On November 7, 1942, the day the Allies invaded Vichy-held North Africa, the Voice of America broadcast all night long, urging Vichy forces to surrender while appealing for the cooperation of North African civilians. Ray not only supervised all the music but also rushed to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, grabbing ship workers and French sailors and dragging them to the studio to fill airtime with interviews. It was an inspiring night for all.
The happy bubble didn’t last long, however. The incessant memos and phone calls from anti-Communist pressure groups took a toll on group morale, and when the first hard blow came, not long after the North African triumph, it struck an unlikely enemy of the people.
In late 1942, Robert Sherwood asked Houseman to launch a sister Voice of America operation in London, aiming broadcasts directly at North Africa and Nazi-occupied Europe. Houseman was enthusiastic about the new assignment, and Ray and Ernst were eager to follow him abroad. Houseman reminded Sherwood that he was technically an “enemy alien” who hadn’t held a U.S. passport for nine years, but Houseman’s direct supervisor, Joseph Barnes, helped facilitate a speedy naturalization process, and in March 1943 the head of the radio propaganda bureau took an oath of U.S. citizenship, the “fourth nationality” of his life. A VIP seat was arranged for Houseman on an army bomber traversing the Atlantic.
Houseman still needed a valid passport, however, and the State Department mysteriously withheld its required approval. Or it may have been the Defense Department, for General Dwight Eisenhower had his differences with the Voice of America; the assignment overseas involved designating Houseman a colonel, and the armed services would have to sign off on his appointment. After weeks of waiting, Houseman went to Washington to meet with a general at the Pentagon. Examining his FBI and Civil Service files right there on a desk in front of him, the general grumpily agreed that Houseman had no apparent record of “disloyalty or subversion.” Yet still his passport was stalled. Sherwood appealed directly to presidential adviser Harry Hopkins in the White House. An undersecretary of state reviewed Houseman’s files—but then, finally, officially, denied his application for a U.S. passport.
Houseman was furious. He saw his “interdiction,” he recalled, not as a “personal” affront but as “part of the continuing departmental struggle between the State Department and the Voice of America.” After finishing his work supervising all-night news bulletins in a dozen languages, issuing official reports on the summit meeting in Casablanca between British prime minister Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt, he sat down and wrote out his resignation.
Houseman then left immediately for Hollywood. He abandoned Ray and Ernst, who were still hoping to make their own move to London, to his replacement, Louis Cowan, a public relations and advertising man who had created the successful Quiz Kids radio show. Voice of America writer Howard Fast, himself rejected for an overseas assignment because of passport troubles, recalled Cowan as “very decent” if ineffectual. Ray, privately, called him “the great and brave Louis Cowan,” meaning he was neither—especially compared to John Houseman.
The secret club had lost its most prized member. John Houseman had been as much cheerleader as leader of his VOA colleagues, chortling and nodding and exclaiming, “Let’s do it!” His advice was usually as modest and tactful as it was pointed and relevant. His absence would throw his bravery and greatness into relief—now, and again later in Ray’s Hollywood career.
Writers Howard Fast, Robert Ardrey, and Molly Day Thacher, Kazan’s wife, who had been an assistant to Houseman, were among the dispirited holdovers still clocking long hours at the Voice of America. Fast, Ardrey, and Thacher had their own reasons to be talking about Hollywood. And now, for the first time, Houseman’s absence gave Ray cause to think seriously about motion pictures.
Until 1943, Ray had prided himself on being a radio and theater purist. Saying that a person emitted “the stink of the gallows,” the air of “belonging to the theater,” was the highest compliment he could pay to someone. But while working on radio propaganda scripts with Fast, Ardrey, and Thacher, and grumbling about the cloudy future of the Voice of America, Ray started hearing promising things about the film industry.
Fast’s novel The Last Frontier had just been published to acclaim and was attracting option offers from the major studios. Ardrey, meanwhile, seemed like a kindred spirit to Ray; he’d also been a protégé of Thornton Wilder’s at the University of Chicago and was a star of the college radio station during Ray’s student stint there. Ardrey’s first for-hire screenplay, They Knew What They Wanted, had just been filmed. Fast and Ardrey were a couple of “real writers,” from Ray’s point of view, able to work freely on movies without becoming beholden to the studio system. If they didn’t feel tainted by association with Hollywood, why should he?
Thacher also kept him up-to-date on her husband, Kazan, who had vaulted to success on Broadway in November 1942 with his masterful staging of Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth. Months later, the play was still drawing packed audiences at the Plymouth Theatre. Never again would Kazan have to hunger for food—or recognition. Kazan the cocky subway type was on his way to becoming a smooth limousine type.
Thacher lived her life in her celebrity husband’s shadow. Ray was sympathetic. As Thacher drew closer to Ray, she filled his ears with talk of her husband’s limitless future, the gathering fruits of his success. On the heels of The Skin of Our Teeth and a series of other hit plays, Kazan was now weighing film-directing offers from Warner Bros. and 20th Century-Fox. If Ray’s personal idol was going to Hollywood, why couldn’t he?
Unlike Kazan, who was being offered bestselling properties on a silver platter, Ray would have to come up with his own stories. He brainstormed with Fast and Ardrey, passing along the writers’ compliments in letters to Houseman, much as he had with Thornton Wilder and Frank Lloyd Wright. In mid-1943, the trio “went on a minor binge,” Ray wrote to Houseman in Hollywood. “We were talking about the different kinds of movies we’d like to work on, and Ardrey said that if he went back to Hollywood at all he’d want to work with you over and above. Thought you’d like to know that.”
Houseman had found a perch at Paramount, preparing a new film, The Unseen, based on a novel by British mystery author Ethel Lina White. Ray wrote the producer regularly, forwarding his ideas for stories that, for the first time, were imagined exclusively for the screen.
Ray could be an imperfect correspondent, his letters dotted with misspellings, grammatical errors, and circumlocutions; he once admitted to sometimes carrying “a creased and scrawling, pocket-ridden letter” around for weeks before getting up the courage to mail it. He sorely desired collaborators for his stories, but Fast and Ardrey were reluctant to volunteer. For one brainchild Ray turned to Alan Lomax’s wife, Elizabeth. The story he proposed was mainly hers, he wrote Houseman; it wasn’t much more than a “story idea,” but if the producer was “at all interested,” Ray could put it “in organized shape,” with suggestions for “ ‘situations.’ ”
Another idea, hatched with journalist William Lindsay White—also part of the Voice of America cadre—involved an émigré cabaret duo from Prague, Jirí Voskovec and Jan Werich, whose radio skits were beamed to Czechoslovakia and parts of Eastern Europe. The idea was to build a story about Voskovec and Ulrich arriving in America and visiting kin in Sacramento, California, then traveling across the United States by foot, boat, or vehicle, and their experiences would “serve to expose or interpret America to itself.” Ray said the two characters might be treated like the two cricket fans in Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes.*
Ray’s ideas were often sketchy, free-form, without a clear beginning, middle, or end. Ray felt insecure and defensive about their shortcomings. The Voskovec-Ulrich story had taken him a while to develop and he needed “to talk my ideas out with people more articulate” than himself, he explained to Houseman. “Maybe it’s a hell of an idea,” i.e., a rotten one, but he hoped the producer would look kindly on his efforts because he dearly wanted to
work with him on “some one thing.”
From time to time Houseman visited New York, and Ray sounded him out in person too. But when Connie Ernst was the first to get her promotion and transfer to the new Voice of America base in London, Ray’s attention shifted with her. Hollywood was premature for him, a long shot; Ray told his Voice of America superiors he wanted to head overseas with Ernst. To do so, however, he would have to undergo the same passport and security check protocol that had humbled Houseman.
Meanwhile, whether because of the hole left by Houseman’s absence or his usual fear of domesticity, Ray was starting to drink again, disappearing on binges, passing out at dinner parties.
His behavior undermined the most important thing in his life: his relationship with Ernst. One time the two took a trip to Florida on a train filled with soldiers. “Once we were there he disappeared gambling,” Ernst remembered. “It was very tricky, being with Nick.”
Ray was dealing with his divorce and child support, but he told people, then and later, that his relationship with Ernst was true love. “We had once wanted to marry,” he wrote, years afterward. According to Ernst, however, marriage was never in the cards. She was clear-eyed about her Voice of America colleague, and she had another prospective suitor, also with the OWI, whom she eventually married. Ray knew about the suitor, even scuffled with him once or twice.
He and she still worked closely together on Ernst’s various series, and they vacationed together in Nantucket after broadcasting Robert Ardrey’s final script for them: “White Collar Girl,” with Ernst herself playing a typical American office worker. The two spent rainy days indoors, brewing ideas for Voice of America shows in London. “I kiss Connie for you on Sundays,” Ray wrote Houseman. “She of course disapproves the high plane on which I keep them [the kisses].”
Although Ernst’s transfer and passport were approved, Ray’s kept being deferred. As of their August 1943 Nantucket interlude, though, he was still blithely looking forward to moving to London with his darling Connie. After Nantucket, Ray traveled to Chicago to work on a Voice of America segment about steelworkers, unaware that operatives under orders from J. Edgar Hoover were still dogging his footsteps, determined to prove his B-2 “dangerousness.” According to the files obtained through FOIA, this was the FBI’s last-ditch attempt to prove that Ray was engaged in “current activities” on behalf of the Communist Party. But the agency was unable to pinpoint any nefarious behavior.
Hoover found himself permanently thwarted, in the summer of 1943, when his secret indexing system for classifying the potential “dangerousness” of security threats was overruled as inherently valueless by the man at the very top of the U.S. legal hierarchy: U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle. “The notion that it is possible to make a valid determination as to how dangerous a person is in the abstract and without reference to time, environment, and other relevant circumstances, is impractical, unwise, and dangerous,” Biddle admonished Hoover.
The FBI’s failure to prove that Ray was still a card-carrying Communist, along with the attorney general’s finding against Hoover’s security-threat index, inspired other anti-Communists inside the government to take matters into their own hands. In late July 1943, Ray’s name surfaced publicly for the first time amid congressional hearings into new appropriations for the London branch of the Office of War Information. Led by Representative Richard B. Wigglesworth of Massachusetts, a number of Republican congressmen openly questioned the loyalty of key personnel attached to the OWI.
Wigglesworth interrogated Vernon A. McGee, an assistant director acting as spokesman for the OWI, about a number of OWI personnel. “Have you a Nicholas Ray” under salary? Wigglesworth demanded at one point. “Has his background been checked?”
“The final investigation report has not yet been received,” responded McGee.
“Was he a director of the WPA Living Newspaper, and did he attend the Fourth Congress League of American Writers, or at one time have a lot of Communist literature stored in his basement in Virginia?”
“We have no evidence to that effect.”
Evidence or not, in early November 1943, Representative Fred E. Busbey, a Republican congressman from Illinois* and a member of a subcommittee still reviewing the request for an extra $5 million in the budget to fund the Voice of America expansion to London, rose on the floor of the U.S. Congress to read a list of twenty-two individuals with “allegedly Communist ideologies” who “are or were on the pay roll of the Office of War Information.”
“Nicholas K. Ray” was the seventeenth name on Busbey’s list. And there were others: The names included Houseman’s direct superior, Joseph Barnes, deputy director of Atlantic OWI operations (“whose attitude has been consistently pro-Soviet”), and Ray’s friend, best man, and former Theatre of Action comrade Al Saxe. “Representative Busbey said he has reason to believe an investigating committee will be able to substantiate his information,” reported a Washington newspaper.
This was the second time that Ray had been openly branded a Communist. In private he took the matter lightly, asking Houseman in a letter if he’d noticed the “honorable mention” he’d received in the Congressional Record. He referred to it as his “graduation present” before his continued matriculation overseas—still convinced that he was London-bound with his beloved. Six weeks after the floor-of-Congress branding, however, the official word came down: Ray’s transfer to London was denied, his passport application rejected.
Although his onetime Communism was undoubtedly the main cause, other factors may have played a part. Once again, at another crucial moment in Ray’s life, something murky transpired. Houseman, who was as close as anyone to Ray at this point in time, wrote later that Ray was “thrown out of the OWI.” But he added a postscript—a curious one, considering Ray had boasted of womanizing in his version of the investigation: “I always thought [that Ray was thrown out] on political grounds, swept out along with the rest of us. But in fact, the ostensible reason was homosexuality.”
As planned, Ernst would go on to London without Ray. The two agreed to suspend their romance indefinitely. On their last date, Ray, in a flash of dark humor, took Ernst to see Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat—a film about the sinking of a ship crossing the Atlantic during wartime.
Soon after she left for London, Nick Ray left for Hollywood.
Two friends in higher places—Elia Kazan and John Houseman—encouraged Ray to leave his troubles behind and explore a possible future in the film industry on the West Coast.
Left to his own devices, Kazan might not have taken the initiative, but Molly Day Thacher urged her husband to bail out the disconsolate Ray. After finally accepting a contract with 20th Century-Fox, Kazan was on track to direct his first Hollywood picture. He invited Ray to be his all-purpose assistant behind the camera. What that entailed even Kazan didn’t know.
According to Bernard Eisenschitz, when Kazan left New York for Los Angeles in mid-March 1944, he took Ray with him on the cross-country journey. Kazan doesn’t think to mention Ray in his autobiography, Elia Kazan: A Life, noting instead that he enjoyed “an uninterrupted three days alone” on the train, plenty of time to reread A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith’s bestselling quasi-autobiographical novel, which he had agreed to shape into a motion picture.
Whether he traveled separately or with Kazan, by late March 1944 Ray had taken up residence in the film capital. (The FBI was still keeping track of all his addresses.) After a temporary stay in Hollywood proper, Ray found a place in Santa Monica, near Houseman. His fellow Voice of America refugee was involved in a romance with actress Joan Fontaine while producing a new film, Miss Susie Slagle’s, the first directed by young left-wing New Yorker John Berry.
Meanwhile Kazan checked into the once-posh Garden of Allah hotel and took up duties at 20th Century-Fox, with the photography of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn scheduled to begin in April. The studio occupied vast acreage in the area of Los Angeles known as Century City. Ray’s job title and sala
ry were up in the air until early April, when Kazan got him a contract with an assigned office near his in a building on the lot. Ray would work, uncredited, as Kazan’s “dialogue director.”
Ray had arrived in Hollywood in a kind of daze. He felt tentative about everything in his future, including motion pictures. But for him work was always invigorating—and this was not only well-paid work, it was Ray’s first opportunity since the Theatre of Action to learn directly from Kazan, who had grown in experience and stature since they last worked closely together.
Preparing actors for their auditions was his first order of business. As Ray would learn on his first Hollywood job, casting was negotiated between the director and the front office, with the front office reserving veto power. Kazan wanted actors who could deliver truthful performances in Betty Smith’s realistic story, but he was good at finding performers with faces or backgrounds that could, at first, seem mismatched for their parts. The disparities appealed to the first-time director, who quickly proved adventurous about mixing and matching actors with diverse qualities.
“During the casting,” Ray recalled years later, “some incredible tests were shot. For instance, [Kazan shot] a test of a remarkable actress, who later went through a long period of institutionalization. She must have been twenty-three or twenty-four, and very sophisticated at the time, with a fabulous body. At the request of the studio heads, they taped over her tits to give her a flat chest, so that she could appear for rehearsal and eventually an expensive test for the role of Francie, a twelve-year-old girl.
“We ended up with Peggy Ann Garner, a child actress with no stage experience, who could not be loaded down with any theories of acting. But she did have the experience of a broken family, a mother who was a lush and a bad check passer.
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