Nicholas Ray

by Patrick McGilligan

  “[Playing the mother was] Dorothy McGuire, from a fairly elegant background, well-educated, married into a Northeastern blue-blood family.

  “And [playing the father was] Jimmy Dunn, who could have been a vaudeville comic, associated mostly with gamblers and musicians and burlesque people. He had all of the realistic qualities of the character. He was a drunk, drank himself out of the business. He was a constant risk in the minds of everybody. He was also a beautiful human being. And he gave an Academy Award–winning performance.

  “Kazan’s extraordinary technique brought them all together in a unit. He got them all in the same key, they all belonged together, not one note jarring. After the test with these three people, I made a note: ‘When you find the real thing, fuck acting.’ ”

  After the cast had been finalized and filming began, Ray performed a variety of tasks, rehearsing lines off-camera, even making sketches of proposed shots under Kazan’s supervision. For the first time in his career he was called upon to think in cinematic terms, to consider how to compose stories visually, as a series of linked images. When he wasn’t on the set he was often in the cutting room, watching the teams of editors splice takes together, trying to absorb visual continuity by studying their options and choices.

  Ray was never reluctant to work late, and he took it upon himself to set up an informal series of after-hours tutorials with some of the veteran technicians. Thursday nights, after the last take of the day, Ray convened a small group—four editors and a projectionist—to talk filmmaking over drinks at the Luau tiki bar in Beverly Hills. He did the buying and, as always, more than his share of the drinking.

  Already demonstrating his yen to diverge from the conventional studio approach, Ray brought along panels clipped from the Steve Canyon and Terry and the Pirates comics in the Los Angeles papers, “as references and [to] discuss the ideas and problems I’d accumulated during the week and not had a chance to resolve over the Movieola,” in his words. “I brought the Dick Tracy strip too, once in a while. It was mostly too loose and uninterestingly stylized for me, but the compositions were tight, the two-shots were always great, the three-shots were always great, and the individuals were always in an interesting perspective to the background.”

  Ray had noticed that the “the old fashioned boys,” as he called them (meaning such longtime contract directors as Henry King and Henry Hathaway), always organized their films in a standard way—“long shot, medium shot, close shot.” Ray thought it might be refreshing to imitate the comic strips with tighter shots, skewed angles, and extreme close-ups. This comic-strip approach could be a way to intensify the emotional impact of a scene, delivering a jolt to the audience. Lubricated with drink and bored with the rules of their craft, the editors thought Ray might be on to something.

  The filming of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn lasted two months. Kazan even gave Ray a walk-on part as a bakery deliveryman, and publicly the director always praised his assistant’s contribution to his debut feature, even if his memory of Ray’s contribution was amorphous. “He hung around, took notes,” Kazan recalled. “He edited them for himself and gave me a copy. A lot of them were influenced by [producer Louis B.] Lighton, and others were my own thoughts, or things I said. Nick liked that kind of generalization on aesthetics, etc.”

  Kazan had hired Ray at his wife’s insistence, and their friendship was still an imbalanced one of unequals. In letters to Molly, Kazan complained that Ray and other Theatre of Action and Group Theatre alumni kicking around Hollywood expected too many favors from him. He also found Ray a bit too fawning for comfort. “It is very, very bad for him to work with me,” Kazan wrote his wife after the filming of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn ended. “He respects me too much and is constantly trying to impress me. It’s very pathetic, and everybody notices it. Not good.”

  Plunged into this world where money and gorgeous women were abundant, where the premieres and parties never ceased and the sun shone every day, Ray tried to find a way to fit in.

  He plugged quickly into the network of New York transplants Kazan complained about, many of them friends from radical theater, the WPA, and the Voice of America looking to find a new footing in Hollywood. In Hollywood, at least, the left-wing theater movement was still alive and well in 1944.

  According to some accounts, Ray flitted in and out of the only real left-wing theater in town, the Actors Lab on Laurel Avenue, where screen artists burned the fat from their studio contracts mounting serious, sometimes political plays. He briefly involved himself with the Hollywood Writers Mobilization Committee for Democracy, which deployed liberal writers on topical issues—both groups designated by the U.S. attorney general as “Soviet communist controlled” in 1948.

  But his politics had gotten him fired from the Voice of America, and Ray understood that he was at a career low point as well as a crossroads of opportunity. Though he stayed friendly with most of his left-wing peers in Hollywood, he also abandoned his radical activism of more than a decade with surprising ease, much as he slipped away from the bed of a woman.

  Ray spent most of his free time socializing with other displaced New Yorkers. John Houseman invited him frequently for dinner, and the assistant director was a fixture at Gene Kelly and Betsy Blair’s house parties every Saturday night; after Kelly joined the military, the parties shifted to MGM composer Saul Chaplin’s place on Orange Grove Avenue.

  The Kelly-Blair crowd was in their late twenties and early thirties, most of them, like Ray, just getting their bearings in the film business. Writer Millard Kaufman was often in attendance, as was left-wing actor Stanley Prager, who was always more hilarious in living rooms than in his fleeting movie roles. The Chaplins had two pianos at their house, and sometimes Saul and his wife, Ethyl, dueled at the pianos with witty lyrics and jokes. A busty blonde named Shelley Winters often insisted on belting out songs there too, to general dread.

  Sometimes Ray came to these parties with a woman, but just as often he came alone, drinking, watching people, but saying very little. He indulged in “several affairs” during his 1944–45 tryout in Hollywood, according to Bernard Eisenschitz. Besides Winters, who would become a standby in Ray’s life, the list included that lovely lady whose breasts were taped for her A Tree Grows in Brooklyn screen test; the tall, dark-haired actress Doris Dowling (Kazan had a long-running romance with her sister Constance); and perhaps Judith Tuvim, among the wartime influx to the film capital.

  Tuvim and the Revuers came to town for a booking at the Trocadero, which got the cabaret troupe noticed and eventually signed by Ray’s studio, 20th Century-Fox. But when the Revuers were all but expunged from Greenwich Village, their debut picture, the dispirited troupe split up. Soon after, Judy Tuvim became Judy Holliday, and she and Ray resumed their flickering relationship.

  It was never a very cheery romance, for both Nick and Judy were known to wallow in their sorrows. One day Ray, Houseman, and Holliday drove over to the beach house of Broadway actress Doris Dudley, who was also trying to break into Hollywood. “Judy had a few drinks,” recounted Holliday biographer Will Holzman. “Nick had a few more. Both were depressed; Hollywood was squandering their talent. Life was awful, they agreed, and it looked worse with each drink. Somebody suggested a dip in the ocean.

  “Judy and Nick waded out into the waves, when with inebriated wisdom they decided that life was no longer worth living. They swam straight out into Santa Monica Bay. The swells grew, the current stiffened, and they changed their minds. The only problem was they were a good distance from shore. Groggy and exhausted, they eventually struggled back to the earth. Houseman helped them to the house and provided them with coffee and dry clothes.”

  Connie Ernst wouldn’t really count as one of Ray’s Hollywood affairs, but the Voice of America producer contrived to be in Los Angeles in late summer, on assignment from London, and Ray and she briefly rekindled their affection. Like Jean Evans, the fun-loving Ernst was another of Ray’s “lifelong loves.” But then again he remained friends with qu
ite a few of his former lovers; whether they were troubled or confident women, most simply held no grudge against him.

  By August, Kazan was done with his work on A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and anxious to return to New York, where another Broadway directing job awaited him. Ray had no such glittering prospects ahead of him, and he was enjoying the novelty of his new life in California; he preferred to stay.

  Coaxed by his wife, Kazan went to bat for Ray, reminding studio officials of the value of a man who was able to help out in so many ways behind the scenes, including screen testing, rehearsing actors, and critiquing scripts. Kazan was the studio’s fair-haired boy, and Ray was widely seen as his protégé. The studio extended Ray’s contract through the end of the year.

  “They think him a bit strange, which he is,” Kazan wrote to his wife on August 9 before leaving for New York, “and UNGATHERED (my opinion). Also he has a dangerous fault in work. You feel that he’s thinking a little more about himself, and his angles, than of the material.

  “This comes out of his uncertainty.”

  For the rest of the year, Ray floated around the lot, handed from producer to producer, helping with menial tasks behind the scenes. Among the productions he worked on was a B movie quickie called The Caribbean Mystery, starring James Dunn from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Ray made suggestions that were incorporated into the script, but both his dialogue direction and touch-ups went uncredited on the screen, like everything else he would do at 20th Century-Fox.

  He returned to the notion of writing a film of his own. Not alone: Ray enjoyed hatching script ideas in collaboration with New York acquaintances at Hollywood bars and restaurants, and when he wasn’t scrounging for work at the other studios, in the first half of 1944, he was pitching stories and scripts to producers and friends.

  He got a little attention from the local press, cropping up in an article in the Los Angeles Daily News. Columnist Virginia Wright trumpeted one of Ray’s properties, written in tandem with the well-known actor Howard Da Silva, a friend from Da Silva’s days in the Group Theatre. Understandably, the article focused on Da Silva, who had reclaimed his glowering-villain niche in Hollywood after five hundred Broadway shows as Jud in Oklahoma! But it gave an intriguing account of a story Ray had developed with the actor. “Doctors in the [Ray–Da Silva] screenplay hope to learn from the patient’s reaction to insulin shock just what makes a Nazi tick,” Wright wrote, describing the script. “What they do discover is the way the ‘master race’ virus is injected into each generation.”

  Ray had better luck with the Three Stooges than with the Master Race, helping out on the “original story” of a Moe, Larry, and Curly musical. Swing Parade of 1946 had a long gestation period: An entire year would pass before the picture was released, emblazoning the name of Nicholas Ray on the screen for the first time. But the Three Stooges vehicle couldn’t have been less consequential, and the studio, Monogram, ranked among Hollywood’s lowliest.

  “Ungathered”: That had been Kazan’s verdict, and Ray probably wouldn’t have disagreed. He had had the rug pulled out from under his acting aspirations. The left-wing theater movement had stagnated. He had reason to feel betrayed by both CBS Radio and the Voice of America. And Ray was still uncertain about Hollywood—about his ideas, his future, the role he might assume in filmmaking. But he was good at maintaining a mask of confidence, even as he struggled to keep his private uncertainty in check.

  Truth be told, he still felt ambivalent about filmmaking. Unlike many of his New York friends, he hadn’t grown up hooked on movies. He liked to tell this anecdote: Although The Birth of a Nation was imprinted on his memory as the first movie he’d seen as a boy, he’d never paid much attention to the names of directors. When he first arrived in Hollywood, he hung out a lot at Beverly Hills bars, drinking and bantering regularly at one place alongside a “nice old gentleman” whose mumbled name didn’t ring any bells. Long after changing bars, he was shocked to realize that the man was D. W. Griffith. “I have never been a film buff,” Ray explained. “If I had been a film buff I would have known.”

  John Houseman rode to Ray’s temporary rescue in October, engaging him as his general assistant on a two-reeler the producer and screenwriter Philip Dunne had agreed to craft for the Office of War Information to help explain the American electoral system to foreigners.

  Artist John Hubley, who had left Walt Disney after a bitter strike against the studio in 1941, was helping with the drawings and animation. Howard Koch, who had written Orson Welles’s famous War of the Worlds script for the radio and Casablanca for Warner Bros., was penning the narration for the newsreel sections. John Berry, who had finished Miss Susie Slagle’s at Paramount, was handling the staged scenes (“the milkman, the grocer, the office worker, the farmhand and the housewife,” exercising “their democratic right by going into an enclosed booth in the local schoolhouse or barbershop and voting for the man of their choice,” as the New York Times reported). The celebrated composer Virgil Thomson, a friend of Houseman’s who also had pitched in at the Voice of America, was scoring the music. Ray’s job was to advise and assist this exceptional team. The OWI production, called Tuesday in November, was eventually sent abroad in twelve languages; ironically, it would be the high point of Ray’s first year in Hollywood.

  Reappearing around then, at just the right time, was another old friend, who predated Elia Kazan and John Houseman. Joseph Losey had blown into Hollywood around the same time as Ray, planning the English-language version of Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo, to star Charles Laughton. Brecht and Laughton were busy translating and refining the German text in Santa Monica, where Brecht, a refugee from Hitler, lived. In and out of town, as the script revisions dragged on, Losey wangled a directing contract at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, making his first theatrical film there: a gripping two-reeler everyone was talking about called A Gun in His Hand, which was part of MGM’s long-running Crime Does Not Pay series.

  When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt passed away on April 12, 1945, the Hollywood left-liberal community organized a memorial at the Hollywood Bowl. Losey was picked to stage the event, working from a Writers Mobilization Committee script, and once again he asked Ray to serve as his backstage manager. The stars onstage included James Cagney, Ingrid Bergman, Orson Welles, and Frank Sinatra. Losey and Ray rustled up contributions from Earl Robinson and other New York arrivistes who had been sympathetic to the New Deal. More important, the executive producer of the event was Dore Schary.

  Schary was already a storied figure in the movie business. Originally a writer (he’d won an Oscar for Boys’ Town in 1938), Schary had become an admired producer for MGM and David O. Selznick, one who not only made intelligent films but was, everyone agreed, something even rarer in Hollywood: a genuine mensch. Schary, whose future would take him even higher in the Hollywood hierarchy, took note of both Losey and Ray.

  Except for Tuesday in November Ray did not work with very closely with John Houseman in his first frustrating year in Hollywood. But the two men lived near each other in Santa Monica, they saw each other regularly, and as the months passed they drew closer as friends.

  It was a frustrating time for Houseman too. Since leaving the Voice of America he had produced three quick, undistinguished pictures for Paramount. His love affair with Joan Fontaine had ended dismally. He’d just signed a new contract with RKO, improving his terms, but, like Ray, the producer felt conflicted about Hollywood and the film industry. Houseman’s first love was the theater; he too missed “the stink of the gallows.” When, at the beginning of the summer of 1945, he announced he was going to drive back east, taking a break from picture-making, Ray eagerly hopped in the car with him. Along for the ride was a box full of stories and screenplays from the RKO files, from which Houseman intended to choose his next film project.

  They were congenial cross-country companions, musing over the stories and scripts, chewing on Hollywood gossip as Ray twirled the dial on the radio looking for good music.

  Back in N
ew York Ray saw old friends and caught up with his family (Jean Evans was thriving at PM), while Houseman went looking for remunerative work for them both. Houseman was soon bombarded by offers, including one from television—an improbable suitor.

  Visiting the CBS offices one day, Houseman was hailed by a former associate who asked him if he would like to direct a television show. The medium had been introduced with hoopla at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, but World War II had stalled the manufacture of TV sets and delayed the development of national programming. In New York, for instance, WCBW still broadcast only locally and in the evenings.

  Why not? Houseman thought. He and Ray could do it together. For his first project, Houseman chose a popular radio drama called Sorry, Wrong Number. Lucille Fletcher, the wife of composer Bernard Herrmann, had written the half-hour radio show about a bedridden woman who overhears a murder plot on the telephone, gradually coming to believe that she herself is the intended victim. Agnes Moorehead had starred in repeat broadcasts of the drama, but these days Moorehead was busy in Hollywood, so Houseman gave the lead to veteran stage actress Mildred Natwick. Over the summer of 1945 he and Ray revised the script for television and cast the smaller parts.

  Then, while preparing Sorry, Wrong Number, Houseman was approached to direct an ambitious musical for Broadway called Lute Song, based on a classic fourteenth-century Chinese play. He was happy again to nominate Ray as his assistant. When Houseman began to shift his attention to the more demanding stage production, it gave Ray another chance to spread his wings. The assistant took over the rehearsals and limited staging of Sorry, Wrong Number. Some sources credit him as director, but Ray’s contribution stopped short of that. “When it came to air time,” according to CBS staff director Frances Buss, “I directed the cameras.”

  The half-hour television show had a budget of only a thousand dollars and just two cameras for the simple coverage. Still, “artistically, the results were very satisfactory,” Variety declared of the show, broadcast on January 30, 1946. All the advance publicity had touted Houseman’s name, yet insiders knew that Buss and another unsung collaborator deserved the applause. The Billboard, a key industry journal, complained of “so few Houseman touches,” while lauding the contribution of Houseman’s “alter ego, Nick Ray.”