Nicholas Ray

by Patrick McGilligan

  Ray would continue in the role of Houseman’s loyal alter ego in the year ahead.

  Lute Song was a dream project for Michael Myerberg, who had hit the jackpot several years earlier as the producer of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth. For nearly a decade Myerberg had carried around a script for Lute Song by Sidney Howard, who had completed the adaptation before he died in 1939 (just before the premiere of the last film he wrote, Gone With the Wind). Veteran composer Will Irwin had contributed a score. Finally, in 1945, Myerberg had the necessary financial backing and stars lined up—and, in Houseman, the director he wanted.

  By the fall, Ray was steeped in behind-the-scenes work on Lute Song. This time the challenges he and Houseman faced were bigger than those of a half-hour single-character drama confined to a cramped set. Lute Song boasted a large cast, including marquee attraction Mary Martin and a magnetic up-and-comer named Yul Brynner, with elaborate song-and-dance numbers. Houseman anticipated five months of polishing the musical on the road before hitting Broadway.

  These months of difficult shared experience bound the producer to his resourceful assistant even more than their time at the Voice of America. He and Ray talked everything over: the script, the cast and performances, every nuance of the staging. They even traded ideas with other shows wending their way toward Broadway. At times Lute Song crossed paths with Born Yesterday, which was also on the road, and Houseman and Ray commiserated in hotel rooms with their old friend Judy Holliday, the star of Garson Kanin’s play, anxious for their advice about what was shaping up to be her comedic breakthrough role.

  As ever, Ray worked tirelessly during the long days and nights. Thrown into constant intimacy with his resourceful assistant, observing Ray under stress, Houseman began to see his friend’s potential as an all-around talent whose promise might rival that of his old colleague Orson Welles. He recognized Ray’s faults—the drinking, gambling, and womanizing. But such faults were hardly rare in show business, and they didn’t seem to hurt Ray’s ability to function at a high level. His “unselfish collaboration,” Houseman reflected, “was of inestimable value.”

  At last, after weaving through Washington, Philadelphia, New Haven, and Boston, Lute Song arrived on Broadway on February 2, 1946. And yet, despite its magnificent design and costumes, the luminaries involved both onstage and off, the Chinese spectacle proved a letdown: “the season’s loveliest production and most charming failure,” as Time lamented.

  Among the many people Ray and Houseman encountered on Lute Song’s road to Broadway was Herman Mankiewicz, the vaunted screenwriter of Citizen Kane. By the end of 1945, Houseman announced that his first official RKO project would be Mankiewicz’s adaptation of a Wilbur Daniel Steel novel called That Girl From Memphis, a love story set amid the boom and bust of a frontier mining town. Ray joined Houseman and Mankiewicz for their periodic script discussions. All three loved to talk, sparring with ideas and trying to top each other. During moments alone, Houseman and Ray began to talk more seriously about making films together—with Houseman producing and Ray writing and/or directing.

  In February 1946, RKO’s production chief, Charles Koerner, unexpectedly took ill and died. Houseman knew and liked Koerner’s assistant, William Dozier, who was temporarily placed in charge of production.* The day after Lute Song opened on Broadway, Houseman left New York for the West Coast. Ray and Mankiewicz, who expected to complete the script of That Girl from Memphis in Hollywood, rode with him in his car.*

  Houseman’s reminiscences show how clear-eyed he was about Ray, a “handsome, complicated man whose sentimentality and apparent softness covered deep layers of resilience and strength,” in his words. On this and other travels Ray made for “a stimulating and sometimes disturbing companion,” according to the producer, “garrulous and inarticulate; ingenuous and pretentious; his mind was filled with original ideas which he found difficult to formulate or express. Alcohol reduced him to rambling unintelligibility; his speech, which was slow and convoluted at best, became unbearably turgid after more than one drink.

  “Yet,” Houseman continued, “confronted with a theatrical situation or a problem of dramatic or musical expression he was amazingly quick, lucid and intuitive with a sureness of touch, a sensitivity to human values and an infallible taste that I have seldom seen equaled.”

  The trio made the drive across America in a week, listening to news bulletins and music and talking up the prospects of the new RKO regime in Hollywood.

  Crossing the desert by night, they arrived in Los Angeles one morning in late February. Houseman had arranged a rented house in the hills above the Sunset Strip with a small guest bungalow for Ray, who was promptly added to the RKO payroll at $200 a week. Technically Ray was Houseman’s assistant, but the producer was determined to reward his alter ego with greater opportunity, and digging through “piles of galleys, synopses and typescripts” in the studio story department, he came upon a novel called Thieves Like Us by Edward Anderson.

  Houseman couldn’t have chosen more wisely. Anderson’s story, recounting the exploits of three escaped lifers in Texas and Oklahoma during the Depression, was like a Woody Guthrie song in cinematic form. As the escaped convicts embark on a murderous bank-robbing spree, the youngest, Bowie, indulges in a romance with Keechie, the niece of one of the gang. The story ends in a spray of police bullets; its title came from the gang leader, who insists that bankers are “thieves just like us.”

  “I decided, before I was halfway through it, that this was my next film,” Houseman said. “It was a blend of chase and love story—the brief idyll of two lonely, emotionally stunted young people set in a world in which hunger, fear, treachery, and violence were essential components.”

  Originally published to acclaim in 1937, Anderson’s novel was too violent for easy adaptation. RKO had script drafts in its files dating back to 1941, including one by the hard-boiled screenwriter Rowland Brown, but every version had run up against objections from the Production Code. Houseman offered the book to Ray, inviting him to try threading the needle—to craft a script that might stay faithful to the novel while clearing the hurdles of Hollywood censorship.

  Ray thought he could write a detailed treatment that would point the way. If Dozier liked the treatment Ray wrote, Houseman said, maybe the RKO chief would let him direct the film too. Galvanized by the possibility, Ray plunged into the work—the main chance of his career. Setting the older drafts aside, he started with chapter one of the book—writing “like a man possessed,” as Houseman recalled. Now, while others partied and attended premieres, Ray worked days, nights, and weekends on an all-new script for “Thieves Like Us.”

  Ray and Houseman conferred constantly, though the producer would later insist that his own contribution to the script was modest. Ray’s “personal experience of hard times” while traveling for the WPA, Houseman explained, enabled the younger man to re-create the “emotional reality” of the novel. “I’d come home at night and we’d go over it,” the producer recalled. “I’d edit it a little, that’s all, and it was very, very good.” Houseman did allow that he wasn’t sure if “Nick could ever have been a good writer, because his sense of organization, which was very strong as a director, was not so strong when he wrote.” But adaptation came more naturally to Ray, giving him the solid structure of a novel to work with. “He was able to do They Live by Night simply because the book was there, and he was able to move within the book.”

  Ray took time out, in March 1946, for one last collaboration with Joseph Losey, who was staging the annual Academy Awards ceremony at the behest of Dore Schary. Once again Ray was a natural stage manager for Losey and for a show that would be broadcast nationally on radio from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Losey’s two-reeler, A Gun in His Hand, was one of the short-subject nominees, but it was a particular night of triumph for Elia Kazan, whose casting gambles on A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, his directing debut—the picture that had brought Ray to Hollywood—paid off with a special juvenile award bestowed on
fourteen-year-old Peggy Ann Garner and a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for dark horse James Dunn.

  Ray toiled through the spring on his lengthy treatment while Houseman laid the groundwork for the production at RKO. Despite many false starts, Ray made steady progress. Just as he was nearing completion, early that summer, they picked up the trade papers one morning only to learn that “RKO had been sold and Bill Dozier liquidated,” according to Houseman. “As usual in show business, all projects initiated by the previous management were automatically cancelled or shelved. I managed to keep Nick on the payroll for a few weeks; we finished the treatment, had it mimeographed—all 124 pages of it—and stole a dozen copies for future use.”

  RKO’s president, Peter Rathvon, had assumed part ownership of the company, deposing Dozier. Rathvon called Houseman in, reassuring him that the studio would appoint a new production chief as soon as possible. In the meantime, he promised, he would submit Ray’s treatment, when polished, to the Production Code office. Whatever happened, one thing was clear: It would be months before “Thieves Like Us” would get the green light. “The change of management did not affect my own contract,” Houseman recalled, “which had two and a half years to run. But, if I was not going to make a film, I preferred to wait for the next phase of my contract back in New York.”

  Ray preferred to leave with him. The partners got back in Houseman’s car and made “another of our high-pressure drives” back east, this time without Herman Mankiewicz. Houseman had another job waiting for both of them, something to keep them busy while Ray refined his “Thieves Like Us” treatment in the months ahead.

  Houseman had been tempted by an offer from a former colleague with the WPA-funded Negro Theater of Harlem. Perry Watkins, “the only black set-designer working in the New York theatre,” in the producer’s words, had plans to modernize, musicalize, and African Americanize The Beggar’s Opera, John Gay’s ballad opera set in the amoral thieves’ world of eighteenth-century London. Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill had collaborated on a famous earlier musical adaptation called The Threepenny Opera. The new all-black version would boast a jazz score by Duke Ellington and lyrics by John La Touche, who had written lyrics for the left-wing anthem “Ballad for Americans” (composed by Earl Robinson) and the hit musical Cabin in the Sky.

  First Houseman and Ray spent a few weeks fine-tuning a traveling edition of Lute Song, with Dolly Haas as Mary Martin’s replacement. The much-touted Broadway musical had closed after a disappointing run of 126 performances, and a road show was needed to recoup the backers’ investment.

  By late August, “Twilight Alley,” as the black version of The Beggar’s Opera was called, was occupying all their time. As before, Houseman was the director, with his assistant Ray never far from his side. The modern dancer Valerie Bettis had been added to the list of stellar names behind the scenes, promising flamboyant choreography to go with the jazz score.

  Before long, though, it became clear to Houseman and Ray that Watkins was in over his head as a novice producer. His financing was shaky, and by the time open auditions came around the producer still hadn’t come up with a finished script or score. Ellington’s endless road engagements, which he was loath to surrender, forced him to delegate the all-important music entirely to Billy Strayhorn, his principal composer and orchestrator. Strayhorn was more than willing and capable, but he was forced to collaborate with Ellington by phone from the road. La Touche, meanwhile, proved a shirker—“not only lazy” but “drinking,” according to Houseman.

  Alfred Drake, the original Curly in Oklahoma!, had been cast in advance as the scoundrel MacHeath (“Mack the Knife”), but it was up to Houseman and Ray to fill out the rest of the large ensemble. Zero Mostel, who had made his Broadway debut in an Elia Kazan play, was picked to play Peachum, the fence and thief-catcher. Ray lobbied successfully for his old flame Libby Holman as the cutpurse Jenny Diver, who betrays MacHeath. There were good parts for Harlem dancer Avon Long, who’d starred at the Cotton Club and played Sportin’ Life in the 1942 revival of Porgy and Bess, and for Marie Bryant, a flashy dancer and bluesy vocalist who had been a headliner at the Cotton Club and the Apollo. Ray also found a small role for Perry Bruskin, his old friend from the Theatre of Action.

  Still, the script, music, and financing refused to jell, and Houseman and Ray couldn’t decide whether to stick with the troubled show. The tipping point was the news that came from RKO in August: Ray’s “Thieves Like Us” treatment had been decisively rejected by the Production Code as “unacceptable” and “enormously dangerous,” in large part because of “the flavor of condonation” attached to the character of the young criminal Bowie. Joseph I. Breen, the head censor, wrote Peter Rathvon a letter condemning Ray’s adaptation as “invidious.”

  While Rathvon insisted that the studio wouldn’t drop the project, Houseman and Ray were skeptical. The uncertainty left them “edgy and impatient,” Houseman admitted. “Nick and I weighed the situation with all its attractions and dangers,” the producer recalled. “We had little to lose and the temptation was great.” They agreed to stick with “Twilight Alley,” which went ahead with rehearsals in late October, even though by then they still had only “the semblance of a first act,” in Houseman’s words.

  The show hit the road, with Houseman and Ray hoping for a miracle.

  Much to their surprise, Peter Rathvon kept his word; he didn’t give up on “Thieves Like Us.” While they were out on the road, Houseman and Ray decided that a revised treatment might fare better with the Hollywood censors. Ray stole time away from “Twilight Alley” to hone the treatment, showing his draft to three trusted writer friends: Alan Lomax, Connie Ernst, and his ex-wife, Jean Evans. He would incorporate their criticisms into the improved version.

  Though Ray’s treatment evolved from draft to draft, it always hewed close to the main characters and plot of the book. It was a shrewd edit of the story, sharpening the characters and intensifying the doomed romance between Bowie and Keechie. Several of Ray’s signature films—most notably In a Lonely Place, Johnny Guitar, and Rebel Without a Cause—would involve a similar infusion of heartache and sentiment into the love story, the kind Ray imagined (and often acted out) in his own life.

  Ray added personal touches and innovations as he went, creating a number of crucial scenes that weren’t in the novel—from Bowie and Keechie’s bus trip, and their roadside nuptials, to their later outing to a city park, followed by a wistful date at a nightclub where they are entertained by a Mexican dancer. Where Edward Anderson had taken a stoic attitude toward his characters, Ray was more empathetic. He liked losers—his films are filled with them—and, when in the grip of one of his blue funks, saw himself the same way.

  The film’s grandiloquent preface (“This is not an underworld movie . . . It is a Love Story; it is also a Morality Story in the tempo of our time”) grew out of Ray’s talks with Evans, according to Bernard Eisenschitz. Most of the deep background he sketched in was devoted to the two lovers (Bowie’s reprehensible mother; Keechie, part-Indian, still a virgin “for no other reason than apathy induced by witnessing her own mother’s actions”). Always trying to create emotional intimacy with his characters, in the treatment Ray had Bowie voice his thoughts out loud during solo scenes; that device was ultimately cut from the final film, but Ray the former radio announcer would return to various kinds of narration again and again in future projects.

  As he worked on the revision, and “Twilight Alley” inched along on its try-out tour, Ray also juggled affairs with several performers in the cast, among them a dancer named Royce Wallace and at least two of the billed stars, Marie Bryant and Libby Holman. Not for the first time, nor the last, did he allow his romantic pursuits to overlap and complicate his work.

  During the out-of-town tryouts that zigzagged through Cleveland, Buffalo, Newark, and Hartford, “Twilight Alley” underwent “whirligig revisions and additions,” in the words of David Hadju, Billy Strayhorn’s biographer. Strayhorn was a blessing, filling ur
gent requests (“We really need a ballet number somewhere . . .”), but lyricist John La Touche never rose to the occasion.

  By the time they arrived in New Haven, the penultimate stop before Broadway, the looming disaster was writ clear. Parts of the show were a mess. The third act was nonexistent. With so many famous names involved, the anticipation in New York was sky-high. But Houseman, defeated by the production’s myriad problems, handed over more and more of the staging to his assistant, a workhorse with a grin.

  They finally scraped bottom in New Haven. “Even in a town that was used to impromptu openings,” remembered Houseman, “ours was unusually calamitous. The last twenty minutes of the show were virtually improvised by [Alfred] Drake and the cast.” That was enough for Houseman: Accounts vary, but either he quit or was fired by the show’s apprehensive backers.

  Left nominally in charge, Ray led the cast and crew to Boston, where the show would have one last chance before its Broadway opening. Waiting to meet him was writer-director George Abbott, a renowned “doctor” of ailing plays, who’d been summoned for a miracle cure.

  Though he was disarmingly placid amid the worst chaos, Ray had been undermined by Houseman’s failure. He was still assistant director, but at best, his job now was to “assist” Abbott in his emergency measures during the show’s two-week Boston run. According to Perry Bruskin, his longtime friend, Ray made a big pretense of nonchalance, shooting craps with the stagehands in the front of the theater while Abbott tried to sort out the problems down front onstage.