Nicholas Ray

by Patrick McGilligan

  One element Abbott wanted to sort out was Libby Holman. The aging torch singer was not thriving in her role. (She did “not seem happy in the role,” wrote Elinor Hughes in the Boston Herald. “Neither vocally nor histrionically did she stand out.”) Abbott personally disliked the songstress, having clashed with her during rehearsals for another Broadway show he doctored, You Never Know, several years earlier. Convinced that Holman was too old to play Jenny Diver, he cut two of her songs in Boston, thinking that would prompt Holman to quit. When she hadn’t before the end of the run, he told his assistant to fire her.

  Perhaps there was no good way to deliver the bad news, but Ray chose to do it one morning after sleeping with her. “Libby took it calmly, even gracefully, Ray thought,” Holman biographer Jon Bradshaw wrote. She turned her face to the wall. “ ‘Everything I touch turns to shit,’ she wept.

  “ ‘Not me, old girl,’ said Ray, putting his arm around her. ‘You’ve still got me.’ ”

  Not anymore, the actress replied furiously, ordering Ray to leave her room. “You just fired me, and I don’t mean sexually”—a rare on-the-record rebuke for Ray the nice guy.

  Abbott furiously slashed and restitched the jazz musical, announcing that it would have a new title—Beggar’s Holiday—as well as a fresh female star (younger contralto Bernice Park) by the time it reached New York. “It is probably superfluous to say,” the Boston Herald acidly commented, “that what it needs more than a different name is serious editing, pruning, and a sense of direction.”

  Beggar’s Holiday limped to Broadway in the last week of 1946. Neither of the famous directors involved wanted credit—or blame—for the show. Houseman, who had been billed as director in Boston, “at his own request,” according to the New York Times, declined that honor in New York; and “Abbott, called in at the eleventh hour to doctor up the production, will not receive any credit for his work either.

  “Only Nicholas Ray will be billed as director.”

  It was his first “real” directing credit, and the timing couldn’t have been better. Herman Mankiewicz had just phoned Houseman, tipping him off that RKO was about to announce a new head of production: Dore Schary. Though Houseman had never worked with Schary, he knew his reputation “as an educated, intelligent, progressive filmmaker.” And Schary fondly remembered Ray from his involvement with the FDR memorial at the Hollywood Bowl and backstage at the 1946 Academy Awards show.

  Houseman phoned Schary to congratulate him and to talk about Ray directing “Thieves Like Us.” Schary was familiar with Ray’s treatment, which Houseman assured him had been revised with censorship issues in mind. Schary liked fostering new talent, and he agreed that Ray, with a Broadway musical under his belt—even a flawed one—looked like a promising candidate to direct “Thieves Like Us.” The RKO producer vowed to put the project on a fast track.

  Shortly after the New Year, Ray jumped back in Houseman’s car for the familiar long drive back to California. For once the two were happy to flee New York. For several years now Ray had served as Houseman’s assistant. Yet Ray had grown over that time, and the producer knew that his assistant had done the lion’s share of their television collaboration, aided him immeasurably during the staging of Lute Song, and covered for him on the Beggar’s Holiday debacle. As the pair crossed America once more, listening to music and planning their film of “Thieves Like Us,” there was an unspoken shift in the relationship between them: Houseman’s alter ego no longer, Ray was coming into his own.

  Chapter Five

  Atmosphere of Fear

  1947–1949

  Nineteen forty-six was the year W. C. Fields died and eight-year-old Natalie Wood had her first big role in a movie. Bing Crosby appeared in two of the year’s top ten highest-grossing films, a list topped by Walt Disney’s animated feature Song of the South. William Wyler’s searching postwar drama The Best Years of Our Lives won seven major Oscars, including Best Picture. Hollywood had not only survived World War II but thrived, enjoying record attendance and profits; the American film industry was poised to dominate the new world markets opened up by victory.

  Only in hindsight have film historians recognized that the record year of 1946 was also the beginning of the end of the Golden Age. Long-simmering labor unrest culminated in a bitter industry strike and the first in a series of layoffs that year, along with deepening inflation. And the worst was yet to come.

  After ten years in lower tribunals, a momentous antitrust case, challenging the studios’ monopoly on theater exhibition chains, was inching closer to a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court. The rival medium of television, held in abeyance by government restrictions during wartime, was about to undergo a boom in programming and viewership. And in the spring of 1947 the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) would convene secret hearings in downtown Los Angeles investigating Communist influence in the screen trade.

  The old escapist formulas no longer struck the same chord with audiences. “Problem” pictures and film noir better reflected the fears and anxieties of the postwar years. A beleaguered Hollywood looked to a new, younger generation of filmmakers to put it back in touch with America.

  Dore Schary led the “youth movement” at RKO, the smallest and shakiest of the so-called Big Five studios, which had long been a sanctuary for fledgling and iconoclastic screen artists. The studio had given Orson Welles a free hand with Citizen Kane and provided a haven for European refugees Fritz Lang and Jean Renoir. Its contract directors churned out the most arresting film noir and low-budget thrillers in Hollywood. The studio was known for taking chances on newcomers, making filmmakers out of cinematographer Ted Tetzlaff and editors Mark Robson and Robert Wise. The studio owned a forty-acre back lot in Culver City, but its main buildings and soundstages were located on Gower Street, in a neighborhood dubbed “Gower Gulch” after the innumerable Westerns made there by Goldwyn, Columbia, Paramount, and RKO.

  In January 1947 the latest hope for RKO’s future passed through the studio gates: tall, handsome Nicholas Ray, looking younger than his years.

  He was thirty-five, a decade older than Welles had been when he took RKO and Hollywood by storm. Ray’s résumé was long, eclectic, but filled with parallels to Welles’s career, from his Wisconsin background to his working friendships with Herman Mankiewicz and John Houseman. Whispered comparisons to Welles might have daunted a lesser man, but Ray felt confident, determined to make his own first film as great as Citizen Kane.

  Ray and John Houseman moved back into their shared estate above the hills of Hollywood and took up adjoining offices at RKO, although Ray was no longer considered Houseman’s assistant. Houseman easily persuaded Dore Schary to let Ray direct a few screen tests, and after the tests passed muster with the boss, early in February the studio announced that Ray would be the “writer-director” of RKO’s planned adaptation of Thieves Like Us.

  There was one slight problem: the “writer” part. Even though Ray’s treatment was “half screenplay already,” in Houseman’s opinion, and “infused with the characteristic tone” of the eventual film, according to Bernard Eisenschitz, after months of augmentation Ray had ended up with a treatment 196 pages long. Only a Hollywood professional would know how to strip the story down to meet “the limitations of a medium-priced program picture,” according to Houseman—and only a veteran of the system would know how to mediate the stubborn opposition of the Production Code Administration.

  Back in December 1946, shortly before Schary’s appointment as studio head, RKO officials had attended an “extraordinary session” at the censorship office, where “the entire staff of ten reviewers” and chairman Joseph I. Breen came together to critique Ray’s latest draft treatment. The Hollywood censors hadn’t budged. Every element of the story had to be softened: the characters, incidents, themes, and “general indictment of society which justifies the title.”

  Ray was as eager as Houseman to break the censorship logjam. With casting and preproduction duties looming before him, he agr
eed to hand over the final script to someone else. Houseman recommended a mutual friend, a former lawyer named Charles Schnee. Underrated in most accounts of Ray’s career, Schnee would make important contributions to several of the director’s finest pictures.

  A Connecticut native and Yale Law School graduate, Schnee had practiced law for a few years before deciding he’d rather be a writer. He’d penned radio dramas for Houseman and the Mercury Theatre, and supplied Lee Strasberg with individual scenes to use in his acting classes. In 1943 Strasberg directed Schnee’s first Broadway play, Apology; the play grabbed the attention of producer Hal Wallis, who signed Schnee to a contract after seeing it in New York.

  Schnee made his mark quickly in Hollywood, doctoring a few scenes for John Berry’s second feature, From This Day Forward, and scripting the hard-boiled I Walk Alone, a Hal Wallis production, for Burt Lancaster. Schnee had just finished a round of work on Red River, a cattle-drive Western destined to become a classic, for director Howard Hawks. (An Easterner to the core, Schnee had spent a summer during college working on a Wyoming ranch.)

  Schnee was a proponent of research and realism, a philosophy congenial to Ray, with his left-wing theater and archival background. “Perhaps my training as a practicing attorney in New York,” Schnee once explained, “has persuaded me of the necessity to dig deep for the facts in writing a screenplay and to relate the characters to the situations with a realization of the over-all objective.” He was also “flexible, fresh, imaginative,” in Houseman’s words, especially good with dialogue. In person Schnee was mild-mannered, puffing on a pipe as he listened during script discussions; he often finished troublesome scripts after other writers bailed out on them. He had the look and demeanor of a lawyer, and functioned like a lawyer, homing in on the thorniest issues any script presented.

  Houseman cautioned Schnee to follow Ray’s existing treatment as closely as possible. “I wanted really to do a transfer job,” Houseman said later, “to transfer the treatment into a screenplay . . . I made it absolutely clear that I didn’t want any original creative work, simply an effective job.” By early February the trio was immersed in script talks, and later that month they visited the Production Code offices to haggle personally with Breen. RKO’s censorship liaison, Harold Melniker, joined the meeting. This was Ray’s first encounter with Hollywood censorship officials, but he did not feel daunted. After all, Ray was a veteran of FDR’s New Deal bureaucracy in Washington, D.C., and he always had shown patience and tact in planning and budget meetings. During his screen career he would help negotiate compromises to many sensitive censorship issues.

  As the trio listened, Breen itemized the sticking points. The three criminals were too brutal. The youngest, Bowie, showed no guilt. Keechie enabled Bowie’s violent behavior. Bowie and Keechie obviously indulged in sexual relations before marriage. Edward Anderson’s ending for the novel, in which the police gunned down Bowie and Keechie, offered little hope or uplift.

  Consulting with Ray and Houseman, Schnee bent to the task, tailoring scenes and penning sharp dialogue where Ray’s lines were long-winded or off the mark. He picked up on the “object tracks”* Ray had added to the story—the mutual gift of watches between Bowie and Keechie—and invested them with increasing meaning each time the young lovers synchronized their watches.

  Wherever possible, Schnee also eliminated static scenes and added action to the story. For example, Ray’s original opening had a Lead Belly–type prisoner singing the blues in the penitentiary where the three lifers are being held. The breakout was more heard than seen, and the convicts made their escape by train. Schnee saved screen and production time by going back to the novel and starting with the prisoners racing down a country road in a stolen car. That led to the film’s opening scene—and inspired Ray’s daring idea to film their escape using aerial photography.

  In his treatment, Ray had also written scenes to intensify the muted radicalism of the novel, blaming the desperate actions of the hardened criminals on social inequities. Breen complained that there were too many such scenes, and Schnee had to eliminate or temper a few. This included the one Ray himself had devised, in which Bowie and Keechie marry at a roadside chapel after impulsively abandoning their seats on a Greyhound bus. Schnee replaced the social commentary in Ray’s version with bitter humor. (The marriage sequence also gave the filmmakers a way to soften the censor-flagged lovemaking between Keechie and Bowie, which leads to Keechie’s pregnancy.)

  Scene by scene, the violence of the story had to be moderated. A policeman who was killed in Ray’s treatment would now be merely wounded. Bowie would be given a “soft heart” and other “likeable” traits (he drinks milk, holds boyish superstitions, even cradles a baby in one scene). The Production Code even regarded the original book title as subversive, with its implication that all businessmen and bankers were “thieves like us.” RKO would have to find a new title.

  Schnee wrote for two months—making “extensive changes,” according to censorship records—before arriving at a much-reduced 117-page draft on May 2, 1947. But Breen rejected this rewrite too, complaining that too much criminality still went unpunished. Schnee and Houseman paid a crisis visit to the Production Code office, this time without Ray, to ask about other ways of “strengthening the voice for morality” through the character of Keechie, who in the novel is more complicit in Bowie’s actions and who is killed with him by police at the end.

  Ray’s own radicalism had evanesced, and in his career he was always pragmatic and resourceful about censorship; the team had little choice but to appease the Hollywood censors. At this mid-May meeting, Houseman and Schnee made the unwanted decision to write new dialogue distancing Keechie from Bowie’s crimes. In small ways, they agreed to reinforce her innocence (playing down any hints of a “sex affair” between her and Bowie before their marriage). They agreed to remedy more than thirty other code transgressions: T-Dub’s physical brutality, Bowie’s indifference to his own misdeeds, the hostile attitude toward police, the actual methods and rewards of crime—all hallmarks of the novel.

  Schnee discussed the changes with Ray and Houseman, and their two months of work and diplomacy finally bore fruit when the Breen office tentatively approved Schnee’s draft of June 7, 1947, pending resolution of minor problems on three pages. Breen sent the team a special letter of gratitude for the cooperation they showed in taming “this originally very difficult story.”

  By then, Ray had labored on the script for more than a year—longer than he would work on any other script of his that ended up on the screen. He had benefited from advice and feedback from astute writer friends in New York and Hollywood, and from Houseman and Schnee during every stage of the struggle at RKO. Even during the censorship crunch he had maintained his compass.

  Indeed, one could argue that, by some mysterious means, the long development process—and even the censorship concessions—further aligned the film with Ray’s psyche. The final script was still relatively faithful to Anderson’s tough-minded novel. But the story now was less about the trio of criminals and more about Bowie and Keechie—a fable of their doomed romance. Like the men in many future Ray films, Bowie was depicted as scalded by his upbringing, misunderstood by society, and in the thrall of macho behavior. He was also helplessly, almost haplessly, in love with a blameless girl. But Bowie’s fundamental decency was underlined by his ultimate self-sacrifice. The doomed character finally succeeded, it might be said, by failing. These elements were present in the book, but they were protected and enhanced as the script evolved.

  And many of Ray’s personal touches persisted into the final script—including his unusual title sequence. Schnee honed the final words, but it was Ray who had conceived the film’s opening: a tight image of Bowie and Keechie, rapturously entwined, along with a narrative scroll. “This boy and this girl, were never properly introduced to the world we live in . . .” This singular prelude would introduce the film—and establish the unmistakable tone of Ray’s vision.

>   The title itself never stopped being a point of contention. RKO didn’t object when the Production Code took issue with Anderson’s original title: The studio didn’t like “Thieves Like Us” either.* And when Schnee replaced the Mexican nightclub dancer in Ray’s treatment with a jazz singer who entertains Bowie and Keechie on their date night, Ray earmarked the part for another Lute Song acquaintance, his rumored lover Marie Bryant. Ray liked a bluesy song in Bryant’s repertoire, “Your Red Wagon,” a 1930s tune retooled by Hollywood composers and recorded by both Count Basie and Jimmy Witherspoon in 1947. In New Orleans slang, “That’s your red wagon” meant “That’s your business,” and Ray thought it made for a good title.

  No one in the studio hierarchy was crazy about its obscure meaning, but that was what was stamped on Schnee’s June 26, 1946, shooting script, and in late June “Your Red Wagon” was announced as the working title of the new RKO production based on Thieves Like Us.

  While Schnee was writing, Ray was organizing the cast and crew and planning the logistics of the production. His biggest concern was casting the two leads, the doomed lovers Bowie and Keechie. Schary had intriguing ideas: Maybe Shirley Temple as Keechie? But the studio boss was willing to let Ray explore other possibilities, reserving the right of final approval.

  From the leads to the smallest parts, Ray’s search process was unconventional. For him, there was no dividing line between the studio workday and the Hollywood night. The parties he attended became an extension of the casting call. Drink in hand, Ray would stare at guests as if, thinking of Vakhtangov, he was peering into their souls, their essences, searching for signs of the characters in the films he was preparing.

  He stared at Farley Granger so long and hard he gave the actor the creeps. Not quite twenty-two, Granger was an epicene Californian with unexpected depths and, in the right role, the pounce of a tiger. In some ways Ray saw the Edward Anderson novel as a crime-story variation on Romeo and Juliet—he joked about borrowing the title—and Granger was Romeo-handsome. Before serving in the military, he had attracted notice in two Lewis Milestone films. Though he was now under contract to Goldwyn, Granger hadn’t worked since the war.