Nicholas Ray

by Patrick McGilligan

  At Saul and Ethyl Chaplin’s house for a party one night, Ethyl introduced Granger to the tall, older stranger who’d been eyeing him from across the room. “I tried to make conversation,” the actor remembered, “but failed miserably. Nick was either shy, or inhibited, or taciturn, or all of the above. After a while I gave up trying to communicate with him and went to get a drink.”

  No matter how often Granger ran into Ray, they fell into these same stilted conversations. “I actually thought he was drunk all the time,” recalled Granger. Nick Ray very well may be drunk, Ethyl Chaplin told Granger with a wink, but he’s also a new director studying you for a part in the movie he’s making. Sure enough, one day soon thereafter Ray and John Houseman summoned Granger to RKO for a meeting.

  There the actor met the other side of Ray. “Nick was completely articulate when he talked to me about the part and what he thought I could bring to it,” recalled Granger. “John Houseman was charming, and, as I was to learn, more than articulate about everything.”

  Ray saw Granger as the fugitive Bowie, but in order to convince the studio, they needed Granger to make a screen test, playing a convincing love scene with a Keechie-type actress. Would Granger prefer to test with any particular actress? The actor suggested his friend and fellow Goldwyn player Cathy O’Donnell, a wholesome, ethereal beauty who’d made a touching debut as the wife of armless war hero Harold Russell in The Best Years of Our Lives. That was enough for Ray, who tended to build his films around male leads, casting the women almost as afterthoughts. He got in touch with O’Donnell, and the actress rehearsed with Granger over the weekend before their on-camera audition.

  The tests went well but Schary wasn’t won over. RKO had its own young contract players, and the studio was reluctant to pay Goldwyn for loan-outs. The director and producer dug in their heels, however, and “Houseman, a very canny man, probably let the final casting go until the eleventh hour in order to be able to put that extra bit of pressure on Dore Schary,” in Granger’s words. The eleventh hour rolled around in June, when Schnee delivered his final revised script, and then, at last, Schary approved Ray’s choices for Bowie and Keechie.

  RKO cared mainly about the two leads and left the supporting roles to the director’s discretion. Between them, Houseman later wrote, most of their picks were people they already knew and felt comfortable with: “our friends—men and women we had worked with before.”

  Ray’s onetime writing partner, actor Howard Da Silva, seemed born to play the sinister Chickamaw. (“Three-toed Mobley” in the book, in the film Chickamaw acquires a glass eye to become “One-eyed Mobley,” playing on Da Silva’s trademark glower.) Ray knew Jay C. Flippen from political benefits in New York and a long poker-playing relationship. The craggy-faced, raspy-voiced Flippen was well known as a vaudeville comic, but Ray also recalled him as the shiftless Jeeter Lester in a road show of Tobacco Road. More recently Flippen had displayed his menace as a prison guard in Jules Dassin’s Brute Force. Ray cast his friend as T-Dub, the oldest, most mercurial member of the trio of escaped convicts. And he called on stage actress Helen Craig, from the ill-fated Lute Song, to make her memorable screen debut as the hard-bitten, treacherous Mattie, the wife of T-Dub’s jailed brother.

  Ray gave small parts to Stanley Prager and to his old Theatre of Action friends Will Lee, Curt Conway, and Erskine Sanford, all circulating in Hollywood these days. In the tradition of left-wing theater, he even buttonholed a few nonactors to play their counterparts on the screen. A real Greyhound driver, for example, played the bus driver in the film.

  Ray was sentimental about one last piece of casting. One day at RKO he recognized Guy Beach—his boyhood idol, now a character actor—making the studio rounds. Ray greeted him warmly and promptly offered the onetime impresario of the La Crosse stock company a role as the plumber who recognizes Bowie and Keechie from their pictures in the newspapers. A publicity photo of the two old friends reminiscing was promptly dispatched to Wisconsin papers.

  The camera, design, and postproduction personnel on the film were all under contract to RKO. Though Ray often claimed to have discovered his cinematographer, in fact George E. Diskant already had solid credits at the studio, including a film noir for Anthony Mann. Ray’s editor, Sherman Todd, was among the best on the lot, Oscar-nominated for The Long Voyage Home and For Whom the Bell Tolls. When Ray told Diskant about his plans for unusual camerawork, including aerial photography, the cinematographer nodded in agreement; when the director told Todd that he shouldn’t expect the standard coverage—establishing shot, medium shot, two-shot, close-up—the veteran editor didn’t even blink.

  By the time principal photography got under way, John Houseman was noticing a “new balance” in his relationship with the first-time director. All of Ray’s background in theater, radio, and television, his time with the WPA and Voice of America—all that he had done in the fifteen years since leaving Wisconsin—had led to this propitious moment. Once Houseman’s trusted alter ego, Ray had grown under his friend’s sponsorship and emerged as his own man. No longer “ungathered,” the novice director had prepared extensively, scribbling notes and ideas all over the novel and script. His experience in broadcasting made him instantly comfortable with the technology of cameras and sound. Full of optimism and energy, “with a style and work patterns that were entirely and fiercely his own,” in Houseman’s words, Ray took charge—so much so that, one day very early in the filming, he and Houseman had a disagreement and the producer was ordered off the set.

  Houseman left willingly. He realized he was no longer needed. Though Ray and he continued to share the same address, and though they stayed the best of friends, the producer was heard and seen less on the set. Houseman already had found a new outlet for his talents, helping to start the Coronet Theatre on La Cienega Boulevard, financed by old New York friends in Hollywood. The Coronet Theatre was just opening up and planning to host the long-awaited American premiere of Galileo, directed by Joseph Losey.

  Left firmly in command, Ray almost immediately raised eyebrows at the studio—and among journalists—with his maverick techniques. It started with his decision to deploy a helicopter for the opening aerial shots, which was trumpeted as a first in Hollywood and attracted coast-to-coast wire-service coverage during the first week of filming. The studio departments had initially opposed the idea as risky and expensive, but Ray insisted that using overhead shots to photograph the trio of convicts escaping in a speeding car and fleeing through a wheat field would be a unique way to launch the story and establish the mood. After the first few aerial shots—for which the director climbed in the copter and flew in the air to personally aim the camera lens—Ray giddily ordered fifteen more unplanned aerial setups. Years later, under the influence of auteurist praise, the director would find a deeper significance to the unusual aerial shots, describing them as “intended to represent the long arm of fate, doom.”

  Yet Ray was a conscious visual artist. He approached a scene the way he examined guests at a party, peering at them from every possible angle, hovering, edging closer, sometimes looming over their heads. His camera made a study of his characters, then sympathetically adopted their point of view. He insisted on handheld photography in some scenes, wedging the camera close to the people trapped inside careening cars. He called for shots that were skewed at an angle, just like in the funny papers. At one point, he even forced a cameraman to dig a hole in a stage floor to get the kind of extreme low angle that would become characteristic in his films. His camerawork forced an intimacy with the characters.

  As much as possible, Ray tried to set his scenes outdoors and at night, to heighten the naturalism of the Edward Anderson story. He set up shots with slats, smoke, rain, or waving branches to add texture to the foreground of his compositions. Not for the last time he used mirrors to divide the screen, with one image commenting on another: a last glimpse of the incorrigible Chickamaw in Bowie’s rearview mirror as he angrily drives away.

  Ray offered con
stant challenges to RKO’s camera and lighting crew, and the same went for the studio sound technicians. With his radio training, Ray was highly attuned to the audio effects for his first film: the wind hissing down wires, the mournful train whistles, and the clamor of cars on the road. The first-time director was bent on “such a thorough and painstaking job that he drove the studio working crews into a frenzy,” according to one newspaper account. “There were mutterings of, ‘Who does he think he is, another Orson Welles?’ ”

  Hollywood directors could be laissez-faire when it came to handling actors; some were sadistic martinets. Here too, on his very first film, Ray set a unique tone with cast members: gentle, whispering, confidential. Drawing on his years of study and experience, he urged his players to ponder the behavior of their characters and explore any similarities to themselves.

  He used every rehearsal ploy he could think of: sending Cathy O’Donnell to work at a gas station across the street from RKO, for instance, to teach her what it was like to pump gas, change oil, and check tires for days on end. When it came time to film, the dirt and grease on her coveralls was real. But Ray was also a good listener. When O’Donnell told him that she’d been born in Alabama and gone to school in Oklahoma, he seized on those details, reminding her that her character was from the same time and place, urging her to absorb and reflect that kinship. He did the same with Jay C. Flippen, an Arkansas native. With certain other performers—like Howard Da Silva, a self-starting powerhouse—his direction was more a matter of a wink and a nod.

  Ray’s biggest roll of the dice was undoubtedly Farley Granger, the actor playing Bowie. Ray and Charles Schnee had strengthened Bowie’s position at the center of the story, revising scenes to reflect the character’s point of view—staging the first bank robbery, for example, from inside the car through Bowie’s eyes. Ray’s nurturing began first thing in the morning—most mornings—when the director picked up the young star and gave him a ride to the studio. Yet Ray could be maddeningly uncommunicative in the car, saying almost nothing until they arrived at RKO.

  Though Ray was “socially inarticulate, he was the complete opposite when working,” Granger recalled. “If he wanted something special from any of the actors in a scene, he would put his arm around your shoulder and walk you away to talk privately about the situation and the character, even if it was for something as simple as wanting me to react differently to the sound of a car approaching.”

  For Ray, Vakhtangov’s dictum to actors—“find yourself within your character”—extended to the director as well. A Nicholas Ray film always worked best when he could explore himself in the main characters. As a onetime delinquent himself who understood intense fears and desires, Bowie was a natural alter ego for him. As closely as Ray observed Granger at parties before, he watched him on the set now, making sure the young actor talked as tough as T-Dub in some scenes and acted as vulnerable as Keechie in others. Granger fulfilled his expectations.

  Ray’s budget was only $750,000—less than half of the $1.7 million budget for Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, for instance, produced by the same studio in the same year (its cost padded by the salaries for three stars: Cary Grant, Myrna Loy, and Melvyn Douglas). Though Ray’s unconventional techniques took him $20,000 over budget, he picked up momentum as the filming progressed, and the production was completed on schedule by mid-August. In the last days of shooting Ray celebrated his thirty-sixth birthday. He was the same age as Elia Kazan when he directed A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

  Flattering publicity came with the studio contract, and here too, Ray revealed a hidden strength; he knew how to play his salesman part in the Hollywood game. In his earliest interviews, the novice RKO filmmaker took pains to carve a distinct identity for himself, even to the point of disparaging a few other directors by name—veteran old-timers who were born at the end of the nineteenth century, whose first pictures had been silent, and who were now in their fifties.

  Interviewers painted Ray as a man with “a tall, athletic body, a handsome, sensitive face, and wavy, slightly graying hair.” Ray’s youthful looks set him apart from the old guard, and so did his wardrobe: Where they dressed in suits and ties, Ray outfitted himself in “outrageous red, white and blue polka-dot shirts, corduroy pants and Mexican rope sandals,” as one reporter noted.

  His cinematic ambitions differed from those of the suit-and-tie generation. “Men like Cecil B. DeMille, Alexander Korda and John Ford expertly handle casts of three thousand people, with two thousand animals and massive sets,” Ray said in one article. “But in doing so, they have to be more like generals conducting a battle. They must sacrifice intimate, personal details, which make an audience realize there is a relation between what they see on the screen and their own lives.”

  He added this statement, a kind of declaration of principle: “I believe in stripping away details that are unnecessary or distracting to an audience. Big sets and fancy costumes are so frequently beautiful by themselves that they cause filmgoers to lose sight of the story and people.”

  “The story and the people”: In interviews and at studio meetings Ray floated a fistful of potential new screen stories to follow “Your Red Wagon.” Bernard Eisenschitz, in his biography, lists five different projects Ray registered through his agency, Berg and Allenberg, which also represented John Houseman. None was ever produced or, as far as is known, completed as a script.

  For a while, after finishing his first film, he worked on another intimate, troubled-youth project with Esther McCoy, Jean Evans’s friend from his early New York days, and McCoy’s collaborator, Colorado-born writer Silvia Richards, who had come out of radio. McCoy and Richards were crafting a Bowie-and-Keechie-type tale about two teenagers in love, whose fates are warped by their bad parents. The two writers did the kind of research Ray valued, visiting juvenile courts and reform schools and interviewing parole officers. Their story had one key scene that took place at the Griffith Park Observatory, where an expert gives a lecture about the stars and sky. The lecture scene lent the McCoy-Richards story its title: “Main Street, Heaventown,” a phrase from a Joyce Kilmer poem. The authors finished a lengthy treatment, but it wasn’t enough to hook RKO.

  Ray announced he would stage Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet with Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell at the Coronet Theatre for Christmas. Good publicity for Your Red Wagon, yet it never happened. The truth was, for whatever he did next, he needed the studio’s consent and RKO hadn’t decided on his next assignment. But that didn’t matter to his feelings of pride and happiness. Even as Ray searched and searched for his next viable property, his future looked bright. His smile was never broader.

  By day, during the fall of 1947, Ray oversaw the cutting of “Your Red Wagon,” working closely with editor Sherman Todd. Todd, whose own directorial ambitions were never realized, encouraged the director’s bolder instincts—cutting from movement into a close-up, for example, or allowing a long uninterrupted glide of the camera. It was Todd, Ray recalled, who suggested “the cut into the trees swaying with the wind that takes Cathy [O’Donnell] into the cabin.” Todd would edit two other RKO pictures for Ray: A Woman’s Secret and Flying Leathernecks.

  John Houseman returned to the lot to assist with postproduction. With “loving care,” the producer remembered, Ray took the lead in shaping a soundtrack of “the characteristic, commonplace, personal and mechanical sounds of American life.” Some of it was popular music derived from radio shows: the chestnut “Comfort and Joy” was heard behind Bowie and Keechie’s Christmas argument, and there were snatches of WPA tunes, including one by Ray’s old friend Woody Guthrie.* Studio composer Leigh Harline blended it all together.

  The excitement around the picture was mounting; the film’s “lyricism” (Ray’s word) gave it a sensibility uncommon among the typical run of crime dramas. The director’s standing rose at the studio and on “the Bel-Air Circuit,” the mansion homes of producers and executives who had plush screening rooms for private showings. Dore Schary met
with Ray and promised him an “A” budget and stars for his next production.

  After his theater and radio careers and other professional detours, the late bloomer had discovered his true calling. “The celluloid strip is a bloodstream for me,” Ray proclaimed toward the end of his life, and it was true: It was a job that encompassed all of life, and all the arts, and nearly everything he had absorbed and practiced and dreamed of doing over the years.

  For the first time ever he also had money to spare, and he felt so at home in Hollywood he even spoke in interviews of building a house with his newfound affluence. The parties and women were still abundant, but money gave him another way to socialize: high-stakes poker games. Ray quickly became a regular in the big games with producers and executives, and now he could even afford jaunts to Las Vegas. In the hotels and casinos in the gambling capital, he quickly became known as a happy-go-lucky loser who never seemed to mind losing big sums of money.

  September 1947 should have been a glorious milestone. Ray’s road ahead looked clear and unobstructed. Then something happened to cast a pall over his—and Hollywood’s—future.

  Years later, writer Gavin Lambert said that Ray’s friends privately thought of the director as a little like Joe Btfsplk, the Al Capp comic strip character with a permanent dark cloud of bad luck hovering over his head. Lambert was alluding to the series of physical accidents and illnesses that began to plague Ray in the mid-1950s, but he might just as well have been referring to the dramatic setbacks that had marked his life dating back to his father’s sudden death, or his banishment from Taliesin.