Nicholas Ray

by Patrick McGilligan

  For a decade, Ray had dodged the rabid anti-Communism hovering over his generation. He had escaped public mention at the congressional hearings that attacked the Federal Theatre Project. He had eluded J. Edgar Hoover’s best efforts to classify him as a dangerous subversive. He was openly denounced when working for the Voice of America and lost out on his overseas transfer and passport, but took it all with a blithe shrug of the shoulders. But he must have blanched in September 1947, when the House Committee on Un-American Activities announced that it was subpoenaing thirty Hollywood figures to testify in Washington, D.C.

  Nineteen of those subpoenaed were accused of Communist Party membership. Most of the accused were screenwriters, their credits as prominent as their left-wing beliefs. Ray personally knew several of the nineteen: Albert Maltz, who had sat on the board of the Theatre of Action; John Howard Lawson, who’d helped the radical collective with The Young Go First; director Edward Dmytryk and producer Adrian Scott, who’d crossed his path at RKO where they too were under contract; Howard Koch, writer of the ballot-box documentary Tuesday in November.

  Liberals in Hollywood rose to the defense of the “Hollywood Nineteen,” forming the Committee for the First Amendment, comprised of top-tier directors like John Huston and William Wyler, and stars such as Gene Kelly, Danny Kaye, Humphrey Bogart, and Lauren Bacall. Members of the Committee for the First Amendment announced that they would accompany the Hollywood Nineteen to the hearings in Washington and speak out against harassment of the industry. Yet Ray’s name was absent from the committee’s signed public advertisements.

  Then, in October, amid sensationalistic press coverage and anti-Communist grandstanding from firm-jawed, conservative-minded stars like Gary Cooper and Robert Taylor, ten of the nineteen were summoned to the witness stand—and stoutly refused to answer hostile questions about their political beliefs. An eleventh, playwright Bertolt Brecht, stymied the committee with his sly, bland responses; after dismissal, Brecht promptly grabbed a taxi to the airport and fled America. The remaining “Hollywood Ten” were cited for contempt of Congress and sentenced to jail terms. They vowed to fight their case all the way to the Supreme Court.

  Liberal support for the Ten evaporated almost overnight in Hollywood. The Committee for the First Amendment, divided by the witnesses’ sometimes belligerent defiance of HUAC—and taken aback by the unsympathetic press coverage—returned to Hollywood and disbanded.

  Dore Schary, an avowed anti-Communist liberal, was one of the witnesses who offered “friendly” testimony to HUAC in Washington. Even after the debacle of the Ten, Schary insisted that studio employees had a right to their political beliefs and “in the absence of company policy he would not refuse to hire Communists,” according to a statement he gave to the New York Times. But Schary was countermanded one month later by company president Peter Rathvon and chairman of the board Floyd Odlum; and RKO became the first major studio to announce it would no longer hire any known Communist.

  A wider blow was struck in early December, when more than fifty film producers and executives held a closed-door meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. After two days, they emerged to announce the firing of the Ten and an industry-wide policy that barred the future employment of any known Communists—“an action unprecedented in American industrial fields,” as the New York Times noted. The moguls who joined in the decision included Columbia’s Harry Cohn, MGM’s Louis B. Mayer, Jack L. Warner, independent producer Samuel Goldwyn—and RKO’s Dore Schary, to the dismay of Hollywood liberals and leftists alike.

  Pressed by reporters to explain his actions, Schary said that his opposition to firing Communists had been “my own personal view,” but that he would “abide by the decision” reached at the Waldorf-Astoria. Edward Dmytryk and Adrian Scott, the two members of the Hollywood Ten under RKO contract, were the first to be let go—the first to be “blacklisted.”

  A short time later, in February 1948, a California governmental group, the Senate Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities, took up the gauntlet with a state-based investigation into “Communist front organizations” in the motion picture industry. Many actors once affiliated with the Federal Theatre Project or the Theatre of Action—friends of Ray’s—were called to respond to charges against them, including Will Lee, who’d had a small part in Ray’s still-unreleased adaptation of Thieves Like Us. Lee was among those who refused to answer whether or not he was ever a Communist, and his screen offers swiftly dried up.*

  Over the Christmas holiday in 1947, Ray took a brief mountain vacation with Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen (who directed Kelly’s MGM musicals), hearing firsthand about the alarming events in D.C. from Kelly, the least repentant of the Committee for the First Amendment delegation. (Kelly’s wife, actress Betsy Blair, was close to the Communist Party.) All three knew and admired Schary and hoped he would moderate the impact of HUAC on Hollywood.

  For a brief time, Ray attended large meetings designed to map out a legal strategy and raise money to support the jobless Hollywood Ten. When the number of supporters dwindled, though, Ray too stayed away.

  In truth, he had long since distanced himself from America’s Communist Party. To most people who met Ray for the first time in Hollywood—not New York—he seemed tight-lipped or apolitical about his beliefs. Mickey Knox, a left-winger from New York who played a featured role in Knock on Any Door, thought Ray didn’t have a political bone in his body. Screenwriter Millard Kaufman, who befriended Ray at parties, said, “I had no awareness of his politics.”

  Writer Arthur Laurents, who knew Ray during the making of They Live by Night (Laurents was Farley Granger’s lover and part of the crowd that gathered at the Kellys’ and Chaplins’), saw him as a faux-leftist. “I never quite believed Nick had any real convictions,” Laurents said, “perhaps because I didn’t believe he knew who he was politically, sexually, or otherwise. Or perhaps because, if he wasn’t drunk, he always sounded vague, as drunks do.”

  But in fact Ray had been a Communist for years before, and his left-wing activity in New York was hardly a secret. His name was on HUAC’s lists. He couldn’t help but feel a stab of foreboding.

  Late in the fall the studio hosted invitation-only screenings of “Your Red Wagon.” After John Houseman arranged with his friend Iris Barry, curator of the film department at the Museum of Modern Art, to have Ray’s first picture screened in New York, the buzz was good on both coasts. “Your Red Wagon” was scheduled for an early 1947 release.

  The hot new director was privileged to receive an invitation to Sam Spiegel’s New Year’s Eve celebration, a lavish annual house party attended by all the studio bosses and glamorous stars. Cary Grant could be spotted whispering in the ear of Hedda Hopper. Elia Kazan, in and out of Hollywood, was there, and at midnight, Ray had to pinch himself to find himself standing next to Alfred Hitchcock, discussing the fine points of filmmaking.

  Three months after the last day of filming on “Your Red Wagon,” however, Ray and RKO still hadn’t settled on a subject for his second picture. His fistful of ideas all sounded problematic to RKO, mainly because the studio would have to allot time and money to develop scripts based on any of Ray’s original stories. From the studio’s point of view, Ray was proven as a director, not yet as a writer. Management preferred literary properties that had a track record with the public.

  Shortly after the Waldorf-Astoria conference, Dore Schary called Ray in and asked him to take on an unlikely assignment, a woman’s picture based on a 1946 Vicki Baum novel called Mortgage on Life. Schary waxed enthusiastic over the Viennese-born Baum, whose Grand Hotel, her most famous book, had spawned a memorable movie in 1932 and several spin-offs.* Mortgage on Life wasn’t Baum’s finest creation, Schary conceded; nor did it aspire to any Thieves Like Us–type reality. But Ray could show his versatility and loyalty to the studio by taking the job.

  Herman Mankiewicz, who had shared the long car ride to the West Coast with Ray and John Houseman in 1946, was already immersed in
writing the script. Not only would his involvement guarantee a quality screenplay, Schary said, but for the first time “Mank,” as everyone called him, was also in line to produce the film.* Mankiewicz was a master of flashbacks, and Mortgage on Life was a novel full of backstory. The drama started with the confessed shooting of a sexy torch singer by her rivalrous manageress, a talented songstress whose rise in show business has been thwarted by her plain-Jane looks. Scenes from the past reveal the manageress and torch singer locked in a triangle with a debonair piano man.

  One big reason the film had to go ahead, Schary explained, was that the project would satisfy a host of commitments from some of Hollywood’s leading talent. The dapper, intelligent Melvyn Douglas already had agreed to play the piano man. At the height of his reputation, with a pay scale two or three notches above Farley Granger’s, Douglas had romanced Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, and Merle Oberon in major box-office hits. The decisive factor, however, was that Douglas owed a picture to RKO from an earlier contract.

  Casting Maureen O’Hara as the female lead had required Schary’s best diplomacy. When she was first asked to play the songstress turned manageress, the fiery, red-haired Irish actress read over the book and announced that it “stank.” Besides, her casting was illogical. One of the screen’s reigning beauties playing the “plain little frum” who claims to have shot the torch singer? O’Hara declined.

  Schary politely reminded O’Hara that she too owed RKO a picture from a previous pact. Although Schary admitted that the Baum film would likely turn out “less than mediocre,” O’Hara recalled, he “didn’t waver in his commitment to making it. Studio executives had a bit of discretionary leeway to make pictures they wanted from time to time, because they practiced block booking, which meant that RKO would sell its pictures to theater owners in packages.”

  When Schary asked O’Hara what it would take to gain her goodwill, she suggested signing her husband Will Price to a director-producer contract: done. (Sure enough, the aptly named Strange Bargain, Price’s first picture, was produced by RKO in 1949.) Then, Schary told Ray, O’Hara requested him as her director, after watching a screening of “Your Red Wagon.”

  The studio chief saved the best for last. The third lead, the role of the sexy torch singer, was earmarked for Gloria Grahame. One of the industry’s hottest newcomers, the blond actress was coming off a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for her role in Crossfire. In her meetings with Schary, O’Hara had gotten the distinct impression that the studio boss had a crush on Grahame, who was known to sleep around. O’Hara wondered if Schary was having an affair with Grahame. Ray might have wondered the same, but quite a few things were left unspoken.

  If Ray wanted to thrive in Hollywood, he would have to shed his purism as well as his leftism. He had to adapt to a new kind of politics: studio politics. The director couldn’t always count on surrounding himself with like-minded collaborators or having producers as compatible as John Houseman. The studios took charge of major production decisions—the story, stars, and budget—and, as Maureen O’Hara rightly noted, often those decisions were made purely for business reasons. Schary made Ray feel like directing the Baum film would amount to a huge favor to him and RKO.

  Ray was a nice guy; he liked doing favors. He was already a high roller with a contract and lifestyle to protect. And hadn’t he shown a willingness to try almost anything in his career stops? Ray said yes, telling Schary he would try to make the Baum film as interesting as possible.

  Mortgage on Life wasn’t such a great book; it wasn’t even a good title for a book. Bad titles followed Ray around like those little dark clouds drifting over his head. The studio borrowed a working title, “The Long Denial,” from the Collier’s serialization, though it wasn’t much better.

  Since O’Hara was nobody’s idea of a “plain little frum,” Mankiewicz had to concoct an explanation for why such a ravishingly beautiful singer would have failed to achieve the same success as the torch singer she mentors. Mankiewicz gave the manageress a mysterious throat infection that voided her singing career, turning her vulnerable and jealous. The novel may have been silly, but the throat infection was pure Hollywood. Ray and Mankiewicz talked through the script; the director managed to insert a few ideas of his own: the Name That Tune radio show that figures early in the film, and the newly Mexicanized name of the torch singer (Estrellita). But Mankiewicz was a grizzled—some would say cynical—Hollywood expert with limited regard for Ray’s storytelling instincts, and Ray was forced to defer to the great “Mank” (as everyone called him), who was after all the producer as well as screenwriter of “The Long Denial.”

  Mank was at the end of a long, hard-drinking, curmudgeonly life. This was his penultimate script; only one more would bear his name before his death in 1953. Not his finest hour as a writer, “The Long Denial” also called for producing skills with which he wasn’t equipped. The patience, mediating ability, and ingenuity of John Houseman, who had again fled to New York, were not part of his makeup.

  Ray and Houseman had collaborated on the adventurous casting of “Your Red Wagon,” but Douglas, O’Hara, and Grahame were already set in stone for “The Long Denial.” Mank let Ray fill in the ensemble: The director tapped Jay C. Flippen again, this time as a wisecracking detective, and gave small parts to Curt Conway, Guy Beach, and ex-revuer Alvin Hammer.

  Ray also called back cinematographer George E. Diskant, whose main mission on the new picture was to prettify the leading ladies and make the New York, Paris, and North African sets as convincing as possible. Ray did manage to get RKO to agree to six days of read-throughs and rehearsal time before filming. This was precious time in an otherwise rushed schedule, but it allowed Ray to get to know the actors and agitate their essences. It also marked the moment when the first long looks passed between him and Gloria Grahame.

  By mid-February, the principal photography was under way. O’Hara and Douglas would enjoy the most screen time, and their performances cannot be faulted. Even Douglas, lamenting his weak role and the poor script, appreciated Ray as “imaginative, with what material he had.”

  As filming progressed, however, Douglas wasn’t alone in thinking that the director had begun to dote overmuch on his third lead, Gloria Grahame, who was playing the wide-eyed shopgirl from small-town Azuza, California (a running joke in the film: “Everything from A to Z, USA!”), who metamorphoses into the torch singer Estrellita, a bewitching monster. Frankenstein never looked so good.

  At twenty-four, the youngest of the three stars and the least seasoned, Grahame gave herself over to Ray’s velvet-gloves style of whispered directing. She surrendered to his fussiness over her look, even when he decided to stuff cotton under her lips to exaggerate her poutiness. The director turned Grahame loose for her musical numbers and then tried to balance her shortcomings as a singer with old radio tricks. Ray called in professional dubber Kaye Lorraine to sing her several songs, forcing Grahame to lip-sync the words. The glamorous blond actress “didn’t have much of a range, four or five notes, give or take a note,” recalled costar Douglas, who resented being upstaged and thought that Ray was proving himself “a neurotic man” in his increasing preoccupation with the actress.

  Douglas may have been the last to realize why Grahame held such a special power over the director: They were sleeping together. Soon after filming began, Ray started to leave the set after work holding hands with the young actress, then showed up with her at late-night parties, where he crawled all over her. As Grahame’s rumored lover, Schary was definitely out of the running by late March, when all of America learned that “Gloria Grahame and Nicholas Ray,” as Hedda Hopper announced in her syndicated column, “have found each other and don’t deny it.”

  Grahame had been alluring in earlier film appearances, but Ray would make her glow as never before in his new film—and their romance made good publicity for “The Long Denial.”

  A native of Los Angeles who had learned her sexy pout from her mother, an actress and acting
teacher, Grahame had been performing since high school but in motion pictures for only three years. When MGM couldn’t figure out how to exploit her talents, the studio sold her contract to RKO, which promoted her sultrier side. After causing a sensation in a small part in It’s a Wonderful Life, she’d gone on to earn an Oscar nomination as the B-girl who hides killer Robert Ryan in her apartment in Crossfire, a socially conscious picture that both RKO and Ray considered exemplary, even if it was produced by Adrian Scott and directed by Edward Dmytryk—both presently blacklisted. Grahame was “a whirlwind headed for stardom,” as columnist Dorothy Manners put it.

  Many of the men who stood in Grahame’s path were mowed down by that whirlwind. At the time of “The Long Denial,” Grahame was still legally married to her first husband, Stanley Clements, an actor who had been one of the East Side Kids—low-budget Monogram Studio’s answer to the Dead End Kids. Their divorce was pending, because California’s interlocutory decree mandated a waiting period, intended to encourage a reconciliation, before the official breakup.

  Grahame was a natural for spitfire roles—in part because they were close enough to the real Grahame. Her sulking sexuality and her lit-fuse personality were no charade: She was a schoolgirl with sorceress eyes, as Cecil B. DeMille once described her. As prolific as he was casual about love affairs, Ray fell hard for Grahame, as was his wont. Much later, though, he admitted that he hadn’t given much thought to marrying her—until she became “chubby” with child, as Bowie fondly puts it in Ray’s first film (still unreleased). Grahame decided to have the baby, and that was a problem for RKO, which like all Hollywood studios had morals clauses in its contracts—and a paranoia about public reaction to adulterous behavior.

  Already public, the Ray-Grahame romance had to fast-forward after the filming of “The Long Denial.” On April 19, 1948, the actress flew to Las Vegas to establish the six-week residency required for a Nevada divorce. Taking breaks from postproduction, Ray made several trips to the gambling capital, which had become one of his favorite places to relax. But six weeks is a long time, and this time it wasn’t relaxing. The director spent days on end at the craps tables, drinking, rolling the dice, and losing thousands of dollars. Several times he wired his agency and RKO for emergency advances and more money to lose. He was being pressured into a shotgun marriage, he was piling up debt, and he was obviously feeling the strain.