At one thirty P.M. on June 1, the very day her legal residency concluded, Grahame was granted her divorce. At seven thirty P.M. that same day, Ray and Grahame were scheduled to wed in a small chapel on the grounds of El Rancho Vegas Hotel. When the appointed hour arrived, however, Ray could not be found. His best man, Jay C. Flippen, had to track him down at the craps tables and drag Ray to the hotel barber to clean up a little. The director went into his second marriage the same way he suffered a bad script: silently, his resentment masked with a smile.
Wire service photographers were waiting outside the chapel to capture the image of Ray, “radiant, with his white handkerchief and polka-dot tie; less ravishing, though, than Gloria, in her generously low-cut Mexican dress.” The smiling, kissing photograph that splashed across America’s newspapers suggested a dewy-eyed wedding, like the one celebrated by Bowie and Keechie in “Your Red Wagon.” But it wasn’t long before Ray started to behave like one of the angry men in certain films he directed, the ones who shout at ladies and slap them around.
“Gloria said that after the ceremony he went back to the tables,” wrote Vincent Curcio in Suicide Blonde: The Life of Gloria Grahame, “and left her with one of his close friends, who was especially mean to her. Not a very romantic, or even kind, way to treat his bride.”
RKO did its best to disguise the truth, and Hollywood reporters who suspected the reality colluded in keeping the secret. This episode cemented Ray’s already developing relationships with Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons, and other Hollywood columnists who traded in “scoops”—like the concurrent announcement that the director had agreed to a multipicture loan-out to Humphrey Bogart’s exciting new production company at Columbia. Although it would eventually have quite a downside, for the moment Ray’s marriage to the ravishing, pregnant Grahame was contrived by publicity to boost both his name and his manly image.
“Our dull little picture is to be sneak previewed next week,” the director wrote Houseman in midsummer about the Mankiewicz-produced “The Long Denial,” “so who cares.”
All of a sudden, studio boss Dore Schary, out of the running with Gloria Grahame, checked himself out of RKO entirely. Back on May 11, while Ray and Grahame were still biding their time in Las Vegas, Floyd Odlum, chairman of the RKO board, announced the transfer of a 24 percent, controlling bloc of company stock to the aviation pioneer and independent film magnate Howard Hughes. The takeover bid by Hughes, an eccentric outsider, sent another shock wave through the studio, which was already reeling from the HUAC depredations.
Studio employees, from top producers to lowliest sweepers, awaited Hughes’s arrival with dread. The new owner made one imperious tour of the RKO premises (“Paint the place!” Hughes is said to have famously declared); then, living up to his oddball reputation, he elected to keep his main offices at Goldwyn Studios about a mile away. Not until late June did Hughes strike his first blow, scuttling four major Schary-approved projects on the eve of filming. Schary resigned in the first week of July to join MGM as its new head of production.
Some, including Ray, thought wistfully of the departing RKO boss as a decent progressive who’d been coerced into the Waldorf-Astoria statement. Schary’s hiring by MGM was probably “the one courageous note” Hollywood had trumpeted in months, as Ray wrote in a summer letter to John Houseman. Although he wondered if Ray could survive in the MGM “den of horrors,” he felt certain Schary was “aware of the booby traps.”
In time, the liberal Schary would further disappoint, but meanwhile the future of RKO belonged to the notoriously quixotic, high-handed Hughes. As soon as Schary was gone, Hughes overhauled the studio’s management, ushered in a new executive team, and began to review all the long-term contracts. He slowed down all production and the release of finished pictures.
Ray’s personal, short-term future was safe—he had free and clear permission to work with Bogart on one or more films independent of RKO. But Hughes’s arrival jeopardized “Your Red Wagon” just when Ray’s first picture was finally due for release. It didn’t help that the film was saddled with a title no one liked or could even remember. In early 1948, Schary had tried giving Ray’s directing debut a new name: “The Twisted Road.” That June—the same month Ray married Grahame, Hughes assumed control of RKO, and Schary left to join MGM—“The Twisted Road” was screened in New York and Los Angeles for the trade press.
Motion Picture Daily found Ray’s debut unusual, strong, and compelling, “directed with distinction.” The Hollywood Reporter likewise thought “The Twisted Road” gripping and eloquent, with Ray achieving “an impressive job of direction that is characterized throughout by intelligent understatement and a markedly successful attempt to keep the characterizations credible.” Variety hailed the picture as honest and moving.
Yet most of the positive reviews commented adversely on the film’s downbeat subject matter—which, according to the trade press, augured a “limited” box-office. After watching “The Twisted Road” himself, Howard Hughes agreed: downbeat and limited. Soon thereafter, Ray’s first film was put on the studio shelf and indefinitely embargoed. While in time this would add to Ray’s mystique, in June 1948 it merely added to his load of troubles.
“The current atmosphere of fear in this town [Hollywood] is much worse,” Ray wrote John Houseman as his mood blackened over the summer of 1948, “and all seem to be picking at themselves, as if they had been covered by soot from a passing freight train.”
The firing of the Hollywood Ten caused the specter of a wider blacklist to hang over the film industry. Some former or current Communists fled Hollywood for New York and the seeming safety of theater or television. Many chose to stick things out, doubtful that the worst would happen. Most campaigned for Henry Wallace, convinced that a President Wallace would put an end to the spreading anti-Communist hysteria. Everyone kept their heads down, picking at the soot.
Ray had made small strides in divorcing himself from the idealistic artist and committed Communist he once had been. During the making of his first film, before the advent of the HUAC hearings, Ray had boasted of his “realistic” approach to the material. But these days in Hollywood the term “realism” was a watchword for radicalism, especially among anti-Communist zealots. Now, in interviews, the director made a point of describing his second picture—prosaically retitled A Woman’s Secret—as “candy-box” entertainment.
Indeed it was. A Woman’s Secret proved that Ray was willing to go along to get along. So did his next choice of leading man: Humphrey Bogart.
When the HUAC hearings were first called, Bogart had bristled at the conservative political attack on Hollywood. Two of his biggest successes, Casablanca and Action in the North Atlantic, had been penned by Howard Koch and John Howard Lawson, two of the Hollywood Nineteen. And Bogart had led the Committee for the First Amendment to Washington, D.C., defending the accused Communists.
But after the HUAC hearings, which liberals considered a fiasco, Bogart returned to Hollywood with his fellow First Amendment defenders, and inside the industry the tough-guy star came under intense pressure to clear his skirts of any pro-Communist taint. Bogart did so faster than most, sending a December 1947 letter to right-wing newspaper columnist Sidney Sokolsky in which he admitted that his support of the Nineteen was “ill-advised, even foolish.” It was one of a series of humiliating apologies that Bogart made publicly and privately in Hollywood, culminating in his infamous “I was a dope and a dupe” article for Photoplay in March 1948.*
The tough-guy hero had turned weak-guy, it appeared; to many people on the Hollywood left, Bogart became a pariah. “No character, nothing. A shit,” declared fellow left-liberal actor Paul Henreid, another star of Casablanca, himself destined to be graylisted.
Then in late 1947, shortly after the Waldorf-Astoria statement, Bogart broke away from his home studio, Warner Bros., and formed an independent company named after his sailboat, Santana. Columbia, another Gower Gulch studio, set out the welcome mat for Santana Productions. T
hough Bogart retained many liberal beliefs, he was urged by close advisers to steer clear of any left-wing associations or controversy in the future—and to clear his name with the movies made by Santana.
The first Santana production, an adaptation of a novel every bit as fraught with dangerous elements as “Thieves Like Us,” would present special difficulties in that regard for its director as well as its star-producer.
Predating the Hollywood Ten uproar, Willard Motley’s gritty first novel, Knock on Any Door, had catapulted the writer from obscurity to fame early in 1947. The episodic life story of a young man, not so unlike Bowie in Thieves Like Us, whose criminal character has been forged by the hopelessness of Chicago slum life, the book sold more than a hundred thousand hardcover copies, with a dozen foreign rights sales. The New York Times hailed the author as an “extraordinary and powerful” disciple of Theodore Dreiser and James T. Farrell.
“Live fast, die young and have a good-looking corpse!” was the credo of the lead character in Motley’s story, Nick Romano, a handsome West Side altar boy whom poverty transforms into a wanton cop-killer, and whose short, violent career ends in the electric chair.
Hollywood had taken quick notice of the book’s success, and bidding for the screen rights rose to $125,000. The competition slowed when producers started recognizing the censorship hurdles any screen adaptation would face; they included the pervasive violence of the book’s milieu—similar to the complaints about Thieves Like Us—and other thorny issues. For example, the Nick Romano character dabbles in bisexuality; he finds homosexuals easy marks for crime but ends up as a kept man for one, rendering him impotent and unable to consummate his relationships with women.
Moreover, while the themes of Thieves Like Us were implicitly radical, Knock on Any Door was an overtly crusading tale about the negative influences of society. It was unabashedly a New Deal novel, with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt among its public fans. To drive home his message, the author inserted himself into the story, in the character of a writer who befriends the former altar boy and comments on the unfolding tragedy.
Born and raised in Chicago, Motley was a rare specimen: a homosexual and a “Negro” (in the terminology of the day) who was openly sympathetic to Communism. So what if the Production Code was dead set “against” his book, as his agent told him? Motley wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it. He had little appetite to sell his book to a Hollywood producer likely to gut or conventionalize a story he’d spent years nursing through research and multiple drafts.
Motley thought the only person in Hollywood who might have the courage to film the book truthfully was Mark Hellinger, a former Broadway columnist who had become a high-quality producer—first at Warner Bros., with realistic gangster pictures like The Roaring Twenties and High Sierra, both watershed vehicles for Humphrey Bogart, and more recently at Universal, where he supervised brutal crime films like The Killers, Brute Force, and Naked City.
Spurred by instructions from Motley, his agent pursued Hellinger after the other bidders dropped out. In September 1947, the agent finally landed a $50,000 deal with the producer. Closely consulting Motley, Hellinger penciled in writer Albert Maltz and director Jules Dassin, the team behind Naked City, to handle the film version. An ecstatic Motley believed Hellinger might even attempt to capture Romano’s divided sexuality; after all, he told friends, recent films like Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend had alluded to the subject, long taboo in Hollywood.
Two developments couldn’t have been predicted: first, the October 1947 HUAC hearings which, in Motley’s word, permanently “furloughed” Maltz, one of the Hollywood Ten. Then, just two months later, a massive coronary struck the forty-four-year-old Hellinger, ending the life of the admired producer.
Hellinger and Bogart had been close friends since their days at Warner’s, and Bogart was already in place as a principal stockholder of Mark Hellinger Productions. They had been planning to make several films together before Hellinger died. Now, along with his business partner, A. Morgan Maree, Bogart took over several of the Hellinger properties, drawing his new Santana Productions roster out of the deceased man’s story file. The best-known among the properties was Knock on Any Door, which Bogart had read and admired.
The success of Motley’s book would guarantee audience interest around the world. While some parts of Motley’s story might be tricky to get past the censors—especially given Bogart’s HUAC troubles—the star envisioned himself in the role of Nick Romano’s lawyer, a part that didn’t really exist in the novel. The original story could be reshaped to please the Production Code office, Bogart’s part could be padded, and scenes that flirted with bisexuality and left-wing politics could be junked. Otherwise, Santana would never be able to obtain the necessary bank loans to finance such an incendiary film—as Bogart himself conceded to the author months later, apologetically.
Bogart and Ray had met first at Hollywood nightclubs and parties, and their glancing acquaintance had evolved into a chummy friendship. Ever the tough guy, Bogart had seen and liked “The Twisted Road” (as Ray’s unreleased first film was now known), and he wanted Ray to direct the first Santana production. Ray was expected to bring the same realism and pictorial expressiveness—not to mention censorship adroitness—to a screen adaptation of Motley’s novel. Another old friend of Bogart’s was just as important to the partnership: Robert Lord, who had taken Hellinger’s place as producer and who would oversee the script.
Lord had been at MGM when the studio had first tried to option Knock on Any Door. But he knew Bogart from Warner Bros. and shared Chicago roots with both Ray and Motley. He’d attended the University of Chicago High School before graduating from Harvard, where he was part of George Pierce Baker’s renowned Workshop 47 in playwriting. After a brief stint as a New Yorker writer, Lord came to Hollywood in the 1920s; he paid his dues writing Tom Mix Westerns before finding his streetwise voice at Warner Bros. Lord won an Academy Award for his story for One Way Passage in 1932, and he was nominated again for Black Legion, a 1937 drama about a secret vigilante organization starring Bogart. The tough-guy star never forgot the film—an unusual socially conscious drama that had rescued him, early in his career, from routine assignments.
After Hellinger died, Bogart went straight to Lord. Lord’s track record as a producer was not as distinguished as Hellinger’s, but Bogart liked and trusted him. In early 1948 the writer-producer became Santana’s vice president, and even before Ray was hired, Lord was already shaping the vulgarization of Knock on Any Door.
First, Lord commissioned another Warner Bros. veteran—John Monks Jr., whose best-known credit was Brother Rat, a 1938 movie based on his Broadway play about life at Virginia Military Institute—to extract a Bogart vehicle from the lengthy, episodic novel. One of Monks’s key contributions was rolling Motley’s narrative observer from the book into Bogart’s lawyer character in the film, making the story less about the sad life of a young hoodlum than about the relationship between the doomed young man and a lawyer with noble intentions. After Monks finished a draft, Lord revised it into a lengthy treatment with dialogue, continuing to bolster Bogart’s role.
The novel had unfolded in painstaking fashion, following the course of Romano’s life chronologically as society gradually devours him. While discussing the script with a Columbia executive (and former Los Angeles judge) named Lester Roth, however, Lord conceived a new frame-and-flashback structure that would launch the film in a courtroom setting. The film could begin with an opening statement by Andrew Morton, Romano’s lawyer and a lifelong friend. (In the novel Morton does not appear in the story until the courtroom climax.) Lord’s decision to tell the screen story in flashback altered the way Romano is shaped by the incremental injustices he suffers in Motley’s novel. It was Roth who suggested depicting Morton as the idealistic partner in a “plushy law firm” that doesn’t appreciate his taking on the cause of a lowlife like Romano—another substantive change that shifted the spotlight further toward Bogart.
> In March 1948, Bogart officially hired Ray as the film’s director. Though Ray too had admired Motley’s novel, he agreed with the necessity of Lord’s changes. That same month, the producer also hired Daniel Taradash to write the final screenplay. A Harvard-trained attorney who had never practiced law, Taradash was a literate yet down-to-earth writer who was in good stead at Columbia, where he had adapted Clifford Odets’s play Golden Boy into a successful film. (Later in his career Taradash would win an Oscar for the studio for From Here to Eternity.)
Ray was not only preoccupied with finishing the melodramatic A Woman’s Secret for RKO, he was busy coping with the personal soap opera of Grahame’s pregnancy and the hastily arranged marriage that followed. In the crucial weeks ahead the director would spend a great deal of his time in Las Vegas—an unfortunate choice that also gave him plausible deniability as the script for Knock on Any Door evolved in his absence.
From March through June, Taradash lived in Miami Beach, where he wrote the bulk of the script; Ray met with him only once or twice on his obligatory visits to Hollywood. Even then, Taradash found the director “strange and remote.” Ray said little, Taradash recalled, merely handed him some pamphlets on juvenile delinquency and reform school.
At Santana’s expense, Taradash made at least one more trip to Los Angeles and another to Chicago to tour the Halstead-Maxwell neighborhood, described in the novel as the milieu of Nick Romano’s boyhood (“the housing is as depressing as anything I’ve ever seen,” wrote Taradash), and his West Madison skid row haunts (“as depraved a section as you can find”). The rest of the time he spent in Miami Beach with Robert Lord, the only person in Hollywood with whom he was in regular communication. Taradash tried with limited success to dispense with the producer’s old-fashioned Warner Bros. flourishes. “I didn’t like his dialogue at all,” the screenwriter reflected years later. “When we discussed it in person, he said, ‘Dan, I’ve been in the business for twenty years,’ to which I replied, ‘So has your dialogue.’ ”
Nicholas Ray Page 19
