Nicholas Ray

by Patrick McGilligan

  The dialogue wasn’t the least of it. Lord was constantly fretting that “Bogart hasn’t enough to do in this picture” and urged Taradash over and over to bolster Bogart’s heroic behavior. Bogart had to be “likeable,” Lord insisted, and his character should take more “action” in the story. This preoccupation gave rise to the action-lawyer scenes, foreign to the book, in which Morton benevolently takes Nick Romano on a fishing trip in Wisconsin—during which Romano steals money from Morton’s stuffy law partner. The Wisconsin crime, in turn, leads to Morton’s payback, when he jack-rolls Romano in an alley later in the film.

  Perhaps the most egregious change from the book was tying Romano’s life of crime into Morton’s professional misjudgments. In Motley’s novel, Romano’s father’s untimely death plunges the family into dire poverty; for the film version, Lord insisted that Romano’s father be wrongfully imprisoned and later die in jail, and that Morton himself be shown as the father’s lawyer. Having failed to defend the father properly, Morton is left with a guilty conscience.

  In the book, it didn’t matter whether readers liked Romano. But movie audiences had to like the hoodlum, according to Lord, who repeatedly asked Taradash to sweeten his characterization. At one point the frustrated Taradash drew up a list of twenty-five “points in my script calculated to make Nick sympathetic and understandable,” citing instances where Romano showed a sense of humor and even his “use of Latin in the park scene,” so audiences wouldn’t forget that he’d been an altar boy once. Taradash even reminded Lord of a scene in which Romano steals to afford a bracelet to give his girlfriend—a scene Lord himself had originally proposed and Taradash had complained about as a cliché—before caving in to write it.

  The film’s budget, including Bogart’s salary, came in at $1.5 million, twice that of the Thieves Like Us adaptation. But Santana was anxious to pay off its bank loans as fast as possible, to avoid the surcharges that could be levied on the loan, and Lord was in a hurry for the final script, so sections were rushed to Lord in Hollywood as soon as they passed through Taradash’s typewriter. “I am going to be awful tough about shooting anything not absolutely necessary,” Lord told Taradash. “Production costs are incredible (and going up) while box-office receipts are dropping.”

  Under the circumstances, Taradash knew that the pages he mailed to Hollywood would suffer a final edit from the heavy hand of Lord, the former scenarist turned producer. When Lord invoked budget concerns to justify chopping away at scenes that distracted from Bogart’s story line—including a brutal reform-school sequence that was crucial to Romano’s downturn in the novel—Taradash asked plaintively if Ray was still around and approved of such drastic changes.

  He was right to ask: Indeed, Ray was still in Las Vegas, even as the reform school sequence was being decimated. Whenever in Hollywood he checked in at Santana, but on script matters Ray tended to support the star and his partner. “Nick Ray has returned and we are conferring hourly,” Lord reported to Taradash. “I gave him a copy of our notes and he seems happy about them.” When Taradash complained repeatedly about Lord’s revisions, the producer reminded him that “both Bogart and Ray think I write good, strong dialogue and seem to like it.”

  Under the shadow of HUAC and preoccupied by his own messy personal problems, Ray had as little as possible to do with the Knock on Any Door script, an increasingly watered-down adaptation of a book whose truths were too stark for Hollywood. He would make a few spot contributions to the script but concentrated instead on his strengths of casting and camerawork.

  Far from the studio-system “victim” that later fans of his films liked to describe, Nick Ray often showed a brilliant ability to simply play the cards he was dealt.

  After finishing the script in late June, Taradash mailed the final pages to Hollywood, then took off for New York to work on a Broadway play. In New York, months later, he was angered to learn he would be sharing screen credit with John Monks Jr., whose draft he had never read. “The funny part of it is that you know at one time I talked about taking my name off the film,” he wrote his agent. “Even now, I don’t think it’s the greatest credit of all time.”

  As Taradash left for Broadway, Ray finally headed home from Las Vegas. In spite of the behind-the-scenes tensions surrounding his nationally publicized nuptials, he and Grahame had made peace and decided to try to make their marriage work. To all appearances, the director was a happy newlywed. Optimism was his stock in trade, personally as well as professionally.

  Now Ray’s old dreams of building a real home for himself in Hollywood broadened to include his new wife and expected child. Given his gambling losses and uneasy feelings about Howard Hughes taking over RKO, though, leasing a house seemed the best temporary solution. After closing up John Houseman’s estate, Ray and the new Mrs. Ray moved into a grand Tudor cottage–style house on Sunset Boulevard, complete with gated driveway and English gardens.

  Ray’s marriage to Grahame gave him something else in common with Bogart: Both had young wives expecting their first babies. (Bogart knew about Grahame’s pregnancy, and by the end of July the news that the actress was expecting had begun to crop up in Hollywood gossip columns.) Ray had always been socially versatile, and with the atmosphere of fear overshadowing his old left-wing circles, the director began shying away from big parties in favor of smaller dinner affairs with other married couples—a group that often included liberal but anti-Communist power couples such as Bogart and Bacall, writer Nunnally Johnson and his wife, and Romanian-born director Jean Negulesco and his wife.

  To all appearances, Ray and Grahame were blissed-out newlyweds, holding hands and smooching in front of others. Both were working on Gower Gulch projects: On the strength of her performance in A Woman’s Secret, the blond actress had been offered her first starring role in an RKO Western. In late June, as Ray was conducting screen tests for Knock on Any Door, Willard Motley himself was on the set when he was introduced to a famous visitor. “Late in afternoon, Gloria Grahame, Nick Ray’s wife, arrives,” Motley wrote in his journal. “ ‘Oh, hello Willard!’ Takes my hand. She [was] very sweet [and] friendly.” Motley was being treated royally by Santana. He had a night on the town with actress Sylvia Sidney and writer Richard Brooks, whom he admired for his Mark Hellinger pictures; a private screening of the film Ray persisted in calling “Your Red Wagon,” though RKO was still clinging to “The Twisted Road”; and a night of cocktails and script talk chez Ray on Sunset Boulevard.

  On the day of Grahame’s visit, Ray was testing actresses for the pivotal role of Emma, Romano’s sweetheart, whose pure love cannot save him from his self-destructive habits and who ends up committing suicide in the story. This type of character—like Keechie in They Live by Night—echoed other saintly women who would pass through the director’s private life (with Grahame a notable exception). Just now Ray was testing Peggy Ann Garner, the young actress whom Kazan propelled to a special Oscar in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (“baby-faced, bunched features,” scribbled Motley in his journal). The following day the director spent a long time giving the same chance to a newcomer without credits (“Much prettier than Peggy Ann. Beautiful hair, big green eyes,” noted Motley). Dozens of tests followed with other would-be Emmas, along with tests for the parts of Vito, Butch, Juan, and the other members of Romano’s skid row gang.

  Bogart stopped by to chat with Ray and Motley. According to studio publicity, it was Bogart himself who personally discovered the film’s unknown young star while touring an infantry camp during the war. John Derek always insisted he had discovered himself—that he had devoured the novel and doggedly pursued the role, pleading with his agent to arrange a screen test. Either way, Bogart and Lord had to approve the casting, and Santana held off announcing the news until June, although Ray had tested Derek several times and Bogart signed off on him early in May.

  Born and raised in Hollywood, the son of silent-era actress Dolores Johnson and writer-director Lawson Harris, Derek had played only a handful of bit parts (und
er the name Dare Harris) before Knock on Any Door. Portraying Nick Romano, the twenty-two-year-old would have more scenes than Bogart, as well as numerous scenes with Bogart. There were private concerns about his ability: “Can that Derek boy really play the part of Nick? It’s not easy,” Taradash warned Lord in a May 22, 1948, letter. But the vital thing was Romano’s looks. In the film, as in the book, Romano is nicknamed “Pretty Boy,” and pretty-boy Derek would also have to convey a sense of inner torment. This was only Ray’s third picture, and already his favorite type of leading man was emerging: a character not unlike himself, a physically dominating, attractive man harboring despair and self-destruction behind his outward beauty.

  With his thick dark hair and soulful eyes, John Derek evoked a Greek god. “His looks are wasted on a man,” associate producer David Mathias assured the doubtful Motley, before they arrived to watch Derek rehearsing with the Emma candidates. “Then saw him,” Motley recorded in his journal. “Very handsome. Mrs. M[athias] introduced us. He shook hands and grinned. ‘Action!’ and he had to start scene again—saying as he walked away, ‘I want to talk to you!’ ”

  Despite his misgivings about the film, and his fish-out-of-water feeling in Hollywood, Motley was momentarily buoyed to meet Derek, whose sculpted visage was matched by a surprising modesty, born of insecurity. “Do you think I’m all right for the part of Nick [Romano]?” was the first question Derek asked, when they ducked inside his trailer for an hour.

  But Motley’s misgivings about the film grew when the actor started talking about his director. Derek insistently “complained about Nick Ray,” according to Motley. “Asked my advice about acting Nick [the character]. Asked if his interpretation of Nick was correct in several scenes. Read one part of the script I hadn’t seen . . .”

  Derek told Motley that he felt he was being rushed by the filming schedule, that he wasn’t yet prepared to do justice to his leading role. The actor yearned to visit Chicago, to “live on the street a while to get the feel of the place,” Motley wrote in his journal. “Says he thinks Ray should go too. Asked me to suggest it. Said he was disappointed that they weren’t going to shoot some scenes in Chicago.”

  Derek surprised him further by blurting out how “he wished Hellinger was doing it. Said he’d like to see Ø [homosexual] men in it and other scenes that this outfit feel are too realistic.”

  Derek echoed the voice inside Motley’s head, alarmed at “the Bogart production angle—and how his pictures had to make money,” in Motley’s words. The author had read the script with a sinking heart, especially dismayed at the film’s new ending—one that Ray himself had brainstormed and described for him over cocktails at his house: a tableau of the lawyer (Bogart) and two of Romano’s pals, Juan and Sunshine, striding down Chicago’s West Madison Street, “almost like the death march itself,” intercut with Romano’s walk to the electric chair.

  Motley liked Ray, found him a nice man. But he found this new ending a flossy betrayal of the novel. Indeed, he was appalled by the adaptation as a whole, finding it “completely altered to suit Bogart.” He’d felt sick to his stomach during his VIP tour of the $75,000 three-block skid row under construction in the San Fernando Valley in lieu of actual Chicago locales. The author tried to be diplomatic, making small suggestions, but he had a hard time connecting with Ray. He found Derek more open to his feedback—indeed, a kindred spirit. Returning to Chicago after his brief stay in Hollywood, Motley privately wrote to Derek, trying to build up Derek’s confidence (“You’re perfect for the part and know that you will make Nick live on the screen”). He enclosed newspaper clippings from the trial of a Chicago teenage murderer named Bernard Sawicki—“upon whom I based some of the courtroom stuff in my book”—that featured photographs of the convicted young killer.*

  “I don’t know whether or not Nick Ray will approve of my sending them to you,” Motley noted diplomatically in his letter. “I hope he does. At any rate show them to him if you wish to or if you want to substantiate any point as to how an actual killer would act or react.”

  Motley’s advice to Derek could have sprung from Vakhtangov: It was both scene- and character-specific. “Maybe looking at the pictures,” the author suggested, “will help give you some of the feelings of a boy on trial for his life. You will notice that the photographer has sometimes caught him sneering but that where he looks most sincere or honest is when he holds his hands in his lap with bowed head or stares straight ahead with his lips slightly parted.”

  The clippings about the Sawicki case were for Derek’s eyes, but Motley also enclosed a September 6, 1947, Look magazine layout of scenes from his novel as imagined by one of the magazine’s top photographers, asking Derek to pass it on to Ray so that he might be inspired by the photographer’s beautiful visualizations. Motley also wrote Ray directly, exhorting him to make “a real movie” like the ones Mark Hellinger had produced. He implored him to depict poverty truthfully, as had been done in William Wyler’s Dead End (another Bogart vehicle) or in old-timer John Ford’s film of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.

  “Please come to Chicago,” Motley begged Ray. Worried that he had “perhaps exaggerated West Madison Street in our discussions,” the author had revisited the Chicago neighborhood several times after returning from Hollywood, he said, but was now more convinced than ever that Ray would scrap the Lord-Taradash Hollywood script and make-believe settings if he were to witness the conditions in Chicago firsthand.

  “Sunday afternoon,” Motley continued. “About two hundred men sitting along the curbstone in an area of three blocks with their feet hanging down in the street. Bottles, full and half empty, sitting alongside of them. In the three blocks distance of at least twenty men stretched across the sidewalk, drunk, sound asleep. One hobo, drunk, with his buddy’s head in his legs . . .”

  Along with the Look layout, Motley offered other specific ideas for camerawork. Ray might shoot scenes on location with a hidden camera, he suggested, as Billy Wilder had while filming The Lost Weekend. “If you come to Chicago you will make a great movie,” wrote Motley. “Come with some old clothes and let’s prowl these streets during the day and at night.”

  In Motley’s voluminous archives there is no evidence of any response from Ray. Producer Robert Lord delivered the official reply from Santana, informing Motley that Chicago was “touchy” about movies displaying the ugly side of the city. The cameras would roll only in Hollywood; the reality would be faked. “Emotional reality” would have to suffice.

  Beyond the fact that the film’s lead character was named Nick, Ray did have many affinities with Willard Motley’s novel. Knock on Any Door was set in Chicago, a city he knew well, with a taut narrative set in motion by a father’s untimely death, not so different from the one that had crucially influenced the director’s life. (Nick Romano was forever after “terribly in need of the son-father relationship which has been destroyed,” as Daniel Taradash noted.) Like Ray, the story’s protagonist was handsome, sexually ambiguous, and unlucky in love.

  Yet Ray had mixed feelings about the vehicle. Just one year before, starting out in Hollywood with unknown actors and low expectations, he and John Houseman had succeeded in mounting a relatively faithful version of the grimly realistic novel Thieves Like Us. But now, with Robert Lord producing and Humphrey Bogart as his star, his hopes were lowered. Done well, this film would take his career to a new level: It was a Bogart film, after all, and an adaptation of a much-talked-about bestseller. But Ray also knew that everyone involved—including himself—had made compromises to get the job done. Some of the decisions—making the star likable, cutting costly scenes—were business as usual in Hollywood. But others were the byproduct of censorship qualms or the HUAC “atmosphere of fear”—and neither Ray nor anyone else saw a way around them.

  Ray was going to begin shooting Knock on Any Door on August 2, he wrote Houseman, enclosing a copy of the script, “and I wish I could report my enthusiasm is at a new high pitch. I can’t.”

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nbsp; Bogart was more than a movie star: He was already an icon, his hard-boiled persona honed with increasing authority and popularity over two decades and sixty films. By 1948 the star had amassed credits as stellar as anyone’s, including The Petrified Forest, High Sierra, The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, The Big Sleep, To Have and Have Not, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. His career may have been at a vulnerable crossroads, but the man himself was at the height of his skill and fame.

  On the set of Knock on Any Door, Bogart appeared relaxed, at ease. But his casual demeanor was deceptive. The star had money as well as his reputation riding on the first Santana production. And, like Ray, Bogart had a dual personality: He could be aloof or volatile, especially when drinking. On the first day of filming, word went around that Bogart was on the wagon; Ray too stopped drinking while filming. Then again, Bogart and Ray both indulged in cycles of bingeing and drying out.

  Trained in the theater, Bogart always approached a script diligently. Ray conferred with him about his part, but Bogart didn’t require or desire much input. His part wasn’t that big a stretch for him, and Bogart was a thoroughgoing professional who’d made his first movie when his director was still in high school.