Nicholas Ray

by Patrick McGilligan

  From the first day of shooting, though, Bogart listened patiently to Ray, nodding even when he disagreed with his suggestions—or was mystified by the director’s fuzzy language. Bogart tried to incorporate Ray’s ideas, but sometimes “afterwards,” as Ray recalled, “Bogie would come to me—as the young director, and he was president of the company and the producer—and he would say, ‘Look, Nick, you know, I just don’t think that’s the best way for me to do it,’ in his offhand manner of speaking. But that wasn’t necessary because I knew from his tone, and as soon as he put his arm around my shoulder, what to do.”

  The only scene that gave Bogart any real concern was his last one, his eloquent courtroom summation speech defending Romano—the star’s shining moment, and the largest chunk of dialogue and social consciousness to survive intact from the novel.

  Yes, Nick Romano is guilty! But so are we. So is this precious thing called Society. Society is you and I and all of us. We—Society—are hard and selfish and stupid. We are scandalized by environment and call it crime. We denounce crime as if it were a magician’s whim—hanging in the air—with no responsibility of our own. Until we do away with the type of neighborhood which produced this boy, ten will spring up to take his place. A hundred. A thousand.

  Until we wipe out our slums and rebuild them—knock on any door—and you may find Nick Romano.

  Bogart was unaccustomed to marathon speeches. As the scene approached he walked around nervously with the pages in his hand. Ray wanted him to try it in one long take. “It was the only scene about which Bogart and I had an argument,” the director said years later. But Ray, telling the star not to worry, convinced Bogart, and the speech was filmed as a master shot, running seven or eight minutes. Then Ray hedged his bets with cutaways and close-ups for coverage.

  The director took greater pains with some of the younger players, including the actress who was finally cast as Emma: Allene Roberts, a twenty-one-year-old who had been inconspicuous in movies before Knock on Any Door. From Alabama, Roberts was another actress with a soft twang and a spectral beauty: a crushed flower, like Cathy O’Donnell’s Keechie. Her delicate love scenes with Derek were close to the book’s, and Ray filmed them simply and naturalistically—composing them, incidentally, as though he’d flipped through Motley’s beloved Look layout.

  When Nick Romano rejects Emma’s virtuous influence, she breaks down, committing suicide by shutting the windows of their small apartment, opening the oven door, and turning on the gas. This was one of the toughest scenes in the book and one that eked its way past the Production Code, with a small script adjustment revealing that Emma is pregnant; Nick Romano’s return to crime sharpens her motivation for suicide. Ray filmed her tragedy exquisitely, with an extreme close-up that dissolves as she bends toward the oven door.

  Ray set the mood, speaking quietly and at length to the actress about her key scene. “I knew that scene was important,” remembered Roberts, “and it was important that I do it well. I really thought about it a lot, going over the lines and movements and everything I had to do. Even before getting on the set, that scene was going through my mind.”

  Ray spent an inordinate amount of time with another actor playing a smaller part. The novel had inveighed against racial discrimination, and it was important to the director—as well as Bogart and Lord—to keep some of that. But the Production Code office kept eliminating references to race in the script, and there wasn’t much anyone could do about it. The most prominent black character was a pal of Romano’s named Sunshine; Ray gave the part to Davis Roberts from the Actors Lab and rehearsed him as much as Bogart, it seemed, advising him to be wary of the “slight Southern quality” in his voice. When it came time for Roberts’s courtroom appearance, he warned him: “Remember you don’t like cops. Harden your attitude and your speech!”

  Ray also suggested changing one line of Bogart’s, having Morton call the character “Jim” rather than “Sunshine” on the witness stand, thereby “making the anti-Negro bias of the prosecuting attorney clearer,” in the words of Ebony, the largest-circulation magazine for black America.*

  More than Davis Roberts, Allene Roberts, or even Humphrey Bogart, however, the film version of Knock on Any Door rode on the shoulders of John Derek, the young discovery playing Nick Romano. Accordingly, Ray paid more attention to Derek than to any other performer. Everyone thought Derek had the look of Romano (“He’s the exact-looking person I had in mind,” Motley exclaimed), but on camera it was sometimes the look of a marble statue.

  There’s no question that Derek himself was partly to blame. He was “a reluctant actor,” recalled Mickey Knox, the young New York actor playing Romano’s pal Vito, “quiet, unassuming.” Derek and Allene Roberts practiced their romantic scenes together “a good bit,” the actress recalled, and when they were rehearsing their first kiss, Derek told her, “Now when we shoot it, I’m going to really kiss you.” That piqued her interest—but when Ray called “Action!” and Derek kissed her, she remembered thinking, “Oh my goodness, if that’s his idea of a real kiss, I’m sorry.” Later she recalled, “It just didn’t go.”

  Derek was an earnest actor, but never a deep-thinking or -feeling one. He lacked the dimensionality, the inner conflict, that the part of Nick Romano called for. Moreover, the first-time star never got over his quibbles with the script, the film’s fake skid row settings, or his inability to relate to the director. Try as he might, Ray just couldn’t win him over.

  Ray’s frustration eventually got the better of him. If Derek was going to act like a statue, then maybe Ray should treat him like one. One day, when he couldn’t get Derek to strike a particular pose, Ray strode over and grabbed the young star by the head. “With suppressed annoyance,” Knox recalled, Ray “turned his [Derek’s] head to the left and told him to keep looking in that direction during the scene.” Although Ray had a growing reputation as an actor’s director, that wasn’t the case with every actor—not all the time. When it came to working with Derek, Mickey Knox recalled, “patience and tact were not in Nick Ray’s playbook.”

  Some actors found Ray a profound communicator; to others he was a sphinx. Knox, fresh from the West Coast production of Galileo, was just breaking into the movies. But his experience working with studio contract directors had left him hungering for something more. Another left-wing theater refugee, Knox had heard of Ray’s reputation, and he arrived on the set full of hope, thinking, “What a break, a real director!” Ray greeted Knox warmly, threw his arms around him, and escorted him on a wide tour of the soundstage, leading with his chin. “I waited for him to speak, tell me the secret life of the character I was playing,” Knox recalled. “But not a word was said. It was a large stage so we must have walked for a full minute. When we got back to the camera position he patted me on the back and said, ‘Okay?’ I nodded, not knowing what else to say. Another disappointment.”

  A handful of actors saw both sides of Ray’s directing attitude: When he wasn’t definite about something, the director could be downright inscrutable, as Farley Granger discovered a few months later.

  After their fruitful collaboration on his first film, Granger met up with Ray when RKO loaned the director to producer Samuel Goldwyn to reshoot a handful of scenes for a picture called Roseanna McCoy. The filming went on for weeks on location in the Sierra Madre, but “beyond our initial warm hello,” recalled Granger, “I couldn’t get him to have a conversation with me. It was almost as if he were ashamed to be working as a clean-up director on a lost cause for Goldwyn.”

  The principal photography of Knock on Any Door was finished by the end of September. Less than two months later, on November 12, 1948—“nearly four months before he was expected,” studio publicity insisted—Grahame gave birth to Ray’s second son, a five-pound baby boy they named Timothy.

  According to the Hollywood columnists, Grahame was “happy as a lark,” an eager young mother who said she intended to quit acting for at least a year to devote herself to parenthood. Ray�
�s sister Alice, who was living in California and attended the Las Vegas wedding, said that Ray was equally happy. “I had never seen such tenderness in a father,” she recalled.

  By late November, Ray found himself dandling another unplanned baby on his knee—this one a film project, designed by Howard Hughes to test Ray’s politics and loyalty to the studio.

  Hughes was warming to his new role as studio chief and making dramatic moves that would affect the entire film industry. Earlier in November, Hughes had decided to submit to the federal government’s demand that the studios divest themselves of the theaters they owned—a move that broke the united front of the major studios and launched the dissolution of RKO’s theater chain. And now, in another bid to accommodate himself to the federal government, Hughes announced the industry’s first high-profile anti-Communist film project.

  Studio publicity described the story, set against the backdrop of a San Francisco waterfront strike,* as the first production to be ordered personally by the owner of the studio, “a special Howard Hughes project.” The film, tentatively titled “I Married a Communist,” would be overseen by RKO’s new head of production, Sid Rogell, a B-unit supervisor with two decades’ experience. John Houseman considered Rogell “a competent hack without imagination or courage,” but the executive had Hughes’s friendship and trust; Rogell and his brother, director Albert Rogell, were both fervent anti-Communists who belonged to Cecil B. DeMille’s circle, which proactively targeted suspected Reds or sympathizers in the screen trade.

  Federal Bureau of Investigation files make it clear that Hughes intended to use his “special project” to clean house of Reds and fellow travelers at RKO. Indeed, “I Married a Communist,” which attracted extensive press coverage, was seen inside the industry as a bellwether for how far the studios would go to cooperate with the growing anti-Communist climate in America.

  Hughes’s initial target was progressive-minded director John Cromwell—a man whose own films were rarely political but whose wife, actress Ruth Nelson, was on the lists as a onetime pillar of the Group Theatre. In early November, Rogell assigned Cromwell to direct “I Married a Communist.” When Cromwell refused, RKO tried to force him out of his contract, but Cromwell was no Communist, and his agents and lawyers dug in their heels. Hughes was stymied.

  Next the eccentric studio boss went after Joseph Losey, whose first feature, the unusual antiprejudice fable The Boy with Green Hair, was just heading into national release. Losey said that he and Ray, nowadays his colleague at RKO, were acutely aware of the rising tide of anti-Communism and “used to walk in empty lots in order to stay out of offices, not to be seen together and not to be in cars so that we wouldn’t incriminate each other.” Losey also declined the “special project” and soon after left the studio.

  Finally, on Hughes’s orders, Rogell offered “I Married a Communist” to Nick Ray.

  As Losey remembered, Ray “asked my advice” about taking the job. He and Ray “walked and walked and walked,” trying to talk the problem over in privacy. “And then we got into his car and he dropped me at my house. And just a very short time after, he rang me on the phone and said, ‘I’ve had a call from Hughes, who knows I’ve been talking to you, so for God’s sake don’t say anything about it.’ Even the precautions we took weren’t good enough.”

  Agonizing over the decision, Ray holed up in Indio, in the Southern California desert, where he had gone for Christmas with his wife and baby. Until this time, he had never even met the notoriously aloof, uncommunicative Hughes. On New Year’s Eve 1948, however, Ray sent Hughes a telegram: “Believe it will be important we talk before I begin my first assignment for you. Time, place, or manner at your convenience. Am at the La Quinta Hotel for the next few days. Happy New Year.”

  Ray drove up from the desert for his showdown with Hughes. And then, just a few days later, in the first week of January 1949, the studio made an astonishing announcement: Nicholas Ray had agreed to direct the anti-Communist hot potato. Gloria Grahame was being considered for the film’s leading lady, and rehearsals were due to start within days.

  His New York friends couldn’t believe their ears. “I got calls from my friends on the left: ‘Nick, what are you doing? Are you out of your mind?’ ” he later recalled. “I’d say ‘Shut up!’ and hang up the phone.”

  Whether Ray intended to make the film in any way, shape, or form is still debatable. “I thought we might make a comedy out of it,” the director boasted later in life. Only a few days after the first announcment, newspapers had begun to report that Ray was balking at the prospective script. The director entered into urgent discussions with Rogell and, again privately, Hughes. What happened between Ray and Hughes is as elliptical as his last encounter with Frank Lloyd Wright. In this case, however, there is no question that Ray and Hughes struck another kind of “strange bargain.”

  Just one week after announcing that Ray would guide “I Married a Communist” to fruition, the studio backtracked, saying the director had excused himself “for dramatic rather than ideological reasons,” according to the January 14, 1949, New York Times. When the paper tried to reach Ray for further explanation, it was told that he was “not available for comment.”

  His old left-wing friends were left scratching their heads. Ray had apparently declined to direct Howard Hughes’s special anti-Communist project—and RKO had accepted his refusal without repercussions, even after two previous directors, John Cromwell and Joseph Losey, had been sent to the studio doghouse for rejecting the same assignment. Ray’s agents, Berg and Allenberg, made a show of asking for his release from the studio, but RKO again acted in baffling fashion, announcing that it would prefer to retain his services. The studio then actually renewed Ray’s contract, giving him job security with extended terms.

  Trying to keep the interest rates down on its bank loans, Santana rushed Knock on Any Door into release. Although it was the third film he had directed, in late February 1949 the screen adaptation of Willard Motley’s bestseller premiered ahead of “The Twisted Road” and A Woman’s Secret, becoming the first Nicholas Ray picture to reach the American moviegoing public.

  In early March the studio held a special premiere in Chicago, the story’s setting. Ray had always been fond of Chicago, but he skipped the event, as he was busy with his remedial gig on Roseanna McCoy, the first of many cleanup jobs he’d handle for Howard Hughes and RKO in years to come. The studio paid him his regular staff salary on such assignments but made a profit on loaning him out. The red carpets in Chicago were rolled out for Humphrey Bogart, his wife, Lauren Bacall, and a small retinue of publicists. Author Motley set his private reservations aside to greet the stars at the train station.

  Bumming a cigarette from the novelist, Bogart immediately tried to dispel the tension between them. “First thing he said, ‘I hope you aren’t sore at us for what we did to your book!’ ” recalled Motley. Bogart ruefully admitted that he’d been “crazy” about the novel. “I loved the book too,” Bacall agreed. Then the tough-guy star nervously pulled out pamphlets for “a Boy’s Town in Italy for which he [was] trying to get donations,” charming Motley. “A regular fellow,” the author wrote in his journal. The stars and their entourage repaired to the Ambassador East, where columnists, reviewers, and publicists fraternized, Bogart fielded questions from the press, and the scotch and bourbon flowed. (Bogart “boozed up” quite a bit, Motley noted. The author pleaded for beer—“these people never heard of beer”—and drank several to steel his nerves.)

  Motley hadn’t yet seen the film, but the publicity staff talked him into piloting a bus down to skid row, filling it up with his own friends and some conspicuous down-and-outers; they were all shuttled to the fancy premiere, followed by Italian cuisine at Riccardo’s. When some of the drunks who’d been loaded onto the bus slept through the screening, Motley wryly observed that they probably had the right idea.

  In his journal and letters, the author proved an astute critic of the screen adaptation, itemizing i
ts cop-outs and failures:

  • Motley found the casting “typical Hollywood with corny touches” and Emma’s characterization especially “insipid.”

  • He recoiled at “the little slap-slap-kiss scene between Nick and Nellie” (another female character, played by Cara Williams), the kind of quick violence women suffered from frustrated men in more than one Ray film, dismissing it as “real burlesque.”

  • At the sight of Mrs. Romano in a wheelchair, an obvious bid for audience sympathy, Motley “almost puked.”

  By the time of Bogart’s summation in the courtroom, Motley had shrunk down in his seat, despairing over the director’s star-oriented staging and grandiose flourishes. “Bogart’s body first and then just his head filling two-thirds of the screen when he made his final speech was uncomfortable to me, at least, as a spectator,” the author wrote in his journal. “And, my, my, how theatrical they got at the end.”

  Deciding that he should see the film again before forming a final opinion, Motley sneaked into a Chicago theater and watched Knock on Any Door with the general public, studying his beloved creation more closely, with more detachment. This time he was “more conscious than ever of Nick Ray forcing—I suppose forcing, after seeing him work there two days—Derek to overact scenes,” he wrote.

  When it came to publicity, Motley was all smiles. Privately, however, he was tearing his hair out. “It isn’t my kid! It’s a bastard!” he wrote his agent, admitting that he’d wept over the botched product. “By the way,” he added bitterly, “can you tell me what book the movie was taken from anyway?”

  The reviews were mixed: some quite good, some bad, some half and half, like the verdict in Newsweek, which found the picture intelligent and sincere but full of “situational clichés and preaching.” Critics familiar with the novel were more likely to view the film as diluted. Bosley Crowther in the New York Times decried the “hokum from the start—a mélange of gangster-film clichés and sentimental romance.” Ebony said that the outstanding realism of Motley’s original story had been “powder-puffed” in the film version.