Nicholas Ray

by Patrick McGilligan

  The reviews were worse when the candy-box A Woman’s Secret was released soon after. In the Chicago Daily Tribune, Mae Tinee found the woman’s picture a “silly” waste of time. In the Washington Post, Richard L. Coe called the Vicki Baum adaptation “a perfectly terrible movie, well near the top of the year’s Worst List.” The New York Times declined to review it. Few, at least, bothered to mention the director’s name.

  Meanwhile, Ray’s first film—his Citizen Kane—still sat on the studio shelf.

  Chapter Six

  Mr. Nice Guy

  1949–1951

  By the beginning of 1949, Ray was stuck in two shotgun marriages, but the one with Howard Hughes may have been the happier of the two. However opportunistic it was, the friendship they developed appears to have been genuine. Both fundamentally lonely, uncommunicative men, Ray and Hughes shared occasional dinners together at the studio chief’s mansion, sometimes joined by the director’s favorite nephew, his oldest sister Alice’s oldest son, Sumner Williams, who had acting ambitions and had played his first bit role in Knock on Any Door.

  In 1976, in the midst of one last-ditch attempt to craft an autobiography, Ray received word that Howard Hughes had died. The news stopped his writing cold. Ray said he felt “the same block,” the same “emptiness,” that he had experienced when trying to write about his father. Sometimes, when interviewers asked him about Hughes, Ray would well up with tears, fumbling even worse than usual for the right words. To the end of his days he saw Hughes as someone whom he “admired, respected, may even have loved.”

  A father substitute for Ray, Hughes was also a manly exemplar. Ray was fond of recalling the older man’s stories of his test-pilot heroism and the “battle scars” from his romances with glamorous actresses. The director acknowledged the “gaping holes” in Hughes’s character, excusing his flaws as making him “more real, more touchable, more in common with most of us, more decipherable,” and the political divide between them, admitting that he “detested his party politics,” even “felt superior to him” in such matters. But Ray didn’t linger on Hughes’s half-mercenary, half-inept dismantling of RKO, and he rarely commented on Hughes’s blacklisting of Ray’s “friends on the left.”

  What was behind this unlikely affinity between the right-wing RKO boss and his left-leaning director? What kind of bargain had they struck?

  There’s no doubt that Hughes was a fervent anti-Communist. But he was also fiercely independent, and he was paranoid about the U.S. government meddling in his business affairs. He refused to take meetings with FBI men who wanted to discuss Communists in the film industry, finding himself unable to trust the government men (or G-men, as they were known in Hollywood movies). Instead, Hughes wanted to deal with the Communist menace in his own way: RKO would produce the first anti-Communist movies in Hollywood, and Hughes would be the first to sweep his lot clean of suspected Reds.

  All but one, at least. With his impeccable patriotic credentials, Hughes was uniquely positioned to shield that one lucky man, Nicholas Ray, through the Sturm und Drang of the blacklist.

  Why? Did Ray convince Hughes that he was fed up with Communism? Did he vow to atone for his leftist ways?

  Did the angst-ridden Hughes feel an emotional kinship with Ray? Did Ray’s anguish strike him more favorably than John Cromwell’s intransigence or Joseph Losey’s arrogance?

  Did Ray plead new marriage and fatherhood? Did he beg for privacy? Or did he simply express his admiration for Hughes so sincerely that the studio boss was moved to help him?

  Whatever happened between them, shortly after Ray withdrew from “I Married a Communist” Hughes ordered production head Sid Rogell to remove “all the bugs and harassment” from the director, in Ray’s own words. By the early spring of 1949, after six penitential weeks on Roseanna McCoy, Ray found himself back in good standing at the studio. He was even given a new “A” project: a script called Bed of Roses, which had more in common with A Woman’s Secret than They Live by Night or Knock on Any Door.

  In truth, Bed of Roses was a musty old project, a women’s drama based on Anne Parrish’s 1928 novel All Kneeling, that a parade of RKO writers had been struggling to adapt since before Dore Schary’s tenure.

  Parrish’s book concerned a ruthless schemer who insinuates her way into high society and marries a deep-pocketed husband, whom she cuckolds for a dissolute writer. The adroit actress Joan Fontaine owned a percentage of the screen rights and had been penciled in as the schemer during Dore Schary’s regime. But Fontaine cooled on the prospect when Hughes took over RKO, and the studio boss had to win her back by satisfying her salary and other demands. Quivering with fear in Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion had brought Fontaine an Oscar for Best Actress, and nowadays she had her pick of directors. After watching “The Twisted Road” she chose Ray, who came highly recommended by her old boyfriend John Houseman.

  Bed of Roses, whose lead character was a lying adulteress, was another project that had long rubbed the Production Code office the wrong way. Fortunately, Charles Schnee, who had adapted Thieves Like Us, was back to lend his lawyerly hand to the proceedings, and by June he and Ray had hammered out a new script. (This would be Schnee’s last RKO job; he soon followed Schary to MGM, where he would serve, often uncredited, as executive producer and “fixer” for pet Schary projects while writing occasional screenplays of his own. Among the latter was The Bad and the Beautiful, a drama exploring the seamy side of Hollywood that dominated the 1953 awards season; produced by John Houseman and directed by Vincente Minnelli, the film won Schnee an Oscar for his script—and another for Gloria Grahame as Best Supporting Actress.)

  After Joan Fontaine agreed to play the lead in Bed of Roses—Christabel, the schemer described by the script as a cross between Lucretia Borgia and Peg O’ My Heart—Ray met with Hughes to decide the other leads. The studio boss preferred Robert Young for the leading man, an earthy novelist who has a long-running affair with Christabel, but Ray lobbied for Robert Ryan, the rugged, craggily handsome star of thrillers whose status at RKO was second only to Robert Mitchum’s. A Chicago native, Ryan had been a boxing champion at Dartmouth and starred in Clifford Odets’s Clash by Night on Broadway. Under RKO contract in the postwar years, Ryan had earned his first (and only) Oscar nomination as the anti-Semitic ex-GI at the center of Crossfire. His reputation as an honest, authoritative actor had been enhanced by his lead for Jean Renoir in The Woman on the Beach and good parts in Max Ophüls’s Caught and Joseph Losey’s The Boy with Green Hair.

  Ray convinced Hughes to approve Ryan, and together they settled on Zachary Scott as the wealthy cuckold—a playboy, philanthropist, and aviator (the last a touch that Ray and Schnee added to please Hughes)—and Mel Ferrer as the amusingly pretentious artist of paintings with titles like Hungry Men Digging Potatoes. It was also Ray who chose Joan Leslie, James Cagney’s wholesome wife in Yankee Doodle Dandy, as the decorous fiancée who is backstabbed by Christabel.

  After the final script was ready, Ray tried an unusual theatrical exercise with the five principals before the cameras rolled in June 1949: He called Fontaine, Ryan, Scott, Ferrer, and Leslie to a “cold reading” at RKO, with all the top-billed performers handed the shooting script for the first time. Ray told the cast members to invest their lines with as little emotion as possible and concentrate instead on relating to each other during the reading.

  It was an interesting move, but such stage techniques didn’t always work with established screen stars—at least it didn’t work in this instance, with a strong-minded actress playing a character who was no wounded doe. Fontaine tried to cooperate with the exercise but she was clearly uncomfortable. At one point, as the actress got carried away by her dialogue, the director stopped her. “Now remember, I don’t want any acting here, I want a reading of the lines,” Ray told Fontaine, “and I want you to look at the person to whom you are speaking—that’s all I want now.” That got Ray off on a bad footing with the highest-paid person in the room.

 
Ray worked more comfortably with Ryan, playing another character named Nick, a hard-living scribe trapped in Christabel’s web. The strapping, charismatic Ryan would play similar hard-drinking, frustrated womanizers in several Ray pictures—parts that were often, as in this case, surrogates for the director.

  The actress who listened most eagerly to Ray’s whispered direction was the youngest and lowest-paid in the cast. Twenty-five-year-old Joan Leslie saw her role as an adventurous break from typecasting, and she enthusiastically soaked up his guidance. Studying the actors thoughtfully as they ran through their scenes, Ray’s eyes lingered on Leslie. He took “special pains” with her character, the actress recalled. For one key scene, in which Leslie was called upon to rebuke Christabel (Fontaine) for her cruelty and treachery, the actress thought she might play the scene brimming with tears. But Ray took her aside to warn her against that approach. “Remember,” he told her, “you’re the only one that gets to tell off Christabel—everybody else plays along with her until the very end when she is exposed, so I want you to play it hard . . .”

  Then he banished the young actress to an empty, cavernous soundstage where she practiced her dialogue with Rodney Amateau, a New York friend of Ray’s from his radio days who often worked as his assistant director. Amateau had Leslie recite her speech over and over, each time more forcefully. “I read the lines louder and then projected them and put anger into my voice and recrimination,” she recalled, “and I worked on it until my throat was kind of sore.” By the time Ray was ready to shoot, she was ready to play it hard.

  “He was absolutely right,” Leslie recalled. “I didn’t need to have tears in my eyes. I’m so glad he corrected me. I had heard from other people that he was a strong director who knew what he wanted. He’d go along with you and wouldn’t fuss with you at all, unless he wanted to correct something and then he’d get right in and correct you.”

  Leslie felt fulfilled by her interactions with Ray. But Joan Fontaine never felt she established the kind of connection she wanted with a director. “Ray made me terribly nervous,” the star recalled. Fontaine was convinced that Ray “was not right for this kind of a picture,” which was “a study of a society girl and her machinations. . . . [It] should have been directed by George Cukor,” the actress concluded, “who could have lifted it to another plane.”

  Ray did his best to nudge Fontaine with velvet gloves, but her star power gave her the upper hand, and the director had to be stoic as she brushed his ideas aside. Fontaine was a diva who “prided herself in knowing exactly where her key light was,” the director recalled years later, and on “being able to make a wardrobe change in thirty seconds, without causing a moment’s delay for the crew. And all her talent dried up in that over-awareness.”

  Fontaine’s unhappy memories of collaborating with Ray stayed with her; she even titled her autobiography No Bed of Roses. Despite her resistance, though, Ray coaxed a thoughtful performance out of his star, who was excellent playing against her usual nervous-Nellie type. And the film itself—pulpishly retitled Born to Be Bad at the behest of Hughes—wasn’t bad either. The director managed to wrest a series of sharp moments from the undistinguished material and bright performances from his ensemble. Salvaging lesser films by coaxing strong performances from his actors in certain scenes was becoming one of Ray’s gifts.

  Meanwhile, in the spring of 1949, Ray’s first film, once known as “Your Red Wagon,” now collecting dust as “The Twisted Road,” was still unreleased in the United States.

  For the third time, the studio tried rechristening the film. Howard Hughes loved tinkering with titles and he himself was rumored to have come up with the noirish They Live by Night, under which name the film was offered to exhibitors at trade shows in England. Although the British exhibitors showed little interest in the downbeat Hollywood movie, with its cast of relative nonentities, They Live by Night did catch the attention of a young editor and critic for Sequence, a film journal emanating from Oxford University.

  The young aesthete, Gavin Lambert, responded to the film’s remarkable, deeply felt performances, its dark, poetic mood, its meticulously scripted and staged drama, and the feverish quality of its lighting and cinematography and editing. Recognizing that They Live by Night was a deeply personal take on the standard Hollywood crime picture, he championed it to high-placed London critics, including Dilys Powell of the Times, Virginia Graham of the Spectator, and Richard Winnington of the News Chronicle.

  After another screening was organized, Lambert recalled, their backstage support persuaded “art houses in London and a few other cities” to book the picture. Paired with The Window, another low-budget RKO thriller, They Live by Night was presented at London’s artsy Academy Cinema. There Ray’s debut film enjoyed a solid run and garnered almost unanimous praise from the high-placed critics along with reviewers for the Express, Mail, Herald, Telegraph, Standard, News Star, and Dispatch.

  “Every now and again Hollywood produces a film which receives a minimum of advertisement, which is sometimes not shown in the West End at all, and which is worth a dozen of those productions which are put on with all the flourish of which publicity is capable,” wrote Dilys Powell in the Times. “It is the custom of the normal Hollywood film to compromise, to make concessions, to force its material into an artificial shape, but They Live by Night is content to present a flat and hopeless statement; it achieves its interest by its care for detail and by all that it implies in criticism of certain aspects of the American social system.”

  Powell did not acknowledge the film’s director by name in her notice, but Virginia Graham did, praising Ray’s “Gallic approach to an American social problem,” adding that “if only he had taken the trouble to be a Frenchman we should be licking his boots in ecstasy.” Ray’s name also drew mention in Sequence and elsewhere. Suddenly, it seemed, good fortune was smiling upon him.

  This spontaneous British acclaim for Ray’s long-orphaned directing debut triggered a reappraisal of the film’s prospects at RKO. Armed with the favorable London notices, studio sales executives were persuaded to give They Live by Night another chance with American moviegoers.

  When the film was finally released in the United States in late October 1949, more than two years after it had been shot, American critics greeted They Live by Night almost as warmly as their British counterparts. The Los Angeles Times set the tone, hailing the “depressing” drama as “unquestionably an artistic success” and one of the best films of the year. In the New York Times, Bosley Crowther hailed the picture as sensitive and affecting, sharply and vividly staged. While the New Yorker’s John McCarten found the story “rather thin,” he praised both the “exemplary” acting and Ray’s “sure and unobtrusive” guiding hand—one of many reviews that took special notice of the director.

  The British reclamation of They Live by Night helped to establish the permanent mystique of Nicholas Ray as a filmmaker sinned against and misunderstood by Hollywood, while the film’s London art house opening solidified his growing reputation—in Hollywood as well as critical circles—as an “arty” (as opposed to “commercial”) filmmaker. And Lambert’s beau geste would have a “profound effect,” as he put it, on both their futures.

  And it all came just in time. As he plunged into preparations for his fourth Hollywood picture—his second with Humphrey Bogart—Ray’s spirits needed a lift. His marriage was in a bad state. His recent films had been disappointing. This belated surge of recognition for his first effort in Hollywood reminded him of his original vision—and his power—as a director.

  Ray’s marriage to a sexy, Oscar-nominated blond actress, staged for maximum publicity in Las Vegas, raised the director’s profile in the press as decisively as the plaudits for They Live by Night. But by the first half of 1949 the cracks in Ray’s marriage to Gloria Grahame were already common knowledge in Hollywood and staple fodder for columnists. The couple’s initial pose as happy newlyweds was followed by “many months of quarrels and misunderstandings,�
� in the words of Louella Parsons, one of the many Tinseltown scribes who tracked the love story on the public record.

  Not as gifted at salvaging marriages as he was at salvaging films, Ray couldn’t get over the feeling he had been duped somehow. He had always been an impulsive lover; his affairs came and went as dramatically as his drinking binges. But his marriage to Grahame was sobering. “I was infatuated with her,” the director mused about his second wife years later, “but I didn’t like her very much.”

  He didn’t trust her very much either. Even before their vows the director had harbored misgivings about Grahame, and years later he would reflect that his days-long gambling streak before the ceremony had been an instinctually “vindictive” action. “I wanted to be absolutely broke,” Ray said. “I didn’t want this dame, who later proved to be as shrewd as she had begun to threaten to be, to have anything of mine. I didn’t want her to have any money at all.”

  The public handholding swiftly tapered off in their marriage; Grahame’s behavior grew ever more slippery, and that in turn made Ray all the more controlling. At times his distrust verged on paranoia, and his jealousy could take on a threatening edge, just as in his films.

  One of Grahame’s close friends, fellow RKO actress Jane Greer, said that “Nick had his finger on Gloria,” that “there was always a certain tension” between them. Another friend of the sexy blond actress, studio acting coach Lillian Burns Sidney, said that “whenever they were out together Gloria always stood behind him, with her eyes cast on the ground.”

  One way to avoid problems at home was to make himself scarce, as his own father had done, eluding the trials and responsibilities of family life. Throughout the first half of 1949, Ray found excuses to stay away from the Sunset Boulevard house he shared with Grahame and his baby son, stealing time gambling at rich producers’ houses or, at every available opportunity, in Las Vegas.