Nicholas Ray

by Patrick McGilligan

  Whenever he wasn’t actually in production on a film, Ray’s drinking and gambling tended to accelerate. In Vegas he sometimes dropped “thirty or forty thousand dollars a night,” according to Vincent Curcio’s authoritative biography of Gloria Grahame, and during the first year or two of their marriage Ray added marijuana and pharmaceuticals to his list of habitual stimulants. “Gloria and her mother would stay up at nights meticulously opening up capsules to replace the drugs with sugar,” according to Curcio.

  Their marital troubles were well known to the couple’s close friends, and frequently alluded to in the press. Ray made friends with Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper and other gossip mavens, fielding their phone calls, sweet-talking them, tamping down the rumors when he could. Even so, Parsons was preparing to report a genuinely serious “tiff” between Ray and Grahame in September 1949 when instead, to her astonishment, she received a Santana Pictures publicity release announcing Grahame’s post-childbirth comeback—in a film called In a Lonely Place, the next Bogart vehicle to be directed by Nicholas Ray.

  Not everyone had read Knock on Any Door or cared whether the film was a faithful rendition of the book, and Bogart’s name brought lines of his fans into the theaters. After his initial independent production, the actor had starred in two other Santana productions, both set in the aftermath of World War II: Tokyo Joe, an overtly anti-Communist tale situated in Japan, and Chain Lightning, a test-pilot drama from which the writing credit of Lester Cole, one of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten, had been removed. Politics aside, after years of servitude at Warner Bros., Bogart had hoped his independent company would produce more distinguished pictures.

  Maybe, finally, In a Lonely Place would be the one.

  The tough-guy star and his wife, Lauren Bacall, still socialized with Ray and Gloria Grahame; the couples both had babies—the Bogarts’ baby son, Stephen, was born only two months after Tim Ray—and they swapped child-rearing tips and advice. Bogart didn’t blame Ray for any disappointment he might have nursed over Knock on Any Door; the star knew he shared responsibility for the film’s shortcomings. The question was never if Ray would ever direct Bogart again, but when, and what the right story was for the two of them.

  In late 1949, after consulting with Ray, Bogart and producer Robert Lord acquired the rights to In a Lonely Place, a novel by Dorothy B. Hughes, and Howard Hughes agreed to let Ray direct a film version for the Santana company. Once again, as with Knock on Any Door, the material was anathema to the Production Code, but Hollywood had successfully adapted two of Hughes’s previous books, The Fallen Sparrow and Ride the Pink Horse, and by now Ray had proven nimble with the censors. Everyone was optimistic.

  In a Lonely Place was a suspenseful crime story about a Los Angeles man who poses as a writer of murder mysteries. His name is Dixon (Dix) Steele, and in reality he is not a writer; he is a sociopath, a serial strangler. City police are stalking the killer, and an old army buddy, now a detective, begins to suspect Dix’s guilt, even as he homes in on his next victim, Laurel, a beautiful neighbor and would-be actress.

  As happened with Knock on Any Door, Lord, the former writer who was Bogart’s partner, took the early lead on developing the screenplay and conferring with Production Code officials in the spring of 1950. It was Lord who gave the Bogart character a new career: Taking a cue from Laurel’s wishful profession in the novel, he changed Dix from a purported mystery writer to a bona fide Hollywood screenwriter. (In the novel, Dix never did any actual writing.)

  In April, Edmund H. North, who played tennis with Lord and badminton with Bogart, was hired to pen a lengthy treatment of the novel, following Lord’s guidelines as John Monks Jr. had with Knock on Any Door. A hard-nosed professional who’d been around Hollywood since the early 1930s (he’d win his Oscar for Patton in 1970), North wrote a version that preserved Steele as a serial strangler, with Laurel as his last victim before he is arrested, while embedding the story (and Bogart’s character) more firmly in the Hollywood milieu. North’s treatment featured a glamorous, film-colony restaurant (inspired by Romanoff’s) and several “Hollywood types,” including a dissolute aging actor, and the harried talent agent who represents Dix.

  Though he was still working on Born to Be Bad, Ray attended the early script meetings for In a Lonely Place, but he tended to side with star-producer Bogart—or to say as little as possible. “I found him hard to deal with,” North recalled. “It was hard to draw out of him what he was trying to say. You would ask him something and he would pause; there would be these long stage waits while he pulled his imaginary beard and thought his little dreamy thoughts. This could drive you crazy.”

  As a matter of routine, Lord submitted North’s treatment to the Production Code. The censors predictably objected to having Bogart play a remorseless serial killer, even if the law did nab him in the end. Lord promised he’d find a satisfactory solution—though he knew Bogart relished playing a killer. His solution was to make Dix a suspect in the slaying of a hatcheck girl, who is reading the novel Dix has been hired to adapt into a film; then, in the end, another character would be revealed as the true killer of the hatcheck girl and the other serial victims—but not before Dix’s violent side, aroused by the crime script he’s writing and by steady police harassment, drives him to murder Laurel. The film would end with Dix’s arrest.

  The job of converting North’s treatment into a full screenplay was handed off to Andrew Solt, who had just finished a well-crafted film noir for Otto Preminger. To ensure the picture’s viability, Solt had to jettison almost everything left from the original novel, except for the unsolved serial murders and the names of the main characters. In deference to the Production Code, he toned down the violence and the sexual sparks between Dix and Laurel. To compensate, Solt expanded on the story’s Hollywood atmosphere, crafting sharply drawn minor characters like a hotshot producer’s boastful son-in-law and Laurel’s possessive, mannish masseuse. Bogart himself asked Solt to enlarge the role of the alcoholic thespian who spouts snatches of Shakespeare, setting up the character for an old acquaintance, former Broadway star Robert Warwick, who had befriended the tough-guy star in his salad days.

  Most importantly, Solt strengthened and sweetened the romance between Dix and Laurel, giving Bogart more of an opportunity to display his tender side. In the process the writer enhanced the part of Laurel, a onetime B-picture actress (according to the film script) and, until just recently, the kept woman of a real estate magnate who’d built for her a swimming pool “to increase the value of his property.” Bogart had been waiting and hoping to cast Bacall as Laurel; she even read the part during a read-through at their house. But Jack Warner, who controlled Bacall’s contract, still resented Bogart’s decision to abandon Warner Bros., and he ultimately refused to loan her out to Santana and Columbia.

  Like Edmund H. North before him, Solt found the director’s thoughts on the script difficult to decipher. During their few conferences Ray was stingy with words, favored ambiguous silences, and when he did “make suggestions,” in Solt’s words, they emerged “most of the time through his mouthpiece [Rodney] Amateau,” who had been engaged again as Ray’s assistant on the production.

  After the read-through at Bogart’s house, the star declared the script perfect and said they would shoot it “without changes.” But the part of Laurel remained uncast. Bogart proposed Ginger Rogers, but Ray couldn’t imagine the sugary actress in the role. Another obvious candidate was Ray’s wife, Gloria Grahame, but she had been unmentionable whenever the subject was aired before. By the late summer of 1950, however, with just a month left before shooting was scheduled to start, a decision had to be made.

  Talking it over with Bogart and Lord one day, Ray said, half-jokingly, that he might save his marriage by directing his wife. The columns were drumming up anticipation for her return to the screen after time off for motherhood. Bogart and Lord worried that the obvious fissures in their marriage might make things difficult on the set, but Ray reassured them that he’d d
irected his wife before without any trouble—and reminded them that the “husband-directs-wife” angle would be a publicity boon for Santana.

  Bogart and Lord were game, and Howard Hughes, who tended to be cooperative whenever Ray needed a favor, agreed to loan Grahame out in exchange for compensation. Ray’s wife was presented with a unique contract that included the following stipulations: “my husband shall be entitled to direct, control, advise, instruct, and even command my actions during the hours from 9 A.M. to 6 P.M., every day except Sunday, during the filming,” with a clause forbidding her to “nag, cajole, tease, or in any other feminine fashion seek to distract or influence him.” The “Mr. and Mrs.” contract, as it was dubbed, was promptly turned into a publicity release dispatched by Santana to columnists and newspapers around the nation.

  Though he had hung back during the script stage, as production approached there were signs that Ray was intent on turning the film into something out of the ordinary, something personal. Besides casting his wife, Ray gave Art Smith, a founding member of the Group Theatre, a pivotal role as the good-hearted agent Mel, who believes in Dix but is mistreated by him. Partly as a gesture toward Grahame, Ray cast a close friend of hers, the reliable B-western actress Jeff Donnell, as Brub’s wife, who is wary of Dix. And he gave his old acting mentor Guy Beach his last bit in a Ray film (Beach would die in 1952). Other parts went to Frank Lovejoy, as the “good cop” named Brub, Dix’s former war buddy, and to Carl Benton Reid as the “bad cop” who doesn’t believe Dix’s alibis. A boogie-woogie pianist and singer Ray had enjoyed around town, Hadda Brooks, was signed for a piano bar sequence.

  For the look of the Patio Apartments, where Dix and Laurel live in close proximity, Ray asked Columbia art director Robert Peterson to re-create one of the director’s first Hollywood homes, a residence on Harper Avenue in the Fairfax neighborhood where he’d briefly stayed in 1944. Though much of the film would be shot on Columbia soundstages, Ray planned to add location verisimilitude by providing glimpses of Bogart out and about in the city, standing on the street, driving around in his car, or standing in front of area landmarks like the Beverly Hills city hall. (He also slotted cameo appearances by local celebrities like Mike Romanoff, owner of the eponymous Beverly Hills restaurant, a popular hangout for Hollywood folk.)

  Bogart was still the supreme boss of the production, and now and then he would step in to override the director. During the piano bar sequence, for instance, Ray wanted Brooks to sing her song in the same “juiced-up” (Ray’s words) manner that Marie Bryant had sung “Your Red Wagon” in They Live by Night. Brooks resisted the notion, preferring to perform the number her way, and Bogart had to break the impasse. “You can’t make a Shirley Temple out of a Judy Garland,” Bogart snapped, “so let her alone. Let her sing like she wants to sing it.”

  But the big scenes belonged to Bogart and Grahame. In a Lonely Place was crafted as their showcase, the story of their characters’ doomed romance. It wasn’t hard for the director, with his empathy and admiration for Bogart, to view the tortured writer Dix as a crazy-mirror version of himself. And with Grahame playing Laurel, it would have been impossible for Ray not to see their fragile love story as a twisted commentary on his own marriage.

  Where Bogart had strolled through Knock on Any Door, this new film called on him to play certain scenes on the edge of madness—and others in a teasing, tickling, lovey-dovey manner, something that came less easily to the star. It was a more challenging role for Bogart, calling for sudden mood swings and odd, alarming behavior. This time, the actor would have to surrender more trust to Ray and be more responsive to his direction.

  And vice versa: The director had to put more faith in his mercurial star, now playing his most mercurial character. “At certain times when I would not drink—when filming, particularly, or in the period of preparation before filming,” Ray wrote of Bogart years later, “our relationship would alter. In some ways it became deeper, and in others only more formal.”

  For emotionally demanding scenes in his films, Ray tended to prefer multiple takes as a form of extended rehearsal. But Bogart went “dry” after six, Ray recalled. By their second film together the director had developed a strategy: stop after the sixth take and “close up for the day; there was no point in trying for more. The next morning I began with an insert as a warm-up, and to get away from anything he might have had a block about from the night before.”

  The character of Laurel was as changeable as Dix. A vamp with bedroom eyes at the outset, she metamorphoses (thanks to the Production Code) into a burbling girlfriend who is willing to stay up all night to type up Dix’s brilliant script—one sign of how Ray preferred to idealize marriage. After witnessing Dix’s Jekyll-Hyde transformations, however, Laurel begins to pop pills and becomes a nervous wreck—the director’s vision of marriage gone amok.

  Held in check by their “Mr. and Mrs.” contract, Grahame seemed as eager and responsive as Bogart to her husband’s direction. Ray encouraged both his leads to improvise bits of dialogue and stage business, and the actors soon grew so comfortable with their characters that they were giving the kinds of “involuntary” performances the director prized above all.

  “After an involuntary performance the actor is kind of stunned and bewildered, he doesn’t know what just happened to him,” Ray told a class in 1977. “He is in shock at having caught sight of his own evasions, tricks, and clichés, or at sensing something of his own vast and untapped resources, at being forced to question why he became an actor at all. At such moments the director knows he has found something, released something which nobody in the world could have told the actor was there.”

  That was all on the set, in the studio. At home, of course, there was no audience—just Ray and Grahame, husband and wife, the director and his leading lady who often couldn’t stand each other in private. Despite Ray’s hopes, filming together didn’t save their marriage; rather, it put him and Grahame into round-the-clock contact, with foreseeable results.

  Sometime in early November, with production in full swing, the director abruptly moved out of his Sunset Boulevard home and started sleeping in a dressing room on the set, telling Bogart and Lord he needed the extra time and isolation to ponder the script and prepare scenes. Of course everyone understood the truth, but Ray was expert at keeping up appearances.

  Around this time, the ending of the film came up on the schedule. (Ray was shooting out of continuity—typical Hollywood practice.) At the end of Andrew Solt’s script, Dix turns maniacally possessive, just when Laurel has become convinced the police might be right—that Dix may be a sadistic murderer after all. As the police move in, Dix loses control and strangles Laurel.

  By day, Ray insisted on take after take of the emotionally charged material. He pushed the camera close to Bogart and Grahame, heightening Dix’s mania and Laurel’s trapped feeling. But at night, tucked away in his on-set living quarters, the director scribbled fretful notes to himself in the margins of the script. Unlike Dix, who cheerfully admits he has killed “dozens of people . . . in pictures,” Ray fought the urge to kill the fictional character his wife was playing. The idea was all the more unspeakable considering how much he loathed Grahame at the moment. “Shit! I can’t do it! I just can’t do it!” Ray recalled thinking.

  The first time Ray filmed the scene, he shot it just the way Solt had written it. “When Dix realizes that Laurel is about to run away, he pushes her into the bedroom onto the bed,” as George E. Turner described it in his definitive article on the making of In a Lonely Place. “The next morning Dix is hunched over the typewriter. The cleaning woman, the masseuse and a deliveryman all arrive and go past Dix into the bedroom. Somebody screams. Brub Nicolai and some policeman arrive a bit later. Dix says, ‘Just a second, Brub. I’m finished.’ Brub finds Laurel’s corpse in the bedroom . . .”

  But Ray couldn’t accept this ending, even after filming it. Talking things over with Bogart and Lord, he got their permission to try to craft an alternativ
e final sequence. Alone at night on the Columbia soundstages, the director wrote new pages, agonizing over how the story should end.

  Ray finally emerged with a new version, in which Dix is interrupted by a phone call just as he is bent over Laurel, choking her. When he hears the ring, Dix grabs the phone, listens, then hands it to Laurel, muttering abjectly, “A man wants to apologize to you.” It’s Brub on the line, telling Laurel that another man, the hatcheck girl’s boyfriend, has confessed to her murder. Dix has been proven innocent after all—the phone call has saved Laurel, yet Dix’s vindication has come too late, as Laurel has already seen what he is capable of. “Yesterday this would have meant so much to us,” she responds, dazed. “Now it doesn’t matter.” As Dix staggers away across the courtyard, disconsolate, Laurel murmurs a tearful good-bye and one mournful, memorable phrase: “I lived a few weeks while you loved me . . .”

  A line Ray himself wrote, according to many sources: part of the most memorable passage in the film, recited in its entirety by both lead characters in an earlier scene.

  I was born when she kissed me

  I died when she left me

  I lived a few weeks while she loved me

  “I want to put it in the script,” Dix informs Laurel earlier in the film, “I don’t know where.” But the best lines sometimes have to wait for the right moment. When Ray conjured up this new ending to In a Lonely Place—with this elegiac parting shot, accompanied, ultimately, by George Antheil’s throbbing music in the background—he completed the film’s transformation from a crime story to that of a glorious romance self-destroyed.

  “Lord and Bogart looked at both versions,” Turner wrote, “decided they preferred Ray’s revised ending, and retained it.”