Nicholas Ray

by Patrick McGilligan

  Throughout the filming Grahame rose to the challenges, and Bogart was never better.

  Afterward, the director and his leading lady announced that they would travel together as husband and wife at Christmas, visiting Ray’s mother and family members in Wisconsin. But Ray couldn’t even bring himself to move back into their Sunset Boulevard home. As Christmas neared, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner reran their smiling, kissing wedding photo with the caption “Smiles Have Faded,” and the news spread across the wires that Grahame had filed for divorce.

  “I am sorry to tell you at this joyous season that the often reported breakup of Gloria Grahame and Nick Ray’s marriage has become an actuality,” wrote Louella Parsons. Ray, “one of Hollywood’s most imaginative directors,” according to Parsons, would spend Christmas alone in La Crosse.

  Not quite alone: Ray would reunite with his mother and three sisters—Helen, Ruth, and Alice, now Mrs. Ernest Hiegel of La Crosse, Mrs. Stanley Fairweather of Chicago, and Mrs. Porter Williams of Pasadena, California—for the first time since the death of his father in 1926. The La Crosse Tribune published a photograph of the Kienzles, together again.

  Ray came back to Hollywood in time to toast the New Year—and to clean up a bit of unfinished business for Howard Hughes. While Ray was working on In a Lonely Place, Hughes had taken an interest in the Joan Fontaine picture Ray had finished six months before. Not only had the studio boss changed the title—from “Bed of Roses” to Born to Be Bad—but now Hughes ordered Ray to reshoot portions of the film, substituting a new, lighter ending.

  A pair of married writers, Edith Sommer and Bob Soderberg, hastily supplied new scenes to satisfy Hughes, including a new reconciliation scene between the aviator playboy (Zachary Scott) and his onetime fiancée (Joan Leslie) on an airstrip. Hughes himself is said to have penned the aviator’s confessional monologue (“I made a big mistake when I gave up flying . . .”). The film’s revamped ending was sprinkled with humor, with Joan Fontaine huffily escorted from Scott’s mansion.

  Ray was rankled enough by Hughes’s tampering that he registered a formal complaint about the changes through his agents. But the director agreed to return to supervise the revised scenes in January. Later still, RKO contract directors Robert Stevenson and Richard Fleischer shot additional retakes for Hughes, who would eventually release multiple versions of Born to Be Bad at the end of August 1950, manipulating the footage for different markets.

  Permanently vacating his Sunset Boulevard home, Ray moved to a new place in Malibu near his old friend John Houseman, who had come back to Hollywood in late 1949 to supervise Ray’s next film for RKO.

  Ray never stopped trying to write something worthwhile, but he had a hard time breaking through in Hollywood as a potential writer-director. Studio officials tended to greet his original story ideas with skepticism; most were sketchy, just a few written pages—or, worse from their point of view, intricate and overlong and overambitious. And Ray always seemed to be working on several ideas for scripts at once, rather than concentrating all his resources on the best bet. When he was trying to wriggle out of “I Married a Communist,” for example, Ray proposed “two original story ideas”—one “a drama loaded with music and based on the wreck of the old 97,”* the other “a warmhearted western comedy” from a story by Rod Amateau, his friend and frequent assistant director. Neither made much headway with studio executives.

  But there were easier ways to get the studios interested in one of his projects—such as starting with an already published novel or produced play. And so, for his fourth picture for RKO, his sixth overall as director, Ray came up with a book he wanted to film, his own discovery.

  A singular book it was: A 1946 novel by Englishman Gerald Butler, Mad with Much Heart was not an obvious Hollywood movie. Its story was set almost entirely in the English countryside, and its three main characters included a mentally deficient teenager who kills a young girl; his blind older sister, who hides and protects the teenager; and a hard-bitten London detective who is smitten by the blind sister while tracking the troubled teen.

  In 1949, at Ray’s urging, the RKO story department took a close look at the book, conceding that the novel was “powerful” but rejecting the story as “unpleasant” art house stuff, unlikely to generate “sizeable box-office returns.” Head of production Sid Rogell seconded the story department’s negative verdict while urging Ray to “keep punching” with his other ideas.

  During the making of In a Lonely Place, Ray contacted Houseman in New York and asked him to get involved; with Houseman as his producer, RKO might be persuaded to take a chance on the film. Houseman didn’t share Ray’s enthusiasm for the novel. “I saw what drew him to the story,” he said, “but not how he proposed to turn it into a viable movie.” But the producer was itching to return to California and take up his RKO commitments, so he agreed.

  When Houseman returned, though, he was chagrined by the sweeping changes at the studio since Dore Schary had given way to Howard Hughes. “RKO under Hughes’s management was very different from the studio I had known,” recalled Houseman. “Hughes himself was never seen, but his influence was pervasive and sinister: he manifested himself through occasional sexual forays (set up by one or another of his personal henchmen) and by influence exerted through his hirelings, who sought to protect their jobs by second-guessing the tastes and caprices of their masters. It was a distasteful and unproductive atmosphere.”

  Convinced that RKO might greenlight the project if a name writer was committed to the script, Houseman sent the novel to Raymond Chandler, with whom he had worked on The Blue Dahlia, his last Paramount production before joining RKO. The dean of hard-boiled crime fiction turned down the job, however. “It has no humor at all which makes it tough for me,” Chandler wrote Houseman. “The cop is a ridiculous character. . . . The blind girl is obviously an idiot.”

  Houseman never showed Chandler’s dispiriting letter to Ray. Now the producer turned to A. I. Bezzerides, a half-Greek, half-Armenian novelist from Fresno, who was living with scenarist Silvia Richards, whom Ray had worked with on the unproduced “Main Street, Heaventown.” Although not as famous as Chandler, Bezzerides had written several critically acclaimed novels, full of tough, proletarian characters carrying “a grudge against the world,” as Lewis Gannett wrote in the New York Herald Tribune. In Hollywood Bezzerides had become a noir specialist, most recently writing Thieves’ Highway, an adaptation of his novel Thieves’ Market about a vengeful truck driver, directed by Jules Dassin. After reading Mad with Much Heart, Bezzerides agreed to write the script.

  Together, Ray and Houseman cornered their mutual friend Robert Ryan and sold the top RKO star on playing the lead character, the disillusioned detective whose abusive behavior gets him banished from the city and sent to the countryside to help solve a rural murder. Neither Bezzerides nor Ryan brought enough star power to convince Rogell, however, and Houseman was forced into a personal concession he later regretted. He agreed to produce a lesser studio project, a love story involving a female ex-con, in exchange for the go-ahead on Ray’s film. (“Of the two dozen films I have produced,” Houseman later wrote, the resulting film—the “silly and bad” The Company She Keeps—“is the only one of which I am totally ashamed.”)

  The deal was finalized by the end of 1950, allowing Ray and Bezzerides to launch their first script conferences early in the new year. Unlike on They Live by Night, where he had been integrally involved in the adaptation, this time Houseman left the script entirely to Ray and Bezzerides. The two “seemed to understand each other,” the producer recalled, “though I was never quite sure how closely they agreed on the nature of the film we were about to make. They were both great talkers and both combined an almost feminine sensitivity with a strong ‘macho’ streak.”

  The first step was to Americanize the novel, which was set mainly in the English countryside. Ray wanted to draw out the city side of the story, showing how the disillusioned cop had been dehumanized by his contacts
with low life in the urban jungle. The detective at the center of the novel, Jim Wilson, was a tormented policeman, living “the life of a garbage man, digging and prodding and letting the smell out from human dregs,” as Gerald Butler had written. Ray wanted to go deeper in that direction, turning the detective into an angry soul who took sadistic pleasure in beating up crooks, stoolies, and B-girls.

  In script conferences, as Bezzerides discovered, Ray could talk like a river or retreat into unfathomable silences, depending on his mood or the problem they were trying to solve. His talk and his silences alike were ripe for interpretation. “He’d say, ‘You know, this scene . . . uh . . . uh . . . ?’ ” Bezzerides recalled. “I’d say, ‘I know.’ And I’d go off and I’d fix it because I knew exactly what he was talking about, and he’d say, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s it!’ But he couldn’t tell me what it was.”

  Yet Ray and Bezzerides made “slow, garrulous progress,” as Houseman recalled, bolstering their work with intensive research into the daily regimen of policemen. In the increasingly paranoid atmosphere of the time, when accusing fingers were being pointed at realistic, socially conscious films—with so much of the industry on the defensive—backing up even a fictional story with factual research and expert endorsements seemed increasingly important. The research and checking with experts dovetailed with Ray’s background in the theater of the left, the Works Progress Administration, and the Voice of America. But now, in the Hollywood of the 1950s, it became almost a mania for him during the preparation stage of a film.

  Bezzerides did his part, venturing out at night with Los Angeles cops, taking notes as they drove around their beat. But Ray went further, flying back east to spend time with police in Boston, where he considered setting the city portion of the film, picking up procedural details and vignettes drawn from their daily lives. (The amount of time he spent there varied wildly in his many interviews—from a few days to several weeks.) The second half of the story, the rural half, would take place a long car drive “upstate,” where the banished detective joins an ongoing hunt for a teenage killer and meets the blind sister at an isolated farmhouse.

  One thing that fueled Ray’s enthusiasm for the novel was an intriguing, Wizard of Oz–type concept he had for the cinematography: shooting the city half of the film in noirish black and white, with the upstate half gradually unfolding in color. It would be as though the cop—and the audience—would learn to appreciate the beauty of the rural world through the blind woman’s eyes.

  While Bezzerides wrote, Ray traveled, picking up pointers and scouting locations. His East Coast trips always gave him an excuse to catch up with Broadway plays and friends and family. In New York, he saw Sidney Kingsley’s Detective Story, another portrayal of the grim routine of a restless cop. (It too was being filmed, over at Paramount.) He also spent time with Jean Evans and his son Tony, just barely a teenager, moody, volatile, at times a hell-raiser but sweet-centered like his father. Tony was always changing private schools and costing Ray more money.

  Ray still had a cozy friendship with his ex-wife—warmer, indeed, than his relationship with his current, estranged wife, Gloria Grahame. At PM, Evans had evolved from a family-features writer to an interviewer of celebrities like Frank Sinatra and Alfred Stieglitz, and finally to a chronicler of New York subcultures and case histories of troubled people. After PM shut down, Evans had secured a Guggenheim Fellowship to write a book of psychiatric case histories. As usual, her work overlapped with Ray’s interests.

  As he often did, Ray picked Evans’s brain about the script in progress for the new film, which for the moment still carried the novel’s title, “Mad with Much Heart.” They also talked about an article she had written for PM about Gypsy life on the streets of New York, which intrigued Ray as a possible film subject. Evans’s friend Esther McCoy was still collaborating on script projects with Silvia Richards, and Ray was still interested in “Main Street, Heaventown,” their juvenile delinquency story. On the way back to California, then, Ray stopped in Colorado to scout rural scenery near Denver, a closer outdoors location for the second part of the picture. The director settled on a desirable area in Grand County, Colorado, high in the Rocky Mountains.

  Meanwhile, with constant input from Ray, Bezzerides had made progress on the script. The director had continued to push the material away from genre conventions, making it more a character study of the detective, and—as with They Live by Night or In a Lonely Place—more of a fragile romance. At first the two leads, the detective and the blind sister, would evince an awkward physical attraction, brushing up against each other at odd moments, at one point even stretching out their hands to clasp and console each other—anticipating James Dean’s anguished reach for Natalie Wood at the edge of the cliff in Rebel Without a Cause. Eventually, their intense feeling for each other would overtake the crime story.

  Bezzerides liked and respected Ray, but the director reminded him as much of the blind woman in their story as of the violent cop; the characters were like two sides of the same person. “Nick Ray lived in a sheltered contained world all his own,” Bezzerides later reflected. “He was totally isolated.”

  But when Ray insisted on adding a coda to the script after the story’s deadly hilltop climax—with the detective quitting the force and returning upstate to the sightless woman awaiting him in her farmhouse—Bezzerides fought it as sentimental mush. Any hint of a happy ending, he argued, would betray the spirit and letter of the novel, in which the two characters did not end up together. Houseman also found the romantic coda “soft” and embarrassing. But Ray insisted, and he finished what Bezzerides couldn’t bear to write. Bezzerides alone would be credited for the screenplay, but for only the second time since They Live by Night, Nicholas Ray’s name also appeared on-screen as a writer—sharing an adaptation credit with Bezzerides.

  Too often, in Ray’s career, he found himself working against the clock. It seems truer of him than some directors, perhaps because he never enjoyed the stature in his industry of directors like Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, or Howard Hawks, who had the power to dig in their heels when they felt it necessary, to slow things down and clear a path to make the films they wanted to make. Hollywood studios were always in a hurry, and Ray’s RKO contract obliged him to keep busy.

  His latest production, in Ray’s mind, was intertwined with his affection for twenty-two-year-old, blond-haired Sumner Williams, his sister Alice’s son. An absentee parent to his own children, Ray felt fatherly toward his nephew, encouraging his acting aspirations with his first small part in Knock on Any Door. In Wisconsin at Christmas Ray had spent quality time with Williams, observing him intently. His nephew would serve as a lucky charm behind the scenes of other Ray pictures, but Williams would play his biggest role ever on-screen as the twisted young killer of “Mad with Much Heart.”

  The part of the blind protectress seemed tailor-made for Ida Lupino, an underrated actress—she jokingly referred to herself as “the poor man’s Bette Davis”—who often played hard-shelled women with tender hearts. As Hollywood’s only female director, Lupino was acting less frequently by the early 1950s; her scenes had to be crowded together on the schedule, many of them interiors at the studio. (Her company had offices at RKO, which distributed her films.)

  A reliable, blustering presence in many John Ford films, Ward Bond was engaged to portray the shotgun-toting father whose determination to avenge his young daughter’s slaying, and hostility toward the big-city detective, contributes to the tension of the hunt.

  Although the studio ultimately vetoed Ray’s hopes for a split personality for the photography—shooting half the picture in black-and-white and the other half in color—the director was able to arrange the valued services of his They Live by Night cinematographer, George E. Diskant. For the music he engaged the formidable composer Bernard Herrmann, whose name was to be forever bracketed with his magisterial score for Citizen Kane. (Herrmann’s “violent scherzo” for the manhunt in Ray’s film, wrote Steven C. Smith i
n A Heart at Fire’s Center: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann, would rank among “the most exhilarating pieces of film music ever written.”)

  The script was finalized, and Ray and company somehow managed to pitch their tents in mountainous Grand County, about four hours by air from Hollywood, by the end of March. Grand County was rugged at any time of year, but late winter guaranteed heavy winds and snowstorms and sunny glare off the snow and ice. The film’s protracted chase would be all the more existential for the extreme elements.

  The communities of Granby and Tabernash welcomed the Hollywood visitors with buffet suppers. Farmers and residents were rounded up to play the search party, including the rancher who is stabbed in the shoulder by the fugitive teenager when he steals a car. That part was given to Don Yager, the manager of Granby’s only movie theater.

  It was the first time Ray had ventured away from Hollywood for lengthy location work, and he relished the escape. Shooting in this humble section of America reminded him of his own backstory: hitchhiking to California as a youth, sojourning in Mexico after his bust-up with Frank Lloyd Wright, journeying throughout the South and Midwest on behalf of the WPA. Those were days he spent discovering the artistry of common people, the natural beauty of the land, and himself. To the end of his life Ray would wax nostalgic over this shoot in Grand County, ranking the performances of “some of the farmers of Colorado,” in his words, alongside those of Bogart and Grahame in In a Lonely Place, Mercedes McCambridge in Johnny Guitar, and Sal Mineo in Rebel Without a Cause.

  In truth, the locals performed only minor parts, nothing consequential. But for the first time since arriving at RKO, Ray was out from under the confinement and prying eyes of the studio executives. He absorbed the harsh Colorado landscape and looked for imaginative ways to use the physical staging to clarify the film’s emotional undercurrents. His angles and compositions were fresh, using handheld camerawork to follow the action closely, sometimes shooting the actors as moonlit silhouettes, huffing across frozen ground.