Nicholas Ray

by Patrick McGilligan

  Ray’s camera would treat the furtive character of Danny—played by his nephew Sumner Williams, a striking but limited actor—with extra care and sympathy. Danny was another prototype from Ray’s psyche, another Bowie or Nick Romano, young and suffering, cause indeterminate. Like his predecessors, Danny hurts himself above all, making mistakes that prove fatal.

  Ida Lupino was expected to sail through her part—and she did. Ray and the actress agreed beforehand to let her “act” the part of a blind woman rather than use special contact lenses to simulate an unseeing stare, as was often done in Hollywood. At the director’s suggestion, Lupino logged time dogging the heels of a prominent Los Angeles eye physician, observing his patients. Up in Colorado, the joke on the set was, who was directing whom?

  Lupino’s character, the sightless sister, had tragic qualities much like those of Keechie or Emma; all three are in some sense blind to reality. The sister instinctively fathoms the cop’s inner pain. “Sometimes people who are never alone are the loneliest,” she tells him. Lupino delivered a spellbinding performance under Ray’s direction.

  The detective played by Robert Ryan, whose alienation from himself and the world spills over into abusive behavior, was a different prototype—a stunted, grown-up version of Danny. Ryan excelled at depicting such antisocial characters without surrendering his innate likability. “There was a constant dignity floating around” Ryan, Dore Schary once said, “but like an invisible armor.” If Lupino was a poor-man’s Bette Davis, Ryan was a poor man’s Bogart, and like Bogart he always hit his marks. Ray gave the actor only a “very few suggestions,” the self-reliant star recalled. “He took a lot of trouble to get a certain reality. During shooting, he talked to me [about cops] as if he were telling me a story.”

  Stories revolving around strong, handsome men riven by inner torments stirred Ray’s deepest instincts. His films thrust these divided men into hostile environments that tested them and were made haunting by his camerawork. The director knew such male characters too well, and when the leading man was tailored to the part, the emotional effect was doubled.

  Off-camera Ray and the leading man of On Dangerous Ground were kindred spirits. Besides chain-smoking, heavy drinking, and awkward family relationships, the two shared an eternal desire “to write something.” Curiously, during breaks in the making of the taut, suspenseful “Mad with Much Heart,” Ray and Ryan scribbled away on a romantic comedy “about an insurance salesman who bets his life savings he can sell a $1,000,000 policy to an heiress.”

  But comedy was hardly Ryan’s strong suit, and Ray was less and less the young man with a constant grin; after a few pro forma publicity items, their script came to naught.

  After the Colorado filming was done, Ray staged the farmhouse interiors, and the first half of the film, at RKO and on the backlot. The director established a bewitched mood for the studio scenes with Ryan and Lupino in her ghostly illuminated farmhouse sanctuary. Night shooting and second-unit work in Los Angeles added dark texture to the city half.

  Toward the end of his work on “Mad with Much Heart,” the director’s personal love story received an injection of hope. According to the Los Angeles papers, Ray reconciled with Gloria Grahame, and the actress and their one-year-old son, Tim, moved into Ray’s oceanfront residence in Malibu.

  Their reconciliation coincided, ironically, with the nationwide release of In a Lonely Place, Ray’s gut-wrenching portrait of a destructive relationship wrapped around a crime story. Many critics praised the director’s noirish look inside Hollywood, with its unusual blend of suspense, character study, and broken romance. The New York Times hailed the film as “a superior cut of melodrama,” a verdict echoed by Variety, which called it forceful and nail-biting, predicting “a box-office winner.” Philip K. Scheuer of the Los Angeles Times wrote, “Nicholas Ray’s direction is his most meaningful to date.” Writing in The Commonweal, Philip T. Hartung said that In a Lonely Place was “exciting cinema,” adding, “Mr. Ray knows how to keep you on edge. . . . The climax is terrific; and the ending, the only one that would make any sense, comes as a complete surprise.”

  Few realized then how closely the film’s bleak, paranoid atmosphere echoed persistent elements of Ray’s own domestic life. But over time In a Lonely Place has come to be regarded as an emblematic work in his career, described as “one of the most heartbreaking love stories ever committed to film” approaching “the torrents of Camus and Sartre” (Kim Morgan, the Huffington Post) and “the director’s most personal Hollywood movie” (J. Hoberman, the Village Voice).

  In real life, Ray and Grahame—the models for Dix and Laurel— resumed the pretense of a happy home life. In Malibu they set up their new household, hosting other film industry couples for cocktails and dinner. John Houseman, who lived nearby, privately thought their marriage was an absurdity, yet he and his new spouse (Joan Courtney, a French countess by birth) visited often. The producer courted Grahame about appearing in one of his future projects.

  Other frequent guests included director Edward Dmytryk, one of the Hollywood Ten, who was engaged in a losing battle in the courts against his contempt-of-Congress citation, and Dmytryk’s young wife, actress Jean Porter. Ray was one of many who admired Dmytryk’s Crossfire as a seminal postwar social-consciousness picture, and he would borrow three of its four stars—Robert Ryan, Robert Mitchum, and Grahame—again and again for his own films. Dmytryk complained to Ray about his predicament: He and Adrian Scott, Crossfire’s producer, had wanted to admit their past Communism in front of HUAC, making it clear they were no longer Party members; instead they were talked into a vow of solidarity with the other Ten. As a group they had defied the Committee, and now as a group they might go to jail.

  Although Ray and Grahame put on a good show, the fault lines in their marriage were still there and still obvious to friends. Ray was Mr. Nice Guy, everyone agrees, but Grahame was Mrs. Trouble. Ray wasn’t always convincing in the role of the dutiful husband, however, and Grahame didn’t care for the role of loving wife. While Mrs. Trouble struggled to impress guests with her cooking, Mr. Nice Guy usually slowly drank himself into a stupor.

  Screenwriter Millard Kaufman had known Ray for several years and considered him a friend. Kaufman and his wife came to dinner several times at the Rays’ Malibu house. While the director was always “very pleasant, a helluva nice guy,” Kaufman recalled, “he lacked the kind of spontaneity that after a while you expect of a friendship.” The marriage lacked the same spontaneity. To Kaufman, the couple seemed to have “kind of an adolescent reaction” to hosting visitors: They steered husbands and wives off clumsily into separate rooms—and when Kaufman and his wife compared notes later, they found they themselves had done most of the talking. To Kaufman, it seemed like an empty marriage.

  One trait Ray and Grahame definitely shared was the ability to create endless crises out of their own imaginations. Grahame was wrapped up in her own image. Though she tried to be a good mother (rocking a carriage with one hand as she read How to Raise a Baby “intently” with the other, according to her biographer), the blond actress, now approaching thirty, was living in dread of weight and wrinkles and other signs of aging. Convinced that “her chin was too prominent,” according to Vincent Curcio, Grahame indulged in a series of plastic surgeries, trying “to get surgeons to give her what nature hadn’t.” And she was a binge shopper, obsessively anxious about how she looked in clothes, constantly adopting “a new look.”

  Influenced by Jean Evans’s advice, Ray decided that his wife had psychological problems. Although he himself was wary of analysts, Ray insisted that his wife seek healing through therapy. Along with her fear of aging and her shopping sprees, the director felt that Grahame evinced a peculiar intimacy with her girlfriends. She talked on the phone for hours with other actresses, went shopping with her girlfriends, visited them endlessly, sometimes even deciding impulsively to stay with them overnight. Whenever she disappeared for the night, Ray was suspicious.

  One re
ason Grahame may have needed a psychologist was for her apparent addiction to sex. In bed if nowhere else, the couple was still compatible. Sexual chemistry had brought them together, and sexual chemistry reignited the marriage whenever it threatened to die. But Ray’s lust for his wife defined the relationship, and the actress delighted in raising the stakes.

  According to one of Grahame’s friends, In a Lonely Place actress Jeff Donnell, quoted in Vincent Curcio’s Suicide Blonde, “Gloria expected Nick to be like Stanley [her first husband], possessive and temperamental, and when he wasn’t [she] created situations to make that happen. She did make him jealous . . . because she was a very sensuous, sexy lady, and, knowing that any man with an excitable temperament could easily react to any provocation with suspicion, deliberately set out to effect it.”

  Ray lusted after Grahame, but he wondered whether she truly lusted after him, or if he was merely a convenience. Many of those who knew Grahame considered her a nymphomaniac who lusted after multiple sex partners, who—like facial surgery or wardrobe changes—continually validated her youth and attractiveness. She demanded regular sexual activity, and her incessant, sometimes extreme appetites took a toll on Ray. He told one friend that Grahame forced him to escort her to private sex shows whenever they passed through New York. Once, when they got back to their hotel after one such freewheeling event, Grahame demanded sex. When Ray wearily declined, Mrs. Trouble pulled a gun out of her handbag and ordered him to fuck or die.

  Alas, such anecdotes are impossible to confirm. But they might help explain why, too soon after publicly resuscitating his marriage, Ray was overcome by ennui and doubt. Many nights the handsome director could be found lingering at Lucy’s Cafe across from RKO after work, ordering rounds of drinks and complaining, under his breath, about his famous wife.

  Obviously this was not a wonderful time for Ray, personally or professionally.

  Or politically: The New Deal was over, and anti-Communism was ascendant.

  Even some of Ray’s oldest friends would be scarred by the Red-baiting fever that was spreading to all professions—among them his high school and college pal Clarence Sezezechowski, who had shared early theater and journalism adventures and Communist sympathies with Ray. After changing his name to Clarence Hiskey, he had moved from La Crosse to the University of Wisconsin in Madison, after which Hiskey had forged a distinguished career as a scientist. The House Committee on Un-American Activities subpoenaed Hiskey in September 1948, accusing him of being a dedicated Communist who had acted as a Soviet spy during his involvement with the Manhattan Project. Hiskey refused to answer questions and was cited for contempt of Congress in 1950; he was forced to resign his academic posts.

  The progressive strain of American politics took blow after blow in the early postwar years. Third-party presidential candidate Henry Wallace was defeated in the 1948 national election. The following year, the fate of the Hollywood Ten was adversely affected by the untimely deaths of two of the U.S. Supreme Court’s most liberal justices in 1949. In the spring of 1950, the new court, its number swelled by two conservative jurists appointed by President Harry Truman, declined to hear the cases of John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo. They were the first of the Ten to go to jail. Edward Dmytryk, fresh from the Rays’ dinner parties in Malibu, followed in the last days of June.

  In February 1950, Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy announced that the U.S. State Department had been “infiltrated” by 205 Communists. On June 25 of that year, North Korea invaded South Korea, instigating the Korean War. In August, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were jailed for espionage. And when, one by one, the Hollywood Ten trooped off to jail, HUAC announced a fresh wave of hearings probing Communism in the film industry, with the first new round scheduled for early 1951 in Los Angeles itself.

  Government investigators had already swarmed Hollywood, collecting the names of left-leaners and Communists throughout the film industry. Anti-Communists in the screen trade were only too happy to help with the list making, and many decided to draw up unofficial lists of their own, making certain anyone too liberal or “pink” was blacklisted from future work in motion pictures.

  Actors Ward Bond and John Wayne and director Cecil B. DeMille were among the leading lights of one particularly virulent organization, the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, founded in 1944. The group’s leaders had supported the initial HUAC attack on Hollywood in 1947, and now it and other ad hoc groups began to function as clearinghouses for people who wanted to get their names off the swelling lists of probable Reds.

  In June 1950, DeMille led the charge at the Directors Guild: He crafted a loyalty oath that he wanted all members to sign attesting to their patriotism and anti-Communism. (“I do not believe in,” the loyalty oath stated, “and I am not a member of, nor do I support any organization that believes in or teaches the overthrow of the United States government.”) Officers of the guild were already obliged to sign such affidavits, but guild president Joseph L. Mankiewicz, a liberal who recognized DeMille’s move as part of a larger right-wing agenda, opposed any mandatory oath-taking for the membership at large. In August, while Mankiewicz was away from Hollywood, DeMille forced a full membership vote on the issue on numbered open ballots — in order to keep tabs on how individuals voted. The “numbered ballots contributed to an atmosphere of fear in which only fourteen directors dared to check the ‘no’ box under the text of the proposed oath,” wrote film historian Joseph McBride. “There were 547 ‘yes’ votes,” and 57 abstentions, or ballots not returned.”

  When Mankiewicz himself refused to sign the new anti-Communist pledge, DeMille tried to have him removed from the presidency as “anti-democratic.” In October, Ray joined twenty-five directors on a petition demanding a full membership meeting to defend Mankiewicz and reconsider the mandatory oath. It would be the last political stand Ray would make for almost twenty years. “Although he signed the petition,” wrote Bernard Eisenschitz, Ray “seems not to have attended” the full Directors Guild meeting in late October. (DeMille was rebuked at the meeting, the oath-taking temporarily suspended.)*

  The Hollywood blacklist was never official, because the studios had no desire to open themselves up to litigation from complainants. Unofficially, however, thanks not only to HUAC and flag-waving studios like RKO, but to individuals like DeMille and ad hoc groups like the Motion Picture Alliance, the blacklist was going full blast by the late summer of 1950. No Communist in Hollywood, current or former, could hope to fly beneath the anti-Red radar much longer.

  That summer, Ray kept his head down. He stayed busy editing “Mad with Much Heart”—retitled On Dangerous Ground at the studio’s behest—and preparing his next RKO picture: Flying Leathernecks, another “special project of Howard Hughes’s,” an unabashedly patriotic paean to flyers stationed in the Pacific during World War II.

  Ray had already given a quiet nod to the bullies in charge of the Hollywood blacklist by handing a pivotal role in On Dangerous Ground to Ward Bond, who’d grown as notorious as Cecil B. DeMille for his rabid anti-Communism. Bond was the point man inside the Motion Picture Alliance for clearing former Communists trying to repent their past politics and preserve their film careers; Bond was said to enjoy haranguing his apologetic victims sadistically, sometimes vetting them from his office bathroom while sitting on a toilet with the door open.

  Now, in Flying Leathernecks, Ray would be directing the figurehead president of the Motion Picture Alliance. John Wayne would get top billing as the commander who always sets personal feelings aside in order to make the hard decisions, playing opposite Robert Ryan as a popular, good-hearted officer who bonds with his troops but finds himself in constant conflict with Wayne.

  Kenneth Gamet wrote the original script, later polished by other writers, including James Edward Grant, a crony of Wayne’s who contributed to several of his films, and Ray’s friend Rodney Amateau, who made last-minute fixes on location at Camp Pendleton south of Los Angeles.

 
Grant and producer Edmund Grainger, who had produced some of Wayne’s other war pictures, were also Motion Picture Alliance zealots, helping to hound Ray’s “friends on the left” out of show business in their spare time. In case there was any doubt about the message of Flying Leathernecks, Grant added a jingoistic prologue and narration to the film.

  The story gave Wayne a faithful wife at home (Janis Carter) and Ryan a life-of-the-party brother-in-law (Don Taylor), who would suffer a predictable fate for his callowness. The rest were also stock characters, with Jay C. Flippen—Ray’s best man in his marriage to Grahame and a welcome presence in They Live by Night and A Woman’s Secret—back for comic relief as the conniver who could “requisition” any luxury in a pinch.

  The film had everything that the younger, more innocent Nicholas Ray had maligned about Hollywood in his earliest interviews: the enormous scale, the army of extras and second-unit crews, the director in supreme military commander mode. In most ways Flying Leathernecks was a typical pro-American air force film dominated by the aerial acrobatics. Years later, Ryan told a French admirer that he and the director “often asked ourselves what we were doing on a film like this.” But Ray shrugged off his qualms then and later.

  The once-left-wing director and the superpatriotic Wayne established a kind of détente on the set, one that even grew into a cautious friendship. “He was a much better actor than most people gave him credit for being,” Ray said later, “almost daily full of nice surprises.” Wayne gave the director an appropriate gift at the end of filming: an inscribed Marine Corps knife. “Wayne would close all political discussion with ‘You’re full of shit!’ and that was the end of it,” recalled Amateau. “Wayne was always a very prudent, careful man. He was kind to everybody. And he felt sorry that Nick made a lot of enemies.”