Nicholas Ray

by Patrick McGilligan

  In the critical months of September and October 1950, as the Motion Picture Alliance was demanding fealty from all Hollywood directors, an increasingly vulnerable Nicholas Ray was toiling away at a thankless studio exercise lionizing American war heroes. His first Technicolor film, Flying Leathernecks was touted as realistic, and some critics found the aerial photography, shuffled together deftly with file footage, exciting. Yet ultimately the direction seemed as uninspired as the paint-by-numbers script. It was the antithesis of his greatest work, a personal film only in the sense that he was covering for himself.

  Despite Ray’s best efforts to separate his personal and professional lives, the two had always intertwined—and never more torturously than now, as HUAC’s second round of Hollywood hearings drew closer in March 1951. Yet even as dozens of screen figures, including several of Ray’s close friends, began receiving HUAC subpoenas, the real drama was in his own home, where his marriage to Gloria Grahame was approaching a climax.

  Though he later claimed to have loathed his actress wife all along, Ray’s behavior suggests that his feelings for her were conflicted. Though he himself avoided going home when he could, he fixated on his wife’s frequent absences and mysterious “appointments.” Better than anyone, the director recognized that Grahame was addicted to sex, destined—like Christabel in Born to Be Bad—to cuckold him again and again. Thus his wife must have had a secret lover, but whom?

  Although Grahame knew how to incite her husband by flirting with other men in front of him, they weren’t necessarily the men she was sleeping with. For a long time, Ray was convinced that his wife was bedding one of the elephant trainers she’d met on the set of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth, in which she was playing the “elephant girl.” All smiles, Ray visited the big-top production one day for a bit of joint publicity. He got so caught up in trying to identify the roustabout in love with Grahame—without success—that he completely missed a fling she was having with one of his own screenwriters. She was also busily engaged in a clandestine affair with Mickey Knox, the handsome actor from Nick Romano’s gang in Knock on Any Door.

  Friends and bystanders were drawn into the couple’s web of mutual distrust. Even back during the filming of In a Lonely Place, according to Vincent Curcio, Ray pointedly cut back on close-ups of Frank Lovejoy, the actor playing Dix’s detective friend Brub, after deciding that Lovejoy had been supporting Grahame with her alibis.

  Grahame’s friend Jeff Donnell told Curcio about one dinner she and her husband had with the Rays. “Nick started to question Gloria about where she had been the night before,” Curcio wrote. “Gloria said she was with Jeff; Nick said he called Jeff’s house and there was no answer, and before Jeff could say a word, Gloria said they had gone to the movies, which wasn’t so. Nick became furious with Jeff, badgering her with incisive questions. Did she really go to the movies with Gloria? Why didn’t she answer the phone? Since she [Jeff Donnell] was the mother of two small children, when wasn’t she at home with them, instead of at the movies? The argument kept escalating, and finally Jeff and her husband couldn’t stand it anymore, leaving Gloria and Nick in the middle of a screaming match.”

  Even as the Red-baiters in Hollywood were dogging Ray’s heels, the director put his own wife under surveillance. As angry and paranoid as Bogart at the end of In a Lonely Place, Ray hired a detective agency to follow his wife and report on her extramarital conduct. But Grahame soon realized that someone was trailing her and eluded the detectives by slipping in and out of hotels with her lovers in Los Angeles and back east. Thinking that Grahame must be trysting with her lovers in Malibu when Ray was away, the detectives even tried tucking a tape recorder under their living room sofa—but the family dog barked at the machine incessantly, obscuring any other noise in the house.

  The detectives were right in a way. The tape recorder wasn’t necessary, however. Shortly after Grahame finished The Greatest Show on Earth, the Rays’ marital suspense built to a catastrophe no one could have foreseen.

  The scene: the couple’s Malibu home.

  The surprising main character: Tony Ray, the director’s thirteen-year-old son with Jean Evans. Evans was always fretting that her ex-husband did not spend enough time with his son, and Tony had started making summertime visits to Hollywood. The young teenager and his stepmother had established a warm relationship. When Tony showed up in late May or early June 1951, just after completing his first term in a new prep school, he looked all grown-up, big and strong and handsome like his father. The teenager was prone to the same feelings of arousal Ray had felt for his own father’s mistress back in La Crosse. And Grahame was promiscuous.

  “Gloria opened the door, and like a scene in a movie, the two of them looked at each other and something instantly passed between them,” wrote Curcio. “Gloria was tall and radiant at that time, with reddish-blond hair, never more beautiful; Tony was dark and attractive, with large liquid eyes and all the touching beauty of the first blush of youth. They did not think of before or after, of proscriptions or consequences . . .

  “They made love that afternoon.”

  According to a detective employed by Ray, the couple’s lovemaking continued stealthily for days. But Ray’s suspicions were mounting, and one afternoon the director barged in without warning to discover his wife and teenage son in flagrante delicto.

  “All hell broke loose,” Curcio wrote. Ray stormed around, waving his arms and shouting, smashing everything he could find. Tony was thrown out of the house; he spent the night sleeping under a neighbor’s porch.

  Grahame later told a friend she merely “swept up the broken records and put the books back in the bookcase, and just sort of tidied up, and made the house look nice again.”

  A house, but never again any kind of home: Overnight Ray took rooms at the Garden of Allah on Sunset Boulevard, the venerable Hollywood hotel where Kazan had once stayed, nowadays populated by old-time screenwriters and reclusive silent-era stars. A short time later he moved into a separate four-room bungalow adjoining the Clover Club, a private, illicit casino on the Sunset Strip.

  By the second week of July the Hollywood columnists, who knew the details of the scandal but kept their published accounts tasteful, reported that the director and sexy blond actress had finally split up for good. “I think we made a good try,” Ray told a wire service. “In fact we tried over and over again, but it just didn’t come off.”

  Of all the inexplicable bits of bad luck that could have happened to Ray, this was the worst. His teenage son sleeping with his wife: It was not just a blow to his pride but a stab to his heart and soul—a burden he would carry for the rest of his life and a humiliation he could never hide . . . because everyone already knew.

  “In the circle emanating from Houseman’s house we all knew,” said Norman Lloyd, the onetime Theatre of Action player long since installed in Hollywood.

  Ray plunged into a blue funk of heavy drinking. Actress Betsy Blair tried to remember when it was exactly—July 1951, she thought—one morning after a Saturday night party she’d thrown with her husband, Gene Kelly, she woke up to see director sprawled asleep outside their window. Ray hadn’t even made it to his car. He’d passed out on the lawn.

  As Ray’s personal life was crumbling around him, HUAC investigators were pressuring him to deliver testimony about his years as a Communist, demanding the names of friends and associates who’d been Party members. Ray had been sensitive to the issues of informing as far back as They Live by Night, which had been made during the tumult of the first HUAC hearings. In this, his first film—and the one over which he exerted the greatest artistic control—Mattie’s “informing” leads to Bowie’s death. The film clearly condemns the character’s treachery: after being reassured by police who tell her she’s doing the right thing, Mattie remarks, “I don’t think that’s gonna help me sleep nights.” By 1951, however, informing was the only clear way to avoid being blacklisted, and in future films involving various acts of betrayal—a
surprising number of his films touch on the matter—Ray would be more sympathetic to the betrayer.

  In March and April, HUAC convened the new Hollywood hearings, the first to focus on motion pictures since 1947. Widely covered in the press, the hearings riveted the film industry. Subpoenas went out to more writers than actors, and more actors than directors. The Directors Guild was “not a hotbed” of Communism, director Jules Dassin, who was ultimately blacklisted, commented years later, “not even a tepid bed.” John Berry, whom John Houseman had launched as a director and who had collaborated with Ray on the documentary Tuesday in November, was among those subpoenaed in 1951. But Berry joined Dassin, Joseph Losey, and a burgeoning number of Ray’s left-wing friends who evaded their summonses or anticipated them by leaving for New York, Europe, or Mexico.

  Dassin, Berry, and Losey, directors all: They were bellwethers for Ray. But more influential, ultimately, was the appearance before HUAC of another colleague: Edward Dmytryk. On April 25, 1951, after having served six months in prison, Dmytryk recanted his “unfriendly” testimony and named himself and twenty-six other former Hollywood Communists. “The philosophical reason for his change of position,” reported the New York Times, “was the fact that the U.S. was at war with the Communists in Korea. On the personal level, he was faced with the need to support a wife and children.” One month later, Dmytryk was hired to direct a Hollywood movie.

  After 1947, a handful of important screen figures were permitted to give cooperative testimony at closed-door hearings or in private meetings attended only by lawyers and Committee representatives. These sessions were not reported by the press or in any way made public. It was a strategy designed to let a secretly “friendly” witness preserve his (or her) public image, as well as the confidentiality (and arguable factual nature) of any testimony.

  Ray’s friend and fellow director Elia Kazan, briefly a Communist Party member in the 1930s, would become a paragon of this strategy. But in mid-1951 Kazan was still trying desperately to squirm away from the clutches of HUAC. (He was temporarily safe in Texas, directing Marlon Brando in Viva Zapata!, a picture he later would cite as proof of his anti-Communist values.) Although Ray wasn’t as prominent in Hollywood as Kazan, they were in a mutual quandary and talked the dilemma over by phone.

  Ray had a lot to lose. Not for nothing does his alter ego Dix (Bogart) in In a Lonely Place, complain about women whose expertise is limited to the fine points of community property. Ray was facing a second divorce, and he would have two ex-wives and children to support. The director had “a deep-seated suspicion that Gloria was after his money,” wrote Vincent Curcio, and “years later, near death, he continued to allude to her avariciousness.” Not to mention that Ray had a gambling habit and an expensive Hollywood lifestyle to protect.

  It was no longer enough that Ray had associated himself with Bogart at the very moment when the star had publicly repudiated Hollywood Communists. It wasn’t enough to be protected by his mysterious handshake agreement with Howard Hughes, or to have given up his early social-consciousness inclinations in favor of candy-box women’s pictures and the emotional reality of domestic melodramas. It wasn’t even enough to have worked with Ward Bond and John Wayne, or to have grit his teeth and ground out a pledge-of-allegiance film like Flying Leathernecks.

  Ray was no different than anyone else on the Committee’s endless lists. He would have to cooperate with HUAC, explain and atone for his Communism, and name names—or else.

  “A posse is like an animal,” comments Sterling Hayden in Johnny Guitar, “moves like one, and thinks like one.”

  “They’re men with itchy fingers and a coil of rope around their saddle horns,” replies Joan Crawford, “looking for somebody to hang.”

  “Either you side with them or us,” barks a leading citizen of the town, the spokesman for the posse, played again by none other than Ward Bond.

  Why would Ray cooperate with HUAC? Why would he secretly aid the inquisitors and facilitate the efforts of people like Bond and Wayne, who were out to destroy his old friends? Was he moved by a heightened skepticism toward the Soviet Union? By a fresh surge of anti-Communist feeling engendered by the Korean War? Had Ray become a sincere anti-Communist, as some informers claimed in explaining their decision?

  Or was Ray compelled by other, less defensible motives? Had he become the “materialistic American” he once had scorned? Was he afraid that his conflicted sexual identity might be revealed? Congressional investigators had been known to blackmail homosexual leftists, threatening to expose their private lives unless they cooperated.

  What Ray told the House Committee on Un-American Activities—what names he named, what rationale he gave for doing so—remains conjecture. His Freedom of Information Act files are voluminous up to 1948 and the “I Married a Communist” incident; the file is then suspended and does not resume until 1963. No other records are known to exist. Ray protected many secrets in his life, and thus far he has protected this secret—better even than Elia Kazan, the transcript of whose 1952 executive-session HUAC testimony was withheld from film historians until 2005, two years after Kazan’s death.

  What is known is that Ray did meet with HUAC behind closed doors, as Bernard Eisenschitz first reported, quoting a “curious admission” the director made to his beloved ex-wife Jean Evans. “He told me that when he had to testify [before HUAC],” Evans reportedly said, “he said I was the one who brought him to the Communist Youth League, which wasn’t true at all.”

  This is the one astonishing detail known about his testimony: that Ray “named” his first wife, lying that she had recruited him to the Party (he’d been a Young Communist back in La Crosse). “Naming Names [Victor Navasky’s book about the moral terrain of blacklisting] spoke of how you could arrange, off the record, to go before the Committee and not have any publicity,” Evans explained. “I think that is what Nick did.”

  Ray may have offered his secret testimony in the late winter of 1950 or in early 1951, after completing his John Wayne film. It might have been in May 1951, when Ray traveled to the East Coast to visit Grahame in Philadelphia on the set of The Greatest Show on Earth. It may have been midsummer, after the new Los Angeles hearings coughed up a slew of eminent informers—including actors Larry Parks and Sterling Hayden, as well as Dmytryk—and pressure on others intensified. It could even have been as late as the autumn of 1951, when Ray made a quiet trip east, stopping in La Crosse to lead a parade of dignitaries, Marine Corps color guard, and drum and bugle corps marchers—leading not as young George Washington this time, but as the director of the patriotic new film Flying Leathernecks, opening at the downtown Rivoli.

  Unlike those of more famous informers, Ray’s capitulation never made headlines or mention in the show business columns. Ray never had to admit or defend his testimony publicly. There is no evidence that he ever told anyone but Jean Evans. (She herself appears to have escaped any HUAC harassment.)

  Only a few people, then and later, wondered how Ray had managed to elude the blacklist. Rebel Without a Cause screenwriter Stewart Stern said he “heard from passionate, political theatre friends over the years, that Nick seemed not to know what morality was when it came to the politics of the blacklist days and his part, or partlessness, in it.” Most preferred not to know the tawdry details of this latest self-inflicted harm to a man who usually—though not this time—hurt only himself.

  Nineteen fifty-one was the least productive, most ruinous year of Ray’s career. Though the director could not salvage his marriage or his political ideals, he continued to earn his salary and prove his value to Howard Hughes by shooting retakes and performing repair jobs.

  For a while he concentrated on mending a pair of films that were left unfinished by Josef von Sternberg, a living legend who had become a cropper at RKO. Von Sternberg, who’d guided Marlene Dietrich to iconic status in elegant pictures in the 1920s and 1930s, had been virtually inactive since the early 1940s, until Howard Hughes lured him back to work in 1950. I
n a comeback blaze of glory, von Sternberg mounted two RKO pictures in a year’s time. But Hughes found fault with both films and was holding them back until they could be “fixed.”

  The first, Jet Pilot, was another anti-Communist aerial potboiler with John Wayne, this time costarring Janet Leigh. According to Ray, he shot scenes for this film, as did almost every other director on the RKO lot, though Jet Pilot wouldn’t slink into theaters until 1957.

  The second, Macao, followed the exploits of an undercover crime fighter in the South China Sea port city of Macao. Von Sternberg’s autocratic methods had alienated most of the cast and crew during the actual filming, and RKO’s editors couldn’t find a way to splice the footage together into a logical story line. “I was meeting myself coming through doors,” leading man Robert Mitchum later cracked.

  The reigning box-office king of RKO, Mitchum was one of three Macao stars—along with Jane Russell and Ray’s estranged wife, Gloria Grahame. The director was gradually becoming the studio’s Mitchum expert, having shot a series of fix-it scenes earlier that year for His Kind of Woman, another Mitchum-Russell vehicle about a deported gang boss in Mexico. Starting in late May, according to the New York Times, Ray launched “extensive retakes and added scenes” for von Sternberg’s muddled Macao.

  But he was no longer the Grahame expert. Ray and his wife were up to their necks in divorce lawyers; there was no hope this time for a “Mr. and Mrs.” contract. “Howard Hughes had to fly Mel Ferrer in from La Jolla [a San Diego resort community] to direct” new footage with Grahame, wrote Hedda Hopper. But Mitchum and Russell were the real stars, and Grahame’s part in the film continued to shrink.

  Mitchum and Russell were compatible with Ray. The film’s original script was useless, according to Mitchum, who claimed to have written most of the new scenes with input from Russell and the resourceful fix-it director. “My dressing room was being repainted,” Mitchum claimed, “so I used Victor Mature’s and wrote the day’s work and gave it to the secretary to type up. We shot it in the afternoon. Did that for almost ten days. At least they could release it. Before that it was a flat impossibility.”*