Nicholas Ray

by Patrick McGilligan

  That made for a good anecdote, but production records show that producer Jerry Wald, ensconced on the RKO lot with his partner, writer Norman Krasna, worked with Ray and two young scenarists—Norman Katkov and Walter Newman—refining the scenes. It was Ray’s introduction to Wald and Newman, both of whom would loom in his future.

  “They said the picture needed three days’ work,” Mitchum also said, “but they didn’t say what three days.” It took more than three days—more than ten, actually—but Ray strengthened the byplay between the leads, tightened plot points, and added humor to the troubled film.

  After Macao, Ray moved on to another flawed law-and-order vehicle from RKO: The Racket. Earlier in 1951, director John Cromwell had finished shooting this remake of a Bartlett Cormack play about gangsters and corruption, already filmed once before in the silent era. Howard Hughes still had Cromwell in his anti-Communist sights, though, and the studio boss refused to approve The Racket without remedial enhancements from Ray. (Later graylisted, Cromwell wouldn’t direct another feature film for five years.)

  If there was any high point in this year of lows, it was working with Robert Mitchum. Ray had known Mitchum socially for years and had tried to cast the beefy, sleepy-eyed star in earlier pictures, as far back as They Live by Night; now the two developed a close friendship based on Ray’s rescues of His Kind of Woman, Macao, and The Racket. They stuck around late at night after everyone else had gone home, drinking and smoking marijuana and talking.

  But on every other level, 1951 was a washout—a year in which Ray, who had completed six pictures during his first four years in Hollywood, didn’t finish a single movie in its entirety.

  Ray’s bitter divorce and the grubby HUAC business dragged him through the year.

  According to Gloria Grahame’s biographer Vincent Curcio, Ray was so afraid he was being set up for a high alimony that he behaved in an extremely vindictive fashion once Grahame filed for divorce.

  With his longtime involvement with radio broadcasting and archival recordings, Ray had taken to tape-recording script conferences, wiring himself with a lapel mike and recording his sessions with writers and producers to make sure he registered all the important details. Many of the tape recordings were never listened to or transcribed, however. Now, Curcio writes, Ray “forced” his son Tony “to make a recording of what had passed between him and Gloria, and was threatening to use it in court against her in their divorce trial.” According to Grahame’s biographer, John Houseman felt that, regardless of what had transpired between the blond actress and Tony, Ray acted neurotically and horribly toward his son. His old friend and most supportive producer was infuriated, and Houseman and Ray drifted apart. “Where his son was concerned,” said another longtime Ray friend, Rodney Amateau, “Nick was a dedicated prick.”

  It would take a year for the director’s divorce to become official—a miserable year in which Ray alternately blamed Tony, the remorseless Grahame, or himself.

  On August 14, 1952, Grahame arrived in court “in a black dress as low cut as anyone could recall,” the Associated Press reported. “Over it she wore an unbuttoned white sweater, which concealed none of her charms.” (A revealing photograph of Grahame was transmitted with the report to hundreds of American newspapers.)

  As Ray looked on miserably, the actress testified that her husband “hit me twice, once at a party without provocation, and once at our home when I locked my bedroom door”—an account suggesting that the sadomasochistic relationship between Robert Ryan and a B-girl in On Dangerous Ground—or the sex games hinted at between Bogart and a former girlfriend in In a Lonely Place—weren’t entirely fictional. The director was frequently “sullen and morose” during their four-year marriage, Grahame, continued, “and would go into another room when my friends came to the house. This made me so unhappy I lost weight and it hurt my acting.”

  In the end, though, like his HUAC testimony, Ray’s secret recording of Tony was never aired in public. A settlement was worked out in advance: Grahame asked for not a penny of alimony, only a modest $300 monthly support payment for the couple’s four-year-old son, Tim. Ray could afford it: Even treading water at RKO, he was still making several times that amount every week.

  Chapter Seven

  Bread and Taxes

  1951–1954

  Ray would never again work with John Houseman after On Dangerous Ground, nor with any producer as sympathetic to his artistic goals. He sorely wanted to produce his own films, but Howard Hughes was not ready to allow that step. For the moment, Ray needed to forge a constructive relationship with another intelligent producer, and perhaps the best candidate at RKO was a newcomer to the studio who claimed some autonomy: Jerry Wald.

  Hughes had lured Wald and his partner, Norman Krasna, to the studio early in 1951, promising them financial incentives and creative control of their projects. Krasna was the invisible partner of the team, a successful screenwriter (with four Best Screenplay nominations and one Oscar win by the early 1950s) but also a playwright who often contrived to be away in New York, on Broadway jobs, or in Europe, where he took long vacations to refresh his creativity. Wald was more the Hollywood creature, a writer-turned-producer and demon of energy who thrived on studio pressures and power games. The duo’s deal with Hughes included a side agreement to fix any studio pictures that required reshooting or reediting. Wald had fallen in with Ray while they were both doing repair work for Hughes early in 1951.

  While he was overseeing repairs on Macao—and then fiddling with Ray’s On Dangerous Ground after mixed previews made Hughes demand retakes and recutting—Wald realized that the head of the studio had a genuine affection for the director. Wald couldn’t get Hughes to approve any of his numerous pending projects, and it occurred to him that folding Ray into his unit might help. Wald gave the director his choice of their backlog of properties, and Ray chose the long-gestating “Cowpoke,” a script about a broken-down rodeo contestant.

  “Cowpoke” was one of several projects the Wald-Krasna team had ready to go when they arrived at RKO. The story derived from a May 1946 Life magazine article about a colorful rodeo performer named Bob Crosby, known as the “King of the Cowboys.” After reading the article, Wald had commissioned a lengthy treatment of Crosby’s life from the Life author, Claude Stanush, a Texan who had just started in the magazine’s Los Angeles bureau. Stanush, who had grown up on a ranch, was a knowledgeable fan of the rodeo world, and he completed both a treatment and a full script under Wald’s supervision before the project got stalled.

  Stanush moved to Life’s Washington, D.C., bureau, but Wald remained interested in the rodeo project, and some time later he asked Stanush to collaborate on a new draft with director Robert Parrish and David Dortort, a young New York novelist without any screen credits.* Stanush, Dortort, and Parrish met up at Madison Square Garden, where a second unit was shooting rodeo footage for Wald; afterward they repaired to Hollywood, carving out an improved script that moved away from Crosby’s true story into a fictionalized drama about an aging bronco-riding champ who befriends a young ranch hand aspiring to rodeo fame. The older champion, who’s nursing a crush on the rancher’s wife, ultimately sacrifices his life to save his protégé from death in the arena.

  Parrish soon departed for another job, however, and Wald jumped to RKO. There “Cowpoke” was stalled. Even though Hughes had pursued Wald and Krasna, he was maddeningly evasive and indecisive about their properties once they were ensconced at his studio. Wald would send Hughes urgent questions about his plans and have to wait days or even weeks for a response—unless it concerned one of the studio chief’s pet projects or a sexy actress with big breasts.

  Wald had submitted a first draft of “Cowpoke” to RKO as early as January 1951, but Hughes took his time critiquing it. Even as Wald and Ray met with a succession of writers to craft a final script, Hughes’s enthusiasm lagged—no matter that his favorite director was on board, excited about a story that put him back in the scratch-a-living world of
loners and ramblers.

  One problem was that Hughes didn’t like the title, and when he didn’t like a title it bothered him, coloring his view of the whole enterprise. And the studio boss didn’t like to be rushed on the casting of stars, which he considered his prerogative. Ray and Wald had penciled in Robert Mitchum as the broken-down rodeo champion, but Hughes had gotten the idea that Ray and Mitchum had a conspiratorial friendship that excluded him. Throughout 1951, as he took his time weighing the script, Hughes urged Wald to look for a bigger star: Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Burt Lancaster. And he changed the title: “Cowpoke” became “Rough Company.”

  Wald was a driven man, accustomed to frenetic speed and productivity. His motto, according to writer David Dortort, was “Do a dozen pictures, and if one turns out to be a money-maker that’ll take care of the other eleven.” By the end of the summer Wald had been at the studio for four months, but all of his production unit’s ideas and scripts were still in limbo. He hadn’t done a dozen; he hadn’t gone into production on a single Wald-Krasna picture for RKO. All his valuable time had been taken up critiquing and polishing RKO scripts and mending unfinished RKO films.

  Another factor in the delay may have been Ray’s brush with HUAC. If Ray was not thoroughly cleared of any Communist taint, even Hughes wouldn’t be able to emblazon his name on a film, lest he incur the wrath of the anti-Commie special interest groups. Himself an anti-Communist liberal, Wald had turned his company into an informal refuge for cooperative HUAC witnesses. One Wald-Krasna employee was writer George Beck, who named names in September 1951 and shortly thereafter directed his only film for Wald-Krasna and RKO. Another was German émigré filmmaker Fritz Lang, who was desperately trying to clear himself of any left-wing stigma; Lang was no Communist, but he had many acquaintances who might qualify, including his former girlfriend and amanuensis Silvia Richards, a onetime Communist who eventually surrendered to HUAC. Lang was busy preparing a Wald-Krasna film of the play Clash by Night by former Group Theatre playwright Clifford Odets, who would also turn informer, shortly after Elia Kazan in 1952.

  One day, late that summer, Wald got a visit from a Syracuse supermarket tycoon named Lawrence A. Johnson. A one-man crusader against Hollywood Reds, Johnson wielded his chain of stores like a dripping ax, using them to promote boycotts of theaters that dared to book pictures with cast or crew members he suspected of Communist ties. The studios were terrified of Johnson and businessmen like him, who claimed to represent a wide constituency.

  Wald banished his staff and met with Johnson alone, patiently reviewing a list of people active on the Wald-Krasna projects that were awaiting Hughes’s go-ahead. Around this time, the studio logjam finally broke, and Hughes grudgingly approved Mitchum as the star of “Rough Company.” In early September Ray was given permission and the necessary budget to travel with a small crew to Oregon to shoot some background footage at the Pendleton Round-Up, one of the oldest and largest annual frontier celebrations in America.

  Years before, during summers growing up in La Crosse, Ray had fallen in love with the rodeo; during his WPA days, he began to see the cowboy competitions as a sort of Western people’s theater. The director envisioned the Pendleton Round-Up as the setting for the final rodeo scenes in the film. He was joined on the trip by cinematographer George E. Diskant and writer Horace McCoy, the latest contributor to the ongoing script progress. Ray deployed twelve cameras to capture the opening parade of the roundup, the small-town and rodeo atmosphere, and cowboy contestants. Ray also brought along stuntmen to double for Mitchum, who was busy elsewhere.

  As happy as he was to be shooting the rodeo footage, the extra salary he was picking up for supervising the second unit was also a welcome boon for a director worried about divorce costs. And after the Pendleton shoot Ray took a brief vacation, visiting his mother in Wisconsin; there he could store up thoughts for the rodeo film’s early, poignant homecoming scenes.

  Meanwhile, back in Hollywood, Ray’s Pendleton footage won Hughes over. The excited studio boss finally okayed the production and even came up with a new title that might help lasso a leading lady for the project: “This Man Is Mine.”

  Although Ray boasted later that they “actually had almost thirty pages” before filming started, and Robert Mitchum claimed, “Nick and I, both stoned, worked out the script,” the rodeo film had a succession of capable writers and a series of complete drafts.

  By the time Ray became immersed in the project, sometime after he finally signed off on Macao in August, Wald had recruited Niven Busch, initially, followed by Horace McCoy, to revise the Stanush-Parrish-Dortort draft.* Although Ray participated in the conferences with McCoy, the film’s final writer, their personalities never really jibed.

  A former Texas newspaper man steeped in cowboy lore, McCoy had been called in to reinforce the lingo and authenticity of the script. After starting out as a sports and crime reporter, McCoy had penned pulp fiction for Black Mask magazine in the late 1920s; eventually he made a double life for himself as a novelist and screenwriter, publishing hard-boiled novels including They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, a slice of life about marathon dancers in the Depression, and Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, a gangster story that had just been produced as a film with James Cagney. But his macho credits didn’t prepare one for the real McCoy, a courtly, soft-spoken southerner (born in Tennessee) who preferred to write in longhand with a quill pen while standing at a lectern.

  Wald himself was a caricature of a cigar-chomping Hollywood producer, with a surplus of secretaries always trailing after him to take down the ideas spewing from both sides of his mouth. Every night before falling asleep the producer made wire recordings of the fresh ideas he’d brainstormed after office hours, and every morning he brought the recordings to script meetings. Ray didn’t mind Wald’s recording regimen—he’d been known to tape his own late-night musings—but Wald’s ideas were never-ending, and the producer needed help distinguishing the good ideas from the bad and cutting off the flow.

  The two had gotten along well when they were fixing other people’s pictures. Wald was giving the orders then, and Ray seemed to take orders cheerfully enough. Now, however, a new, more swaggering Ray was emerging from the aftermath of his divorce and HUAC difficulties. Despite all the humiliating drama in his private life, which people knew about, Ray came to the office with his coat thrown over his shoulder, with the air of some kind of genius. In meetings Ray paused in long, pregnant silences before agreeing, disagreeing, or commenting noncommittally. The normally unflappable Wald was not exactly cowed but he was confounded.

  Ray seemed mainly interested in Mitchum’s part: the aging, limping rodeo headliner who mentors a younger, ambitious ranch hand. Ray flaunted his chummy relationship with Mitchum, and soon Wald was feeling as excluded as Hughes from their two-man club. The script talks among Ray, Wald, and McCoy became like a weak game of billiards, with the balls caroming around the table but rarely connecting.

  Ray’s difficulty articulating his ideas—and his silences—were real, but sometimes they were also a stalling tactic, especially where the script was concerned. The struggle for self-expression was at the core of his personality, and his art. And wasn’t it the most poignant handicap an expressive artist can have—the inability or powerlessness to express himself, to realize his art fully?

  Wald had other projects to juggle, and eventually he handed matters to McCoy, who would try his best to follow his dictums. McCoy knew the terminology and milieu of the rodeo world, and he did his utmost with the script. “Typical of McCoy’s best work in Hollywood,” wrote Mitchum biographer Lee Server, the final screenplay “blended strong, flavorful writing with backlot clichés.” By the time he had finished, however, McCoy had a feeling that a dissatisfied Ray was going to potchky the pages on the set.

  Trying to make up for lost time, Wald wanted to start filming by the end of 1951. By early December they’d made definite progress casting the other two principals.

  The casting was a delicate thre
e-way negotiation with Wald and Hughes. Everyone wanted Ray to be happy with the stars, but the final decision was up to the producer and the studio chief. With Wald feeling flummoxed by the director, he distrusted Ray’s casting impulses all the more.

  “Please be sure that I okay everybody that Nick Ray okays for ‘This Man Is Mine,’ ” Wald wrote, addressing a memo to the RKO casting department. “In other words, it is most important to me that I have the final approval on these castings. I would also like to know what each person costs, too. Let’s be careful on any bit players especially that we try to make deals where we can get them a little cheaper. I’m sure you’ve worked with Nick Ray before and you know better than I do how to handle him.”

  Initially, for the part of Mitchum’s protégé, Wald tried to whip up a general enthusiasm for Ben Johnson, a genuine ex–rodeo man who’d done impressive work in John Ford pictures. But Ray argued for his own personal discovery, twenty-two-year-old Casey Tibbs, a fast-rising bronco rider he’d befriended at Pendleton. Tibbs, from South Dakota, would win the first of two World All-Around Rodeo Champion titles in 1951 and decorate the cover of Life.

  Like many directors, Ray liked the idea of discovering unknowns and launching their careers in film. He brought Tibbs to Hollywood, screen-tested him at RKO, and wangled items for the young rodeo star in Hedda Hopper’s column. Tagged “the male Katharine Hepburn” by Hopper, the tall, lanky Tibbs made for good press, driving around Hollywood with Ray in his fuchsia-colored Cadillac. But Wald couldn’t see an amateur in the part, and he vetoed Tibbs after viewing his camera test. Tibbs ended up with a walk-on.