Their most intriguing prospect was another story of Ray’s, entitled “Passport,” about a man without a passport living on a tourist ship that shuttles between Italy and France. Bogart wanted to work in Italy, and this was the first hint in Ray’s career of his own fixation with Europe. Louella Parsons reported that the director had hired Italian writer Pier Pasinetti,*who was teaching world literature at the University of California–Los Angeles (UCLA), to collaborate with him. But “Passport” was abandoned when Santana went out of business, and Bogart booked himself up with writer-directors John Huston and Richard Brooks, who came equipped with full scripts they had written themselves.
Brooks was close to Ray’s age, and Ray regarded him as something of a rival in Bogart’s circle. One of the movies they all admired, Crossfire, had been adapted from Brooks’s first novel; more important to Bogart, Brooks had helped John Huston with the script for Key Largo. A hot up-and-comer, Brooks was announcing future projects left and right, and his rapid rise as a writer-director seemed to put Ray to shame. It wasn’t like Ray to grouse about a colleague, but he complained that Brooks got ahead by “singing for his ego” at Bogart’s house, and that in his first films Brooks showed “no talent” as a director. One day, spotting Brooks at the racetrack, Ray boasted, he got a “vicious pleasure out of returning his pleasant greeting by yelling from the box: ‘Hi, WRITER!’ ”
By the end of 1952, Ray had at least one completed script that he could carry around with him to meetings. Under his new, improved contract with Howard Hughes, Ray and a collaborator, Walter Newman, had fashioned a love story set in the New York Gypsy subculture Jean Evans had written about for PM. Ray’s original two-page synopsis of the story evolved into a 130-page screenplay after long hours spent with Newman, a former radio dramatist who’d been nominated for an Oscar for writing Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole. Ray still couldn’t nail down a leading man, but Jane Russell had committed herself to the female lead and they had tailored the script for her. The well-endowed RKO actress was a personal favorite of Hughes’s, but even that wasn’t enough for Ray or Russell to convince the studio boss to approve the project.
The RKO story executives heaped praise on the Ray-Newman script. But after they warned production officials that it might be too much of an “arthouse” project the Gypsy film got stalled. When Walter Newman moved on to other assignments, Ray was left to fitfully revise the script, in between remedial chores on RKO films considered to have better profit potential.
By the end of the summer of 1952, Ray’s days at RKO were coming to a close.
Though the details were still being arranged, Howard Hughes had found another buyer for the studio. When Ray’s last RKO picture, The Lusty Men, was released in October, American critics saw in it many of the same virtues that characterized On Dangerous Ground: an ambitious overlap of genres, a dreamlike pictorial quality, and a brooding, fatalistic view of life. The wayward script (which too quickly “develops a limp,” as the Time reviewer noted) attracted its share of complaints, but the director got credit for all that was different and unusual about the rodeo-world film. “The situation is worked out melodramatically, but it is director Nicholas Ray’s surrounding atmosphere that counts most,” Newsweek wrote. “The rodeo as an institution, human and geographic, comes to intimate life.”
Over time, The Lusty Men has soared in reputation and has come to be regarded as one of the director’s triumphs. For fans of Mitchum, it boasts one of the actor’s standout performances. “A masterpiece by Nicholas Ray—perhaps the most melancholy and reflective of his films,” Dave Kehr declared unreservedly in 2000 in the Chicago Reader. “Ray creates an unstable atmosphere of dust and despair—trailer camps and broken-down ranches—that expresses the contradictory impulses of his characters: a lust for freedom balanced by a quest for security.”
Yet the film’s downbeat storyline conspired to keep The Lusty Men from doing well in theaters at the time of its release—a now-familiar failure that only added to Ray’s pigeonholing in Hollywood as an “arty” director. And RKO’s collapsing distribution and exhibition network left him little reason to continue his career there.
An entire year would elapse between the release of The Lusty Men and the moment Nick Ray called the first take on his next picture. It was a transitional year for Ray professionally, one in which he forged a new image for himself in Hollywood. He had started out in the industry hailed as a wunderkind director of realistic human drama. His RKO studio handouts then reframed him as a “melodrama specialist.” His marriage to Gloria Grahame gave him another fresh hook as a ladies’ man with a knack for working fruitfully with glamorous actresses, on-screen and off. After his HUAC clearance and messy divorce from Grahame, Ray worked extra hard at polishing this ladies’-man image; it gave him political cover while alleviating the private and public embarrassment of his divorce (which was swiftly followed by Grahame’s third marriage).
Ray’s divorce was officially granted in August 1952, but well before then the director had recovered from his marital disaster enough to advertise himself as “a well-known movie colony heartbreaker,” in the words of columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, “the darling of so many Hollywood glamour girls.” Kilgallen was an old New York acquaintance who may have known Ray’s charms firsthand, but Ray also cultivated his friendships with Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, trading items about his romantic affairs for items promoting his various projects.
Ray’s serial womanizing ate up almost as much time, energy, and money as his drinking. Hopper and Parsons both covered Ray’s love life and career with equal avidity. Hopper was a rabid anti-Communist who complained incessantly in her column about Reds and pinkos hanging on by their fingernails at some studios, but Ray often sat next to her at Hollywood premieres, and she never so much as hinted at Ray’s past politics. The director strengthened his ties with Parsons in similar fashion, occasionally escorting her divorced daughter Harriet, a Paramount producer—one of the few women in that position—to industry functions.
Gossip items can be wishful, but Ray himself boasted about his female conquests, to columnists and friends alike—and many of the star romances can be corroborated. Ray was always beguiling to women, and never more so than at this vulnerable time of his life. Some believed that Ray’s high rate of success with women was aided by the impression that he was “a potential homosexual with a deep, passionate and constant need for female love in his life,” as his friend, producer John Houseman, wrote sympathetically. “This made him attractive to women, for whom the chance to save him from his own self-destructive habits proved an irresistible attraction of which Nick took full advantage and for which he rarely forgave them.”
Atop the list of glamour girls romantically linked to the director was Marilyn Monroe. One of Hollywood’s rising stars, just starting to get good parts, Monroe shared a flat with Shelley Winters, who blew hot and cold on Ray over the years. Winters and Monroe passed Ray back and forth in the early 1950s, but Winters later reflected that the very things about Ray that daunted her—his age and intelligence—were the traits that turned Monroe on.
While Ray was working on The Lusty Men, Monroe was filming Clash by Night, the Fritz Lang film of Clifford Odets’s play that Jerry Wald was producing for RKO. Ray had known Monroe for a while by then, escorting her to Gene Kelly and Betsy Blair’s parties more than once. He had a real crush on Monroe and often talked about working with the actress on a film one day, but Monroe always kept a few steps ahead of him. Whether Ray and Monroe were in Wald’s office or out on a date, the director “monopolized” her, as one columnist put it, fluttering around the sexy blonde as if she were a personal trophy. Monroe sincerely liked Ray, but her interest in him ebbed and flowed, not always coinciding with his interest in her.
Richard Baer, Wald’s young assistant, was also pining for Monroe and kept trying to finagle a date with the actress. Monroe loathed watching dailies but insisted that Baer phone her nightly to report on her scenes in Clash by Night—
how she performed, how her hair and costume looked. Baer kept hinting that it would be easier if he just could come to her place in person. “Over the phone is just fine,” Monroe always replied sweetly.
Finally, Baer coaxed Monroe into a lunch date at Lucy’s. They were just getting settled when Ray swept in, wearing some kind of cape, and headed straight for their table. The director plunked himself down in their booth, fawning over Monroe, stroking her arms and patting her thighs. Balefully eyeing Baer, Ray kissed Monroe good-bye on the cheek before making a grand exit. The actress waited until Ray was out of sight, then gave Baer a look and murmured dolefully, “I never knew a man with such terrible teeth.”
Another object of Ray’s affection during this time was Joan Crawford, an older and more established Hollywood glamour girl—six years older than Ray himself. A steely-eyed diva who had reigned over both MGM and Warner Bros. in her heyday, Crawford had won an Oscar at the latter studio for her title role in Mildred Pierce. By the early 1950s, when the studios could no longer afford long-term contracts with high-paid stars, Crawford was forced into freelancing.
As often happened with Ray, his romantic partnership with Crawford had a professional component. The couple first made news together early in 1952, as they planned a big-budget Cold War suspense drama for Paramount called Lisbon, which Ray hoped to shoot partly on location in Europe. The gossip columnists were terrified of Crawford and treated her private life with kid gloves; the fact that they reported on her off-and-on affair with the director—including their late-night rendezvous and many long-distance phone calls when they were apart—suggests that their affair was genuine, or at least that Crawford approved the items.
When his high-profile affairs waxed and waned, Ray dallied with lesser lights—the blond Hungarian personality Zsa Zsa Gabor, who was between marriages and just starting out in Hollywood; or the beautiful starlet Natalie Thompson, who had just left Clark Gable. The director had a regular table at the Mocambo nightclub and flaunted his eligibility.
He was an expert at juggling his women. One woman heading out Ray’s door rarely met the next one coming in, in part because he arranged some of his trysts during the day. Whenever the women did meet, Ray usually got a referral. “He was known to be great in the sack,” said Gavin Lambert, who later was Ray’s lover for a brief time, “which surprised me, given how much he drank.”
The closest of the director’s girlfriends may have been the least-known in Hollywood. A German redhead who was raised a Catholic but was Jewish by birth, Hannelore Axmann had come to the United States after spending the last year of World War II eluding the Gestapo in her native Munich. A woman whose “beauty,” rhapsodized her friend, poet Arthur Gregor, was “not only of a perfection of features but of a subtle, mesmerizing mysteriousness,” Hanne Axmann was a gifted painter who was trying for a career as an actress in Hollywood; though Michael Curtiz agreed to give her a screen test, only a few walk-ons came of it. Much later in life she would she appear in a number of Das Neue Kino films in Germany.
Axmann’s real talent lay in her humaneness and generous spirit, friends said, which drew her to troubled men. A brief marriage to actor Edward Tierney—the youngest of three Tierney actor brothers and the one with the meanest streak—ended around the time he was arrested for statutory rape. Her separation and subsequent divorce drove her into the arms of Ray.
Axmann once estimated that she spent “hundreds of nights” drinking with the director, often staying up all night long talking blue streaks with him before dozing off; after Ray’s morning visit to a psychoanalyst, they would resume their drinking in the afternoon. Sometimes Ray would freshen up and head off to a studio appointment; sometimes he’d disappear for days. Whether she knew or cared about his other girlfriends, Axmann waited for him to come home, as patient and tolerant as a wife, sister, or mother.
Compartmentalized, like the other women in Ray’s life, the beautiful, nurturing Axmann “met nobody through Nick,” she later told Bernard Eisenschitz. But Axmann didn’t mind their nonexclusive, intermittent relationship, and she would remain his friend for a long time.
Ray had avoided professional therapy during the crises of his first marriage, but he had begun seeing a psychoanalyst several times a week under court order as part of his California divorce process. Besides discussing the love affair between his wife Gloria Grahame and his teenage son Tony, he may even have discussed his cooperation with HUAC; many other “friendly” witnesses later admitted to exploring their burdens of guilt with therapists.
His appointments were with Carel Van der Heide, a favorite of the Hollywood show business crowd, whose offices were on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. His first sessions with a therapist, back in 1941, had ended with Ray losing his voice from the stress. But often with Ray, silences had to be decoded.
Dr. Van der Heide was an expert in Freudian dream analysis and the author of influential articles like “Blank Silence and the Dream Screen,” published in 1961, which reads as though it was inspired by his visits with Ray. Van der Heide observed that chronically silent patients, or those who resort to unintelligible speech, believed they were sharing “blank dreams” as though from a sleepless dream. At times now, Ray opened up to the psychoanalyst, and he found he almost enjoyed the ritual of talking to someone who was paid to listen to his miseries.
Regardless of the many newspaper items he planted about his projects, his career had bogged down. The Gypsy love story Ray had developed with Walter Newman seemed moribund. Ray had his heart set on the project, even investing his own money to bring a young man he had spotted in Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados to Hollywood from Mexico, touring him around town and touting him for the lead he had once envisioned for Marlon Brando. No one nibbled, however—and in any event the Gypsy script was still owned by RKO, now nearly defunct.
There was one bright light during this lost year, however. Ray got himself a powerful new agent: Lew Wasserman of the Music Corporation of America (MCA).
Wasserman had risen up from music and nightclub booking to become president of the Hollywood division of MCA, and after Ray’s RKO contract finally ran out, he became the director’s agent. Wasserman was a pioneer at bundling actor clients along with writer and director clients into “package” deals for the major studios, although once he had packaged the elements of a film, his subordinates usually stepped in to negotiate the details. In Ray’s case, the fine print usually fell to Herman Citron, dubbed “Lemon Citron” by some, “the Iceman” by others, because he was such a sour, tough negotiator.
Wasserman, a supercharged workaholic, was one of Ray’s card-playing buddies—and like Ray, he was another habitual loser at gambling, alleged to have lost his own house, twice, on bad bets. They had a real affection for each other. Wasserman didn’t even seem to mind it when Ray began a protracted affair with the agent’s wife, Edie Wasserman. The petite, vivacious Edie was known to sleep around, but Gavin Lambert, who knew them both, insisted that Ray was one of her true loves. “Absolutely,” Lambert is quoted as saying in a joint biography of the Wassermans. “There was something masculine about her manner and voice” when Edie was among other people, but she turned “soft and feminine” around Ray. Ray and Edie trysted regularly after his divorce from Gloria Grahame, and at one point their affair became so “intense” that Edie considered leaving her husband, according to Lambert. That prompted Ray to cool it.
The tall, gentlemanly Wasserman, Hollywood’s ultimate power broker, spent most of his time on his A-list clients, including Alfred Hitchcock, James Stewart, and Bette Davis. Ray was not on the A-list; nor was he an easy sell. The studios were cutting back on production while looking for potential blockbusters—and, apart from his two Bogart pictures, the director didn’t have a very impressive box-office track record.
Everyone seemed to know Ray’s personal backstory—his actress wife’s affair with his teenage son, which led to their divorce; his left-wing ties and narrow brush with HUAC. But Ray was still winning in me
etings: Talking to producers, he radiated energy, confidence, and likability. Wasserman got the director a few promising deals in the last half of 1952 and the first half of 1953—although none of these “packages” actually made it in front of the cameras.
The one that came closest—and ultimately bore ancillary fruit—was Lisbon, the lavish thriller Ray prepared for Paramount. Joan Crawford was the star, and she and Ray went around town nuzzling for the columnists. The director had just gotten medical shots to head overseas and scout locations in Portugal when Paramount balked at the escalating budget and postponed the production. (It would eventually be produced by Republic in 1956, shot almost entirely on soundstages, with Ray Milland directing and starring opposite Maureen O’Hara.)
Crawford was incensed. The steely-eyed diva had been nursing along another project at Republic, the cheapest, least prestigious studio in Hollywood, and early in the summer she announced that she would take her marquee name over to Republic and star in her first Western since the forgotten Montana Moon in 1930. Ray would join her as her director.
The Hollywood press reported that the Western would have a $2 million budget, unusually lavish for Republic. Besides a salary commensurate with her billing, the star would participate in the film’s profits, because she owned the screen rights to Johnny Guitar, the novel on which the picture would be based. Ray’s salary would be a mere $75,000 covering the preproduction and filming schedule, yet it was his biggest paycheck to date for a single film.
Crawford was considered the picture’s de facto producer. For Ray, an important part of the Johnny Guitar package was that, for the first time, he would also get a producer title—“associate producer,” actually, according to publicity announcements. But after nearly a year spent squiring glamour girls around Hollywood—and watching his quixotic projects fall to the wayside at studio after studio—Ray was grateful for the opportunity.
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