Besides noting the strangeness of the characters, the “hallucinatory” colors, and the “emotional quality” of the camerawork (“Crawford often appears from above on her balcony, worshipped by the camera in low-angle,” as fellow critic Roger Ebert wrote years later), Truffaut saw three distinct levels to the Western: Freudian, political, personal. The last was the most important for the Cahiers group, which was largely apolitical or moderate politically (except for Godard). Above all, according to Truffaut, Johnny Guitar should be recognized as an allegory of the director’s life story, with a link to certain life-story allegories that Ray previously had directed. “Bazin agrees with me here—how much Ray’s life resembles his films,” Truffaut observed. In his view, the director’s tumultuous divorce from Gloria Grahame suggested a link between Ray’s In a Lonely Place—with Bogart almost strangling Grahame’s character—and the Joan Crawford Western. “One can imagine,” wrote Truffaut, “our lovers meeting again six years later. He has become a guitarist, she runs a gambling-joint out West, and here is the end of In a Lonely Place running neatly into the beginning of Johnny Guitar, with Crawford replacing Gloria.”
There were so many allegorical meanings tucked inside Johnny Guitar, Truffaut conceded, that ordinary moviegoers shouldn’t be expected to fathom them all, at least not at first. “The public on the Champs-Elysées wasn’t mistaken to snicker at Johnny Guitar,” the auteurist and Ray admirer admitted. But Truffaut went on to make a bold prediction. “In five years,” he wrote, “they’ll be crowding into the Cinema d’Essai to applaud it.”*
Truffaut was right about one thing certainly: Johnny Guitar had a crowd-pleasing future. Over time it has become a particular cult favorite, especially for gay viewers. (The documentary The Celluloid Closet notes, for example, how Ray’s costuming for Crawford—her black gunslinger apparel—sent signals that straight audiences didn’t always notice.) And audiences may have taken longer to catch on to the film in Europe, but in the United States it happened right away in 1954. The Joan Crawford vehicle became a surprise modest hit for Republic, aided by its pairing in many cities with an “added first run attraction”—John Ford’s The Sun Shines Bright. Ticket sales stretched out over the summer. Though not quite a blockbuster, Johnny Guitar helped Ray turn a corner in his career, proving he could thrive outside of RKO and put his distinctive stamp on a Western.
Chapter Eight
The Golden World
1954–1955
For once, during the summer of 1954, Nicholas Ray could bask in the sun. Johnny Guitar was running up ticket sales, and his next Western, starring James Cagney, was well along in postproduction. The director’s “Hollywood dinner dates, which had been cancelled after the bad reviews of Johnny Guitar,” according to the New York Times, reporting Ray’s own recollections, “were reinstated when the film became a big money-maker.”
In July, Ray traveled to Wisconsin to visit his mother and his sister Helen’s family and go boating on the Mississippi. “Wisconsin has never been so beautiful,” Ray told the local press. “I flew in from Chicago, and I’ve seen the state from the air, the land, and the water. There’s a lovely warmth and a special quality in the landscape.”
In August, Ray earned a bit of easy, if not big, money staging a half-hour television episode of General Electric Theater called “The High Green Wall.” Broadcast later in October, the show, starring Joseph Cotten, was based on an Evelyn Waugh story. Besides Sorry, Wrong Number in 1946, it was the only television show he ever directed.
For once, Ray had plenty of job offers. One place where he commanded special attention was Warner Bros., tightly run by the youngest brother, monomaniacal Jack, whose nerves twitched to think of his former contract players Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and Joan Crawford now flourishing independently under Ray.
In September 1954, after a Paramount rough-cut screening of Run for Cover, Ray invited Lew and Edie Wasserman home with him for dinner. He was living these days at the Chateau Marmont, a sprawling, castle-like complex of buildings towering over Sunset Boulevard west of Crescent Heights. Ray occupied Bungalow 2, a large, free-standing three-bedroom unit just inside the gates of the compound. The swimming pool ran along the back. The Chateau’s elite clientele included Marlon Brando, playwright Clifford Odets, and the up-and-coming writer Gore Vidal.
After dinner, Ray and the Wassermans sat down to watch Dragnet, the popular true-crime show, on the director’s giant black-and-white Madman Muntz TV set. Ray was in a sour mood, after having just watched the producers’ businesslike cut of the Cagney Western, with many of his personal touches—like the polo-playing Indians—excised from the film. Ray cleared his throat, warming up to make a point. Wasserman knew better than to hurry his ruminative client. Finally, the director spoke.
“I’m tired of doing films for the bread and taxes,” Ray said. Wasserman raised an eyebrow. “I want to make a film that I love,” the director continued. “I have to believe in the next one or feel that it’s important.”
“What’s important to you?” the head of MCA asked.
“Well, there are about six productions of War and Peace scheduled around town, so I’ve given that one up,” Ray joked. “Kids,” he finally added, wearing a somber expression. “I want to do a film about kids growing up, the young people next door, middle-class kids. Their problems.”
He had been thinking about juvenile delinquency all his life. He could even be considered something of an expert, Ray said with a slight smile, considering his own misspent youth. He admired the Spanish-born surrealist Luis Buñuel, whose 1950 film Los Olvidados, about the violent, criminal life of Mexico City slum youth, Ray had watched repeatedly. Los Olvidados, he thought, was Knock on Any Door done right. Ray didn’t want to try to improve on Buñuel; he was through with the slum approach. But what about middle-class delinquents? Didn’t ordinary American teenagers have a story worth telling?
“I’ve done my share of films about the depressed areas of society,” the director continued, referring to They Live by Night and Knock on Any Door. “The misfits. Now I want to do a film about the kid next door, like he could be one of my sons.”
Ray’s agent nodded thoughtfully. He wasn’t sure what Ray had in mind, but he knew the studios lusted after the burgeoning teenage market. He knew that Warner Bros. had been asking about Ray’s availability and that the director yearned to work for the studio, which was known for its hard-hitting, topical, populist pictures—“an adventurous studio in different periods,” in Ray’s words. Wasserman told Ray he’d see what he could do.
Shortly thereafter, Wasserman phoned Steve Trilling, Jack Warner’s chief lieutenant, and told him that Ray wanted to make a definitive film about teenage delinquency. Warner had a grudging respect for Wasserman, a respect that bordered on fear; a few years earlier, he had actually banned the agent and his “MCA blackbirds” (as he called them, for their standard wardrobe) after they provoked too many stars into declaring their freedom from his term contracts. But Wasserman had a reputation for being ahead of the curve, and Trilling told him that Warner would be interested in Ray’s pitch.
Trilling asked the story department to messenger over a couple of youth-oriented scripts the studio owned, along with a 1944 nonfiction book by psychiatrist Robert Lindner. The book had a good title, Rebel Without a Cause, and a long, forgettable subtitle (The Hypno-Analysis of a Criminal Psychopath). Employing hypnosis and analysis, Lindner had investigated the troubled childhood and antisocial impulses of one particular career criminal in a federal penitentiary, a subject identified only by his first name, “Harold.”
As a director who’d been saddled, often at the eleventh hour, with lusty, dangerous, born-to-be-bad titles circled off a list by Howard Hughes, Ray was instantly drawn to Lindner’s evocative title. Ray actually knew of Lindner’s work already, through Jean Evans, but he rejected the psychiatrist’s book and the other Warner’s scripts, saying that “it was neither the psychopath nor the son of a poor family I was interested in now.�
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The director was sent over to the studio to meet with Trilling. The tall, square-shouldered, handsome forty-three-year-old director, his hair now flecked with gray, was in his best salesman mode, passionately assuring the portly, poker-faced, cigar-smoking executive that he could make the best teenage delinquent picture Hollywood had ever seen. Ray told Trilling that he liked the title of the Lindner book but that he didn’t need the rest of it, the medical-analytical business. He wanted to get inside teenagers’ heads and hearts.
What kind of story was he thinking about? Trilling asked. The director winged his answer, calling up a number of anecdotes from his own life and others he’d read in the papers. For the next forty-five minutes, he talked easily through the story elements he wanted to explore.
Trilling was intrigued. He asked the director to put something down on paper so he could show it to Jack Warner. Ray stayed up all night with his secretary, pouring out his thoughts on the theme, which had preoccupied him all his life, personally and professionally. The result was a seventeen-page treatment he called “The Blind Run.” After they finished, at seven A.M., Wasserman had the treatment rush-delivered to the studio. Trilling read it and passed it on to the studio kingpin.
Ray’s seventeen pages began with a series of “searingly graphic images,” as Lawrence Frascella and Al Weisel noted in their authoritative book Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making “Rebel Without a Cause,” including “a man aflame” hurtling toward the camera and “a nearly pornographic scene of a sixteen-year-old girl, stripped to the waist, being whipped by three teenagers.” Warner Bros. could hardly be expected to allow such shocking images in a finished film, but no matter: “The Blind Run” was intended as an attention grabber, not a final product.
Some of the material in “The Blind Run” was disposable, but the treatment also contained a number of “key concepts” that helped shape the eventual film, according to Frascella and Weisel. Chief among them was the film’s “teenage trinity,” including “a heroic boy (who would grow into the iconic figure of Jim Stark), a girl named Eve (who would lose her biblical overtones to become Judy) and Demo (a teenage psychotic who would eventually evolve into the groundbreaking figure of Plato).”
Besides the “teenage trinity,” the treatment also featured a knife fight and a suicidal car contest—the “blind run” of the title, a daredevil game in which two cars charged toward each other in a dark tunnel. Perhaps the crucial distinction of Ray’s seventeen pages, wrote Frascella and Weisel, was the author’s proclamation that “youth is always in the foreground, and adults are for the most part only to be seen as the kids see them.”
Ray’s first treatment was sketchy, light on plot and heavy on sensationalism. But Warner’s interest was piqued, and by the end of the day Wasserman had a deal. Not only did the agent arrange for the director’s biggest salary to date—three thousand dollars per week for the duration of an “A” production—but he also got Ray five thousand dollars for “The Blind Run” as the story basis of the film-to-be with added compensation for his participation in development of the script.
Despite paying extra for “The Blind Run,” Warner Bros. was skeptical of Ray’s writing ability and insisted on enlisting a professional to craft the script under the supervision of an in-house producer. Even so, Wasserman scored one all-important guarantee: Regardless of how many writers followed him, sole credit for the story would go to Nicholas Ray.
“Like he could be one of my sons”: After the filming was over and Oscars were in the offing, the successive writers of Rebel Without a Cause would disagree about who had invented each of the film’s memorable scenes. But no one could dispute that, emotionally at least, Ray saw himself as a hapless parent like the ones depicted in the film.
He felt like a bad father to Tony and Tim, and from all accounts he was not a very good one. Gloria Grahame had primary custody of Tim, and Ray tried to preserve a civil relationship with his ex-wife—even moving back into the couple’s old Malibu house to take care of his young son when the actress traveled overseas to star in Elia Kazan’s anti-Communist potboiler Man on a Tightrope. (Like so much of Ray’s personal life, it seemed, this cozy arrangement was covered in the gossip columns, although in fact Ray arranged for his older son, Tony, to do most of the actual babysitting.) But it was never easy for Ray to get along with his self-absorbed ex-wife, and he threw up his hands after her August 1954 marriage to scenarist Cy Howard and the weird public announcement that his son Tim Ray had been renamed David Cyrus Howard.
Ray had time and money for girlfriends, parties, and all-night poker games, but he didn’t have much time or money for Tim, six years old in 1954. In March 1958, in fact, Grahame filed suit against her former husband, claiming that Ray had fallen fifty months and $15,000 behind in child support payments, dating back to the time when he was planning Rebel Without a Cause. It was hardly a unique situation: All of Ray’s wives chased him for support money, although the 1958 case was eventually dropped.
Sweet, volatile Tony, who turned seventeen in 1954, dreamed of becoming an actor, and his father was an expert on acting. After discovering the teenager in bed with his wife, however, Ray struggled to connect with Tony. In the best of times their relationship always had been fragile, with Ray mostly absent from his son’s upbringing. “I think he hated himself to a large degree for failing as a father,” mused Gavin Lambert. “He should never have had kids. . . . He should never have been married. Nick had quite a few guilts. This was one of them. And it influenced his approach to [Rebel Without a Cause].”
Warner Bros. gave Ray his pick of staff producers, and he chose David Weisbart—because, as he often noted, Weisbart was the youngest producer on the lot (not quite forty), and he had two teenage children of his own. A top editor at the studio throughout the 1940s, Weisbart had been nominated for an Oscar for 1949’s Johnny Belinda; more important, his last editing job before turning producer was for Elia Kazan on A Streetcar Named Desire.
In many ways, Kazan cast a long shadow over Rebel Without a Cause. Ray’s old lefty theater colleague had offices at Warner’s now, where he was immersed in postproduction for East of Eden, the first picture to star a young sensation named James Dean. Ray acquired a suite of offices nearby, and he and his onetime mentor drew closer as friends if not quite equals. They were united by their shared HUAC ordeal and by Kazan’s experience directing Gloria Grahame in Man on a Tightrope. Kazan found the actress a spoiled child, and it ratcheted up his respect and empathy for Ray that he could have stayed married to such a woman for even five minutes. Although Kazan was never very effusive about Ray’s films in public, he also had a growing, if grudging, regard for him as a fellow director.
As Kazan was finishing Eden and Ray was starting work on Rebel, the two found rare free time to socialize. The two directors got together with Clifford Odets, and also with writer Budd Schulberg, another tough guy who had turned “friendly” for HUAC. Schulberg, a boxing fan, was trailed by boxer friends wherever he roamed. He talked about writing the life story of a New York boxer, a onetime undefeated middleweight named Roger Donoghue who had quit boxing after his knockout punch killed a foe at Madison Square Garden. Seeing the idea as a possible film project, Ray collected sixteen-millimeter newsreel footage of bouts he watched late at night when others dropped off to sleep.
Ray befriended the twenty-four-year-old Donoghue and hired him as an adviser on his upcoming film. Tall and handsome, with curly hair, twinkling eyes, and an Irish capacity for drink, Donoghue had showed Brando boxing moves for On the Waterfront; for Rebel Without a Cause he would teach James Dean how to duck and glide.
Weisbart, a modest, diplomatic man who knew the ins and outs of production, came highly recommended by Kazan. Ray felt he had had bad luck with producers; he considered them a breed apart, loyal first and always to money and management. (The producers in In a Lonely Place are repugnant characters, hotshots and blowhards.) Thanks to Kazan, Ray would have good luck with Weisbart, the only pr
oducer besides John Houseman whom Ray called “outstanding,” by which he meant standing behind him.
Weisbart was deferential when it came to finalizing the script, which was one weakness of his résumé. Ray’s first challenge was resolving the Robert Lindner situation. According to Frascella and Weisel, the studio “insisted” that the director accept Lindner’s title, Rebel Without a Cause, as the title of his film-to-be, since the studio had paid the sum of five thousand dollars for the rights to Lindner’s book—the same amount they’d paid Ray for “The Blind Run.” But they couldn’t have had to fight very hard: Ray coveted that title, and there were also some ideas in Lindner’s book he was happy to borrow as he shaped the story.
A Baltimore native, Lindner had been widely hailed as a leading authority in his field—as well as “a fine storyteller”—by Ray’s ex-wife Jean Evans, who reviewed one of his books for the New York Times. Lindner was one of many authors trading on the public fascination with Freudian theories during this era; his 1955 book The Fifty-Minute Hour, comprised of case studies of individual patients—including a chapter called “The Jet-Propelled Couch,” about a brilliant physicist who created and inhabited an imaginary science-fictional world—is still considered a classic in the profession. Another of Lindner’s fans was producer Jerry Wald, who had brought Rebel Without a Cause to Warner’s in the late 1940s and oversaw several script versions of the book, including an early one penned by Lindner himself.
Ray made a point of meeting Lindner when the psychologist came to Los Angeles in November 1954 as part of a national lecture tour. Ray listened to Lindner’s talk, which defended middle-class teenage delinquents as rebels against insidious social conformity, and afterward attended a cocktail party in his honor at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Ray introduced himself to the psychologist as the director of the Warner’s film that would take its title from his book. When Lindner pleaded to be hired as a consultant on the project, however, Ray rebuffed him—much to his astonishment—and shut the psychologist out of any future participation.* Lindner later threatened legal action against Warner Bros., but the studio adopted the legal position that it owned the film rights to his book free and clear, and that included the right to use his title as they saw fit.
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