More than ever Ray was determined to go out on a limb and make a film that was entirely his own. From the very beginning of the process, he committed himself as never before. He was determined, this time, to avoid unseemly compromises, to fight every battle—to subsume all ideas and influences and collaborators under his own banner.
Ray borrowed at least one core concept from Lindner’s book: that psychopathic criminal behavior was often reflected in an alienated or deviant sexuality. This was also a central motif of Knock on Any Door—the novel, not the tame film version. Back then, Ray had distanced himself from the subtext, which may have struck too close to home. But time, and the power handed to him by Warner Bros., emboldened him now, and as the script evolved, the character of Plato, youngest of the “teenage trinity,” inched toward a conflicted or closeted sexuality.
Who should write the screenplay? That was the next battle Ray had to fight. The appointed writer had to harmonize with the director, who had written “The Blind Run” in an all-night sleepless dream state. He would have to create a through-line with the main characters of “The Blind Run” that satisfied the studio executives, censorship officials, and especially the director—and in order to please Ray, the writer would have to learn to interpret his frequently abstruse ideas and cryptic silences. “Are you a mind reader?” hatcheck girl Martha Stewart asks Humphrey Bogart in In a Lonely Place. “Most writers like to think they are,” Bogart replies.
Establishing a relationship with a compatible writer was almost as formidable a problem in the director’s career as finding a sympathetic producer. Charles Schnee had been an effective collaborator at RKO, but no other writer had worked subsequently with Ray more than once. The foundational work on the Bogart films, flaws and all, was Robert Lord’s and done largely without Ray’s involvement—although he could claim yeoman service on the final act of In a Lonely Place. He had left the heavy lifting on The Lusty Men to another writer-producer, Jerry Wald, though Ray made equally vital on-the-spot contributions to Robert Mitchum’s scenes. Ray had allowed Philip Yordan (or one of his “surrogates”) to sprinkle fairy dust on Johnny Guitar and had never even met the scenarist of Run for Cover, his latest picture.
Working with friends or acquaintances on his own time and dime, Ray hadn’t yet gotten any of his original ideas made into films. Although studio professionals had worked on all his produced pictures, over time the director had come to view Hollywood writers as compromised, conflicted creatures, like Dix in In a Lonely Place. Playwrights (they always stank of the gallows) or literary novelists (not the bestselling variety) were more legitimate; they worked from scratch, originating stories that were unconstrained by movie conventions or censorship. Ray had once aspired to be a poet or real writer, like his early mentor Thornton Wilder, someone whose work was worthwhile and enduring. Saddled too often with contract writers, Ray yearned for outsiders with blue-ribbon names.
First Ray bid for the services of Clifford Odets, lately his neighbor at the Chateau Marmont. Ray had worshipped Odets since the 1930s; besides their onetime left-wing beliefs, the two shared a taste for drinking and womanizing, and during the mid-1950s they bonded as never before. But it had been ten years since Odets had written an original motion picture. His plays, while enshrined in the culture, were seen as left-wing or highbrow. Hollywood viewed Odets as more of a script doctor, and that would become his circumscribed role on Rebel Without a Cause. David Weisbart nixed Odets as the lead writer, but the playwright stayed on call as the director’s muse, making suggestions big and small. As Odets worked with Ray to define the character of Jim Stark (James Dean), for example, the playwright urged the director to “find the keg of dynamite he’s sitting on,” obscure advice, perhaps, but as Ray later recalled, “That one single concept helped me tremendously in building the character.”
Weisbart and Warner Bros. preferred a writer already on the lot, which was better for the budget and for supervisory purposes. From a list of available names, Ray and the producer gravitated to Leon Uris, who’d just finished a script based on his semiautobiographical novel Battle Cry, about the love lives and battle sacrifices of young marines in the Pacific during World War II. Like A. I. Bezzerides, who had written On Dangerous Ground, Uris was a legitimate novelist, and after meeting with Ray and Weisbart he warmed to the idea of a bellwether film about lawbreaking middle-class teenagers.
Uris was known for his research methods, and Ray maintained his fondness for factual research as background in preparing a film. “Documentation” helped to preempt any criticism of socially edgy films. Reading authoritative sources, consulting specialists, mingling with real-life counterparts of screen characters—increasingly, this had become Ray’s methodology, one way to invest his vaunted “emotional reality” with genuine reality.
For Rebel Without a Cause, Ray, joined by Weisbart and Uris, lined up judges, social workers, child psychologists, and police officials to shed light on the roots of juvenile delinquency. The director himself spent “sixty five hours in a juvenile division police patrol car, gathering data and impressions,” according to later studio publicity. He drew on his meetings with these authorities in shaping the story, and—just as important—secured their official declarations of support. Such official endorsements allowed the studio to plan an unusual “exploitation campaign,” as Ray forecast in a studio memo, “forthcoming on a national scale,” delineating his film as being “fresh, different and as realistic as the headlines.”
Ray added actual teenage youth gang members to his list of preferred “experts” and even asked the studio for permission to arrange the pretend arrest of his nephew, Sumner Williams, so that he could mingle with juvenile offenders and report back. “He’s 25, looks 28, ex-G.I., so can handle himself, knows what we’re looking for, etc.,” Ray wrote to Weisbart. “I think it’s a good idea.”
Uris’s hiring appears to have short-circuited the fake-arrest idea, and the new writer took up the research gauntlet, riding around in police cars, attending juvenile court sessions, apprenticing for ten days as a social worker at the juvenile hall of the downtown Los Angeles Police Department. By October 7, the director was able to send Weisbart an upbeat report on Uris’s progress, noting that he “is not only gaining insight to the problems and characters, but is already beginning to talk story characters and scenes. In other words, the excitement gathers.”
That was before Uris had put anything down on paper, however. When the writer submitted his first take on the prospective film, a five-page sketch of an imaginary town faced with a teenage crime wave, dated October 14, 1954, Ray’s gathering excitement deflated. Uris’s treatment offered a too “intellectual approach,” Ray felt, and the writer’s subsequent twenty-four-page treatment and revision, dated October 20 and November 1, were pocked with “tedious, clichéd descriptions of adults’ petty, quotidian small-town lives,” in the words of Frascella and Weisel, while neglecting Ray’s chief goal: capturing the inner angst of the teenagers.
Uris had dubbed his treatment “Rayfield,” as a humorous nod to the director. But the title alone “made me vomit,” Ray said later, ungenerously. Uris had failed to divine and interpret Ray’s secret thoughts. “It was like an eye test at the optician’s,” as Ray explained later. “Could he read the characters in my mind as he might a chart on the wall?”
Weisbart agreed with Ray. Uris was summarily discharged. According to Frascella and Weisel, though, the writer’s work wasn’t entirely discarded. In his treatment, Uris “did create a tender image that survives into the final film—Jimmy protectively covering his sleeping friend Plato with his jacket. Uris also depicted Amy—who would become Judy, the Natalie Wood role—as starving for her father’s affection. Uris wrote that she ‘tries to replace her mother . . . become the wife of her father.’ ” The members of Ray’s teenage trinity all had inadequate parents, but the fathers were especially hapless.
Although East of Eden would not be released until March 1955, Hollywood wags were already touti
ng its debuting star, James Dean, as the new Marlon Brando. Ray first heard about Dean from Elia Kazan and his wife, Molly, at a dinner where Kazan inveighed angrily against the impossible young actor. Ray crossed paths with Dean at rough-cut screenings of the Kazan picture, but Dean was “aloof and solitary,” as Ray recalled. “We hardly exchanged a word. It didn’t occur to me that he was the ideal actor for my film.”
Ray pined to work with Brando, the most compelling actor in postwar Hollywood, but after his triumph in Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire Brando had shot into the sky like a nova; for the foreseeable future he was booked up with the most prestigious first-tier directors. Kazan didn’t think that Dean, “a far, far sicker kid,” unruly, undisciplined, and solipsistic, merited the comparisons to Brando. Directing Dean had been a struggle; Kazan had had to resort to flattery and insults, coaxing and bullying. But Dean was right for Rebel Without a Cause, and Kazan thought Ray could handle him.
Twenty-three in the fall of 1954, Dean was hardly a teenager. And he was an unknown quantity to the general public, which knew him only from “live” television. In person the young actor was a slight, almost fragile-looking man-child, always mumbling about fast cars and jazz when he wasn’t mumbling about truth and art. Uncombed and sleepy-eyed, dressed in T-shirt and jeans and cowboy boots, faintly bored with everything, he was the most charismatic person in the room, wherever he happened to be. He sought truth in acting but also, he made it clear, he was looking for truth in living. Though he was capable of both wit and warmth, he was haunted by deep-seated loneliness, anger, and pain.
Like Ray, Dean was a displaced midwesterner, born in small-town Indiana. Both had lost a parent in youth (Dean’s mother had died of cancer when he was nine; “he could never quite forgive her for that,” Ray recalled). In most ways, the two men made a sublime mirror image. Yet at first they circled each other noncommittally. Everyone knew that Ray was planning a major film about teenage rebels; everyone knew that Dean, under contract to the same studio, Warner Bros., might or might not be interested in the gig. Many who were there have described how their initially cautious relationship evolved, over several months, from a steady courtship and mutual seduction into a slow dreamy tango.
Dean started dropping by Ray’s office, acting “warily interested” in the teenage delinquency film, in Ray’s words. Then, one night, the actor dropped by Ray’s bungalow at the Chateau Marmont. Upon entering, Dean turned a back somersault, bringing a smile to Ray’s face. “Are you middle-aged?” Dean teased the director, who was old enough to be his father. Dean had brought along an entourage—including actor Jack Simmons and the local television horror show hostess known as Vampira—and coaxed Ray to tell them the story of his escape from the Clover Club fire, delighting in his story of walking over glass shards carrying his pet dog.
Later, Ray said that Dean was probably more cat than dog. “Maybe a Siamese,” the director mused on one occasion. “The only thing to do with a Siamese cat is to let it take its own time. It will come up to you, walk around you, smell you. If it doesn’t like you, it will go away again. If it does, it will stay.”
When Dean headed to New York for a television appearance in the fall, the director followed in his tracks, ostensibly to visit the Actors Studio, whose cofounders included Kazan, and to interview budding young thespians studying the Method under Lee Strasberg. Along with a Warner Bros. talent executive, William T. Orr, Ray met or auditioned several dozen East Coast actors and actresses during the trip.
The director checked in with Jean Evans and his teenage son Tony but kept his eye on the main chance, sniffing Dean out at his East Sixty-eighth Street fifth-floor walkup, full of books and records (jazz, classical, African tribal, Afro-Cuban song and dance); racing, bullfighting, and sailing posters; and bongo drums. On a music stand was the score of Berlioz’s Harold in Italy, which Dean was “studying assiduously,” in Ray’s words, at the recommendation of composer Leonard Rosenman, who was finishing the score for East of Eden. Dean played his favorite records for Ray, changing them excitedly midsong.
Together Ray and Dean went to see Jour de fête, Jacques Tati’s 1949 comedy. The actor was “morose as he entered the theater,” Ray remembered, but was so overcome by wild laughter at the French comedy that the two were asked to leave. The director introduced Dean to his son Tony, and Dean invited the aspiring actor to the all-night bongo parties that Dean thrived on. “I put him together with my son, who was Sal [Mineo]’s age,” Ray explained later, “to see how he reacted to a youth of that age. And it was wonderful.” In a small way, Tony helped his father win over Dean.
The conversations between Ray and Dean revealed a curious coincidence: They shared the same psychiatrist, Dr. Van der Heide in Beverly Hills. And by the end of their time together in New York, Dean had decided he trusted Ray enough “to impart a confidence,” in the director’s words, confessing that he had crabs and asking what he should do. Ray took him to a drugstore. “I want to do your film,” the grateful actor told him. “But don’t let them know it.” It would be “us vs. them,” i.e., Warner Bros., all the way. The two shook hands on it.
Their sniffing courtship continued, though, as there were various snags that had to be overcome. For one thing, a number of other, more luminous directors were wooing the new Brando, including George Stevens, who was fresh off the Western Shane and the Montgomery Clift–Elizabeth Taylor drama A Place in the Sun. Dean’s schedule after East of Eden was still up in the air, and after the young star’s tussles with Kazan, Warner Bros. had adopted a wait-and-see attitude. Dean himself felt “unsure about Ray’s ability to pull off the kind of top-line movie with which he wanted to be associated,” in the words of Frascella and Weisel.
Ray, however, was sanguine. He had achieved his best films when he was able to work at a slow, leisurely pace, an opportunity Hollywood had rarely afforded him. Writing a story or script, preparing a film, he was more comfortable taking time to ponder and study the subject, get to know people, store up thoughts and observations and ideas. Ray looked forward to spending time with Dean and studying the human being as a means of building the characterization of Jim Stark.
“To work with Jimmy meant exploring his nature,” Ray wrote later. “He wanted to make films in which he could personally believe, but it was never easy for him. Between belief and action lay the obstacle of his own deep, obscure uncertainty.” The same might have been said of the director.
Until he had a script in hand, Ray could afford to wait and watch. Ray had two aces up his sleeve—cards a less mellow, more controlling director, like Kazan, would not have condoned. The first was the age gap between Ray and Dean, with all its father-son implications. Like Ray, Dean yearned for a loving relationship with his father, who’d abandoned him after the death of his mother—a man Dean considered “a monster, a person without any kind of sensitivity,” as Dean’s friend Leonard Rosenman recalled. (Ray soon enlisted Rosenman to write the music for Rebel Without a Cause.)
In his own reckless youth, Ray had assiduously sought out role models and mentors. In many ways he himself would fail as a parent. But in middle age, ironically, he had begun to transform himself into a father figure for numerous young people.
As time went on, and word spread that he was developing a film about teenage rebels, Ray’s bungalow at the Chateau Marmont filled up with a host of starry-eyed young hopefuls. The director was “enthroned,” writer Stewart Stern recalled, “as guru.” The youngsters mingled with Ray’s contemporaries, like his friend Odets, and usually an assortment of ex-boxers, some, like Roger Donoghue, also young enough to be Ray’s son. Ray held regular gatherings on Sunday afternoons that were reminiscent of Taliesin or Almanack House Sundays. But other parties and get-togethers ignited spontaneously. One Hollywood columnist wrote that Ray’s parties tended to start at one P.M. with bop and end at one A.M. with Bach, the music blasting continually from Ray’s hi-fi. Lit by red lanterns and scented by night-blooming jasmines, Ray’s bungalow became a haven for
aspiring young actors flocking there from all around town.
That was Ray’s first ace: Young people trusted him as a father figure. His second was that he too was a bohemian, a self-styled outsider. Where Kazan was a lordly director, Ray saw himself as one of the gang, an eternal delinquent. His club was privileged but never elitist. Ray’s doors opened to a circle of trust.
While Dean in time became a regular at the director’s bungalow, mingling with other young people, he was as much the star of the gatherings as Ray. And at first, Dean was slippery to lure inside the circle of trust. The troubled actor wanted a father but he didn’t want to be eclipsed. He was “intensely determined,” Ray said later, “not to be loved or to love.”
Ray gave him trust and approval, watching and waiting. Even before Dean was official, even before an acceptable script existed, Ray had begun to absorb the actor into Rebel Without a Cause. “He wanted to belong and I made him feel that he did,” wrote Ray later.
In November, Ray and David Weisbart agreed on another writer: Irving Shulman, a novelist whose 1947 bestseller The Amboy Dukes realistically depicted youth gangs rampaging through Brooklyn streets. Universal had adapted the novel into a taut film, City Across the River, and though Shulman continued to write novels about crime and society, he had since moved to Hollywood and written scripts for a couple of gritty boxing pictures.
Ray was won over when Shulman professed his belief that adults, not teenagers, were the real delinquents in society. Shulman wasn’t a researcher like Uris, but “his talent for inventing or remembering incidents led us quickly forward,” according to the director. It was Shulman, then, who recalled an item in the papers about a gang of kids staging a “chickie run,” a rite of passage in which two teenagers in separate cars raced toward a precipice, seeing which of them would “chicken out” first before applying the brakes. The “chickie run” would replace Ray’s “blind run,” becoming a memorable highlight of Rebel Without a Cause.
Nicholas Ray Page 34
