Nicholas Ray

by Patrick McGilligan

  Between them, Ray and Shulman made strides in the evolving portrait of Plato, who’d been a flat-out psychopath in “The Blind Run.” In Shulman’s draft, Plato would still be depicted as “a ticking time bomb,” in the words of Frascella and Weisel, but with an empty home life that explained his explosiveness. Building on that idea, Shulman gave Plato a nanny, standing in for a negligent mother, and a father whose only contact with his son was his child support payments. The studio thought the absentee father was a little harsh, according to Ray, but he insisted on it “as I have two sons in that situation, and it was an idea drawn only too directly from personal experience.”

  Shulman’s draft introduced the idea that the teenage trinity should meet on a class field trip to Griffith Park’s planetarium, a local landmark and tourist attraction overlooking the city of Los Angeles. (“Confronted with a giant replica of the sky, pinpointed planets and constellations glittering on it,” as Ray put it later, “they listen to a dry cosmic lecture.”) Ray later claimed that he and Weisbart brainstormed this memorable set piece, but in fact he had copped it from “Main Street, Heaventown,” the teenage-delinquency script he had worked on years earlier with Esther McCoy and Silvia Richards. The director “lifted it either consciously or unconsciously,” Richards told Bernard Eisenschitz. “He didn’t deny it when I accused him.”

  Shulman finished his 164-page draft on January 26, 1955. His version “has much in common with the final film,” wrote Frascella and Weisel, who analyzed all the drafts, “although it reads like a distorted mirror image.” One big difference was the climax, which Shulman envisioned taking place at Plato’s home, surrounded by police. Ray and Shulman disagreed strongly about the location of the climax: The director wanted Plato back at the planetarium, “seeking shelter under its great dome and artificial sky,” in his words, but Shulman insisted that the ending would be played better at Plato’s house. “The issue made me decide that our points of view were essentially different,” Ray said later.

  It didn’t help matters when Dean met the screenwriter one day at Ray’s bungalow and the two butted heads in an exchange about cars. “Dean was disappointed to discover that Shulman’s car, an MG, had neither special carburetors for racing nor wire wheels,” wrote Frascella and Weisel. “Shulman, meanwhile, resented the fact that Dean wanted to buy a German-made Porsche so soon after World War II. It wasn’t long before their conversation sputtered to a halt.”

  Like Ray, Dean held a special reverence for “important” writers: He was awestruck to meet Clifford Odets on another occasion at Ray’s bungalow, considering the former Group Theatre playwright comparable to Ibsen or Shaw. Shulman didn’t inspire the same warmth or respect, and eventually he, like Uris, was shown the door. Not that he minded: “I didn’t like working with Ray,” recalled Shulman, “and the whole project took on a nightmarish quality.”

  His replacement was ready and waiting in the wings.

  Accompanied by a clinging Marilyn Monroe, Ray came to Gene Kelly and Betsy Blair’s house for their annual Christmas party in 1954, playing volleyball before dinner and charades after. The other guests included Arthur Loew Jr., grandson of Marcus Loew, the theater chain magnate and a founder of MGM, and his cousin, Stewart Stern, a balding thirty-two-year-old with the feverish look of a beat poet, who was visiting from New York.

  Loew had produced and Stern had written the 1951 film Teresa, directed by Fred Zinnemann, a “problem drama” with a neorealist aesthetic concerning a young World War II veteran and his Italian bride. Stern had been Oscar-nominated with Alfred Hayes for the screen story (separate from the script, which Stern wrote alone). Ray told Stern how much he’d admired the movie, and a short time later Stern’s agent, Clancy Sigal, phoned to say that Ray wanted to talk with Stern about a script job.

  The invitation might never have been made if Stern hadn’t met Ray at Gene Kelly’s party, but the writer already had passed muster with Dean and Leonard Rosenman, who were guests at Loew’s house that same Christmas season. After failing at small talk, Stern and Dean had plopped down into big revolving armchairs and spun around making farm-animal noises—cows especially. “His ‘moo’ in Rebel is a souvenir of that,” Stern recalled, “a kind of private hello to me.”*

  Despite his Oscar nomination, Stern had been fired from MGM amid a general studio housecleaning after Teresa. Disillusioned by Hollywood, he’d gone back to his native New York, where he was prospering in live television. The writer wasn’t sure he wanted to have anything more to do with the motion picture industry.

  Ray met with Stern at Warner Bros., first in his office and continuing over lunch in the commissary. The director explained he wanted to do a movie about middle-class kids who clashed with the law because of their need to act out “the emotional strivings, longings and horrors caused by terrible family relationships,” Stern recalled. “He was passionate about bringing to public notice his discovery that the alienation that brought on this ‘delinquent behavior’ was not restricted to what were called ‘ghetto families’ then, but also by deep maladjustments in typical middle class families who provided no economic reason to steal, maraud, plunder or deface but every emotional reason to rebel.” Emotional deprivation was just as critical as economic deprivation, Ray insisted.

  The director supplied Stern with a pile of newspaper clippings, including accounts of “chickie runs” and articles depicting the lives of troubled teenagers and their families. He also gave Stern the Shulman script, without mentioning that he himself had written the treatment that was its basis.

  Captivated by Ray’s ambitions for the film, Stern felt his resistance to Hollywood gradually melting away. He and Ray were on the same wavelength, he felt, both soul-searching creative types. “Nick was in agony, a kind of private hell, at that time,” recalled Stern. “He had a concept and a vision of what he wanted to say, but he had not found a way to say it through the writers he had had. He was almost inarticulate about what he wanted.”

  When Stern’s turn to talk came, Ray listened intently. The writer made a powerful impression. His sincere wariness about the studio system, coupled with his preference for living in New York, endeared him to the director. Stern revealed that he was deeply involved in therapy, trying to understand himself; that resonated with Ray, who also kept regular appointments with a “head-shrinker,” to borrow Plato’s terminology. Stern had to connect with a subject emotionally in order to write about it; Ray felt the same way about writing and directing. Stern was almost painfully honest, his flights of eloquence leavened with wry humor.

  The two men found common ground discussing their personal family backgrounds. “Nick confided that part of his passion for the subject came from the guilt he felt about the ways he was handling his own fatherhood,” Stern said, “and I confided to him the resentment, loneliness and blame I felt about my parents’ relationship with each other and with me.”

  A fan of Peter Pan since childhood, Stern said he could envision the script taking on the fairy-tale mood of a “modern version” of the J. M. Barrie play, with Dean’s character as a variation on Peter, and Judy and Plato, the other two members of the teenage trinity, as a Wendy stolen away from her family and a Lost Boy respectively. Ray countered with one of his own favorite sources of inspiration, saying he thought the romance of Jim and Judy ought to have a Romeo and Juliet–type quality. They agreed that elements of both could be woven into the final film.

  By the end of the day, Ray and Stern had reached a “profound emotional agreement,” the writer recalled. “Nick and I knew that we both had deep personal statements to make through the vehicle of whatever story I came up with based in part on his ideas,” said Stern, though Ray agreed that he “should be freed to start from scratch.”

  Their financial agreement was just as profound: four figures weekly, more than Stern had ever earned. Ray urged the writer to adopt some of the same research habits as his predecessors on the script, posting him to the Los Angeles Juvenile Division. Said Stern, “I proc
eeded to spend many nights with its personnel there, posing, at their suggestion, as a social worker from Wisconsin, so I could witness at first hand how kids arrested that night were brought in and interviewed, sometimes with the parents summoned to meet them.

  “I was allowed to have any ‘inmate’ brought before me for a private interview, sometimes late into the night, and as more trust was built between the officers and myself, was granted permission to read the intake reports, psychological workups and social workers’ family-visit assessments of any child whose experience attracted me.”

  Stern’s Juvenile Division notes helped flesh out the teenage trinity, whom Shulman had named Jim, Judy, and Plato. In Judy’s case, Stern noticed one girl “who was having a terrible time with her father, but she was too young to understand any of the sexual connotations. She only knew that he was constantly rejecting her. She wasn’t allowed to wear lipstick—or do anything to make herself look more feminine—even though her father allowed her younger sister to do it. And that became a kind of signal for the relationship between Judy and her father.”

  Under Stern, the teenage trinity—and their families—began to spring to life. Plato acquired the caring middle-aged black woman who acts as his nanny (the film’s only African American character). Stern saw Judy as being “in a panic of frustration regarding her father—needing his love and suffering when it’s denied. This forces her to invite the attention of other men in order to punish him.” He derived Jim Stark’s parents from his own upbringing: a domineering mom and a submissive dad who was known to wear an apron—a burning image from Stern’s youth.

  Between Ray and Stern—though later they disputed the origin of certain ideas—they established the sequence of the narrative. Ray wanted a juvenile hall opening that would introduce the audience to the teenage trinity, though the three would not actually meet in the scene. Stern wrote the scene with Jim, Judy, and Plato being booked for arrest, “visible to each other through the glass walls of their interviewing rooms” in the police station. It was Ray’s idea for Judy to leave her compact on the chair at juvenile hall, an item Jim then pockets as a souvenir, showing it to Judy after Buzz has been killed—“an inspired director’s invention of an ‘object track,’ ” recalled Stern. Another object track, the coat Jim is always offering to the shivering Plato, was also planted in the opening.

  In subsequent meetings, Ray and Stern pinged off each other beautifully. When the director said he wanted the three teenagers to enjoy “a wonderful kind of crazy Walpurgis Night celebration” in a deserted mansion, Stern brainstormed a kind of Never-Never Land interlude, with Jim, Judy, and Plato hiding from Buzz’s gang and spending time as an “idealized family,” in Stern’s words. Plato would pretend to be a real estate agent showing the empty house to potential buyers Jim and Judy; all three would lark about in an empty swimming pool.

  Stern went along with Ray’s idea that Plato should meet his fate back at the planetarium (“a sacrifice on the steps of the temple,” in the writer’s words). But through the years Stern always insisted that he came up with the idea to link the rotation of the solar system to the film’s circadian plot structure, with the story unfolding within a strict twenty-four-hour time frame—a crucial bit of structure as well as a nod to classical dramatic unities.

  The director encouraged Stern to meet with Dean, listening to the young actor’s ideas, observing his tics and traits. Stern and the young star started hanging out often at his cousin’s house, talking and trading ideas on an informal basis. “Without meaning to use specific aspects of Jimmy’s personality, I became infected by it,” recalled Stern.

  Ray gave Stern total freedom, and if the director had an idea he didn’t like, he felt free to reject it. “Nick was superb when he was superb,” according to Stern.

  They had only one serious disagreement before filming. Ray had been chewing over his dreams with Dr. Van der Heide; enamored of Luis Buñuel and his surrealistic approach—and worried, according to Stern, about “being able to fill up the Cinemascope screen”—the director proposed a series of split-screen fantasy sequences in the film, with one half of the screen depicting the Freudian dreams or daydreams of the teenage trinity as the real action was staged on the other half.

  For example, Plato might have a dream where he imagined himself “inside a crayon drawing, singing to himself about being alone,” according to film historian Douglas L. Rathgeb in his book The Making of Rebel Without a Cause. “A crayon car arrives with his father, who wears a naval officer’s uniform. The father hugs Plato. Plato’s mother appears, smiling. Plato and his father walk down the crayon road and go fishing. They sit on the bank of a blue crayon lake under the yellow stars of a crayon sky. Plato shivers. His father offers him his uniform jacket. The father has Jim Stark’s face.”

  Or, while his mother and father argue over him, Jim might withdraw into a daydream at a shooting gallery, where he aims a .22 rifle at moving metal ducks. Three large balloons with bull’s-eyes would then appear above the ducks, bearing the faces of his mother, father, and grandmother. After he shoots each balloon he runs to a service station and tries in vain to reinflate the balloons. When Jim returns to the shooting gallery, he takes aim at a new balloon decorated with his own face. Jim pleads for punishment, a shot rings out, and in the words of the script, “a look of relief passes over his face.”

  Ray also wanted to make Jim Stark’s inner thoughts explicit by adding voice-over narration. Narration had been a routine storytelling device in Ray’s radio career, and as a man fueled by inner voices, desperate to break Hollywood conventions, Ray used different types of narration as often as he could in his films.

  The director had forced some of these ideas into Shulman’s draft. Now he urged Stern to keep them and expand upon them. The writer dug in his heels, finding many of the conceits “pretentious and intrusive.” Weisbart quietly sided with Stern, but Ray defended his experimental ideas stubbornly. He had used mirrors to similar effect, as far back as They Live by Night. Having been denied his split-photography experiment with On Dangerous Ground, he was adamant about the fantasy/reality scenes he envisioned for Rebel.

  Ray did have one group on his side: the experts he courted during his research. Dr. Douglas Kelley, head of the criminology department at University of California–Berkeley, was one of the most prestigious consultants on Rebel Without a Cause (he’d been chief psychiatrist during the Nuremberg Nazi war crimes trial), and Kelley voted with the director, saying that such daydreams could accurately depict troubled minds.

  Feeling pressed, Stern did write a few split-screen surrealistic scenes for Ray. But Weisbart contrived to have them rejected by the studio, and ultimately the scenes—along with the voice-over idea—were winnowed from the shooting script. Ray was disappointed; he would have to wait fifteen years, and leave Hollywood far behind, before he had another opportunity to indulge in the kinds of surrealist images, multiple voices, and technological experimentation he never managed to pull off within the studio system.

  The script evolved gradually, then, over the course of months. Although Stern tried to write every day, at first he made painfully slow progress, until he too came under the influence of Elia Kazan. One day, wandering into a theater to watch On the Waterfront, the writer found himself thunderstruck by the natural poetry of Kazan’s film, by the way it spread a “layer of myth over something so real.” The writing began to move for him.

  Throughout February and March 1955, Stern wrote and rewrote. He met with Ray only when necessary. Ray trusted Stern and believed the script was in loving hands. The three pillars of Rebel Without a Cause were finally in place: a sensitive, questing writer; an actor who embodied the torments of the lead character; and a director resolved to fulfill his lifelong desire to create something entertaining, artistic, and worthwhile.

  With Stewart Stern busy on the script and James Dean deep-thinking his part, Ray began to assemble the rest of the cast. The official readings and auditions were held at the stu
dio, but as usual with Ray the process spilled over into restaurants, parties, and his home.

  Members of an actual middle-class youth gang from Hollywood High, whose jackets identified them as “Athenians,” had begun showing up at the Chateau Marmont shortly after Ray met their leader, former child actor Frank Mazzola, at a studio casting call. The director cultivated a close friendship with Mazzola, and the Athenians mingled at his house with young performers who were angling to play characters just like them.

  In turn, Mazzola invited the director to attend the gang’s own meetings and to hang out with its members, observing their behavior and recording their slang from “a portable miniature wire recorder inside his breast pocket,” according to studio publicity. (Later, in a televised interview, Ray said he was also wired with mikes on his wristwatch and tie clasp.) He even went along with them to supposed rumbles. The Hollywood gang eschewed guns, booze, and pot, but they were tough, fighting it out with tire chains, according to Ray.

  In time, the mutual attraction between Ray and some of his young acolytes breached the bedroom. Ray was a father figure, but one who gave off a pronounced sexual vibe. “There seemed to be a musky sexual readiness when he moved through a crowded room making deep, searching connections with the eyes of the young,” Stern recalled, “as if his message to them was, ‘I see you, I love your specialness which nobody else remarks, I will never seduce you, but in time you’ll realize that I know you better than anyone else does and I am the safety you need.’