“Then he’d move on, leaving them gawping with their cokes going warm in their hands. There was simply too much of him for most people to resist. And nothing turned him off.”
The leading female character in the film-to-be was Judy, and many young actresses coveted the part, but none more so than one sixteen-year-old nervy brunette who was halfway through her senior year at Van Nuys High School. A former child actress whose increasingly unhappy home life was dominated by a cold, alcoholic father and a fiercely protective stage mother, Natalia Zakharenko—or Natalie Wood, as she was known—had been named the “Most Talented Juvenile Picture Star” for her endearing performance in 1947’s Miracle on 34th Street, a Christmas story about a little girl who doesn’t believe in Santa Claus. Now, seven years later, Wood had grown into a ripe teenager itching to be noticed. Hollywood had her stuck playing sweet young girls in Rock Hudson vehicles. Once in a while she got an interesting part in live television.
One of those interesting parts was playing a crush of James Dean’s in “I’m a Fool,” a half-hour drama based on a Sherwood Anderson short story, aired live on General Electric Theater in November 1954. Wood’s role was minor, but after briefly sharing the stage with Dean, she felt anointed. A diligent student of her own profession, she read all the trade papers and gossip columns and looked forward to Elia Kazan’s film of East of Eden. She knew that Kazan was celebrated for his handling of actors like Marlon Brando, and when East of Eden was released early in 1955, Wood saw the film ten, twenty, thirty times—losing count.
All of Wood’s friends and acquaintances were former child performers, now teenagers seeking to break away from their own adolescent straitjackets, and by January 1955 she’d learned through the grapevine that Dean’s next project was a film about teenage rebels directed by Nicholas Ray—a protégé of Kazan’s and a man attuned to young people. Finagling a copy of the Irving Shulman script from an agent, she saw herself instantly as Judy.
“I felt exactly the way the girl did in the picture toward her parents,” Wood recalled. “It was about a high school girl rebelling, and it was very close to home.” Wood told her friends she would do anything to get the female lead opposite Dean. The young actress often voiced her ambitions of being taken seriously and winning an Oscar.
Aiming to look older and sexier, the sixteen-year-old showed up at the Warner Bros. casting department one day dressed to kill, sporting opera pumps, a tight black dress, and a black-veiled hat. Admitted to Ray’s office, she pounded on his desk, insisting on a screen test. He interviewed her—he spent all day interviewing and auditioning young actors—but then showed her the door, still seeing Wood as a child actress. Outside his office, however, he noticed a friend of hers waiting, “this kid with a fresh scar on his face,” and Ray thought twice. Maybe this girl was on some kind of rebel trip after all. “Let’s talk again,” the director told her.
Was Ray thinking something else too? Wood definitely was. She was in awe of the director, but she was also physically attracted to him. Though Ray was old enough to be her father, he seemed “mysterious, laconic and powerful, like an aging Heathcliff,” in the words of Gavin Lambert, who also fell in love with the director one year later. Ray’s charisma had its fatherly side, but he was also Romeo-handsome, and the women in his life trended younger as he grew older; the father-daughter angle was already a factor in his active love life.
In fact, Ray had been interviewing many other former child actresses, including Margaret O’Brien, who had been cute in Meet Me in St. Louis but was too cute for Judy, as things turned out. Ray himself might have preferred to discover a newcomer for the film, but Jack Warner insisted on a marquee name—or, at the very least, a discovery Warner felt he could build into a marquee name. Some days Ray would see fifty young men and women; Wood was only one of many begging for his attention.
But he had noticed her now, and after Wood and a girlfriend started hanging out in the studio commissary, trying to bump into Ray “accidentally,” he noticed her again. At first her outfits were wrong: Wood had misread Ray’s vision for the part, dressing up in high heels and expensive jewelry. But soon after she switched to flats, a sweater, and a ponytail, the director stopped by her table to say hello. He told the maître d’ to add the two pretty young girls to his tab and invited them to lunch the next day.
Ray immediately began treating Wood and her friend like experts on teenage life, peering at them as intently as if he was holding a lens in his hands, earnestly asking their opinions of his script ideas, then listening just as seriously to their teenage views and problems. Ray was the first director “who wanted my ideas,” Wood said later. Their commissary lunch led to a dinner invitation, and Wood tricked her parents to sneak out of the house and meet Ray at the Chateau Marmont. He took her to the Luau, his favorite watering hole, and ordered drinks for his underage companion. Other dinners ensued, with candlelight and champagne.
In Ray, the teenager had found a one-man Fellowship. The director was her father surrogate, intellectual guru, and, soon enough, partner in love. Wood eagerly soaked up his observations on acting, his takes on Vakhtangov and Stanislavski. Ray spoke knowledgeably about literature; he seemed to know all about F. Scott Fitzgerald, and in his thrall Wood fancied herself as Zelda to Ray’s Scott. One of Ray’s favorite books was The Little Prince, and soon the children’s fable about a golden-haired prince who lives on an asteroid became one of hers. The teenage actress felt as though she’d been admitted into a “golden world,” in her words.
Only a few days passed before they slept together. “That [first] interview took place in the first week of February,” wrote Gavin Lambert, who later shared the confidences of both, “and by the time she made her first test ten days later, they were lovers.”
After Ray gave Wood a key to his bungalow, she started making the scene at the Chateau Marmont too, mingling at his drop-in parties whenever she could elude her parents, lounging around in her leopard bikini at the swimming pool in the late afternoons, desperate for glimpses of Brando. When Ray came home from the studio, they’d make love. “I’d like to make love with you,” he’d say, the word with setting Ray apart from the other lovers the teenager had already known. “All the other guys just want to screw me,” she confided to a friend. “He wants to make love with me.”
Ray enjoyed making love in the afternoons, according to Lambert—possibly because he had other bookings late at night, when Wood found it difficult to slip away from home. According to several accounts, at this heady point the director was juggling concurrent affairs with several women—among them the French actress Geneviève Aumont and his intermittent paramour Shelley Winters (who told columnists that Ray was not only good-looking but also “very adept at discussion on any subject”). When Winters was off duty, Marilyn Monroe was on, and Edie Wasserman was always hovering in reserve.
Ray also pursued another young hopeful he screen-tested for the part of Judy: busty platinum blonde Jayne Mansfield. Ray later claimed the Mansfield screen test was “an hallucination” of the casting department, that he “didn’t even put any film in the camera,” but Leonard Rosenman and actor Dennis Hopper, who read James Dean’s lines with Mansfield, insisted it was a real test, film and all. Ray recommended Mansfield to director Frank Tashlin, whom he knew from RKO and who gave Mansfield her big break a short time later in The Girl Can’t Help It.
As Lambert pointed out in his detailed biography of Wood, it took quite a while, after the actress started sleeping with Ray, before she secured the part of Judy. Her first camera test was only adequate. Ray ticked the issues off to her, one by one (it was unclear whether they were his issues or the studio’s). Her figure was petite, not curvaceous. She was too thin. Her walk wasn’t sexy enough. Her hair wasn’t right. Her voice was too girlish. This was their pillow talk, and Wood listened, determined to become the Judy Ray wanted.
Dennis Hopper, who’d been firmly cast in Rebel Without a Cause according to studio publicity releases authorized by Ray,
didn’t know yet what role he’d be playing. (For one thing, the script was still being written.) When Dean was out of town, or couldn’t be bothered, Hopper read his part with many actresses. On the day of Wood’s first test, he stood in for Dean with ten actresses. A native of Dodge City, Kansas, the eighteen-year-old Hopper was raised in San Diego and studied acting at the Old Globe Theatre there. Warner Bros. had signed him after two television appearances in December 1954 and January 1955. After Wood’s test, Ray raved about the young San Diegan’s glittering future and handed Wood five hundred dollars to show him around Hollywood.
If that was a hint, Wood took it. She asked Hopper out on a date after their test and “planned their assignation like an experienced conspirator,” according to Lambert, “asking him to wait outside in his car at five o’clock when she’d be leaving Nick’s bungalow.” After they drove up to Lover’s Lane on Mulholland Drive and parked, Wood aroused Hopper by telling him that she’d just left the director’s bed. The two young actors made love in the car.
Ray and Wood remained lovers, but so did Wood and Hopper. Ray also promoted Wood’s later, well-publicized dates with Nick Adams, another young actor signed for an undetermined role in Rebel Without a Cause. Sometimes the relationship between Wood and Hopper seemed to irritate Ray; other times it had the effect of alleviating the pressure he was feeling from the lovestruck teenage actress. Ray “accepted the threesome,” according to Lambert, and once in a while the trio even dined out together.
All the while, Ray was privately coaching Wood for her all-important second camera test, scheduled for the end of February. Trying to act above it all, the director claimed that Steve Trilling and Jack Warner were the vacillators holding up the decision. (For a while, the studio wanted Debbie Reynolds as Judy.) But many people felt that Ray himself was leaning seriously toward Carroll Baker, a young actress who was a protegée of Elia Kazan’s. Wood remained optimistic, a true believer in Ray but also—just as crucial—a believer in herself.
Ray assured Wood that her physical limitations weren’t the real hurdle. Physical problems were technical problems, and those the director could fix. After all, he said, it was he who’d enhanced Gloria Grahame’s sexy pout by ordering cotton stuffed under her top lip. What Ray was really looking for was truthful acting. He urged Wood to look inward and find aspects of her own personality to transfer to Judy. They talked through the part over and over again, reviewing key aspects of the role.
By her second camera test, Wood was up to the challenge. Whether Ray had finally convinced himself is unclear. He was maddeningly evasive with Wood, telling her that he had to wait on word from the studio bigwigs. Even after her second test, the director kept auditioning potential Judys, with Hopper standing in for Dean. Not until March 1 did Ray write a forceful memo declaring, “We just spent three days testing 32 kids. There is only one girl that has shown the capacity to play Judy and that is Natalie Wood.”
But there was still no decision from on high, and Wood’s nerves were fraying. Around this time a dangerous incident occurred: Wood and Hopper and one of the actress’s girlfriends started drinking at lunch; they drank wine all afternoon, switched to whiskey after dinner, and then drove in Hopper’s car to the top of Laurel Canyon to gaze at the night stars. The friend passed out. Wood vomited. As Hopper drove them home down a long, twisty road, he steered head-on into an oncoming automobile, flipping his car and tossing Wood from the vehicle with a concussion. An ambulance rushed her to an emergency room.
“Nick Ray,” Wood kept murmuring when she was asked her parents’ phone number. “Call Nick Ray . . .” The director arrived in a fury, slamming Hopper up against a wall—not the first flicker of tension between them—and blaming the young actor for what had happened. When one of the hospital staff allegedly called Wood a juvenile delinquent, according to Suzanne Finstad’s biography of Wood, the actress pulled Ray close and hissed, “Nick! They called me a goddamn juvenile delinquent! Now do I get the part?”
Lambert dismissed this anecdote as a press agent’s invention, but either way, as Hopper later said, “She wanted him to see her—not like a Hollywood type, but really in trouble.” And it worked. On the way out of her hospital room after consoling Wood, Ray told the supervising doctor, “Take good care of this young lady. She’s the star of my next movie.” Driving her home from the hospital a day or two later, Ray officially confirmed the news: Trilling had phoned to say that Jack Warner had finally approved her as Judy.
When Ray had time and a willing vessel, he went the extra mile. In the two months before the start of filming, while constantly urging Wood to be herself, the director engaged Robert Ryan’s voice coach to help her develop a more expressive timbre; he gave instructions for Wood’s makeup to be toned down and her hair darkened and shortened, so that it would hang just below her ears in flip waves; he had a special bra designed to lift up and accent her breasts; he ordered up hip pads to give her more of an hourglass figure; and he hired movement instructors to teach her a sexier way to walk.
In such ways he never stopped second-guessing himself.
Now Wood joined Ray, James Dean, and sometimes Leonard Rosenman in meetings with Stewart Stern, who was pushing to finish the script. Dean was officially announced as the star of Rebel Without a Cause early in 1955, but Warner Bros. also had scheduled him to star in George Stevens’s adaptation of Edna Ferber’s epic novel Giant, a bigger-budgeted extravaganza that was due to start filming in Texas in late May or early June. Dean would have to squeeze in Ray’s film before then.
The team finalized certain key scenes in meetings at the studio, but sometimes they were refined during spontaneous late-night rehearsals at the Chateau Marmont. One night, in the director’s bungalow, Ray and Dean were mulling over the scene where Jim Stark returns home in the dead of night after Buzz has been killed during the chickie run. Ray thought the scene, originally written to take place in Jim’s mother’s bedroom, was “too claustrophobic” and might be more effective in showing Jim’s “turmoil” if it was shifted to a different setting.
He asked Dean to act out his entrance in his living room with “two contradictory actions,” namely “you want to get upstairs without being seen, without being heard, without a confrontation, but yet you’ve got to spill your guts out to somebody.”
Playing Jim’s father, Ray turned his TV set on to a “dead channel” and pretended to be asleep on the couch, watching “with one eye open” as Dean crept into the kitchen for a bottle of milk, then sprawled at a skewed angle on the couch, his head flopping upside down, almost to the floor. During the rehearsal Dean improvised swigging the milk and rubbing the bottle across his burning forehead (perfectly capturing “the sensibility of the milk-fed American teen, caught between maturity and childhood,” in the words of Frascella and Weisel). In the script, the next thing that happens is that Jim’s mother cries out his name from the top of the stairs. When Ray gave the cue, in a mother’s voice, Dean turned his head toward where his mother would be—and “gave me the idea of the 180 degree turn of the camera,” Ray recalled. The director devised an extraordinary shot in which the camera follows Jim’s point of view as he gradually rights himself, his mother rushing down the steps toward him. “The shot came to express my feeling toward the entire scene,” as Ray explained later. “Here was a house in danger of tipping from side to side. It felt organic to the scene.”
Just as he had when making In a Lonely Place, Ray talked his ideas over with the studio art director, Malcolm C. Bert, asking him to scrap the mother’s-bedroom set and redesign the living room and staircase to match the layout of Ray’s bungalow. He would direct the scene as they had rehearsed it. “It was all based on the improvisation at my home,” Ray said later. Ray’s camera adopted a nightmarish tilt at several points during the confrontation between Dean and his parents, and then later echoed the tilt, fast like a tremor, when Plato is shot. Spending so much time with Dean and the others paid off in a thousand ways. Ray’s script and settings and
camerawork would never be as organic, as yoked to the psychologies and emotions of the actors, as in Rebel Without a Cause.
Young people by the hundreds swarmed the casting department. Often the candidates for parts were handed a couple of script pages to study for improvisational purposes, but sometimes they were simply invited to sit around and talk informally with the director. “What do you think about what’s going on in the world today?” Ray liked to ask.
“He just wanted to talk with everybody,” recalled actor Ken Miller, who was cast in a small part among the many that would end up on the cutting-room floor. “That’s how he figured out if people would be right or wrong. He just became one of the gang.”
One of the film’s pivotal characters was Buzz, the leader of the gang harassing Jim Stark. It is Buzz who challenges Jim to the chickie run but who also befriends him before the event, as they gaze over the cliff where the run will end and one of them will die.
BUZZ (quietly): That’s the edge. The end.
JIM: Yeah. Certainly is.
BUZZ: You know something? I like you. You know that?
JIM: Why do we do this?
BUZZ (still quiet): You got to do something!
UCLA theater graduate Corey Allen, who appeared frequently in local plays, came to the studio backlot one day along with a hundred and fifty other young actors, where they were told to gather on a set of bleachers for the audition. A young New York actor named Perry Lopez, a friend of Dean’s who was assisting Ray, blew a whistle, signaling the assembled aspirants to climb up to the top rows, then turn around and descend, as the director watched. While the others stampeded by him, Allen took his time climbing up and down, puzzled by the exercise. He got the part.
For weeks, other prospective members of Buzz’s gang went through similarly peculiar improvisations. Night after night Ray took a bunch of performers out onto a floodlit wooden platform in the studio parking lot, encouraging them to crawl around the superstructure and improvise “until he had winnowed out the few from the many and was left with a tribe that belonged together and could never be pried apart,” in Stewart Stern’s words.
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