Nicholas Ray

by Patrick McGilligan

  By late February, Ray had settled on most of the tribe, which began to collect more purposefully at his bungalow for nightly talks and rehearsals. Casual visitors or bystanders like Ray’s son Tony were quietly sent away. The lucky ones stayed. Ray talked with them about sense and emotion memory, entreating the young actors to seek the truth of their characters deep inside themselves. The cast members all carried around dog-eared copies of Michael Chekhov’s book To the Actor, which covered Stanislavskian theories and techniques.

  Dean was one of the tribe but also the leader of the tribe. Over the months of getting to know Ray and preparing for his role, he had transformed himself gradually into Jim Stark, until he was truly living Jim’s emotional reality. Dean rarely stepped out of character; he was self-absorbed, sometimes surly, never cuddly. The others admired him, but they were also intimidated by his persona. And whatever his mood—or the mood of the scene they were playing—Ray gave his star the room he needed.

  “Read and see what you can do,” Ray gently urged the young actors as he handed out pages of the working drafts for their use in read-throughs and improvisations. “Take it easy and explore.” Rehearsing the scenes repeatedly, trying out inflections, movements, and gestures, the actors developed a closeness and shorthand they would carry over into the film.

  With his lifelong penchant for capturing sound, Ray recorded many of the rehearsals and improvisations, then played them back for the young performers so they could hear and critique themselves. Ray urged them to analyze and discuss the scenes at length. Time was forgotten. The discussion and critiquing seemed endless. “He [Ray] would encourage me,” recalled Wood, “and get annoyed if I didn’t bring in lots of notes or ideas, or even changes of dialogue, or if I didn’t challenge certain scenes.”

  A couple of weeks before principal photography was supposed to start, key cast members gathered for the first full read-through at Ray’s bungalow. All but one: Ray still had not chosen the film’s Plato, so Dean’s friend Jack Simmons, who’d end up playing a member of Buzz’s gang, read the part. Stewart Stern was present to participate and take notes for final revisions. Photographer Dennis Stock, another friend of Dean’s, recorded the session on Ray’s reel-to-reel machine.

  A photograph exists of the cast sitting in a circle of chairs in Ray’s living room, heads bent over their scripts. The adult actors playing the parents were almost an add-on to the read-through; when the two portraying Dean’s parents arrived at the Chateau for the first time, they soon realized that the younger performers had formed an intense bond with each other—and with Dean and Ray—from which they were excluded. The adults did not belong to the same golden world.

  For the part of Jim’s father, Ray had cast against type, hiring Jim Backus, known as the voice of the myopic cartoon character Mr. Magoo. Dean had suggested Backus to Ray after meeting him at a Thanksgiving dinner hosted by Keenan Wynn. Buffoonery was Backus’s forte, and his casting completed the impression of a weak-willed father.

  Ray had chosen veteran actress Marsha Hunt to play Mrs. Stark, Dean’s mother. The actress recalled the Chateau read-through as an especially “weird night” for the more seasoned players, who weren’t accustomed to such deeply introspective interpretations. “The cast sat around and mumbled,” Hunt remembered. “Nobody was audible but me.” Hunt would later be dropped from the cast and replaced by Ann Doran, who was just as seasoned, though in lesser roles.

  Hunt wasn’t the only actor dropped at the eleventh hour; several parts were recast before filming. The studio claimed that scheduling delays forced Hunt’s replacement, as the actress was obliged to honor a prior stage contract. But the suspicion has never been dismissed that Hunt didn’t fit into the circle of trust—or that someone at Warner Bros. may have noticed her mention as a Communist sympathizer in Red Channels, the 1950 booklet that listed suspected Communists in the media and entertainment industries. Though she was never a Communist, Hunt had been a left-liberal activist in Hollywood causes, and her career suffered for it in the 1950s. “All these years later,” wrote Frascella and Weisel, “Hunt still cannot deny that the blacklist may have played a role.”

  The last member of the teenage trinity, the part of Plato, was still up in the air two weeks before the first day of filming. At Dean’s urging, Ray tested Jack Simmons, the star’s friend and personal assistant, while also looking closely at Billy Gray, who played Bud on TV’s Father Knows Best. Ray couldn’t make up his mind. Then one day he spotted a baby-faced actor with an olive complexion answering a general casting call for the film. The actor looked “more like a Plato than a Billy Gray,” Ray noticed, while also reminding him of his son Tony, whom he regarded as “a Plato of sorts,” though the actor was “prettier.”

  An impish fifteen-year-old with doe eyes, Sal Mineo was an alumnus of the original Broadway production of The King and I. Like so many other child performers, he was seeking a fresh start in Hollywood, yet had snagged only minor television and film roles to date. Ray called Corey Allen over and asked him to improvise with Mineo. Then he invited Mineo to the Chateau Marmont on Sunday afternoon to read with Dean.

  “I thought I dressed pretty sharp for those days in pegged pants, skinny tie, jacket—until Jimmy Dean walked in with his tee shirt and blue jeans,” recalled Mineo in a subsequent interview. “We went through a scene and nothing happened between us. Nick Ray finally walked over and suggested we sit and talk for a while.”

  The informal “talking” worked to open both of them up, as Ray had guessed it would. “When Jimmy found out I was from the Bronx,” Mineo said, “we started gabbing about New York, and then progressed to cars, and before we knew it, we were buddies. . . . Then we went back to the script, and this time it went off like clockwork. When we reached a part where we were to laugh hysterically, Jimmy let out a giggle, and I couldn’t help but follow along. Pretty soon we just couldn’t stop laughing.”

  Mineo’s camera test took place a few days later, on March 16, with Dean, Wood, and Mineo feeling their way through the deserted mansion sequence, using a set left over from Kazan’s film of A Streetcar Named Desire. After touring the mansion as pretend buyers in the scene, and fooling around in an empty swimming pool, Judy hums a lullaby as Plato falls asleep. Jim and Judy kiss. Then Buzz’s gang swarms vengefully.

  The director tested another young prospect, Richard Beymer, the very same day, but clearly the chemistry wasn’t there: Beymer found Ray “gruffly unhelpful,” and he felt as excluded as Marsha Hunt from the playful, giggling repartee among the other actors.

  After summoning him, Ray waited for Mineo at his office a day or two later. Wearing a frown, the director took a long time to get words out of his mouth. “Sal,” Ray said finally. “Every once in a while, a director has to gamble. I’m going to take a chance. You’re Plato.”

  The character of the psychopathic criminal can be traced all the way back to Robert Lindner’s book, and Plato is definitely a psychopath in the film. (In the first scene, at juvenile hall, the police are grilling him for shooting puppies.) But Mineo had another unspoken qualification for the role: his homosexuality. The director knowingly cast other young homosexual or bisexual actors in the picture as well, and of course most accounts agree that Dean himself was bisexual. “Jimmy himself said more than once that he swung both ways,” the director affirmed in 1977.

  Plato’s sexuality in the film is latent, but the signals are clear, right down to the pinup of Alan Ladd in his school locker. The decisive factor in the casting was Mineo’s natural chemistry with Dean. On the set, according to several accounts, Mineo developed a crush on Dean that echoed Plato’s painful attraction to Jim Stark. Ray’s own dual sexuality made him the rare Hollywood director attuned to such subtexts, and even as he was fighting off studio and Production Code concerns about homosexual inferences in the scenes between Jim and Plato, he urged the actors themselves to explore those implications. When Mineo told Ray that he really wanted his driver’s license, the director advised him to look at
Dean “as if he is your driver’s license.” In the same vein, Dean urged Mineo, “Look at me the way I look at Natalie.”

  Years later, Mineo would boast that he’d played “the first gay teenager in films.”

  Just as Ray was ready to start filming, the industry was abuzz about another juvenile delinquency picture opening in theaters. Blackboard Jungle, an MGM picture, was written and directed by Ray’s professional nemesis, Richard Brooks, whom Ray still resented for cozying up to Bogart a few years before. Speaking with the press as Rebel Without a Cause was hitting theaters, Ray later took pains to differentiate his film from Brooks’s, which he described as sensationalistic. But early acclaim for Blackboard Jungle drove up expectations for Ray’s entry into the teenage rebel sweepstakes, and an anxious Jack Warner urged Ray to hurry and seize the moment.

  Writing feverishly, Stewart Stern finished the final draft of the script about a week before the official start date of March 25. He had spent part of the time working in New York, where he kept an apartment. Elia Kazan also lived in New York part of the time, and Ray insisted that Stern get Kazan’s opinion of the script. Feeling “very uncomfortable” with the errand, Stern took the script over to Kazan’s place on the East Side, just down the block from John Steinbeck’s.

  Kazan graciously welcomed Stern, offering the writer a sandwich before disappearing into his study with the script. Stern said, “Nick insisted that I wait there while Kazan read it,” so he sat and twiddled his thumbs, watching Steinbeck out the back window, “about two gardens away, sitting in his backyard typing.”

  Kazan returned, handed the script to Stern, and shook his hand politely, without saying anything that lingered in Stern’s memory. Kazan phoned Ray later with his reaction, but nothing he said ever reached the screenwriter.

  Just before photography began, Ray brought the teenage trinity back to Warner Bros. for another stab at the deserted mansion sequence, filming their performances as a dress rehearsal so the young actors could study themselves afterward—a highly unusual practice at the time. Their movements, body language, and byplay would be recycled almost verbatim during later filming, though some felt the dress rehearsal was even better.

  The rehearsal was also a chance for the director and cameraman to familiarize themselves with CinemaScope, the wide-screen process Warner had licensed from 20th Century-Fox. This was the first excursion into CinemaScope for both Ray and Ernest Haller, who’d shared an Oscar (in a career of seven nominations) for the photography of Gone With the Wind. At first both were somewhat nervous about the oblong shape of the CinemaScope image, and the director made more notes to himself, sketched more shots, and ordered more storyboard art than was his custom.

  Unlike some Hollywood directors, though, Ray would quickly grow accustomed to the brand-new format, which complemented his personal aesthetic. “Remember I worked with Frank Lloyd Wright?” Ray liked to remind interviewers. “The horizontal line. I felt at home with Scope.” He would shoot all his future films except one in wide-screen, and in Europe—where the beauty of his compositions was particularly celebrated—he would be dubbed “Mr. CinemaScope.”

  A few days after the dress rehearsal, James Dean suffered a panic attack. After racing his Porsche Speedster in a Palm Springs competition, the star disappeared from his usual Hollywood haunts. Dean had gone to ground somewhere, perhaps New York. The studio was “frantic,” Stewart Stern recalled. Busy with last-minute work on sets and organizing the crew at the studio, the director dismissed everyone’s apprehensions. Dean would show up when the time came.

  That weekend, Stern answered the phone to hear mooing on the other end. He mooed back. It was Dean, calling to say he couldn’t shake his qualms about Ray, who didn’t instill the same confidence in him as Kazan. Kazan was firm, decisive; Ray kept tinkering with the tone and staging of important scenes like the one in the deserted mansion. “I’m not sure I should do this movie,” he told Stern, “because I’m not sure I can trust Nick.” Stern, who was beginning to have his own trust issues with Ray, talked it over with Dean but ultimately said the decision was up to the actor.

  But Stern told no one about Dean’s phone call. Reluctant to mediate between the star and director, he then decided to sit out the filming in New York. “Ray promised to call Stern in New York if he decided to change anything in the script,” wrote Frascella and Weisel, “a promise that Ray would break many times over.”

  The filming started with background and location shots on Wednesday, March 25. The teenage trinity wasn’t on call until March 30, when the schedule called for Ray to stage the knife fight between Jim Stark and Buzz at the observatory.

  Dean’s disappearing act didn’t last long; when Monday came, Ray was right—the star showed up on time. But Dean still harbored doubts about Ray—doubts that were exposed in the very first scene of his that Ray directed. For the knife fight between Jim Stark and Buzz, Dean and Corey Allen had decided to use real switchblades with dulled edges. They wore chest protectors but still risked injuring themselves. Ray’s boxers had choreographed all their moves, but the two actors warily twirled away from each other during the first few takes. It was a crucial scene, which also involved Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo, and the rest of the tribe, and it took two days before Dean and Allen began to lose themselves in the moment. Then, at one point, Allen lunged at Dean, accidentally nicking the star’s ear and causing a spurt of blood.

  Alarmed, Ray shouted, “Cut!” and requested first aid.

  Dean had been momentarily elated with the scene. Now he turned furious. “Goddamn it, Nick!” cried the star. “What the fuck are you doing? Can’t you see this is a real moment? Don’t you ever cut a scene while I’m having a real moment! That’s what I’m here for!”

  People on the set were astonished. They waited for Ray to defend himself, but the velvet-gloved director stepped back, saying nothing while the medic fussed over Dean’s minor injury. That incident set the pattern: When Dean was in a scene—and he was in the bulk of them—Ray patiently indulged his star’s instincts. The director and star interacted with such seeming parity that the other actors and onlookers weren’t always sure who was in charge.

  The knife fight had been shot in black and white, but then Jack Warner took a look at the first week of dailies and was riveted by what he saw—the balletically staged confrontation between Dean and Allen, with the rebel girls standing on the sideline, turned on by the violence. On the second Saturday, the studio head made a bold decision: to start the filming over in color.*

  By mid-March, East of Eden, a CinemaScope film shot in color, had opened in New York and Los Angeles, drawing praise and filling theaters. Dean was a winner with critics and audiences alike; Rebel Without a Cause would disappoint his swelling number of fans if it wasn’t also in color.

  A last-minute switch to color was a gamble, as Ray the gambler knew. But the director’s artistic instincts were also aroused by color, and he welcomed the edict from the studio boss, although it entailed many hurried adjustments. A handful of scenes would have to be refilmed and a number of script details adjusted. For example, the story had originally been set during Christmas (with Buzz and his gang accosting a shopper on Christmas Eve); now the time frame was moved to Easter, which made more sense because of the springtime weather.*

  The outlaw gang in Ray’s last color film, Johnny Guitar, had looked like they were dressed for an MGM musical. The Western possessed all the emotionalism of a Nicholas Ray film but little of the realism he was also known for. For Rebel, he wanted the color to be more natural. As a color consultant, Ray engaged John Hambleton, an old New York drinking buddy who had started out in the left-wing theater movement before doing the costumes for top-drawer Broadway plays. Showing the designer a layout of college students from Life, Ray told Hambleton he wanted the teenagers to be dressed like them—as realistically as possible.

  As with Johnny Guitar, however, Ray opted to dress the main characters, the trinity of Jim, Judy, and Plato, in coded colors. Dro
pping the horn-rim glasses and black leather jacket he had been wearing for black-and-white photography, Dean donned a red nylon windbreaker to contrast with his white T-shirt and blue jeans. The customized black 1949 Mercury his character drives completed the star’s iconic look. “When you first see Jimmy in his red jacket against his black Mercury,” Ray said later, “it’s not a pose. It’s a warning.”

  In her early scenes, Natalie Wood would wear a bright red Easter coat, her lips a “gauche red,” almost as garish as Joan Crawford’s in Johnny Guitar. Later, her character graduated to nonthreatening greens and “soft fluffy pink.” (The 1950s were a “pink world,” according to color-film scholar Patti Bellantoni, with “bright and iconoclastic” shades signaling “danger, rage, torment, and courage.”)

  The sexually conflicted, violence-prone Plato was intentionally dressed as a “square,” wearing tweed jackets, sweaters, a white shirt and tie. In the deserted mansion scene, it’s revealed that he’s wearing mismatched socks, one red and one blue. (“That helps in the most external way to say to the audience quickly,” according to Ray, “that he’s had a pretty confused day.”)

  The colors of the teenage trinity stood out in an otherwise saturated wide-screen palette. CinemaScope was still new, the rules staid. Ray broke them with his lustrous colors, and in other ways—with his insistence on complicated boom and crane shots, tilts and angles (the low-to-the-ground lens often peering up adoringly at Dean), the tight close-ups and quick shots of people in motion. All this would add to the film’s visual turbulence.