Nicholas Ray

by Patrick McGilligan

  The star took his sweet time working himself into a mood for major scenes. Dean’s moodiness didn’t make him dark or unpleasant, Ray insisted later. “Beautiful moods, wonderful moods, gay joyous happy moods,” the director recalled. “He had temperament. He was never temperamentally irresponsible. It was very workable temperament.”

  Ray worked with his star in deceptive ways, whispering, brainstorming together, and waiting for Dean to react to alternative suggestions. Unlike Natalie Wood, Dean didn’t need any physical modification (although Ray later claimed, “I taught him how to walk!”). The actor also knew how to agitate his own essence: Squirreled away for prolonged periods in his dressing room, Dean played his bongos, or drank from a jug of red wine, or listened to recordings of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries before appearing on the set and humming the same music on camera. Between takes he’d curl into himself, deep in preparation while Ray stalled on his behalf.

  The older cast and crew members were skeptical of Dean’s extreme modus operandi. One day, Ann Doran recalled, she and Jim Backus crept up from “way, way behind the camera” to watch Dean mired on concentration. “All of a sudden everything got quiet and Dean got down in this fetal position. We waited, and waited. Finally, he stood up, and they said, ‘Action!’ Jim and I practically fell on the floor laughing. We had never seen such a bunch of crap in our lives. We snuck out.”

  The camera crew were cautioned never to disturb Dean’s intense concentration by calling out the customary cues of “Speed!” or “Roll ’em!” “Nick wouldn’t go until Jimmy said so,” recalled Corey Allen. “And all Jimmy would ever do was nod his head; sometimes he wouldn’t go, with the crew standing around, maybe becoming angry.”

  Sometimes Dean would explode on camera in startling ways, smashing his hand so badly on the desk of a police officer when they shot the first scene of the picture that he had to be treated at the hospital. In the family living room scene, where Jim Stark argues with his parents over whether to tell the police about Buzz’s death, Dean leaped up the stairs to grab Jim Backus, pulling the middle-aged actor down the steps and dragging him across the living room, then hurling him over a chair and trying to choke him. Only the attempted choking was in the script. (“Welcome to the Elia Kazan hour!” Backus quipped later.)

  Dean was just as unpredictable in his quieter, more vulnerable scenes. He improvised his bit in the opening credits where he drunkenly lies down on a street with a mechanical monkey, cradling the toy. (The inspiration came at the end of a longer sequence in which Buzz’s gang attacked a stranger returning to his family with an armful of holiday gifts, including the monkey. Only Dean’s final improvisation remains in the film.)

  He turned his nervous laughing with Plato, in an alley outside the Starks’ garage after Buzz has died, into an erotically charged moment. And he unexpectedly prolonged his first kiss with Judy. Ray didn’t always know in advance what Dean was going to do. Sometimes Dean himself didn’t know.

  “Very often,” recalled Natalie Wood, “he [Dean] would kind of take over and almost say fuck off to Nick Ray.”

  “In my opinion,” said Dennis Hopper, “James Dean directed Rebel Without a Cause, from blocking all the scenes, setting the camera, starting the scene and saying ‘cut.’ Nicholas Ray intelligently allowed him to do this.”

  Dean was “practically a codirector,” Jim Backus said later. (“Jim Backus is an asshole,” Ray barked when asked about his comment.)

  It wasn’t the first time that Ray had formed a close partnership with his male lead. On Knock on Any Door and In a Lonely Place, it was Bogart and him. The Lusty Men, one of Ray’s proudest accomplishments to the end of his life, was shaped by the two-man club of Robert Mitchum and Ray. On Rebel Without a Cause the director drew his youthful cast into a circle of trust, but inside that circle there was the best two-man club of all: Ray and Dean. Sometimes Ray acted paternally toward the star. Other times he treated him like a brother, almost as though he were Dean’s twin. Some days he even dressed like Dean, in T-shirt and jeans and—an indulgence no Hollywood director had ever ventured before—bare feet. He treated Dean like an echo of himself.

  Ray and his star drew even closer as the filming progressed. They spent hours together on weekends, talking about forming an independent production company. The two of them stole time together in Mexico, watching road races they might incorporate into one of their future projects. When Dean decided he wanted to start seeing another psychiatrist besides Dr. Van der Heide he consulted Ray about who it should be.

  Together, they decided, they would produce films, even entire television series. Dean would direct some of the projects himself, drawing on the notes he was making while watching Ray shoot Rebel Without a Cause.

  Of all the unorthodox behavior Ray was known to have indulged in during the making of Rebel Without a Cause—holding auditions and rehearsals at home, directing in Levi’s and bare feet, plying underage teenagers with alcohol, smoking dope with James Dean—his “secret” romance with Natalie Wood was the least defensible. Today such behavior would invite charges of sexual harassment. Then, as now, it qualified as felony statutory rape.

  Though everyone pretended ignorance, the studio and most of the principal cast and crew knew, or suspected, that the director was carrying on an affair with his underage lead actress. “We all knew,” said Ann Doran in 1999. “Jim [Backus] and I talked about it.”

  Even Ray’s friends and supporters were discomfited by the affair. Increasingly, they felt, the director blurred the lines of morality if it was personally convenient. “I liked Nick,” said Leonard Rosenman years later, “but I didn’t like him. He was a weird guy.”

  Although Ray had a dozen roses delivered to Wood on the first day of filming, at times he treated the teenage actress inconsiderately in front of others—as though he were trying to distance himself or heighten her insecurity as she played her first romantic lead opposite America’s most celebrated rising star.

  One of Wood’s hallmarks as a child performer had been her uncanny ability to shed tears on cue. In her very first scene for Rebel Without a Cause, she was called upon to break down weeping, but Ray insisted on multiple takes and berated her efforts as inadequate, according to eyewitnesses. The director complained openly about Wood’s fake histrionics and insisted on more truthful emotions. “How did I ever hire her?” he grumbled aloud.

  Dean himself, the other member of the two-man club, played his share of mind games with his young leading lady. Although Wood revered Dean and longed to impress him, the star was stingy with pleasantries—except where Sal Mineo was concerned. “On the set Sal seemed always to be under Jimmy’s protective arm,” remembered Dennis Hopper, “which was the relationship that Jimmy created and that their parts demanded.”

  As the filming progressed, however, Ray and Dean both seemed to soften toward Wood. This dovetailed with the story line and corresponded with scenes in which the seemingly cold, brittle Judy is gradually won over to Jim Stark’s side. When Ray shot the mansion sequence—with Dean giving Wood her first big-screen kiss*—the set was cleared of nonessential personnel. All of a sudden, it seemed, Ray and Dean were both alert to Wood’s jitteriness. Dean treated his costar sweetly while shooting the scene, and afterward Ray congratulated her on giving the sort of “involuntary performance” he prized above all.

  Whether he was scolding or applauding Wood, Ray maintained his furtive romantic relationship with the teenage actress throughout the filming, even though a studio-appointed guardian was supposedly supervising her and Mineo during their time at the studio. Both she and Mineo were underage minors; both had to sit for school lessons for three hours daily.

  Ray and Wood had to be careful about their time alone, however, and that may have prompted a flare-up of jealousy on the director’s part. One day, the director buttonholed Wood’s mother and “snitched” to her, to use Dennis Hopper’s word, that Hopper was engaging in sexual relations with her daughter. Wood’s mother knew about her daughter
’s ongoing affair with Ray (she had spied on them from her parked car outside the Chateau), but she never interfered. After talking with Ray, though, Wood’s mother marched off to Warner’s executive offices and complained—about the nineteen-year-old Hopper, not the forty-three-year-old Ray. Hopper was warned away from Wood, though he insisted later their relationship continued in secret.

  The secret couldn’t be kept from Ray, though, and he began to harp on Hopper’s shortcomings, trimming his action and lines. After feeling maltreated during one scene, Hopper stormed into Ray’s trailer, demanding that they duke it out like men. Ray peered at the young man scornfully, telling him to grow up and start using his brains instead of his fists.

  One day, Hopper and another young player left the set during a break and missed their next call. Ray made a show of angrily shutting down the production. Though he pardoned the second actor, the director insisted that Warner Bros. should fire Hopper. Steve Trilling met with Ray and told him such a rash decision was precluded by Hopper’s contract. Hopper stayed on, but his role continued to shrink.

  He wasn’t alone. Others in Buzz’s gang faded into the background, becoming less individual characters than a Greek chorus responding to the events of the story with cries and echoes of dialogue, and with the restless choreography that sent them swirling and scattering in ceaseless motion, then swarming back to rejoin the main body. Ray added extras for certain scenes, then dropped them from retakes. Actors were filmed in small parts, later cut. Scenes were lengthened, or shortened, depending chiefly on Dean’s improvisations, which Ray relished from behind the camera.

  Some people behind the scenes felt that Ray acted indecisively at times, reassessing scenes and changing his mind at the last moment about what the actors should do, or how to frame or where to move the camera. The schedule lost a little time when the film switched to color, and the production kept falling further behind as staging and dialogue were tinkered with, the camerawork grew more elaborate, and Wood and Mineo became unavailable because of restrictions on the work hours for minors.

  Ray prided himself on adapting well to production pressures, but in this case the constant changes did affect the timetable—and his originally planned ending for Rebel Without a Cause. The director had envisioned a climax in which the panicked Plato climbs atop the planetarium dome, causing the alarmed police to shoot him down.* One problem was getting the actor up there safely; an expensive replica would have to be constructed in the studio. Ray showed makeshift coverage of the scene to studio officials on May 23, just a few days before the last scheduled day of photography. But the studio fretted about the extra cost and time involved, and producer David Weisbart agreed. Ray’s ending had to be scaled back.

  Stewart Stern devised a compromise, with Plato waving his empty gun at police from the steps of the planetarium. As the police mow Plato down, Jim shouts out desperately: “I got the bullets! Look!” It was a line Ray insisted was written by Odets and paid for out of the director’s own pocket.

  Bereft, Jim zippers the jacket Plato is wearing—his jacket, which he’d given to him inside the planetarium—murmuring a line with a hint of Wisconsin: “He was always cold . . .”

  After that, however, came an unusual postscript: Ray gave himself a Hitchcock-type cameo at the very end of the picture. Stern fought the idea of a cameo tooth and nail, but the director insisted on the moment. As the ambulance carrying Plato’s body leaves and the police cars drive away, a trenchcoated figure toting a briefcase is glimpsed from high overhead, walking through the crime scene toward the planetarium as the sun rises.

  “He was determined to do it,” recalled Stern. “You can see it in his very determined walk.” The figure’s identity is never explained, but it was Nicholas Ray, the director, putting his stamp on the final shot of the film, the one that would become his lasting testament.

  After a handful of inserts and retakes, the filming of Rebel Without a Cause ended at two forty-five A.M. on May 27, 1955. The shoot had taken two months and forty-seven shooting days. “We didn’t really want to admit it was all over,” the director recalled years later. Ray, Natalie Wood, and Dennis Hopper piled into Ray’s Cadillac with two of his assistants and followed James Dean on his motorcycle from Burbank to Googi’s, a deli kitty-corner from the Chateau Marmont, where they enjoyed a late-night celebratory feast.

  During the last days of filming, Warner Bros. had circulated a list of the tentative credits to principal cast members and personnel. The result shocked Stewart Stern. The screenwriter had been hearing reports from the set that the director was encouraging Dean and the other young actors to stray from the script when the spirit moved them. At one point during the production Stern even wrote a formal letter of protest to Steve Trilling, complaining about the “bit by bit emasculation” of his work.

  Many of Dean’s impromptu touches invaluably enriched the film (such as his side-of-the-mouth crack about children in the deserted mansion sequence—“Drown ’em like puppies!”—a nod to both Jim Backus’s character Mr. Magoo and Plato’s puppy-killing spree). But other additions or subtractions sanctioned by Ray were “inappropriate,” according to Stern, including a number of too-explicit “on-the-nose lines and some so sentimental that they wrecked the scenes they occurred in and pulled the audience right off the screen.”

  Stern hated it when Plato’s kindly black housekeeper explained to the intake officer in the juvenile hall opening that “Plato was a Greek philosopher” because it was “wildly out of character for that woman.” He hated it just as much when Plato blurted to Jim Stark, “Gee . . . if only you could have been my father . . . ,” in the garage alley scene, or when Mrs. Stark stares into the camera from the backseat of a police car and utters lines cribbed directly from a Los Angeles Times article about a failed chickie run that Ray carried around in his pocket. “I don’t understand,” Jim’s mother says. “You pray for your children. You read about things like this happening to other families, but you never dream it could happen to yours.” (“Rebel’s most hackneyed moment,” according to Frascella and Weisel.)

  Even worse, Stern felt, was “Nick’s assault on the dignity of the picture’s ending by filling the father’s mouth with treacle so he can burble out lines of repentance like ‘Stand up, son, and I’ll stand up with you. Let me try to be as strong as you want me to be . . .’ ”

  Now, in late May, Stern learned for the first time Ray would be taking sole story credit. Stern would be credited only with the screenplay. Stern was astonished to learn that Ray had written anything at all for the film. He had never read Ray’s treatment, “The Blind Run,” or even been informed about its existence. On Teresa, Stern’s first film, he’d been dismayed to be nominated for his costory but not his solo script; now he worried that the same thing would happen with Rebel—that the story would be honored while the script was dismissed as cut-and-paste.

  Moreover, Irving Shulman’s name had been entirely left off the proposed credits. From Stern’s point of view, “Irving first, and then I, had, in that order, created the story line, the personalities of all the characters and all the incidents in the script.”

  Rather than “leave to chance, or nervousness,” the way he presented his case, the scenarist sat down and wrote a three-page letter to Ray, taking it to a private meeting with the director at the Chateau Marmont. Stern read the letter aloud to Ray and then handed it to him.

  Ray became “very silent and very glum,” according to Stern, “and then told me about his ‘secret’ deal with Warner’s: that upon submitting the ‘treatment’ to them he would be guaranteed solo story credit and that now that was part of his contract. I told him that I hadn’t even known there had been a treatment, or certainly what was in it.”

  Stern asked to see Ray’s treatment, but the director refused to hand over the seventeen pages. At the very least, Stern argued, Shulman deserved an adaptation credit, and Ray agreed to support that change.* But Ray still refused to share the story credit.

  “He
then asked me what story ideas I considered myself to have contributed to the screenplay and I went through the list,” Stern said. “He dismissed each in turn and professed to have dated notes that proved that each had been his idea first.”

  One particular bone of contention was the story’s twenty-four-hour time-structure, which Stern claimed as his brainstorm. The writer could pinpoint the very day when he first had raised the idea. “I was glad that you finally realized what I had on my mind,” Ray answered flatly.

  Finally, Ray said, if Stern was permitted to share his story credit, he should be allowed to share the screenplay credit. Stern angrily rejected that suggestion, telling Ray that he’d never written a line of the script. “Then no deal,” said Ray. “The credits stay as they are.”

  They shook hands and parted, leaving Stern forever outraged at what he deemed a moral and professional betrayal—but also forever grateful, as he wrote in his letter to Ray, for “one of the happiest and most challenging episodes of my creative life.”

  Pleased that Ray had finished Rebel Without a Cause in time for James Dean to report on schedule for Giant, Warner Bros. bestowed a sizable bonus on the director. Perhaps inspired by Dean, Ray splurged on a Mercedes 300 SL. He certainly had Dean in his thoughts when he spent the rest of his bonus, optioning the rights to a story called “Heroic Love” and putting a little money into another story “about a Mexican road race,” which topped the long list of projects he and his Rebel partner envisioned in their future.

  Giant had started ahead of Dean, but director George Stevens was waiting on location in Marfa, Texas, for the star and two of his Rebel buddies, Dennis Hopper and Sal Mineo. Natalie Wood was due in Monument Valley, where she would play a young girl kidnapped by Indians in John Ford’s The Searchers. As Gavin Lambert pointed out, by the time John Wayne picked Wood up in his arms and said, “Let’s go home, Debbie,” the company had returned to Los Angeles, shooting the scene in a Griffith Park canyon a few miles away from the observatory.