Incredibly, Ray himself was due to start directing another film by early July: “Tambourine,” the new working title of the Gypsy love story that had been Ray’s pet unfulfilled project at RKO. The Rebel Without a Cause delays had shoved the two production schedules up against one another, and Ray should have postponed “Tambourine.” But for the last nine months he had been spending exhorbitantly, throwing parties and spreading cash around to young people—lavish gestures he couldn’t afford.
Too soon, he would sorely need money. One contract clause Lew Wasserman hadn’t wangled was keeping Ray on salary for the postproduction of Rebel Without a Cause. This is where it hurt him not to be a producer, or even coproducer, of the film. Although he worked closely with David Weisbart and editor William H. Ziegler, a veteran of several Hitchcock movies, certain scenes in the script had stretched out during the filming, and the picture was going to run long. The cutting involved subtle as well as obvious choices, weighing numerous alternate takes and multiple versions of scenes, deciding which privileged moments would be saved or dropped. Moreover, countless lines of dialogue had been lost or mumbled by the cast, and the dubbing and looping chores ahead were prodigious.
Panicked, Ray asked for more time and pay. He wanted more power over the rough cut, which Jack Warner was demanding to see as soon as possible in order to push Rebel into theaters while the excitement over East of Eden was still fresh. Warner’s reply didn’t come fast enough, though, and on June 7 Ray dashed off an ill-advised “Dear Jack” letter that didn’t endear him to the top man.
“My name is Nick Ray,” the letter stated, “and I just finished making a picture for you called Rebel Without a Cause. I thought maybe you’d forgotten my name because the last time we met any closer than bowing distance was in your office late at night and you wished you’d never met me and I thought you should have felt just the opposite.”
More tactfully, Ray said he remembered “every important frame” of Rebel Without a Cause “as if it had been printed on my skin,” and he promised a “wonderful show” for Warner if only he could get a “limited” extension on the editing schedule.
Warner stood firm, however. He didn’t want to extend Ray’s time or salary. In addition to commercial pressures to release the picture, the mogul was now facing political pressures: In the third week of June, Warner was due in Washington, D.C., to testify before a subcommittee chaired by U.S. Senator Estes Kefauver, who was leading a crusade against violent films about juvenile delinquency.
“We’ve had some calls on Rebel Without a Cause,” Kefauver told the studio chief.
“Whoever called must be working with radar,” Warner said. “I haven’t seen it myself yet.”
That was true. With a host of important editing and postproduction decisions yet to be made, Warner’s private memos to Weisbart show that he was pressing his staff producer to stem Ray’s “arty” impulses where necessary. Weisbart did his best to mediate; he also did his best to incorporate Ray’s “cutting notes.” While the director sneaked time in the editing room, he was also holding script and casting meetings for “Tambourine,” aiming for a delayed July start at Columbia.
Warner sat for the rough cut on June 30 and pronounced it “excellent,” with “Dean beyond comprehension.” By that date, however, with editing and postproduction touches still to come, Ray was forced to move on to “Tambourine.” Leonard Rosenman was busy working on the music, fusing classical themes with jazz in a memorable score that would anticipate West Side Story.
Only a contradictory personality like Ray could have followed the budding personal triumph of Rebel Without a Cause with the near-total disaster of the Gypsy love story.
Lew Wasserman had organized a lucrative package, with Ray as director; Jane Russell as the star; her husband, football player Bob Waterfield, as executive producer; and former MCA agent Harry Tatelman as producer of the film. Perhaps the only excuse for junking Walter Newman’s script, which had been praised in the past by everybody who had read it, was to boost the package with a new writer, another MCA-Wasserman client.
The new writer, Jesse Lasky Jr., was a veteran of Alfred Hitchcock and Cecil B. DeMille films, and the son of silent-era pioneer Jesse Lasky, a cofounder of Paramount Pictures. Lasky had an unforgettable first appointment with Ray at the Chateau Marmont. “I heard jazz coming out as I approached the door,” Lasky remembered. “I went in, and the first time I saw Nick he was dancing with another man. The other man was a young prizefighter, and the two of them were dancing cheek-to-cheek around the room to jazz. Nick waved me to sit down and waved the servant with a drink, and I sat there and watched the two of them dance. . . . They danced beautifully, very graceful guys.”
When the director finished his cheek-to-cheek, he and Lasky shared drinks and a long, digressive conversation about “Tambourine.” Ray saw the film as a semimusical: Gypsy guys dancing with other Gypsy guys. Lasky didn’t blink at this; nor did he hesitate when Ray told him he could start work on the revised script tomorrow. “I knew the minute you sat down in that chair,” explained Ray, “that you were the right writer for me.”
Without a Dean to partner with, however, the new picture didn’t really engage the director’s imagination. Though he kept up an ebullient façade, after Rebel Without a Cause fell behind him, Ray slipped into a sort of postpartum depression. The director worked as if by rote, and the results were largely uninspired.
Ray delegated to others what he might have done himself under less hectic circumstances. He dispatched Lasky to meet the king of the Gypsies in Los Angeles. (“Talk to him, get all those ideas, watch what you see, make your mental notes . . .”) He sent Roger Donoghue to New York on a similar errand, asking him to brief (and be briefed by) Jean Evans and tape-record a few street Gypsies. Later the charming former boxer actually pitched in on the screenplay, collaborating with the director on the elaborate, pivotal “whip dance” wedding scene.
But Evans’s vaunted research, and Ray’s endless study of Gypsy-ceremony photographs, fell by the wayside in the rush to get the script and cast and crew ready for the cameras. The revised script moved the story from New York City to a nondescript urban locale, with most of the film to be shot on artificial sets in the studio.
Later, Ray said that he went ahead with the Gypsy film out of loyalty to Russell, who had long ago agreed to play the hot-blooded lass forced into an arranged marriage with the footloose brother of the king of the Gypsies. It was also loyalty to Jean Evans; his first wife got story credit and her only Hollywood paycheck.
Ray had originally touted Marlon Brando as the brother of the Gypsy king, a free-spirited itinerant dancer. Then when Brando became untouchable, the director pursued Robert Mitchum. Ultimately Ray had to settle for Cornel Wilde, with Luther Adler, formerly of the Group Theatre, as the king contriving to enthrone his brother before his death.
Although Ray tried holding a freewheeling rehearsal in his bungalow, à la Rebel Without a Cause, he couldn’t cast the same golden spell over these nonteenagers. The James Dean film had been a watershed for him in many ways—not least because he started to break his own rules of not drinking or taking drugs while on the job. Working at home at the Chateau Marmont had blurred the line. Now Wilde, for one, was thrown by Ray’s often “broken and slurred” speech. “A lot of what he said was incomprehensible, or at least it was way up on cloud nine as far as I was concerned,” said Wilde, who had just, for the first time, directed one of his own films. “I know Nick drank some but I think he was on something else too. His expressions were so vague that frequently I didn’t know what he was getting at.”
The photography finally got going on July 25. It was another CinemaScope venture, with an explosion of color in the costuming and decor compensating for the drab script. While Ray guided Russell and Wilde through their Gypsy paces, Leonard Rosenman scored the music for Rebel Without a Cause and David Weisbart, consulting with Ray, polished the Dean picture to a gloss.
A week or two later, as the d
irector was still guiding song-and-dance numbers for the Gypsy love story, Natalie Wood ended her work for John Ford—and, around the same time, her romance with Ray. According to Gavin Lambert, the final blow to their waning relationship came when the teenager missed her menstrual period. Wood placed a urine sample in the refrigerator of the director’s Chateau Marmont bungalow one night before a pregnancy test; stumbling about in the wee hours, Ray mistook her urine for a glass of fruit juice, thirstily gulping it down. The actress, who had just celebrated her seventeenth birthday, took the opportunity to break off their months-long affair. Fortunately, it turned out Wood wasn’t pregnant.
In spite of his mild friction with the studio boss, Ray’s special relationship with James Dean gave him the upper hand with Jack Warner. In just a few months’ time, Dean had catapulted from unknown quantity to star with an unlimited future; the studio was hoping that Dean would cooperate with the publicity campaign and appear in future Warner Bros. pictures.
The studio was also aware of Ray’s rising reputation in Europe and of his ease with the press. The director had been trying to get overseas for several years, planning ill-destined film projects set in Italy with Humphrey Bogart and in Portugal with Joan Crawford. Now Warner’s arranged for him to travel first-class to Europe, to screen Rebel Without a Cause for European censors and distributors and promote the film in interviews. He was scheduled to leave days after calling the last take on “Tambourine.”
By late August, Dean had finished most of his work on Giant, just as Ray was about to depart for New York. The two met for dinner. The star complained about director George Stevens’s old-fashioned methods, saying how much he missed the creative flow, the circle of trust, that Ray had engendered during the making of Rebel Without a Cause. For several hours they talked over their future projects: They thought they might start with “Heroic Love,” a story by an Arizona English professor, Edward Loomis, revolving around a Lusty Men–type triangle of an older judge, the judge’s younger wife, and a lawyer.
A few hours after they’d said good-bye, Dean turned up again, at three in the morning, at the Chateau Marmont. Elizabeth Taylor had given her costar a Siamese cat as a parting gift, and he wanted to borrow one of Ray’s books about cats. After Rebel Without a Cause was released, Ray and Dean planned a much-needed vacation. “We had our holiday place to stay in Nicaragua all picked out,” Ray told a film journal years later.
The first preview of Rebel Without a Cause, which Dean attended and Ray missed because of a trip, was set for September 1 in Huntington Park, a suburb of Los Angeles south of downtown. The world premiere was scheduled for late October in New York.
Chapter Nine
Circle of Isolation
1955–1957
Just as Ray once turned his eyes from New York to Hollywood, he now began to pivot toward Europe. Clippings of his overseas coverage kept him apprised of his growing stature in France as a major screen artist who could do no wrong. The director consciously sprinkled a little French into Rebel Without a Cause, and after shooting the erotically charged alley exchange between Jim Stark and Plato—where Plato invites Jim to stay overnight at his house (“we could talk in the morning and we could have breakfast”) and gushes that he wishes Jim could be his father—Ray told James Dean that he’d handcrafted the scene to titillate his Parisian admirers. “I didn’t think anyone would pick up on it in the States,” the director said in an interview years later.
France beckoned, and in early September Ray took passage on a transatlantic ocean liner that would give him several days of needed rest during the crossing. Once in Paris he checked into the luxurious Prince de Galles Hotel on Avenue George V just off the Champs-Elysées, an establishment favored by Hollywood visitors. Though he distanced himself from “Tambourine,” leaving the Gypsy film behind for postproduction, Ray threw himself into selling Rebel Without a Cause, which he foresaw as his signature work.
In Paris, Ray felt buoyant, mixing invisibly with the boulevardiers while holding court with cinephiles at Les Deux Magots. The director was their auteurist rebel, his films their cause. Though he had a sense of what to expect, Ray was nonetheless taken aback by their seemingly bottomless praise. When one Frenchman raved to him about Johnny Guitar—which Ray himself considered a troublesome career blip he would rather have forgotten—he was stunned. “He almost persuaded me it was a great movie,” he joked with Gavin Lambert a few months later.
Back in California, Rebel Without a Cause aced its first previews, meeting the studio’s highest expectations. Jack Warner, Steve Trilling, and producer David Weisbart sent telegrams to Ray reporting the positive audience response cards and the mounting anticipation for the film. Without Ray, they made final trims in precious sections the director had obsessed over, including the knife-fight sequence and the sexually inflected alley scene, but they did so, as Trilling insisted in his communications with Ray, for length and “without losing any scenes or values.”
After a brief stay in Paris, Ray flew to London to meet with Arthur Abeles of the London office of Warner Bros. The United Kingdom was the single most lucrative foreign territory for Hollywood, but British censors were strict about films that mixed violence and young people. Blackboard Jungle had preceded Rebel Without a Cause in England, stirring controversy and losing footage to the censors. Ray had no qualms about bad-mouthing Richard Brooks’s more realistic take on juvenile delinquency, helping the London team craft a strategy touting Rebel as “sincere and intelligent” compared to the MGM film. While in London, Ray also made a round of the British studios, already thinking of making a picture in Europe someday soon.
Ray was still visiting London on September 30, 1955, when James Dean, chain-smoking Chesterfields as he sped down the highway in his new silver Porsche 550 Spyder, smashed into a 1950 Ford turning left into his path at the intersection of routes 466 and 41 near Cholame, California. Rushed by ambulance to a Paso Robles hospital, Dean was officially pronounced dead at six twenty P.M. In the predawn hours, the telephone rang in Ray’s room at the Savoy Hotel. It was Roger Donoghue in America.
“Jimmy’s dead,” Donoghue told the director.
There was a long, heavy pause. “Are you sure?” Ray finally responded.
Donoghue said that he’d double-checked with the wire services before calling. The charismatic twenty-four-year-old star of Rebel Without a Cause, upon whom Ray had pinned so many hopes, had been crushed beneath his steering wheel, suffering a broken neck, multiple fractures, and internal injuries. He was dead on the scene. The sole passenger in Dean’s car, and the driver of the Ford, both survived their injuries.
“I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” Ray said before hanging up.
Ray fled to Frankfurt, where he met up with Hanne Axmann, who’d moved back to Germany. “Hi, darling,” he said, getting off the plane, “Jimmy’s dead.” He broke down weeping, and he sobbed on and off throughout the day as they drove to Axmann’s country house, stopping along the way at “every inn” for “a Steinhager or something to drink,” in her words.
He tried a little sightseeing and visited Göttingen University to meet the writer of a book he expressed interest in filming. Mostly, however, he spent two weeks in drink and tears.
One day, Ray and Axmann drove to the eastern border to watch the first trainload of repatriated German prisoners returning home from ten years of slave labor in Russia—men whose trials had left them looking “older than their parents.” Impulsively Ray spent two days photographing the ex-soldiers and interviewing them, with Axmann as his interpreter. “If I can think of a constructive way of handling the material so it will fit into a picture, it’s certainly a stark background,” the director informed Hedda Hopper in an exclusive for her column, already spinning future plans and keeping his name in the limelight. “I feel there’s something to say about it.”
Returning by plane to London, the director sat through Rebel Without a Cause with the top British censorship official, Arthur Watkins. “Much as I love the pict
ure,” Ray scribbled on a Lufthansa postcard to Trilling, “it’s a little like going to a funeral, as you can imagine.”
Dean’s abrupt death did not stop Warner Bros.’s plans for the film’s elaborate October 26 world premiere in New York City. “Possibly if the timing had been different we could have held back the release,” Trilling wrote sympathetically to Ray, “but publicity had already been planted and it was impossible to stop the forward movement without creating comment.”
The director arrived in New York on the Sunday before the occasion. He was booked into the St. Moritz overlooking Central Park. Roger Donoghue picked him up at the airport at ten A.M., but Ray had drank steadily all during the flight and was thoroughly soused. Donoghue had seen the director stumbling and slurring before, but this time was different. “I think it was all over on that September night of 1955,” Donoghue said later, meaning the momentum, or perhaps pleasure, of Ray’s career.
The premiere went smoothly, although the big-city critics were divided over Ray’s teenage delinquent manifesto. With its fervent emotionalism, Rebel defied easy categorization, and some of its moments bordered on camp or soap opera. Wanda Hale of the New York Daily News hedged her three-star review with complaints about the cardboard adult characters. Alton Cook of the New York World-Telegram described the acting of the teenage trinity as outstanding but said the story went to “unacceptable extremes.” Despite memorable performances, wrote Archer Winsten in the New York Post, the film was studded with clichés. William Zinsser of the New York Herald Tribune called Dean the saving grace of a “turgid melodrama.”
Good, bad, or mixed, the reviews would not matter to the extraordinary reception accorded the film by the public. Ray saw his usual equation reversed: Critics may have been underwhelmed, but ordinary people took the film to heart. Capitalizing on the surge of interest in Dean after his death, Rebel Without a Cause was the rare Nicholas Ray film to spread like a wave among audiences across America. The film became the eleventh-biggest moneymaker of 1956 and Warner’s highest-grossing picture of the year. No other picture Ray directed had scored such a bull’s-eye with audiences.
Nicholas Ray Page 39
