Nicholas Ray

by Patrick McGilligan

  Indeed, no other film he directed was ever rated so highly among his film industry peers. Early in 1956, when the Oscar nominations were announced, Rebel Without a Cause became the only film Ray directed to be nominated for any major Academy Awards.* Lew Wasserman’s foresight—and Stewart Stern’s apprehensions—were confirmed when the film drew a Best Motion Picture Story nomination, based on Ray’s seventeen-page treatment, “The Blind Run.” The film’s screenplay, by contrast, was overlooked.

  Disappointingly, Dean’s performance in Rebel was slighted in the Best Actor category; instead he was nominated for his breakthrough under Elia Kazan in East of Eden. But a Best Supporting Actress nomination for Natalie Wood validated Ray’s stewardship—and manipulation—of the young actress, while a Best Supporting Actor nomination for Sal Mineo affirmed Ray’s discovery and sensitive handling of a prior unknown.

  Dean lost to Ernest Borgnine in his category* and Rebel didn’t win a single award on Oscar night, but the three nominations stamped the picture within the trade as Ray’s highest achievement. That is also the view of posterity. Today, Rebel Without a Cause continues to entertain, fascinate, and inspire. The film that best captures Dean’s tormented sensibility, it endures as a unique touchstone of its era. And for Ray himself, inarguably, it was the rare moment in his career when everything had come together.

  The director didn’t think the film was perfect. It had nagging faults. “I didn’t like the way Nick Ray treated the parents in Rebel Without a Cause,” Elia Kazan wrote in his memoir. “I get angry just thinking about that film,” Orson Welles once declared, believing the picture had been overpraised.

  And the French, perversely, tended to rank it lower than some other Ray films, the underdog movies that must beg for attention. (Rebel Without a Cause is “more explicit, less mysterious” than these films, in Bernard Eisenschitz’s words.) But as Ray himself often said, it was his most satisfying film, his favorite.

  “We deem Nicholas Ray to be one of the greatest—[Jacques] Rivette would say the greatest, and I would willingly endorse that—of the new generation of American filmmakers, the generation which only came on the scene after the war,” rhapsodized Eric Rohmer in his lengthy appreciation of Rebel Without a Cause in Cahiers du Cinéma. “In spite of his obvious lack of pretensions, he is one of the few to possess his own style, his own vision of the world, his own poetry; he is an auteur, a great auteur.”

  Fate robbed the “great auteur” of immediate pride in his greatness, however. His pride was tempered by what-ifs. He tasted more bile than pleasure. Ray could think only of the fallen star, the dead man-child, his almost-son, blood brother, twin, his echo, the cat man.

  Every interviewer asked him about James Dean, and the publicity never stopped. While on the East Coast, Ray was comforted by Jean Evans and Connie Ernst (now married and known as Connie Bessie) before returning briefly to Los Angeles and the Chateau Marmont to lease his bungalow to an actor for several months. He told people he was returning to Europe on behalf of Warner Bros. but intended to stay there for an extended period. He met with actor James Mason, who had a project at 20th Century-Fox that he wanted Ray to direct, but Ray wasn’t sure; despite his familiar smile, he went about in a blue-funk daze.

  In Hollywood he sold the Mercedes that he’d bought to use touring around Mexico with Dean (“never drove it”) and checked in on postproduction for the Gypsy love story, which had suffered another generic retitling and become Hot Blood. (“What a title!” he exclaimed to Movie magazine in 1963. “It’s hard for me to say it.”) It was nearly Christmas, but any joy of the season had been drained out of him—and out of Hot Blood.

  Then he headed back to New York, where he tried disporting, by turns, with Shelley Winters and Jayne Mansfield. When Ray departed by ocean liner again for Europe, Mansfield was there to see him off at the dock, later telling a columnist that she rated the “tall, attractive” director among America’s ten most fascinating bachelors, for his “rare combination of brawn, brains and achievement.” (The others on the actress’s list, including heartthrob singer Johnny Ray and fashion designer Oleg Cassini, were no slouches.)

  Back in Europe, Ray spent two weeks with the loving and sympathetic Hanne Axmann in a Munich hotel. But there was also work to be done, and he once again put his salesmanship at the disposal of Warner Bros., helping to plan the Paris and London openings of Rebel. In London, Ray failed at one important mission: The British censor, Arthur Watkins, insisted on snipping six minutes out of the Dean film, including bits from the knife-fight scene and the scene where Jim Stark throttles his father—and even then granted the film an “X” certificate, for over-sixteen moviegoers only. Warner’s London emissary, Arthur Abeles, blamed himself for relying too much on Ray, who “cut absolutely no ice” with Watkins while also making impolitic statements about censorship to the British press.

  Ray did score a direct hit on another target, however. The director went to a New Year’s Eve party hoping to meet Gavin Lambert, the young critic who’d rescued They Live by Night from oblivion, now the editor of Sight and Sound, the prestigious journal of the British Film Institute. Just before midnight, Lambert arrived to be ushered into the presence of “a man with powerful shoulders, a leonine head and graying blond hair, very handsome but gloomy,” standing alone in a far corner of the crowded room, seeming “to create a circle of isolation around himself.” Lambert instantly recognized Ray from photographs.

  “I am a new director of very remarkable talent,” Ray said, introducing himself jocularly with words quoted from Lambert’s own review of his debut film—and taking a long look at the thin, ascetic scribe, with his rooster’s tuft of hair. After singing “Auld Lang Syne” with the other guests, Ray said, “Let’s get out of here,” and escorted Lambert to a chauffeured limousine. At the Hyde Park Hotel they settled in the sitting room of Ray’s suite, drinking vodka and discussing Ray’s films, especially Rebel Without a Cause (which Lambert had seen at an advance screening and liked) and James Dean.

  “You can imagine how I felt . . . ,” Ray said, groping to express his grief over Dean’s death, pouring himself another vodka. He never did finish the sentence.

  Changing the subject, Ray asked if Lambert had seen and enjoyed In a Lonely Place. Yes, the Englishman said, and he appreciated “its ambiguity, the way it left you wondering how the Bogart character was going to spend the rest of his life.”

  Ray perked up at this discerning appraisal of the Bogart film. “Exactly,” he replied. “Will he become a hopeless drunk, or kill himself, or seek psychiatric help? Those have always been my personal options, by the way.”

  Before Lambert could digest this unsettling remark, Ray switched subjects again. He started talking about Johnny Guitar, the ordeal of making that movie, what a monster Joan Crawford was—and how amusing the French were, praising the film to the skies.

  Then Ray wanted to hear about Another Sky, a low-budget love story, set partly in Morocco, that Lambert himself had written and directed a year before. Ray wanted a screening arranged for him right away—the next day. The director had meetings all morning, followed by a lunch date, so three o’clock would be optimal, Ray said. “Then he got up, rifled through various scripts and papers on a table,” according to Lambert, “and handed me a photocopy of a New Yorker article,” a story that was the basis of the picture James Mason wanted him to direct.

  “I want you to read this and tell me what you think about it at the screening tomorrow,” Ray said, heading for the bathroom that adjoined the bedroom in his suite.

  He paused at the door, almost as an afterthought, and turned to ask, “How old are you?”

  Thirty-one, answered Lambert.

  “I’m forty-four,” Ray mused. “Not quite old enough to be your father.”

  “What was that supposed to mean?” wondered Lambert, who was homosexual and comfortable with his sexuality. Ever since Ray’s teasing opening remark at the New Year’s party, Lambert had been trying to decide if Ray was
homosexual; the director seemed to be striking an intentionally “flirtatious note” with him. Ten minutes later he looked at his watch; hours had passed, it was three thirty A.M., and Lambert began to wonder something else: “Why hadn’t Ray come back from the bathroom?”

  Perhaps he’d fallen asleep. Lambert peered into the bathroom, but it was vacant. Then he peeked through the bedroom door, which was not quite closed.

  “As I reached it,” wrote Lambert years later, “the door opened further and I collided with Nick on his way back, naked except for his underpants.” They fell into each other’s arms and made love.

  Afterward, Ray was talkative. “An hour or so later,” recalled Lambert, “he said that he wasn’t really homosexual, not really even bisexual, as he’d been to bed with a great many women in his life, but only two or three men.”

  That would make Lambert number three or four but the only one whose identity is definite, because he wrote extensively about his relationship with Ray in his autobiographical book Mainly About Lindsay Anderson.

  Near dawn, the Englishman stumbled home to the flat he shared with fellow critic and budding filmmaker Lindsay Anderson. After catching a few hours of sleep, Lambert went off to work at the British Film Institute, only pretending to busy himself at his editor’s job. “All I could think about was the fact that I’d fallen deeply in love with Nick,” he wrote. “So, as I discovered later, had scores of other people.”

  To Lambert’s relief, Ray praised Another Sky after the screening—“it’s got a strange kind of concentration”—and back they went the next day by limousine to the Hyde Park Hotel. En route they discussed the New Yorker article “Ten Feet Tall,” a nonfiction account of a New York history teacher, suffering from a degenerative artery disease, who is treated with the new drug cortisone. The drug alleviates his symptoms but transforms the history teacher into a manic-depressive whose aberrant behavior wreaks havoc on his family.

  Ray said he’d just signed a two-picture contract with 20th Century-Fox. A film based on “Ten Feet Tall” was slated to be the first of the two. Ray had signed the contract only after the studio included, as part of the deal, a first-class return ticket to Europe after the two pictures were completed. “I want you to come out to Hollywood and work with me on it,” the director told Lambert in his suite, pouring himself a generous glass of vodka.

  Before Lambert could recover from his astonishment, Ray said that the next day he had to dash off to Paris, where Rebel Without a Cause was going to be shown to journalists under its French title, La fureur de vivre (“The Fury to Live”), and thence to Berlin for similar events and publicity interviews covering the German market. He said he’d return to London for the official press screening of Rebel Without a Cause in a week’s time. After hugging Lambert, the director ambled into his bedroom and closed the door: No lovemaking this time.

  From Paris, he phoned to tell Lambert that the French were cooing over the James Dean picture, with one critic comparing it to the “masterful” Johnny Guitar. Lambert admitted that he, like Ray, could never understand why Cahiers du Cinéma critics took the Joan Crawford Western so seriously. “Something about inner solitude,” Ray explained wryly, adding, “I miss you.”

  Lambert heard nothing more from Ray until his rendezvous with the director at the London screening. Again, Ray told him that he would be “leaving tomorrow,” but this time he asked Lambert to drive him to the airport, where he was due to catch a flight to America en route to Hollywood.

  The London screening had gone well, though the atmosphere was more restrained than in Paris. “The British critics had been very polite,” recalled Lambert. “He [Ray] wondered if they really liked the film. Some of them told me they did, I assured him, but critics here feel they have to safeguard their integrity by keeping a distance from filmmakers.”

  “A virginity complex . . . ?” Ray asked mischievously.

  On the way to the airport the next day, Ray talked enthusiastically about “Ten Feet Tall” and assured Lambert that he was going to like California a lot after he moved there. The director said he’d already asked 20th Century-Fox to prepare a green card for his new assistant. Ray offered Lambert advice on filling out his visa application. Then he shifted to personal ground. “He gave me a lecture on the need to disguise my homosexuality in Hollywood,” recalled Lambert. “A butch handshake, he said, is very important, then demonstrated a bone-crushing one, and gave his startling smile.”

  The director told Lambert he didn’t need to see him to the gate. The two said a hurried good-bye, then Ray turned to go. Before he disappeared he called out to Lambert: “Will you bring me a couple of bottles of marc de Bourgogne?” he asked plaintively. “I can’t get it out there.”

  Medical correspondent Berton Rouche’s case study of cortisone treatment gone amok, “Ten Feet Tall,” ran over twenty magazine pages in the September 10, 1955, issue of the New Yorker.

  After receiving a Best Oscar nomination for playing Judy Garland’s alcoholic has-been husband in A Star Is Born, the debonair, mellifluous-voiced British actor James Mason had been wooed by 20th Century-Fox to produce and direct his own pictures. The actor had invested months in diligently preparing a remake of Jane Eyre, but the studio canceled the project at the eleventh hour. Mason was eager to get something produced; he didn’t care about directing. After reading “Ten Feet Tall,” Mason seized on the article and got permission from the studio to purchase the screen rights. He worked closely with Cyril Hume and Richard Maibaum on a first-draft script written without Ray’s direct involvement; it was completed before Christmas 1955.

  The senior partner of the writing team, in age and reputation, Hume was a former New York reporter who had written his first, acclaimed novel at the age of twenty-three. He’d logged much of the 1920s in England and Italy writing lost-generation novels that earned him comparisons to F. Scott Fitzgerald, before moving to Hollywood with the explosion of “talkies” in 1930. His best-known credits were on Astaire-Rogers and Tarzan vehicles before MGM teamed him with Maibaum, a newly arrived playwright from New York, in 1936. The two had worked intermittently together since then, their scripts including a 1949 version of The Great Gatsby for Paramount.

  Hume and Maibaum took the true-life husband and wife interviews that shaped “Ten Feet Tall” and created a drama about a fictional family. In the original article, the schoolteacher, his wife, and their eleven-year-old son had lived in Queens; the writers moved the family to a suburb in a small, unidentified American city. But the planned community in their script bore a distinct resemblance to New Rochelle, where Hume had been born and raised: “a huge residential housing development,” in the words of their script, “the individual houses” opposing “the vast, underlying uniformity by being bright, modern, attractive, and superficially varied in design.”

  Besides creating the main characters, Hume and Maibaum established the story premise (the spells of pain suffered by the teacher, which prompt doctors to diagnose him with a rare inflammation of the arteries and prescribe cortisone) and the sequence of events that ensues: the mood swings and the downward spiral of the narrative. Their script even included some of the film’s most memorable dialogue. When the teacher suffers his worst psychotic meltdown and decides to kill his own son, for example, he recites from the Bible the story of God asking Abraham to sacrifice his only child, Isaac, as a “burnt offering.” But God stopped Abraham, his wife tearfully reminds him. Ed’s blasphemous rejoinder—“God was wrong!”—is in the Hume-Maibaum draft.

  Production Code officials approved the Hume-Maibaum script with only minor quibbles, which were easily resolved in later versions. The studio then made a halfhearted effort to recruit an American type to play Ed, the schoolteacher, briefly pursuing Richard Widmark for the part. But Mason had grown attached to the story, working closely with Hume and Maibaum, and he thought he might play the teacher after all, finessing the American accent. If Mason was going to produce the film, the studio was more than happy to have him
star in it as well.

  After screening Rebel Without a Cause, Mason picked Ray from a list of director candidates supplied by 20th Century-Fox. Darryl Zanuck, the studio’s longtime chief, had just handed over the reins of production to a group of executives led by Buddy Adler, an old card-playing confederate of Ray’s. One of Adler’s right-hand men was Sid Rogell, once Ray’s nemesis at RKO, now the 20th Century-Fox studio manager. Rogell could attest that Ray had done everything and more asked of a contract director for Howard Hughes.

  Twentieth Century-Fox was one of Hollywood’s venerable studios, with a long track record of quality and success under Zanuck, who tightly controlled the final product. By the time the director had signed his contract, the Hume-Maibaum script of “Ten Feet Tall” had been approved by Mason, the Production Code, and the studio officials substituting for Zanuck, with a start date for filming firmly on the calendar, two months hence.

  Arriving back in Hollywood in early January, Ray met with Mason and told him that he wanted to improve the script as much as possible in the time remaining. “Would he like to meet the writers Cyril Hume and Richard Maibaum and brief them about the improvements that he had in mind?” Mason recalled asking. “No, he definitely did not.”

  In that case, Mason suggested that he and Ray could collaborate on the revisions, because “we both had experience,” in the star’s words.* The director said no, he preferred to hire his friend Clifford Odets, whose name would lend distinction to the film. (Ray had moved back into his bungalow at the Chateau Marmont, where Odets still lived.) But Mason was wary of the ex–Group Theatre playwright, who might be tempted to do too much, maybe start over from scratch. The star said no. Ray went over Mason’s head to Buddy Adler, but Adler also said no. Having lost that gambit, Ray plunged into script sessions with Mason.