Their script work was congenial enough but filled with “pause play,” in Mason’s words, and not always conclusive. The third star-producer Ray had worked with, after Humphrey Bogart and Joan Crawford, Mason joined another growing list: collaborators of Ray’s who found it challenging to decipher his pauses and silences. “Nick was not too sure about the script but he couldn’t really pinpoint it,” Mason recalled some years later. “He is a person who can’t express himself in words very well. He’s a man who holds long, inarticulate pauses and during these early stages it was really quite frustrating because he wanted rewriting to be done, but he couldn’t say exactly what it was.”
As usual, Ray sought to bolster the authenticity of his approach by consulting medical authorities for their expertise. He arranged to speak to Dr. Philip S. Hench, a shared winner of the 1950 Nobel Prize for Medicine for his part in treating rheumatoid arthritis with injections of cortisone. Dr. Hench was willing to answer Ray’s questions but uninterested in any close association with a Hollywood movie; the Nobel Prize–winner was wrapped up in his work at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. For that reason, in part, Ray’s ardor for realism was dampened.
Yet Ray and Mason made progress enhancing the Hume-Maibaum draft. Much of the revision went toward strengthening Mason’s schoolteacher character, Ed, as had happened before when Ray formed two-man clubs with other stars—Bogart, Mitchum, James Dean. For example, Ray and Mason gave the script a new beginning, in which the dedicated teacher fights off mysterious stabs of pain after a hard day at school, then heads to a second, nighttime job as a taxi dispatcher (a secret sideline he keeps from his family). Ray later took credit for the taxi-moonlighting idea himself, saying it arose from his indignation that American teachers were such “poorly paid professionals.” Teachers often held second jobs in order “to keep up with the Joneses,” in his words, “the false central idea of much of the activity of this country [the United States].”
“Revisions in this version by James Mason and Nick Ray” was inscribed on the drafts that followed Hume and Maibaum’s, suggesting that Ray was angling for another writing credit like the one that had brought him an Oscar nomination for Rebel Without a Cause. But this time the director had no such guarantee in his contract, and ultimately Hume and Maibaum alone would be credited on-screen with the story and script.
Even as Ray and Mason came to the end of their work, however, the director still wasn’t satisfied, and he revived the idea of engaging Odets for a final swipe at the script. “He wanted the confidence which would be given him by the cooperation of someone like Clifford Odets,” according to Mason. But Mason still demurred, and the star recalled that a “barrier” sprang up between him and the director then, which might have worsened if Gavin Lambert hadn’t arrived on the scene in early March.
Officially, 20th Century-Fox had hired Ray’s protégé as a dialogue director—the same way Ray had started out in Hollywood. But Ray made it clear to James Mason that Lambert was a multitalent: a discriminating critic, writer, and budding filmmaker. Ray told the star that “as a younger man,” Mason recalled, “he had been taken on as an apprentice and enormously helped by Elia Kazan and as a result he had always felt it was his duty, in the event of finding someone with outstanding talent, to help him in a similar way.”
“Your first Hollywood set,” the director said, gesturing grandly, escorting Lambert to dinner at fashionable Chasen’s just hours after the Englishman had arrived by plane, been chauffeured to the Chateau Marmont, and been handed a key to the bungalow he’d share with Ray. At dinner that night, they discussed the Mason picture, soon to be retitled Bigger Than Life. Though they’d made some improvements, Ray said, the script was still inadequate. The relationship between the husband and wife was superficial, the dramatization of medical procedures old-fashioned. Lambert would surely agree, Ray said, after reading it.
On the way back to the Chateau, they stopped at Judy Holliday’s house in Beverly Hills, where they socialized with the blond comedienne, whose career had slowed down as a result of her hostile cross-examination by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952. Holliday and Ray were both in a low mood, troubled by radio accounts of U.S. hydrogen bomb tests in the Pacific. “Some time after one o’clock in the morning,” Lambert recalled, “they both ran out of angst.”
Returning to the Chateau, Ray handed Lambert the latest draft of the script; then, saying he was tired, the director trudged upstairs to his bedroom and closed the door. “Nick’s way of telling me, I supposed, that what had happened once in London might or might not happen again,” Lambert recalled, “and it was up to him to decide. I was not too tired to feel disappointed and confused.”
Lambert’s spirits lifted, however, upon meeting the star and producer of the film. He felt an instant rapport with fellow Englishman James Mason, who was much admired as a silky-smooth actor. Mason liked Lambert too: Besides being bright and articulate, Lambert was “a young man,” Mason realized, “and Nick communicates with young men much better than he does with people of his own age, so it seems.” Mason and Ray’s assistant went to work trying to inject some vitality into the script’s domestic and medical scenes, while Ray supervised preproduction.
Ray was still yearning for input from Clifford Odets, however, and again he went over Mason’s head, pleading with Buddy Adler to let Odets critique their final draft. Odets had offered his services for free; the studio wouldn’t even have to pay. Adler prevailed upon Mason to let Ray go ahead; the critique couldn’t hurt and it might serve some purpose.
Ray and Lambert crept across the Chateau grounds one night for a late-hour appointment with Odets. The director carried a tiny portable tape recorder in his vest pocket so he could document the eminent playwright’s advice. Yet Odets gave them only a few specific pointers, Lambert recalled, including suggesting they ought to blame the teacher’s financial pressures on the “social ambitions” of the wife.* Mostly Odets expressed himself in somewhat vague terms, at one point delivering “a long, mournful aria on ‘the loss of belief as we all grow older,’ ‘the shrinkage of idealism,’ and ‘the death of hope,’ ” according to Lambert. “Although it was supposedly a lament for American life in general, to me it sounded more like Odets’s song of himself.”
Leaving Odets’s place, Lambert was at a loss for words. “It’s fascinating in a way, but we can’t do it,” he finally muttered, meeting a glance from Ray that seemed to concur.
Ray plowed ahead with casting. As Mason’s wife, the director picked Barbara Rush, an elegant actress under contract to Universal; for the young son he chose Christopher Olsen, who had recently appeared in Hitchcock’s remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much. Walter Matthau landed an early, unlikely role as a high school gym teacher who looks out for his friend Ed.
Ray also hired a prominent informer, composer David Raksin, who wrote evocative music for many motion pictures (including the famous theme to Laura) and whose career continued to soar after his 1951 HUAC appearance, in which he named eleven former Communist comrades—all, he later rationalized, dead or previously identified.
The studio had slated the film as a CinemaScope color production, with Mexican-born Joseph MacDonald behind the lens. One of the studio’s stellar cinematographers, MacDonald had photographed John Ford’s My Darling Clementine and Elia Kazan’s Viva Zapata! Working with MacDonald and studio art directors Jack Martin Smith and Lyle R. Wheeler, while nursing drinks with his production-design friend John Hambleton, Ray ordered up another color scheme that was encrypted with meaning. The natural earth tones and outdoors scenes would be “indicative of life,” as Ray later explained, while more garish colors, like the expensive Christian Dior orange dress the manic teacher buys for his wife, represented alarm-bell “intrusions.” The household would grow darker and more shadowed as the teacher’s psychosis progressed and the family entered its nightmare.
Again, defying the conservative rules that guided most CinemaScope productions, Ray planned for clo
se-ups, unusual angles, and elaborate camera movements (the camera racing with the boy to catch his father’s football pass) whenever he felt the scene required a visual kick. For the picture’s climax, the violent struggle between the psychotic teacher and his friend, Ray set up multiple cameras to run without a break for several minutes.
Mason insisted on adhering closely to the script, and all page changes had to go through him and the studio. As Lambert noticed during the filming, however, Ray prided himself on using the camera to impose his will on scenes where he found the script, or the scene’s emotional content, lacking. “How I shoot depends on what I want to get away with—to fool the censor, the front office, whoever,” the director confided to Lambert during the production, “or how confident I feel about the scene as written.”
One example: Ray wanted to add “some dialogue about the medical profession’s carelessness in prescribing new ‘wonder drugs’ whose side effects had not been thoroughly monitored,” Lambert recalled. Mason thought that was fine, but the studio rejected Ray’s lines, apprehensive about the reaction from the American Medical Association. So the director cast “tough-looking actors” as physicians and “shot them nearly always on the move, in dark-suited gangsterish cabals of two or three,” in Lambert’s words. Like the teacher’s financial woes, the sinister doctors gave the film a mild edge of social criticism.
Again and again, whenever the director was “forbidden to make a point verbally,” Lambert recalled admiringly, “Nick had an extraordinary flair for making it visually.”
The photography got under way at the studio in the last week of March 1956.
Behind the camera, Gavin Lambert wore several hats. Besides rehearsing lines with the actors before each scene, the director’s assistant watched the actual filming carefully to make sure there were no continuity gaps. Whenever a script fix was needed, it was Lambert’s job to supply it.
Besides interpreting Ray’s silences for Mason, he also decoded him for studio officials. “I remember one of the executives at Fox saying to me quite early on, ‘Well, you know Nick Ray very well. We don’t understand his silences, we’re so intimidated by them,’ ” the director’s assistant and lover recalled. “I’d tell people, ‘Don’t be intimidated. When Nick is silent it means he’s got nothing to say. It’s really as simple as that.’ ”
Privately, though, it was not as simple as that. From late March through early May, during six weeks of principal photography (and while living together at the Chateau), Lambert increasingly saw Ray as a flawed human being who was at a professional and personal crossroads. While Ray wore a mask of steadiness and good humor, and talked about using the camera as a means of controlling the film, inside the armored façade he was a weak man plagued by self-doubt.
Taking a sip of Ray’s glass of orange juice by accident one morning, Lambert realized the director’s serving was spiked with vodka. The director was desperately hiding his alcoholism from people, in the same way that James Mason’s character was concealing his cortisone addiction in the film they were making. Ray was “not the falling-down drunk kind,” Lambert said, “but some days his usually acute responses were blurred.”
Like the cabinet in the teacher’s bathroom in Bigger Than Life, Ray’s was filled with medicine vials. Some days, the director also kept quick appointments with the studio doctor for supposed vitamin B-12 shots. The injections “very quickly” energized him, as well they should, Lambert discovered eventually, for they contained “a dash of amphetamine.”
Most days, Lambert insisted, Ray was on point. The director communed easily with Barbara Rush, a sensitive actress playing Ray’s usual type of self-sacrificing wife, but despite their mutual regard, he never established a profound kinship with Mason, who felt uncomfortable with his own performance and noticed the days when Ray seemed fuzzy. “When Nick wasn’t on his best form,” Lambert wrote in Mainly About Lindsay Anderson, “James Mason reacted with the puzzled, uncertain look that often crossed his face, so different from the strength and occasional menace he conveyed on the screen.”
If the camerawork excited Ray, the script inadequacies continued to bother him, and he spent most nights after filming working over the upcoming scenes with Lambert. “Every day or so he would come in with a few new sheets of paper which were submitted through the proper channels,” Mason said, “just small dialogue improvements mostly.”
Secretly too, the director kept up his midnight appointments with Clifford Odets. Ray was shooting more in sequence than usual, with the last scenes of the script coming up toward the end of May. The story ended with the teacher hospitalized after his worst breakdown. How could that be rounded off cathartically (and optimistically) for audiences? As usual for Ray, who’d fought for his bleak endings to In a Lonely Place, The Lusty Men, and Rebel Without a Cause, the ending was a sore point.
Mason was just as unhappy with the film’s scripted ending, but he despaired of a wholly satisfactory solution. One night, toward the end of the schedule, Mason got together with Lambert for one last whack at the final scene; meanwhile, unbeknownst to Mason, Ray brought the same issue to Odets, who had swallowed a sleeping pill and had to force himself awake to hear the director outline the circumstances of the scene. After some drowsy gabble, the playwright agreed to come to the studio the next day and try to solve the problem.
Ray smuggled Odets onto the lot and stashed him in the back of a property truck to cogitate and scribble. Mason was astonished when Ray told him he’d brought Odets to the lot (“The man is talking to me,” the star recalled thinking, “as if I am a party to the midnight script conferences that have been going on”), but he agreed to listen to Odets’s recommendations at lunchtime.
At the end of the script, the teacher’s psychosis takes a murderous turn. He stalks his young son with a scissors, and when the gym teacher intervenes, a fight ensues. The two crash through a banister, smashing up the hallway and living room (as circus music blasts from the nearby TV) before the teacher ends up unconscious and sedated in a hospital room that’s lit like a prison cell. As his doctor and family gather around his bed, it’s unclear whether the teacher’s mind will ever recover.
What should happen next? Should the family—the audience—be given false hope, when cortisone, with its dangerous side effects, has already been described as the last resort for his illness? That was the dilemma for Odets, for Ray, for the film.
The writer’s writer presented his ideas. The doctor should tell the wife that she must have faith in the future, Odets said. Then the teacher should wake up from a feverish dream. He recalls walking along with Abraham Lincoln in the dream, “as big, as ugly, and as beautiful as he is in life.” But then speaking the name “Abraham” gives the teacher a start, and he remembers the Bible story that drove him to try to murder his own son.
With eyes misting over, the teacher struggles to remember the horrifying details—everything that has happened, all he has done to endanger his family. The doctor urges him to hold onto the memory, telling him how important it is never to forget. The teacher is filled with contrition, but also a hopeful feeling of renewal. He draws his wife and son to him in bed, murmuring, “Come closer, closer . . .”
Ray nodded approvingly. Mason too was thrilled, despite his previous misgivings about Odets. “This was the first indication that I had had that Nick was going and checking with Clifford in the evenings,” the star-producer reflected years later, “and in fact this is probably what gave some quality to the film. Without Clifford’s help maybe it wouldn’t have had that quality which brought it to the attention of some of the French critics.”
Later in life, Ray described Mason as a “wonderful producer” who gave him nothing but support and encouragement while they were making Bigger Than Life. But Mason had wanted to make a realistic film, “very close to a documentary film,” and any hopes for realism were dashed—first by CinemaScope, he said later, whose wide-screen color image made “all films look like very cheap color advertisements from
magazines,” and second by his own performance. Mason felt he had been implausible as an American schoolteacher, with the slightest of Yank accents. The film had emotional realism, to be sure, but not enough of the kind of realism Mason would have preferred.
In his best of moods, however, Mason looked back on Bigger Than Life as “a great adventure.” Though he found Ray a “neurotic man” who “wanted the kind of big brother I was not,” as the star explained in one interview, Mason was tempted to work with the director again. The two talked about reuniting and even had a few near misses later in the early 1960s. “I could tell you many conversations about Nick Ray,” Mason once mused sympathetically, “and mostly they’re an exchange about Nick’s strange conduct in one way or another. They all seem to end up with someone saying, ‘Mark you, Nick is not without talent!’ ”
One weekend, during the filming of Bigger Than Life, the restless Ray woke Gavin Lambert up at around two in the morning and led him to his bedroom. They made love. Ray quickly fell asleep afterward, the fragrance of a perfume he occasionally used lingering in the air.
Their lovemaking was infrequent because Ray stayed “sexually very active” with a number of women during this time. “Some weekends,” Lambert wrote, “Nick arranged for a girlfriend to come over in the late afternoon, and asked me to stay out of the bungalow for ‘a couple of hours.’ The girlfriend was usually one of several young unknown actresses, very occasionally she was Marilyn Monroe, and in any case [she] never stayed the night.”
Divorced from baseball star Joe DiMaggio, Monroe was dating Ray again when convenient. She remained one of his deepest crushes, although he could never quite promote himself into the role of her steady “beau” (as Hedda Hopper was encouraged to describe their relationship). He couldn’t quite promote her into any film he was directing either.
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