Nicholas Ray

by Patrick McGilligan

  A few days later, Adler reread the script more closely and dictated a detailed critique. He just couldn’t fathom some of the psychologizing—as when the character Remington (played by Alan Baxter) reminisces about Jesse James, using words drawn from William Wordsworth: “The child is father to the man.” (“I do not understand this quotation, and neither do several other people,” wrote Adler. “Please delete it.”) Baffled by the convoluted “pattern of the story,” Adler itemized page-by-page dialogue trims and clarifications that would help simplify the script.

  Newman continued to cut and revise until his contract ran out. Adler then brought another writer in for remedial revisions, which continued throughout September even as the cameras rolled. As studio memos make clear, when Ray was faced with a roomful of people finding flaws in the script, he meekly acquiesced to the chorus. His heart wasn’t in it—the script or the film—and Lambert confirms that the director was drinking and popping pills like crazy to get through that summer.

  Believing that his camerawork would ultimately triumph over the weakened script, Ray told Newman he intended to shoot The True Story of Jesse James in sequential fashion to satisfy the studio, but then he would try to restore some of the flashback structure in the editing room. Newman wondered if that was even possible but thought, more power to him.

  Among Ray’s illusory hopes for The True Story of Jesse James was that the rock and roll star Elvis Presley might be recruited to portray Jesse James. Elvis, whom Ray regarded as “another kind of James Dean,” in Gavin Lambert’s words, was an unabashed fan of Rebel Without a Cause, able to recite swaths of dialogue from the film from memory. David Weisbart had produced Elvis’s first picture for 20th Century-Fox, earlier in 1956, and could make the introductions. But Presley had been spirited away to Paramount by producer Hal Wallis, and 20th Century-Fox fixated on one of its own contract players, handsome Robert Wagner—“an all-American laughing boy,” as Ray later described the star with faint scorn. (“I’m sure he knew every possible mechanical gimmick,” the director also said uncharitably. “He just didn’t know how to act.”)

  In 1956, however, Ray was okay with Wagner, who was dating Natalie Wood; he was equally comfortable with the actor he cast as Frank James, Jeffrey Hunter, who had been married to Barbara Rush. Both were young smoothies, not as complicated as Farley Granger or James Dean, but under the right circumstances both could be quite good. Nor was there anything amiss with the rest of the cast: Mercury Theatre and Citizen Kane alumnus Agnes Moorehead was the James boys’ mother, and Jesse’s sweetheart was played by Hope Lange, a television actress crossing over to film. (The True Story of Jesse James was only her second feature, after a prominent debut in Bus Stop.) The director happily stuck with studio cinematographer Joseph MacDonald, who had handled the beautiful camerawork for Bigger Than Life.

  But over the summer Ray increasingly regarded the Jesse James remake as a “potboiler” belonging to the studio, not to him. Studio officials seemed to fight all of his best instincts, right down to insisting on rehabbing old sets and filming at the 20th Century-Fox ranch in the Santa Monica Mountains, when Ray had hoped to photograph some scenes on location in Missouri and Minnesota—the James Gang’s real stomping grounds. One sequence in the script depicted a famous bank robbery in Northfield, Minnesota, only a little more than a hundred miles from where Ray grew up, and it gnawed on him to re-create that outlaw raid in Hollywood.

  “The real reason they made it [The True Story of Jesse James] was because some genius at Fox had figured out a way of reprocessing old footage into [Cinema]Scope,” Ray complained in a later interview. “Fortunately,” the studio had had “the foresight” to make the original Jesse James in color. “Now, if you’ve ever seen it, the one scene that you’ll recall is this incredible stunt where Jesse and Frank elude the posse by riding through a plate glass window, down the streets out of town, and over a huge cliff into a river. Well, since the picture had been made, the ASPCA [American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals] cracked down on abuse to horses in movies. I mean those animals really took a fall. So basically, that whole picture was made to use that scene again. We matched the clothing and everything. A lot of the same buildings and props were still around.”

  Ray would do his duty and shoot the film, bolstered by drink and drugs to dull the pain. His self-medicating had begun to creep into working hours during the filming of Rebel Without a Cause, and Gavin Lambert had noted mounting evidence of the director’s various addictions during the making of Bigger Than Life. In a 1976 journal entry, Ray admitted that he’d existed in an almost “continuous blackout between 1957 or earlier until now.”

  Just before launching photography, the director took a drunken tumble down the stairs of his bungalow, spraining his ankle—the same bad foot he’d had since The Lusty Men. Most days Lambert had to chauffeur the director to the set. Ray’s mood was strained, even his characteristic smile barely manifested. His pain gave him an excuse to sip from his thermos of spiked orange juice, while the cast made sense of his foggy bidding.

  Marian Seldes was playing Hope Lange’s sister; it was her first credited screen role. One day, she recalled, Ray gave the actress advice in such a low whispered tone it was as though he was mumbling to himself. After the scene, he called Seldes over, acting hurt. “Didn’t you like what I suggested?” She couldn’t say—she hadn’t understood a word of his mumbling.

  “He hardly ever gave you a physical direction,” recalled Robert Wagner. “It was all about emotions, and that’s what he tried to put into the movie.” But the director’s drinking and drug dependencies were obvious to the film’s star, contributing to “a very confused and convoluted personality, even for a director,” as Wagner wrote in his memoir, Pieces of My Heart. “The problem was that Nick was always anesthetized; he’d stare off into space and then he’d say, ‘Try this. No. Wait. Don’t.’ He liked acolytes; I have this mental snapshot of him wearing cowboy boots, surrounded by actors sitting around him on the ground. I remember thinking that he looked a little too comfortable. He was terribly enamored of [Elia] Kazan, but he completely lacked Gadge’s focus. Every morning we’d all wonder how Nick was going to be today, which is no way to make a movie.”

  Producer Herbert B. Swope Jr. was an admirer of Rebel Without a Cause, and he had looked forward to getting to know the director. “But he was not an easy man to know,” said Swope. “He’d just sit in a big easy chair by the window and look forlornly out the window as you came into his office to talk. He didn’t make contact directly too much. He was inhibited in some ways, and there was a kind of air of defeat about him.”

  Yet Swope was open to Ray’s flashback ideas and prevailed upon the studio to screen two different rough cut versions in early November: the director’s cut, with a number of flashbacks wrapped around a Jesse James ballad sung by George Comfort Sr., and a second, more straightforward, conventional version. The executives who assembled to watch the competing cuts included the West Coast studio boss Buddy Adler and East Coast company president Spyros Skouras. Afterward, Adler took the floor, saying that he thought both versions fell short, but the flashback variation was as impossible to follow as Walter Newman’s convoluted script had been. The film would have to be recut in a more linear fashion, Adler said.

  Swope agreed. This betrayal (as Ray saw it) prompted a repeat of what happened at the first screening of The Lusty Men; now, however, the stakes were not as high and Ray was playing with a losing hand. The director exploded, shouting at the producer, calling him a traitor and worse, hurling abuse at him in front of the shocked studio executives. After the dust settled, Ray did handle some of the refilming, while contract directors steered a few other scenes. In the final film, the flashbacks and narration and music—the ballad threading the story—were all cut back.

  In later interviews, Ray preferred to blame the studio’s stupidity. “I think some of the best scenes I ever directed were in that film but were cut out,” the director ruefully recal
led years later. “One was the fight between Frank and Jesse in the cave with very straight dialogue in a good heavy sense. The action was also a little too violent. For taste, I reshot it.” But Lambert recalled pleading with his mentor to fight harder for the film in the last weeks before Ray left for Europe and Bitter Victory. “We could do this, we could do that—that would be a little better, don’t you think?” Drink in hand, Ray answered him, “Yeah, but why bother?”

  Swope took over the reediting after Ray left, following Adler’s memos. Walter Newman did a little more writing at the end; Ray blamed the scenarist for being overly cooperative with the producer and refused ever to speak to him again. Of course the multipicture contract Skouras had offered Ray was out of the question now. Yet Ray had his ticket back to Europe, which he insisted on, and the studio delivered, even though officials were disappointed in his half measures.

  Thanks to its handsome stars, The True Story of Jesse James did fair business when it was finally released in March 1957. Today, though, the picture looks lackluster; whatever gold flecks may be buried in his final Western, even Ray cultists find them deeply hidden. “I’ve only seen the film once in projection,” Ray boasted to Movie in 1963.

  Ray did have at least one excuse for never seeing the finished film: In mid-November, the director went into St. John’s Hospital for foot surgery. By the time of his discharge, Paul Graetz had phoned to accept Gavin Lambert’s draft of Bitter Victory. The producer wanted Ray to come to Paris as soon as possible to work on the final script, casting, and scouting locations.

  Humphrey Bogart was in a different hospital, and Lauren Bacall called Ray to let him know the tough-guy star was gravely ill without long to live. Ray was in a hurry to leave and didn’t have time to visit his onetime pal; Bogart died at home a short time later, in January 1957, with Ray overseas. The Golden Age of Hollywood was dying all around. The old studio system was in on its last legs. General Tire, which now owned RKO, shut down production at the studio the same month that Bogart died, and the other once-robust major studios seemed to exist on life support.

  Ray went almost straight from the hospital to New York, wearing his bandages, though before he left America he flirted publicly with Shelley Winters, who always seemed to rebound into his life whenever Marilyn Monroe slipped away. The director even appeared in the audience of a broadcast of What’s My Line?, Dorothy Kilgallen’s show, as the “mystery guest” of Winters. The actress had a “long-time crush” on Ray, wrote Kilgallen, his loyal chronicler.

  This time he traveled by plane to Paris, looking not over his shoulder at the botched and misguided Jesse James but forward with hopefulness to Bitter Victory. In prospect the latter appealed to him more, with its aching romance and failed heroics and rival leaders Brand and Leith—the former a hollow man with a feeble military résumé, the latter an intellectual with a death wish, both of them typical of Ray’s vying “male antagonists who achieve a kind of mystical equality,” as critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has noted.

  In their script sessions, Ray and Lambert had “talked mainly about the conflict between the two principal characters, something he felt very close to,” as Lambert wrote, “because . . . basically he was both of them. And I think that was the mainspring of the film for him. It wasn’t a war film, nor was it an anti-war film; it was a private psychological duel.”

  As the script evolved, however, the duel became more one-sided, with Ray favoring the braver Leith, who is not too proud to admit his fear (“All men are cowards . . . in some things”) and other weaknesses. Although a man of action when necessary, Leith is “lonelier than any man had ever been,” in the words of René Hardy’s novel.

  Curiously, Ray originally envisioned the Welsh actor Richard Burton as Brand, the hollow superior, while hoping for Montgomery Clift as Leith, the archaeologist and Orientalist. But in Paris, without consulting his director, the producer cast German actor Curd Jürgens as Brand. Jürgens had just catapulted to international recognition opposite Brigitte Bardot in And God Created Woman, and he was certainly a capable actor, but his German accent made him just as unlikely a British officer as James Mason was an American schoolteacher.

  “Just add a line that he’s South African,” Graetz told Ray, “a Boer.” Ray threatened to walk off the picture; Graetz threatened to sue. The director backed down. He had staked too much on Bitter Victory, and he was already drinking heavily by the time Lambert arrived in Paris, two weeks after his sponsor. The producer informed Lambert that he had to take some responsibility for Ray’s drinking, or the writer would have his contract canceled once filming started, when Ray was bound to need him most. “I know exactly how much you mean to him, and how upset he’ll be,” Graetz told Lambert with a sleazy smile.

  The director did need Lambert—for his French—and, as always with Ray, for the script, whose inadequacies gnawed harder at him as the start date neared. Ray and Lambert plunged into revisions, but the company was scheduled to travel to Libyan desert locations in February, and under the drink and duress Ray showed “signs of compulsive indecision,” in Lambert’s words. The director seemed unable to pinpoint what was wrong with the script or how to make it better. “Something’s missing,” Ray kept repeating, “I don’t know what it is, but I know it isn’t there.”

  Maybe a more experienced writer could suss it out. Born in France, Vladimir Pozner was a former Hollywood scribe with an Oscar nomination in 1946 for The Dark Mirror among his handful of prestigious credits. (He’d also been one of the writers for the Hollywood all-star FDR memorial Ray had worked on behind the scenes.) The blacklist had sent Pozner back to Paris. In Hollywood, Ray avoided blacklistees like the plague (most had vacated anyway). But Europe was different, and Pozner wouldn’t have known anything about Ray’s closed-doors cooperation with HUAC.

  Ray and Lambert met with Pozner, talking through numerous improvements that “seemed to satisfy Nick for the moment,” in Lambert’s words. Of course, Pozner would get no screen credit; he came at a bargain price, and moreover had to be paid off the books. The director insisted on keeping the blacklistee’s participation secret even from Graetz. “I was a mechanic repairing a broken-down car,” Pozner said later.

  For Ray, working with Graetz was a horror; he was less cooperative and more meddling than the worst Hollywood producer. Graetz closely monitored every script change and surprised Ray again by announcing that he’d cast an American, Hollywood actress Ruth Roman, as Brand’s wife Jane, who is secretly in love with Leith. The producer harbored “a pathological hatred of directors,” according to Lambert, and enjoyed lording his arbitrary decisions over Ray. In most power struggles, Ray the nice guy, the patient whisperer, the velvet-gloves director, was the natural patsy, and the tension grew between him and Graetz. Once again—far from the American studio system—Ray would have to resort to stealth and duplicity in order to win the day.

  In January, Ray and Lambert took a scouting trip to Libya that gave both of them a happy breather. Graetz, who was Jewish, felt he might be subject to possible kidnapping risks in the predominantly Islamic nation, and the producer chose to stay in Paris when the director and his writer-lover flew to Tripoli, checking into a deluxe hotel. Ray had made earlier trips to Libya with the camera and design team but this was more of a last idyll for the two of them. The desert had attracted and beguiled Ray ever since he’d screened Lambert’s directing debut, which was set in Morocco. In 1957, before the discovery of oil reserves and revolution, Libya was a constitutional monarchy, a paradise of ancient sights whose government was trying to boost tourism.

  The two visited the unspoiled Roman ruins of Leptis Magna, where the Wadi Lebda meets the Mediterranean near Egypt, and toured the huge amphitheater at the port of Sabratha. Standing on the highest tier, staring out over ten thousand seats and the sparkling blue sea, with yellow and blue wildflowers blooming all around, the director felt exultant. “Do you realize the Romans built in CinemaScope?” he asked Lambert gleefully.

  Suddenly, seized b
y a vision, Ray grabbed Lambert and tugged him down to the arena. The amphitheater would be the perfect site for a production of Sophocles’s Athenian tragedy Oedipus Rex, the director declared, with “masked and robed figures performing in front of the circle of archways” and “the sea as a backdrop.” His arms flung wide, Ray declaimed from memory the last line of Yeats’s translation: “Call no man happy till he is dead.”

  “I never saw him happier,” Lambert recalled.

  Inevitable lows followed the highs. Lambert could do nothing about Ray’s persistent drinking, nor his reckless gambling at the casino that was attached to their hotel. The director haunted the casino every night, “seemingly indifferent to the large sums he lost,” wrote Lambert, adding that he finally realized why Ray “understood so well the character of the teacher addicted to cortisone in Bigger Than Life, and how (with the help of James Mason’s fine performance) he could make the scenes of personality disorder so compelling.”

  Returning to Paris with Ray, Lambert resumed his problematic script work. At one point Graetz buttonholed him, demanding confidential reports on Ray’s drinking and gambling; when he refused, the producer threatened to fire him. Lambert told Ray about Graetz; the director went to the producer and threatened to quit. Another stalemate, but Lambert soldiered on.

  Just as Graetz relished such power games, Lambert felt that Ray enjoyed conjuring up endless crises. Although Ray defended his assistant professionally, he left Lambert confused about where they stood on a personal level—especially after one night when the director brought back to their hotel a young woman he’d picked up in a St. Germain bar. The woman, who went by the name Manon, claimed to be a “Moroccan Sherifian” descended from nobility, according to Lambert. “About eighteen years old,” she had dyed blond hair, “manic eyes,” and a “violent temper.” She was also a heroin addict—an Arabian nightmare, from Lambert’s perspective. But Ray, for some reason, began to dote on Manon. The director pretended to be rescuing his discovery from the depths of depravity, but in truth Manon was leading him down. He treated her as his latest protégée, but in the category of depravity they were competitors.