Nicholas Ray

by Patrick McGilligan

  As Lambert and the script faded into the background, the Hollywood director and the teenage heroin addict plunged into a weird folie à deux. “What I understood,” recalled Lambert, “was that his impulse to self-destruction had grown too powerful for anyone to deflect.” After Lambert completed the shooting script, Ray flew off to Libya with cast and crew—and Manon—leaving his scenarist and spurned lover behind. The writer begged Graetz for his last payment. The producer refused to pay until Ray was done with the filming.

  Lambert lingered in Paris.

  With the typical logic of international coproductions, the producer had cast a German and an American in two of the film’s three main roles, both playing English characters. Ray finally acquired the genuine article, Richard Burton—not for the role of Brand, but as Leith. Already reigning over epics like The Robe, and destined for a career of messy greatness, Burton was persuaded to play the sensitive, brooding hero whose fate is entwined with a deadly scorpion and an apocalyptic sandstorm. Brand was the better role for him in the end.

  The rest of the ensemble was ordered up from England, with a sprinkling from France. The supporting roles were subordinate, not deeply characterized, almost interchangeable. Actor Christopher Lee arrived from London with no idea of what role he would be playing. “We were ferried out to the Marcus Aurelius ruins,” Lee wrote later, “and there the dramatis personae were apportioned with the same casual optimism by the director as if the clock had been turned back fifteen years and we’d all been in fact doing a skit for the camp entertainment. All but the stars took part in this lottery. Everybody got a part they either did not want, or somebody else coveted more than they did.”

  French actor Raymond Pelligrin, Sacha Guitry’s Napoleon, was upset, according to Lee, “because he’d drawn the short straw in the casting and had only four lines as an Arab guide.”* Lee also found himself in “none too agreeable a mood after being told, as Sergeant Barney of the Guards, ‘not to bring all this British Army nonsense into it,’ which I thought was an odd direction in a story supposed to be about the British army.”

  The scouting trips had been quixotic and optimistic. The actual filming, in contrast, seemed a depressing ordeal. Ray stayed in the fashionable hotel with attached casino, but most of the troupe bunked at a lower-cost venue, with tiny rooms and narrow beds. Cast and crew rose as one body before dawn to be shuttled off to locations sometimes over one hundred miles away, first forming a line of cars, and then switching to jeeps, driving for hours before arriving at dunes that stretched to infinity. They were usually in for a long day of breathing the sand, with rainy weather and freezing temperatures at sundown; the company often didn’t get back to Tripoli until ten at night.

  By now, it was standard practice for Ray to fiddle with unsatisfactory scripts during actual filming as a means of imposing his vision on a picture. He did this with little regard for the ellipses in characterization or continuity that could result; indeed, one could argue that ellipses were his hallmark, with his gnomic personality and questing artistry the only glue binding them together.

  As usual, his on-the-spot changes tended to privilege the character he preferred (Leith) along with the actor that was closest to being his soul mate (Burton). Ray drew Burton out between setups, talking about art, music, theater, and literature; on camera, he turned the actor into another brooding, sensitive James Dean. (Burton was even photographed to look like Dean, with the wind tousling his fine hair.) The actor was rewarded with the film’s bones-of-war speeches (“The fine line between murder and war is distance”), philosophical musings (“I wonder why people have short memories—do they forget what they want to forget or don’t they care?”), and borrowings from Walt Whitman (“I contradict myself!”).

  Although Graetz again elected to stay in Paris, the producer wouldn’t let go of the script, which symbolized the continuing battle between him and Ray. The producer regularly telexed new pages he was extracting from an established American short-story writer and novelist, Paul Gallico, who lived in Paris. Ray had reluctantly gone along with the eleventh-hour hiring of Gallico, seeing him as a writer’s writer whose ideas and critiques might be useful. But the stream of telexed pages tended to conflict with Ray’s own drift, plumping up the roles played by Jürgens or Roman, the producer’s favorites. (Jürgens, in particular, complained that his character had been weakened and demonized in Lambert’s script.)*

  Sometimes, though, Gallico sided with the director. Especially with his knowledge of the relationship between Lambert and Ray, Graetz never had liked the subtext of the scenes between Leith and Mokrane. Stung by a scorpion, Leith is lovingly attended to by his Arab guide, who first attempts to suck out the scorpion’s venom with his own mouth and then cuts into the stomach of the expedition’s only camel to retrieve its bladder and medicinal viscera. The provocative scenes hinted at another dimension to Mokrane’s devotion. After revising these scenes one last time for Graetz, Gallico told the producer that the scenes were fine, that they could be carried off with subtle direction, and that Ray was up to the job. And he was.

  Phoning Lambert regularly, Ray boasted that he was ignoring most of Gallico’s revisions while introducing “quite a few changes of his own.” This, over time, had become his signature approach, grabbing from here and there, zigging and zagging, assembling a film out of the ideas and influences and experts and collaborators he collected as he thought and planned and ultimately filmed. Such a process didn’t bear imitation, and it didn’t always work; it simply reflected the director’s variegated personality. But Ray’s buffet approach to the script, which had hardened into a default methodology, endeared him to neither producers nor writers.

  Concerned that Graetz might be eavesdropping on the phones at the hotel where both of them were staying, Lambert took Ray’s calls at the Champs-Elysées post office. The director said he was sure Lambert would approve his on-the-spot emendations and the final form of the script. “I’m sure I will,” Lambert told Ray stoically, telling himself, however, “It no longer mattered what I said because the film was a lost cause.”

  Some in the cast and crew felt the same way. The logistics were grueling, and Ray’s tentativeness and second-guessing were beginning to get the better of him. On the set, sometimes, he rehearsed and rehearsed, stalling his camera decisions. He had an adaptable cinematographer in Frenchman Michel Kelber, a veteran of Jean Renoir and René Clair films who wasn’t cowed by the desert, but Ray had to call the shots, and sometimes he couldn’t decide. He weighed choices, waited for inspiration, shot and reshot.

  His deliberative method could produce extraordinary results. “Nick would choose what he wanted, and he had plenty to choose from,” insisted Renée Lichtig, one of the editors of Bitter Victory. “If it wasn’t there in one setup, it would be there in another. But he didn’t take what he wanted just from the angle he wanted. Because it wasn’t the angle that interested him, it was the performance. There was always a take which contained the phrase, the little bit he wanted. And that was his strength; even while filming, he could see that this line had something he needed.”

  Still, the overtime costs inched up. The budget swelled. The filming fell behind schedule—not drastically, but enough to tighten the screws on Ray above all.

  Every day the company returned to Tripoli, drained and cursing their misfortune. No matter how hard the day had been, Ray couldn’t sleep. Until midnight the director was up hacking at the script. He quarreled fiercely with Manon, then hit the casino, “betting on all the numbers at roulette,” according to cinematographer Kelber, “forgetting what numbers he was playing, losing everything; the croupiers soon tumbled to him and pocketed everything.” The next morning, en route to the set, Ray would doze in the jeep.

  One of the actors tried to slit his wrists—for “private domestic reasons,” recalled Christopher Lee, “bad news from home, but as I said to him rather tartly, we all of us had plenty of good justification for suicide in the circumstances all around us. He lived
. We all did, and parted after six weeks in the certain knowledge of having shared in a failure.”

  Or was it? As with The Lusty Men or Bigger Than Life, perhaps only cultists would call the film a masterpiece. But the cultists say so, loudly and insistently.

  In the end the script was a mash, however, with both flat scenes and moments of transcendence. This was Ray in his glory, failing gloriously, trying to bend chaos partly of his own making to his will. The location scenes were worth it, the desert photographed in black and white as eerily, as beautifully, as rolling Wisconsin hills in the winter. Off-camera and on, the physical struggles of the characters paralleled their emotional and psychological trials.

  In late March, Paul Graetz finally pulled the plug, calling Ray back to Nice to finish the remaining scenes in a studio.

  Among the last interior scenes to be filmed was the ending. Ray kept changing his mind about exactly how the story should end. In the novel, Leith shoots himself to end his suffering; Brand is disgraced by his actions. In the film, Leith sacrifices himself to cover Brand during the terrible sandstorm, while Brand survives, only to be given a medal for his lies and cowardice and murder. Thus the film ends with a hollow award for treachery—a possible guilty allusion to the blacklist, and certainly Ray’s bleakest ending. Feeling alone and defeated, his marriage ruined, Brand sticks his prize on a training dummy as the closing credits roll.

  Ray had returned from Libya “a wreck,” recalled Gavin Lambert, “ravaged, traumatized” from the pressures of filming. The director was drinking around the clock and had fallen “seriously into drugs” with his heroin-addict girlfriend, Manon. At the Victorine Studios in Nice, Ray spent several weeks completing the relationship and soundstage scenes by day while debauching himself with Manon and frequenting the baccarat tables in Monte Carlo after hours. One night the director is said to have lost sixty thousand dollars. Sumner Williams, playing a minor role in his fifth or sixth Nick Ray film, kept his uncle company and somberly wrote out the checks.

  “It’s true that I lost all my money gambling,” Ray told Vincent Canby a decade later. “The only time Graetz wouldn’t bother me was when I was playing chemin de fer. To find some peace, I just continued to play chemin de fer until I ran out of money.”

  Williams was an undemanding Sancho Panza, but Lambert was through. Barred from Nice by Paul Graetz, Lambert was paid his last five thousand dollars in Paris after filming finally wrapped down south; the producer then ordered the writer to vacate his hotel room.

  Ray summoned him to a Champs-Elysées nightclub, where he waited with a frantic-looking Manon. The director “seemed to have aged ten years in two months,” Lambert recalled. Ray limped and used a cane. It wasn’t the old foot injury, Ray explained, but a new, mysterious one in his leg. Michel Kelber believed that Ray’s illnesses were induced by various “psychoses.” If not the leg and his cane, then “he’d lose his voice, open his mouth and be unable to speak.”

  Ray said he was experiencing a temporary cash shortfall because of his gambling losses, but that Manon, who looked shell-shocked, needed “help right now.” What sort of help was not specified. Lambert returned to the hotel where he’d been packing, counted out one thousand dollars from his stash, returned to the club, handed Ray the money, and then left without another word.

  “He didn’t try to stop me,” Lambert wrote. The writer sat at a nearby café, his eyes filling with tears, thinking “how Nick had come into my life at a crucial moment and transformed it irrevocably. I wanted to go back and tell him I would always love him for that.”

  Instead, the next day, Lambert flew to London and thence to Los Angeles, where he moved out of the Chateau Marmont and started over in Hollywood as a screenwriter and novelist of distinction. Lambert would remain cordial with Ray in years to come, talking to the director by phone now and then but seeing him rarely.

  In Paris, the director found time to tell columnist Dorothy Kilgallen about his romance with a “lush beauty” named Manon (no last name reported) whom he was escorting to Paris “hot spots.” Manon was described as the “script girl” for Bitter Victory, which she was not. Eventually, to recover from the tribulations of Bitter Victory, the director checked into a hospital, as much for exhaustion as for his chronic leg pain.

  He was visited there by Stewart Stern, the scenarist of Rebel Without a Cause, who was passing through Paris when he discovered a just-published French novelization of the film called La fureur du vivre, complete with scenes and dialogue from Stern’s script but bearing only Ray’s byline. Ray insisted it was merely a publicity device, and Stern backed off with regrets for his illness. Ray wouldn’t say how much he had been paid: pocket money for his lifestyle.

  His hospital stay was brief, and afterward Ray plunged into work with a French team preparing a rough cut of Bitter Victory to show the organizers of the Cannes Film Festival in May. But the director was becoming dilatory about his editing decisions too, coming in after the main editors had gone home and then working all night with their young assistants, playing with established sequences, changing the order of pieces of film, later changing them back. Eventually a score by Maurice Le Roux was added to the print, and the real premiere of Bitter Victory was scheduled for the Venice Film Festival in early September.

  At the time, the correspondent covering the festival for the Times of London wrote that Bitter Victory “startled” discerning critics “and at times divided them into two hostile camps.” The London correspondent found the film’s plotting disorganized, the skulduggery unsuspenseful. Even Eric Rohmer, one of Ray’s longtime admirers, confessed to being “somewhat disconcerted,” though he added that Bitter Victory was “the only intelligent film shown at the festival,” a backhanded compliment. Later, Jean-Luc Godard would hail the film with a famous trumpet blast: “The cinema is Nicholas Ray.” (Godard ranked the Ray film at the top of his personal ten best of 1957, ahead of films by Hitchcock, Buñuel, and Ingmar Bergman.)

  Although Bitter Victory became the second Nicholas Ray picture to be nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice festival, it still won no major prizes. Not surprisingly, the grim World War II picture then struggled at the box office. It probably didn’t help that the producer and censors cut the film significantly for public exhibition, presumably to curtail its bleakness. Originally 102 minutes, Bitter Victory was ninety when shown in England and eighty-two when finally released in the United States in March 1958, a year after it was completed.

  Perhaps Lambert, ultimately shouldered aside by his own mentor on the script (he shared screen credit with Ray, René Hardy, and Paul Gallico), was its most discerning viewer. Bitter Victory had “some powerfully staged scenes,” Lambert wrote years later, but “too many others that were muddled or inconclusive, the truth of Richard Burton’s performance undermined by the falsity of [Curd] Jurgens’s.”

  Their lover-protégé-collaborator relationship was over in a year’s time, but like many people burned by the sweet man, Lambert thought of Ray only sympathetically.

  Chapter Ten

  Lost Causes

  1957–1959

  Paul Graetz blamed Ray for everything that had gone wrong on Bitter Victory, and afterward the producer busied himself writing letters to studio officials he knew in Hollywood, warning them not to hire Ray because the director was an irresponsible drunk.

  After the double whammy of Hot Blood and Bitter Victory, Columbia didn’t need any further warnings about Ray’s misconduct or weak box-office record. Twentieth Century-Fox was no longer in Ray’s corner, after the director had given a less-than-sterling effort on The Return of Jesse James and scuttled a multiple-picture contract. RKO, his long-ago sanctuary, was defunct. The number of studios where Ray might be welcome was dwindling.

  In Paris, Ray announced various “personal projects,” including a series of Grand Guignol horror plays, but none of them would ever materialize, for lack of an actual script, viable producer, or financing. His journey to Europe had not set him free, at leas
t not yet. He really had little immediate choice but to sift through his remaining U.S. options.

  One American who believed in Ray was the writer Budd Schulberg, who had been Elia Kazan’s creative partner on the multiple-Oscar-winning On the Waterfront. Schulberg had known Ray for years, primarily through Kazan, and always liked him personally, though he was nagged by the feeling that there was “always something of the poseur about him.”

  Budd and his younger brother Stuart, who had been producing films in Germany, were organizing an independent company to make their own movies. Producing was a family tradition. Their father, B. P. Schulberg, who died early in 1957, had produced Wings, the winner of the first Oscar for Best Picture, and the paterfamilias ran Paramount in the 1930s. Seeing Ray as a natural ally, Stuart Schulberg had arranged to meet with him in New York in late 1956 before the director left for Paris to start work on Bitter Victory.

  One Hollywood studio that might overlook disparaging reports from the producer of Bitter Victory was Warner Bros., where Jack Warner—and his right-hand man Steve Trilling—still reigned. Not so long ago, despite his unorthodox habits and methods, Ray had taken a sketchy story of seventeen pages and transformed it into the triumphant Rebel Without a Cause for the studio. In a sense, Ray stood as a testament to Jack Warner’s own good judgment.