Nicholas Ray

by Patrick McGilligan

  Stuart Schulberg’s older brother, Budd, was also a desirable risk for the studio. Budd had just finished a job for Warner Bros. writing A Face in the Crowd, another Kazan film. Even before Kazan, Schulberg had been a voluntary cooperative witness in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in May 1951, taking pleasure in decrying his past Communist ties and equal pride, later, in insisting that the Communists he fingered had all been exposed to light long before he named them.* The film that he and Kazan subsequently made together, On the Waterfront, had showcased Marlon Brando as a longshoreman willing to stand up to corrupt union bosses; many people saw Schulberg’s script as an allegorical defense of informing, with the Communist Party disguised as the corrupt union.

  Now the Schulbergs wanted to make a film about the Florida Everglades. Over time Budd had grown fascinated with the story of the forgotten, sometimes deadly turn-of-the-century war between pioneering Audubon Society agents and primitive Everglades squatters, who slaughtered egrets, blue herons, and flamingos to supply milliners with feathers for high-fashion hats.

  The writer had sketched out enough of a story treatment to hook Warner Bros., combining action, adventure, and “the urgent theme of conservation,” in Schulberg’s words. Coincidentally, just as with Bitter Victory, the two main characters of his story were mortal enemies: Cottonmouth, a plume hunter who is king of the Everglades lowlifes, and Walt Murdock, an English teacher and naturalist who is opposed to the slaughter. The antagonists would lock horns throughout the film, eventually perishing at each other’s hands, according to Schulberg’s first treatment—though this nihilistic ending was quickly rejected by the Production Code office.

  A lengthier treatment was in motion when Stuart Schulberg met with Ray at New York’s Plaza Hotel in December 1956. Bitter Victory was weighing on the director’s mind, but an alliance with the Schulbergs seemed propitious down the road. Budd was a pedigreed writer, and besides Kazan’s friendship and cooperation with HUAC, they had a common interest in boxing and a mutual friend in Roger Donoghue. Indeed, after the prospect of casting James Dean in a Donoghue biopic evaporated, the Schulbergs had begun talking about having Donoghue play himself in a film. Ray could maybe direct the Donoghue movie after the Everglades picture; it was all between friends, all in the family. They shook hands on a two-picture deal.

  Warner Bros. signed a two-picture contract with the brothers, and Budd Schulberg got busy writing, while Stuart brokered arrangements with the studio and MCA, which still represented Ray. Warner’s was happy to have Ray as the director, but once Ray was off in France and Libya, he began playing hard to get. He demanded a “right of first cut” and a salary of $75,000, with a badly needed cash advance upon signing. The Schulbergs countered with $50,000 and 5 percent of the producer’s profits, no advance.

  His Oscar nomination and the box-office sensation of Rebel Without a Cause were only two years in the past. Ray should have been at the height of his bargaining power. But he had never made as much money as the most trusted first-echelon names: Alfred Hitchcock was getting $150,000 per picture with a long list of perks and profit clauses by the 1950s. George Cukor, long a contract director at MGM, had a new arrangement promising him $4,000 weekly on a year-round basis.

  Bigger Than Life may have been a success d’estime, but Hot Blood, The True Story of Jesse James, and Bitter Victory had cost Ray. After overseeing the director’s two-picture deal at 20th Century-Fox, which had ended so badly, Lew Wasserman and Herman Citron had passed Ray on to lesser lights in the agency. Now Mort Viner tried to mediate Ray’s needs on behalf of MCA, but by midwinter the Schulbergs were growing anxious for the director’s formal commitment. They sent treatment pages to Paris, asking for Ray’s comments and suggestions. Viner sent telegrams to Ray, trying to sort out Ray’s salary and the other contract issues. Neither party heard back.

  The business-minded brother, Stuart, was less personally friendly with Ray, and he advised Budd to forget the uncommunicative director. “I will check once more with MCA,” Stuart wrote to Budd in Sarasota, Florida, in February, where the writer was hunkered down with the script, “but with little hope since MCA itself confesses Nick has been incommunicado for a month. He has failed to answer two letters from me and never acknowledged the Christmas cable we sent him. This is worrisome behavior.”

  Though initially enthusiastic, Warner’s also grew increasingly wary. When Stuart Schulberg asked Steve Trilling if the brothers might switch to Robert Parrish as director, Trilling—whose skepticism about Ray would catch up to and surpass Jack Warner’s—gave a fast reply: “He’s first-rate. Skilled, solid, cooperative. You can’t go wrong with Parrish. Get him!”

  It was Budd who preferred to give Ray the benefit of the doubt. The director was understandably preoccupied, shooting on location in Libya, for God’s sake, Budd said. Warner’s could be stalled. Budd had plenty of writing to do. The brothers could afford to be patient.

  In the meantime, the Schulbergs thought ahead to the casting. On Broadway they had recently seen The Lark, a drama by Jean Anouilh about Joan of Arc, and they were excited by Canadian-born Christopher Plummer, a commanding young actor who played the Earl of Warwick. They penciled in Plummer for Walt while targeting Ray’s old folksinging buddy Burl Ives, whose acting career had blossomed after his “friendly” HUAC testimony and his colorful, fourth-billed turn as Sam the Sheriff in Kazan’s East of Eden, as natural casting for Cottonmouth. Stuart Schulberg knew that Ray and Ives went way back and thought the folksinger’s involvement would add to the family spirit of the enterprise for the director.

  Not until mid-March did Ray finally send a telegram from his temporary address in the Hotel Negresco in Nice, explaining that he was still “winding” Bitter Victory and wouldn’t become available until June. Relieved, Stuart Schulberg replied immediately that “for a number of reasons—not the least of them some uncertainty as to your availability” the brothers had already decided to postpone the start of photography until August or September. The summer heat and hurricane season would be over by then, everyone hoped; they planned to spend two months on Florida locations and finish interiors in New York studios by Christmas.

  Still, to the Schulbergs’ dismay, Ray offered scant feedback on the script or casting ideas, and he kept throwing up roadblocks over his contract. Warner’s and the Schulbergs readily agreed to give Ray right of first cut, which they viewed as nothing more than an intermediate stage of the final assembly. But the studio was adamant about keeping the budget below $1.1 million and did not want to pay Ray a penny until he reported for duty in the United States. Both the studio and the Schulbergs opposed his $75,000 salary. Indicating his weak leverage, Ray finally dropped to $60,000 and 5 percent of the producer’s profits.

  By the end of May, with Ray still at a geographical and emotional distance from the project, his contract still unsigned, the leads had been tentatively cast and some locations preliminarily scouted around Everglades City off the coast of the Gulf of Mexico in southwest Florida. Budd had delivered his first expanded treatment to the studio, which the Warner’s story department found talky and downbeat. In a confidential June 7 memo to Jack Warner, Trilling warned that the Schulbergs might stubbornly resist the needed script changes—making the studio executive all the more nervous about placing their friend Ray in charge, because Trilling felt sure the director would take the brothers’ side in any disagreement.

  Budd cranked out pages as the summer flew by. At first Ray was mired in postproduction for Bitter Victory; then he advised the Schulbergs that his doctor had ordered him to take a month’s vacation after his hospital stay. Yet the brothers suspected that the real reason Ray was still in Europe was that he was in no hurry to leave and was casting about for other prospects. They had heard gossip about his wild times overseas—about drugs and drinking and gambling. The director’s bad habits were no secret: A mutual friend, the poet and screenwriter Alfred Hayes, who had helped out writing The Lusty Men, would later mention Ray in
a poem, portraying him as a chic drunkard, living at the Hotel Raphael near the Champs-Elysées.

  In August, Stuart Schulberg took it upon himself to organize ten days of second-unit work at Duck Rock sanctuary off the tip of southern Florida, photographing thousands of nesting egrets, herons, and flamingos. Ray had urged the Schulbergs to hire Paris-born cinematographer Joseph C. Brun, and the absentee director passed on filming instructions for the second unit, but it was Stuart who led the expedition that captured the breathtaking wildlife footage, pleasing everyone who viewed it and reassuring jittery Warner’s executives.

  “I know you will be as thrilled by it [the footage] as all of us here,” Stuart Schulberg wrote to Ray at his Hotel Raphael address, where the director was ensconced, on August 22. “We got much closer to the birds than we expected and were able to shoot them in every conceivable light and position, from close-ups of baby birds in the nest to mass shots of mature birds streaking across the sunset skies. Joe Brun did a magnificent job. No picture postcard gaudiness, but soft half-tones and pastels.”

  Not until late August was Ray officially contracted to helm the first two Schulberg productions, the one now called Wind Across the Everglades, and a second project, tentatively slated to be the Roger Donoghue story. MCA used the two-picture commitment to carve out future guarantees and options for Ray, tied to the expected success of the first picture.

  The Schulberg brothers had not laid eyes on Ray for almost nine months when they greeted him at the Plaza Hotel upon his arrival back from Europe at the end of the first week of September. Ray came straight from the Venice Film Festival, where he’d appeared in support of Bitter Victory. Its failure to win the Golden Lion sorely disappointed him. The brothers’ first glance told them the whispers were true: This was not the same man who had directed Rebel Without a Cause, not even the same person they had conferred with in New York last December. Ray had obviously been living rough and drinking hard. The director was dressed poorly. His attention drifted. And he looked unhealthy.

  They could barely conceal their astonishment when Manon strolled out of the bedroom in Ray’s suite, wearing only a bra on top, and “flopped in his lap during our first conversation about the picture,” according to Schulberg. Ray listened to the brothers with a dreamy expression, stroking Manon’s hair, as they discussed the work ahead of them. If the Schulbergs were feeling apprehensive before, the sight of their director, obviously in the thrall of a young drug addict, triggered serious alarm bells.

  Though they were shaken by the encounter, the brothers talked it over afterward, reassuring each other that, when the time for filming began, the old Nick Ray would bob to the surface and reassert himself.

  The casting plans had fluctuated over the summer. Christopher Plummer had been signed to make his screen debut in Stage Struck, detracting from his allure as the Schulbergs’ “discovery.” For a while the brothers pursued Paul Newman, another new Brando, whom the Schulbergs saw as a sexier candidate for Walt. Intriguingly, Ray countered by suggesting the chiseled star of The Ten Commandments, Charlton Heston, but the brothers diplomatically dismissed that notion. Heston “seemed to us too physically magnificent, too obviously competent, to create any suspense about his survival in the Glades,” Stuart Schulberg wrote to Ray.

  Ives proposed Ben Gazzara, an Actors Studio discovery, his costar on Broadway in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, directed by Elia Kazan. Ives felt a special chemistry with Gazzara, who was marked down for the part of Walt. But then Ives’s own participation became doubtful; he had a supporting role in William Wyler’s The Big Country, and the filming was going to take longer than anticipated, putting the folksinger out of reach until mid-October at the earliest. Warner’s wanted to replace Ives, but the Schulbergs were convinced Ives would make the perfect Cottonmouth, and they preferred to shoot around him until he finished the Wyler film. In the way it often happens, then, Gazzara abruptly dropped out of the project, and Plummer dropped back in as Walt.

  The continual delays added to the budget, and Warner’s pressured the Schulbergs into cutting a number of backstory scenes, set in New York and Boston. This would save production time and money while anchoring the story and filming almost entirely in the Everglades. The changes gave the script focus but diminished its scope and breadth. Ray, who’d been looking forward to shooting in East Coast locations for the first time, was dismayed by the forced changes, but he lagged behind the decision-making and nursed his resentments as the planning sped along.

  In mid-September the Schulbergs tried to revive the family spirit with a little togetherness. Ray, the brothers, and the production team—which included many veterans of Elia Kazan films—took a scouting trip to Everglades City in Florida. Ray and the brothers agreed on Duck Rock for a primary location and Chokoloskee Island for the wetlands portions of the story, and they interviewed local fishermen and citizens for small parts.

  The Schulbergs were hoping for an early November start date, but now it was the writing that fell behind. Budd had to keep going back and revising the earliest scenes on the schedule to keep up with studio dictates. He did most of his writing in Florida, limiting Ray’s input.

  Trying for his own circle of trust, however meager, Ray convinced the Schulbergs to add color consultant J. Edward Hambleton to the Wind Across the Everglades payroll. The director also found small parts for his old New York friends Curt Conway (from the Theatre of Action days) and George Voskovec (the refugee comedian from Prague who’d performed on Office of War Information broadcasts). As usual, Ray’s nephew Sumner Williams would act a minor part, but Williams also graduated to a behind-the-scenes role as “dialogue supervisor.”

  Yet Ray seemed to be having a hard time clicking into gear, becoming inspired by the material or committing to the experience. The signs disturbed the Schulbergs. They were no strangers to heavy drinking. But outside their purview, it was obvious—even to straight arrows like them—that Ray was indulging in assorted drugs, perhaps including heroin. “He was in a way a distortion of the Nick that we had known,” recalled Budd Schulberg. “He was in a cloud, he just wasn’t clear, he didn’t know what the story was. It’s true that our relationship flip-flopped almost overnight from one of being friends to being almost adversaries.”

  One of the worst things, from the brothers’ viewpoint, was the constant presence of Manon. Ray seemed umbilically attached to the young woman, who was constantly hovering nearby him, monopolizing him with her always-urgent needs. One day, Budd asked Ray if he loved Manon. Ray quickly said no. Then, later, he vacillated, explaining that he’d found a relationship “strangely easy with this strange woman” and “maybe it makes for loving.”

  In mid-October, the Schulbergs conspired to organize another boys’ night out, luring the director away from Manon on a leisure trip to Florida with a small group of their friends. They arranged to tour the Everglades with the film’s technical adviser, a professional guide, and a local friend of Budd Schulberg’s, a well-known Florida abstract artist named Syd Solomon. For several days they would do nothing but “sop up the atmosphere,” in Budd’s words. If the brothers hoped to make the trip a restorative for Ray, however, it had the opposite effect. Away from Manon and drugs, Ray plunged into a blue funk. One morning, the director refused even to come out of his cabin; Schulberg found him sitting inside, holding his head in his hands.

  “His attitude was, ‘When can we go back? When you’ve seen one Glade, you’ve seen them all.’ He was just not in a frame of mind to do this picture,” recalled Schulberg.

  There was no uptick in goodwill or confidence after their return to New York. As the endlessly delayed November launch of photography approached and the brothers organized for the big move to Florida, the Schulbergs privately chewed the matter over again. Ray was acting crazy; Manon was at best a distraction, at worst a conduit to hard drugs. The brothers arranged a face-to-face with Ray, laying down the law: His girlfriend shouldn’t go on location with him. Everglades City was a p
rovincial place, one that wouldn’t embrace someone like Manon.

  Thus confronted, Ray reluctantly agreed. Then, however, the director went back to the hotel room he shared with his young inamorata and wrote a remarkable letter in which he revealed his innermost feelings—and reversed his decision about Manon. “My very dear Budd,” Ray wrote, “I will go with you unqualifiedly to the end of life against any opposition and toward any goal. I beg an understanding, a tolerance of others and yourself. That you feed on hatreds as well as loves is common to us both—but I believe they should be deeply and justly founded and have a purity that cannot be associated with the festering of rumor or second and third hand reports, the motivations of which we can only guess at this time . . .

  “You or Gadj [Kazan], my two kids and a few others may ask anything of me at any time,” Ray wrote—except for banning Manon from the Florida shoot. That was too much to ask.

  “Until now an early anger towards women has marred my march thru hundreds of women and a couple marriages,” his letter continued. “And now I feel protective and giving toward one woman on a scale which I can no more understand than the abstraction of love.”

  Ray’s struggle to express himself was never more apparent, but his resolution was unmistakable. “Somehow I feel that behind your allowance of a festering anger toward Manon is a protective feeling toward me,” Ray’s missive concluded. “I appreciate that but become concerned with your inner burn because you let it get too hot before you loose it on her, or me. My feelings for you should be clear enough for you to know that nothing need be withheld beyond the moment of the thought itself. I will accept, reject, but consider and honor whatever it may be, and with this declaration I take Manon to Sarasota to clear the atmosphere of the shack for work.”