Nicholas Ray

by Patrick McGilligan

  Sidelined and impotent when it came to key filmmaking decisions, the director put his foot down on this issue. When the cast and crew arrived in Everglades City, Manon was at Ray’s side.

  Thus far the Schulbergs had taken the lead on their first production. Budd Schulberg, who was also the producer of Wind Across the Everglades, had followed his own muse on the script. His brother and coproducer Stuart guided the second-unit photography, which would lend flavor and authenticity to the film. The Schulbergs also arranged much of the casting.

  A “motlier” cast, wrote Christopher Plummer in his memoir, never existed. The former stripper and litterateur Gypsy Rose Lee was recruited to play the madam of the local brothel. The Schulbergs gave speaking parts to jockey and broadcaster Sam Renick and boxer “Two Ton” Tony Galento, who had once fought Joe Louis. The sad-faced circus clown Emmett Kelly agreed to a rare screen appearance, mainly for publicity’s sake, and other pugilists and circus types acquainted with the Schulbergs were awarded walk-ons. Bits went to cronies and relatives. One of Ray’s choices was an offbeat Actors Studio alumnus named Peter Falk, who was making his first movie. Falk was one of the “only actual actors in the film,” Plummer joked.

  The leading lady, Plummer’s love interest, was also a newcomer. The Schulbergs bestowed this plum part on their personal discovery, a former Israeli airline hostess named Chana Eden, whom Stuart had spotted when making the rounds of New York acting classes. (Stuart later admitted that her rash casting didn’t improve the film.)

  Another novice actor unwittingly exacerbated the growing rift between Ray and the Schulbergs. Author MacKinlay Kantor, who had won a Pulitzer Prize the previous year for his Civil War novel Andersonville, was a Sarasota resident and a mutual friend of Budd Schulberg’s and Ray’s. (Kantor had mingled with the director during the Hollywood phase of his career.) He was the consensus choice to play the judge in the picture.

  But when Kantor came to the hotel where they all were staying to meet with Ray in his suite, Budd waited for his invitation to join them. “I thought we’d all get together more or less socially,” recalled Schulberg. After Budd had waited “maybe two hours,” Ray suddenly “burst” into his room, waving a copy of the script and saying excitedly, “Budd, Mac and I have been working on the script, and I think we’ve made some marvelous improvements.” Schulberg angrily remembered his astonishment decades later. “He had it all written down in the margins. I said, ‘Nick . . .’—I was shaking, I was so angry—‘Nick, I want you to get away from me, just get away from me.’ He said, ‘But please, look at this . . .’ He didn’t seem to understand what he and Mac had done.”

  Schulberg rushed off to find his brother. Ray had lost touch with reality, Budd warned Stuart. The director was a deluded man, acting as though the script were a blueprint for his own genius. The brothers were debating whether to fire Ray—and whether Warner’s would accept such a last-minute shock without pulling the plug on the production—when they were interrupted by a phone call from the hotel owner, who was also a physician. Manon had just taken an overdose of sleeping pills in the bathroom of Ray’s suite. “It was the first of three so-called attempts” at suicide by the director’s girlfriend during the filming, according to Schulberg.

  Good timing: Manon was saved from the brink, and her failed suicide changed the crisis. Schulberg mended fences with Ray and Kantor, and the brothers set aside the idea of firing the director.

  The first day of filming was November 5, 1957. The night before, Ray convened the entire cast for a read-through of the script. That was his cherished method, studying the actors as they grappled for the first time with their lines and characterizations. It was a throwback to his theater training, though it didn’t always work for motion pictures.

  The night was a travesty of the unifying event that had hypnotized the young cast of Rebel Without a Cause. Burl Ives, one of the major players, couldn’t be present; his lines had to be read by someone else. On the other hand, even the “bit players” were invited, recalled Budd Schulberg, “like the manager of the Everglades Hotel Rod and Gun Club. He shouldn’t have been at such a reading anyway, but as he read his lines, Nick stopped him and said, ‘Now, do you understand your motivation for this?’ Nick was talking Stanislavski to this poor little man who was just thinking it would be fun to dress up and be in a movie.”

  Other advice Ray proffered that night struck even some of the professional actors as “incoherent,” according to Budd Schulberg. After the reading, Plummer made a beeline for the writer-producer and yanked him aside. “You do realize, don’t you, Budd,” hissed the leading man, “that this man is stark, raving mad?”

  Ray and Plummer never really hit it off, and the read-through did nothing to improve their relationship. The read-through was intended to foster a communal spirit, but as Ray would demonstrate in various ways on location—offending some in the cast and crew by insisting on special meals rather than standing in line; dining alone with Manon rather than communally—such gestures were merely a pretense. Plummer was the kind of theater-trained actor Ray normally favored, but the Canadian-born thespian was not Ray’s casting, and he symbolized a creative process dominated by the Schulbergs. Furthermore, Plummer was playing “the somewhat colorless leading juvenile of this fated film,” in the actor’s own words. Ray looked more fondly on the rapscallion parts, especially the chief outlaw, the hard-boozing gambling man Cottonmouth, the role earmarked for his old folksinging buddy Ives.

  After Plummer finished his confab with Schulberg, Ray, who had been eyeing them suspiciously, grabbed Budd for another earful. “I can’t handle Chris,” the director announced. “So what if I direct Burl and I let you direct Chris?”

  Was Ray joking? Schulberg couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Later, he and his brother had another “serious discussion” about firing Ray, rehashing the pros and cons. Warner’s might cancel the picture or impose its own crappy director. Ray boasted a fine body of work; keeping him was preferable to scaring the studio. For all his faults, they still held out hope that Ray would get back on track once filming started. The Schulbergs chose to wait and see.

  The Schulberg brothers were novice film producers, and they were gradually becoming overwhelmed by a critical mass of problems and emergencies. Most of the time, Budd Schulberg was just as pickled in alcohol as Ray, though some felt that the writer-producer held his liquor better. (The older Schulberg brother “started on the vodka at ten in the morning and by late afternoon was still standing, believe it or not, quite sober, even when writing copious pages of new dialogue,” recalled Plummer. “What a constitution!”)

  The hellishness of the location couldn’t be blamed on Ray. First the cast and crew experienced miserable heat and humidity and mosquitoes and snakes; then the weather switched to thunderstorms and the coldest, wettest winter in decades. Filming in the Everglades was as arduous as working in the Libyan desert. Everyone took to bed with ailments.

  Everyone but Ray: Once again the director’s physical courage impressed people, even when his psychological state gave them cause for alarm. One day, Ray fell thirty-five feet from a gangplank into the Barron River and had to be fished out by an electrician; he went straight back to work on the scene in progress. At one point, the Schulbergs reported to Steve Trilling, “Ives and Plummer both bedridden . . . Nick also sick but still on his feet.” Variety ran a publicity item describing Ray as “a hero to his colleagues on location scouting expeditions.” Unafraid of the rampant snakes, Ray took the lead on treks into the wetlands and told a reporter, “Those rattlers never strike the first person in line, always the second or third.”

  Budd Schulberg frightened Ray more than pneumonia or snakes. Early in the filming, Budd tapped Ray on the shoulder to make a suggestion and the director jumped ten feet. From then on Ray ordered Budd to keep his distance—the opposite of how Schulberg had worked with Elia Kazan, and this time Schulberg was not only the writer but also the producer! Nevertheless, Budd bit his tongue and vowe
d to tread cautiously.

  Ray spent the first month shooting every possible scene that didn’t involve Burl Ives, while waiting for William Wyler to release the big fellow from The Big Country. That meant, primarily, agitating the essence of Christopher Plummer. Just before an important scene, he’d take Plummer on one of his characteristically long strolls, whispering and gesturing ambiguously. “On these instances,” Plummer said, “he could be at his most pretentious. Only too occasionally would flashes of talent show through, and then he was both lucid and helpful.”

  One time, just before a key close-up, Ray elaborately threw his arm around the actor and took him on the grand tour of the set, expounding on the complexity of the role he was playing and comparing his character, Walt Murdock, to “Hamlet or Oedipus,” in Plummer’s words, “favored slightly with a touch of Kraft-Ebbing and Kierkegaard.”

  Another time, before another close-up, Ray walked Plummer around for a long, long time—maybe ten minutes, maybe four hundred yards. As the crew waited and waited, director and actor walked and walked—and Ray never uttered a single word. Finally, he stopped, turned to Plummer, and asked, “See what I mean?”

  “Things are getting a little scary,” Plummer thought. The actor chalked it up to dope, or whatever other influence was emanating from Manon. “If she didn’t push dope,” recalled Plummer, she “pushed just about everything else. She was certainly feeding Nick with something, for to those on board who had known and respected this gifted man he most certainly was not himself. His eyes were always running, the pupils strangely dilated—he would stare vacantly into space. Half aware of this he began to wear a black patch over one eye so that he resembled that famed rebel director from the recent past Andre de Toth.

  “Nick and his girl were never apart. She stood close to him on the set, never took her eyes off him. One could sense there wasn’t much tenderness there; they seemed shackled together in a love-hate bondage that could only end in despair.”

  Ray had threatened to leave the direction of Plummer to Budd Schulberg, and “in a sense that is what happened,” said Schulberg. “He simply wouldn’t communicate with Chris at all, and we just tried to work out together how to adjust to that situation.”

  Plummer wasn’t alone in wondering if he was trapped in some kind of swamp horror flick. He and Peter Falk and a few others formed an “anti–Nick Ray” clique, privately referring to the film as “Wind Breaking Across the Everglades.”

  When Ives finally arrived on location, however, everyone’s spirits lifted a little. The burly folksinger serenaded everyone at night, taking up his guitar and singing favorite songs from the balcony of his room. Ray too sprang back to life. The director threw himself wholeheartedly into his old cohort’s scenes, most of which involved singing and drinking and gambling. He and Ives spoke the same language of macho bluff, and Ives’s scenes played as warmly and slyly menacing as Plummer’s were cold and devoid of charm. Ray also gave privileged moments to other friends playing minor characters, like George Voskovec. Convinced that the thirteenth-billed Voskovec added texture to the film, Ray gave inordinate screen time to the former Prague comedian.

  “Screen time” was a mounting issue as Ray repeatedly sank into his chair, deep-thinking the next shot. While filming, the director called for constant last-minute changes in camera setups and numerous alternative shots. At night, unable as ever to sleep, Ray would feverishly compile notes and sketch shots, but by day he insisted on filming the same scene through numerous similar angles, with only slight adjustments in the coverage.

  Undoubtedly, Ray did manage to capture some picturesque images on film. (“Some of his photographic setups and angles,” Plummer wrote, “were most interestingly conceived.”) But both Jack Warner and Steve Trilling sent telegrams complaining about Ray’s endless minute variations, nearly all of which were destined for the cutting room floor. “Time, effort and cost,” they wrote, “unnecessarily expended.”

  Privately, the Schulbergs concurred. But the brothers were doing their best to control Ray without triggering panic in Hollywood or an explosion in the Everglades. “Methods of director unexpectedly intricate and expensive,” Stuart Schulberg reported politely to the studio. “We have pressed for simplification to maximum extent possible without destroying his effectiveness. Of course controlling him is our responsibility but as you know a difficult problem to be handled on the scene and on Day to Day basis.”

  For all these unpleasant reasons, the filming fell behind schedule and budget. The scenes and footage kept elongating, and Warner Bros. kept insisting on making cuts in the script to compensate. Already feeling under the gun, Budd Schulberg trimmed scenes further, blaming the need for the trims on Ray. The director, in turn, grew irritated by the constant flow of revisions, over which he exerted zero influence, and which, he later claimed, jettisoned some of the very elements in the script that had drawn him to the story in the first place.

  The atmosphere on location had become one of permanent crisis.

  The Schulbergs had been fearing some kind of explosion, and it came, literally, in mid-January.

  After failing three times to kill herself, one night Manon made a game attempt at murdering someone else. “In the dead of night she had left their bed, Nick still sleeping,” Plummer wrote in his memoir, “got into the big Cadillac convertible, backed up several yards then gunned it at full speed straight through the wall of their bedroom. If, seconds before, Nick hadn’t got up to pee, he would surely have been a dead man. We saw the cabin the next morning which looked like a collapsed accordion.”

  Ray was “badly shaken” by the incident, according to Plummer, and Manon was briefly spirited away somewhere. But the mysterious young French woman didn’t go very far; she would be glimpsed at least twice more, several days later.

  Some of the film’s crucial scenes were coming up, including the late passages in which Walt Murdock confronts Cottonmouth in his lair and force-marches him to justice through an alligator-infested swamp. The ending had been the subject of much internal debate: The script had originally concluded with both the protagonist and villain dying, but Schulberg changed it at the behest of Warner Bros. so that Cottonmouth would acquiesce in his own death by snakebite, almost as a noble gesture. Though the change was Schulberg’s decision, it bore an almost eerie similarity to what happens between Leith and Brand at the end of Bitter Victory.

  The director felt he had been working well with Ives, building his characterization and performance, and Ray was looking forward to the death march as an opportunity to clinch an Oscar for his old friend. But it was not to be: Before Ives could die on camera, a second, less violent but even more disastrous blowup took place that derailed the picture altogether.

  It happened not long after Manon’s car crash—on January 13, 1958, according to Bernard Eisenschitz—the fifty-eighth day of photography, with about two and a half weeks of filming left.

  After supervising a brief shot involving a minor character, Ray told the man to quit the scene by exiting to his left. His continuity girl, Roberta Hodes, checked her notes and told the director the shot wouldn’t match with the editing unless the performer exited to the right. Ray said that the editing matchup didn’t matter to him and repeated his direction to exit left. Hodes spoke up again, in a small voice, warning that the shot might cause confusion in the editing room. Loudly, Ray said he didn’t care. Finally, assistant director Charlie Maguire chimed in, agreeing with Hodes. Maguire “was disciplined, knows his place as an assistant director, never talks back to directors,” Hodes recalled, “but he [Maguire] said, ‘Nick, Roberta’s right, it won’t match, it’ll look as if instead of following up, he’s going in the opposite direction.’ ”

  Ray waxed indignant. “I will not have this kind of insubordination on my set!” he protested. Then cinematographer Joe Brun—“a gentle artistic soul, he would never intervene, but finally he did,” as Hodes noted—spoke up, siding with the continuity girl and assistant director. Furious, Ray demand
ed the take he wanted, the one everyone warned him wouldn’t be suitable.

  Watching from the sidelines with mounting exasperation, Budd Schulberg finally let loose, upbraiding Ray and heatedly telling him he ought to thank three knowledgeable people who’d tried so hard to assist him with good advice. The director stood his ground, rebuking Schulberg angrily. “I cannot and will not work with this sort of interference!”

  “Well,” said Schulberg, “maybe we had better stop right now.”

  The filming halted, and everyone sheepishly returned to the hotel. The Schulberg brothers met one last time to debate what to do. Budd insisted that Ray was physically incapable of directing the picture, that he was “not really coherent.” The cast and crew were demoralized by his erratic behavior. Budd felt they had no choice but to fire him.

  But who would take over for the remaining two and a half weeks, Stuart asked, including the climax of Cottonmouth’s death? Budd said he could direct the remainder himself, with the help of the cinematographer and assistant director. “It can only be better,” he argued, “it can’t be worse.”

  Years later, Ray would strike two blows to Budd’s solar plexus, telling friendly interviewers that Schulberg had a ghostwriter on the set (i.e., his brother?) and that Budd had secretly wanted to direct the picture all along (i.e., that Budd was a faux writer and director). “Schulberg refused to allow a range of respect among men,” Ray said, defending himself abstrusely.

  But the truth is that the Schulbergs had given Ray plenty of charitable reprieves. Now they felt forced to dismiss him, banishing him from his own set and ordering him to stay in his hotel room while Schulberg, assistant director Charlie Maguire, and director of photography Joseph Brun finished the filming. In exchange for staying out of sight, the Schulbergs agreed not to announce publicly that Ray had been discharged. The director insisted on his contractual right of first cut and his directing credit. The Schulbergs readily agreed. He demanded the remainder of his salary; that too was granted. Warner’s had to be apprised of the change (Jack Warner and Steve Trilling were frankly relieved), but the studio would keep the secret to avoid negative publicity.