Nicholas Ray

by Patrick McGilligan

  But Ray couldn’t bear his dismissal and confinement. Not long after his firing, Budd Schulberg glimpsed the director crouched low in the back of a rental car lurking on the perimeter of the set, watching the filming from the stipulated distance with Manon behind the wheel. A few days later, Plummer spotted the director in the same furtive position in the back of the same rental car; this time, however, Manon was driving the couple to the airport.

  Privately Ray may have been deflated, but only briefly was he cowed. He believed his own defense and rationalized what had happened. His hubris remained intact—helped by the fact that, as often happened in his life, only a handful inside the film industry knew of his secret firing and the whole shameful episode.

  Besides, Ray had a ready fallback. The director had been talking to Charles Schnee about directing a Roaring Twenties quasi-musical for MGM. The dependable writer of They Live by Night and Born to Be Bad had supervised a script called Party Girl, slated to be the last picture he would produce for MGM before leaving the studio. (Schnee’s booster, Dore Schary, had been ousted as production chief in late November 1956.) Ray’s contract for Party Girl was being finalized the very week of the Everglades standoff.

  MGM was one of the last major studios in Hollywood where Ray hadn’t worked. The studio insisted on a “morality clause” in his contract, penalizing the director in the event of indecent or illegal deportment—a clause that, while pro forma in many contracts, hinted at whispers about his drinking and drug use. Ray swiftly dropped his initial resistance to the morality clause after the Schulbergs fired him, and there is no evidence MGM was informed about what happened in Florida. Just as swiftly, Ray agreed to $3,750 weekly for twenty weeks. That added up to $75,000, the very salary he had been unsuccessful in obtaining for Wind Across the Everglades.

  Pressured by Warner’s, meanwhile, the Schulbergs rushed to assemble a rough cut of the Everglades picture. Although Ray was in New York for the rough-cut editing, he deliberately absented himself. Editors Joe Zigman and George Klotz were urged to let Ray view the rushes “on that part of the picture completed after his departure,” according to Stuart Schulberg, and to let him advise and consult on the overall editing, but the director never showed for the screenings scheduled to accommodate his input. Despite “repeated efforts by telephone to arrange other dates for him to screen the material, he never returned their calls or made any effort, as far as they could discover, to meet with them,” recalled Stuart Schulberg.

  Ray was pointedly invited to the rough-cut showing attended by Jack Warner himself in New York. He didn’t respond to the invitation. After viewing the assembly, the studio mogul wrote an April 22, 1957, memo to Steve Trilling: “Just saw picture . . . about 100% better than we thought it would be . . . needs editing but doesn’t need any retakes . . . all we need is some stock shots of animal life . . . Editing can be done between you, me, Rudy [Rudi] Fehr.” The latter was a Warner Bros. official, formerly a top editor, who specialized in tidying up messy pictures.

  Ray left for California, and the editing of Wind Across the Everglades soon moved there also, so that Warner Bros. could closely guard the final form of the film. Fehr, Zigman, and Klotz worked with the Schulberg brothers on the Warner’s lot. Feeling obliged to keep Ray apprised because of his “contractual right of first cut,” the Schulbergs persisted in their efforts to reach the director at his new MGM offices, but he refused even to return their phone calls. Stuart Schulberg tried calling Ray’s new MCA agent, Herb Brenner—one more rung down the agency’s ladder—but Brenner was having no better luck communicating with Ray.

  The Everglades film progressed through postproduction. Actors flew in for dubbing. Warner Bros. approved a final cut. Canned music was added after a musician’s strike hit Hollywood, though more goodwill with the studio might have stalled that unwise decision. A July 9 preview was slated, with Ray the only name on the guest list without an escort and the name Manon conspicuously missing.

  Ray still hadn’t seen Wind Across the Everglades. Still worried about the director’s right-of-first-cut clause, Stuart Schulberg made one last-ditch effort to contact him. Ray’s secretary told him the director had been ill, but that he would phone him shortly. It wasn’t until the last week of June that the director finally did, however. Schulberg told Ray that he was free to see the film at any mutually agreeable time. Yet more days went by without Ray specifying a date.

  After reading all this in a June 30 memo, with the studio preview just one week away, Steve Trilling dictated a blunt memo: “Forget the whole matter.” The Schulbergs and Warner’s had done everything possible to honor Ray’s contract. Now it was “his problem,” Trilling said.

  Defying expectations, then, Ray showed up at the preview. Afterward, the director dashed off a memo to the Schulbergs and George Klotz (the French editor Ray himself had hired), reporting “my reaction to the film.” The memo, which appears personally typed, rather than dictated, revealed a mind still at times lucid, other times groping for clarity.

  “The story line is unclear,” Ray began. “Therefore, to say that unity is lost is redundant.” He mourned the loss of favorite scenes, many involving fringe characters such as the one played by Voskovec, and especially the “largely improvisatory” moments—his own contributions, that is, not those scripted by Schulberg. “I find angles used differently than their intention,” he pointed out—their intended use, of course, known only to him.

  “The academics of repetition to make historic or folkloreistic [sic] points, annoyed me and the audience,” he wrote in a particularly obscure passage, “because, no matter what our sentiments might be, the interference with entertainment is on film.”

  Ray found the preview version to be hobbled by “almost ludicrous” scene transitions, and he felt compelled to make suggestions for cuts and resequencing, even singling out certain lines of dialogue for clarification, deletion, or translation into the Seminole language. “This is not creative cutting,” he said of the preview version, “but I am not in a position to do more than challenge it.”

  The dubbing was “atrocious,” Ray added almost as an afterthought, “and the canned score, of course is impossible. But I’m certain you entertain no thoughts of releasing the film this way.”

  By the end of the three-page memo, his bitterness had built to a howl of outrage. “I’m sure that my name means very little to the box-office revenue for this film except in Europe,” Ray declared, “but unless the final scene shot after my departure from Florida is reshot, I would be most acquiescent to having my name removed from the film. I cannot allow it to be associated with the style of acting employed by Burl, in the death scene.

  “The film has a potential of being interesting,” he concluded, “but not in its present state.”

  The “death scene” to which Ray referred was supposed to have been the cathartic high point of Wind Across the Everglades. If Ray himself had shot it, the director believed, it would have clinched a Best Actor Oscar for Burl Ives. And Ray wasn’t alone: No one was satisfied with the ending as it was filmed by the makeshift trio of Budd Schulberg, cinematographer Joseph Brun, and assistant director Charles Maguire. Ives himself remained sympathetic to Ray, and during his trip to Hollywood for dubbing, he volunteered to redo several scenes including his death on studio soundstages. By that time, however, Jack Warner was through adding to the production budget. He wanted to cut his losses and move on.

  “Good luck,” Ray signed his impolitic memo, which he copied to Trilling and Warner. But the director’s suggestions were ignored, the canned music was preserved, and Wind Across the Everglades was released in September to tepid box office and reviews that tended to damn with faint praise. (“Moderately interesting,” wrote John L. Scott in the Los Angeles Times.) Ironically, Ives did win an acting Oscar that year—not for Everglades, but for his supporting role in The Big Country.

  There would be no second Schulberg brothers’ project for Ray—or for Budd and Stuart, for that matter. (It was a
ctually the last motion picture either Schulberg would make.) Jack Warner scoffed at striking the director’s name from the credits, but for the foreseeable future Ray was persona non grata at the studio that had gambled so successfully on him with Rebel Without a Cause. This was one blacklisting that had nothing to do with politics.

  Charles Schnee didn’t last very long without Dore Schary. After MGM’s new management restricted his freedom with the Party Girl script and dictated leads that appalled him, the writer-producer fled to Columbia. The Roaring Twenties musical was bequeathed to Joseph Pasternak, who’d been producing light entertainment for three decades, including many musicals, first in Germany, then for Universal and MGM in Hollywood.

  Party Girl was set in a time and place Ray knew firsthand: Chicago in the era of Prohibition and gangland violence. The story wasn’t much, a romance between a nightclub performer and a crippled mob lawyer whose sole client, a boyhood friend turned brutal criminal, has begun to question the lawyer’s loyalty. The formula was old-fashioned, like a Warner Bros. gangster film of the 1930s, only with singing and dancing instead of a social conscience.

  After Schnee’s departure, several writers tried to pump life into the script. The last of these was George Wells, who’d won an Oscar for writing Designing Woman, an MGM picture Vincente Minnelli had directed the year before. Before Ray came on board, Wells’s final script had been approved by MGM officials and budgeted by the departments. Though the major roles had been cast, Ray sprinkled in a handful of old acquaintances in minor roles: Corey Allen from Rebel Without a Cause and Rusty Lane, one of the judges of the radio contest he had won, long ago in Wisconsin. The director had time and opportunity for only trivial script changes. “I don’t know whether he didn’t like my work or I didn’t like his,” recalled Wells. “I do not know. I did not do well with him.”

  The two leads, whose casting Schnee had fought unsuccessfully, were set in concrete: Robert Taylor and Cyd Charisse, two aging, fading stars making their last MGM pictures under cushy contracts that had to be paid. Both were cast somewhat against type: Charisse was supposed to play a common showgirl—“no background, no breeding,” in Wells’s words—yet most moviegoers knew that the silky dancer, trained as a ballerina, was a “highly talented woman, beautiful, refined, everything wrong for the part.” The same went for Taylor, in real life “a smooth, wonderful nice guy,” as Wells noted, whom the front office insisted on casting as a tainted lawyer with a limp, the only person willing to stand up to a sadistic gang lord.

  There was a third lead, the gang lord Rico, even his name a Hollywood cliché. For that role the studio had cast Lee J. Cobb, a Group Theatre veteran who’d been directed by Elia Kazan onstage (in Death of a Salesman) and on-screen (picking up an Oscar nomination for playing the corrupt union boss—i.e., tyrannical Communist leader—in On the Waterfront). Dogged by his many left-wing associations, Cobb had been hounded by HUAC into naming twenty Communists in a 1952 executive session, suffering a massive coronary shortly thereafter. In keeping with the times, and with Ray’s own retreat from his leftist roots, Cobb would be playing a no-good character, undeserving of sympathy or understanding, regardless of how unfortunately his environment shaped him.

  Cobb had nothing on Robert Taylor, who had appeared as a “friendly witness” for HUAC in 1947, saying he didn’t know for sure who in Hollywood was Communist but offering to “name a few who seem to sort of disrupt things once in a while.” “Whether or not they are Communists,” Taylor testified, “I don’t know. One chap we have currently, I think, is Mr. Howard Da Silva. He always seems to have something to say at the wrong time.”

  A character who always had something to say at the wrong time: That was the role Da Silva had played in They Live by Night, Nicholas Ray’s first film, in which he was unforgettable as the loudmouthed Chickamaw. After the Hollywood Ten went to jail in 1950, and the new rounds of hearings were launched, Da Silva had been among the first unfriendly witnesses—“belligerently uncooperative,” as Victor Navasky put it. RKO decided to make a “symbolic example” of Da Silva, splicing him out of a leading role in a Western and then reshooting his part with Brian Donlevy. Once a friend of Ray’s, Da Silva found himself blacklisted thanks to people like Taylor; for the next decade he’d miss out on a host of choice movie roles—including the gang lord in Party Girl, for which he would have been perfect.

  The studio vetoed any location work in Chicago, instead re-dressing standing sets for the filming. The cinematographer, Robert J. Bronner, specialized in MGM musicals highlighting the beauty of Cyd Charisse. But Ray found consolation in CinemaScope and color, and some consider Party Girl his most exquisitely beautiful picture.

  John Hambleton was around for drinks and brainstorming, and once again Ray resorted to “the psychology of color” in costuming the main characters. Charisse would appear in “a film wardrobe restricted to shades of coral or flame,” the director informed the press. Taylor, “a well-educated, sharp-shooting gangster attorney,” would wear “nothing but businesslike grey and shades of grey.” Gangster boss Lee J. Cobb would be dressed in “conservative black clothing” that set him apart from young, ambitious underlings like his lieutenant, played by John Ireland, who had seven wardrobe changes in varieties of green—i.e., callowness, envy, money, etc. (“The color just goes with the part he represents,” said Ray.)

  Only one color was banned from the set: blue. Ray regarded blue as a “scene-stealer,” the director told journalists, distracting from the main action. The only exception to the ban was Ray himself, who now abandoned his jeans and sandals for a blue sport coat, hinting at a jaunty attitude.

  And yet, during the principal photography, which ran from late March until early May, Ray seemed a wounded, diminished figure. Some days the director deliberately absented himself from the set. Ray had always said he wanted to stage a Hollywood musical, and along with Hot Blood this was the closest he came. But he delegated the handling of all the musical numbers to choreographer Robert Sidney, who rehearsed the singing and dancing and then guided the camerawork, ostensibly under Ray’s supervision. The filming halted during the musicians’ dispute in May and then didn’t resume until early July, but most of what remained were song-and-dance numbers that were mapped out for Sidney. Ray soon left the lot, and MGM staffers supervised the editing and musical scoring.

  Characteristically, Ray worked best with Taylor, the male lead, insisting in a later interview that the sometimes colorless star worked for him “like a true Method actor.” (“I took him to the greatest bone specialist in southern California,” Ray told Take One, “and we spent hours going over hip dislocations, and what would cause that kind of limp.”) The director failed to obtain the same agitation of essence from Charisse, who was mystified when Ray suggested, during one scene, that she take a handful of roses and inhale deeply “as though you were smoking a joint,” as she told French author Jean-Claude Missiaen. Charisse was frankly relieved when Ray left the song-and-dance routines to her favorite choreographer. “Ray didn’t have a clue about the [musical] numbers,” the actress recalled years later.

  Was Ray himself smoking joints, drinking heavily, or trying to wean himself off his dependencies? Was he plagued by illness, as his secretary had informed the Schulbergs? Or was he burned out?

  “He was in an unhappy frame of mind,” recalled Wells. “I don’t know what was bothering him.”

  And whatever happened to Manon, the “one woman” for whom Ray had declared his true love or something “almost” like it? There are unsubstantiated rumors that the French North African heroin addict was arrested and deported in Florida—and other rumors suggesting she lingered with Ray in Hollywood. No one has ever reported Manon’s last name or even confirmed that she had one.

  Ray found Manon’s replacement on the set of Party Girl, however, when dancer Betty Utey roared back into his life like a blood transfusion. At twenty-three, from a Michigan family, Utey (born Uitti) was half Ray’s age. Blond and vivacious, with a swee
t come-hither smile, she resembled Carroll Baker, the star of Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll. Bright and bursting with energy, she was dying to prove she was more than a chorus girl.

  Utey had been a chorine for nearly a decade: training with the Ballet Russe, dancing behind Jimmy Durante in nightclubs, doing chorus work in Pal Joey, and twirling on Fred Astaire’s arm briefly in Silk Stockings (another Cyd Charisse vehicle). Ray had met her as a teenager at RKO, and they may have had an affair back then. Now she was one of the billed “party girls” dressing up the background of his MGM musical.

  As soon as he drew his last paycheck, the director declared that he needed a long vacation from Hollywood—maybe a permanent vacation. Hollywood was killing him. Utey, who fell in love with him during the filming, was a sunny optimist who believed that all Ray really needed was to stop drinking and taking drugs. They left together in a car heading east, stopping in Wisconsin, to visit Ray’s mother, and in Michigan, where Utey had relatives. They took their time, and Ray began to decompress. Their summer vacation became an extended sabbatical, and for months Ray barely kept in touch with his Hollywood agents. By the fall they had worked their way north to Maine, where they took a cabin and did little every day but hunt, fish, and make love.

  Once again Ray had fallen hard for a woman, and this one, like Jean Evans, was determined to uplift him. On October 13, 1958, the two exchanged wedding vows at a United Methodist church in Kingfield, Maine, near Sugarloaf Mountain, not far from the Canadian border. Bursting with happiness, Ray himself phoned Hedda Hopper from nearby Quebec and told her he was in love and newly married for the third time.