Nicholas Ray

by Patrick McGilligan

The director did not spend all of the latter half of 1959 in the editing room, or even in Rome.

  Avoiding Hollywood, where he was not very employable, Ray traveled widely, floating ideas and flirting with producers hoping to mount various projects with him in France, Switzerland, and Israel. Encouraged by his young wife, he talked about directing “simple,” noncommercial stories, nothing as searching or grueling as The Savage Innocents. They shared the bliss of her pregnancy and took long motoring trips through Italy.

  In Rome one day, Ray met with a one-of-a-kind producer named Samuel Bronston. Born in Bessarabia (then part of Russia, today Moldova) three years before Ray, in 1908, Bronston was Jewish by birth, Napoleonic in height. Not a creative producer per se, he was more of an extraordinary salesman, a man of monumental ideas who could make pitches to backers in any number of languages. Soft-spoken but feisty, always elegantly dressed, Bronston was a gentleman who sometimes seemed to adhere to an extinct code of chivalry. Ray liked him—not always an auspicious sign in his career. Liking people was one of his Achilles’ heels.

  Though his track record was hardly dazzling, Bronston also harbored Napoleonic ambitions. He was launching a series of big-budget international coproductions, historical spectacles to be filmed under less-than-ideal conditions in Spain, and he needed a director who could handle the scope and logistical pressures of a bona fide epic. (An epic, as Mildred the hatcheck girl explains in In a Lonely Place, is “a picture that’s real long and has lots of things going on.”)

  Bronston was cobbling together a colossal bankroll from investors around the world, including Pierre du Pont, the American heir to the multinational chemical company. Bronston’s superspectacles would all be shot in Spain, because most of Bronston’s investors—individuals, banks, and other companies—had funds in Spanish banks that had been restricted by the country’s fascist dictator, Francisco Franco, limiting the money to local Spanish use. Cheap nonunion crews and extras would lower the costs of production.

  Bronston’s superspectacles, dotted with internationally recognized marquee names, were intended for the widest possible audience. The producer had worked hard to endear himself to the Vatican, to Spanish Catholics, and to the Franco regime, pledging to make historical, religious, and patriotic sagas “for families, for everyone to see.” (The Vatican newspaper L’osservatore romano described Bronston as the screen producer whose intentions and principles were “nearest to our point of view.”)

  Thus far, Bronston had managed to produce only one of these super-spectacles, and John Paul Jones, released earlier in 1959, wasn’t quite the launching pad he had envisioned. The American military saga, starring Robert Stack, had bombed at the box office. Bronston had lined up the film’s Australian-born director, John Farrow, for another superspectacle, his second, but that faltered when the pressures of epic-making sent Farrow’s health into a tailspin from which he never recovered. (Farrow died in 1963 without making another film.)

  Farrow’s dream project had been to shoot a film about the life of Jesus Christ. Bronston had underwritten several script drafts on the subject, all thus far unsatisfactory. “Son of Man” was the tentative title of the dream project. Would Ray like to direct a film about the life of Christ?

  A subject neither personal nor small, in most ways an epic life of Christ was the complete opposite of everything Ray had been saying he’d rather do. In his New York Times review of The Savage Innocents, Eugene Archer had construed the Eskimo film as Ray’s brave artistic rejection of commercial moviemaking. Now, here was Samuel Bronston, talking about reaching a worldwide audience with a lavishly budgeted, seventy-millimeter, road-show-length adaptation of the New Testament.

  At best, moreover, Ray’s association with religion had always been arm’s length. He hadn’t been a churchgoer since his Wisconsin childhood. True, Bigger Than Life had pivoted on a Bible lesson, and Betty Utey had brought the director back to his mother’s religion for their wedding (his first two were civil ceremonies). And Bronston kept talking about portraying the historical Jesus, satisfying all faiths (and ticket buyers). That was tempting. So was the money.

  Over the course of several meetings with Bronston, Ray got down to brass tacks. Could he also write the script? Bronston was skeptical. Would Ray even have the time, much less the inclination, to wear two hats on such a massive operation? Ray wondered then if he might protect himself, fulfill a career dream, and add to his paycheck by serving as coproducer of the life-of-Christ epic. Bronston didn’t want to encourage that ambition either.

  Bronston himself had little patience for the details of producing. He had a staff of highly qualified people to handle the day-to-day issues. It was true that the life of Christ needed a new script as well as a hands-on producer. But Bronston wanted to hire Ray only as the director. Down the road, if their partnership worked out, Bronston promised, Ray could write and produce other Bronston superspectacles. Right now, though, Ray could help Bronston find the right writer and producer to join in a collaboration with them, someone who would be a boon to both of them.

  Ray knew the right man, a writer who was also a producer: Philip Yordan, who had salvaged Johnny Guitar, the Joan Crawford Western. Bronston knew Yordan’s reputation as a Hollywood insider who knew all the other insiders, a consummate writer and businessman, the ultimate problem solver. That was just the kind of man he needed in his operation.

  By late November, Ray and Bronston were down to contract clauses. The director stalled until he was offered $3,125 weekly for twenty-four weeks: six months of preproduction and filming for a total of $75,000. That was the same money he had made in the past, and for more weeks of work, but Bronston also tempted Ray with promises of bonuses and profit points and a long-term future of other projects stretching ahead. When the producer threw in a new car and a mink coat for Utey, Ray finally signed on.

  Apart from his usual desperate desire for cash, Ray had new household responsibilities. On January 10, 1960, soon after he agreed to film the life of Jesus, Betty Utey gave birth to their first daughter, Julie Christina, in a Rome hospital. The director’s old friend actress Jane Russell, in Italy for nightclub dates, visited Rome with her husband to help Ray celebrate his new fatherhood. Soon after, Ray and Bronston flew to Madrid to meet up with Yordan.

  Chapter Eleven

  The Martyrlogue

  1960–1963

  Madrid was the production headquarters of Samuel Bronston’s budding empire. The sets for his life-of-Christ epic were already under construction at Estudios Chamartín, north of the city center, and Sevilla Studios in the same vicinity, where Bronston was also leasing space. Reached in New York, Philip Yordan said that filming the life of Christ didn’t much interest him, but Ray pleaded with Yordan to join them in Madrid, if only for a weekend. Bronston offered him first-class airplane tickets and accommodations at a deluxe hotel. When Bronston and Ray met him on the runway and whisked him through the airport—bypassing Spanish customs officials—Yordan realized that Bronston must have extraordinary influence with the Franco government.

  Yordan liked Bronston instantly, but as a producer—judging by his list of credits, which included John Paul Jones, an obscure Jack London biopic from the 1940s, and several documentaries produced for the Vatican—well, he “knew shit about movies.”

  But Bronston knew he knew shit. That’s why he needed a smooth operator like Yordan, who understood the creative side but also the dollars and cents of moviemaking.

  Bronston presented Yordan with a stack of rejected “Son of Man” scripts, including a draft by John Farrow that had been rewritten by Alan Brown, a Bronston associate, and revisions of same by the veteran MGM scenarist Sonya Levien. Yordan sat in a suite at the Castellana Hilton, where Bronston maintained an open account, dully turning the pages of the latest version. “The script consisted of two hundred pages of excerpts from the New Testament,” remembered Yordan. “No continuity. No characterizations. No dialogue or description other than direct lifting of passages from the bib
lical text.”

  Bronston and Ray took Yordan on a “depressing” tour of Estudios Chamartín, grandly revealing the sets in progress, which the writer privately scoffed at as “so small only several actors could play on each set—like a high school drama.” Over dinner, Yordan told Bronston and Ray that the working script was worthless; he’d have to start over on a blank page. He advised Bronston to stop, dismantle all sets, and furlough any personnel ensconced at the Hilton. “My every command was obeyed without question,” Yordan recalled wonderingly, though Bronston was desperate and “Nick’s acquiescence was no surprise.”

  Yordan signed his contract less than a week after Ray, accepting the same $75,000 salary for only twelve weeks of work. (MCA coordinated the deal.) Aware that Bronston was flirting with bankruptcy after John Paul Jones, Yordan demanded two weeks’ pay in advance and insisted on being allowed to write the script on his own in California.

  All agreed they needed a fresh title for the life-of-Christ epic. Yordan, who prided himself on snappy titles, began earning his salary with his idea: King of Kings, which was actually a title Cecil DeMille had used for his silent-era life of Christ back in 1927. Ray, who wasn’t always fortunate with titles, beamed to hear the suggestion. “The title was magic,” boasted Yordan. “Probably the greatest single title in the history of the cinema.” After finding out that DeMille had never bothered to renew his registration of the title with the Motion Picture Association of America, Yordan bought a four-cent postage stamp and registered King of Kings on behalf of the Bronston organization. DeMille’s estate filed suit (he had died in 1959), but Yordan, a lawyer, prevailed.

  While Ray returned to Rome, Yordan hied to Hollywood to write King of Kings.

  When Philip Yordan was involved, who actually did the writing was murky as ever. Yordan rarely if ever worked alone, preferring to employ ghostwriters (often, these days, blacklisted screenwriters) who were paid to take down his stream of ideas and organize them on paper as coherent narrative.

  Ray and Yordan agreed that the script couldn’t be sermon-like, and that the drama needed a through-line, giving the audience other characters—besides the Son of God—to relate to. The two shared a passion for research, and Yordan stocked his shelves with all sorts of history books and reference aids. According to Yordan, he launched into a frenetic skim of the scholarship, searching for a character whose story might run parallel to that of Jesus’s, and discovered the solution “in a passage by some obscure British historian in the eighteenth century” that presented Barabbas as a revolutionary who saw the savior as someone like himself, a rebel helping to destroy the Romans and free the Jews of Caesar’s tyranny.

  Jesus as a rebel: Ray liked that. Barabbas the revolutionary would become one of the principal through-line characters in Yordan’s script. When Christ preaches nonviolence, the disaffected Barabbas launches a violent uprising; his arrest brings him in front of the Passover crowds in Jerusalem at the same time as Jesus. When asked by Pontius Pilate to choose which of them should be freed, the multitude picks Barabbas.

  As Yordan (and/or his surrogates) wrote, Ray divided his time between his office in Rome, decorated with photographs of James Dean, and appointments in Paris and London, where he met with possible cast, crew, and religious experts. In early February, Ray wrote to Bronston that “For the first time since I completed the script of Savage Innocents I feel like writing again.” By then, however, most of the Jesus script had been finished in Hollywood, beyond his reach. Yet Ray and Yordan kept in close touch, and Yordan, under the gun to finish, welcomed the director’s contributions. Ray liaised with the experts to hone the accuracy of key sequences.

  Ray’s penchant for authenticity never met a greater test. How should Christ be baptized? Forehead only, or full immersion? Did ancient Jews wear skullcaps? Was the traitor Judas wholly evil, or could he have been sincere but misguided, as Ray was inclined to believe of turncoats?

  Jesus—especially his trial and crucifixion—had to be depicted in a way that would not offend Jews, Catholics, or any Christian denomination, much less censorship groups or critics. That was crucial to Bronston’s entire sales approach. In London, Ray called on the Reverend George D. Kilpatrick, an Oxford professor who was a foremost authority on the relations between Judaism and early Christianity, the historical Jesus and his disciples, and the known facts and context of Jesus’s era. Kilpatrick was hired as a consultant, serving much the same purpose on King of Kings as the many juvenile delinquency experts who had vetted Rebel Without a Cause.

  In Rome, Ray forged a relationship with the equally useful Diego Fabbri, one of Italy’s preeminent playwrights (his plays were regarded as profound examinations of Catholic dilemmas) and screenwriters (he collaborated frequently with Roberto Rossellini and served on the Cannes Film Festival jury in 1960). Though a leftist, Fabbri had worked closely for many years with the Catholic Film Center, Italy’s version of the Legion of Decency, on liberalizing the church’s attitude toward motion pictures. Fabbri could anticipate doctrinal issues in the script and work to secure the blessing of the Holy See.

  As grueling as it had been to film in the Libyan desert, the Florida Everglades, and the Canadian wilds, King of Kings was an undertaking on a far more massive scale, calling as never before upon Ray’s ability to absorb a crushing workload and juggle and delegate endless tasks. Although Bronston had a large, capable staff ready to assist him, Ray was being put in charge of an enormous chain-reaction machine. And time was money: Bronston wanted Ray to start the filming by April.

  As Ray and Yordan doubled up on the script, the producer flitted around Europe and America, trying to raise the five or six million dollars he needed for filming. After Yordan coughed up his first draft, Ray and Bronston flew to Hollywood, where MGM had always been interested in the life-of-Jesus project. Yordan accompanied them to a meeting with Sol C. Siegel, MGM’s head of production, and Joseph R. Vogel, East Coast president of MGM’s parent company, Loews Inc.

  Siegel had taken the reins at MGM after Dore Schary when Party Girl was already underway with Ray directing. Although that film had cost and paid out pretty much as expected, Siegel was “worried” about Ray taking charge of a biblical epic like King of Kings, according to Yordan. He also took a “dim view” of Bronston. But Siegel and Yordan were old friends who trusted each other from Siegel’s days as an independent producer at 20th Century-Fox, when they worked together on films like House of Strangers and Broken Lance. (Siegel had protected Yordan’s original-story credit for House of Strangers, then recycled the same story into a Western that was made as Broken Lance, garnering Yordan his only Academy Award—Best Original Story for Broken Lance, a picture for which he hadn’t written a word.)

  Bronston let Ray and Yordan do most of the talking. Ray outlined his vision for the film, his intention to aim for a historical truthfulness never before achieved in telling the life of Christ, and to cast actors as youthful as the characters they were playing. Still best known as the director of Rebel Without a Cause, Ray hammered his points home with his fresh research: Salome had been a mere teenager, he informed the MGM brass; John the apostle was also underage. Many of Jesus’s most fervent disciples had been young rebels in their twenties or early thirties.

  Yordan talked through the nuts and bolts of his script, still a labor in progress. Siegel praised Yordan’s first draft and said that Barabbas served a good purpose as a continuing character and the other elements of the story seemed to be falling into place, but the studio might have criticisms and suggestions after the final script was ready.

  When the discussion turned to financing and terms, Vogel took over. Loews was willing to offer Bronston a $5.5 million pickup, which meant “no money in advance but when the completed film is delivered the money would be paid,” in Yordan’s words. The contract between MGM and Bronston would not even be signed until the cameras rolled on the first day of photography. And the studio insisted on controlling the final cut. But the money was the important thing,
and Bronston was delighted about the offer, knowing that he could borrow the necessary operating capital from different banks based on the MGM guarantee.

  Finally, because of studio concerns about Bronston and Ray, neither of whom inspired much confidence, according to Yordan, “it was stipulated that I was to supervise the production in Madrid until delivery.” Bronston agreed without missing a beat. As with Johnny Guitar, Yordan had smoothly engineered a role for himself as producer as well as writer of the project. He was amazed at how grateful Bronston and Ray appeared—how relieved, almost. Later, back at the hotel where they were all staying, Bronston and Yordan talked it over. Obviously his old contract had to be torn up in favor of a new one. Bronston offered Yordan $400,000 for writing and producing King of Kings, “plus an unlimited expense account,” in Yordan’s words. “Everything with Bronston was always ‘unlimited.’ ”

  Within days, Yordan had vacated his Hollywood premises and moved to Paris, finding a new place to live in his favorite European city. Ray and Bronston shot back to Italy, where the director gathered up his family and relocated them to a Madrid villa. Yordan hurried from Paris to Madrid, where he took a long-term suite at the Castellana Hilton. Work on the final script would have to compete with the countdown to readiness for the first day of filming.

  Bronston lingered in Rome for a “private audience” with Pope John XXIII, according to Variety, sliding the final piece of his master plan into place. The page-one story in the show business weekly, headlined “Pope Direct OK Simplifies ‘Kings’ Coin Problems,” broke the news that “the Phil Yordan–Diego Fabri [sic] screenplay was read and accepted by highest New Testament authorities. The Pope blessed the production and urged Catholic support” for King of Kings.* No less important than MGM’s backing, the Vatican endorsement “eliminated ministerial obstacles to clearance of import licenses for a reported $4,000,000 of U.S. agricultural machinery and manufactured equipment ‘blocked funds’ ” for Bronston to spend in Spain.