In Madrid, preproduction shifted into high gear. A babel of languages was spoken at the daily project meetings, but these days Ray felt more at home in Europe than in Hollywood, and his meager Spanish was enough to get by. When Philip Yordan arrived, he and the writer-producer settled into a comfortable working rhythm. They had friendship and a mutual respect. Ray brimmed with energy and optimism, exulting in the obstacles and hurdles ahead. The walls of the villa where he lived with his family were covered with sketches of sets and costumes; books about Jesus crowded the shelves of his home and office.
“If you sit down to a big dinner,” Robert Mitchum advises Susan Hayward in The Lusty Men, “just loosen your belt.” It was a matter of pride for Bronston to pay out huge sums of money for everything, and King of Kings was looking to be a very big dinner indeed. The creditors were usually close behind the producer, however. No one kept accurate track of the fluid exchange rate—the dollars converted into pesetas—or of the accounting, which overlapped several different Bronston productions. “There was an endless chain paying off old bills,” recalled Yordan. “Over a hundred thousand to TWA airlines. Over two hundred thousand to the Madrid Hilton Hotel. Over half a million to unpaid debts incurred on John Paul Jones . . . countless obligations to private lenders.”
The result was a budget, originally estimated at $4.5 million, that rose daily with the sun. Bronston ordered costumes with real silk, rather than imitation, and twenty-four-carat gold leaf to adorn the legs of chairs in minor scenes. But he also took curious austerity measures, balking at paying for “a cast of star name actors,” Yordan recalled. Bronston, who’d hired the dependable but low-cost Robert Stack to carry his first super-spectacle, still had learning curve when it came to big-name stars.
Ray and Yordan had to scrounge for their stars for King of Kings and for the money to pay them. They decided that one marquee attraction might serve as “a Judas goat” (Yordan’s words) to lure others to the slaughter. Ray fixated on Richard Burton to play Lucius, a centurion who was another of their key characters threading through the life of Christ. Yordan knew the Welshman from The Bramble Bush, the last film he’d written, and of course Ray remembered him fondly from Bitter Victory.
Ray and Yordan put full effort into courting Burton, promising to build up his part, give him top billing and limit his involvement to a ten-week schedule. Burton was interested, but it came down to money. Burton’s agent wanted $200,000, about as much as Bronston had set aside for the entire billed cast. Yordan angrily wrote Burton off.
Ray was disappointed—Burton was another soul mate with whom he would never be reunited—but Yordan decided the Welshman was only a “semi-name” anyway. He started over with Robert Ryan, a longtime friend of his and Ray’s, who agreed to $50,000, less than his customary fee, to play John the Baptist. Though Ryan was likewise a semi-name, the well-regarded actor instantly gave King of Kings “respectability,” in Yordan’s view.
Yordan later boasted that he spent all of one day at MCA’s offices in New York collecting the rest of the supporting cast at a bargain group rate. “Spain” and “Jesus” were the magic words. Instead of Burton as Lucius, he dickered for the Australian-born Ron Randell, a onetime Bulldog Drummond in Hollywood B pictures: Asking price: $10,000. For his Herod, the lesser-known Australian Frank Thring, Yordan paid even less.
Hurd Hatfield, the titular star of The Picture of Dorian Gray, agreed to play Pontius Pilate for $13,000. Viveca Lindfors, whom Ray had directed in Run for Cover, would portray Pilate’s wife for $10,000. Actors Studio alumnus Rita Gam as Herod’s wife came aboard for $8,000. The Irish actress and Abbey Players luminary Siobhan McKenna agreed to play Mary, the mother of Jesus, for $15,000. The Spanish actress Carmen Sevilla, also paid $15,000, would portray Mary Magdalene. Two Actors Studio up-and-comers, Rip Torn (who’d been directed on Broadway by Elia Kazan) and Harry Guardino (he’d be Tony-nominated for his role in One More River, which had just closed) were signed for the vital jobs of Judas Iscariot and Barabbas respectively for $1,000 per week.
The only role that really mattered, of course, was Jesus. Ray was determined to cast the perfect Jesus, and he and Yordan had their only real casting dispute over the part. Ray considered unknown stage actors from London and better-known thespians like Max von Sydow, already famous in Europe from Ingmar Bergman films; when Yordan stumbled into Molokai, la isla maldita in a Madrid movie house, he was moved by the lead performance of Javier Escrivá, a Spaniard making his first appearance on the screen as Father Damien, the leper priest.
The man who played Jesus had to be “the greatest actor alive, or an unknown,” Ray told journalists, and Yordan felt that Escrivá was that great unknown. Yordan leaked Escrivá’s name to Variety, but Ray had to be convinced even to give the Spaniard a screen test. Yordan felt the test was “magnificent.” Ray did not. Escrivá knew only Spanish, and his English would have to be fluent for scenes like the Sermon on the Mount, which Ray envisioned as one of the high points of King of Kings. Ray foresaw dubbing others in the international cast, and he didn’t want to have to dub Jesus.
Bronston was torn by the decision, recalled Yordan. The top boss was “terribly impressed by this obscure Spanish actor’s performance but nervous over Nick’s apprehension.” Bronston and Yordan ultimately deferred to Ray, though the director’s final decision in early April was neither an unknown nor the greatest actor alive: Jeffrey Hunter from The True Story of Jesse James. Yordan professed skepticism, but Ray liked Hunter personally and thought he had the acting chops to play Jesus. Ray didn’t even bother testing Hunter, saying he recalled “the quality of genuine gentleness in his conduct with people” from his earlier filming experience with him.
Hunter had been threatening to become a major star for a decade. A graduate of Northwestern University, the intelligent, thoughtful Hunter lived “a quiet and peaceful life,” Bronston proclaimed after investigating him. The film’s Jesus had no skeletons in his closet. MGM approved of his casting. And, above all, Hunter had the look: He was the right age for Jesus, thirty-three, and strikingly handsome, with pale blue eyes and a Christlike serenity. (Indeed, Hunter bore a distinct resemblance to Ray himself as a younger man.)
Whatever else they got wrong, Ray kept telling Yordan, they had to get Jesus right. At first, Ray had seen the life-of-Christ project as merely a well-paying job. Like Robert Ryan in On Dangerous Ground, Ray had squirreled his Bible away; he didn’t necessarily believe in the divinity of Jesus. But the man and the myth grew on Ray, working on his imagination. The director decided that he truly admired Jesus as a genuine rebel, and the film would treat him like one, with the savior’s “flaming red garments and rebellious stances,” as critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote some years later, taking viewers “right back to James Dean in his zipper jacket.”
Just before filming was set to start, the press began reporting on a renewed relationship between Ray’s son Tony and actress Gloria Grahame, Ray’s second wife. As a young teenager, Tony had helped to precipitate his father’s divorce after Ray discovered him in bed with Grahame. Now twenty-three years old, tall and striking like his father, Tony had appeared without credit as Bob Younger in The True Story of Jesse James and had a small billed role in an Anthony Mann film the same year; he also had understudied for a William Inge play on Broadway. But Tony’s thespian career had sputtered, and these days, according to New York columnists, he and Grahame were taking classes together at the Actors Studio. Though Tony denied rumors of any romance between them, the subject was painful and humiliating to Ray, who knew better. Everyone tiptoed around the news in his presence.
The painful rumors made it all the more essential that Ray’s new family succeed. Ray had bounced back from the overindulgences of his Manon period; these days he stemmed his drinking until after dark. He showed little interest in other women and always seemed energized and happier with Betty Utey by his side. Though “every place he lived seemed like a hotel suite, never a home,” recalled Gavin Lambert, who visited
him and his family in Madrid, the director seemed “more settled, more at peace with himself” in his luxury villa in La Florida, a section of Madrid on the outskirts of the city and reachable only by taxi or car—the kind of place you might find in the Los Angeles hills, with a beautiful lawn flecked with trees.
The couple doted on their infant daughter, and everyone felt that the third Mrs. Ray exerted an enormously positive influence on her husband. Utey was not shy about proffering forceful opinions and advice, and her behind-the-scenes role would grow over time. As with Jean Evans and Gloria Grahame, there was a professional component to Ray’s third marriage; the director went to bat for Betty, a trained dancer, and got her the job of choreographing Salome’s sinuous dance for King Herod. Though Utey would not receive screen credit, the married-director-and-choreographer angle made for good publicity.
One of the dark jokes of Sunset Boulevard is the prospect of the wrinkled old silent star, Gloria Swanson, planning her comeback as a teenage Salome. For his Salome, Ray made a more age-appropriate choice: sixteen-year-old, dark-haired Brigid Bazlen, a Wisconsin native known mainly for her gig in Chicago as a fairy who flew across the stage on a wire at the beginning of a weekly children’s television show.*
Imagining Salome as “a rebellious teenager,” Utey applied her modern-dance techniques to Bazlen’s hyperkinetic solo in the film, hoping the wild wiggling and hip-tossing might disguise the fact that Bazlen was really “a little girl who could not dance,” in Utey’s words. (Ray’s solemn direction made it even more bizarre, like the Gypsy dances in Hot Blood.) Filmed at Sevilla Studios, like many of the interiors, Salome’s dance received almost as much press coverage as the Sermon on the Mount or the Crucifixion.
Unlike other directors, Ray never managed to collect much of a “filmmaking family” to follow him from job to job. In the Bronston company Ray counted only a handful of friends or supporters among his personal circle of trust, including the French editor of King of Kings, Renée Lichtig, whom Ray had gotten to know and trust during his Bitter Victory ordeal, and his nephew Sumner Williams, who was serving as one of several second-unit directors.
Ray did manage to line up the Hollywood cinematographer he wanted: Franz Planer, who had experience in Spain filming The Pride and the Passion. Planer, in turn, brought on Manuel Berenguer, a Spanish veteran who’d been his operator on the earlier film, to handle the European camera crew. MGM wanted its very best composer, and Miklós Rózsa, a specialist in historical spectacles who’d just won the Oscar for Ben-Hur, would compose some of the music in Madrid; in the spirit of truth-seeking, Rózsa visited several other “European ecclesiastical centers to find authentic musical themes for the score,” according to MGM publicity.
Top studio officials were on hand for the late-April start date, with Sol Siegel and Joseph Vogel flying in from New York to watch Ray stage a spectacular scene that encouraged MGM to sign the official papers. The scene showed Pompey leading hundreds of legionaries into the temple of Jerusalem, where they massacre the Jewish defenders and rabbis, setting up the Roman conquest of Judaea before Christ’s birth. After that first day of filming, the money started to flow—although months later Ray would reshoot the entire scene, this time with upgraded sets and costumes.
Never mind that, too often, the money ebbed. Bronston sometimes vanished for days while people waited for their paychecks. The trickle turned gusher in surprising ways. “One day he showed up on the set with an enormous carpetbag full of exotic currencies—pfennigs, pesetas, francs, lira and a variety of others,” recalled Robert Stack, the star of John Paul Jones, “announcing that the currency represented my week’s salary.”
The financial shortfalls and chicanery were almost a joke. But the logistics of the production—the constantly revolving cast, everyone speaking different languages; the huge crowd scenes, requiring thousands of extras; the intricate scheduling and rescheduling of scenes—were more a nightmare. Early scenes were planned meticulously and came off well enough, but as the script and preparation dragged, the schedule began to unravel and the budget to soar.
Though in many ways they were running a race in which they were joined at the hip, Ray and Yordan soon found themselves in a power struggle, aggravated by time and economic pressures and, as usual with Ray, eleventh-hour disagreements over the script. Since taking charge as producer, Yordan had been preoccupied with money and casting and preproduction decisions. The script that he (and, possibly, his team) had written in Hollywood had been neglected. Subsequent drafts had been written mainly to satisfy MGM demands—often deletions to save on length and costs. There was never a true “final script” before filming began.
Ray found inadequacies in the best scripts, and even under prime conditions he was inclined to rework the pages of key scenes up until the moment of filming. Yordan had a lot on his mind, and he wasn’t a polisher. But he didn’t enjoy pounding the typewriter every night, then consulting with Ray about the new pages every morning—only to find, while watching dailies, that the director had continued to weave his own ideas into the scenes even on the set.
“Yordan and his people are reporting back to Bronston on every move I make,” Ray boasted to Gavin Lambert, who visited the location one day in Madrid. “But I’m sneaking in quite a few changes, and we’re so over-budget they daren’t make me reshoot.” Watching the director set up an elaborate Pontius Pilate scene, Lambert noted “two widely separated groups” standing at opposite ends of the set, staring hard at each other “like the headquarters of opposing armies.” Commanding one army was Ray, the other Yordan, “and they communicated only through their assistants by walkie-talkie.”
Yordan didn’t care about the camerawork; that was Ray’s bailiwick. But script disputes were another matter. It was one thing for Ray and Yordan to have collaborated amicably on an emergency injection to Roy Chanslor’s script for Johnny Guitar. It was another thing for Ray to be rewriting Yordan insistently behind his back. Ray was a fine director, and Yordan liked him personally. But Ray was the director, not the writer, not the producer. And this was King of Kings, a multimillion-dollar superspectacle, not a penny-ante Western for Republic. Yordan was answerable to Bronston and MGM. The life of Christ was only the first of a full program of superspectacles he was planning with Bronston. If they pulled this one off, it was only the beginning of their glorious future together.
So the stakes were high—and that very fact preserved a tense truce on the set. For the moment, Yordan needed Ray, and vice versa. Yordan had films of his own that he had earmarked for Ray to direct. He had plenty of ideas for films, and the ones that didn’t suit Bronston would be channeled into Yordan’s own independent company, Security Pictures, which followed him wherever he roamed. Soon enough, the writer-producer announced a separate lineup of Security projects under the aegis of the Rank Organization in England. Ray could write as many scripts and direct as many films as he liked—as long as he did his job on King of Kings.
What ultimately brought the two men back together was MGM’s meddling.
By early June, the budget for King of Kings had risen to an estimated $7.5 million, and a studio production manager was dispatched overseas to clamp down on costs. The MGM man calculated that thus far only 20 percent of the script had been photographed. The stately quality of the footage pleased everyone at MGM, but the pace of production was equally stately. Yordan’s script revisions barely kept pace with the filming, and the lack of a bona fide shooting script made it impossible to get a reliable estimate of budget and schedule. At this rate, the production manager guessed, Ray would still be filming King of Kings in December.
The production manager’s memo to higher-ups triggered alarm bells in Hollywood. Yordan dove back into the script, cutting and trimming, while Ray picked up speed to make up for lost time.
Later in June, another emissary from MGM arrived in Madrid. Bernard Smith, the head of the story department and the studio’s senior creative executive, had been studying the footage forwarded fr
om Spain. So far, he informed Ray and Yordan, King of Kings was adding up to a series of beautiful tableaux; beautiful to behold, but the story badly required more narrative drive and human drama. The audience would never identify with Christ, Smith explained, who was an invulnerable deity after all. The script cried out for a fresh character, a Romanized Jew drawn to Christ, who could move through the film and present a mortal point of view. Neither Barabbas nor the centurion Lucius would suffice. A Romanized Jew had to be inserted into the script, with his life story crisscrossing the main events of Christ’s. Ray and Yordan would have to go back and interject this new character into the film, almost scene by scene.
After weeks of mutual hostility, Ray and Yordan shared an empathetic glance. Smith’s idea suspiciously evoked Ben-Hur, another MGM road-show picture—with Charlton Heston as just such a Romanized Jew—which had enthralled millions and dominated the season of awards the previous year.
Exasperated, Ray pointed out that Lucius the centurion had been created for that express purpose. The director had expended almost as much effort and focus on Ron Randell, who was playing the centurion, as he had on Jeffrey Hunter’s Jesus. Too bad, Smith replied, because thus far Randell was “virtually deadpan, inarticulate and remote.”
Yordan phoned Siegel in Hollywood to convey their unhappiness. Siegel told Yordan that his position at MGM had become untenable and that others at the studio were siding with Smith. Don’t make waves, Siegel implored the writer-producer, for old times’ sake. Siegel suggested that Yordan hire an English actor and then cleverly craft the character so that he could be integrated into the footage with a minimum of refilming. Siegel would consider it a personal favor.
Now Ray and Yordan were thrown into a conspiracy to mollify Smith, who lingered on location in Madrid for a month and watched the footage like a hawk once he was back in Hollywood. While Ray continued shooting, Yordan immersed himself in conferences with the MGM official, ripping out chunks of the old script and minting fresh sections revolving around the brainstormed character of David, a Roman Jew intrigued by Jesus. Yordan flew to London and returned with an all-purpose stage actor, Richard Johnson, to play the part.
Nicholas Ray Page 50
