Nicholas Ray

by Patrick McGilligan

  The showdown with MGM clarified the relationship between Ray and Yordan. When MGM forced an unwanted character into Yordan’s script, it brought the writer and director back together against a common foe. It also clarified Yordan’s supremacy as producer; on vital script and production matters MGM dealt directly with Yordan, while Bronston also deferred to him.

  Ray had never proved himself as a writer or producer, a weakness that had hampered his career. He often resorted to tinkering with scripts behind producers’ backs, and Yordan conceded that much of his tinkering was for the good. The director was sincere when he told the press he wanted King of Kings to be “the greatest film of my career.” The scenes were turning out as well as could be expected, and Yordan appreciated Ray’s diligence, even if Yordan himself was a pragmatist with no illusion that King of Kings would be the greatest film of his career.

  For the remainder of the production the script would remain as fluid and volatile as the budget. Yordan gave Ray leeway in shooting pages that may have been hastily conceived at night. The variations in scenes were almost as hard to track as the fluctuations of cash. Throughout the filming, Ray dropped scenes that had been carefully planned and shot rewrites that hadn’t been shown to MGM, improvising “questionable bits,” as Smith complained in one studio memo. “No doubt some of them will never even appear in the final cut.”

  But Ray’s tableaux were exceedingly beautiful, pleasing the apprehensive studio executives who gathered to watch the accumulating footage in MGM screening rooms back in Hollywood.

  In July, the director filmed the Sermon on the Mount with more than five thousand extras in the Chinchón hills, southeast of Madrid. In paintings and films, Jesus was usually depicted standing and lecturing in front of a vast crowd. Ray’s research told him the sermon probably followed “the teaching method used in the synagogues at the time,” in his words, “a dialogue comprising question and answer.” To that end, he recalled, “We constructed what, according to my crew, was the longest track ever built, from the top of a hill to the bottom, with a track counterbalancing it on the opposite slope, as the cables wound round a pair of olive trees, and we followed Jesus as he moved through the crowd, answering questions as he was asked.” The scene, which took several weeks to photograph and lasted eleven minutes on the screen, riveted everyone who viewed it in Hollywood.

  Ray also lent his visual flair to the Last Supper, departing from the familiar Leonardo da Vinci depiction of Christ seated at the center of a long table. After vetoing a long or crucifix-shaped table as ahistorical, the director settled on “a Y-shaped grouping of small tables,” in his words, “from the head of which Jesus could easily pass the bread and wine to each of his devoted followers.” The unusual design and simplicity of his staging took his officials at MGM by pleasant surprise.

  As the weeks passed, however, the filming, like that of Bitter Victory, Wind Across the Everglades, and The Savage Innocents, became another marathon endurance test. The company shuttled between Chamartín and Sevilla Studios, but also journeyed to other locations, including Alicante, on the Mediterranean coast, for the desert-fasting scenes, and a craggy peak above the ski-resort town of Navacerrada, for the Crucifixion. Now and then, one of the crew or the extras keeled over from heatstroke after standing out too long in the oppressive Spanish sun. Harry Guardino, who was playing Barabbas, was injured in a car accident that killed another member of the production team. And at one point, Franz Planer fell ill and was forced to leave the job; another Hollywood cinematographer, Milton Krasner, came to Madrid, seamlessly making the join.

  Though Ray had a reputation for stamina, he also had a history of physical breakdowns dating back to The Lusty Men, and at one point during the filming of King of Kings he had to be replaced for several days by Charles Walters, an MGM contract director better known for comedies and musicals. Emergencies came and went with each new day. If, as Gavin Lambert believed, the atmosphere of crisis on a Ray film was often “self-created” by the director, this time Ray had plenty of help from God and nature. Yet Ray made it to the celebration of his forty-ninth birthday on the set in August, with gifts piled high and Cava and cake for five hundred cast and crew and spouses, government officials, and Spanish nobility.

  “Isn’t it great?” the sunburned director exclaimed to visiting Hollywood correspondent Erskine Johnson later that same month, standing like a king on a mountaintop overlooking camera platforms, scaffolding and generators, and thousands of actors and extras. “The enthusiasm of Ray oozes out with his perspiration,” wrote Johnson.

  The very bigness of it all, the thousands of day extras delegated to assistant directors, seemed a contradiction for this man who had begun his career as director whispering to small ensembles of kindred souls. Ray still prided himself on forging a confidence with his principals, getting to know the lead players inside and out, agitating their essences. But there were so many actors in King of Kings, and by necessity some had to be abandoned to their own resources. The director wasn’t the only one carrying around history books for reference, and the twelve apostles formed their own study group with a Spanish priest.

  These days Ray was more likely to be found squinting through a viewfinder, huddling with a camera squad, discussing the merits of different lenses and filters. He spent much of his time with design staff, or setting up unusual shots and camera moves. The actors were artfully arranged and treated kindly, but there was less time, and perhaps need, for whispered advice.

  Jeffrey Hunter would do his best for Ray, but it was hard to be the perfect Jesus. Between Ray and MGM, his physical appearance was under constant scrutiny. Once again, as with Gloria Grahame in In a Lonely Place and Natalie Wood in Rebel Without a Cause, Ray prepared his actor by first sandpapering his look—arranging for Hunter to get a nose job (replacing his button nose with an aquiline profile) and ordering him to shave his armpits for the Crucifixion.

  Even after the look was right, the voice was wrong. Ray kept trying to dial down Hunter’s American accent, at one point sending him to the same voice coach who’d helped Natalie Wood. Ray filmed and refilmed the actor’s sermonizing so often that Jesus developed laryngitis. Later, after the main photography was over, the MGM executives decided that some of Jesus’s lines sounded too tough-spoken, and the star endured extensive redubbing to restore what the studio described as “the traditional, religious quietness of Christ.”

  Ray had more hands-on participation in the editing room than on most previous Hollywood films, because the MGM contract required delivery of a complete assembly of King of Kings. At every stage, the production team spliced together completed sequences in Madrid before shipping them to Hollywood. Ray and Yordan wrangled over the editing, and Yordan brought in one of his longtime associates, editor Irving Lerner, to second-guess Ray’s cutter, Renée Lichtig. According to Bernard Eisenschitz, it was only after viewing Lerner’s more conventional version that the director started drinking heavily again—whether because he’d realized that Lerner had superseded Lichtig, or that Yordan had once again managed to overrule him—or, perhaps, above all, that King of Kings was falling short of greatness.

  Sol Siegel flew in to watch Lerner’s version, however, and his nonendorsement convinced Yordan that Ray knew best. The buck was passed back to Ray and Lichtig, and it was their three-and-a-half-hour rendition of King of Kings that was handed over to MGM on October 11 in exchange for a $6 million check. Bronston and Yordan desperately needed the money to launch El Cid, slated for a real star this time, Charlton Heston, and to be directed by Ray’s old Federal Theatre Project friend Anthony Mann. El Cid was due to go before the cameras one month later at Sevilla Studios.

  El Cid was about the eleventh-century hero who drove the Moors from Spain. It was Yordan’s idea that Ray and Mann could alternate the directing of Bronston productions and Security pictures. Heston was the man of the hour—he had just picked up the 1959 Best Actor Oscar for Ben-Hur—and Bronston had finally ponied up the required bucks to purchas
e a marquee name of his magnitude. Heston was in and out of Madrid, and Ray arranged a lunch with the chiseled star, asking if he’d consider starring in the director’s next picture, for either Bronston or Yordan. Heston was intrigued but noncommittal.

  After ten nonstop months working on King of Kings, Ray finally went for a medical checkup. As Hedda Hopper’s column reported, he was sent shortly thereafter to “a Swiss sanitarium for total fatigue.”

  MGM viewed Ray’s version of King of Kings as the director’s obligatory “first cut,” and the studio brought in Margaret Booth, the editing wizard who oversaw and approved the final form of every major studio release. She would supervise staff cutter Harold F. Kress in reshaping the length and continuity of the biblical epic. After his stay in the Swiss sanitarium, Ray rushed to Hollywood. Busy with El Cid, Yordan trusted Ray to serve as liaison with MGM. Bronston promised to pay Ray’s bills even if MGM did not.

  Long fond of radio-style narrative voice-over as a storytelling device, the director busied himself arranging the narration for the film, which Yordan needed to fob off on another writer. The best man for the task in Hollywood was Ray Bradbury, well-known for science fantasy but a multifaceted novelist and short-story writer who also dabbled in screenplays. “I had lunch with Nicholas Ray,” Bradbury recalled, “and he says, ‘We’re in the last days of making the film, but we need a narration. Will you write a narration for us?’ I said, ‘I certainly will, because I love the Bible.’ And he said, ‘We need an ending for the film, we don’t know what the ending should be.’ I said, ‘Have you tried the Bible?’ ”

  Bradbury wrote one possible ending for Ray, but it was rejected as “too expensive,” the writer recalled. Otherwise, the narration was all his. Yordan refused to cede any credit to Bradbury, however, “because he was jealous of my doing the narration,” as Bradbury recalled. Orson Welles agreed to lend his majestic voice to the proceedings, but then refused to let MGM use his name on the screen unless he was paid more money, so neither was listed on the screen.

  MGM, never enthusiastic about Ray’s involvement, discouraged the director from entering the editing room. The studio ordered retakes and filming of new scenes on soundstages—some of which Ray directed, some of which he knew nothing about. After about a month in Hollywood, according to Bernard Eisenschitz, he was probably “sacked” or barred from the studio. The extra filming, dubbing, scoring, and postproduction persisted for months, with Ray reduced to pleading from afar. The elusive ending he was still agonizing over in December was ultimately conjured by MGM from available footage.

  In the end, the editing team of Booth and Kress obliterated Renée Lichtig’s version so thoroughly that Ray’s editor was credited only on the French release. By shaving subplots and trimming scenes, the road-show film was brought down to 168 minutes. One element that was deleted entirely, ironically, was Richard Johnson’s character—the Romanized Jew originally shoehorned into the film at MGM’s behest.

  Long after its release, Ray would tell Movie magazine that the film had been “atrociously edited.” And yet, despite these affronts, Ray remained loyal to King of Kings. Dating back to The True Story of Jesse James, this was the sixth picture in a row from which he had been discharged, left early, or was sabotaged by producers—the sixth in a row that, strictly speaking, did not represent his final vision. By Christmas the director had left Hollywood for his home in Rome, dejected, but with his smile fixed to celebrate the New Year.

  In early 1961, Ray’s wife became pregnant again. The director moved his growing family into a house on the Appia Antica. Though happily married, the director found many reasons to stay away from home, with business and pleasure often taking him to the city center.

  Since the early 1950s, the ancient city had become a mecca for U.S. film producers fleeing bloated Hollywood budgets (hence the term “runaway productions”). Italian studio space and personnel were cheap, and the exchange rate and lack of union surcharges made things cheaper still. American visitors were part of the food, glamour, and all-night bacchanalia of La Dolce Vita. “Hollywood on the Tiber,” the Americans called Rome.

  The budding catastrophe of Cleopatra, with Richard Burton seducing Elizabeth Taylor on-camera and off-, drew most of the attention, but all or part of numerous Hollywood films were shot in Rome in 1961, including Two Weeks in Another Town, another MGM production, with a final script by Charles Schnee* and Ray’s old friend John Houseman as its producer. After years of polite communication, Ray and Houseman now enjoyed a warm rapprochement.

  Ray saw old friends and made many new ones among the English-speaking community in Italy. Yordan was trailed to Rome and Paris by the string of blacklistees who pitched in on the many scripts that were credited only to him. Yordan’s reputation for hiring former Hollywood Communists was well-known, and now the Yordan-Bronston-Security operation became a mother lode for refugees living in England, France, and Italy. People even had a nickname for them in Madrid: “Los Negroes,” or the Black Ones.

  Safely away from America, and from the waning years of McCarthyism, Ray was thrown back into the company of onetime political compatriots. Los Negroes included Bernard Gordon, who had just come from America and was writing his first script, a schlock horror film, for Yordan; Julian Halevy, a writer friend of Gordon’s from college days, now blacklisted and living in Rome; and former Hollywood scenarist Leonardo Bercovici, another blacklistee gone Italian. These and other Los Negroes were Yordan’s troubleshooters. He always had “a half dozen other stories he wanted written by some of the poorly paid slaves he kept in his basement rooms” in Paris, recalled Gordon. And Yordan employed nonwriter blacklistees too, including his frequent production manager Lou Brandt.

  Ray had a beach house in Sabaudia that became a warm-weather magnet for Americans in Rome, including several of Los Negroes. (Bercovici also had a summer place in the coastal town.) These days, the group talked more about film than politics; for a while Ray contemplated adapting Halevy’s 1955 novel The Young Lovers, about a bittersweet college romance.

  For the first time in a decade, in private conversations with Los Negroes, Ray defined himself as a kindred radical. That was news to Gordon, a younger New Yorker who hadn’t known the director in Hollywood before the blacklist but warmed to him nowadays as a friend. Ray was not really one of Los Negroes, thought Gordon; for one thing, he was paid better and worked under his own name. But they were all in the same boat, Gordon reasoned, victims of the blacklist and dubious beneficiaries of Yordan.

  For Ray, much of 1961 was leisurely and recuperative. The director stayed on retainer for Bronston’s superspectacles, but Yordan also paid him to develop subjects for his Security Pictures. Ray spent part of the year making notes for his planned adaptation of a favorite book, British author Nicholas Monsarrat’s well-known novel The Tribe That Lost Its Head, which involved political intrigue and violence on a jungle island off the coast of Africa.

  The Monsarrat adaptation was an unlikely Bronston or Yordan project, however, and not much actual money got paid out for the activity. Script development was Ray’s alone to pursue. He traced and retraced a path from Paris to London, Madrid, New York, and Hollywood, talking up The Tribe That Lost Its Head and other film ideas with writers and producers. Some of his projects were tied to Yordan’s sponsorship; others were more or less independent, and more or less illusory, without a star or financing.

  Ray set no limits on the type or range of film material that interested him. One project, for example, was about Cyrus the Great; another, the adaptation of a novel by Yael Dayan (the young daughter of Israeli military leader Moshe Dayan). The director toyed with the idea of a French Revolution epic, which intrigued both Bronston and Yordan; an adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s futuristic Brave New World; even a film based on Rimbaud’s nineteenth-century prose poem Une Saison en Enfer.

  He dashed off a passionate fan letter to Clifford Odets, whom he had last seen at a party at Danny Kaye’s house, pleading for the rights to what would
turn out to be Odets’s final play, The Flowering Peach, a comedy about Noah building the ark. One last time he hoped to collaborate with his friend, still a paragon of writers in Ray’s mind. He asked for the playwright’s permission to write a treatment of The Flowering Peach, demonstrating how it might be adapted into a film, “and [if ] you like these plans well enough to either give me an option, or use the ideas and develop it yourself (and I don’t understand why you haven’t done so already)—any one of these things singly or in combination would be acceptable to me.”

  Every time Charlton Heston met with the director, it seemed, Ray was talking up a different way forward. Late in 1960 Ray claimed he would forge ahead immediately with the Nicholas Monsarrat novel, if only Heston would agree to star in the picture. In another meeting with Heston, Ray touted William McGivern’s 1961 novel The Road to the Snail, about the building of a local road in southern Spain that led to a mountaintop villa dubbed “the Snail.” (McGivern was the uncle of Brigid Bazlen, and Ray’s Salome, he mentioned, was penciled in for a suitable role.)

  Early in the year, Heston was preoccupied in Spain with El Cid, but in April he and Yordan passed through Rome as guests of honor at a lavish cocktail party for Bronston investors. Over a long lunch at Ray’s house, the director made one last appeal on behalf of The Tribe That Lost Its Head. Ray said he and Heston might team up on two projects—The Tribe and then a new, tantalizing possibility, a film based on a true-history children’s novel by Henry Treece about a medieval army of children marching to the Holy Land through Italy, peacefully converting Muslims en route. Heston could “act in one film [The Tribe] for him, then coproduce, codirect another one on the Children’s Crusade,” Ray explained enthusiastically. “I must look into this,” Heston wrote in his journal, unconvinced that either was feasible or real.