Nicholas Ray

by Patrick McGilligan

  Traveling by jet to Los Angeles the next morning, however, Heston was astonished to discover Yordan in the seat next to him and Ray smiling at him across the aisle. The two started in on him, talking about the Boxer Rebellion and 55 Days in Peking. The actor felt cornered, trapped for hours on the transoceanic flight. All three drank liberally from a bottle of thirty-year-old single-malt that Yordan and Ray had managed to smuggle on board. “Phil [Yordan] was matchless in this situation,” as Heston recalled. “He outlined the history of the attack on the foreign legations in Peking by a bizarre bunch of Chinese fanatics, secretly supported by the Dowager Empress, the last woman in history to hold absolute dictatorial power in any government.”

  Somewhere over Greenland or Iceland—he could never remember where exactly—Heston surrendered, saying that after the Bronston organization had finished “The Fall of the Roman Empire” Heston would star in 55 Days at Peking. Then Yordan really amazed the actor by announcing that they’d decided to postpone the Roman Empire superspectacle, pushing it back a year or two in order to shoot 55 Days in Peking next summer with Heston instead. “I was stunned, impressed and flattered in about equal measure,” the Oscar-winning star recalled.

  Heston made a “semi-commitment,” in his words, “pending my approval of script and casting,” but Yordan knew a dodge when he heard one. (“It’s been observed in Hollywood that a semi-commitment is about as reliable as a semi-erection,” as Heston wrote in his autobiography.) In late December, again in Madrid, Yordan and Ray tag-teamed the star, holding an all-day meeting that ended with Yordan threatening to throw himself out a hotel room window if Heston wouldn’t sign a contract to star in 55 Days at Peking—one that offered Heston “a unique deal for a percentage of the producer’s share,” in Gordon’s words. Ray was the closer, driving Heston to the airport the next morning.

  “I feel uneasy,” Heston told himself. But he decided that he trusted “the director’s talent,” even without a script in hand. “I think I’ll do it,” he scribbled in his journal.

  Like the old film montages, the calendar pages were already flying away, as 55 Days at Peking was already slotted to begin shooting in the summer of 1962. Samuel Bronston was determined to churn out one superspectacle a year, and already they were behind schedule. “The Bronston studio in Madrid had to keep operating with a new picture, a new budget, and financing in place to pay the overhead and substantial salaries of many people, including Yordan,” recalled Bernard Gordon.

  Ray began to meet with art directors Veniero Colasanti and John Moore, an Italian and Englishman who together had designed El Cid and now had the daunting task of building the residence of the Dowager Empress, the Forbidden City, and the surrounding Great Wall on a backlot outside Madrid. The sets alone would cost nearly $1 million.

  Yordan, preoccupied with business meetings and other planning, left the heavy lifting on the script to Bernard Gordon. “Yordan tried to work closely with me,” the blacklisted writer recalled. “A great deal was at stake. He was good at coming up with an idea for a spectacular scene or situation, [and] he had a good feel for what would sell the picture, but I had to go back to my office and try to sweat these ideas into a plot and into personal stories.”

  The goal was to have the first third of the script ready by February 1, the day Ray was scheduled to move back to Madrid to take charge of preproduction. Indeed, Gordon sweated—he was suffering from the flu, but he was also drawing blanks on major characters and scenes. When Gordon faltered, Yordan sent him to Madrid to confer directly with Ray. “Yordan was hoping and praying that, working together, Nick and I would solve the script problems,” remembered Gordon, “and leave him free for all his other machinations.”

  Ensconced at the Castellana Hilton, Gordon plunged into four weeks of intensive sessions with Ray. They worked well together, the writer felt, and made decent progress. Ray wanted to take the script down a venturesome path; he was back in the mode of On Dangerous Ground, where he’d argued unsuccessfully for a split black and white/color visual scheme, or Rebel Without a Cause, where he’d tried for “dream bubbles” portraying the subconscious lives of the teenage trinity. For 55 Days at Peking he wanted to divide the screen with multiple images that showed simultaneously unfolding planes of action. Gordon found Ray’s ideas novel and stimulating; the director commissioned Spanish and Chinese artists to create renderings of the split-screen images, and put special effects wizard Linwood Dunn, who had worked on Androcles and the Lion with Ray at RKO, on salary as a consultant. (Dunn’s career as the studio’s effects expert stretched back to the original King Kong.)

  Then Yordan arrived in Madrid, read the venturesome scenes the two had devised, and tossed them into the circular file. “I was disheartened,” Gordon said. “I don’t believe Nick ever regained his confidence in me. He needed someone like Yordan to tell him what to do. From this point on he went along with all Yordan’s opinions. In other ways, so did I.”

  With extravagant sets under construction and the start date encroaching, Yordan insisted that the blacklisted screenwriter “go back to square one and write the kind of clumsy, impersonal, fat historical opus,” in Gordon’s words, that “international distributors, who catered to the lowest common denominator, wanted.” With sinking spirits, Gordon started over, this time with decidedly less input from the director of 55 Days at Peking.

  Ray took the defeat placidly, thought Bernard Gordon; with plenty of other problems, he seemed relieved to be rid of script responsibility.

  Around this time, in May, columnists reported that the director’s son Tony had married Ray’s ex-wife Gloria Grahame in Mexico, adding a new chapter to the love affair that had begun between them in Malibu when Tony was a teenager. Ray rarely mentioned the union between his oldest child and his second wife, which lasted fourteen years and produced two children, but the news must have pierced his heart, and it further colored his relationships with Tony and Tim, Ray’s son with Grahame.

  He lost himself in the endless details and problems of preproduction. As he had armed himself with clippings and books and tape recordings and official endorsements while preparing Rebel Without a Cause, and with all manner of references and expert advice and official approval in the making of King of Kings, the director now surrounded himself with artwork and volumes of history and professorial experts on the Boxer Rebellion.

  Every day he held meetings with roomfuls of associate producers and department heads on the Bronston payroll. The staff debated at length what kind of horse Heston should ride, what kind of equipment should be leased from Lawrence of Arabia (also shooting in Spain), how the different national uniforms and armaments should look, how much water would have to be ferried to remote exterior locations for drinking and bathing and potential fire prevention (a real concern in the hot summers), the number and ethnicity of extras (they had endless trouble finding Chinese people in Spain and had to import the majority from London). On days when Ray could not be present, script supervisor and director’s assistant Lucie Lichtig—sister of editor Renée Lichtig—represented him faithfully and took notes.

  Bronston had refused to rehire Renée Lichtig, who’d been superseded by MGM on King of Kings, but her sister Lucie joined Ray’s narrowing circle of trust. Bronston also balked at hiring Sumner Williams as a second-unit director again, and Ray’s nephew chose to sit out 55 Days in Peking. But Ray engaged a likable production manager, whom he knew from Hollywood, and a young assistant director, José Lopez Rodero from King of Kings, whom he regarded as his latest protégé.

  There were circles within circles at the Bronston offices; visitors had to walk through the big office of Ray’s trusted production manager to gain access to the director’s inner, more spacious office, as though one were guarding the entrance to the other. To his bewilderment, Rodero found himself installed inside Ray’s large office at a small desk facing the director and his huge Hollywood-style desk. When he wasn’t meeting with someone or talking on the phone, which was most of the time,
Ray kept busy shuffling papers and turning the pages of books or the slowly burgeoning script, making notes to himself. “What do you think?” he’d ask the young Spaniard from time to time, indicating the script open on his desk. Taken aback, the young assistant director would stammer, “Well, I haven’t really had a chance to read it thoroughly . . .

  “I had to look directly at him all day and exchange looks,” Rodero recalled. “He had reading glasses and sometimes he’d look at me over his glasses and I’d wait, expecting a question or something. Many times, nothing would come out. I had to make something up, obviously, now and then, because this went on hour after hour after hour.”

  It occurred to Rodero that Ray had barricaded himself deep inside the Bronston machine against the outside world. Betty Utey was in and out of the office with their two young children in tow. The family was back living at the La Florida villa, and Utey was at the center of Ray’s circle of trust. She was vocal and articulate, and he listened to her.

  Gordon saw Ray most days and some nights. The director did not seem to be drinking in the office, but Ray was clever at fooling people, and at night he sipped steadily, during their long talks, from a bottle of Fernet Branca, a potent Italian digestif he claimed aided him in his battle against alcohol dependency. But the drink was eighty proof, and Gordon noticed that Ray could polish off a liter or one-quart bottle easily in a sitting.

  Still, Ray was calm and smiling much of the time. How could he look and act so normal, Gordon wondered, while downing an entire bottle of Fernet Branca? Appalled at the high-velocity plans that were already in motion for an epic that lacked a coherent script—a script for which he was responsible—Gordon himself felt on the verge of a breakdown. When he joined Ray at the studio one day to inspect small-scale models for the sets, Gordon worried aloud about the way the Great Wall, the embattled compound, and the Forbidden City had been laid out, saying there didn’t seem to be enough space for the rousing scenes he had yet to cogitate.

  No, no, Ray assured Gordon with his easy smile, don’t worry—everything will turn out fine. That was his mantra, part of the unflappable persona long worn by the strong, handsome man, and it certainly convinced many people. But Gordon, overwhelmed by the scale of the undertaking, decided that Ray was “just as frightened as I.”

  Before flying to Madrid in the third week of May, Charlton Heston had been unnerved by a chance conversation he had with his longstanding, trusted publicist, Bill Blowitz. Blowitz said he knew Ray from a weekly poker game with the director in Hollywood. “Let me tell you something, Chuck,” said Blowitz. “He’s a gifted guy, but he’s a loser.”

  Heston’s misgivings mounted when, upon arrival, he was handed a 140-page draft of the script that was “unfinished,” with many scenes only summarized or sketched in. “Not pleased,” the actor jotted in his journal. “The love story is very arbitrary, I think; the dialogue primitive. Lunch with Nick and Phil filled me with apprehension.”

  With Bernard Gordon dragging his feet, Philip Yordan called in reinforcements. David Niven had been signed to play the British ambassador, but the dapper veteran insisted on meatier scenes for his character. Robert Hamer of Kind Hearts and Coronets fame was express-delivered from London to pad Niven’s part with a number of stiff-upper-lip speeches. Unfortunately, Hamer did more drinking than writing, and another London writer, Welshman Jon Manchip White, was rushed to Madrid as his replacement.

  Heston’s love interest was a Russian countess, her character somewhat adrift in the story. Ray and Heston both wanted to cast a European actress for the role, while Yordan and Bronston leaned toward a Hollywood commodity like Ava Gardner. Gardner was living, conveniently, in Madrid, making her practically a European. Still, Ray tried lobbying for Greek actress Melina Mercouri, and Heston made a quick trip to Rome to watch a screening of Phaedra, starring Mercouri and directed by American blacklistee Jules Dassin (who later became her husband). Though Heston felt unable to endorse Mercouri wholeheartedly—the print he’d seen in Rome was dubbed in Italian, which was Greek to him—he stood nobly with Ray against the Bronston brass in a heated meeting, insisting on a European personality. By the end of June, though, Gardner was cast.

  When Gardner came aboard, it was her turn to inspect the script. Invited with Heston to Ray’s villa late one night, she delivered a vitriolic rant against its flaws—especially those in her character’s scenes. Ray listened stoically. Heston sneaked out after about forty minutes. “A macabre evening,” the star wrote in his journal. “Oddly, her rejection of the script has the curious effect of throwing me into support of it.” One of the most dependable of Yordan’s Los Negroes, Arnaud d’Usseau—a former Broadway playwright and Hollywood scenarist—was then ferried to Madrid to plump up Gardner’s scenes as fast as they flew out of Gordon’s typewriter.

  After the roles played by Heston, Gardner, and Niven, the most important characters were the evil prime minister and Empress Dowager, and those parts were offered to former Australian ballet star Robert Helpmann and longtime versatile character actress Flora Robson. But Robson was of such regal stature (she was named a dame commander of the British Empire in 1962) that the team felt compelled to build up her scenes too, and Gordon’s friend and fellow blacklistee Julian Halevy was parachuted in from Italy to do the honors.

  Meanwhile Gordon scurried about, trying to keep track of the ever-changing continuity issues while superintending Los Negroes, who were working on all of the subplots and tailoring character-specific scenes.

  With emergency writers arriving right and left, Heston realized that Yordan had snookered him again. As with King of Kings, there would never be a final script before the cameras rolled on 55 Days at Peking. The script would be written and rewritten during filming. Since everyone else was busy making egoistic demands, Heston decided he might as well insist on a few award-caliber scenes of his own. He talked it over with Gordon, insisting on a soul-baring moment for his hero character. Gordon brought the matter to Ray and Yordan, rolling his eyes as he did.

  One of Heston’s marines in the story is a guilty father—a familiar character in Ray’s work—who has abandoned his young half-Chinese daughter. Heston had a scene in which he gave the marine a little morale-boosting pep talk. “You’re better than most fathers,” Heston says to reassure the marine. “At least you try to see her when you can.” But there was no payoff for this motif in the script thus far, and so now Ray got together with Gordon and Yordan and spitballed a clever expedient. They would write another scene for Heston and the little Chinese girl, with him comforting her after the marine’s death. In the scene the gruff officer is forced into tenderness, taking over for the dead marine and becoming, in effect, her surrogate father. Heston was thrilled, and it became a strong scene in the film.

  Even the Italian cinematographer the director had hired blinked when he arrived in Madrid to find the same half-baked 140-page draft that troubled Heston. Aldo Tonti, who had signed a contract for 55 Days at Peking after working so well with Ray on The Savage Innocents, couldn’t be reassured. Yet Ray was able to replace him at the eleventh hour with British ace Jack Hildyard, who had just won the Oscar for The Bridge on the River Kwai.

  The scene with the Chinese girl appeased Heston, but the star still couldn’t shake his publicist’s distressing warning. After discussing his role with the director “at length, but to no great purpose,” Heston wrote, “I can’t put my finger on the lack of contact I feel there. He’s intelligent, articulate, and committed, but I feel a barrier . . .” He felt as if Ray were giving “a performance somehow.”

  The first day of photography approached: July 2, 1962. The cast was a bouillabaisse, representing every nation where Bronston and Yordan hoped to sell the film, and most of the performers arrived barely in time to squeeze in their costume fittings. The script was full of holes and Band-Aids and scenes marked for revision or late-schedule filming. “I start this picture with more misgivings than I remember about a film,” Heston wrote in his journal.

/>   Ray had also kept a journal, erratically, for years. He scratched notes to himself on scrap paper and napkins too. The running words in his head were another form of journal.

  The director might well have stared in the mirror, as the start date approached, and wondered if he was gazing at an impostor, giving the kind of “performance” that ran counter to his own principles. It might be said that, as in Bigger than Life, the image staring back at him was broken in shards.

  As a young man in La Crosse, Ray had worried about prostituting himself as an artist; publicly he had declared his purity. At Taliesin he had reinforced his credo that art should aspire to organic truth and beauty. In New York and Washington, D.C., working onstage and in radio with left-wing idealists and ideologues, he had tried to celebrate the lives of ordinary people and grassroots culture.

  Early in his Hollywood career, he had denounced directors like Cecil B. DeMille, whose swollen epics, intended for maximum box office, lacked the intimacy and humanity of the type of stories Ray preferred. He had never really meshed with the commercial system in Hollywood, but in desperation (and thrall to his addictions) he had grasped at more and more lucrative yet less and less malleable material.

  His last picture, King of Kings, had been a virtual DeMille remake. Now Ray found himself immersed in another, even more bloated super-spectacle. The stars, not all of his choosing, came equipped with myriad accents and chips on their shoulders. Thousands of anonymous extras and necessary and unnecessary crew workers waited his call to action. Journalists were flooding in from all over the world to describe his every move. Enormous sets were poised for his staging; all manner of machinery and technology and devices stood ready, waiting for the agitation of his essence.

  As a young man, moved by the imprecations of Thornton Wilder, Ray had sworn never to become a materialistic American. Now every day his job revolved around money: his blockbuster-in-the-making, with its supersize budget and expected worldwide profits; his own salary, his highest ever, with perks he’d come to enjoy and rely on; his very lifestyle, once lived cheaply, now padded with luxury.