Nicholas Ray

by Patrick McGilligan

  “One of Nick’s troubles,” mused Gavin Lambert, “was that he always wanted to be a sort of avant-garde, independent moviemaker and do daring things on a low budget. At the same time, he wanted the five-star hotel and the limo at his beck and call.”

  Away from the studio or office, drinking got him through the job. Few knew the full extent of his intake. And few suspected that, supposedly to cure his alcoholism, Ray had begun crystal methamphetamine injections from a nurse who visited the family villa—a place where he spent less and less time. Work was paramount. Rest and sleep were enemies. When not in the office, he contrived to be out and about, taking meetings and short trips, finding ways to gamble, though it was illegal in Franco’s Spain. “My mother said he was more excited about losing than he was about winning,” said his daughter Nicca.

  Ray was a loner who hated to be alone, and he coaxed Lucie Lichtig or Bernard Gordon or his young Spanish assistant, José Lopez Rodero, into many a dinner with him, calling them working dinners when he really just wanted some company. Yet the director was “difficult” to communicate with “even alone,” recalled Rodero, always taking an extraordinarily long time to digest whatever he was thinking or about to say.

  Regardless of external pressures, in spite of internal doubts, Ray maintained his composure. The press clippings almost uniformly describe him as tall, strong, and handsome, as positive minded and healthy looking as could be. “I never noticed any evidence of Ray’s dismay,” said the Spanish filmmaker and critic Juan Cobos, who visited the set of 55 Days at Peking as a young man. “Even in those days he always defended the idea that a movie director has to arrive at the film studio every morning firmly believing he was making a very good picture, the best picture ever made.”

  Years later, Ray liked to say that he awoke one night, shortly before filming began, and told his wife he’d just dreamed that 55 Days at Peking would be his last movie. It’s hard to know whether to believe the story—among other things, it would have required Ray to be at home, sleeping soundly—but it made a good anecdote and no one doubts the premonition.

  Bernard Gordon thought that anyone would have cracked under the pressures of making 55 Days at Peking. From the outset, the project was a paradigm of waste, mismanagement, lunacy.

  The first day of filming, “the height of that really wild year,” in Gordon’s words, arrived with a trumpet blast. Bronston threw an impossibly exorbitant party, chauffeuring all the guests—Franco officials, the mayor of Madrid, press correspondents from around the world—to the old-Peking set, arranged on a leased portion of the fifty-thousand-acre estate known as Las Matas (the Shrubs), home to the Marques de Villabragima, about sixteen miles outside Madrid. The golden spire of the Temple of Heaven, the towering Chien Mien Gate, and one hundred other buildings were in various stages of completion.

  The event was planned for maximum publicity value. Ray would shoot from inside the Forbidden City “toward the great Temple of Heaven, a round building that had actually been constructed full-scale and half-round,” Gordon recalled. The scenarist was ceremonially “greeted by Nick, who took me with him in the basket of the crane that lifted us both high above the action.” Cinematographer Jack Hildyard “had gathered every 5,000-watt brute in Spain and some from France to light this huge exterior night scene. When the lights went on, it was impressive, seeing the great set illuminated for the first time.”

  The speeches and champagne toasts went on far too long, however. The director had to delay the first take until after dusk, and then the footage was worthless. In the darkness, the round Temple of Heaven looked “flat, a two-dimensional fake,” said Gordon. The shot had to be redone later, at great expense, though the journalists were none the wiser.

  Not that Bronston cared about the mounting expense. He was at the height of his delusions of grandeur. The wheeler-dealer was then negotiating to buy the Chamartín Studio, which he would rename the Samuel Bronston Studios. Bronston wanted everything on a Bronston production, on- or offscreen, “to be real, only the best,” in Gordon’s words. The Castellana Hilton filled up with Bronston dependents. “People came and went from Hollywood and London to be consulted, at Bronston’s expense, on foolish, doomed schemes for original ways to photograph the action sequences (pace Nick Ray),” according to Gordon. “Expensive talent was hired and then dismissed and paid off on a whim. Personal expenses were unrestrained and had to come out of the budget.”

  Every day, Bronston’s publicity staff offered reporters privileged glimpses of the director at work on the magnificent sets. But while the journalists stared and scribbled, Ray scrounged for scenes to shoot, as much as possible working around the highest-paid stars. Gordon and Los Negroes scurried around in the background, trying to keep ahead of the filming. As the journalists oohed and aahed, Ray made slow, painful progress.

  July was painfully hot besides. The first week of August brought the bulletin that Ray’s old flame Marilyn Monroe had been found dead in the bedroom of her Brentwood home. More than Humphrey Bogart’s death, Monroe’s sudden passing, at thirty-six, seemed a personal augury to Ray. He had loved the blond sex symbol, for her obvious qualities but all the more for her elusiveness; now he would never have the chance to direct her in a motion picture. Monroe’s death left Ray “deeply shocked and grieved,” according to news accounts, but the director could not leave the high-pressure filming in Spain and had to content himself with sending a floral display to her funeral.

  Gradually, Ray moved the stars in front of the camera for the film’s more intimate scenes. He always had worked famously well with actors but not always as smoothly with self-important stars. His usual thing was to ask the actors what they wanted to do in a scene and then play with their ideas, but there wasn’t always time to do that now, and it was next to impossible with three marquee names—Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, and David Niven—maneuvering for advantage.

  As usual, the director had better luck with the men. Ray had been friendly with the easygoing Niven in Hollywood for years, and once the actor’s scenes were properly aligned for his character the Englishman made effortless work of his role.

  Heston, of course, was the main attraction for investors and audiences, and Ray would have to spend most of his quality time with the chiseled star. Heston felt constrained by his one-dimensional drinking, womanizing, warrior-hero character, but as he worked closely with the director, he began to invest his scenes with swagger and feeling.

  Ray couldn’t seem to strike the right note with his leading lady, however. As had happened before—with other female stars in Ray films—Gardner felt like a mere adornment, a bauble, in a man’s world. Insecurity about the character she was playing translated into insecurity over her performance. Ray had to treat her gingerly. The actress had a temper; she drank, she swore. Ray feared her disapproval, at first treating her misbehavior with velvet gloves.

  They were shooting “French hours” most of the time, starting at eleven in the morning and continuing until eight at night. Gardner was “most reliable” in the mornings, recalled Heston, but French mornings were only about one hour long, and it took time to set up each new shot. Gardner was habitually late, and often hungover, and she liked to hide out in her trailer until she felt presentable. When she was hiding out she inevitably resumed drinking, a glass of wine followed by tequila or vodka, until by late afternoon she often couldn’t remember her lines or slurred them.

  “September 1, Las Matas,” Heston recorded in his journal after two months of his costar’s lateness and drinking and sulking and tantrums. “Today marked the worst behavior I’ve yet seen from that curious breed I make my living opposite. Ava showed up for a late call, did one shot (with the usual incredible delay in coming to the set), and then walked off just before lunch when some Chinese extra took a still of her. She came back after a painful three-hour lunch break . . . only to walk off again, for the same reason (this time untrue; the Chinese extra did not take a still of her). Great day.”

  Ray suf
fered a public humiliation that day, and some—Heston for one—thought the director himself was partly to blame. One time, José Lopez Rodero witnessed a nasty exchange in Gardner’s dressing room, with Ray angrily summoning Gardner to the set and Gardner telling the director to fuck off—and getting away with it. Would Ava Gardner have dared tell John Ford to fuck off?

  Bronston and Yordan couldn’t cope with Gardner either, however. Yordan contacted Ben Barzman in Paris, asking him to read the script and find ways to minimize the actress’s remaining time on the shoot. Barzman scratched his head sagely and said the solution was obvious: Kill her character off. Yordan thought that was brilliant. Deleting the countess after a certain point could be done without damaging the rest of the structure, and with the help of Barzman and Gordon he concocted a scene in which she would be struck by Boxer shrapnel as she nobly tends the wounded.

  A death scene is a gift to any actor, and Gardner was flattered. When it came time to film the scene, though, Ray made a mistake. “The previous day’s scene had slopped over,” wrote Heston. “Nick didn’t wrap the other set till midafternoon. By the time he had Ava’s death scene lit, she couldn’t do it.”

  The staging was simple enough: Gardner lying in a hospital bed, with Paul Lukas playing the surgeon hovering over her, listening sympathetically as her last words tie up her backstory with Heston’s character. But Gardner was too drunk to perform the lines.

  Ray saved the day, coming up with the inspired idea of handing her lines to Lukas—which took “surprisingly little rewriting,” in Heston’s words. (“I’m still amazed we got away with this,” Heston wrote, “but the dialogue worked quite well, largely because of Paul’s skill.”) In Heston’s view, though, Ray had been “badly at fault” for having procrastinated in the first instance. Already suspicious that her character was being winnowed from the picture, Gardner had been forced into a position of “unspeakable humiliation,” according to Heston, having to surrender her valedictory to another, more clear-headed actor. “I’ve never before seen someone literally writhe in frustration and shame,” wrote Heston. “Poor, sad lady.”

  For Heston, the incident only confirmed his publicist’s dim view of Ray as a loser. “He was a sensitive and intelligent man,” the star wrote. “When he was talking about a scene, or an acting problem, you saw a quick creative mind at work. Shooting the scene, you saw something quite different. He wasn’t so much directing as acting the role of director. He was surely not a good captain. Whatever his talents, a director must, must be a captain.”

  The leading lady in Ray’s personal life—Betty Utey, his wife—also began to cause problems. The director had been married to Utey for three years, about as long as he’d managed to stay with both Jean Evans and Gloria Grahame. “For three years all Jeff had to do was whistle,” the lady trick rider in The Lusty Men confesses, “and I came running.” Why did she stop running? “He quit whistling.”

  Ray’s third wife had shored him up after Party Girl, supported and assisted him during the endurance tests of The Savage Innocents and King of Kings. Ray saw himself as Utey’s mentor, but Utey was a dominating character who asserted herself as his equal. She kept pushing for equality, and Ray kept ceding ground.

  To some extent, within the Bronston company, Utey was regarded as Ray’s compass and muse. Often close at hand, in the office and on the set, she’d pass him scribbled notes or lean over and whisper suggestions. Sometimes, when his wife made a surprise appearance during filming, he’d grow visibly tense to see her. At the same time, the director continued to need her, lean on her, and involve her in many aspects of the production.

  When Ben Barzman flew in from Paris to write Ava Gardner out of 55 Days at Peking—the fifth or sixth of Los Negros to contribute to the script—he was chauffeured by limousine to the Rays’ villa to discuss the various options with the director. There, to the writer’s amazement, it was Utey, not Ray, who delivered a summary of the script issues as they stood. “It was a scene right out of Sunset Boulevard,” Barzman recalled.

  It became increasingly clear to some in the Bronston operation that Ray was actually farming out some of the last-minute remedial revisions to his young wife. “We managed once again to resurrect an ill-written scene into some semblance of life,” Charlton Heston wrote in his journal on August 18. “Curiously overwritten lines seem to keep popping into the script every day or so on new pages. I’m drawn inescapably to the conclusion that these are from the nimble typewriter of Nick’s wife Betty. This will not do . . .”

  When Yordan found out, he exploded. This was worse than the director tinkering with Yordan’s pages behind his back. Mrs. Ray was not even a writer. Yordan had a sharp confrontation with Ray—the kind both usually avoided—and told him it had to stop.

  Humiliated, Ray blew up at his wife, banning her from the office and the set. Now Utey’s absence—and that of their two young daughters, Julie and Nicca, who had delighted everyone and cast a charm on the production—left a regrettable void, though it was unremarked upon as Ray walked round and round the set, chain-smoking, slowly setting up his shots.

  The shots seemed to take longer and longer to set up. A man so highly praised for his visual compositions now began to falter at the greatness expected of him. After Ava Gardner’s botched death scene—which happened not long after Ray had banished his own wife from the office and set, and not so very long after the director’s fiftieth birthday—came the last straw.

  Not all directors, especially not very many of the old-fashioned boys, carried around a viewfinder the way Ray did. He enjoyed putting the lens up to his eye and walking around a scene, crouching down or standing on a rise, contemplating unusual angles. He enjoyed chewing the shots over with his cameramen, talking lenses and lighting options. The camera crews were paid to listen to him, almost like psychoanalysts, and they had all the time in the world. Ray devoted more and more time to the camerawork, hoping it might rescue this leviathan of a film, with its grudging actors and spotty script.

  Yet with so much effort being put into the staging and setups, Ray fell farther and farther behind schedule. The birthday watch his wife gave to him became, for some members of the company, an echo of the Bowie-Keechie object tracks of They Live by Night and a symbol of the general mishegas of the film. It was a newfangled watch with a little alarm, which more than once went off right in the middle of a take, causing Ray to grunt an apology and order a retake. Oddly, however, this happened several times, until some began to wonder if it was planned, if the director himself kept setting the alarm, perversely enjoying everyone’s discomfort.

  Normally, it was the job of Ray himself to dispel people’s discomfort. At his best, especially in his early days, he could be endlessly tolerant with his actors, always pleasant and agreeable, but now he was “running out of steam and becoming more irritable,” as Bernard Gordon recalled. Worse yet, often Ray couldn’t make up his mind about a shot. The production lost more and more time as he walked around and around, thinking and thinking, slow to come to any decision.

  “Eventually” one day, wrote Gordon in his autobiography, Ray “froze up and was unable to decide where to put the camera to start a simple scene. Yordan was sent for.”

  It was another scene on the hospital set, with Paul Lukas examining Ava Gardner just after her injury. Yordan raced to the set wearing a diplomatic face. “Prudently,” said Gordon, “Yordan acted as though he had to give this matter serious consideration, then turned to Nick with a tentative suggestion. ‘Maybe you could have the doctor hold a watch in one hand and take the patient’s pulse with the other. Then start with the camera in close on the watch, pull back and go on with the scene.’ After Yordan’s profound suggestion, Nick gave this his usual protracted and thoughtful consideration. ‘Good idea,’ he eventually agreed. The shooting resumed.”

  But it was a dire portent, and there was worse to come. A few days later, on September 11, Ray “finally caved in,” Heston wrote, “collapsing on the set this morning as we
waited for the first set-up. They bundled him into a car, white-faced and sweating.” Years later, Heston added this bracketed note to his original journal entry: “A major coronary.”

  Louella Parsons, a confidante of Ray’s, reported contemporaneously that the “so-called heart attack” was nothing of the sort. It was a “warning attack,” she wrote.

  Betty Utey told Bernard Eisenschitz that the incident was a tachycardia—not technically a heart attack but an irregular, fast-beating heart rhythm caused by stress or other factors.

  Heston did not say he actually witnessed Ray’s collapse, nor his rush to the hospital, nor even his physical presence on the set that day. Assistant director José Lopez Rodero, who was at Ray’s side whenever he was on the job, said the director simply did not show up at the studio that morning. The first thing Rodero heard was that Ray was in the hospital.

  Years later, Yordan told anyone who would listen that Ray hadn’t suffered any heart attack. He just quit. An ambulance was called to make it look good for people on the set.

  Was it, indeed, a heart attack or tachycardia? Was it brought on by stress, or by Ray’s various bad habits, his sleepless nights, the endless tensions and pressures of the shoot? Had Ava Gardner threatened to quit the film, as some believe, if Ray was not replaced? Or had Bronston and Yordan simply fired the director, fed up with his inability to control Gardner, his fussing with the script, his procrastination with the camera, his drinking and drug use?

  And was the illness “staged” by Ray and Yordan to disguise the firing, much as the Schulbergs had protected the secret of his firing on Wind Across the Everglades?

  Something happened in private between Ray and Yordan, and like other crucial episodes in Ray’s life, many versions have been reported, none of them quite conclusive.