Nicholas Ray
Page 55
After four days, Heston visited the director in the hospital. He noted in his journal, “[Ray] looks . . . not bad, really, but quelled, somehow. Apparently he has accepted the fact that he dare not work again on 55 Days at Peking, though we didn’t speak of it.” James Cagney, vacationing in Spain with one of his brothers, heard that the director of Run for Cover had been hospitalized and also paid him a visit, holding the hand of one of the few men of his profession whom he liked and admired. Most other visitors Ray turned away. When José Lopez Rodero phoned his room, the nurse told him Ray was taking no calls.
Ray’s production manager and script assistant, the Spanish and Chinese artists working on sketches for split-screen images, and the RKO effects specialist—all were quickly let go. Only Rodero, Ray’s assistant director, remained to bridge the transition.
Andrew Marton, a well-respected second-unit director who’d staged the chariot races for Ben-Hur, rushed to Madrid to take the reins of command. An Englishman with whom Heston felt comfortable, Guy Green, flew in to handle an emotional scene between Heston and Gardner. Everyone felt sorry about Ray, but the production picked up energy and finally seemed to get on track.
When Heston visited Ray in the hospital a second time at the end of September, the star was appalled to discover that the sidelined director, who was looking “better and better,” was talking “of coming back to the film next week.” Heston noted in his journal, “I can’t believe this is a good idea . . . either for him or for us. It’s a horrifying thing to say, but maybe the best contribution he made to our enterprise was falling ill when he did.”
Bronston and Yordan couldn’t believe it either. They had no intention of enabling Ray’s return. Marton’s no-nonsense approach was refreshing, his early footage fine.
The two producers had negotiated the terms of Ray’s surrender, and as with Wind Across the Everglades his contract would be honored only if he stayed away. Ray would receive his contractual salary and director’s credit. He’d also receive generous compensation and a story credit for the still-sketchy Circus World. No heart attack, quitting, or firing would be confirmed, only a vague “illness” requiring his hospitalization.
Some scenes Ray had finished would be rewritten and reshot, including a few with Heston and Gardner. “I threw out sequence after sequence,” Marton said insistently later. The principal photography would persist for almost three months, until December; some days two units toiled simultaneously, one headed by Marton, the other by second-unit director Noel Howard under Marton’s supervision. Although Ray was discharged from the hospital after three weeks, he was not welcomed in the Bronston offices or on the set. He tried to view the new footage, but one day, after Ray snuck into an assembly preview for investors and exhibitors only, editor Robert Lawrence warned him away.
Ultimately, Marton believed, he directed at least as much of the final footage of 55 Days of Peking as Ray. Indeed, Marton estimated that his scenes comprised 65 percent of the film, which eventually would run nearly three hours. Even as he was still shooting, Marton began to lobby for the main directing credit. Bronston and Yordan sympathized with Marton and thought they might persuade Ray to share the director’s credit—a rare solution, but one the lawyers and guilds would accept if both parties did. Ray demanded to see an assembly in order to address the issue, and Bronston decided that was only fair.
One day in November Ray came to a projection room to watch the work in progress with Bronston, Yordan, and a handful of others in the organization. “I wasn’t there,” said Marton, “but my spies told me he was so abusive and so critical of the first part of the picture, which was my part, that they stopped and went out to lunch.”
Ray returned after lunch, only to be informed by the projectionist that Bronston had ordered the screening halted. Ray was forbidden to watch and comment on the rest. The director waited around for an hour or so before he realized Bronston wasn’t going to budge and then he left quietly. Ray later sent memos urging that several scenes be reedited or reshot, but his advice was politely ignored.
Marton wanted the directing credit so badly he threatened legal action and guild arbitration, but Bronston assuaged him with money and flattery, and finally Marton let the matter drop in the interest of goodwill. But there is no question that Marton directed most of 55 Days at Peking. Grateful for his intercession, Bronston and Yordan thanked him with an unusual separate screen card crediting him as “director of second unit operations.” Marton would go on to work on several additional projects for Security Pictures, including a few as director. Yordan, ruefully and without bitterness, would wash his hands of Nick Ray.
As Ray’s health rebounded, so did his optimism. The director tried to repair his marriage to Betty Utey, and the family began to divide their time between Rome and Madrid. When Ray wasn’t with the family, he was traveling and meeting with producers.
Mr. and Mrs. Ray were together at the world premiere of 55 Days in Peking in London in May 1963. The program read “directed by Nicholas Ray,” and some of it clearly was: the anguished faces in close-up, spilling out of the frame; the unconventional framing and cutting of action; the dark, swirling colors; the film’s marked empathy with fearful men.
One scene Ray certainly directed involved his own cameo appearance. Ray had given audiences a glimpse of himself at the very beginning of his career in Hollywood, in Elia Kazan’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and he had contrived an enigmatic moment of recognition for himself at the end of Rebel Without a Cause. Now, his oeuvre was bookended with a scene that couldn’t easily be reshot or taken out of the picture.
According to official accounts, an actor with a small part had dropped out at the last moment, and the director was forced to step in, portraying an ailing U.S. official who announces at a high-level meeting that “the United States has no territorial concession in China.” Ray performed his brief scene as the official with a heavy beard, swaddled in a wheelchair.
55 Days at Peking did surprisingly well at the box office, slipping into the top twenty of 1963. Ray always boasted that none of his pictures lost money, but the truth is that Rebel Without a Cause and his two Bronston productions, which were heavily promoted and widely distributed around the world, were his only big commercial hits—and the Bronston super-spectacles outstripped even the James Dean film.
Six months after the 55 Days premiere, Ray and Utey separated. She moved back to America, taking a house with her two children in Malibu, soon filing for divorce.
By then Madrid was Ray’s de facto home, and for a while he seemed to put as much energy into being a public figure in the Spanish capital as he did toward his next film project. He kept in the spotlight by opening a restaurant and cocktail lounge called Nikka’s, between Avenida de America and Cartagena Street. The name of the place was a contraction of Nick’s name and his daughter Nicca’s—although for the next decade his daughters would barely see him. Sumner Williams—his own film career kaput—became Nikka’s manager.
Ray’s Flying Leathernecks star John Wayne, in Europe for The Longest Day, was a VIP guest for the opening night of Nikka’s. Ray dutifully talked Wayne up as the prospective star of Circus World, Ray’s big-top story, now taken over completely by Yordan. The director’s friends were always comped at the nightspot—including Yordan and Samuel Bronston, though they rarely came. With a small parade of American celebrities passing through, Nikka’s—a small tunnel-shaped basement restaurant by day, a club with a stage for shows at night—became the place in Madrid to see and be seen.
Actor Mickey Knox, who had appeared in Knock on Any Door before being blacklisted, stopped at Nikka’s one night during a trip to Madrid. Ray strode up to him, coldly declaring that he’d had his detectives follow Knox back when the actor was having an affair with his wife Gloria Grahame. Ray said he had evidence they were lovers. Knox brazenly lied to Ray, insisting it wasn’t true. Ray glowered at the actor but slowly stepped away. Knox was not comped.
Besides its well-stocked bar, Nikka
’s was known for its cabaret and jazz performers, American musicians touring Europe, and emerging Spanish personalities like the singer Marisol, for whom the place was a stepping-stone in their careers. Ray worked closely with some of the younger, novice entertainers, helping to choreograph their acts and advising them on proper stage behavior, throwing himself into producing their shows.
Early on, Ray made himself conspicuous, sitting at the bar, greeting guests, dressed to the nines like Humphrey Bogart, the lord of Rick’s Café Americain in Casablanca. The Spanish journalists who encountered the director there found him unusually gracious and intimate compared to other Hollywood filmmakers who flocked to Spain in that era.
A chunk of Ray’s Bronston-Yordan contract buyout, reportedly around $1 million, was poured down the drain of Nikka’s. It was an expensive hobby, and in time the crowds diminished. Eventually, whenever he was in Madrid, Ray the insomniac could be found there late at night, alone at the bar with a bottle, reluctant to go home. When the director started traveling nonstop, Ray bequeathed the place to Sumner Williams for a short time; after being dunned for debts and taxes, then, Nikka’s was closed down. Everyone remembers it fondly as a glorious failure.
Chapter Twelve
Project X
1963–1979
One day in Madrid, back during the making of King of Kings, Ray crossed paths with one of his cinema idols, Luis Buñuel, who had returned to Madrid after years of forced exile. Generalissimo Franco had brought the surrealist filmmaker back to Spain amid huge fanfare, arranging government financing for his new project, Viridiana. (The fascist regime would later condemn Viridiana and expel the subversive once more from his native land.)
Ray—the highest-paid director in Hollywood, according to his own overblown publicity—invited one of the lowest-paid to dinner, along with Buñuel’s son, Juan Luis. “Buñuel, out of all the directors I know,” Ray said, “you’re the only one who does what he wants. What is your secret?”
“I ask for less than fifty thousand dollars per film,” Buñuel replied proudly. He adjusted his stories to small budgets, Buñuel explained, and then filmed them as he liked.
“You’re a famous director,” Buñuel told Ray. “Why not try an experiment? You’ve just finished a picture that cost five million dollars. Why not try one for four hundred thousand dollars and see for yourself how much freer you are?”
Ray looked aghast. “You don’t understand!” he protested. “If I did that in Hollywood, everyone would think I was going to pieces. They’d say I was on the skids, and I’d never make another movie.” The dinner talk moved on politely.
“A sad conversation,” Buñuel reflected later, “because he was absolutely serious.”
By the end of 1963, Ray’s hair was whitening, and he was starting to grow it long. Though his face was increasingly furrowed, he somehow appeared even more handsome, and he still radiated energy and enthusiasm. He was still the nice guy, welcome everywhere he went.
Ray spent the rest of the 1960s plotting a glorious comeback. At first he stayed in Madrid, making it the main hub of his activity; later he would move to London and Paris and other European cities. When traveling, Ray often had to crash with friends and borrow money. Yet he was determined to restart the career he had frittered away, not in Buñuel fashion, but in the magnificent high style to which he had grown accustomed: hot properties, writers’ writers, top stars, plush budgets, first-class hotels.
Shortly after he and his wife separated, Ray struck up a collaboration with James Jones, the author of From Here to Eternity. The two had much in common: Both were midwesterners in Europe, boozers, chain-smokers, self-styled macho men. Ray had the idea of making a sprawling Western, set in the late nineteenth century, and Jones liked his idea. In the fall of 1963, Ray moved in with Jones and his wife and two children in their Ile St.-Louis home in Paris. But the director couldn’t raise money on the story, Jones had other work and interruptions, and the Western was deferred.
For several years, the Jones residence was Ray’s refuge whenever he passed through Paris. Jones’s secretary recalled fondly how the director hurtled through their lives, arriving and departing in puffs of Gitanes, leaving behind suitcases and books and wallets and piles of files and swirling scraps of paper. He also left behind astronomical telephone bills: Though he could be maddeningly uncommunicative in person, these days Ray seemed to be perpetually on the phone trying to conjure financing or to coax stars of his earlier films—Anthony Quinn among them—to star in his increasingly chimerical projects.
His son Tim was at Cambridge in England, and Ray visited the young man and sometimes crashed with him and his friends. In London, Ray made the rounds of American blacklistees; they were usually happy to see him, though inevitably he got around to asking for a handout. (“Can I borrow a hundred pounds? Do you know any producers?”) He picked up pocket change from old friends and seed money from producers willing to shell out for a synopsis or treatment, though wary of heavy investment.
While touring Europe for a Redbook assignment in the summer of 1963, Jean Evans visited her ex-husband in Madrid. Alarmed by his habits— insomnia, chain-smoking, drinking, and drugs—she talked with Joseph Losey, who operated out of London. Losey’s main interest was Losey, and despite the blacklist his own career was going gangbusters; Losey still considered Ray a friend, but he was more disposed to his fellow La Crossian in the abstract than in the flesh. When Ray turned up on his doorstep, Losey passed him on to an acquaintance, Dr. Barrington Cooper.
Cooper was a fatherly physician and psychiatrist who was renowned in London for treating prominent English politicians, intellectuals, artists, and entertainers. “An intuitive and calming man,” the Times wrote of the admired doctor, “Cooper divided his practice equally between the cure of the body and the mind. To be received in his consulting room was to encounter tact, extreme discretion, imagination and sympathy.”
As he added more and more screen figures to his clientele, Cooper acquired ambitions to become a motion picture producer. One of his patients had been Dylan Thomas, and after Thomas’s death in 1953, Cooper had secured the rights to one of the Welsh poet’s few film treatments, called The Doctor and the Devils. Set in nineteenth-century Edinburgh, the story drew on the exploits of a real-life surgeon, Dr. Robert Knox, who had employed two Irish immigrants to rob graves (and kill people) to supply bodies for his anatomy classes. The mystique of Dylan Thomas made the property potentially valuable, although his musical prose made it seem unfilmable to most who read it.
In Cooper, Ray had stumbled upon a physician and coproducer all in one—complete with precious film material. The director moved in with the doctor, living in his London mews for several months. The shared residency was a form of “occupational therapy,” as Cooper recalled. The physician in him tried to cure Ray of his amphetamine and other dependencies; his aspiring-producer side joined Ray in forming Emerald Films, buying stories or scripts on which the partners collaborated, then selling the improved drafts to other producers. Sometimes there was more reliable money to be made in script speculation than in iffy film ventures that took forever to become realized. “We edited and cowrote,” Cooper said, and Ray was “an extraordinarily effective script editor.”
They made decent money at it, shuffling their scripts and dealing them out like cards. They held on to two high cards for themselves: The Doctor and the Devils and another project, an adaptation of Dave Wallis’s futurist novel Only Lovers Left Alive, which Ray intended to direct after they filmed the Dylan Thomas script.
Ray met several times with James Mason, who was intrigued by the prospect of the Dr. Knox character, though he weighed the risks of reuniting with the director of Bigger Than Life. Ray also met with Yugoslavian businessmen and producers who were interested in creating a “Hollywood on the river Sava” in Zagreb. Ray’s leftist credentials and positive experience in Spain under the Franco regime made him seem a plausible bet to thrive under the Communist rule of Marshal Tito.
Ray waved the most recent draft of the Dylan Thomas script in front of his new assistant as though it were an aphrodisiac. “It’s Gothic, even a bit macabre, set in Victorian England. And full of dark poetry,” Ray explained.
“Who adapted it?” Becker asked.
“The latest revisions are mine,” the director replied ambiguously.
The script was still incomplete, Ray admitted, because he was still debating the ending. The script Becker read ended with a fade-out on the main character, with these teasing words: “We do, indeed, see him again, one last time, but perhaps not in the place or the time we expect.”
The involvement of the Yugoslavians and the prospect of filming in Zagreb spurred the director into a wholesale rethinking of the script. He decided to transpose much of it to the Austro-Hungarian empire, with glimpses of the field of battle at Waterloo, where Dr. Knox first crosses paths with one of the body snatchers. Aghast at how far the idea was straying from Dylan Thomas’s original (with Edinburgh passed over in favor of Vienna and so on), James Mason begged off. Ray began talking up Laurence Harvey as a potential lead, surrounded by a cast of international names.
“I was with Nick almost daily, with night and day bleeding into each other,” recalled Becker. “He never seemed to sleep, this man. Not conventionally. He would work on well into the night, hold long, late interviews with French writers to whom he would pose the question, ‘What is this film about?’ Then the writer would answer by narrating the incidents in the screenplay, while Nick closed his eyes and listened . . .