“Then there would be an interminable silence during which nothing happened and we were sure he’d fallen asleep. Finally he would open his eyes and through his drifting Gitanes smoke say, ‘No, no, not the plot. I know the plot. What is this about?’ ”
Most of 1964 went by in whiskey-soaked, Gitanes-smoke-wreathed slow motion. Ray kept trying to figure out what “The Doctor and the Devils” was about, never mind the ending. Ray couldn’t find the right writer on his shoestring advances, and the Yugoslavs added a caveat: They would invest up to $600,000, ultimately, but only if the director found matching funds from U.S. producers and forged ties with a Hollywood studio for Western-world distribution.
As usual, the director distracted himself with half a dozen other possible projects, which tumbled from his mouth as easily as bumming a cigarette. At one point Ray was on the verge of launching a production of Henrik Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea, with Ingrid Bergman and Laurence Olivier as his stars and a $2.5 million budget from MGM, until someone at MGM looked over the prospectus and thought twice.
The director also toiled briefly on an adaptation of Next Stop, Paradise, a Polish novel by Marek Hlasko about the hard lives of truck drivers in the mountain forests of the Carpathians. Another Ben-Hur alumnus, Stephen Boyd, was announced as the star after meeting with Ray. The director decided he would shoot the picture in Poland or Alaska, making it another ethnographic adventure like Bitter Victory, Wind Across the Everglades, and The Savage Innocents—until one night he fell into a drunken quarrel with the author in Stockholm and learned that Hlasko had slept with his ex-wife Betty in Hollywood, and, worse, that he’d already sold the book to another producer.
Now and then, Ray put in some time on the James Jones Western, while crashing with Jones and family on the Ile St.-Louis, running up phone bills before rushing out the door to an urgent meeting with another backer in another country. Ray became extremely proficient at extracting installments from deep-pocketed producers, and every once in a while he used his salesmanship and contacts to broker a deal for another colleague. According to Bernard Eisenschitz, for example, Ray handled the sale of German director Volker Schlöndorff’s second film to Universal for American distribution, pocketing $50,000 of the $173,000 deal plus $10,000 for expenses.
But the Yugoslavs were purposeful, and 1965 loomed as the make-or-break year for “The Doctor and the Devils.” After visiting Zagreb and Belgrade, Ray was convinced that the time had come. By now he was a familiar figure at European film festivals, sometimes as a juror, other times just there to see films and dole out interviews. At Cannes in 1965, Ray met with John Fowles, a writer’s writer, trying to convince Fowles to take the Dylan Thomas gamble.
Fowles, who’d come to Cannes to promote William Wyler’s film of his novel The Collector, regarded Ray warily. He found the director “atrociously hesitant and uncommunicative” in person, Fowles wrote in his journal. “After his first ‘good films’ he has had a decade of bad ones. He explains, with nervous drawings that mean nothing, his idea of mixed shots in one frame, to tell, say, three stages of a story simultaneously. But he is vague, so vague. . . . I have glimpses of what he intends—something Expressionist, historical, Bergman-like,” Fowles added. “But his sentences taper off into silence.”
Overnight Fowles dutifully read the latest version of the script, which, he said “plunges from good to bad and back again. I can’t decide, it is so far from decency.” Before Fowles met with Ray again, he had a sobering word with Jud Kinberg, the producer of The Collector, who had known Ray in Hollywood and in Rome. “He’s a difficult man to work with,” Kinberg told him. Fowles’s second meeting with Ray was comprised of “more indecision, more silences.” Fowles backed off; Kinberg’s cautionary words had struck a nerve, like the advice Charlton Heston got from his publicist.
Eventually, Ray’s eyes turned to Rome. The ancient city had been lucky for Ray, and he still had many connections there. The director flew to Rome to meet with Gore Vidal, an old friend from his Chateau Marmont days, now an author of distinction (of mainly novels and plays, though he had doctored Ben-Hur) who didn’t cavil about money. Ray prevailed upon his old acquaintance, and in a Rome hotel room he and Vidal wrestled the script into a condition meant to impress American investors.
“He was a big con man, as all successful directors are,” Vidal recalled cheerfully, “And I suppose we had enough past in common. Anyway, he didn’t bore me, which most movie directors do. But he was quite crazy.
“The first sign when I realized you could perhaps institutionalize him: he came to my flat in khaki trousers with one leg torn to shreds. I said, ‘What the hell did you do?’ He said, ‘Well, I went to the zoo, where there’s a new lion cub. I held it, then it fell and cut my trousers; but I want to own a lion cub and I’m going to buy it.’ I said, ‘Where are you going to keep it?’—‘Oh, I have a little flat in Paris.’ I said, ‘But you’re always away, how are you going to keep the lion?’—‘Oh, it’s not difficult, I’ll find somebody to look after him.’ That was when I realized I was dealing with a madman.”
Everything about the project ballooned as the director kept raising the stakes on the story and budget. The script Ray and Vidal wrote together ran to 152 pages, which would augur nearly three hours on-screen. The official projected cost of the production was $2.5 million, but everyone who read the script viewed that as a deliberate underestimate.
More intriguingly, Ray—a onetime actor who had squeezed himself into several pictures in his career—had conceived a new framing device for the Dylan Thomas story, giving himself an on-screen role as director of “a film company shooting a picture and we dissolve from the director commenting on the film to the story itself,” in the words of one précis. Besides the autobiographical elements, “The Doctor and the Devils” also was intended to make good on long-standing Ray artistic ambitions: dabbling in divided screens that would show parallel action unfolding in multiple story lines.
Laurence Harvey was no longer the definite lead; the star would probably be Maximilian Schell (or “an equivalent,” as Ray explained in meetings), with Susannah York as a love interest added for commerciality (the story reaches a crisis point when her body is delivered to the doctor), and/or Geraldine Chaplin and/or Ava Gardner, with whom Ray had been trying to mend fences. (As a juror at the 1964 San Sebastián International Film Festival, according to Bernard Eisenschitz, Ray campaigned strenuously for Gardner to win Best Actress for her role in The Night of the Iguana.) The “devils” of Dylan Thomas’s story—the two drunken thieves who lure and strangle people to provide the dead bodies—had become less important as the script evolved, as did the simarily shifting names of the actors playing the roles.
Vidal’s rewrite gave Ray a fresh jolt of optimism, and the director moved “permanently” to Zagreb, setting a start date of October 21, 1965. Ray grandly announced a $14 million slate of eight or more international coproductions to be produced under his own banner: basically his personal file of script ideas, including the James Jones Western. For all his troubles, the name Nicholas Ray still resonated in Hollywood, and the news made all the trade papers.
With his Yugoslav start-up money in hand, Ray contracted a capable cinematographer and art director from Prague; he hired the faithful Hanne Axmann to design the costumes, Renée Lichtig as his editor, and her sister Lucie as script girl. In a Zagreb hotel suite the director presided over a staff of several dozen. It wasn’t quite the lap of luxury, but it was a fair imitation of Bronston and Yordan, with government vouchers and civic support. “Nick thought and spoke in English,” recalled Cooper, “the Yugoslavs thought and spoke in Serbo-Croat, and their Ministry of Culture thought and spoke in French. So the script meetings were just a little complicated.”
Ray sketched shots even as he rewrote the scenes to change them utterly. The latest version of the script was dispatched to America. The director was still anathema at the major Hollywood studios, where he had crossed the line too often in too many ways.
But Ray knew people in high places in New York, bankers and lawyers who had taken management positions with the small independent film production companies that proliferated now that most of the West Coast goliaths were floundering.
After Vidal’s script bounced around New York offices over the summer of 1965, Ray pinned his hopes on Seven Arts Pictures, a thriving Park Avenue enterprise headed by Ray Stark and Eliot Hyman. Seven Arts financed films and then sold them to the major studios, gradually becoming equity investors. (In 1967, the company finally merged with Warner Bros.) Stark was a former hard-charging Hollywood agent who steered West Coast affairs; Hyman, the lower-profile partner, came from wholesale tires, microfilm, and TV programming. Both had played gin rummy with Ray back in the day.
Seven Arts was asked to invest $750,000 in the Dylan Thomas film; in return the company would get all world distribution rights to the picture, except for Italy and the Eastern Bloc countries. (Those were set aside for the Yugoslav film companies Avila and Pol.) At least one-third of the $2.5 million had to come from Spanish investors and other sources yet to be determined. The director requested a $225,000 salary, down from his supposed high of $1 million, but with a share of anticipated profits.
Seven Arts remained undecided about the Gore Vidal script, even as casting was being finalized and the sets were going up in Zagreb. In this way too, Ray was following the Bronston-Yordan model, viewing the script as a fluid entity, more a selling tool than a final blueprint. A few weeks before the shooting was set to begin, as Ray made another round of changes—turning a boy character into a girl, flipping settings and time periods, and so forth—Vidal finally threw up his hands. The director also hurt himself by informing Seven Arts that he was still “working on the script daily” and that it was “much better than the first draft” he had delivered to America. “Sounds like a few other directors I know,” a company story analyst commented smarmily in a private memo.
It fell to longtime story editor and script consultant William J. Fadiman—ironically, the very man who had once read a book called Thieves Like Us and urged RKO to option it for the screen—to summarize the risks of Ray’s project. “The total cost of this picture—two to two and a half million dollars—is staggering, but there are reasons for it,” Fadiman wrote. “There is a huge fiesta-pageant, there are numerous scenes of crowds; the final trial scene has many people—but none of these elements aid the story one single bit.”
Despite Vidal’s sparkling writing, Fadiman said, the story never really jelled. “The dialogue—Vidal cannot write bad prose—is literate and clear; but it is not outstanding and I have the impression that Vidal did this job very hurriedly . . .”
The director was another issue. “I would certainly not think of Nick Ray for this even if it were contemplated (as it is) on a high budget. This is the kind of shock material that could be done best by an [Henri-Georges] Clouzot or a Carol Reed or even a Hitchcock.”
As the first cast members landed at the Zagreb airport, they might have waved to Ray, who was boarding his own flight to New York for an eleventh-hour summit with Seven Arts executives. The director was counting on winning over key people in person with the likability that had always been his calling card. Although Ray made a solid pitch, the rumors about his lifestyle, which had followed him for years in Hollywood, didn’t help his cause. The director hadn’t visited New York for a few years, and his aging appearance startled company representatives. Seven Arts accepted Fadiman’s negative report. No U.S. money was promised.
What happened next is cloudy; over the years Ray offered conflicting accounts. The start of filming was officially postponed several times, until one day it could be delayed no longer and the actors assembled to start work. They were amazed to learn their director was still in New York, foraging for the matching funds he needed to save the film. Ray ordered assistant director Lou Brandt—one of Los Negroes—to call the first take in his absence. After a day or two of this, even the truest believers drifted home. “The Doctor and the Devils” was abandoned, although the stink of litigation would linger for years.* Nobody even knows for sure whether Ray ever even returned to Zagreb.
“He’d had a year or two of living as a great man in a small, unsophisticated community, and he liked that very much,” Cooper explained. “He had done what came easily to him, which was storytelling and directing preproduction, when he would be a great man. But I think that he was terrified of fucking it up on the floor.”
“Nick was a Titanic, an ocean liner, a sinking one,” Hanne Axmann said more bluntly.
Within the film industry, Ray’s breakdown during 55 Days at Peking—and the stories of his erractic behavior on earlier films—represented a stain on his reputation that would never wash away.
“The Doctor and the Devils” was Ray’s last real chance at a Bronston-type comeback. He made other attempts at launching grand-scale projects, but they were even less in line with reality. In May 1966, for example, the Rolling Stones announced that the director of Rebel Without a Cause would guide their first motion picture, Only Lovers Left Alive, with the Stones as the youth gang of Dave Wallis’s novel battling for survival in a postapocalyptic world. Ray was flown back and forth across the Atlantic to hotels and press conferences, but as Betty Utey said, it was all a “total fantasy,” lasting only a few weeks before it evaporated. (Though not before the director got some money out of it.)
More typical, in these years, was what happened when Frawley Becker ran into Ray on the Champs-Elysées a few months after the Rolling Stones nonstarter. The director started telling his former assistant about his plans to remake Gosta Berling, based on the classic Swedish novel by Selma Lagerlöf, which as a silent picture had helped to introduce Greta Garbo to audiences. Ray claimed that Ingrid Thulin, an ice-blond Swedish actress who had risen to international prominence in several of Ingmar Bergman’s stark masterpieces, had expressed definite interest in playing the lead.
The Swedish actress wanted script approval, as Ray explained, and he hadn’t yet put together a proper script. He had always alternated famous writers with novice ones he tried to mentor, and this chance meeting spurred a surprising offer. Ray asked Becker if he wanted to try collaborating. Becker was flattered enough to accept, even though he realized that Ray was “debt-ridden at this point, and so had no money to pay me.”
The new partners plunged into hard work “every day, long, long hours,” as Becker remembered, “writing a narrative treatment, but animating it with great spurts of dialogue that flowed out of Nick easily. Of the character Gosta Berling, a minister with earthly desires, he wrote, ‘Just because a man’s collar is on backwards doesn’t mean his pants are buttoned up.’ I was in love, totally in love, with Nick’s creativity, and what we were doing together. Yet I was not blind to the fact that he was broke and that I was buying almost all our lunches or dinners. I didn’t care. I considered it tuition to school. And I didn’t care when he spoke of his gambling debts at some of the clubs, and I lent him several hundred dollars that he probably used to go to other clubs, drink, and lose still more. I didn’t care that I would never see that money again.”
After they banked about twenty-five pages, Ray announced that he had enough material to fly to Sweden to meet with Thulin and her husband, Harry Schein, a founder of the Swedish Film Institute, who advised the actress on her career choices. The director told Becker to continue on in his absence. “The very name of Nicholas Ray opened any door in Europe,” Becker believed, “including the one to Thulin’s home, which was where their meeting was to be.”
The director raced off to the airport, leaving behind his debts, his personal belongings, and the unfinished script. Becker dutifully carried on with the writing—until a few days later, when Ray phoned from Sweden, sounding rueful. The Thulins had surprised him with a piece of news: The screen rights to Selma Lagerlöf’s novel were tied up with another producer. But “they both loved the idea of Thulin doing the role,” Ray told Becker, trying to put a good face on the s
ituation.
Overnight, Gosta Berling was dropped, Becker’s long, long hours with Ray all wasted. The protégé never saw or heard from his mentor again. Like many others momentarily seduced by one of the director’s enticing pipe dreams, however, Becker considered the whole episode one of the charmed moments in his life.
After “The Doctor and the Devils” imploded, Ray fled to Munich. He lived with Hanne Axmann for a spell, until she couldn’t stand his all-day, all-night routine any longer and kicked him out. From there he moved to Sylt, the largest of a group of islands in the Wadden Sea, a part of the North Sea, off the western coast of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, near Denmark. Ray had briefly vacationed on Sylt in 1964 and was drawn to the island’s Wisconsin-like winters and warm, pleasant summers. A year-round retreat for affluent retirees, Sylt was also a longtime retreat for homosexuals and a popular spot for vacationers who prized the sea air, water sports, and nude beaches.
Ray lived first in a guesthouse in the village of Braderup near Westerland, the island’s largest town. The landlady thought her new tenant resembled a gnarled lumberjack, with his deeply lined face and astonishingly low but cultivated voice. The American told her proudly that he was a Hollywood movie director, but that his real last name was Kienzle, and he was descended from the German Kienzles, whose patriarch had founded a quality clock-making firm in 1822 that was still in business a century and a half later.
Sylt was connected to the mainland by a causeway, allowing the director to make rapid trips to an airport that offered excursions to London, Paris, Madrid, Rome, and elsewhere. He encouraged friends and potential producers to visit him on Sylt, where he delighted in taking them to the nude beaches, stripping off his clothes and stretching out naked on the sand to brainstorm his latest project. As usual, his residence was more a launching pad than a permanent settlement, but the island felt like a real home to Ray. “I love the panorama of change,” the director told an island publication. “I had to live where the leaves turn and where they fall, where the trees return to green, where it storms and then becomes sunny afterwards.”
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