Raving about the climate and topography while ignoring the practical realities, Ray began to envision film stories that he could shoot entirely on the island, simulating nearly every kind of landscape in the world. “Here one could realize things that were impossible elsewhere,” he rhapsodized in interviews. At one point, Ray outlined a project that would bring Jane Fonda and Paul Newman, along with two thousand extras, to the island. This project even had an intriguing title: “Go Where You Want, Die as You Must.” Ray made tireless scouting trips around the island, filming screen tests of local residents, even talking about constructing a soundstage—out of driftwood!—on the island. Municipal authorities convened meetings about how to serve his needs.
One local paper, Sylter rundschau, sent a photographer to shoot the director feeding white paper into a typewriter, supposedly working on the Fonda-Newman script, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. Many other would-be scripts would pass through the same typewriter over the next three years—one intended for Brigitte Bardot, another about an escaped convict on an island with a lighthouse. But none ever quite got the ending it needed, and none was ever filmed.
Ray entertained an incessant stream of ever-younger admirers on the island, who came and went as he did. He had girlfriends aplenty, an endless number; some of them he referred to, jokingly, as his “nurses,” because part of their responsibility was to keep him regular with his vitamins, including booster injections in the backside. (Ray liked to boast that one girlfriend was a granddaughter of composer Richard Wagner, whose music James Dean had hummed in Rebel Without a Cause.) Perhaps there were boyfriends too; no one is sure. The visitors and lovers and crashers piled up indistinguishably.
The visitors included supportive critics like V. F. Perkins, who arrived from London one day to film Ray for a BBC television show, and Ray’s son Tim, who also came from England. Tim had been trailing his father for a few years, usually accompanied by a gaggle of chums. But on the island he and his father developed a closer relationship, and the director encouraged Tim to become a cameraman.
Ray’s projects kept falling by the wayside, however, and his trips away from Sylt waned. Few American producers had any idea where he was living. Even Philip Yordan, asked by an acquaintance why he didn’t hire Ray to direct one of his many productions in the 1960s, said he wouldn’t know how to contact him if he wanted to. (As usual with Yordan, who spent the decade in Europe making his own pictures, it’s unclear whether that was entirely true.) There were a number of Europe-based producers who did make the effort to visit Sylt, but they left after finding Ray unable to talk for long about a film idea without multiplying the story lines and stars, subdividing the imagery on-screen, and doubling and tripling the anticipated budget.
By the late 1960s, not for the first time, the director’s finances had reached a dire state. He had surprising resources—paintings he bought and sold along the way, small bank accounts and investments—but some days the well ran dry. Ray sent a begging telegram to studio head Darryl F. Zanuck, who had resumed control of 20th Century-Fox after some years away. Apart from Howard Hughes and, to a lesser extent, Jack Warner, Ray had had only glancing contact with the legendary moguls of Hollywood. Zanuck was absent from Fox when Ray directed Bigger Than Life and The True Story of Jesse James, and he barely knew Ray, but out of fondness for Elia Kazan and James Jones—both of whom urged him to help—he responded with a check.
Ray sold his Mercedes, which he had been parading around the island. (“He made one’s ability to tolerate his reckless driving a kind of loyalty test,” recalled V. F. Perkins.) He moved to increasingly smaller houses, leaving behind unfinished scripts, personal mementos, heaps of refuse, and, always, unpaid bills. The director drank to stay awake and drank to fall asleep; he took any drugs on offer, in this era when the variety of available stimulants snowballed; he carried around a doctor’s bag with his vitamins and amphetamines and other anonymous uppers and downers. Whenever he felt the urge, if one of his “nurses” wasn’t available, the ex–Hollywood director happily dropped his trousers, no matter whom he was speaking with, and unselfconsciously injected himself in the buttocks.
Unable to make the big films, Ray began making small ones, returning to adolescence as a theme but also in his methods. He launched a “student film” with his son Tim as the cameraman and Tim’s schoolmates as performers—a sketchy story called The Scene about private school students revolting against their privileges. Jean-Luc Godard loaned him sixteen-millimeter cameras and a cameraman, and they collected a bunch of footage that included boys poring over sexually explicit magazines and “one of the most lyrical, poetic expressions of masturbation I’ve ever seen,” as Ray later told Vincent Canby of the New York Times.
Living on Sylt might have made him elusive to producers, but Ray was easily sought out by cinephiles, who flew him to the burgeoning number of retrospectives in his honor throughout Europe. One of those occasions was May 1968, when a Paris theater made Ray and his son Tim special guests at a joint screening of Johnny Guitar and They Live by Night. Students rioted in the Latin Quarter that night, and after the double feature Ray rushed to the melee in the streets, camera in hand, and father and son shot footage they intended to incorporate into their Sylt film. (A third segment was later shot in London with stock and crew left over from a Godard production.)
There are many legends about Ray during May 1968; the unsubstantiated report that the director of Rebel Without a Cause handed a gun over to militants that he claimed had been bequeathed to him by James Dean is the most famous.* But there is no question that the tall, striking man strode through tear gas and milling crowds, calling out shots for a film taking shape in his head. Paris was still the home of his most fervent cult, and Ray could always find lodging with one of his followers; he would always borrow money and whip up excitement among the Nouvelle Vague critics, many filmmakers now, who’d championed him from the first.
The late 1960s were hopscotching years for the director. Perversely, his inactivity—as well as his bizarre activity—only served to solidify his place in the martyrlogue. Throughout the decade auteurism spread across America, gradually becoming as pervasive and deeply embedded a critical theory as it had been in England or France in the 1950s. Along with Eugene Archer in the New York Times, and Peter Bogdanovich as a programmer of New York retrospectives (along with his film journalism and criticism), the leading voice was Andrew Sarris, who’d begun his career as an editor of the short-lived English-language edition of Cahiers du Cinéma.
As early as 1961, commenting on the Oxford Opinion–Sight and Sound dust-up, Sarris had defended Party Girl, the film that separated the men from the boys—the auteurists from “old fogies.” The film’s acting, script, and subject matter may be “beneath contempt,” Sarris maintained, but “in Ray’s wild exaggerations of decor and action, there arises an anarchic spirit which infects the entertainment and preserves the interior continuity of the director’s work.” Sarris ended his appraisal of the Robert Taylor–Cyd Charisse quasi musical by re-hurling the French gauntlet: “One may choose to confront or to ignore the disturbing implications of Party Girl, but the choice involves more than one film and one director. It involves the entire cinema, past, present and future.”
Sarris launched a widely read column in New York’s alternative weekly the Village Voice in 1960 and wrote prolifically for this and other venues about Ray’s work, finding merit in the least of the director’s films whenever he had cause to mention them. Sarris’s aggressive auteurism sparked a notorious response from old-fogy critic Dwight Macdonald in Esquire, who called Sarris a “Godzilla monster” that was “clambering up from the primeval swamps” of small publications to champion the pretentious politique des auteurs.
Macdonald didn’t mention Nicholas Ray, but Pauline Kael did, in passing, when she joined the attack on Sarris. In “Circles and Squares,” published in the spring 1963 Film Quarterly, she denounced auteurists as silly and dangerous (“they’re not critics, th
ey’re inside dopesters”). Kael never wrote very much about Ray (he was basically done directing by the time she started reviewing), but her hostility to the celebrated auteur and his films became well-known among her acolytes, who were as numerous as Sarris’s.
Not until 1970 did Kael get an opportunity to harangue Ray—in person, over lunch at a Chinese restaurant. “Pauline, vexed by his recent critical deification, went through his films one by one,” recalled New York critic David Denby, who was present at the Chinese lunch. “This movie twenty years earlier had a few good shots, another one had been overpraised, a third was terrible and so on. And Ray, his face cast down into his shrimp and rice, said hardly a word.”
The Sarris-Kael feud would rage and simmer until Kael’s death in 2001, a conflict dividing American film critics between those who generally sided with Sarris, in one corner, and the so-called Paulettes, who refused to wholeheartedly embrace auteurism, in the other. It was a complex argument with many underlying causes and disagreements. But over time Ray became “the cause célèbre of the auteur theory,” as Sarris proclaimed, a thunderclap that left little room for middle ground. In other words, one could not be a serious film critic without admiring Nicholas Ray.
Sarris outlasted Kael, but perhaps his enduring contribution to film culture came early in the debate: his seminal 1968 book The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–1968, which expanded upon a hierarchal categorization of filmmakers first aired in Film Culture. Sarris did not rank Ray in his “Pantheon” of the fourteen greatest American directors, but the hero of the auteurists made the second grouping of twenty, dubbed “the Far Side of Paradise”—ahead of John Huston, Billy Wilder, and Ray’s friend Elia Kazan, among many others. (Sarris’s full list ranked more than two hundred directors, grouped in eleven categories.)
Sarris’s summary of Ray’s career hailed “the indisputable records of a very personal anguish that found artistic expression” for too short a time. Sarris found merit in the most tenuous of Ray films, among them Wind Across the Everglades. (Years later, irked by one of Sarris’s routine references to Everglades as a Nicholas Ray film, an outraged Budd Schulberg wrote Sarris privately to complain that Ray got too much credit for the film. Schulberg, after all, had notched many years vacationing in and absorbing the Everglades culture; he had written the script, overseen the casting, actually directed part of the film, and sat in on all of the editing. Ray, meanwhile, had been fired from the production. How, then, was this a Nicholas Ray film?)
As ever, all the critical wrangling added luster Ray’s name. Yet it did nothing for his career: He remained out of action for most of the 1960s. Yet whether his inactivity was perceived as bad luck or artistic rejection by the establishment, whether he was seen as a reclusive eccentric or substance abuser, Ray’s unfortunate circumstances lent him a distinct tarnished glory and lodged him still deeper in the martyrlogue.
The French auteurists also paid tribute to their idol in their own films. In Pierrot le fou, Jean-Luc Godard chose Johnny Guitar as the film to which Jean-Paul Belmondo sends his nanny to improve her mind. In Mississippi Mermaid, Francois Truffaut shows Belmondo and Catherine Deneuve the same film to kindle their love.
In Hollywood itself, Ray was increasingly forgotten. By the end of the 1960s, few studio executives or producers from his heyday held on to power. Many in his peer group—crusty old directors who’d survived decades of studio dictates and their own difficult career struggles—didn’t think much of Ray, if they thought of him at all.
In interviews, Ray himself tended to denigrate certain filmmakers by name. Though, for example, he praised Marilyn Monroe’s last picture, The Misfits, directed by John Huston, Ray said it was “not as good as The Lusty Men,” his rodeo film. He made disparaging remarks about Alfred Hitchcock, once a personal favorite, now a shockmeister in Ray’s opinion. He made dubious, sweeping pronouncements that couldn’t have endeared him to many in his profession: “Directors who have not had the experience of acting are crippled to some degree,” or “I started out as an actor, so did Elia Kazan. That’s why we’re two of the greatest movie directors in the world.”
His onetime collaborator and lover Gavin Lambert met John Ford in the mid-1960s. When the great American director asked Lambert how he had come to live in Hollywood, the Englishman replied that he’d been engaged to work on a Nicholas Ray film. “Never heard of him,” snapped Ford. (Although, with Ford, one never knew; years earlier, he might have heard the young Nick Ray group him with Cecil B. DeMille and other “old-fashioned boys.”) Around the same time, Serge Daney and a Cahiers du Cinéma colleague were interviewing George Cukor, still active as a director in Hollywood after over thirty years on the job. They made the mistake of fleetingly praising Wind Across the Everglades. “Hearing this,” Daney said later, “Cukor started howling, the laugh of a mean and sour old lady, crying to the others, ‘Come here, come here! You know which film they like? Wind Across the Everglades! The film that Jack Warner didn’t even dare release!”
A few years later, Ray appeared at a University of Chicago film society event with Fritz Lang, who had worked for producer Jerry Wald at the time Ray was directing The Lusty Men. “I was just coming out of the men’s room with Lang,” Terry Curtis Fox reported with astonishment after Ray’s death, “and he turned to me and asked who was this guy with the eye-patch. He didn’t know who Nick was.” Of course Lang might have been jealous to share the stage with someone he considered a lesser mortal; and by that time Lang might not have recognized Ray—who in those days sported an eye patch eerily like Lang’s own accessory—as the strong, handsome, smiling paragon of the craft that he’d been in 1952.
As the heady summer of 1968 passed, Ray carried on. He undertook more low-budget shoots and started new scripts; he indulged in further debauchery and suffered more downsizing. Finally, he moved to a smaller house on the east side of Sylt, close to the Wadden Sea. A crazy-mirror Almanac House, Ray’s place became a commune for momentary friends, hippies, and drug addicts, strewn with litter, empty champagne bottles, and used hypodermic needles.
Helped by his son Tim, Ray delved into an autobiography, making long tape recordings for Tim to transcribe preparatory to polishing. Ray persuaded a publisher to give him a little advance money, but it was difficult to organize the scattershot material and fill in the vast blank spaces—some memories permanently lost, others secret, known only to Ray. The writing changed and improved certain memories. He could never decide whether to tell some of the secrets. Ray wrote pages and pages of stream-of-consciousness memories, hoping almost to the end to finish an autobiography, leaving notes and pages behind whenever he moved on.
In the fall of 1969 two young visitors arrived. A pair of independent filmmakers from America, Bill Desloge and Ellen Ray (no relation), had brought their first movie, a sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll Western called Gold, to Cannes. Now they were making the pilgrimage to Sylt, inspired by Ray’s empathy for delinquents and the courtroom theatrics of Knock on Any Door. They thought they might coax the living legend back to the United States to direct their second planned film, about a young man on trial for possession of marijuana.
Ray had been absent from his native land for most of the 1960s, a decade in which America had undergone seismic upheavals: the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy; the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam; protests, demonstrations, riots, shootings, bombings; the woman’s movement, gay liberation, and the spread of the young scofflaw counterculture. But Ray had been energized by the spectacle of May 1968 in Paris, and the director felt in tune with the new rebels and their causes. When the young Americans offered him a plane ticket and the promise of a crusading film project, he declared himself ready to abandon the island of Sylt.
Leaving practically overnight, he stored his paintings on Sylt and in other European cities—paintings he later claimed were worth $1 million—while defaulting on many of his island debts, including his massive
phone bills. When his last landlady tracked him down by phone and pleaded with him to return his missing house keys, Ray returned one last time, grandly handing her a bag full of several hundred keys, telling his landlady she could hunt for hers among them. As if he were declaring, “Such incidentals do not concern me . . . I am not a materialistic American.”
The director flew straight from Europe to Washington, D.C., arriving on Saturday, November 15, 1969, as thousands of demonstrators from all around America gathered in the nation’s capital to protest the escalating war in Vietnam. Though thousands were there to protest peacefully, one more militant antiwar group tried to march on the South Vietnam embassy before being repelled by riot policemen.
“An hour” after disembarking, Ray later said, “I was in Dupont Circle, with a camera in my hand, for the first gassing” of the radicals. Camera crews organized by Ellen Ray accompanied him throughout the chaotic weekend as the director weaved through the streets—à la Paris ’68—chasing the left-wing agitators. The battle escalated on Sunday, November 16, when store windows were smashed, police cars damaged, and rocks and bottles tossed at government buildings. Dozens of arrests and injuries were reported.
Ray felt invigorated, feeding as ever off the energies of those around him. He talked about adding the footage of antiwar rioting to the unfinished films he’d been creating on Sylt, then integrating all of that and more into the marijuana-defendant film, precise form and content to be determined later. While on the East Coast, his young producers set the director up with deep-pocketed liberals in D.C. and New York, and Ray found that antiwar sentiment had loosened up the flow of money. He caught up with Jean Evans and Connie Ernst Bessie and other friends from the past who were glad to see him, hopeful the new film was real and willing to cheer him on.
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