Many of the D.C. radicals bore banners supporting the Chicago Seven, a group of movement leaders who had been charged with conspiracy and inciting to riot during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. During his first weekend back in America, Ray met and filmed two of the Seven: the Youth International Party (Yippie) leaders Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. (Ray was especially proud of a shot of “Abbie lifting his shirt to expose his tummy in the L.B.J. gall bladder pose,” as Roger Ebert later wrote.)
The “Chicago Conspiracy” trial had riveted the nation’s attention since September, and now it riveted Ray’s. Chicago—the city he’d known well since high school and his one-semester matriculation at the University of Chicago—was the next stop in his homecoming. Knock on Any Door and Party Girl had both featured Chicago locales and courtroom showdowns; now the Chicago Seven trial would become part of his new film project, whose layers and scope were expanding daily in his imagination.
Originally there had been eight members of the Chicago Conspiracy, until the hostile judge, Julius Hoffman, bound and gagged Black Panther Bobby Seale in the courtroom, severing him from the case and sentencing Seale to jail on contempt-of-court charges. For three months the remaining Chicago Seven had bitterly mocked the judge, the judge had shouted down the defendants, and demonstrations against the case had swirled outside the courtroom. At one point the National Guard was called in to control the protests.
Many commentators described the trial as a circus. Judge Hoffman would not allow cameras inside the courtroom, but Ray’s legend preceded him, and the defendants embraced the director of Rebel Without a Cause, admitting him and his crew into their strategy and rap sessions and crash pads. “Anybody who’d met Jimmy Dean,” Abbie Hoffman exclaimed, “what the hell, gonna let him in the door!”
Arriving as the prosecution wound up its case, just two weeks after the Washington, D.C., riots on December 3, Ray collected the Chicago Seven for a freewheeling night of improvisation, including the filming of an “absurdist version” of the trial, in the words of defendant Tom Hayden. “I played the role of Judge Hoffman,” Hayden recalled, “sitting on a platform elevated twenty-five feet in the air. Afterward, we stayed out drinking and clowning around.” Early in the morning of December 4, when the group learned that a murderous police raid had just taken place at the home of Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, Ray and his crew rushed to the blood-spattered scene, photographing the dead bodies of Hampton and Mark Clark, another Panther.
Ray fit right in with the sixties rebels, taking over a cheap Orchard Street apartment, sleeping on a mattress on the floor. He was surrounded by film equipment, piles of relevant reading matter, and ashtrays filled with French cigarette stubs. Ray drank his breakfast from a bottle of wine (“a source of Vitamin C,” he liked to aver) and carried an omnipresent briefcase filled with “needles, ampules of methedrine and B-complex, mysterious pills, bags of grass,” in the words of defense committee volunteer Susan Schwartz, not to mention “blocks of hash.”
Using an assortment of low-millimeter cameras and recording paraphernalia, Ray followed around the accused conspirators, their star witnesses, and their team of lawyers for two months. He was assisted by a few professionals who still thought he was devoted to their marijuana-court-case movie, and by a small army of film-crazy college students and defense committee members acting as unpaid volunteers.
As the project ballooned, so did the costs. The Chicago Seven were uncanny fund-raisers, and the money spilled over to Ray from donations to their case. The filmmaker also forged promising links with Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, Hair producer Michael Butler, and Grove Press editor in chief Barney Rosset, a sponsor of the English-language version of Cahiers du Cinéma and distributor of controversial films like the sexually explicit I Am Curious (Yellow). All were sympathetic to the defense and opposed to the war.
Ray was still adept at self-publicity. In the nation’s capital, even amid the chaos in the streets, he had found time to talk to the Washington Star, and in Chicago he gave interviews freely, appearing on local television’s The Maggie Daly Show, whose eponymous hostess was the mother of Brigid Bazlen, the Salome of King of Kings. One day Roger Ebert recognized Ray as he strode “through the crowd of demonstrators around the Federal Building, a tall, lean striking man with a shock of white hair and an eye patch . . . carrying a small movie camera.” Ebert, then a young journalist, later to become one of America’s leading film critics, profiled the director for the Los Angeles Times.
By the time of Ebert’s published interview, in February 1970, Ray’s plan for the would-be film had evolved into a restaging of the courtroom proceedings, mixed with newsreel and documentary footage and interviews and whatever else he might decide. He envisioned multiple film gauges and a subdivided screen. Ray and volunteers were working tirelessly to shape the thousands of pages of court transcripts into a dramatic script, though it was a little like wrestling a phone book.
Financiers as well as journalists were titillated when Ray floated his casting ideas: Groucho Marx, or James Cagney, or, perhaps most curiously, Dustin Hoffman playing Judge Hoffman. According to Bernard Eisenschitz, Abbie Hoffman actually cajoled Ray into phoning Groucho on one occasion. But Cagney and Groucho said no; in the end it was all “moon talk,” and no big names were landed.
“His idea is to have the defendants play themselves,” Ebert explained in the Los Angeles Times article. “All of the action will take place on a courtroom set now under construction in a Chicago studio. The dialogue will be drawn largely from the trial transcript itself. But the words in the courtroom will occasionally be illustrated by scenes from other places. Vietnam, possibly, or ancient Rome . . .”
Ray showed some of the footage to Ebert, including a scene he had shot during a rabble-rousing trip that Abbie Hoffman and Rennie Davis (another of the Seven) made to Washington, D.C. “There was one, long Godardian sequence in the airplane where Abbie and Rennie talked and kidded each other while a girl in the window seat pretended to be asleep,” Ebert wrote. “Every once in a while, the girl would open an eye.”
Undoubtedly the material was of historical value, but Ray repelled some people as much as he attracted others. Still highly functional as a filmmaker in some ways, especially when he was behind the camera, in other ways he was at a loss without the Oscar-winning cameramen, sound crew, and editors who’d been at his beck and call in Hollywood. Physically, his addiction to methedrine (supposedly to treat his alcoholism) was driving him to new depths of dysfunctionality. In meetings he’d act bored or listless one moment, then sometimes erupt the next in a fury of paranoia, vehemence, or recrimination.
At one point, Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman tangled with Ray over Elia Kazan’s decision to name names to the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Ray argued that Kazan had given only “dead names,” people who were dead or already had been named.* Hoffman dismissed the argument, maintaining that Kazan’s connivance was indefensible. Hoffman ultimately saw Ray as “a somewhat sad figure,” in his words, “a very desperate person,” with Ellen Ray and her group “babysitting for him; I don’t think he could have survived alone at that period.”
By late February, when the Chicago Seven case was decided (with guilty verdicts for five of the seven, all ultimately reversed on appeal), Ellen Ray and her team had begun to suspect that they’d thrown away a lot of money bringing Ray back to America for a film project that no longer interested him very much. They were right. Likewise, the Chicago Seven followers developed the queasy feeling Ray was never going to finish the semidocumentary film about their cause. They were right too.
As Ray devolved personally, his hopes of financing evaporated in kind. He continued to write, to film, to edit; in many ways, on some days, he seemed competent. Yet the Chicago Seven script would never be written, the film never finished, despite Ray’s customary vows of completion. (“I can promise you this film will be made!”)
The most important thing that happened to Ray during his
brief sojourn in Chicago, however, was probably not his failure to complete any film work but his introduction to the young college student who was destined to become his last life partner. A dark-haired beauty in her first semester as a freshman at the University of Chicago, Susan Schwartz was a volunteer with the Chicago Seven’s defense committee when the group’s attorney, William Kunstler, introduced her to Ray outside the courtroom one day. The college freshman had just turned eighteen. The director was fifty-eight.
Although the titles of his films didn’t mean much to Schwartz when the ex-Hollywood director mentioned a few of them, the college student did recognize Ray as “the coolest of cats” with an “auric field” that “crackled with high-voltage charge.”
Toward the end of the trial, Schwartz offered to help out on his film project. When a taxi brought her from her college dorm to his house, Ray looked just as cool in his eye patch and leopard-spotted bikini underwear, a cigarette dangling from his lips, surrounded by film reels and machines and minions. After a long day, in which she proved herself by washing dishes and answering phones while Ray and his crew were out filming, he handed her a stack of court transcripts and asked for her advice and assistance on the unwieldy script.
“I told him I had not seen a film script before,” the new volunteer recalled in her collection of Ray’s writings and musings, I Was Interrupted: Nicholas Ray on Making Movies. “He told me I would figure it out but offered a hint, like a trick to opening the cap on a jar: I should look for events that advanced the action.”
Gradually the college freshman surrendered herself almost entirely to Ray and the project. “He felt at home with me,” Schwartz recalled. “I would not go away.” In early May, when Ray lit out for New York to scrounge money for the Chicago Seven film, he invited her to come along, to be his apprentice. She would linger a while in Chicago, trying to finish her studies, before finally dropping out and following—an event that advanced the action.
First, Ray traveled to La Crosse to visit with his favorite sister, Helen—Mrs. Ernest Hiegel. While there, he gave an interview to the La Crosse Tribune. He mentioned the Chicago Seven film, to be called either “Conspiracy” or “Before the Fall” (he was still deciding). He also told the paper that he was assembling a bunch of hometown footage for a new “Project X,” starring his boyhood friend Russell Huber, now a local radio and television music director. Ray invited a Tribune reporter along to observe the filming, which started under the Losey Memorial Arch at the entrance to the Oak Grove Cemetery.
Wielding a fifty-pound camera—worth ten thousand dollars, as Ray pointed out—the director told his old Central High School classmate to walk out from beneath the arch. “Ray shot the scene twice, then directed Huber to walk back through the arch and disappear into some spruce trees,” according to the Tribune. “He next directed a bewildered Huber to face the camera while standing in the same grove of trees, glance skyward, carefully comb his hair and then walk off.”
Hurriedly setting up another scene in front of gawking bystanders, Ray told the local journalist, “More than any other quality a director needs imagination.” Then the director ushered Huber into a greenhouse to conjure one last scene starring his old friend. “Here an amused Huber was instructed to walk down an aisle between some plants, stop suddenly, turn to the camera and say, ‘You’re pretty disgusting.’ ” The hometown success said a hurried good-bye to Huber and the journalist and then departed La Crosse—for the last time, as far as anyone recalls.
Was Ray really planning a “Project X”? Did he intend to sandwich the footage into the Chicago Seven film, or one of his growing number of home movies? Or was this merely a flattering gesture to an old friend, who like Ray had long ago dreamed of stardom?
About that intriguing eye patch: Toward the end of January 1970, Ray claimed, the director “fell asleep at the editing table” one late night and woke up with an embolism. After being hospitalized for a week, he said, he started wearing a black patch over his right eye.
As Bernard Eisenschitz has observed, though, “the loss of sight in his right eye remained a mystery which he fostered.” As far back as 1954, according to news items, a special effects explosion on the Colorado location of Run for Cover had hurled a small piece of glass into Ray’s eye, forcing him to wear dark glasses for a time. Actor Christopher Plummer also remembered the director flaunting an eye patch now and then while filming Wind Across the Everglades. In his autobiography, Elia Kazan insisted that his old friend had lost his eye “in a bar fight in Madrid” in the early 1960s. Film critic Myron Meisel, who once in the 1970s spent a night with Ray in Boston looking for an all-night store that carried a fresh supply of patches, said he saw Ray wear the patch “over each of his eyes in turn.” And the director stopped wearing the patch entirely during his last few years of life.
For the sixties radicals, the eye patch helped confirm Ray as one of them: an adventurer, an outlaw, a buccaneer. For film aficionados, it evoked an elite club of one-eyed directors with similar patches: André De Toth, Fritz Lang, Raoul Walsh, John Ford. Ray’s looks had always been a deceptive part of his appeal. For a man who cut a romantic, bigger-than-life figure—though “with a crucifixion in his face,” as Melville described Ahab—the eye patch was the perfect adornment, the advertisement of a flaw.
In New York, in the summer of 1970, Ray and his new college-dropout acolyte crashed around, often at the home of either Connie Ernst Bessie or Alan Lomax, who was back living in New York. The director commuted between the two, “depending on how pissed off he was with me at the time,” according to Schwartz, “or how pissed off with Connie.” Sometimes the director and Schwartz stayed at the same place, sometimes separately. Connie’s house in the Village was close to Bob Dylan’s, and Ray tried without success to interest Dylan, the new Woody Guthrie, in supporting his film with music, money, or a cameo.
This was the rocking, reeling, rolling New York of Dylan and Andy Warhol and Midnight Cowboy and the Weather Underground, even wilder than New York in the 1930s. Acquaintances old and new greeted the former Hollywood director—a sight to behold, with his unruly white mane, his characteristic garb of black Levi’s, turtleneck, and cowboy boots—as a returning conqueror. “All of a sudden,” Perry Bruskin said, “Nick found himself very radical again.”
While toiling away obsessively on the Chicago Seven footage, Ray attended plays and films and concerts and parties and hung out at the Village Vanguard. He liked to stay out on the streets all night, “trading insults with winos, drinking at local bars, playing cribbage, pool, poker and endless rounds of bingo at Fascination on 48th Street,” according to Schwartz. He started drinking wine as soon as he rolled out of bed, switching over to gin and beer later in the day. He shot speed and gave himself intramuscular injections. Friends kept him well supplied with pot, hash, cocaine, and LSD. For food, he relied heavily on Mars bars.
By summer, the Chicago Seven were yesterday’s headlines, and the money for that project had dried up. “Nick talked about a multi-media road show going round the campus circuit,” recalled film scholar James Leahy, who was working with Ray on the Chicago Seven film. “This would use drawings, water colors, stock footage, scenes extracted from the transcript of the trial. There would be dramatic re-enactments improvised under Nick’s direction by actors drawn from the audience.”
With the Chicago Seven project in limbo, the director found other outlets for his boundlessness. He was invited to sit in on rehearsals of a Sam Shepard play, offering tips. As he had back in the 1950s, he started talking about filming another Alan Paton novel set in South Africa. He got a nibble from Mike Myerberg, the producer of Lute Song, who installed Ray in an office above the Princess Theater on Forty-seventh Street and Seventh Avenue. Actors were interviewed, screen tests conducted before there was a completed script. Another urgent project always came along just as the money ran out for the preceding one. Each new possibility tended to first overlap and then override the last.
More than ever,
the projects were overtly autobiographical. One the director toiled on during this period was called “New York After Midnight.” Based on an original story by Ray, it tracked the nighttime wanderings of a character dubbed “Eyepatch” who has returned to New York after years of absence “to encounter loose ends from his past among present more savage despairs,” in Schwartz’s words. According to Bernard Eisenschitz’s book, this self-exploratory exercise was doomed, despite voluminous notes and several drafts for “scenes, often repeated (with elements of science fiction), some of them dazzling (in particular a dramatization of the death of Ray’s father).”
Nineteen-seventy went by in a blur of hyperactivity and substance abuse and blue funks. Schwartz held down a job to make ends meet; though they were sometimes at odds, the couple enjoyed moments of peaceful togetherness, such as the morning they spent watching They Live by Night on TV. “Nick nodded and rambled on for a while about the first shots ever made from a helicopter,” Schwartz recalled, “but by the end of the film he was weeping.”
Trying to throw him a lifeline, Elia Kazan recommended Ray for a teaching stint at Brandeis University, but the school rejected him, plunging Ray into the bluest of funks. Then, one night at a Grateful Dead concert at the Fillmore, Ray bumped into Dennis Hopper, now a director himself. With their old misunderstandings behind them, Hopper offered to fly Ray to his ranch in Taos, New Mexico, where the actor-director was fitfully editing The Last Movie, an arty movie-within-a-movie shot in Peru (and written, incidentally, by another Rebel Without a Cause alumnus, Stewart Stern). Ray jumped at the chance. Leaving more debt and unfinished business behind, he traded New York for Taos—one adult Disneyland for another. There he sat in on the cutting of The Last Movie, while finding “shelter, food, drink, entertainment, new faces, wide vistas, guns, horses” and more, Schwartz recalled, in the “deluxe outlaw’s den” hosted by Hopper.
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