Nicholas Ray

by Patrick McGilligan

  He arrived with vision in hand: a short story he’d hastily written, titled “Wet Dreams,” that might be right for the unlikely project. Ray’s story involved a preacher who discovers the joys of sex, and a janitor of his church who is his doppelgänger. Besides directing, Ray would play the preacher, who engages in oral sex and incest with his own underage daughter, as well as the janitor, who puts his broom to unspeakable uses. Once again, Ray would stage his own death on camera, when the janitor kills the preacher at the end.

  “Wet Dreams” was “a personal film from the word go,” wrote Eisenschitz. Ray shot it “almost entirely in close-ups, giving an astonishing sense of brooding re-examination, or mirror effect.” Directing himself, “complete with eye-patch, missing tooth, and socks tumbling about his ankles,” Ray delivered an orgy-inducing sermon, to which several figures respond by performing fellatio on him: “a bespectacled woman with large teeth, a black woman, and finally his daughter.” The Amsterdam producer found a genuine underage girl for the daughter (who, like the others, reportedly performed actual fellatio on the director). Ray kept his erection for hours during the all-night filming, the producer proudly boasted.

  Though most of “Wet Dreams” was filmed after Cannes, Ray would return to Amsterdam at least once for additional shooting and editing. Now, however, he had to scurry back to America after receiving a hard-cash offer to film country-and-western singer Willie Nelson’s July Fourth picnic in Texas. Like “Wet Dreams,” and the Sylt films, and any of the other short movies Ray is supposed to have made in the years after 55 Days at Peking, Ray’s Willie Nelson footage has been confirmed by only a privileged few. “These films are like flying saucers,” wrote Bill Krohn, a staunch Ray defender, “you catch glimpses of them or hear about them from people who’ve seen one.”

  Especially after its underwhelming reception at Cannes, Ray viewed the temporary 1973 version of We Can’t Go Home Again as more a tribal student work than a professor’s intended masterpiece, and for the next three years the director would feed his sleepless energy into creating a definitive final version that would stand as his magnum opus.

  Ray returned to Los Angeles. He crashed with his ex-wife Betty Utey, now an ABC-TV staffer with access to editing rooms and equipment. Ray reunited awkwardly with his daughters, now teenagers, and plunged into reediting the copious footage with a team of former Harpur College students and assistants, often working through the day to assemble a version or brainstorm new scenes only to tear everything up overnight.

  Though Utey welcomed Ray for a while, she eventually realized that the director was “too alcoholic and too full of drugs” to keep on indefinitely and showed him the door. His other Hollywood friends were equally appalled. Hoping to spur investment, he showed his student-professor film to a select few, like Philip Yordan. “It was something that somebody would do in a crazy house,” Yordan thought.

  Surprised to receive an invitation, Stewart Stern attended one L.A. screening. He was taken aback by the jumbled work in progress and even more flabbergasted when Ray—looking like “the ghost of Beethoven,” all bones—jumped up after the showing to give him a hug and kiss. “Nothing made sense,” the writer of Rebel Without a Cause recalled, “not the rough cut—not the hug—not the sudden jump cut [in my life] to this wreckage of one of the most gifted men I had known.”

  In March 1974, Ray made his way from Los Angeles north to Berkeley, where Tom Luddy had arranged a retrospective at the Pacific Film Archives. While there he was invited to use the Zoetrope editing rooms, where Francis Coppola was busy editing The Conversation. Coppola and his team worked by day, Ray and his by night. Between sleeping on the premises amid empty bottles (“He’d be zonked out with a gallon of white Almaden Mountain Rhine wine,” recalled Luddy) and his astronomical phone bill, the director was prodded to move on. Ray first went to a filmmaking collective at another building and finally to a factory warehouse in Sausalito, where his refrigerator, couch, editing table, and film cans shared space with sewing machines and seamstresses.

  For nearly three years after his Harpur College experiment, Ray marched ahead, filming new sequences for the film with dedicated former students in several American and European locales while shuttling between editing quarters in Los Angeles and the Bay Area. Now and then, Ray would host other showings of the film in progress, including a packed unveiling at the First Avenue Screening Room in New York in the fall of 1974. True believers felt that We Can’t Go Home Again was unfolding toward a great destiny, while others tended to agree with Yordan and Stern. “Elia Kazan and Nick’s old producer John Houseman [were] there” at the First Avenue screening, wrote Bill Krohn, the American correspondent for Cahiers du Cinéma, “along with a number of backers who were considering investing in the film.”

  But Krohn and the others “were all disappointed” when “the screening lasted only a few minutes” before the projector suffered a “mysterious breakdown.” With an auteurist’s faith, though, Krohn reported “the few minutes we saw were worth the price of admission.” In his view, Ray’s last picture was finally shaping up as “a radically experimental work,” integrating documentary, dramatized scenes, multiple formats, and interwoven story lines.

  Crisscrossing America in the early 1970s, sandwiching in several trips to Europe (including a disastrous stint as president of the jury of the 1974 San Sebastien Film Festival), Ray took a victory lap celebrating his career even as it reached its all-time nadir.

  Colleges, museums, revival theaters, and film festivals offered him well-paid speaking engagements, and wherever he touched down the director gave interviews about his student-professor film project while reflecting on the highs and lows of his filmography. He still did homework on his admirers and could anticipate many of the questions. “I like the piece you did for the Voice,” the director told Cliff Jahr at the start of their televised interview, adding pointedly, “The last one.”

  Pressed by one interviewer as to whether he would like to go back in time and improve any of his twenty features, Ray was mildly irritated. “There were times I could have extended myself more,” he said. “All the films made money, so why [be]labor it?”

  Sometimes Ray was a self-important dissembler; other times he blurted blunt truths. “My father told a great many lies in his life,” Nicca Ray conceded. “He was a great liar,” agreed producer Chris Sievernich, who worked with Ray and German filmmaker Wim Wenders in the final months of the director’s life. Indeed, at times Ray was an incorrigible “con artist,” according to former Harpur student Tom Farrell—but then again that might be a vital ingredient in a film director’s makeup.

  Now and then Ray managed both truth-telling and -dodging simultaneously, as when he declared, “I am the best damn filmmaker in the world who has never made one entirely good, entirely satisfactory film.”

  He had a sense of humor about his own failures, saying of Born to be Bad: “It sure was!”

  Few cared anymore whether Knock on Any Door or Johnny Guitar—not to mention In a Lonely Place or Bitter Victory—had been strong or weak novels; the books were long out of print or hard to find, and permanently supplanted in the culture by the Bogart films and Ray’s version of Johnny Guitar (if not by Ray’s version of Bitter Victory). The director introduced a number of Johnny Guitar screenings—over time he had grown almost as fond of the film as his admirers—and even showed his first, uneven Bogart picture to his Harpur College class. (“Although the film was a huge success, it never gave me any satisfaction or feeling of accomplishment.”)

  Party Girl may have been the second-greatest Ray film of all time, as a 1999 poll of ninety Spanish film scholars and critics decided. (A special issue of the journal Nickel Odeon tallied eighty-four “favorite” votes for Chicago año 30, as Ray’s MGM musical was known in Spain, eclipsed only by Johnny Guitar with eighty-seven votes; Rebelde sin causa came in third.) But Ray, in one interview, said it was “just another MGM straight-to-the-nabe picture. No one thought much of it. [Robert] Taylo
r considered it a punishment picture; something the front office had thrown him into to help use up his contract. He was probably right.”

  On Dangerous Ground: “A failure, unsuccessful in achieving what I wanted.”

  King of Kings: “A piece of shit.”

  Though the French auteurists insisted that Ray was a genius, unable to err without being interesting, to his adoring questioners Ray repeatedly said, “In Hollywood about one out of every four films I made was a film I liked,” adding, “That’s a damn high average.”

  He’d directed only twenty Hollywood films, and if his math was right that meant he only liked about five. One perpetual favorite was his first, They Live by Night. Another was Rebel Without a Cause. The Lusty Men may have been the third. The other two were up for debate, largely dependent on his mood or the questioner. In a Lonely Place? Bigger Than Life?

  On college campuses, leftists and counterculturists greeted him as a Hollywood rebel. Curiously, Ray reinforced this impression by telling people that his generation had disappointed him by “betraying” their values. “Nick told me that one out of every ten people on the left were informers at one time or another,” recalled Leslie Levinson, a student actor in We Can’t Go Home Again. Rarely interrogated about the blacklist, the director more than once defended Kazan’s decision to name Communists “on the grounds that these names were already known,” according to more than one published account. His own accommodation with the McCarthy era was never suspected.

  Even a first-rate left-wing journalist like Andrew Kopkind, who interviewed Ray sympathetically, found the director “politically right-on,” writing in 1976 that “for some unknown reason” Ray had “escaped most of the horrors of McCarthyism in the mid-50s, although many of his comrades on the Left were denounced and blacklisted.” Somehow, Ray’s reputation survived even the publication of Bernard Eisenschitz’s biography, with its clear evidence of HUAC cooperation. Nearly two decades after its publication (in Europe, with spotty distribution in the United States), respected critic Emmanuel Levy could note on his blog that Ray “left the U.S. on a self-exile as a protest against the McCarthy witch-hunt,” while the avowedly left-wing J. Hoberman still could describe Ray in the Village Voice as “an ex-Communist who was never persecuted and must have wondered why.”

  Although the experience of meeting the great man was always memorable, many felt—as Kazan once did—that Ray was terribly “ungathered.”

  In March 1973, the former Hollywood director turned up in his old stomping ground of Madison, Wisconsin, where graduate student Gerald Peary, who later became a Boston film critic, was a teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin. After a screening of Johnny Guitar, Ray took questions and taught a practicum for film students. An auteurist who carried around a thumb-worn copy of Andrew Sarris’s American Directors, Peary was among the throngs who attended Ray’s events.

  One day Peary and other students assembled eagerly for the director’s workshop in an empty classroom set aside for that purpose. Ray divided the group up into a crew ready to work behind the camera, using sixteen-millimeter equipment, and others who were willing to perform improvised scenes. Whenever he was asked a question, Ray took a long time before responding in his weary, often incoherent way. “What was wrong with him?” Peary wondered.

  “Perhaps recalling vaguely some paranoid moment crossing a border at an airport (because he was carrying drugs?), Ray broke the actors down into opposing groups,” recalled Peary. “One group was passengers trying to get into the U.S., being stopped at the border. The other group was government agents checking passports, looking for suspicious people trying to wiggle into the country.

  “The two thespian groups huddled there, waiting for directions from Ray. The crew waited for directions from Ray. And my memory is that nothing happened. Ray stumbled about in private thought, private conversation, and all those people kept waiting. For a few hours. Finally, everyone dispersed. Ray himself didn’t seem to notice the hours passing, and that he never got around to directing.”

  The next day, a privileged group of film-crazy students were invited to a lunch with Ray. Peary ended up sitting next to the director. Ray was quiet, “pretty uncommunicative.” Peary tried to engage him, asking him what had happened during the production to mar his vision of King of Kings. “Ray had no answer. Instead he gasped around, and began seriously trembling and trembling . . . never saying anything.”

  Lunch continued awkwardly. An hour later, it was time for Ray to say his good-byes. “And this weird thing happened,” Peary continued. “Nick Ray sought me out, walked up to me, and said this cryptic sentence . . . ‘This summer . . . Some of us . . . are coming through here in a van.’ Did he mean that, On the Road–fashion, he was crossing America and that, Electric Kool Aid Acid–fashion, he had chosen me, me alone of all his UW contacts, to be On the Bus? I’ll never know . . .”

  Regardless, the Velvet Light Trap, the left-wing, auteurist campus film journal, published a lengthy, reverential interview with the director, who was often able to recount, in loving detail, shots or highlights from his beloved Hollywood movies, but who in other respects behaved like a regrettable wreck of a human being.

  After Madison, the director was invited to Portland, Oregon, by the Northwest Film Student Center for a screening of They Live by Night. Ray attended a reception at a private home that drew a local crowd, including Ted Mahar, a film critic and entertainment writer for the Portland Oregonian. Rebel Without a Cause had been “one of the major cinema events” in Mahar’s life, and for weeks he had been looking forward to meeting Ray. Mahar arrived bristling with questions about James Dean, Bogart, Mitchum, and all the rest.

  Mahar instantly recognized that his auteurist hero had seen better days. “His physical body was horribly present, but he was so blotto that he had trouble standing and focusing,” Mahar recalled. “Might as well have chatted up the family pooch.” Mahar gamely flipped open his journalist’s notebook, and the partying stopped all around as Ray “struggled manfully to perform well for the audience,” answering Mahar’s questions.

  Ray seemed oddly belligerent, not toward Mahar personally, but toward “the Establishment.” And he couldn’t concentrate on the questions. “He literally seemed unable to get me into focus,” Mahar recalled. “His brows were like cartoon slashes as he faced me, leaned forward, and tried to stare at me intently. After about fifteen minutes of this, his eyes began to close involuntarily. He never actually nodded off, but the pattern was clear. He was becoming incommunicado.

  “The experience saddened me tremendously,” the journalist remembered. It was “the major reason I chose to write nothing” in the Oregonian about Ray’s visit.

  Auteurists generally looked past the man to his films, but many were also smitten with the man regardless of his flaws, above and beyond his accomplishments. One day, during a visit to Hollywood, Myron Meisel took an emergency telephone call in his hotel room from the director, who was also passing through Los Angeles. Ray explained that he’d gotten himself “pinned under a large metal standing shelf that had fallen on him” in an editing room at F & B CECO, an independent production company, where he was toiling away on his student-professor film.

  “It seemed an odd situation,” recalled the former Boston film critic, who’d helped craft the I’m A Stranger Here Myself documentary about Ray, “but I rushed over in a cab to pull it off. There I saw this plaintive man, terrible as Lear, submerged in spools of film, literally drowning in the issue of his compulsive drive to glory and failure. If you committed a scene like that to film, no one would believe it. He slept that night in my bed and in the morning put the bite on me for practically everything in my wallet.”

  Regardless, “I cherished every minute of it,” Meisel recalled a few years later, “even unto watching My Darling Clementine at 4 A.M. with the sound off. He had dozed off claiming that he never slept more than two or three hours at a time, hadn’t for years. He was out for nine. I don’t think I had ever
before seen him asleep.”

  By early 1976, having burned too many bridges on the West Coast, Ray decided to return to live in New York. One of the last things he did before leaving Los Angeles was attend the funeral of Sal Mineo, the young actor who had soared to fame and success in Rebel Without a Cause. In February, Mineo had been murdered by a drifter near his home in West Hollywood.

  Ray brought We Can’t Go Home Again back to New York with him, aiming to polish up the latest version to show to Don Rugoff, whose company Cinema 5 owned a small chain of New York theaters showing art house films. The director had been working on his student-professor film fitfully for years, between his crises and meltdowns, shaping and reshaping the material. The 1976 version was significantly altered from its 1973 predecessor, with footage from his Chicago Seven and flying-saucer projects woven into the Harpur College material, along with cameo interviews with counterculture celebrities and Jimi Hendrix on the soundtrack. Ray had written new narration to replace Tom Farrell’s 1973 voice-over, and this time he recorded the narration himself, rising to the occasion in a San Francisco recording studio with eloquent voice-over work that helped focus the film.

  “I stayed to the end of the [Chicago Seven] trial,” Ray explains in his narration. “Most people began to disappear. Which really made me wonder—where is everybody? So I thought I’d try to find them someplace else. Fortunately, I was offered a job in an upstate New York university. Hell, I decided I’d buy a crooked cane, grow a goatee, wear a crooked smile and impress them with my rhetoric, rebellion, and ponderosity.”