Nicholas Ray

by Patrick McGilligan

  In many ways, though, We Can’t Go Home Again remained a stubborn hodgepodge in need of cohesion. As the Cinema 5 screening date neared, Ray drank “heavily,” in the words of Susan Schwartz, becoming “almost useless.” All along Schwartz had been helping Ray in ways small and large, and now she stepped in to give the film a more coherent structure. “I had a lot to do with that work print. For one thing, I outlined it, I established the order of the scenes,” Schwartz said later. “I also did the music.”

  The distributor was insufficiently impressed, however, and We Can’t Go Home Again lost its final bid for public bookings. At first, though, that didn’t crush Ray—because, in the spring of 1976, largely as a result of all the attention he’d received for his student-professor film project, along with his many personal appearances and laudatory interviews, the director appeared to have landed one last chance to mount a theatrical feature.

  “NICK RAY BACK: LEAD IS PORNO QUEEN” screamed the April 21, 1976, headline in Variety. The article described plans for a screen story involving a young hooker defended by a seedy lawyer. Blending courtroom drama (one of Ray’s specialties) with a porno slant (a more recent feature of his career), the project would star Marilyn Chambers of the scandalous X-rated blockbuster Behind the Green Door. The lawyer was to be played by Rip Torn, whom Ray had directed before in King of Kings.

  If the name Nick Ray still stirred excitement in film circles, the real attention-grabber was the casting of Chambers, a blond hard-core actress then at the peak of her notoriety. The director said that he hadn’t seen Behind the Green Door, nor attended Chambers’s “Le Bellybutton” cabaret show currently running in a Manhattan hotel. For that matter, he hadn’t even screen-tested the actress. Rather, Ray had simply talked and walked with Chambers. “I have a camera in my head,” Ray declared, then undercut this pronouncement by adding, more dubiously, that Chambers would “eventually be able to handle anything that the young Katie Hepburn or Bette Davis could.”

  The script was by a writer named William Maidment; the ostensible producer was Jan Pieter Welt, who had photographed, acted in, and helped edit author Norman Mailer’s film projects. Mailer himself was said to have signed on for a supporting role, and Ray’s old boxing pal Roger Donoghue—a friend of Mailer’s too—would pitch in on the script.

  An ebullient Ray took an office and a cutting room in a house at the corner of Broadway and Canal. Meeting with Chambers, Ray was informed by the performer that blue was the best color to flatter her looks. He was momentarily disconcerted, having long inveighed against that color. But rules were made to be broken, and Ray announced that he would shoot the film entirely in shades of blue and call it “City Blues.”

  It was all a glorious delusion, and not everyone noticed that Ray started drinking at breakfast and tended to fall asleep in his soup at lunchtime. “With some change in his pocket,” as Susan Schwartz chronicled later, “Nick easily found all the herbs, liquids and powders he claimed he wanted to quit and he went for them all; but he stayed on the job rewriting the script in three days, scouting locations, talking with actors, abounding with visions and plans.” The starting date of “City Blues” kept getting postponed, and within two months, changing tax shelter laws halted the shaky financing.

  One day, Ray ran into British film critic V. F. Perkins in Greenwich Village. In the course of their conversation, Perkins told him he had an idea for a horror film. Ray thought it sounded like a good idea and asked if his auteurist champion would like a partner on the script. Perkins was taken aback; he hadn’t thought of Nick Ray as a horror filmmaker, much less a potential collaborator. Yet they plunged into the partnership routine, never getting beyond a first draft—another on the pile of unfinished Ray scripts.

  “The horror was not just on paper,” recalled Schwartz, who was at her wit’s end. When the director refused to moderate his self-destructive habits, she left him. “Nick was no longer able to be a cool drunk,” according to Schwartz. “He looked like an asshole when drunk. Plus which he was constantly in and out of hospitals with a series of ailments, from pneumonia to infected bruises, all of them the result of his alcoholism. Plus which he had worn out most of his friends now; he had no place to go.”

  A week later, in early September 1976, Ray fell down a flight of stairs and injured himself. He had been checking into hospitals with regularity for years, for illnesses or falls aggravated by his addictions—including one stint, while filming a student workshop in Minneapolis, that briefly aggravated his old foot problems and forced him onto crutches. But this new injury, along with Schwartz’s desertion and his deteriorating professional fortunes, was one wake-up call that penetrated. Ray checked himself into Roosevelt Hospital and spent two months in the detox unit there.

  Released in November, he vowed to stay sober. He moved into a new home with Schwartz, “finally a place big enough for us both,” she said. The two went job-hunting by day, then “joined other couples for bridge and quiet evenings at home.” Ray also attended daily Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. “I believe he felt a new peace at this time,” she wrote later.

  Teaching and acting rejuvenated Ray. Old colleagues Elia Kazan and John Houseman arranged for him to host acting-directing workshops at the Lee Strasberg Institute, part of the Actors Studio, where he gave talks and assigned texts on Vakhtangov and Stanislavski as well as Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

  “That insanity is over,” Ray told Cliff Jahr during his Camera Three interview in 1977. He was referring to his lost European years in the 1960s, though he could have meant all his insanities through all the years. In this appearance the director looked none the worse for wear, wearing a fashionable seventies-style suit. He didn’t hem or haw; he seemed more focused than he had in years, without the extended silences or unfinished sentences he was known for. “I like myself better now,” Ray declared.

  Late that winter, the New German Cinema filmmaker Wim Wenders came to New York to shoot scenes for a movie based on Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels. The cast of Wenders’s picture, called The American Friend in English, included Dennis Hopper and Hollywood B director Sam Fuller. Wenders had never met Ray—neither, for that matter, had Fuller—but they were brought together by the French production manager and hit it off. One night, during an all-night game of backgammon, Wenders told Ray the story of Ripley (a series of books), and Ray expressed interest in playing one of Highsmith’s characters: the small role of a painter who keeps producing art after faking his death. (His paintings become more valuable after his death.)

  Wenders had left that character out of his movie, but now, with Ray’s help, the character was written into the script. The German filmmaker directed Ray in a few cryptic, self-referential scenes in the spring, including brief scenes with Hopper. “It was the first time they had worked together for twenty years,” Wenders recalled. “Dennis was very moved. And Nick was nervous.”

  Ray continued to be in demand as a speaker on the college circuit, although he confined most of his appearances to the East Coast because of his teaching responsibilities. He had quit alcohol so thoroughly that he would not even taste a dessert flavored with brandy, according to friends; he attended his AA meetings faithfully, sometimes twice a day. These days he seemed almost like a traditional professor in his workshops for budding actors and directors. “With his new glasses,” wrote Bill Krohn, who observed a Strasberg Institute session, “Nick looks a little bit like Barry Goldwater, and what he seems to be teaching, apart from the time-tested precepts of the Method, is discipline, orderliness, and professionalism. A far cry from the wild tales of the Harpur days.”

  The Strasberg Institute classes were regarded as a personal vindication for Ray, and in the summer Laszlo Benedek—the director of The Wild One with Marlon Brando, now head of the New York University (NYU) film department—invited him to host a summer workshop for advanced students. That too was considered successful, so much so that the director was asked to teach a regular class
at NYU in the fall of 1977.

  Too soon however everything changed. After checking into a New York hospital for tests, Ray was diagnosed with lung cancer. Exploratory surgery indicated the cancer had surrounded his aorta and invaded his bloodstream. The doctors gave him two difficult years at most. Among his visitors was Kazan, who found Ray looking healthy and in good spirits. Ray took off his pajama top and proudly “exhibited a long red scar diagonally across his back,” Kazan recalled, then put his top back on, sat down, and lit a cigarette. “I wondered if he was doing that for my benefit—or for his own,” Kazan wrote later. “I figured that it was his way. He was challenging death.”

  Writer Michael Weller, who joined in a weekly poker game with Ray, thought the director might play the small role of the General in Miloš Forman’s film of Hair, for which Weller had written the screenplay. The offer was appreciated, and by February 1978 Ray was on location in Barstow, California, playing a general sternly addressing Vietnam-bound troops with a wind machine blowing black smoke around him. Forman later said that he had no idea of Ray’s cancerous condition, or he wouldn’t have called for repeated takes for several days. “He never once complained,” said Forman. But Ray had always been a trouper, and the worst was yet to come.

  Wim Wenders and Dennis Hopper came up from Hollywood to spend a little time with Ray, and the director traveled to Malibu to visit the Housemans. When his son Tim escorted him to an AA meeting in the area one day, he encountered Edith Soderberg, “an old friend from Garden of Allah and RKO days,” in Ray’s words, one of the screenwriters who’d done repair work on Born to Be Bad, now honoring the pledge along with Ray. Later the director took the bus to Las Vegas for one last gambling splurge—as usual, losing more than he won.

  Returning to New York after the filming, Ray continued to teach sporadically at NYU and the Strasberg Institute. His interaction with Wenders, Forman, and other filmmakers, and his stimulating exchanges with students, renewed the old itch to direct one last picture. He began to generate fresh ideas for film projects, taking stabs at various scripts (among them the story of the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous). The unorthodox professor reemerged—“No lectures! Just do it!” The former Hollywood director even launched a couple of short film projects with his students.

  Cahiers du Cinéma correspondent Bill Krohn returned to the Strasberg Institute and watched Ray as he directed a few days’ worth of Marco, an eleven-minute sixteen-millimeter short film with his students playing criminals caught in a police dragnet. “The first day of shooting,” Krohn wrote, “is devoted to booking the students, each of whom has been assigned a crime as the basis for his improvisation.

  “But because of the inadequate wiring at the Institute, the lights keep blowing every three minutes, and shooting conditions on the cramped stairway outside the Marilyn Monroe Room are difficult . . .

  “By six o’clock the shooting is already half a day behind schedule; Nick makes a stern speech berating the students for their habitual lateness and enjoins them to report in at twelve o’clock sharp the next day.

  “Assuming that the injunction does not apply to journalists I come at four o’clock and Nick shows up after me. By this time most of the class has gone home.”

  At the recommendation of his longtime friend Connie Ernst Bessie, by then a cancer survivor herself, Ray entered the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in early April 1978 for experimental treatments that involved the implantation of radioactive particles in his lungs. In May he had a brain operation to remove a tumor.

  Somehow, through the years—regardless of his soiled shirts, his nicotine-stained and burned fingers, his wine-blotched lips, his stubborn, phlegmy cough; regardless of how addled with drink or drugs he became—the director had always retained his rugged, vulnerable beauty.

  Now his look changed dramatically, though it was still charismatic. When film critic David Thomson met Ray at Dartmouth College in midsummer 1978, after his surgery and radiation treatments, he thought the director resembled “Max Schreck’s vampire in Murnau’s Nosferatu, for he was utterly bald and the head was a glaring, eerie dome.”

  Wenders had vowed to make another film with Ray, this time with the ailing director as its star. In a sense they would be codirectors. By now Ray knew he would never finish We Can’t Go Home Again to his own satisfaction. Wenders’s offer was his last chance to be involved in a motion picture that might actually come to fruition. Ray suggested that he might again play the painter character from The American Friend “as a point of departure,” in Wenders’s words, with the painter learning that he’s dying for real this time—of cancer.

  Ray dashed off a number of script pages about “a man sick with cancer who wanted ‘to bring himself altogether’ before he died,” in Schwartz’s words. The project gained momentum with European financing in late 1978, though Ray had lost weight due to his illness and become frail and depressed. “His body shrank down and everything extra burned away with disease,” Schwartz recounted. “What was left was essence of life which in Nick’s face took on a look of such pure sweet sadness it was transfixing.”

  The photography started in New York in late March 1979, with a screening of The Lusty Men and a talk-back at Vassar College. His mood elevated by cocaine, Ray showed fits of energy in the first week of filming. But the script quickly faltered, Ray’s health declined further, and the part-fiction, part-documentary idea began to morph. Soon the production was being improvised around Ray’s bedside at the Spring Street home he shared with Schwartz, becoming primarily a colloquy between the two filmmakers, interspersed with glimpses of visitors and friends and family sometimes playing themselves, sometimes fictional characters.

  “Look, everybody’s looking at me!” says Old Tom as he lies dying in Johnny Guitar, a good line that might have been written by Ray. “It’s the first time I felt important.”

  Schwartz was conflicted—sometimes “in an extreme state of rage”—over the production, which increasingly intruded on her home and her beloved’s obvious suffering. Wenders liked to call it “Nick’s Movie,” but the two filmmakers were at constant loggerheads over how to shape the scenes, and Ray wasn’t up to challenging Wenders: It was really “Wim’s Movie.” Ray felt his German colleague was “lost, both behind and before the camera,” Schwartz wrote later, and what he saw of the dailies he didn’t particularly like.

  The first round of photography had to be interrupted in early April when Wenders was summoned to California for talks with the screenwriter of Hammett, a feature film about the crime novelist Dashiell Hammett that he was preparing for Francis Coppola. With Wenders gone, Ray was admitted to Sloan-Kettering for subsistence treatments. When the German filmmaker returned, he was told that Ray’s days were numbered. Wenders’s producer asked Ray’s physician if the dying man could be kept alive for at least the handful of days that were needed to finish the film. “Lest it be considered cold-blooded,” Dr. William G. Cahan later wrote, “I should say that Nick desperately wanted this. However, in spite of vitamin shots, stimulants, exhortations to eat, he kept steadily wasting away.

  “In his late stages, he had completely lost his appetite,” continued Cahan, “and his esophagus was so narrowed by the cancer that it was impossible for him to swallow. To delay this race with death, we fed him food concentrates intravenously. On this routine, the reverse of a crash diet, he gained a pound a day, [and] for a short time, renewed vigor.”

  Ray’s hospital room was flooded by his circle of old trusted friends, some of them dating back to the early 1930s—Connie Bessie, Alan Lomax, Jean Evans. The hospital welcomed Ray’s students from Harpur College and other young people from the Strasberg Institute and NYU. Ray’s son Tim, who was involved in the Wenders production, both behind and in front of the camera, was often at his father’s bedside and tried to teach him meditation exercises to ease the constant pain.

  Elia Kazan hurried to the hospital one day and found Ray being pushed down a corridor in a wheelchair by a nurse. At firs
t he didn’t recognize the man he’d met some thirty-five years earlier at the Theatre of Action compound, and when he did, he thought, “He’ll look better in his coffin.” One side of Ray’s head was shaved, he recalled, “and there was a target mark indicating where the X-ray should be aimed.”

  When Kazan said hello, Ray’s response was “less cordial than usual, not unfriendly but distracted.” Kazan walked along with Ray’s wheelchair, “asking a few questions, getting uncertain and brief answers. He seemed in a hurry as if he was late for an appointment.”

  As they entered his hospital room, Ray called out “Wim!” and Kazan noticed several men busy setting up camera and sound equipment. He was taken aback to realize that his old friend was devoting his final days to a film capturing his own life and imminent death. “Just like him,” Kazan thought as Ray left, “Nick is like an actor preparing to play his most important scene.

  “I thought about what was going on and found it grotesque: a man cooperating in putting his own death on film. Walking home, I thought more about what I’d seen. I thought Wenders ghoulish, but I also thought that this might be what Nick himself would most wish to do: dramatize himself as he was dying, make that his last act on earth. What kind of man would do that?”

  Years later, as Kazan was working on his autobiography and reflecting on that last encounter with Ray, he worked up the nerve to watch the Wenders film, eventually titled Lightning over Water, which he’d “vowed not to see.” “Much of it,” Kazan wrote, was “clumsy and tedious. But then came an extraordinary long close-up of Nick near the end. The dying director, who knows he’s dying, looks straight into the camera’s lens and directs his last scene, which is his death. Nick looked unbelievably exhausted. There could be no doubt that he had only a few days to live. But there was also no doubt that, with those last hours of his life, this was precisely what he wanted to do.