In Which We Find Nicholas Ray In A Lonely Place

This is the second in a series about the life of the director Nicholas Ray. You can find the first part here.

A Dangerous Fault

by ALEX CARNEVALE

He has a dangerous fault in work. You feel that he is thinking a little bit more about himself, and the angles, than the material. This comes out of his uncertainty.

Hollywood in the late 1940s was a dangerous place for anyone who had ever has the slightest association with the Communist party. The director Nicholas Ray had recently married an actress named Gloria Grahame after impregnating her.  He could not afford to be blacklisted; he had to work. So he turned to his friend Howard Hughes.

At RKO, Hughes' mission was to make anti-Communist films — he did not particularly care the politics of the people who made them. Ray refused to direct a movie called I Married A Communist because it hit too close to home — his friend Gene Kelly had done just that. His first film, They Live By Night, had been shelved and  a proper follow-up, starring Joan Fontaine as a miscast bad girl, was something of a mess as well.

He was unhappy with his marriage, too. Grahame was beautiful, but as Patrick McGilligan explains in his masterful biography Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure of an American Director, Ray admitted he was "infatuated with her: but I did not like her very much." At the start, their connection was mostly sexual, with Ray's friends in awe that he was able to even maintain an erection given the amount of alcohol he consumed.

Gloria loved sex more than her husband. One of her friends suggested that when they were out, Gloria stood behind Ray with her eyes cast to the ground. Ray's gambling and drinking were spiralling out of control — Grahame and her mother would spend hours replacing his cocaine with sugar.

One of Ray's closest friends, Humphrey Bogart, was his star in the legal drama Knock On Any Door. In 1951, they planned to reunite for a picture in which Bogart would play a man with the double life of a screenwriter and serial killer. The working title was In A Lonely Place. Because the Production Code was loathe to approve the concept of Bogart as a multiple murderer, Ray and producer Robert Lord rewrote the script to make Bogart only a potential suspect in the case.

In A Lonely Place is a masterpiece of atmosphere and mood over actual content. Bogart plays his usual caustic individual, but Ray pushes the character into something like a literary supervillain. They had great trouble casting Bogart's love interest-victim until Ray suggested his wife. In order to get the film publicity they drew up a his-and-hers contract where Ray's second wife was forbidden to "nag, cajole, tease or in any other feminine fashion seek to distract or influence him" during the film's production.

On set, the real intimacy was between the heterosexual Bogart and the indeterminate Ray. The particulars of the relationship depended entirely on which of them was drinking at the time. "At certain times when I would not drink," Ray later wrote, "when filming, particularly or the preparation before filming, our relationship would alter. In some ways it became deeper, in others, only more formal."

Ray rewrote the novel's ending to reflect the dark nature of the relationship between himself and Grahame. The real-life parallels were all too obvious to everyone on set of In A Lonely Place, and Bogart convinced the studio that it all actually worked, so Ray's new ending stood. Although not very successful at the box office, In A Lonely Place established Ray as a director who was doing new things that other men in the industry could only dream of.

The closeness necessitated by their working together drove Ray and Gloria Grahame even further apart. He moved his things out of their Sunset Boulevard home and slept in his trailer. They kept up the fiction of their marriage in order to protect their young son, but the gossip columnists broke the story. Grahame's deep hurt was expressed on a series of men, while Ray started an on-again-off-again courtship of a younger woman named Marilyn Monroe.

One night Ray walked in on his 13-year-old son Anthony from a previous marriage inside of his soon-to-be-ex-wife. The story followed Ray everywhere. (It only worsened the situation in 1962 when his look-alike son and Gloria Grahame reconnected and decided to exchange vows of marriage.) The betrayal meant more drinking, more drug use, and when he could get it, more of Marilyn.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

"Crux" - Jean Grae (mp3)

"August 20th" - Jean Grae (mp3)

In Which What Looks Organic Is Organic

This is the first in a two part series on the life of director Nicholas Ray.

Too Masculine A Role

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Ever since I was four and she was nine I've wanted to make it with my sister Helen, because she was my sister.

Alcohol was the major feature of Nicholas Ray's young life. His father was an alcoholic; his mother was active in the abstinence movement. "I learned about Aqua Velva long before I started shaving," Ray later recalled. "No, I didn't drink it. I poured it over the sheets or into the bathtub to clear the smell of my puke." La Crosse, Wisconsin was about as American as it gets.

While his father went from bar to bar, Ray would wait in the car, sometimes using the time to masturbate. When he was especially drunk, Ray's father would beat his son. One night young Nicholas dragged his father home from a particularly severe bender; he had dragged the pathetic man up from where he lay in puddles of vomit. Later that afternoon, his mother called him to tell his father was dead.

His older sisters were all married by then, pleased as punch to be out of La Crosse. Ray and his mother did not get along so wonderfully, and part of the time she sent him to live with his sister Ruth on the north side of Chicago. A friend attended the University of Chicago, and Ray focused his efforts on transferring from a La Crosse junior college to a place where he might have Thornton Wilder as his instructor. Eventually through sheer force of will he was accepted.

He arrived in Hyde Park with two gallons of undiluted grain alcohol, a determination to have sex with as many women as possible and a passion for acting.

in old age

The director of Wilder's on-campus productions was a popular professor named O'Hara. He took a serious interest in Ray, working up to the point where he parked his car on Lake Michigan and attempted to give the boy a blowjob. "He caressed me," Ray explained whenever he recalled the story. "I wanted to please him. God knows I wanted to say thank you, somehow I wanted to say thank you. I said thank you. He unbuttoned my trousers. I wanted to come if he wanted me to come. I stroked his gray-white hair. I couldn't come. We drove back to campus."

Ray's sexuality was a deeply confusing subject, but he harbored no attraction to the older man. His own mixed-up ideas led him to notice similar confusion in others: "I always suspect the warmth or tenderness or color range of a person who publicly disports himself in either too strict a feminine or too strict a masculine role," he said.

Nicholas Ray only lasted one term in Hyde Park before returning to his junior college in La Crosse, unable to keep up with the academic work. There he started a theater group that become modestly successful, allowing him to open a school for drama that would teach teens in his mother's house, where he now lived.

at Taliesin

1933. Ray's friendship with Thornton Wilder secured him a place with Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin. The compound had a variety of activities that suited Ray's talents in the theater, and it was hoped that division would bring in the money Wright's enterprises sorely lacked. Given Wright's financial position at the time, anyone who could pay six hundred dollars a year was accepted.

Ray didn't have the money, so he headed for New York in the meantime. He crashed on a couch in the West Village, sending Lloyd Wright postcards. He had no money by then: his father's death had left his estate to his wife alone, and Ray swiftly spent all he had made from community theater. "Struggle is grand," he wrote Wright unseriously. "It's what we young should live with a great deal more than we do; it is a little-undernourishing to the body sometimes, but what matter, it is as solid as pain."

Wright eventually travelled to New York, and while there he invited Ray to return to Taliesin with him to aid the prospects of the Hillside Playhouse, a new structure which boasted a 200 seat amphitheater. To draw crowds to see films which did not usually make it to Madison or Milwaukee, the playhouse began screening a variety of foreign films. It was Ray's initial exposure to Eisenstein and Carl Dreyer, even the first glimpse the future master of color had of animation.

In mere weeks Ray had himself appointed director of the playhouse. The highest of masters and lowest of apprentices all shared in communal work at Talesin. This mixed Ray in with apprentices in every field. On a sexual level, both men and women wanted him for themselves. But this prominence in the community also drew unwanted attention from its king. Wright had planned to construct sandstone over a few lovely oak panels, and Ray dared to question the architect, asking him, "Is that it, Mr. Wright? What looks organic is organic?" He was on a bus out of Taliesin the next day.

Wright argued that it was Ray's alcoholism which set off the feud. In a letter describing Ray's departure from the commune, Wright wrote, "I am letting him out today... He is intelligent and has many charming qualities, notwithstanding his defects. He should make the most of them." Others have suggested the reason for Ray's departure was due to Wright's secret desire to be with men.

Elia Kazan, Ray and others

In New York he joined a group of left-wing actors and writers calling themelves the Theatre of Action. There he re-met an acquaintance from his hometown, the director Joseph Losey, and a short Greek actor named Elia Kazan. Except for Kazan and a few others, most were communists; and under direction from political leaders in the party began advocating for certain changes in the New York theatrical world. Ray and his girlfriend Jean Evans lived in the theater's 27th Street home. When the theater broke up, the two relocated uptown.

Losey went on to better things, and hired the still-destitute Ray to be his stage manager. Recently returned from Russia, Losey was the darling of the left-wing theater, a Darmouth and Harvard grad who was engaged to ready-to-wear clothing designer Elizabeth Hawes. Losey quit the play they were working on due to interference from the party before opening night, but joined the movement later.

on the set of the CBS show

Ray made good money and with a baby on the way, looked for more. The couple moved to Washington, where the father took a job with the WPA and met Alan Lomax. "He was certainly one of the most splendid young men in the whole world," Lomax said of Ray. "He seemed to me to be the person I'd always dreamed of being. He was very powerful and gentle and wonderful to look at. He had a kind of grin and laughter that were the same thing."

Ray grew to hate his desk job at the WPA, as much as he enjoyed spending time with Lomax and producer John Houseman. Initially faithful to his new wife, he soon allowed himself to step out on her in Washington. He had a conflicted attitude towards these dalliances. "I'm afraid that sex destroys intimacy more often than it creates it," he admitted regretfully. They eventually went back to New York to try to claim a better life for themselves where they were once happy. Ray directed a CBS series entitled Back Home Where I Come From featuring performers from Lomax's project.

After the show was canceled, they lived on Evans' income alone. "I think we're going to get really straight on our own problems," Evans told her friend. "We've been very happy in many ways — and there's something we've got now which we never had before — a kind of cohesiveness that comes with trouble." She could not have been more wrong.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

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