“I haven’t had a drink for fifteen months. If I had, I would be dead now, and that would make me furious.”
Darling of auteur theorists, Nicholas Ray created stylish paeans to the alienated and disaffected that were a huge influence on Jean-Luc Godard, Wim Wenders, and Jim Jarmusch (Ray’s assistant at the time of his death). A Wisconsin native, he studied architecture with Frank Lloyd Wright as a Taliesin Fellow before transitioning into theater. He moved to New York in 1932, where he came under the tutelage of Elia Kazan and John Houseman. Ray directed his first Broadway production in 1946, and his first feature, the Houseman-produced They Live by Night—considered a forerunner of Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands—the following year. (Night would be remade by Robert Altman as Thieves Like Us in 1974.) He directed Bogart in one of his most underrated performances, In a Lonely Place, in 1950, and in the mid-fifties directed his two signature pictures: Johnny Guitar (1954) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955). But Ray’s proclivity for alcohol and drugs resulted in his marginalization within the industry. He was dismissed as director of 55 Days at Peking (1963) after collapsing on set and never completed another feature. He turned to academia in the 1970s, teaching at Binghamton University, the Lee Strasberg Institute, and NYU.
THOUGH THE ICONIC 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause now plays like a quaint relic, the story of the man who directed it grows more unlikely (and insane) with each passing year. Such was the life of Raymond Nicholas Kienzle, known to cinema buffs as Nicholas Ray. Ray’s filmography is a study in intelligent and ambitious eccentricity, from the talky Bogart noir In a Lonely Place (one of the best films of the era; see it immediately) to the feminist Western Johnny Guitar, to the endless (and endlessly wacko) Jesus biopic King of Kings. Even his worst films were intensely personal—if nothing else, because it was no great leap to believe they’d been made by a crazy Midwesterner who’d stalk his sets always drunk, turning every obstacle into an argument. Director Jim Jarmusch, one-time student of Ray’s, described him as “my idol—a legend, the outcast Hollywood rebel, white hair, black eye-patch, and a head full of subversion and controlled substances.”
Predictably, the thing that makes Ray’s work so great—his absolute and steadfast refusal to do anything at less than full-bore crash-and-burn intensity—made his personal life an epic mess. An example: In 1948, Ray married the actress Gloria Grahame. She gave birth to their only child six months later, which might have led people to conclude they’d gotten married because she was pregnant—except Ray had already been telling this to anyone who’d listen since the wedding was announced. It was his way of declaring his unreserved contempt for her. And instead of doing something simple—like maybe not marrying her—Ray made a further and very public display of his feelings when he gambled and lost his entire life savings playing roulette the night before their wedding because (he claimed) he “didn’t want this dame to have anything of mine.” That plan didn’t quite work out: three years later (and still somehow married to Grahame), Ray came home to find her in bed with a teenage boy: his thirteen-year-old son, from a previous marriage. Ray moved out the next day. While Grahame would in fact marry the son, nine years later.
Predictably, the thing that makes Ray’s work so great–his absolute and steadfast refusal to do anything at less than full-bore crashand-burn intensity–made his personal life an epic mess.
So yes, you’d be correct in assuming that Ray’s relationship to booze wasn’t confined to the occasional Mint Julep over Derby weekend. After divorcing Grahame, Ray would shack up with a woman named Hanna Axmann. A German dabbler in film acting and screenwriting, with some success, she recounted her time with Ray thusly, “The hundreds of nights I spent, with Nick drinking … at four or five in the morning he’d start talking nonsense; by seven he’d be more or less fresh, contemplating his feet a bit to get back to earth. Then he would go off every morning to his psychoanalyst, Dr. Vanderhyde, come back and start drinking.”
Admittedly, Ray may have been in a dark place at the time, given the wife/son thing. Yet, consider this final example, in the fall of 1973, more than twenty years after the Grahame episode. Tom Luddy of Pacific Film Archives invited Ray to Berkeley, California, for a retrospective of the director’s work. By this point, Ray was half-blind from an embolism, still near always drunk, and fond of toting a briefcase filled with needles, pills, speed, and hash. Before he arrived in Berkeley, while teaching at Harpur College at Binghamton University in New York, he and his students had shot an experimental feature called We Can’t Go Home Again. For some reason, Ray had the notion to finish it in Berkeley. Francis Ford Coppola, who was cutting The Conversation at the time, offered use of his editing suite to Ray during the off-hours, from midnight to 8 a.m.
Not surprisingly, Ray immediately became a squatter at Zoetrope: sleeping in screening rooms during the day, then getting up to work in the middle of the night. It was supposed to just be a short stay, but three weeks after Ray arrived, it became apparent to Luddy that Ray had no intention of folding up his tent. Some days, they’d find Ray passed out with a bottle of Almaden Mountain Rhine wine beside him. On the rare occasion that he’d actually leave the building to go drinking, Ray would set off Zoetrope’s complex security system, costing the company money with each false alarm. Adding to this, Ray started making expensive phone calls on Zoetrope’s dime. Finally, after Ray somehow broke the editing machine, Coppola pulled the plug on the arrangement.
By the time Ray left Berkeley, the only thing he’d accomplished was alienating everyone who’d tried to help him. He once asked Luddy if he knew where he could get $36,000. When Luddy said no, Ray replied, “How about six dollars? If I had six dollars, I could buy a hamburger and a bottle of Almaden.”