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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Byline: Sam Kashner
James Dean was only 24 years old when he crashed his Porsche Spyder and died on a lonely stretch of highway outside Bakersfield, California. The tragedy occurred on September 30, 1955, scarcely a week before the opening of Rebel Without a Cause, the celebrated movie about juvenile delinquents, which would immortalize him as the archetype of the brooding adolescent. "That guy up there's gotta stop; he'll see us" were Dean's last words to his mechanic, Rolf Wutherich, riding next to him, just before he slammed into a Ford sedan making a left turn from the opposite lane.
This June, Warner Bros. will throw a giant party commemorating the 50th anniversary of James Dean's death, not in Hollywood but in his hometown of Fairmount, Indiana. In addition, Warners is preparing a special-edition two-disc DVD of Rebel Without a Cause to be released at the end of May. Rebel still seems to be James Dean's show, but, in fact, it was the movie's director, Nicholas Ray, who was the real rebel behind the film. His fourth wife and widow, Susan Schwartz Ray, 53, wrote in her introduction to his collected lectures, I Was Interrupted: "What was all the fuss about Dean when Dean was so clearly-to me anyway-aping Nick?"
Other filmmakers agree, especially the French. Jean-Luc Godard rather famously wrote, "There was theatre (Griffith), poetry (Murnau), painting (Rossellini), dance (Eisenstein), music (Renoir). Henceforth there is cinema. And the cinema is Nicholas Ray." Francois Truffaut called Ray "the poet of nightfall." American director Jim Jarmusch, a former student of Ray's, called him "my idol-a legend, the outcast Hollywood rebel, white hair, black eye-patch, and a head full of subversion and controlled substances."
But, despite such admiration from his peers and three recent retrospectives of Ray's films in London, New York, and Los Angeles, "America still seems unsure whether Ray mattered, whether he even existed," said film historian David Thomson. Forty-three years old when he directed Rebel Without a Cause, Ray would live for another 24 years, spending much of that time trying to re-create the dangerous magic he and Dean had conjured together in the movie. Unable to work within the studio system, he wandered through Europe, drinking and gambling recklessly. At the Cannes Film Festival one morning in 1969, film reviewer Vincent Canby noticed a tall, gaunt man, fully dressed in city clothes, haunting the beach. Canby was surprised to see it was Ray. He had come to Cannes, it turned out, not to promote a movie but to make arrangements that would enable him to unload the rights to one he couldn't make himself. He needed the money.
Ray's 43-year-old daughter, Nicca Ray, has made it a quest to learn more about her father. "He was not very present in my life, and yet he was such a huge presence," Nicca explains. "My mom did not talk about him, so I'd go to bookstores to find out about him." Nicca was searching for answers to questions she had had about him since she was a child: "Where is he? Where has he been? Why was he suddenly here when I was 13? Where was he before this? Who were his friends? Why aren't his movies playing in the cinema anymore? Why did his letters stop? Why isn't he coming home?"
Ray was married four times-to writer Jean Abrams (who used the pen name Evans), briefly and notoriously to the actress Gloria Grahame, to dancer and choreographer Betty Utey (Nicca's mother), and finally, toward the end of his life, to Schwartz. His first three marriages ended in divorce.
"I went to college late in life," says Nicca, who lives in New York and is at work on a memoir about her father. "I went to the New School to get my bachelor's degree. I avoided classes that had to do with my father's films, but this teacher started lecturing.... 'In Rebel Without a Cause, Nick Ray is saying that the family is a ball and chain.' I remember sitting there thinking, Oh my God, my father thought that we were a ball and chain? But when I thought about that film, especially the scene on the staircase where James Dean is saying to his parents, 'Speak to me!,' I think he so desperately wanted there to be a connection.... So afterwards I went up to the teacher. I told him I was Nick Ray's daughter." She had wanted to disagree with the teacher, but that was the first time Nicca had spoken to someone outside her family about her relationship with her father. "I felt I didn't have a right to say anything, because people tend to get possessive of my father, or at least their memory of him," she explains. "Their possession made me silent, as if I had nothing to say."
Ray was born Raymond Nicholas Kienzle, in 1911, in Galesville, Wisconsin, the youngest of four children and the only boy. His father, who had two daughters from a previous marriage, was an alcoholic, a lapsed German Catholic who later became a Lutheran; his mother was a smothering woman with artistic leanings. He attended the University of Chicago sporadically for a few years and quit in 1932, moved to New York, and changed his name. Returning to Wisconsin at the invitation of Frank Lloyd Wright, he began to study with the maverick architect at his communal school, Taliesin, but that association didn't end well-Ray later described Wright as "the most outrageous egocentric of our times"-and Ray left Taliesin under a cloud.
With a hundred dollars in his pocket, he took off in a ramshackle Ford to Mexico, where he lived for a year. When he returned to New York, in 1934, he joined the left-leaning Theatre of Action, a communal, improvisational company, where he met director Elia Kazan. Kazan led his actors to such extremes of improvisation that when they enacted anger, for example, he had to stop them just short of real violence. It was an approach to acting that would leave its mark on Ray. When Kazan went to Hollywood in 1945 to make his first film, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, he took Ray along as his assistant.
Soon Ray was making his own movies, starting with They Live by Night. In 1949 he directed A Woman's Secret, starring Gloria Grahame, whom he married eight weeks after they finished the movie. That same year he directed Humphrey Bogart in Knock on Any Door, which he followed in 1950 with In a Lonely Place, a powerful film starring both Bogart and Grahame, about a screenwriter suspected of murder. Then came Born to Be Bad, Flying Leathernecks (starring John Wayne), On Dangerous Ground, The Lusty Men, and Johnny Guitar, which was a hit at the box office.
Fresh off the success of Johnny Guitar (which, by the way, Ray loathed, having surrendered control of the picture to its star, Joan Crawford), Ray met with Warner Bros., which asked him to direct Rebel Without a Cause. The movie was to be based on Dr. Robert M. Lindner's 1944 clinical study of a disturbed, incarcerated youth, whose violent past was revealed under hypnosis. Warner Bros. had bought the rights to the book in 1946 with two actors in mind for the anguished teenager-Marlon Brando and (surprisingly) Sidney Lumet-but neither worked out. The studio held on to the property for eight years. By...
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