Glamour, Drugs, Movies
“Nick’s work has a quality of delirium. You enter these films and you’re in another place. There’s no other filmmaker who takes you to that same place. I really think he’s a major artist. A real genius.”
When I think of the delirium in Nick’s films I immediately think of Bigger than Life starring James Mason as Ed Avery, a school teacher, husband, and father, who is prescribed the miracle drug, Cortisone, for his severe arthritis. He becomes addicted to the drug and the more he takes the crazier he becomes.
“I first saw Bigger than Life when it was shown in the Museum of Modern Art retrospective of Nick’s films that were screened at the Gramercy Theater on 23rd Street in 2003. I couldn’t wait to see the movie on the big screen. I had done research at the Museum of Modern Art’s film library where I got to know the curators, Charles Silver and Joshua Siegal. They left four tickets for me at the box office. The Gramercy was filled to more than half of its four-hundred-and-ninety-nine seating capacity. I was swept up in the melodrama of the movie, the bright colors, and the over-the-top acting. I could feel his mania oozing out of the screen. Bigger than Life is one of Nick’s personal films, like In a Lonely Place and The Lusty Men. When you come down to it this is a movie about a drug addict who sets out to destroy his son.”
Excerpt from Ray by Ray: A Daughter’s Take on the Legend of Nicholas Ray © All Rights Reserved
In real life, Nick set out to ruin his oldest son, Tony’s, life. You can read all about it in my memoir, Ray by Ray.: A Daughter’s Take on the Legend of Nicholas Ray. How Nick’s second wife, Gloria Grahame, seduced a teenaged Tony, and how Nick protected him (not) by pouring drinks down his throat and forcing him to confess into a tape recorder. Imagine if Ed Avery in Bigger than Life never came off the Cortisone. You’d have Nick Ray.
“In Bigger than Life I had shot the staircase scene in a single shot of nine minutes and when we looked at the rushes everyone exclaimed, “Don’t make any cutaways, don’t do any, it’s the most suffocating scene we’ve ever seen.”
— Nick Ray
Interview with Charles Bitsch for the Cahiers du Cinema
In the 1950s, Nick was notorious for carrying a doctors bag filled with prescription drugs. In spite of his addictions he made some of the most memorable movies of the decade. When I asked the film scholar, Jeanine Basinger, what made my father stand out she said, “He was a director with a lot of innovation. His use of cinemascope, hand-held cameras, the helicopter shot, mixing genres together, ambiguous endings. I think the critic, V.F. Perkins said that Nick Ray was a filmmaker who made little sense to people who go to films to hear a good script read. I think this is such a great statement. These movies are the height of intelligence and sensitivity.”
“I opened Nick’s medicine cabinet and it was absolutely stocked with every kind of pill you could imagine. He had a vitamin cocktail, mainly Vitamin B and speed, to treat depression and give him energy.”
Nick brought the writer, Gavin Lambert, over from England to be his assistant on Bigger than Life. Nick had been in London for the premiere of Rebel Without a Cause and was introduced to Lambert at a New Years Eve party. Lambert had dreamed of moving to the States and Nick needed someone to watch over him. They lived together at the Chateau Marmont from early 1956 to the end of 1957. My mother, Betty, Nick’s third wife, met Lambert for the first time when she arrived at the Bungalow 2 to have a midnight rendezvous with my father. When my parents separated in 1964 and my mother left Spain for California, Lambert picked her up at Los Angeles International Airport. Gavin Lambert’s partnership with Nick had ended in 1957, after filming Bitter Victory, the somewhat poetic war movie starring Richard Burton. It was this film that urged Jean Luc Godard to exclaim, “Nicholas Ray is cinema.”
I prefer the splashy melodrama of Bigger than Life.
When I met Gavin Lambert in 2000, one of the first things he said to me was, “This may come as a surprise to you. Your father and I were lovers for eighteen months.”
The news did not come as a surprise. I’d mentioned to my mother that I was meeting with Gavin Lambert and she’d told me that Nick had had an affair with him. She honestly thought Nick’s bisexuality was no big deal. It’s not something my mom and I talked about when I was growing up. We didn’t talk about Nick in my family. At all. Researching my father’s life for Ray by Ray I became increasingly aware that his sexuality was fodder for gossips and cineastes looking to find hidden meanings in his movies. At first I looked at his sexual exploits as if I were both a gossip and a cineaste. Perry Bruskin, who knew Nick when they were both members of the 1930s leftist theater group, The Theater of Action, felt that Nick’s trouble with alcohol stemmed from his suppressed homosexuality. Speculation about the true nature of Nick’s relationship with James Dean and even Sal Mineo are debated to this day, 65-years after the release of Rebel Without a Cause.
Sal Mineo as Plato in Rebel Without a Cause. Tony was often called a Plato of sorts.
As hard as I tried to look at my father’s sexuality from the point of view of a gossip columnist or a cineaste I couldn’t. I’m his daughter. I can only have a daughter’s perspective. I think for years this was something I felt I needed to apologize for. To prove myself I needed to be scholarly when talking about Nick. I’m reminded of something Jeanine Basinger said to me about Nick’s drug use, “Everybody talks about his drug use. You know what? So what.” That’s how I feel about his sexuality. So what if he slept with men.
What I find more interesting is that he created worlds for us to inhabit and characters for us to identify with. They were flawed human beings just like us. They might go to the extremes, like Ed Avery does when he threatens his son’s life, but you never for one minute hate Avery for the way he’s behaving. You understand he’s been taken over by addiction. When I think about Nick and how his career flatlined after 55 Days at Peking and how he was not much of a father to me I think about what a monstrous figure addiction is. I think Nick captured the monster perfectly in Bigger than Life.
I love this photograph of my father. I think it was taken at the Venice Film Festival. Correct me if I’m wrong. I look at this picture and if I didn’t know any better I would think this man had the most glamorous life.
Sources:Jeanine Basinger quotes from my interviews with her © All Rights ReservedGavin Lambert quotes from my interviews with him © All Rights ReservedNicholas Ray quote from Charles Bitsch interview with him Cahiers du Cinema: The 1950s Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave, Hillier, Jim, Harvard University Press, 1985
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