HAMSTER WHEEL
Hey, you know, there’s a whole life waiting for you outside of that hamster wheel.
For years I sat in a room surrounded by piles of papers. Transcripts of interviews with people who knew Nicholas Ray. Gretchen Horner, his niece. Perry Bruskin from The Theater of Action. Norman Lloyd and his wife, Peggy. Dennis Hopper. Dennis Stock. Gore Vidal. Pete Seeger. About fifty names in all. Transcribed and put into folders and organized by decade in open file carts. Notes written on yellow legal pads. Notebooks filled with more notes. Post-its hanging off of ear marked pages in countless books I’d read about the theater, folk-blues, the creation of the Studio System, Hollywood in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, Gloria Grahame, Thornton Wilder, Elia Kazan, Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, Alan Lomax, John Lomax, Woodie Guthrie, Lead Belly, Pete Seeger, Gavin Lambert, Natalie Wood, Charlton Heston. File folders stuffed with memos, newspaper clippings and notes on index cards written with a #2 pencil. Pages written. Pages marked up. Pages shredded. Pages written again, marked up again, torn into bits. Pages written written written written. Shredded. Pages left on my side desk. Pages left to yellow. Pages stored in folders and stuffed into cabinets. Pages thrown on closet shelves. Pages I hated. Pages I loved. Pages I doubted. Pages I didn’t have the guts to stand up for. Pages I rescued from the trash. Newly printed pages mixed with once discarded pages. Stacks of papers on top of books with ear marked pages gone through with a fine tooth comb.
My hamster wheel in all of its glory.
Nick at the Chateau Marmont in 1971 getting his film, We Can’t Go Home Again, ready for Cannes
Nick in Binghamton, New York where he shot We Can’t Go Home Again with his students.
This photo fills me with his despair. He’s on a hamster wheel he can’t get off of. He kept working on We Can’t Go Home Again until his last days. He was editing it when he came home in 1973. My mother, Betty, found him an editing room in a post-production house in Hollywood.
“At the studio working on We Can’t Go Home Again he was like Gepetto. The more I looked at the footage the more confusing it was. I said, ‘What is the story?’ What is the beginning? The end? Do you have a story?’ He insisted he did.”
I went with Betty to see him there, once. I sat with him at the Steenbeck. We watched the footage on the editing machine’s small screen. The color was muddy like a foul mood.
Excerpt from Ray by Ray: A Daughter’s Take on the Legend of Nicholas Ray © All Rights Reserved.
I wanted my father to be magic like Disney’s Gepetto.
When I visited him at the post production house I sat with him at the Steenbeck. A girl was naked. She was refusing to put on pants. She was trying to be sexy but to me she was scary. In another scene she confessed to Nick that she’d turned a trick in hopes of raising money for the film. She didn’t get the money. She was talking to a journalist and my father was watching them from across the room. He was holding his forehead like he had a migraine.
Excerpt from Ray by Ray: A Daughter’s Take on the Legend of Nicholas Ray © All Rights Reserved
It was excruciating remembering how he really was when he came home after being gone for ten years. That was partly the reason for my hamster wheel. At times getting to my truth was digging through concrete. Another reason I couldn’t get off was self-doubt. He had already been examined by seasoned biographers. I wrote a poem about it:
Muzzle Down
Five hundred and ninety-nine pages, one hundred seventy-nine thousand and seven hundred words. Words that sit in rows. The words are the rows. Church pew gospel. The words, one hundred seventy-nine thousand and seven hundred words. One row piled into another into one more page into five hundred and ninety nine truths told and the deeper I delve the blinder I go. My verbal cascade unfolding ambiguous rows piled haphazardly disrupting their neatly placed words their facts clamping the muzzle to my lips and the five hundred and ninety-nine pages their one hundred seventy-nine thousand and seven hundred words forcing muzzle down.
I spent years running as fast as I could adding pages to the pile repeating verses repairing lines.
I could get off the round-and-round. I did get off. I made a decision about what I had to say and how I would say it.
“Nicca strips away everything fashionable and glamorous about the behind-the-scenes Hollywood big screen to reveal the stark naked truth about the devastating effects of drug addiction, alcoholism, and free sex…If this victim of abandonment and abuse can find redemption and reconciliation, it seems within reach for the rest of us, too.” —Portland Book Review
