“I got married in Las Vegas once. To Gloria Grahame. I didn’t like her very much. I was infatuated with her, but I didn’t like her very much.
“There was something vindictive about me that made me stay at the crap tables while she was waiting out the last few days before her divorce became final. I wanted to be absolutely broke. I didn’t want this dame, who later proved to be as shrewd as she had begun to threaten to be, to have anything of mine. I didn’t want her to have any money at all. I was in the middle of making IN A LONELY PLACE. I lost a bundle.”
~ Nicholas Ray in I Was Interrupted, Nicholas Ray on Making Movies.
I wonder if Ray really lost all his money quite as deliberately as that. If he did, it annoys me somewhat — I’d rather he gave the money to a good cause. He seems to have had a gambling addiction, of the kind that gets satisfaction from losing rather than winning.
Witnesses who saw Phil Silvers at the roulette wheel or craps table reported the same thing — his body would relax totally once he had lost his last dollar. Some kind of relief was achieved.
In his collected diaries, Charlton Heston reports asking a friend about Ray before embarking upon the colossal misadventure that was 55 DAYS AT PEKING. I’m paraphrasing from memory, but the friend said something like, “Oh, he’s a good director. Good sense of story and good with actors. Great visual style. Intelligent. But Chuck, I’ve played poker with him. And Chuck, he’s a loser.”
In the U.S. the word “loser” seems to have a greater power than elsewhere, like it’s the worst thing you can call somebody. I think in Scotland we’d just shrug that one off. “Yeah, so what?” But Heston’s friend is using the word in a more precise and meaningful way — a loser is someone who sets out to lose.
When William Goldman and Rob Reiner were preparing to do MISERY, they talked to Warren Beatty about possibly playing the lead role. Beatty told them that if they kept the script like Stephen King’s novel, where the character has his foot chopped off by the crazed fan, “He’s a loser.” Having his bones broken was a way to make the injury recoverable, so that the ending is happier. The hero can win back what he lost.
This is kind of weird and repugnant to me. The idea that a person who loses a foot is a different KIND of person — a loser — from a person who just has his bones broken, then gets better, is a basically false view of the world, a place where shit happens.
Anyway, returning to Ray, whose loserishness I find appealing and attractive — that marriage to Gloria Grahame ended, and then she married Ray’s son. That didn’t last either. When I mention this in lectures, there’s a sort of shudder of revulsion, as if an act of incest were involved. But it’s not! O.K., marrying your ex’s offspring might be sort of unusual, but really, there’s nothing actually wrong with it per se. Tony Ray was probably closer to G.G.’s age than Nick, and if not, who cares?
G.G.’s last love affair is commemorated in a fine book, Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool.
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