Nicca Ray

Ray By Ray: A Daughter's Take on the Legend of Nicholas Ray by Nicca Ray is an interesting hybrid of memoir, biography, and to a smaller extent a critical look at Nicholas Ray's career. If you are coming to this book expecting one and only one of these books, you may be disappointed or, like me, you may find yourself completely engrossed.

I came to this expecting something much more like a biography of Nicholas Ray, albeit one written by his daughter. As I was reading, I became as interested show more in Nicca's life as I was her father's. Unlike many biographies by family members, which are largely memories and personal recollections, this one required, and benefited from, extensive research. Nicholas and Nicca weren't particularly close so this book serves as the result of her long search to get to know her own father.

While I think a few readers who are wanting a very specific narrowly defined book may be disappointed, I think most readers will appreciate the vast amount of information here as well as the journey Nicca takes to understand, as well as possible, her father.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via LibraryThing Early Reviewers. show less

The last scheduled meeting of our book group was scuttled by the plague among us; too bad, as we had chosen a classic to read and discuss, "The Wind in the Willows" by Kenneth Grahame. Well, there may rarely have been a better shelter-in-place read. It seemed like the central theme of the book was to hasten back into the burrow, build a good fire, eat, and sit in comfy chairs while chatting with friends.

A slightly different notion of home is at work in "Ray By Ray: A Daughter's Take on the show more Legend of Nicholas Ray" (Three Rooms Press, $20). It’s not comfy.

Nicca Ray is the fourth and youngest child of Nicholas Ray, best known as the director of “Rebel Without a Cause.” The Internet Movie Data Base credits him with 31 films, including “They Live By Night,” “In a Lonely Place,” “Johnny Guitar” and others, particularly from the 1950’s, that made him into a darling of the French New Wave, such as Jean-Luc Godard, who considered him the ultimate American auteur: "The cinema is Nicholas Ray."

Ray was championed early on by Thornton Wilder, Frank Lloyd Wright, Elia Kazan, John Houseman, Alan Lomax, and he ultimately influenced subsequent generations of directors like Godard, Truffant, Scorcese, Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch.

A cottage industry of books about Ray confirm his talents, realized and wasted. He clearly exuded a charismatic personal charm, and he needed it to have friends willing to put up with his excesses of alcoholism, drug use, bisexual promiscuity. He was married four times and the relationships were complicated, to put it mildly. Suffice it to say that his second wife, actress Gloria Grahame, wound up marrying Tony Ray, Nicholas Ray’s son from his first marriage.

And there’s a good chance that Tony Ray, Nicca's half brother, also became sexually involved with Ray’s third wife, Betty Utley, Nicca’s mother. Complicated.

Nicca certainly touches on the high and low points of her father’s career in this memoir, but it’s from an oblique angle. She didn’t see “Rebel Without a Cause” until 1995, when she was 34. (Nick Ray died in 1979 at 67.)

As far as Nicca was concerned, her father was mostly just missing, having left Betty when Nicca was two. She saw him rarely in subsequent years and his absence gnawed at her.

Her mother wasn’t exactly a stabilizing influence, either. Betty Utley was an accomplished dancer who had a decent show business career going before she married Ray and had two daughters with him. She, too, married four times, had some drug issues of her own, and in later life embraced nudism and free love.

But at least she was there. If her portrait here comes across as a little daffy, she was clearly a loving mother. (The book is dedicated to her.)

It gives nothing away to say that Nicca is now long-sober and in a stable relationship for 30 years. Between the covers here we see the less salubrious early years, when Nicca was sexually abused by a step brother, plunged into the grunge rock scene which evolved into her own early alcoholism and drug abuse, to the point of turning tricks for cocaine.

It’s frank, and not pretty, but it’s not a narrative onslaught as Nicca tells the tale in kaleidoscopic fashion, largely unmoored from any linear chronology, ricocheting between her story, Nick’s or Betty’s.

Mostly it’s a search for the father she barely knew: Nicca did scores of interviews with the onlookers—one is tempted to say the survivors—and it tends to give a, well, wide-screen look at the entire cast of characters.

Of her father she writes: “I’m not defending his tormented and sometimes cruel character. God, I used to hate it when people would describe him as tormented. It was a way his admirers absolved him from having to take responsibility for his actions. He was, though, a man riddled with torment who lashed out at those he loved with crushing results.”

If she doesn’t defend her father, she doesn’t condemn him, either. She lays out the facts and opinions she’s uncovered, tells her own tale, and lets readers pick through the crushing results as they will.

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An illustrated version of this review (titled "Sometimes I Feel Like a Fatherless Child") and more (the vast majority about golf) can be found at The Bookshelf portion of my website: http://theaposition.com/tombedell/rummaging-around-in-the-bag/the-bookshelf show less

Nicholas Ray, the film director whose immense talent was cut down by alcohol, drugs and mental instability, has quite the reputation among film buffs. Though his films were praised, they never made much money, and his private life was filled with substance abuse and rabid sexuality that crossed over into incest. This book by his youngest daughter is an attempt to grapple with the way that being the daughter of a Hollywood legend can provide both the blueprint for a wasted life and the show more strength to save yourself.

Nicca Ray definitely has an interesting story to tell. Though she never really knew her father, who separated from her mother when she was a toddler and saw her only a handful of times afterward, she has obviously spent a lot of time trying to get to know him posthumously through research, interviews, and reading his letters. She sketches a portrait of a man suffering from deep dysfunction who nonetheless was charismatic and talented enough to convince people to believe in him even when he was clearly strung out on alcohol and drugs and years beyond his prime. Chronicling her own turbulent and nearly fatal teenage years provide an interesting parallel story of the long-reaching effects of abandonment, dysfunction and mental illness on a family.

Unfortunately, her work is almost completely undone by the lack of editing in this book. I've come to resign myself to finding mistakes in supposedly professionally produced books, but this one was really a mess. The timeline jumped wildly, sometimes in mid-paragraph; names and other identifying information were confused; people appeared and disappeared dizzyingly. It was almost like a punk-rock memoir, full of recollections of depraved actions and seemingly unconcerned with ordinary storytelling conventions. I don't know if that's what the author intended, but I think some attempt at organization would really have improved this book. Also, I would like to have read more about how his work affected her own study of filmmaking. show less

I received an Advance Reader Copy of this book from the publisher Three Rooms Press. The author, NIcca Ray, is Nick Ray's youngest child had only been around her father a handful of times during her whole life. When he died, she was only 17 years old and already knew she was an alcoholic. Throughout her life she'd fantasized that if Daddy came home everything would be all right.

In the introduction, Nicca reassures the reader that she and her sister are okay. I'm glad she did because their show more childhood and teen years were truly horrific. It's a compelling story. It kept my interest. However, I couldn't read it all in one sitting. It's hard to enter into the dark world of Nicca's childhood. Nick Ray abandoned his wife and children after he tried to drive his wife insane and have her committed. Why you ask? Perhaps he was working on a plot for a movie. Maybe he thought it was an easy way to get her out of his life.

Many of you are very familiar with the name Nick Ray. I was not. After I read NIcca's story, I read some articles about her father. As with most of us, he was a complex man. In his case, his complexities impacted so many people and not in a good way. I admire Nicca's courage in telling her story and how she came to the realization that she was not her parents and that ultimately the only person who could save her, was herself.

This book is now available through Three Rooms Press at www.threeroomspress.com show less