Ray was invited to crash at the West Eleventh Street apartment of Hauser, now an up-and-coming sculptor preparing his first public exhibitions. Young artists of every sort were streaming into Manhattan, many, like Ray, congregating in the bohemian West Village. As he wandered the streets wide-eyed, taking in the crush on the streets and the zoo of strange people, Ray felt like a blank slate, empowered to reinvent himself. He never lost his love of New York as a home of never-ending hopes and dreams.
At first, though, Ray found it hard to find a foothold in the city. He kept in touch with Wright, sending him cards and letters from Hauser’s address. He spent some time working away at Hovey’s poem: Adapting it into a theater piece was difficult, Ray wrote to the architect, but ultimately possible. If it could be “thrashed over in rehearsal” in Spring Green, Ray could promise “a very palatable presentation.”
Still, the matter of the Fellowship tuition lingered unresolved. Ray talked things over with Harold Stark, who wanted to cultivate his relationship with Wright, and between them they hit upon a scheme. Ray could draw on his organizing and promoting skills, and Stark could use his lecture circuit contacts, and together they would plan a national speaking tour for Wright. They could book the architect at colleges and museums for one-night talks for $250 and a percentage of the ticket sales. Wright was already in demand as a public speaker, but his schedule could be organized better to provide another supplement to the architect’s income. Ray’s proposed 30 percent commission of the receipts would go toward his tuition.
From his perch in New York, all things seemed doable. Ray enthusiastically dummied up a prospectus, complete with cost estimates ($41.50 per 1,000 brochures) and text hailing Wright’s greatness. Calling it “a fairly refined piece of salesmanship,” Ray sent the sample brochure to the architect from his Greenwich Village crash pad. The sample was imperfect, Ray conceded apologetically; it needed revision and refinement. Still, he wrote, it was a promising start.
Ray’s correspondence with Wright was full of flattery for the architect, but it also furnished a platform for his ongoing dialogue with himself. These were “dark years,” the twenty-two-year-old wrote, and people everywhere were plagued by inner doubts and fears. Artistic “lightning,” Ray wrote optimistically, could alleviate those problems; “sharp, stirring stuff that bolts us from within or without, and leaves the self in a fever of creation.” Great men “above me,” Ray added, giants like Wilder and Wright, were his inspiration. “Within—as yet,” he added, “je ne sais quoi.”
In August, Ray and Stark traveled back to the Midwest, trying to get Wright’s lecture tour finalized, visiting Taliesin for overnights, then heading back to Chicago for longer stays. Ray’s friendships with Inez Cunningham and Stark boosted his chances with Wright. Mrs. Cunningham wielded social influence, and not only was Stark a champion of modernism in art and architecture, he had grown up in a landmark river valley mansion in Auburn, Indiana, known as Hilforest House,* which had been photographed by noted Cincinnatian Paul Briol. Stark liked to refer to it as an “1850 F.L. Wright house.”
While Stark had family resources, Ray was pinching pennies. He wrote Wright repeatedly on changing letterhead (“I continue to battle against the pressure of circumstances,” he said, and that included borrowed stationery.) Once, when Wright’s secretary urged Ray to reply quickly by telegram, he couldn’t comply. He was “thoroughly broke,” he later explained, and found it “rather difficult to apologize for the lack of a nickle [sic].”
When visiting Chicago, Ray also rendezvoused with Thornton Wilder and didn’t miss a chance to remind Wright of his strong ties with the playwright, dangling the possibility that he could coax Wilder to Taliesin.
Spending a morning with Wilder was “very stimulating (his architecture of speech and prose is exceptionally fine),” Ray wrote to the architect on August 10, 1933. The morning meeting “culminated” with conversation about Taliesin “and the taking of our pictures together,” Ray wrote. He said he yearned and prayed to join the Fellowship, and if he did, perhaps Wilder would consent “to be my, or our guest” at Spring Green.
Ray and Stark spent much of August in Chicago or at Hilforest, trying to pump life into the lecture tour plans. While in Chicago they toured the exhibits of modern housing at the ongoing World’s Fair celebrating the city’s centennial, with Stark assuring Wright in a letter that “that phase of modern architecture should be called AM I WRONG.”
But Wright’s initial enthusiasm waned, and he soon grew wary of the planned speaking tour. Stark’s art lectures never grew beyond small museums and nonlucrative women’s clubs, and Ray boasted no high-level contacts outside his home state. Even in Wisconsin he found little traction.
Ray tried proposing that Wright start out with an appearance in La Crosse, inviting the architect to save on costs by staying at his mother’s house, but the architect demurred. When Ray journeyed to Milton College, south of Madison near Janesville, to pitch Wright’s availability, he met with the dean and was chagrined to learn the institution was now foundering and that visiting lectures paid little.
By the end of the summer the tour scheme was looking problematic. Ray visited Spring Green one last time before leaving Wisconsin, performing a solo dramatic recital for members of the Fellowship and staying overnight at Taliesin—albeit “as a paying guest,” in his words.
This time he thought Wright seemed indifferent to his higher ambitions, and Ray left for New York discouraged, convinced he’d missed his window of opportunity. On September 15, in the midst of hitchhiking back east (Stark stayed behind in Chicago), Ray wrote the architect lamenting their inability to connect. “I am sorry that you lost sight of me,” he told Wright, adding obscurely, “It is probably my fault since I still clutter myself with sentiment.”
Taking Ray by surprise, Wright wrote back to him promptly, explaining that the only reason he had lost sight of Ray was that “my head is under” with personal and professional stress. The architect vowed even to reconsider a La Crosse speaking engagement, if that might revive the lecture tour plan. “It is very difficult to live up to the pressure these days,” Wright wrote sympathetically, likening their respective difficulties by echoing a phrase from one of Ray’s own letters.
Wright’s missive buoyed Ray, with its implication that the young man might yet be admitted to the Fellowship. He wrote back excitedly, even going so far as to ask if he could do any favors for Wright in New York. Or maybe Wright could do him a favor: Did the architects have any job contacts in the theater world? Ray vowed to save his earnings for Taliesin. “I’ll work like the devil,” he promised.
And Ray did work like the devil, scrounging for any arts-related job he could find, “making a pest of myself at the theaters,” even posing in the buff, for a brief spell, for “a stupid art class” taught by the Lithuanian sculptor William Zorach, one of Alonzo Hauser’s guiding lights at the Art Students League. Ray now counted a number of painters and sculptors among his growing circle of friends, and nudity would become a comfortable habit for him. The odd jobs added up. “I begin eating regularly,” Ray wrote to Wright in October.
Not that the young man was complaining. “Struggle is grand,” he wrote to Wright. “Its [sic] what we young should live with a great deal more than we do; it is a little under-nourishing to the body sometimes, but what matter, it is as solid as pain.” He didn’t know where his next meal was coming from, Ray wrote, but he knew he was on the right path.
Twenty years later, as he worked with James Dean in New York while preparing Rebel Without a Cause, Ray studied the young star as though staring into his own past and this time when he was a nobody struggling for recognition. “The drama of his life,” Ray wrote of Dean, “was the drama of desiring to belong, and fearing to belong. (So was Jim Stark’s.) It was a conflict of violent eagerness and mistrust, created very young. It lay embedded in his personality, with its knife-sharp awareness and inquiring spirit . . .
“Every day,” the director said, c
ontinuing, Dean “threw himself hungrily upon the world like a starving animal that suddenly finds a scrap of food. The intensity of his desires, and his fears, could make the search at times arrogant, egocentric; but behind it was such a desperate vulnerability that one was moved, even frightened. Probably, when he was cruel or faithless, he thought he was paying off an old score. The affection he rejected was the affection that had once been his and found no answer.”
Circulating widely, yearning yet fearing to belong, saddled with a desperate vulnerability, Ray began to make connections. At the end of October he auditioned and was offered a spot in a Broadway play, a translation of a Walter Hasenclever comedy about a statue of Napoleon springing to life, called Her Man of Wax. He rejected the role, though, later explaining that he didn’t like the play’s “sexual” component. Perhaps the small part—an effeminate character—discomfited him.
Instead, he gravitated to a nonpaying, left-wing group. An offshoot of the Workers Laboratory Theatre, which performed at the New School for Social Research, City College, and other Village venues, the Theatre Collective was gearing up for its maiden showcase, a proletarian drama called Dirt Farmer that was culled from a story by a young Communist named Whittaker Chambers.
Soon, Ray made another, even more promising score: falling in love.
In Ray’s film In a Lonely Place, the screenwriter Dix (Humphrey Bogart) gives Laurel (Gloria Grahame) ten seconds to answer his marriage proposal. Ray fell in love almost as fast and easy. He went all the way, buying flowers with spare change and virtually moving in with his new girlfriend.
She was born Jean Abrahams, but like Ray had recently anglicized her surname (to Abrams); soon she would complete the transformation by adopting the pen name Jean Evans. Born in Winnipeg in 1912, Evans was petite and dark haired, with an aquiline nose. She had a lean and hungry look, but with voluptuous curves. Like Ray, she had left behind an unhappy upbringing. Like him she was also an aspiring writer—although Evans was prone to writer’s block, whereas words gushed from Ray whenever he sat down to write.
Another newcomer to New York, Evans shared a place with friends not far from Alonzo Hauser’s apartment. Ever the unabashed nudist, Ray began by dropping by and stealing hot baths in her tub. Her fond nickname for him was “Nickel,” which was about all he ever had in his pocket. “We fell in love and became inseparable,” she later recalled. “We were poor, but it was a happy time. We were both rebelling against middle-class respectability.”
In November 1933, however, Frank Lloyd Wright came to New York to speak at Columbia University. Ray went to meet up with the architect.
The timing was good. The apprentices had just completed work on the Hillside Playhouse, a huge vaulted room with an upper stage, a lower level, and a splendid fireplace. Its open space was adaptable for concerts, plays, film showings, and other performances. (The seats could even be removed for dancing.) Two hundred people filled the playhouse for its grand opening in November 1933, hearing a welcoming speech from Wright and enjoying a German film.
Since its public unveiling, however, the playhouse had been dormant, for practical reasons: The large building required steam heating for the cold Wisconsin winters. Once the steam heat was fully installed, the theater would have to be booked up with plays and other artistic offerings besides the planned weekly movie screenings.
At last, on a walk together after his Columbia lecture, Wright unequivocally invited Ray to come and live with his community of followers. He needed someone to organize the playhouse and turn it into the heart and soul of Taliesin. Even so, probably the decisive factor for Wright was Harold Stark’s willingness to pay twenty dollars every two weeks out of his own pocket to augment Ray’s “scholarship.” Perhaps too the playhouse would turn a profit from tickets to the public events.
Ray hadn’t gotten very far with the Theatre Collective, and he would have to abandon his new sweetheart Jean Evans in New York. Yet now his focus shifted to Taliesin, and his personal relationships, as always, were subordinated to his professional goals. After a quick trip home to La Crosse for Thanksgiving, he was in the bosom of Taliesin by Christmas.
Taliesin, which means “shining brow” or “radiant brow,” was the name of the architect’s estate, slung on the crest of a hill outside the small town of Spring Green, overlooking a valley settled by Wright’s maternal ancestors in the nineteenth century.
Beleaguered financially, Wright had retreated from Chicago to Taliesin in the 1920s, making the ancestral home his permanent residence. The main house on the grounds burned twice in that decade, but Wright had rebuilt it twice before renovating the place a third time to accommodate his brotherhood of young artistic aspirants known as the Fellowship. Wright’s office and living quarters in the main building were expanded to include new studios. The nearby Hillside Home School, administered by Wright’s aunts, was converted into a drafting studio, rooms for apprentices, a dining hall, and the Hillside Playhouse performance space. The apprentices dubbed it “Unit Number Two.”
Only a handful of the roughly thirty apprentices had the privilege of assisting Wright and his professional staff on architectural drawings or scale models. Especially during the first years of Taliesin, the Fellowship was more of a volunteer workforce, hammering, sawing, pipe-fitting, and tilling the soil in furtherance of Wright’s grand vision.
The long Fellowship days began, in Ray’s words, at an “orthodox 5:30, with breakfast at orthodox 6, and work after 7—willingly adding tired to tired and adding it again for tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.” In every season but summer, the first order of business was cutting and chopping massive amounts of cordwood to stoke the sixteen fireplaces and three boilers. After the physical work ended at four P.M., a “tea and conversation” break was followed by individual or group artistic pursuits (including, but not limited to, writing or composing, sketching, painting, sculpting or weaving, designing costumes or sets or rehearsing plays), until a clanging bell announced the family-style dinner at seven. Lights went out at ten—again, “orthodox.”
Wright once described Taliesin as “a station for the flight of the soul.” Beyond his architectural goals, the architect was a passionate advocate for the primacy of nature and preached the truth and beauty of organic art and architecture. He was contemptuous of academic education and favored practical education—learning by doing. Besides Ray, he had sprinkled other nonarchitects among the apprentices: poets, musicians, and a variety of visual artists. “Mr. Wright believed that architecture was the citadel for all of the arts,” Ray explained years later, “and where all arts joined and met in unity and full expression.” Under Wright’s leadership the Fellowship was expected to commune physically as well as intellectually, striving toward an ultimately spiritual kinship.
One of Wright’s pet ideas was that Taliesin would provide uplifting entertainment for the common man as well as the brotherhood. The apprentices spent the first year after the founding of the Fellowship carving the Hillside Playhouse out of the old Hillside Home School gymnasium (using “native materials, stones from the surrounding hills and rough lumber from the woods,” according to a local press account). By the time Ray arrived on the scene in late 1933, the playhouse was in its last stages of gestation, being fitted with its all-important steam pipes.
The young man from La Crosse, the son of a builder, rolled up his sleeves and got to work. The Fellowship was the kind of surrogate family he sought to find and replicate in various ways throughout his life. The whirlwind of action in Spring Green was the type that would always absorb him in years to come, distracting him from his inner fears and doubts. One of Ray’s virtues as a director was the zest with which he took on the endless stages of a challenging film project; he was capable of losing himself happily in the most arduous and trouble-plagued productions.
After the orthodox hour of four P.M., every day, Ray juggled his playhouse activities. Early in January he performed solo for one assembly (“an interpretation of the play by one of t
he apprentices will help to make the afternoon more interesting and enjoyable”) while rehearsing actors for a musical farce called Piranese Calico for later that month.* Piranese Calico was the Fellowship’s “first attempt,” Ray explained in a subsequent article for a Wisconsin newspaper, “to establish drama as architecture, where it belongs, and do it indigenously as possible” in Hillside’s small, non-proscenium theater space. Taliesin’s maiden production was “apprentice-written, apprentice-directed, apprentice-acted, and the music, apprentice-composed,” according to Ray; he himself cowrote, directed, and acted in the short play. The playhouse itself, he said, continuing, was “neither temple nor brothel, but a place where stage and audience architecturally melt rhythmically into one, and the performance—the play of the senses—and the audience blend together into an entity because of the construction of the whole.”
Saturdays at Taliesin were set aside for rest, recreation, and rehearsal; Sundays were thrown open to the general public for presentations like Piranese Calico.
Sundays began with morning chapel services in the little Unity Chapel across the valley, where religious figures from various denominations delivered secular homilies, often driving to Taliesin from Madison to do the honors. Regardless of their individual religious preferences, the apprentices were expected to attend and join lustily in the hymn singing.
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