Ardel Wray

Born Ardel Mockbee on October 28, 1907, in Spokane, Washington, Ardel Wray was the only child of Virginia Brissac and Eugene Mockbee, both stage actors working in West Coast stock companies in the early 1900s. When her parents separated, she was brought to live with her maternal grandparents in San Francisco while her mother continued her career. She spent most of her childhood moving back and forth between her grandparents' home and a boarding school, and was raised primarily by her grandfather, B. F. Brisac, a prominent San Francisco businessman who was a surrogate father and mentor throughout her life.

Divorced from Mockbee, her mother married theatre director-manager John Griffith Wray in 1915 and moved with him to Los Angeles when he accepted a directing job at the Thomas Ince Studios. Ardel came to live with them in 1920, later taking her stepfather's last name. After graduating from high school, she worked as a model for Hollywood fashion designer Howard Greer, briefly attended the University of California at Los Angeles, and lived for a while at The Rehearsal Club in New York, where she considered and ultimately rejected the idea of becoming an actress. She had two short-lived marriages in the decade following high school, both to California artists, Henry D. Maxwell (1928–1930) and Don Mansfield Caldwell (1933–1939).

Wray began her 40-year career in the film industry at Warner Bros., where she worked as a reader from 1933 to 1936. During these years, she became part of a circle of friends that included Dalton Trumbo and Mark Robson. Trumbo and Robson had met on the night shift at a bakery where they both worked: Robson spent his days at college and in the prop room at Fox Studios looking for a way to get into the business of making movies; Trumbo spent his days writing novels and magazine articles before taking the job at Warner Bros.

Anecdotes in Wray's family history suggest that she and Trumbo became "an item" for a while. An undated early draft of Trumbo's novel Johnny Got His Gun with a handful of Wray's margin notes was found among her papers after she died but, if there was a relationship beyond their shared interest in writing, it did not last.

Wray moved to the story department at Fox Studios in 1936. Trumbo had his first screenplay produced at Warner Bros. that year, married Cleo Fincher two years later, and his novel Johnny Got His Gun was published in 1939. Robson left Fox Studios for an opportunity to train as an editor at RKO Pictures. Wray and husband Don Caldwell separated while she was at Fox Studios; she moved to RKO in 1938 and they were divorced in 1939.

The years at Warner Bros. and Fox Studios predate the start of her career as a screenwriter, but this period and these relationships would be influential in Wray's life.

Sometime after starting work in the story department, Wray became involved in RKO's Young Writers' Project, a program designed to identify and cultivate writing talent at the studio. A treatment found in her estate papers puts her in that program in 1941, but her screenwriting career really began in 1942 when she was given an opportunity to work with Val Lewton who was just beginning what would become a legendary short career as a producer of low-budget horror movies.

Lewton had to recruit his production team from inside RKO, but there is no information on how he found Wray. Like many people working in studio story departments at that time, Wray was educated and well-read, but she also came from a respected theatre and film industry family and could deliver high quality work quickly -- all attributes which would have recommended her to Lewton, who relied heavily on literary source material for his films and was producing four and five programmers (B-movies) a year. She could have come to his attention from her work with the Young Writers' Project, but it is also possible that she was referred to him by the head of the story department, or by Mark Robson who Lewton had recruited from the editing department, along with Robert Wise.

Wray's opportunity was, in effect, a writing audition under pressure: Lewton was behind on an ambitious schedule and Wray became the second writer to try to deliver a workable script from a short story about zombies that Lewton liked. The story had been written by an Ohio journalist named Inez Wallace who had borrowed heavily from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and Lewton wanted to capitalize on Bronte's moody and foreboding atmosphere. Wray delivered the script for I Walked with a Zombie and went on to become a regular in the Lewton group.

Her next assignment for Lewton was to write the story and screenplay for The Leopard Man based on Black Alibi, a novel by Cornell Woolrich. Later in 1943, she was loaned out to Maurice Geraghty's production group to write the story and screenplay for The Falcon and the Co-Eds, the seventh in his popular 'Falcon' detective series. Back with the Lewton group in 1944, she developed Isle of the Dead (story and screenplay inspired by Boecklin’s symbolist painting), Bedlam (historical research for a story inspired by A Rake's Progress, the paintings by William Hogarth), and an A-movie property titled Blackbeard The Pirate (original screenplay based on the life of the notorious English pirate, Edward Teach). She also wrote dialogue for Youth Runs Wild (Mark Robson's directorial debut) and, before she left the group the following year, she and Lewton began to discuss ideas for a screenplay about the life of Lucrezia Borgia.

Remarried and living in Hollywood, Wray left RKO shortly before she gave birth to her daughter in May 1945. Her last produced screenplay for Lewton, Isle of the Dead, was released in September of that year, shortly before WWII ended. Lewton's films had played a major role in returning RKO to profitability during WWII, but the audience appetite for horror movies waned after the war. When Bedlam lost money, RKO did not renew Lewton's contract and his group disbanded.

The McCarthy era

In 1947, Wray was again approached by Lewton, then at Paramount Pictures, to write the screenplay about the life of Lucrezia Borgia that they had discussed before she left RKO. Most of what is known about this project is found in chronicles of Lewton's career where, with minor variations, the authors suggest that the project initially belonged to some other producer, that Wray’s script (A Mask for Lucrezia) was abandoned or the project was cancelled, and that Lewton got permission to rework Wray's "unused" script, but that somehow “the project slipped out of his hands.” This account does not align with Wray's history and appears to be based on a cover story for actions taken by Paramount in the early days of the Hollywood blacklist.

Sometime after completing A Mask for Lucrezia, and before it went into production, Wray was summoned to the business office at Paramount where, with little explanation, she was handed a list and asked to point to the names of people who were communist sympathizers. She declined. A few days later, she was let go; her agent severed their relationship; and two weeks after that, all her scripts and work papers were returned to her via U.S. mail, signaling the end of her career as a screenwriter.

There is no mention of Wray's meeting with Paramount in the accounts of Lewton’s career, but this would be the point where A Mask for Lucrezia was allegedly "canceled."

Wray never said anything to suggest that she knew why she had been called into this meeting, other than that it had something to do with Paulette Goddard, who was lined up to play Lucrezia Borgia, and that there was some connection to Dalton Trumbo's troubles. Dalton Trumbo's troubles were that The Hollywood Reporter had publicly named him and a dozen or so other industry professionals as communist sympathizers, and that the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) had seized upon this list as the starting point for their investigation into communist influence in Hollywood. Paulette Goddard was a rising star at Paramount and the studio was heavily invested in her, but she was also at risk of being swept into the HUAC's investigation by virtue of her marriage to actor Burgess Meredith, whose communist affiliations were a matter of record.

Wray's early friendship with Dalton Trumbo, and her acquaintance with others at RKO (Edward Dmytryk, Adrian Scott, et al.) made her an easy mark -- studio bosses freely employed 'guilt by association' and the threat of blacklisting to coerce cooperation in ridding Hollywood of Communists -- but what Paramount or Goddard would gain from Wray pointing at some names on their list seemed to be a puzzle, even to the person who handed it to her. In recounting the experience to her daughter years later, Wray described that person as obviously embarrassed by what they were doing, at one point offering whispered advice that "they've already been named, dear - you won't be hurting anyone."

Wray's reasons for not taking that advice were simple: Such personal knowledge as she had of Trumbo was over a decade old, everything else she knew was hearsay, and whatever was said about him or anyone else in The Hollywood Reporter was almost certainly based on gossip, if not entirely made up. Abstract philosophical ideas hotly debated over too many drinks at studio parties did not, to her mind, constitute subversive activity; and to just wave her finger in the direction of a name she didn't know -- something they actually suggested -- was unthinkable.

Meetings of this kind were kept under wraps by the studios in order to avoid litigation and, although there are circumstances that might explain it, Paramount's reasons for calling Wray in remain a matter of speculation. What is known is that work on A Mask for Lucrezia was suspended for a time, and after that Richard Maibaum took over as producer. Production began in the fall of 1948, and by the time the movie was released in 1949 it had a new title -- Bride of Vengeance -- and the screenplay was based on a story by Michael Hogan with writing credits for two other writers and no mention of Wray's original screenplay.

Wray's original screenplay for Blackbeard The Pirate appears to have suffered a similar fate. One of a few A-movie properties that Lewton had developed at RKO, the project had been set to go into production in 1946, with the famous English actor Boris Karloff in the title role, but was put on hold following the death of studio executive and Lewton supporter Charles Koerner and Lewton's subsequent release from RKO. Two years later, during Howard Hughes' purge of communist influence at RKO in 1947/48, the project was discovered by new studio executives and Wray's script was given to an independent film unit where production eventually resumed. When it was finally released in December 1952, the movie had a slightly altered title, Blackbeard, the Pirate, with writing credits attributed to others and, again, no mention of Wray's original screenplay.

As it did for so many, Wray's unwillingness to "name names" had personal consequences as well as professional ones. Long divorced from John Wray and moving toward the end of a second career as a Hollywood character actress, Wray's mother was frightened by the incident. Concerned for her own career, she did not support her daughter's decision, and publicly questioned her loyalty. Wray's husband had just returned from serving in the Philippines in WWII and was unemployed; the situation put a strain on their marriage, which ended in divorce a few years later. Her circle of friends scattered.

Wray's name would never appear on any list, but she would not work as a screenwriter again for fourteen years -- a phenomenon that would come to be known as the "graylist." To support herself and her daughter, she worked as a reader in various studio story departments and took occasional side-jobs doing research and novelizing films for newspapers. She never remarried and, although she continued to look after her mother, their relationship never fully recovered from this period.

Wray returned to the story department at Warner Bros. in the late 1950s, working as a story analyst and, by that time, the political climate in Hollywood had begun to change.

Broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow's 1954 exposé of Senator Joseph McCarthy had embarrassed the motion picture industry and soul-searching about its complicity in the HUAC 'witch hunt' had gone on for years. Some, like actor Sterling Hayden, never made peace with themselves for caving in to the inquisitional-style politics and testifying against friends; others spent the rest of their lives in denial of the damage they had done. But many did what they could to help restore careers that had been destroyed.

In the fall of 1960, Wray was loaned out to Roy Huggins' production team to do some work on scripts for his television series Cheyenne and Maverick -- a small writing contract that, although uncredited, marked the end of her tenure on the 'graylist'.

When Huggins left Warner Bros. at the end of that year, producer-director Boris Ingster hired her to be the story editor on The Roaring 20s, a new series at Warners for which she also wrote two episodes, and there is little doubt that, together, Ingster and Roy Huggins orchestrated her return to screenwriting.

Roy Huggins was just starting his career when Wray was at Paramount, but he had his own encounter with McCarthyism a few years later and ultimately took the advice that Wray could not and named names. Boris Ingster's career had not been affected by the McCarthy era but he had worked as a writer and director at RKO and Paramount at the same time Wray had been working with Lewton and knew what had happened to her.

In the winter of 1960, a few months after Huggins asked Wray to work on some scripts for him, Dalton Trumbo received screen credit under his own name for the first time in fourteen years for his screenplays for Exodus and Spartacus, events made possible in part by the efforts of Otto Preminger and Kirk Douglas and which came to mark the beginning of the end of the era of the Hollywood blacklist.

Wray continued to work with Boris Ingster for the next ten years, as a story editor and writer on The Roaring 20s, 77 Sunset Strip, The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters, and the movie Guns of Diablo at MGM.

While working at MGM, Wray was diagnosed with cataracts. When her contract on Guns of Diablo ended, she returned to Warner Bros., which was closer to home and did not require driving at night, and she continued working as a story analyst there, and at The Walt Disney Studios until her failing vision forced her to stop. To go through the then long and complicated cataract surgery and recovery process, she retired in 1972 and lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico for the next several years – an area she remembered fondly from her trip there in 1943 to find and photograph the places that would become the sets and backdrops in The Leopard Man.

Wray returned to Los Angeles in 1980, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1983 and died on October 14 the same year. As she wished, her ashes were scattered at sea.

Wray wrote three of the collection films celebrated in Martin Scorsese’s 2007 documentary film Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows, two of them groundbreaking screenplays that helped define the genre of the psychological thriller and establish Lewton's reputation as the master of horror. In Wray, Lewton found a writer with a gift for character development who was also willing to take on challenging or controversial subject matter: the supernatural, a serial killer, the plagues of war and superstition, and the relationships in the notorious Borgia family -- all were out of the mainstream when Wray sat down to write about them. Her ability to seduce 1940's audiences into following Lewton down a path to some of the darker corners of human experience was evident in the unexpected critical and box office success of those films.

Wray was also a member of one of the most famous B-movie units at work during what is now viewed as the 'Golden Age' of Hollywood -- a group whose creative energy and inventiveness made Lewton's success possible. She spoke about working with the group in a conversation with her daughter many years later, a recollection that shines a clear light on the group's chemistry and skill, and the special place it held in Wray's heart:

She rarely spoke about her early career or the McCarthy era. But when I asked once what it was like working with Lewton, she smiled -- thought about it for a long moment -- and then told me about the night the group spent figuring out how to build to the first murder in The Leopard Man. The scene she had written was pure psychological terror, trading on very basic fears -- of the dark, of being punished unjustly, locked out of your own home, abandoned by people you trust -- and at the same time it sets up the mystery that is the premise of the entire film. They were under pressure to get this sequence right, and almost everyone was there that night. The session went well into the small hours of the morning, was filled with laughter, and included a hilarious riff as one of them experimented with a set of castanets, which turned out to be the key to building the tension and suspense. They worked their way through a dozen different shot sequences before they were satisfied and, listening to her, I had the very strong impression that they would have come up with that same elegant, powerful scene even if they had been working with an A-movie budget and had more time. As Agee so famously observed about Lewton, these were people who understood film and cared about human beings. I can still see the smile on her face as she recalled that night. -- Stefani Warren, September 2016

With one exception, the credits listed are per Wray's Internet Movie Database Filmography; where there is a discrepancy with other sources, clarifications can be found in individual footnotes.

Writer

• I Walked with a Zombie, 1943 (screenplay)
• The Leopard Man, 1943 (screenplay)
• The Falcon and the Co-Eds, 1943 (story and screenplay)
• Youth Runs Wild, 1944 (additional dialogue)
• Isle of the Dead, 1945 (written by)
• Bride of Vengeance, 1949 (contributing writer) (uncredited)
• Blackbeard, the Pirate, 1952 ... original screenplay circa 1944, uncredited
• The Roaring 20s TV Series, 1961 (writer, 2 episodes)
• 77 Sunset Strip TV Series, 1963-64 (teleplay, 3 episodes)
• The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters TV series, 1964 (writer, 1 episode)
• Ritual, 2002 (1943 screenplay of I Walked with a Zombie remake)

Story Editor

• 77 Sunset Strip, 1962-1964 (TV Series)
• The Roaring 20s, 1961-1962 (TV Series)
• The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters, 1964 (TV Series)
• Guns of Diablo (1965)