Ray made a return visit to Los Angeles, though he was destitute, taking buses everywhere. Frank Mazzola got a frantic call from him one night from Barney’s Beanery, just off La Cienega—he didn’t have $13 to pay his tab, and the manager was threatening to have him arrested. Ray had taken out a huge, falling-apart address book that he’d carried around with him since the 40s. “It had everyone’s phone number in it,” says Nicca. “James Dean’s old phone numbers, Howard Hughes’s private number—everybody’s.”

On that trip Ray had somehow managed to scrape together enough funds to rent his old bungalow at the Chateau Marmont, and he invited to a lunch as many people as he could from his old Hollywood days to raise money to get We Can’t Go Home Again ready for Cannes. Only a handful turned up. Two of the guests, however, were Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner. She had remained loyal to the man who had given her her first adult role—in life and in art. Until her own tragic death, in 1981, when she drowned off Catalina Island, Wood always acknowledged Rebel Without a Cause as the film that inspired her to become a serious actress.

‘I remember when he was living with us for those few weeks in 1974,” Nicca recalls. “The father who came home was a mess. He was a coke addict and an alcoholic, and he had the patch on his eye and the crazy hair. I didn’t grow up with the father who made Rebel Without a Cause. My father was the one who was unemployed.” Growing up in Los Angeles, she would be taken to the planetarium at Griffith Park, where she would play, doing cartwheels on the grass. “My mom would say, ‘Your father shot a movie here.’”

Before marrying Schwartz and sharing her loft in New York, Ray had become virtually homeless. She described the condition Ray was in: “He drank wine for breakfast.… And then there were the medicaments, a briefcase full that went with him everywhere: needles, ampules of methedrine and B-complex, mysterious pills, bags of grass, blocks of hash, and fresh patches for the right eye.”

Nicca believes that, near the end of her father’s life, “if it hadn’t been for these people who loved his work he would have been lost. They took him in. They took care of him. Then [the German director] Wim Wenders came and pretty much brought him back. His passion was making films. It wasn’t having dinner with the family. He needed to be out there. He needed to be eating film.”

Wenders was one of the generation of filmmakers who had cut their teeth on Ray’s films. In 1977 he cast Ray in The American Friend, an adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith novel. In a brief but lionhearted performance, Ray played Derwatt, an American painter believed dead who goes underground to increase the value of his artwork. Dennis Hopper played Highsmith’s sociopathic hero, Tom Ripley. Wenders and Ray shared the same visionary obsession with the movies, and they embarked on a bold experiment. In 1976, Ray had entered Alcoholics Anonymous, but it was too late: his health was ravaged, and the following year he was diagnosed with cancer. He knew he was dying. “When he found out he was going to die,” Nicca explains, “he made the calls, and he said, ‘It’s time to make a film.’” In what was to be part documentary, part fiction, part home movie, Wenders filmed an emaciated Ray slowly dying on-camera. The movie, titled Lightning over Water, offended many of Ray’s oldest friends. Gavin Lambert says, “When you think what hit him … losing one eye, the cancer, the brain tumor—I mean, it’s like a sort of thunderbolt from somewhere. Just extraordinary and terrible. That’s why I resented Wenders’s film so much.… Nick was so wonderful-looking, and to see him reduced in that way was terrible.” Lambert viewed the film with producer John Houseman, who had given Ray his first opportunity to direct, with They Live by Night. “I remember saying to [Houseman] after the screening, ‘Oh my God, this is so awful and so pitiful, and how could Nick do this?’ And then I realized, I know why he can do it. He loved the idea of going out in a movie.”