Bombshell from beyond the grave: Real story behind Oscar-winning actress Gloria Grahame's relationship with her stepson is revealed in a new memoir so explosive it could only be published after everyone involved died, writes BRIAN VINER

Daily Mail​

22-07-2025

The 25th Academy Awards took place on a rainy March evening in 1953, at the Pantages Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard.
The first nominee to arrive was Gloria Grahame, heavily tipped to be anointed Best Supporting Actress for her compelling performance as a shallow Southern belle in the hit movie The Bad and the Beautiful, also starring Kirk Douglas and Lana Turner.
A couple of hours later, actor Edmund Glenn opened the envelope containing the winner's name. 'Gloria Grahame for The Bad and the Beautiful,' he declared. 'She's the beautiful,' he added, for dramatic effect.
Certainly, as she made her way to the stage, not yet 30 and now an Oscar winner, she looked every inch the radiant movie star, basking in the adoration of her peers. Yet there were some in the Hollywood establishment who knew that Grahame was bad as well as beautiful.
Less than two years earlier, her husband Nicholas Ray, an acclaimed director of film noirs (who would later make Rebel Without a Cause with James Dean), was said to have discovered her in bed, in their Malibu beach house, with his 13-year-old son, Tony.
Tony was a well-built, good-looking lad who looked older than his years. But he was still only 13. And she had first seduced him when he was 12.
Grahame had a blast of posthumous publicity eight years ago when Annette Bening played her in the movie Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool. That was based on a memoir by a Liverpudlian actor called Peter Turner (played on screen by Jamie Bell), whose love affair with Grahame began when he was 26 and she was 55.
But there was no sense in that film that her predilection for much younger men had started when she herself was 26; that she was, indeed, a paedophile.
Last week, another memoir was published which tells, in intimate detail, the story of what really happened between Gloria Grahame and her adolescent stepson Tony Ray.
It is an extraordinary and explosive tale, which has never been properly told before for the simple reason that the man telling it, Tony himself, would not allow publication until long after he and everyone else involved was dead.
He wrote the book in 1958 when he was 21, two years before he became Grahame's fourth husband (making him stepfather to his own half-brother, Tim, her son by her second husband, Nick Ray).
Nick died in 1979, Gloria in 1981 and Tony, aged 80, in 2018. Surviving members of the family have now given the go-ahead to his book Circle of Lions: Nicholas Ray, Gloria Grahame and Me.
It starts with a foreword by Tony's daughter Kelsey, who also unearthed the long-forgotten manuscript. In it she acknowledges the 'deep-seated trauma' that 'trickled into every aspect of his later life'.
Tony followed his father into the movie industry, becoming head of East Coast production at 20th Century Fox. He was in the running for an Oscar himself as producer of the 1978 Best Picture nominee An Unmarried Woman.
But it was a much-married woman who loomed a good deal larger over his life, who was in many ways responsible for his multiple addictions, to drugs, alcohol and gambling, and for his mood swings between, as Kelsey recalls, 'euphoric and grandiose mania' and 'deeply destructive catatonic, depressive episodes'.
Yet she also acknowledges that her father loved Gloria until the day he died, ridden with Alzheimer's. She describes 'one of the most profoundly powerful moments I have ever witnessed' beside his hospice bed.
'My mom (Tony's second wife, Eve) chose to put on a DVD of the movie Oklahoma! (in which Grahame unforgettably sang 'I'm Just a Girl Who Can't Say No') as a way to comfort him.
'She wanted to make sure he wasn't afraid and that he knew he would soon be reunited with so many loved ones. The moment my dad heard Gloria's voice, he briefly but abruptly lifted his head, and with a soft smile gently laid back down.'
Nearly 70 years had passed since Gloria and Tony had first met, at Los Angeles International Airport. It was June 1950, almost six months shy of Tony's 13th birthday.
Tony had got into some minor scrapes at school on the East Coast and his mother, a journalist called Jean Evans, Nick's first wife, thought he might do better living in Los Angeles with his father, who had left the family when Tony was a toddler.
By then Nick had been married to Gloria for three years. Perhaps surprisingly, he agreed to let the son he barely knew join the household.
Tony arrived from New York fully expecting to be met by his dad. The pair had only seen each other a handful of times down the years, but Nick was too busy to greet his son off the plane.
Instead, he sent his pretty, stylish and famous young wife, who wore a V-neck cashmere sweater 'cut very low', and enveloped the boy with a warm hug. While she drove him back to Malibu in her black Cadillac convertible, Gloria asked Tony to light her a Pall Mall cigarette.
Reading the book, it is clear that from the start she treated him as if he were much older, and he was duly flattered.
That Californian summer the pair became firm friends. While Nick turned down all Tony's entreaties to go fishing, swimming, shooting or riding, even to play cards, with the excuse that he was too busy, Gloria was the opposite of distant.
She encouraged her stepson to smoke and drink alcohol with her. She let him brush her hair every morning and even invited him to dry her back after she'd stepped out of the shower. Was she calculatedly grooming him? It certainly reads that way.
Thrillingly, when the pair of them were out together, people asked her to sign autographs.
Gloria had had a small role in It's a Wonderful Life (1946), had been nominated for an Academy Award for her performance in Crossfire (1947), and had been cast opposite Humphrey Bogart in In A Lonely Place (1950).
She was already a fully-fledged movie star and there was no doubt a plethora of willing men available with whom she could have had an extramarital affair, had she wanted to. Yet she chose a boy.
Tony's life changed on the day Gloria offered to teach him how to kiss properly. From there their physical relationship developed swiftly but discreetly, although they still lived dangerously.
When Nick took Gloria and Tony to stay at the celebrated Cal-Neva Lodge and Casino in Lake Tahoe, on the California-Nevada border, they made the most of his compulsive gambling habit by going further than they had before.
While Nick was losing his money on the casino floor, Gloria was pleasuring his adolescent son upstairs.
The marriage was volatile, to say the least. Gloria accused Nick of having an affair with Marilyn Monroe, while he raged at her for condemning his gambling. He would frequently move out of the Malibu house and then back in again.
While Nick was losing his money on the casino floor, Gloria was pleasuring his adolescent son upstairs (Gloria and Nick seen)
But nor was all sweetness and light between Gloria and Tony. In the book he describes a row during which she pulled a gun on him, and then called the police claiming that her stepson had just tried to rape her. When the cops arrived she apologised, telling them she'd merely over-reacted during an argument.
But by any measure it was a deeply dysfunctional household. And Tony was still only 13.
The later rumours in Hollywood - that Nick Ray had found his teenage son in bed with his movie-star wife – were unfounded. But when Nick heard about the unseemly episode with the police he put two and two together, asking Tony directly how long he and Gloria had been having sex.
Tony knew there was no point protesting their innocence. But did his father even want them to be innocent? The book implies that he was already keen to split from Gloria by the time Tony arrived to live with them, and might have manipulated them into having an affair, to facilitate a cheaper divorce.
Whatever, Nick and Gloria were divorced in 1952 and two years later she married another director, Cy Howard.
But that marriage didn't last either. In 1960, Tony met his father for a drink at Idlewild (later John F Kennedy) Airport in New York. They had barely seen each other since the tumult in Malibu but now Nick was returning to Hollywood from Spain and had an hour or so to spare.
He asked Tony if he had seen his classic 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause, arguably the screen's ultimate story of teenage angst. Tony had. For some reason known only to himself, Nick then suggested to his son that he should look up Gloria, and handed over her phone number.
In a postscript to his 1958 memoir, added in 2002, Tony wrote: 'I had had no contact with Gloria since I was 13, but had pined for her throughout my teens. I had kept track of her through her movies … When I got to California, I called her. She wanted to see me immediately. I wanted to see her immediately.
'We agreed to meet at the corner of Laurel Canyon and Ventura Boulevard. She would be driving — as she had so many years before — a black Cadillac convertible.
'When she pulled up, I jumped in and we hugged each other for a long time. I saw that in the back seat there was a suitcase and a box of groceries. We drove to the modest guest house I was renting and unpacked Gloria's things.
'She had not come for an hour-long visit. She had come to stay. Gloria and I were married on May 13, 1960.'
He was 22 and she was 36. It was the same substantial age gap as before but this time without the smear of paedophilia, not that Gloria's sexual attraction to a child, and her stepson to boot, had in any way hampered her career.
She had since won the Academy Award and been given a wonderful role in Oklahoma! Oddly, the 1950s are often held up as an age of moral rectitude, yet nobody seemed at all worried about a female movie star having sex with a minor.
Predictably, the marriage between Tony and Gloria came unstuck, although not before she bore him two sons.
In 1965, the year their second boy was born, she attempted suicide. She became dependent on alcohol and had a nervous breakdown, while Tony developed his own destructive addictions. When they split up in 1974 the judge granted him custody of the children on the basis that he was 'the lesser of two evils'.
It is a desperately sad and seedy story about an illicit Hollywood love triangle that damaged everyone, yet the tone of Tony Ray's book is wistful and affectionate.
Its title, Circle of Lions, apparently refers to the way that trauma can be passed from generation to generation, like one vicious lion begetting another. But an alternative title might have been: The Girl Who Just Couldn't Say No.