Aldo Ray's later years in the 1980s

Aldo Ray’s later years in the 1980s represent the far end of a decline that had already begun by the summer of 1969. The novel contrasts his former standing as a star with the increasingly marginal work he could find, while making the humiliations of his later career part of Hollywood’s broader history of performers who fell from prominence.

From leading man to marginal work

By the summer of 1969, Ray had fallen far from his 1950s heights, when he starred opposite figures including Bogart, Tracy and Hepburn, Rita Hayworth, Anne Bancroft, and Judy Holliday. His decline was not yet over: as the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, his available work came from low-budget filmmakers Al Adamson and Fred Olen Ray, whose shared surname the narrative explicitly notes was no relation. The shift in employers makes the distance between his former leading roles and later prospects concrete.

A career of troubling firsts

Ray’s later public record was distinguished by a pair of unusual firsts. He became the first former Hollywood star to appear in a 1970s pornographic film; for his performance in the 1979 film Sweet Savage, with Carol (Deep Throat) Connors, he also became, at the time described, the only former Hollywood star to win a best-actor award at the Erotic Film Awards. The account places this achievement alongside a less celebratory distinction: Ray was the first former Hollywood star sued by the Screen Actors Guild for appearing in cheap nonunion movies. Together, these episodes show how his later notoriety rested not on a return to mainstream stardom but on work that exposed how far his professional circumstances had changed.

The 1980s in retrospect

The book measures Ray’s decline against other former Hollywood highfliers who experienced hard times, including Ramon Novarro, Faith Domergue, Tab Hunter, and Ralph Meeker, but singles Ray out for the unusually public poignancy of his fall. A night in Spain during the summer of 1969 had already found him desperate and drinking; viewed roughly twenty years later, that night would seem like the good old days. The comparison gives the 1980s their force in the narrative: they do not arrive as a separate reversal or recovery, but as the bleak continuation of a decline whose endpoint was still beyond view in 1969.