Circle of Lions

“Written when I was 21, this is my recollection of experiences I had as a 12- and 13-year-old. The events contained in this work led to my being traumatized for over fifty years.”

June 10, 1950. 12-year-old Tony Ray leaves behind his single mother and their drab Manhattan apartment and flies to Los Angeles, to stay at the sun-drenched Malibu beach house of his father, acclaimed Hollywood director Nicholas Ray, and stepmother, movie star Gloria Grahame. So begins a coming-of-age memoir unlike any other — written in 1958, now published for the first time
Tony’s months in California change his life forever. He desperately seeks affection from his career-obsessed father, who instead packs him off to a military academy. He falls in love with Gloria, and — though she is 26, and Tony still a child — she reciprocates, letting him drink vodka, smoke cigarettes, kiss her, share her bed. Their transgressive relationship dooms the Ray/Grahame marriage. And yet, a decade later, Tony and Gloria would become husband and wife. As Patrick McGilligan notes in his introduction, Circle of Lions “recalls with agonizing honesty the messy three-way entanglement whose repercussions undoubtedly contributed not only to Nicholas Ray’s, but also Tony’s and Grahame’s, lifetime of hurt.”

In this quietly devastating meditation on adolescence and the unrelenting need for connection, Tony captures the thrill of Hollywood glamour and the ache of emotional abandonment. In her foreword, Tony’s daughter Kelsey describes the title Circle of Lions as a symbol of “the impacts of generational trauma that goes untended. One vicious lion begets another until someone is brave enough to break the cycle.” This brave memoir is one young man’s attempt to see the adults closest to him clearly, and so begin to understand himself.

Anthony Ray (1937-2018) was an actor, writer, studio executive and producer. At the age of 21, he appeared in John Cassavetes’ Shadows, and in 1979 was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman.

^{Circle of Lions (2025)
Paperback ISBN 979-8-89976-005-1 254pp 5×8 inches, with b/w images.
Hardback ISBN 979-8-89976-006-8 254pp 5×8 inches, with b/w images.}