Through the middle of the 1960s, Ray lived peripatetically, setting up in Paris, London, Zagreb, Munich, and, for a while, the island Sylt, a German island in the North Sea. He had reacquainted himself with younger son Tim, who was at Cambridge, and enlisted him to help with an autobiography—the elder Ray would record his recollections, and the younger would transcribe—for which a publisher had provided an advance, though no such memoir appeared in Nick Ray's lifetime. Wherever he went, his friends and acquaintances were accustomed to Ray cadging a handout. "Periodically he stopped drinking," writes Bernard Eisenschitz, "switching to a diet of black coffee, going through stretches without sleep, then crashing for forty-eight hours at a time." Retrospectives of his films were marking the growth in his reputation, especially outside the US, including a double bill of "Johnny Guitar" and "They Live By Night" in Paris, in May 1968, placing Ray and his son amid the uprising.