The Lives of Robert Ryan Read online

  the lives of

  ROBERT RYAN

  the lives of

  ROBERT

  RYAN

  J.R. JONES

  Wesleyan University Press | Middletown, Connecticut

  Wesleyan University Press

  Middletown, CT 06459

  www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

  © 2015 J.R. Jones

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Designed by Mindy Basinger Hill

  Typeset in Garamond Premier Pro

  Wesleyan University Press is a member of the Green Press Initiative.

  The paper used in this book meets their minimum requirement for recycled paper.

  Portions of this book appeared previously in “The Dark Shadings of Robert Ryan: A Brief Biography,” Noir City, Vol. 6, No. 2, Summer 2011, and in “The Actor’s Letter” and “The Essential Robert Ryan,” Chicago Reader, October 29, 2009.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Jones, J.R., 1963–

  The lives of Robert Ryan / J.R. Jones.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Includes filmography.

  ISBN 978-0-8195-7372-8 (cloth: alk. paper)—

  ISBN 978-0-8195-7373-5 (ebook)

  1. Ryan, Robert, 1909–1973. 2. Actors—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  PN2287.R88J66 2015

  791.4302'8092—dc23

  [B] 2014033019

  5 4 3 2 1

  Cover illustration: Ryan relaxes on the RKO lot (1946) during production of The Woman on the Beach. Courtesy of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.

  For Margaret

  Contents

  Introduction

  ix

  one Inferno

  1

  two The Mysterious Spirit

  22

  three Bombs Away

  35

  four You Know the Kind

  46

  five We Will Succeed, You Will Not

  62

  six Caught

  82

  seven Learning by Doing

  98

  eight The Whiz Kids

  120

  nine Rum, Rebellion, and Ryan

  141

  ten The Gates of War

  157

  eleven Beautiful Creatures

  178

  twelve The Longest Day

  203

  thirteen One of the Boys

  220

  fourteen My Good Bad Luck

  241

  fifteen The Loneliest Place in Town

  264

  Acknowledgments

  281

  Appendix

  285

  Notes

  305

  Selected Bibliography

  331

  Index

  347

  Introduction

  He was well liked in Hollywood but hardly well known. Tall and trim, with a winning Irish grin and a politician’s firm handshake, he listened more than he spoke, his small brown eyes taking everything in. By the mid-1950s he had worked with some of the best directors in the business — Jean Renoir, Pare Lorentz, Jacques Tourneur, Joseph Losey, Fred Zinnemann, Max Ophuls, Robert Wise, Nicholas Ray, Fritz Lang, Budd Boetticher, Anthony Mann, Samuel Fuller — and none of them had an ill word for Bob Ryan. He dug into his part, he showed up on time, he delivered on the first take. He was generous with other actors, patient with young performers who might be having trouble. He got to know the crew and looked out for their interests; in stressful situations he was always good for a wisecrack to break the tension. But at 6 PM every night he disappeared, home to his wife and three children in the San Fernando Valley. Even his close friends found him a puzzle; director Harold Kennedy echoed many when he called Ryan “the most private person I have ever known.”1

  Forty years after Ryan’s death, his artistic reputation has only grown. Martin Scorsese called him “one of the greatest actors in the history of American film,”2 and when Film Forum in New York mounted a twenty-three-film Ryan retrospective in August 2011, critics recognized it as a powerful body of work with its own thematic coherence. Schooled by the great Austrian theater director Max Reinhardt, Ryan was hired by RKO (Radio-Keith-Orpheum) Radio Pictures in 1942 and groomed as a handsome male lead, but all that changed with his unnerving performance as a bigoted army sergeant concealing his murder of a Jewish civilian in the film noir classic Crossfire (1947). His career ignited just as noir was developing into a shadowy interrogation of American values; with his strength, intelligence, and willingness to explore the soul’s darker corners, he invested the genre with a string of neurotic and troubling portrayals that still reverberate through the popular culture.

  Ryan liked to upset the easy morality of genre pictures, and he was drawn to men with complicated motives: the insecure millionaire who validates himself by controlling his wife’s every move in Caught (1949), the closeted crime lord coveting the cop who’s out to get him in House of Bamboo (1955), and the ruthless California rancher who avenges the attack on Pearl Harbor by killing a Japanese farmer in Bad Day at Black Rock (1955). Long after Ryan had grown frustrated with his sinister screen persona, he continued to play men twisted by hatred or bigotry if they promised great drama that would change minds. By all accounts he was a good man, but often he expressed his goodness by playing evil men — with an alarming relish and conviction. That curiosity and daring set him apart from his ’40s and ’50s peers; his coiled performances widened the parameters of what moviegoers might expect from a leading man and helped pave the way for such volatile personalities as Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, and Tommy Lee Jones.

  His reputation as a heavy obscures his great versatility: by the time Ryan died in 1973, he had played everything from Jay Gatsby to John the Baptist. Against his agent’s advice, he grabbed the role of Ty Ty Walden, the elderly patriarch of God’s Little Acre (1958), and turned in a tender and funny performance as the grizzled old coot. In search of acting challenges, he struck out into legitimate theater, playing political satire (Jean Giraudoux’s Tiger at the Gates), theological drama (T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral), and his beloved Shakespeare (Antony and Cleopatra with Katharine Hepburn, Coriolanus with director John Houseman). Near the end of his career he was hailed for two performances on the New York stage, as the scheming newspaper editor in Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s comedy The Front Page and the angry, self-pitying father in Eugene O’Neill’s tragic Long Day’s Journey into Night.

  Such was his life on the stage and screen. In public Ryan was the antithesis of the right-wing characters he often portrayed; raised in the Chicago Democratic machine, married to a Quaker woman of strong pacifist ideals, he campaigned tirelessly for liberal causes throughout his career, tracing a careful route through the political booby traps of the blacklist era and into the tumultuous ’60s. His experience as a Marine Corps drill instructor during World War II turned him against the war machine forever; he championed “world peace through world law” as a member of the United World Federalists, and in the late ’50s he cofounded the Hollywood chapter of the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. Playing a violent, racist hick in the late-period noir Odds against Tomorrow (1959), he grew close to Harry Belafonte and got involved in the civil rights struggle. In the mid-1960s he spoke out against the Vietnam War, stumping for Eugene McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary that drove Lyndon Johnson from the White House — even as, onscreen, he played hardened military men in Battle of the Bulge, Anzio, and The Dirty Dozen.

  His partner in all this was Jessica Cadwalader, a freethinker from Berkeley, California, who, having mar
ried Ryan, abandoned an acting career and became a writer, publishing five novels. He trusted and admired her; to some extent she became his social conscience, inspiring him in his political work. Their civic ambition manifested itself most impressively with the Oakwood School, a progressive grade school they launched in North Hollywood in 1951 with a handful of other parents. Combining his star power and her determination, the couple managed to guide the school through its rocky first years, when political conflicts among the parents of the enrolled students threatened to tear it apart. They invested heavily in the project, donating thousands of dollars to keep it afloat and immersing themselves in the scholarship of education. Their own children graduated from Oakwood, now considered one of the better private schools in Los Angeles. Ryan often told people the school was the most important thing he had ever done.

  His private life Ryan reserved for himself and his family, avoiding the Hollywood social scene to concentrate on raising his children. Movie magazines invariably portrayed him as a contented spouse and dad, and there was some element of truth in this; interviewed at home in the mid-1960s, he remarked with touching sincerity, “All my best friends live in this house.”3 But there was a dark side to Ryan as well. He could be silent and withdrawn; he drank too much and suffered from debilitating depressions — “Black Irish moods,” he called them. Jessica grappled with similar problems, and through the ’50s a good deal of the hands-on parenting in the Ryans’ home was administered by Solomon and Williana Smith, a childless black couple who lived with the family. Millard Lampell, one of Ryan’s few close friends in the ’60s, shrewdly observed, “I think Robert would [have liked] to be remembered as a loving husband and a good father, neither of which he always was.”4

  Ryan’s own father, who died in 1936, taught him by example that a man keeps his problems to himself, and as Ryan matured and became a celebrity, he grew increasingly adept at compartmentalizing his life. This permitted and, to some extent, encouraged the sharp contradictions in his character. He loved acting more than anything else, but his tireless political activities sprang from a gnawing sense that his chosen profession really was shallow and narcissistic. He recoiled from the hobnobbing and false friendships of the movie business, then fumed when the good roles went to more enterprising actors. He kept his frustrations buttoned up, and when they had a chance to burst out in some of his more unhinged characters, they hinted at a man with more issues than he would ever let on. “Every actor has at least two selves,” he said. “There’s the outside self that takes part in family life and society and the inside self who is someone else.”5

  I gained an unexpected insight into Ryan’s inner life in 2009, when I got the chance to read an undated, twenty-page manuscript he had written for his children and then filed away and forgotten. Uncovered by his youngest child, Lisa, and passed along to Michael Miner, my colleague at the Chicago Reader, it was a brief history of Ryan’s years growing up in the city, warmly nostalgic in its recollections of the North Side and his extended Irish family. But it also contained references that, as I began to investigate, led me to a scandal undocumented in any account of Ryan’s life. His father, Timothy, and three uncles operated the politically well-connected Ryan Company, a firm that specialized in rail and sewer tunnel construction. In April 1931 Timothy Ryan was personally responsible for a South Side project where a disastrous subterranean fire lasting some twenty hours claimed the lives of twelve men and injured another fifty.

  One should always take care when connecting an actor’s life to his roles. But if Ryan was indeed the puzzle that so many claimed, this tragic story supplies at least one piece of it, helping us understand the power and insight he brought to so many of his tortured characters. Conscience runs like a gold thread through many of his key performances. Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground (1952) presents Ryan as a brutal policeman forced to reckon with his rage when he meets a blind woman, played by Ida Lupino, who challenges him to find his better self. In The Professionals (1967) he’s a horse wrangler who hires on to help rescue a kidnapped woman but antagonizes his partners by peeling away the heroic façade of their mission; in The Wild Bunch (1969) he’s an outlaw who can barely live with himself after cutting a deal with the law to track down his old friend. More broadly, Ryan’s political and social conscience sharply influenced his choice of roles, especially after he was freed from his RKO contract in the early 1950s and could exercise somewhat more control over the films he was making.

  Even more revealing than Ryan’s manuscript are the several unpublished memoirs Jessica Ryan left behind at the time of her death in 1972. Witty and acutely observed, these pieces illuminate her husband’s character and her own, particularly their aversion to Hollywood social life. They provide the clearest picture of Ryan’s political skills, honed from years of exposure to the inner workings of machine politics. They also offer a rare female perspective on a Hollywood dominated by men and, in Ryan’s case, populated by such macho characters as Mann, Fuller, Lee Marvin, Robert Mitchum, Richard Brooks, André de Toth, Sam Peckinpah, and John Wayne. Ryan may have been famous for his tough-guy roles in westerns and crime pictures, but when his wife passed away, his sense of self began to crumble.

  The more I explored the Ryans’ lives, the more I realized that here was not just the story of a movie star but a pocket history of American liberalism, stretching from a war against fascism in Europe that united the country to a war against communism in Southeast Asia that bitterly divided it. This struggle played out in Ryan’s screen life, which he began as an eager army flyboy in Bombardier (1943) and ended as a right-wing millionaire conspiring to kill President Kennedy in Executive Action (1973). It defined his public life, where he fought the good fight in the coldest years of the Cold War, his compromises as revealing as his victories. It also animated a good deal of his inner life, a place where men guard their secrets and, sometimes, take them to their final rest.

  the lives of

  ROBERT RYAN

  one

  Inferno

  The day Robert Ryan turned nine, the entire nation celebrated. All weekend long had come word that the Armistice was about to be signed, bringing home a million American soldiers from the trenches of France. In Chicago, where the boy lived, whistles began to sound and guns to go off in the predawn darkness of Monday, November 11, 1918. Women ran from their homes with overcoats tossed over their nightgowns, beating on pots and pans. The elevated trains coming from the Loop tied down their whistles and went screaming through the neighborhoods, confirming that the nation was at peace. People who ventured downtown for work were sent home by their employers, and by noon the neighborhood parties were rolling.1 In Uptown, on the city’s North Side, young Bob ran around telling people this was his birthday and returned home with a few dollars in change. His parents, Tim and Mabel, made him give back most of the money, but even so this was a great day. Everyone had called this “the war to end war” — if that were true, then he would never have to die in a trench.

  The Ryans had no need for their neighbors’ charity; they were respectable, middle-class people who had worked their way up. Bob’s great-grandparents, Lawrence and Ellen Fitzpatrick Ryan, had immigrated from County Tipperary, Ireland, in 1852 during the Great Famine and settled in Pittsburgh, where times were tough (their son John would later tell Bob about the “No Irish Need Apply” signs that greeted them on their arrival). The family moved to Chicago four years later and eventually retreated about thirty miles south to the heavily Irish Catholic river town of Lockport, Illinois, along the Illinois and Michigan Canal.

  John and his older brother, Timothy E. Ryan, worked together as boat builders in the 1860s, then went their separate ways as John established his own business in town and Timothy (known as “T. E.”) returned to Chicago to try his hand at real estate speculation. John served as superintendent of the canal at one point and, with his wife, Johanna, raised a family of eight children. He liked his glass. “Although my grandfather drank a quart of whiskey a day
for sixty-five years, he was never drunk or out of control,”2 Bob later recorded in a memoir for his children.

  Up in Chicago, T. E. Ryan prospered, cofounding the real estate firm of Ryan and Walsh and building his family a mansion on Macalister Place on the Near West Side. He also established himself as a political brawler in the city’s well-oiled Democratic machine. Through the 1890s he won five terms as West Side assessor, and from 1902 to 1906 he served as Democratic committeeman for the Nineteenth Ward. T. E. was widely regarded as boss of the West Side, so popular and influential that, during the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, he was named grand marshal of the Irish Day parade. A portrait reproduced in an 1899 guidebook to state politics shows a handsome man with swept-back hair, a handlebar mustache, and a hungry glint in his eye. “One of the most popular men on the West Side,” the guidebook reported, “and a politician whose power is as strong as ever.”3 His success exerted an irresistible pull on John’s sons, and one by one they all drifted to Chicago.

  Timothy Aloysius Ryan was the second of John’s children, born in 1875, and in the 1890s he headed north to board with his illustrious uncle and get into business in the city. Tim proved to be an eager political protégé: in 1899 he was appointed chief clerk in the city attorney’s office, and five years later he ran for the state board of equalization in the Eighth Congressional District, billing himself as “T. A.” Ryan. His uncle bankrolled all this, apparently seeing in his tall and handsome young nephew a rising political star. Tim got himself started in the construction business and ran an unsuccessful campaign for West Town assessor, his uncle’s former position. “Father’s duties have always been somewhat vague in everyone’s mind,” Bob wrote. “In his twenties he seems to have been occupied principally with fancy vests, horse racing, attending prizefights, and a great deal of social drinking. In short, a rather well-known and well-liked man about town.”4