The Lives of Robert Ryan Page 11
The Boy with Green Hair can be cloying and moralistic, but there are genuine moments of fear and anger as well. Peter, having learned of his parents’ death, is stocking shelves at a local grocery and overhears three women debating the Cold War. Losey follows his face, shooting him through cabinets and shelves as the women’s voices hover off-screen. “People say another war means the end of the world,” says one. “War will come, want it or not,” her friend replies. “The only question is when.” A third adds: “Just in time to get more youngsters like Peter.” This so frightens the boy that he drops a bottle of milk, which smashes on the floor. A low-angle shot shows the three ladies gathered above, grinning in amusement.
The central scene is a powerfully weird and stylized dream sequence in which Peter awakes in a forest clearing and encounters the very war orphans he and his classmates have been studying on posters in school. One girl has lost a leg; another holds an Asian infant. The oldest orphan explains to Peter that his green hair marks him as a messenger: “You must tell all the people — the Russians, Americans, Chinese, British, French, all the people all over the world — that there must not ever be another war.”
The Boy with Green Hair crystallized a public sentiment for world government that had been growing in the United States since the end of the war. Norman Cousins, editor of the Saturday Review of Literature and a founder of the United World Federalists, had framed the issue before any other journalist. His celebrated editorial “Modern Man Is Obsolete,” written the night after Hiroshima was destroyed, argued that the event marked “the violent death of one stage in mankind’s history and the beginning of another.” Now that man had the power to incinerate whole cities, he would have to evolve past the need for war, which would mean eradicating global inequality and establishing world government. To this end, Cousins wrote, modern man “will have to recognize the flat truth that the greatest obsolescence of all in the Atomic Age is national sovereignty.”47 By 1946 a Gallup poll found that 52 percent of Americans favored the liquidation of the US military in favor of an international peacekeeping force. Ryan was one of them, and he would get to know Cousins later that year when he joined the Federalists, a rapidly growing organization that advocated “world peace through world law.”
The week before Ryan shot his scene for The Boy with Green Hair, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced the Oscar nominations for 1947. Crossfire was honored in five categories: best picture, best director, best screenplay, best supporting actress (Grahame), and best supporting actor (Ryan). But as more than one industry observer noted, this good fortune put RKO in a ticklish position, given that it had fired the picture’s producer and director. There was another twist as well: in every category except Ryan’s, Crossfire was competing with Gentleman’s Agreement, the Fox production Schary had beaten to the box office by four-and-a-half months. Released in December and carefully marketed with Crossfire as its model, Gentleman’s Agreement was still doing big business across the country and had topped the nominations race with a total of eight.
Jessica and Robert attend the 1948 Academy Awards ceremony. “We don’t ask actors home,” she would later write. “We haven’t, Robert or I, much to say to them privately.” Franklin Jarlett Collection
Though RKO had beaten Fox to the punch, Gentleman’s Agreement had effectively stolen Crossfire’s thunder as an exposé of anti-Semitism, to Ryan’s great irritation.48 Adapted from a novel by Laura Z. Hobson, it starred Gregory Peck as a journalist who poses as a Jew in order to write a magazine story. In some respects Gentleman’s Agreement was bolder than Crossfire; it confronted prejudice head-on instead of sneaking it into a murder mystery, and in contrast to the other film’s psychopathology, it revealed more casual and insidious forms of bigotry. It was also the kind of picture Academy voters could feel good about honoring: this was no crummy little crime story shot on borrowed sets, but a big, long prestige drama set in the penthouses and boardrooms of Manhattan, produced by the great Darryl F. Zanuck.
The other nominees for best supporting actor were Charles Bickford as the starchy butler in RKO’s The Farmer’s Daughter, Thomas Gomez as the warmhearted carny in Universal’s Ride the Pink Horse, Richard Widmark as the giggling killer in Fox’s Kiss of Death, and Edmund Gwenn as Kris Kringle in Fox’s Miracle on 34th Street. Ryan relished the attention, though his chances of winning seemed fairly slim: he would be dividing the psycho vote with Widmark, and really, who was going to choose a Jew-hating murderer over Santa Claus?
Cheyney Ryan arrived on March 10, at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles, and ten days later Jessica had recovered sufficiently to accompany her husband to the Shrine Auditorium. As most had predicted, Gwenn won best supporting actor. Crossfire was shut out by Gentleman’s Agreement, which took best picture, best director (Elia Kazan), and best supporting actress (Celeste Holm). According to Dmytryk, the right-wing Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals had conducted a vigorous campaign against Crossfire.49 The picture had made the year-end lists of all the major critics and collected honors ranging from an Edgar Allan Poe Award (for best mystery film) to a Cannes Film Festival award (for best social film). But in Hollywood, Crossfire was still a double-edged sword. A few months earlier, when MPPA president Eric Johnston had praised the picture in a speech, the legal counsel for the Hollywood Ten had puckishly invited him to serve as a character witness for Scott and Dmytryk. Johnston declined.
*In response to my Freedom of Information Act request, the FBI reported that its central records system contained no file for Ryan.
*Cinematographers still refer to this device as “the obie.”
*When John Huston finally brought the novel to the screen in 1951, his star was the legendary war hero Audie Murphy.
*Inferno (1953), The Proud Ones (1956), Hour of the Gun (1967), and The Wild Bunch (1969).
*Stockwell had just won a special Golden Globe Award for his performance as Gregory Peck’s son in Gentleman’s Agreement.
six
Caught
The Shrine Auditorium may have been a temple of self-congratulation on Oscar night, but outside its walls the movie business was in serious trouble. Ticket sales had boomed after the war when soldiers were streaming home, but in 1947 domestic box office revenue plummeted as people like the Ryans started families and moved into the suburbs. Britain and other countries, hoping to revive their own war-ravaged film industries, levied tariffs on US imports, diminishing the once-lucrative European market. And the federal government renewed its antitrust campaign against the major film studios, pressuring them to sell their theater chains. If that happened, the entire business model for the studio system would collapse.1
Dore Schary had come to RKO promising to cut costs, and the board of directors reaffirmed its confidence in him after the HUAC hearings. But in his first year as production chief, the studio’s annual profit had plunged from $12 million to $5 million. In February 1948 the trade papers reported that Floyd Odlum, RKO’s chairman and majority stockholder since 1936, would sell his controlling interest in the studio to Howard Hughes, the aviation giant and mercurial moviemaker who had produced such landmark pictures as Hell’s Angels (1930) and Scarface (1932).
In early May, Ryan made a quick trip to New York for the Berlin Express premiere, and by the time he returned to the West Coast, Hughes had struck a deal with Odlum, purchasing 24 percent of RKO for the grand sum of $8.8 million — then the largest cash transaction in the history of the movie business. The announcement sent shock waves through the studio: Hughes had a reputation as a controlling and capricious moviemaker. For years his pet project had been The Outlaw, a sexually suggestive western starring Jane Russell and her thirty-eight-inch bust; shot over a maddening nine months in 1940 and 1941, the picture had been held up first by the Production Code Administration and then by various state censorship boards, finally winning wide release in 1946. Hughes’s latest infatuation was starlet Faith Domergue, and many thought he was buying
RKO in order to distribute Vendetta, the film he had been constructing around her to the tune of $2 million.
Hughes moved quickly to tamp down the paranoia raging around the Gower Street lot: Peter Rathvon, president of Radio-Keith-Orpheum, issued a memo to all employees assuring them that the new owner had “no hungry relatives looking for your jobs, nor substitutes waiting to step into the RKO management.”2 Schary, whose contract permitted him to leave the studio in the event of an ownership change, was particularly apprehensive about the prospect of Hughes, an anticommunist and anti-Semite, meddling in his production slate. But when Rathvon arranged a meeting between the two men at his home, Hughes promised Schary that nothing would change under his leadership. In early June, Schary issued a reassuring memo to studio personnel: “I have had a number of talks with Mr. Howard Hughes, and we are in complete agreement on present policy and on the projected program for RKO.”3
While all this transpired, Ryan was on loan to MGM, making Act of Violence with director Fred Zinnemann. Like Crossfire it was a hard-bitten suspense film that touched on the harsh realities of the war, with Ryan as a fearsome heavy, though in this case the theme was not bigotry but betrayal. Ryan and bug-eyed Van Heflin play survivors of a Nazi prison camp, once comrades but now deadly enemies. Just as Crossfire began with a shadowy silhouette of Ryan beating someone to death, the new movie opened with a predawn sequence of a mysterious figure in trench coat and fedora limping across a New York street, climbing the stairs of a seedy tenement building, and extracting a pistol from a bureau drawer. Ryan’s face is revealed finally in close-up as he holds the gun before him, and thick white letters scream out the title: ACT OF VIOLENCE.
Pictures about returning soldiers had become commonplace (a year earlier, The Best Years of Our Lives had won seven Oscars), but seldom were they so bitter. Ryan’s character, Joe Parkson, catches a Greyhound bus to the West Coast and arrives in the small town of Santa Lisa, where he’s immediately halted by a cop as he tries to cross the street: it’s Memorial Day, and a parade is passing. “I liked the idea of this man, who was the veteran of an unhuman [sic] experience in the war, having to step back because a few old guys were walking past him, carrying the American flag, as though they owned it,” Zinnemann recalled.4 Parkson has come to town to murder Frank Enley (Heflin), a local contractor, family man, and pillar of the community. Enley is a war hero in Santa Lisa, but Parkson knows the truth about him: when starvation drove Parkson and other POWS to attempt a tunnel escape, Enley ratted them out to the commandant.
As Enley, Heflin had nabbed the better role, yet Parkson was iconic — an avenging angel, slouching toward Southern California to be born. Early in the picture he shows up at the contractor’s home to find only his flinty wife, Edith (twenty-one-year-old Janet Leigh). Sweating and absurdly out of place in his noirish getup, Parkson forces his way in. “He’s got it nice here, hasn’t he?” Parkson observes as he peers around their pleasant home. “Real nice.” Edith tells him to get lost, and in a rage Parkson spills the whole story, his eyes drilling through her. He remembers how he and ten other prisoners were ambushed by guards, tortured with bayonets, and left on the ground to die. Only he survived, listening to the others all night: “One of them lasted till morning. By then you couldn’t tell his voice belonged to a man. He sounded like a dog that got hit by a truck and left in the street.” This last detail reduces Edith to tears, and Parkson leaves her to weep in her sparkling kitchen.
Written by Collier Young, the story had bounced around Hollywood (it was briefly a vehicle for Gregory Peck and Humphrey Bogart at Warner Bros.) before landing at MGM with Zinnemann directing and Robert Surtees as cinematographer. The two men had worked together in the early ’30s as camera operators at Berlin’s EFA Studio, where Zinnemann was mentored and powerfully influenced by the pioneering documentary maker Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North). Since then, Zinnemann, a Viennese Jew, had fled the Nazis and found an unlikely home for his grim style at the MGM fantasy factory: The Seventh Cross (1943) starred Spencer Tracy, Hume Cronyn, and Jessica Tandy as Germans who have escaped from a concentration camp; and The Search (1945), with Montgomery Clift, was about a boy who has survived Auschwitz and goes looking for his mother across the German countryside. Only after the war would Zinnemann discover that his own parents had died in a concentration camp.
From Flaherty, Zinnemann had learned the value of authentic locations, and this new picture would give him and Surtees a chance to photograph the real LA, where Enley flees and descends into the criminal underworld. Zinnemann would recall “the many sleepless nights we spent shooting exteriors in the eerie slums of downtown Los Angeles,”5 most notably the Bunker Hill district, with its hilly terrain, its slanting, funicular railway cars, and its long flights of cement steps hugging the run-down buildings. Other scenes were shot at the Hill Street railroad tunnel, the Santa Fe freight yards, and as far afield as Big Bear Lake in San Bernardino County. This sense of realism extended to the actors as well. “No make-up of any kind was used on any member of the cast,” wrote Surtees. “We tried to maintain on the screen a high standard of skin texture.”6 The technique heightened the hard set of Ryan’s face, with its lined brow and sneering mouth.
Ryan and Janet Leigh in Act of Violence (1948). The flinty young actress gave as good as she got when she and Ryan faced off” in this film and The Naked Spur (1953). Franklin Jarlett Collection
As a Catholic, Ryan had no trouble grasping this study in guilt and damnation. Enley’s confession to Edith, detailing the hunger and desperation inside the camp, was the sort of thing most Americans wanted to forget about. “The Nazis even paid me a price,” Enley exclaims. “They gave me food, and I ate it…. There were six widows, there were ten men dead, and I couldn’t even stop eating.” Parkson turns out to be similarly cursed by his thirst for vengeance. In his cheap hotel room he is visited by Ann (Phyllis Thaxter), his girl in New York, who has followed him to LA in the hope of derailing his homicidal plan. She appeals to his conscience, begging him to let go of his hatred. Ryan plays the scene in near silence, considering her words, and looks up in shock when she refers to him being “as crippled in your mind as you are in your — ” Then the telephone rings, bringing news of a rendezvous with Enley, and Parkson’s face hints at a smile as he’s pulled back into his wicked dream.
BY THE TIME Act of Violence wrapped in mid-July, RKO was in chaos. Dore Schary had resigned on July 7, less than a month after his calming memo to employees, when Hughes ordered him to suspend production of one picture and fire contract player Barbara Bel Geddes from another (for which she and Ryan had already done some test scenes).7 Following a weekend meeting with the board, Hughes announced that all production would shut down from August to October as he reorganized the studio. Three hundred RKO employees were immediately terminated, and Variety reported that another seven hundred would be fired in the near future;8 by the time Hughes was finished, the studio workforce of twenty-five hundred would be reduced to six hundred.9 Numerous contract players were let go; by the following winter, only six remained, among them Ryan, Gloria Grahame, western star Tim Holt, and Robert Mitchum (whose contract RKO shared with producer David O. Selznick).10
Hughes could be a ruthless enemy but also a staunch ally, and he was vocal in his admiration for Ryan and Mitchum; he backed Mitchum after the actor was busted for marijuana possession in September 1948. With his connections to the Defense Department, Hughes was a good man to have in your corner during the Red Scare. But he was a strange individual: one time Ryan, summoned to the millionaire’s house, found him shuffling around with empty tissue boxes on his feet; when Ryan asked about them, Hughes told him they were disposable and thus more sanitary than socks. On another occasion Hughes invited the Ryans over for a dinner party; they arrived to a house full of guests but no Hughes. After an hour and a half of cocktails, the guests were called in to dinner. Finally, the host arrived and greeted his guests. “I’m so glad that you’re here tonight, Mrs. Ryan,” Jessica r
emembered him saying. Then he left the room, and no one saw him again.11
Ryan returned to RKO expecting to begin principal photography for his coveted boxing drama The Set-Up, but like everything else it had been shelved when Hughes shut down the studio. Instead Ryan found himself swept into a bizarre professional intrigue that not only touched on intimate details of Hughes’s private life but also provided Ryan with one of the more neurotic roles of his career: Smith Ohlrig, the controlling multimillionaire in Max Ophuls’s caustic melodrama Caught.
Ophuls, another German Jewish exile, was one of many directors Hughes had walked on and discarded over the years. Despite an impressive track record in Germany and later France, Ophuls’s first assignment in Hollywood didn’t materialize until 1946, when his fellow émigré Preston Sturges hired him at California Pictures Corporation, the small indie Sturges had formed with Hughes, to develop and direct Vendetta, Hughes’s project for his nineteen-year-old lover, Faith Domergue. When production began, Ophuls — a master stylist who favored long, sinuous tracking shots and dramatic use of perspective — immediately fell behind schedule and soon was relieved by Sturges, who had wanted to direct the picture himself anyway. Hughes took to ridiculing Ophuls,* referring to him as “the Oaf.”12
Since then Ophuls had gained a foothold in Hollywood, directing the hit swashbuckler The Exile and the sublime romance Letter from an Unknown Woman for Universal. Charlie Einfeld, founder of the small Enterprise Studio, engaged Ophuls to develop a screen adaptation of Wild Calendar, a popular novel by Libbie Block in which a middle-class woman marries her wealthy playboy of a cousin and, following his heart attack, takes up with another man. Einfeld had bought the rights at the suggestion of Ginger Rogers, who wanted to star, and commissioned a script by Abraham Polonsky; when Rogers dropped out, Einfeld gave the property to Ophuls, who threw away Polonsky’s script and started over with Arthur Laurents. “I’m not going to make a picture from that lousy book,” Ophuls told Laurents over lunch. “I’m going to make a picture about Howard Hughes.”13