The Lives of Robert Ryan Read online

  Ray purposely staged their big showdown inside a tent, “using the space for tension, so you could expect that the moment Duke dropped his right, Ryan would stiffen, and pretty soon they’d bring the tent down around them.”39 Unfortunately, the dialogue didn’t live up to the staging. “You just can’t bring yourself to point your finger at a guy and say, ‘Go get killed!’” Kirby says. “You’ve gotta tear your guts out worrying about his flight record, or because some dame back in the States is giving him the brush-off!” Ryan does his best with Griffin’s overripe response: “Four hundred years ago a poet put it better than I ever could: ‘No man is an island.’ When the funeral bell rings, it isn’t just for the dead guy. It’s a little bit for all of us.” He was glad to get the whole thing behind him.

  With the new year, the Ryans, Harmons, and Cabeens pushed forward with their school. Harmon suggested that they relocate their meetings to the Country Schools, a nursery school and summer day camp in the area, and the group circulated a letter, signed “Robert Ryan, Chairman, The Oakwood School,” inviting people to get involved:

  For the past eight months a group of parents in the San Fernando Valley has been working to lay the groundwork for an Independent Elementary School … which would be dedicated to the principles of the best in modern education.

  We plan a non-sectarian, non-profit school with a serious program of parent participation.

  We plan a school

  where — The children are encouraged to work, play and learn together as responsible parts of a group and a community.

  where — The teacher guides the child to achieve learning not by rote but through his curiosity and activity.

  where — The classes are smaller, and closer individual attention is possible than in the overcrowded public schools.

  where — The school belongs to the child and the parents as well as to the Professional Teaching Staff.40

  Parents at the Country Schools proved more receptive to these ideals. “The word progressive could be used without fear of it reflecting upon one’s loyalty to one’s country,” Jessica wrote in her memoir about the school. “Certain common goals became clear: the school certainly should be open to all chil dren regardless of race, color or creed. In fact, we should make every effort to assure a broad democratic base…. Scholarships should be made available to children of working-class parents.”41

  The Ryans had begun immersing themselves in the philosophy of education, especially the writings of John Dewey. “I believe that the only true education comes through the stimulation of the child’s powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself,” Dewey wrote in 1897. “Through these demands he is stimulated to act as a member of a unity, to emerge from his original narrowness of action and feeling and to conceive of himself from the standpoint of the welfare of the group to which he belongs.”42 Sounds pinko to me, parents at their early meetings might have commented. But for Ryan, who had championed motion pictures as a tool for enlightenment four years earlier, the idea of reaching people at a more impressionable age must have been enticing — in any case, more enticing than The Secret Fury, Best of the Badmen, or anything else RKO might have in store for him.

  THE NEW CONGRESS was sworn in on January 3, 1951, and two months later the House Un-American Activities Committee returned to Hollywood with a vengeance. By this time the original Hollywood Ten had all gone to prison for contempt of Congress, and those who had been paroled found themselves unemployable under their own names. The sole exception was Edward Dmytryk, the RKO director whose career had been so intertwined with Ryan’s; in September 1950, from inside a federal prison in Mill Point, West Virginia, Dmytryk released a statement affirming his loyalty to the United States and swearing he was no longer a Communist Party member or sympathizer. He was paroled two months later, and in mid-April 1951, as a second wave of congressional subpoenas rolled through the studios, Dmytryk testified before the committee as a friendly witness and named names. This time there wasn’t a whisper of protest from the Hollywood Left. Of the 110 people called to testify, more than half would recant their radical beliefs and inform on their past associates.

  Interviewed more than thirty years later, Dmytryk would reveal that he quit the Communist Party of America after cell leaders began pressuring him and Adrian Scott to alter the story of Crossfire (he gave no details). To hear him tell it, he stuck with the Ten in 1947 because their Fifth Amendment strategy required solidarity, but he couldn’t tolerate being linked with some of his fellow defendants. “The first day the unfriendly witnesses hit the stand, I knew I was not with them,” said Dmytryk. “The question from then on and for the next two and a half years or more, 1947–1950, was how do I do it? When do I do it as gracefully as possible?”43 Dmytryk would be reviled by some, but he returned to Hollywood and within a year scored a four-picture deal with liberal producer Stanley Kramer.

  Dmytryk had plenty of company: writers Clifford Odets and Budd Schulberg, directors Elia Kazan and Robert Rossen, and actors Edward G. Robinson, Lee J. Cobb, Sterling Hayden, and Lucille Ball all prostrated themselves before the committee and were spared. Other industry people, such as actor Lloyd Bridges, were allowed to testify secretly.* As the panic took hold, a whole cottage industry of red-baiting organizations sprang up around the entertainment industry, companies such as American Business Consultants, which published the infamous Red Channels index of alleged communists and contracted with the studios to help “clear” employees with suspect activities or associations. Compared to the blacklist, which banned specific people from working at the studios, the “graylist” of independent pamphlets and newsletters was even more insidious, a creeping mist of rumor and innuendo.

  While this inquisition played out, much of the nation was also mesmerized by the hearings of the Kefauver Crime Committee, established by the US Senate in May 1950 to investigate organized crime in America. Chairman Estes Kefauver was a liberal Tennessee Democrat determined to eradicate crime syndicates in America, and over the next fifteen months he and his four-member committee traveled across the country to hear testimony from local mobsters. Sessions in New Orleans, Detroit, and New York City were broadcast on live television and drew rapt audiences; for many Americans, this was their first exposure to the Mafia. Mobster Frank Costello refused to show his face on camera, and a close-up showed his twitching hands as he spoke.

  Watching all this unfold, Howard Hughes decided he had the perfect topical hook for a remake of his silent 1928 gangster drama The Racket. Adapted from a play by Bartlett Cormack, it told the story of an NYPD captain, Tom McQuigg, trying to get the goods on a fearsome crime boss, Nick Scanlon (the role had made Edward G. Robinson a Broadway star in 1927). Reporter-turned-screenwriter Samuel Fuller was tapped to update the story, but Hughes rejected Fuller’s florid script in favor of a more prosaic draft hammered out by William Wister Haynes and hard-boiled novelist W. R. Burnett (author of Little Caesar, High Sierra, and The Asphalt Jungle). Their main innovation in the wake of the Kefauver hearings was to saddle the old-school gangster Scanlon with a new, nationwide syndicate of smooth corporate operators who considered his bare-knuckled style embarrassingly passé.

  The Racket was Ryan’s first picture with Robert Mitchum since Crossfire four years earlier (Hughes preferred to parcel out the few stars still on his payroll), though the two actors and their pal Jane Russell sometimes drank together in Mitchum’s trailer on the RKO lot. As in Crossfire, Mitchum sauntered through the picture as the police captain, letting Ryan tear it up as the ruthless thug. Whenever the two of them squared off, the picture crackled: newly assigned to the district, McQuigg barges into Scanlon’s office to put him on notice, and the gangster emerges from a side room eating an apple. For Ryan the apple was a typical bit of business that helped him define the character: Scanlon talks with his mouth full, stops short of taking a bite in reaction to something McQuigg has told him, and, when McQuigg pushes him too far, angrily flings the half-eaten fruit aside.

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bsp; Fuller, who would later direct Ryan in House of Bamboo, thought he had a “charismatic gift for making you like the bastard he played, because he understood what made that bastard tick — and he made the audience understand it.”44 What makes Scanlon tick is Joe, the younger brother he’s been grooming for a more respectable life than his own. To Scanlon’s dismay, he learns that Joe has proposed to a two-bit cabaret singer (Lizabeth Scott), and for a moment McQuigg becomes his unlikely confidante. “You’d never guess what I’ve done for that kid,” Scanlon fumes, pacing around his office with his hands jammed in his trouser pockets. “Made a gentleman out of him. Sent him to four colleges. Four! And the last one, I had to buy a chair.” Scanlon kicks a nearby armchair. “Not like that! An endowment, they call it.”

  Amid the interest generated by the Country Schools meetings, the parents in North Hollywood decided to move forward and find a school supervisor. David Walden, finance secretary for the American Friends Service Committee, referred them to a Quaker educator named Lloyd Nixon, who was skeptical of actors but soon recruited a promising candidate for the job. Bryson Gerard, a teacher at Pacific Ackworth Friends School in far-off Temple City, California, impressed them with his notion of a school rich in the humanities, responsive to the parents, and inspired by the democratic principles of the Quaker meeting. Jessica, who by that time was quite pregnant with her third child, talked Robert and the others into funding the school. Classes would begin in September, around the time she was due to give birth.

  Right after Independence Day, Ryan began rehearsing a low-budget thriller with Ida Lupino called Day without End, about a woman held captive in her home by a violent schizophrenic. Mel Dinelli’s story had been through several incarnations already: it debuted in January 1945 as an episode of the CBS radio anthology Suspense, starring Agnes Moorehead and Frank Sinatra, and since then Dinelli had turned it into a short story and a successful play. Lupino had bought the screen rights for her production company, The Filmmakers; Hughes agreed to loan Ryan out for the picture, which would be shot in three weeks, mostly on one set, and to distribute the result through RKO. Lupino, despite her own résumé as a director, handed this project over to Harry Horner, an Oscar-winning production designer.

  Like On Dangerous Ground, the new picture relied heavily on the strange chemistry between Lupino, playing a similarly benign and ethereal character, and Ryan, cast again as a dangerously volatile, physically intimidating man. “I know what it is to be lonely too,” her character tells his, in a distinct echo of the blind woman and the cop from the earlier picture. This time, however, beauty fails to tame the beast. The opening scene finds Ryan’s character, Howard Wilton, tending to his handyman chores in a woman’s home, calling out for his employer, and then swinging open a door to discover her dead body sprawled on the floor. (In a close-up of Ryan’s hand, his fingers jump with fright.) Howard doesn’t remember having killed her, but he flees anyway, hopping a freight train and landing in a new town where he hires on with Helen Gordon (Lupino), a recent war widow. (For some reason the action is set in 1918.)

  Howard seems like a model employee at first, gentle and courteous, but Helen is soon alarmed by his moodiness and paranoia. Once again Ryan shows his talent for startling physical movement; after Howard has fallen to the floor of the parlor in anguish, he grabs his forehead, pulls himself to his feet, and lurches unexpectedly into the foreground of the shot, where he collides with a little Christmas tree. During another such spell Howard lightly bumps a table lamp, setting the crystal decorations that hang from the shade tinkling like his own disordered mind. “Scenes, like life itself, are mostly a matter of feeling and action,” he once said. “Hardly anyone ever thinks of what he wants to say — almost everyone thinks about what he wants to do.”45 The role gave Ryan a chance to essay a variety of moods: at one moment Howard is quiet and humble, at another he accuses Helen of conspiring against him, his voice shaking with rage. It was a real tour de force, though the premise, so effective in a half-hour radio play, was stretched too thin for a feature-length film.

  Less than a week after they finished the picture (whose title would be changed to Beware, My Lovely), Ryan flew into Chicago on TWA — the boss’s airline — with producer Edmund Grainger and actress Janis Carter to attend the gala premiere of Flying Leathernecks. “A spectacular aerial exhibition by a squadron of Marine Corsairs, piloted by Korean War aces, was staged over Lake Michigan [Sunday] night,” press materials reported. “The Marine air-devils, as climax to their stunts, released flares spelling in the skies at high altitude ‘FLYING LEATHERNECKS,’ which was visible as far west as Aurora.”46 The premiere on Monday, August 14, brought even more pomp, including a three-mile parade down Michigan Avenue with Marine bands, color guards, and fife-and-drum corps. Ryan rode in a car with Grainger, Carter, and Radio-Keith-Orpheum president Ned Depinet (who was nearing the end of his rope with Hughes and would soon resign). In Washington, Richard Nixon caught an advance screening of Flying Leathernecks and commended Grainger on the floor of the Senate.47

  All that summer the parents had scouted North Hollywood and Studio City for a suitable classroom facility, as Jessica struggled with the minutiae of health and fire-code regulations. “The job of starting a school,” she remarked, “often seemed entirely to do with fires and toilets…. Meanwhile what you taught in the school, who taught it, and how it was taught, was of no interest to anybody.” Originally, they had hoped to find a vacant house, but such properties were in short supply. Following the example of Westland School, they began inquiring at places of worship, which often owned multiple buildings, and settled on one belonging to Temple Beth Hillel. It was located near Magnolia Boulevard at the end of a dirt road, near a giant flood control project; as Jessica recalled, its concrete channels “were of such unreasonable width and depth they got a rumor going that they were really secret military highways to be used in case of atomic attack.”48

  Ryan’s business manager, Henry Bamberger, had advised him and Jessica to form a nonprofit corporation; according to Jessica’s memoir, she and Robert hosted the other two couples one evening to come up with a name for the institution. “As the evening progressed (and the liquor flowed),” wrote Jessica, “we went from ideas like San Fernando Elementary School and North Hollywood Elementary School to things like Ryan-Harmon-Cabeen’s Folly, Disturbed Children’s Lyceum, Blacklisted Writers’ Refuge, and The Little Red School House by the Flood Control Project. And laughed and laughed.”49 Despite her recollection, the project had been announced months earlier as the Oakwood School, after a Quaker school by that name that Sid Harmon recalled in his native Poughkeepsie, New York. The name stuck.

  Ryan was named president, Harmon vice president, and Ross Cabeen secretary-treasurer. Tuition was set at fifty dollars, with some thirty-two parents enrolling thirty-five students.50 In the weeks before the school opened, the parents all pitched in to clean up the building, scrubbing the floors and the desks. One conspicuous absentee was Jessica, who had gone into labor and given birth to a baby girl on September 10. The Ryans named their new child Lisa — after Lisa Sokoloff, wife of their old acting coach, Vladimir Sokoloff. Ryan was proud of the child, proud of his wife, and proud of the classes starting up across town, which had been all her idea. The harmony of Jessica giving birth as Oakwood opened its doors was lost on no one, though of the two offspring, Lisa Ryan would prove much less troublesome.

  *Not to be confused with Ray’s first feature, They Live by Night (1948).

  *Harmon was nominated for an Oscar for the original story of George Stevens’s The Talk of the Town (1942), starring Cary Grant and Jean Arthur.

  *Although Howard Hughes had the connections to make this happen for Ryan, no evidence has ever emerged that he did.

  eight

  The Whiz Kids

  Nearly a decade had passed since Ryan signed with RKO. In that time he had made more than twenty pictures for the studio, but gems such as The Set-Up and On Dangerous Ground were few and far between. Max
Reinhardt would have been disappointed to see him squandering his talent on potboilers like Flying Leathernecks and Beware, My Lovely. “He could have written his own ticket after the war, on the strength of Crossfire,” observed columnist Louis Berg earlier that year in the Los Angeles Times. “He let the golden opportunity dangle. ‘I’m doing fine,’ is his invariable reply. ‘I’ve got time.’”1 Ryan must have been stung by the observation that his career had crested, but Berg was right. Beholden to Hughes for his political protection, Ryan took what he could get at the studio. Too many people were depending on his paycheck — not just a wife and three children, but a private school now as well.

  Luckily for Ryan, the fall of 1951 brought an intriguing new assignment. Earlier that year the talented Warner Bros. producer Jerry Wald (Mildred Pierce, Johnny Belinda, Key Largo) and comedy screenwriter Norman Krasna had formed the independent Wald-Krasna Productions (whose acronym earned them the industry tag the Whiz Kids) and struck a deal with Hughes to release sixty features over six years. Now Wald wanted to film Clash by Night, the Clifford Odets flop that Ryan had performed ten years earlier on Broadway with Tallulah Bankhead and Lee J. Cobb. The screen rights had been parked at RKO for years. Wald sold Hughes on the idea of relocating it from Staten Island to Monterey, California, and stripping away its outdated social commentary to focus on the adulterous love triangle.