The Lives of Robert Ryan Read online

  By 1907, Chicago was home to five of John and Johanna’s sons. They were big men — one of Bob’s uncles stood six feet eight inches tall — with ambitions to match. Larry, Tim’s younger brother by eight years, had come north to clerk for T. E.’s real estate firm, and Tom, Joe, and John Jr. wanted to start their own construction firm so they might capitalize on their uncle’s political influence. But the brothers’ relationship with their uncle ruptured. According to Bob, Larry’s job “involved handling some funds and he was ultimately accused by his uncle of a minor embezzlement. Larry was about as liable to have done this as to burn down the Holy Name Cathedral. Father sided with his brother and left his uncle’s bed, board, and generous patronage for good.”5 From T. E.’s power base in the west, Tim and Larry relocated to the relatively unpopulated North Side, where they banded together with their siblings to turn the newly christened Ryan Company into a going concern.

  Timothy Aloysius Ryan, the actor’s father. Informed once that a gubernatorial candidate had been accused of embezzling fifty thousand dollars, he remarked, “Any man who could only steal fifty thousand dollars in that job isn’t smart enough to be governor.” Robert Ryan Family

  Tim was thirty-two the night Larry introduced him to Mabel Bushnell, a lovely twenty-four-year-old secretary at the Chicago Tribune. Raised in Escanaba, a port town on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Mabel was descended from some of the first English families of New York, though her father was a cruel and alcoholic newspaper editor from Gladstone, Michigan, whose career ultimately had given way to a tougher life as a tramp printer operating out of Rhinelander, Wisconsin. Tim took Mabel out on the town, squiring her to restaurants and theaters, springing for hansom cabs. He wanted her badly, but she took a dim view of his boozing, not to mention his political ambitions. Tim agreed to swear off liquor and politics, and in 1908 they were married, in a ceremony conducted by both a priest and a protestant minister. They moved into the apartment on Kenmore, and Robert Bushnell Ryan arrived late the next year — November 11, 1909.

  Robert Bushnell Ryan (circa 1912). “I was a completely nonaggressive youngster,” he later recalled. Robert Ryan Family

  Two years later Mabel gave birth to a second child, John Bushnell, and the two boys slept in the same bed. “Very early in my life I remember the lamplighter,” Bob wrote, “a solitary youth who went around lighting the street lamps.”6 He and Jack enjoyed an idyllic life in Uptown, frolicking every summer on Foster Avenue Beach and running up and down the alley behind their house, an avenue for commercial activity. “Almost all heavy hauling was done by horse and wagon,” Bob remembered, and the alley “was full of various dobbins hauling ice, garbage, groceries, etc. In the hot summers the horses wore straw hats. The horses got to know the various stops and often would break in a new driver by showing him where to go.”7

  The brothers’ friendship ended in June 1917 when Jack — “a rather solemn, gentle little fellow,” Bob wrote — died of lobar pneumonia, probably brought on by flu. He was not quite six years old. “I remember the terrible day that he died,”* Bob would write, “and the feeling of my mother and father that he might have been saved.”8 Devastated by the boy’s death, Tim and Mabel vacated their little apartment at 4822 Kenmore, blocks from Lake Michigan, and moved slightly northwest to a one-bedroom on Winona Street. “The neighborhood was somewhat less desirable,” Bob wrote. “But nothing mattered. We had to move and we did.”9 His parents, craving a portrait of little Jack, took a photograph they had of their sons on a dock and had Bob airbrushed away.

  Now Bob slept alone, in a Murphy bed that folded out from the wall, like the one Charlie Chaplin had wrestled with in his two-reeler One a.m. He went to school alone, having transferred from Goudy Public School, which he remembered as mostly Jewish, to Swift Public School nearer his home. His parents were Victorian people, reserved even with their own child; and as the years passed, Bob learned to keep his own company, reading endlessly and roaming around the new neighborhood.

  One unique attraction was the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company on Argyle, founded a decade earlier and now the city’s premiere movie studio. Chaplin had made films for Essanay in 1915, and Gloria Swanson and Wallace Beery had gotten their start there; Bob would remember seeing them all on the streets of Uptown. He and his school friends even spent their Saturday afternoons appearing as extras in the two-reel comedies of child star Mary McAllister, each earning the princely sum of $2.50 a day.

  He was naturally quiet, even withdrawn, and his parents worried over his introverted nature. Mabel gave him a violin that once had belonged to her brother and every Friday marched Bob to the elevated train and downtown to Kimball Hall for a lesson. His teacher, a Scandinavian player for the Chicago Symphony, couldn’t do anything with him. Tim, knowing full well that a boy carrying a violin down the streets of Chicago would be a magnet for bullies, signed Bob up for boxing lessons at the Illinois Athletic Club, where a coach by the name of Johnny Behr taught him how to fight. Bob loved boxing: he was smart and quick in the ring, and he realized that if you didn’t worry about the punch it didn’t hurt as much. “Athletic prowess did a lot for my ego and my acceptance in school,” he later told an interviewer. “The ability to defend yourself lessens the chance you’ll ever have to use it.”10

  Chicago could be an ugly place. Eight months after the Armistice was signed, Bob saw the city erupt again, this time in violence. Temperatures in the nineties had irritated tensions on the Near South Side between blacks confined to the Twenty-Fifth Street Beach and their white neighbors on the Twenty-Ninth Street Beach. On July 27, 1919, a black boy rafting near the shore at Twenty-Ninth Street was killed by a white man hurling rocks, and the incident touched off five days of murderous rioting. “As rumors of atrocities circulated throughout the city, members of both races craved vengeance,” wrote historian William M. Tuttle Jr. “White gunmen in automobiles sped through the black belt shooting indiscriminately as they passed, and black snipers fired back. Roaming mobs shot, beat, and stabbed to death their victims.”11

  Thirty-eight people died, and more than five hundred were injured. An official report would blame much of the initial violence on Irish athletic clubs such as Ragen’s Colts and the Hamburg Club, but the rage had spread like an infection, creeping into the West and North Sides. (Just south of Uptown lay one of the North Side’s isolated pockets of blacks.) For a boy not yet ten, the riot must have been a frightening experience. Not only could war go on forever, it could happen right in your own backyard.

  THE RYAN FAMILY’S FORTUNES began to turn in 1920 when Tim’s friend Ed Kelly was appointed chief engineer of the Chicago Sanitary District. Son of a policeman, Kelly had started out with the district at age eighteen, and though he had studied engineering at night school, he displayed more talent as a South Side politician, having founded and been elected president of the two-hundred-member Brighton Park Athletic Club. The Irish athletic clubs were mainly social, organizing team sports, but they were also politically oriented, and Kelly soon made a name for himself in the Cook County Democratic Party. By the time he became chief engineer, he had put in more than thirty years with the district. His spotty formal training was much noted in the press (one muckraking journalist accused him of farming out his technical work to consultants). Yet Kelly understood and had mastered the operating principle of Chicago politics: take care of your friends and they’ll take care of you.

  Under Kelly, the Ryan Company won lucrative city jobs paving streets and building sewer tunnels. Tim, who supervised sewer construction, worked from 5:30 AM until 8 or 9 PM at night; he and his son barely saw each other except for weekends. With his winning manner and many connections, Tim was critical to the operation, though according to Bob, the man who really ran the company was his Uncle Tom, “a rather cold and shrewd businessman.”12 Flush with the company’s profits, Tim and Mabel decided to move again, this time to a bigger apartment, in the northerly Edgewater neighborhood, that was only a block from the lake. They bought t
heir own automobile and furnished their new home well. During the summers Bob went to Camp Kentuck in Wisconsin, while his parents enjoyed golfing weekends in Crystal Lake, northwest of the city. Mabel might have succeeded in keeping Tim away from drink, but politics was another matter, and Kelly could always rely on T. A. Ryan as a Democratic Party committeeman for the Twenty-Fifth Ward.

  Haunted by the memory of little Jack, Tim and Mabel would never have another child, choosing instead to spoil and smother Bob. “You cannot know the difficulties that attend an only child,” he would write years later, in a letter to his own children. “Two big grown-ups are beaming in on him all the time — even when he isn’t there. It is a feeling of being watched that lingers throughout life.”13 He hid in the darkness of the movies, spending countless afternoons at the Riveria Theater on Broadway or the smaller Bryn Mawr near the “L” stop. The charm and dash of Douglas Fairbanks were his greatest tonic, and he never missed a picture: The Mark of Zorro, The Three Musketeers, Robin Hood. Bob had seen how motion pictures were made and was fascinated by the results. Yet he could barely conceive of the movies as an occupation; his father and uncles considered the Ryan Company a legacy for their children.

  After Bob graduated from Swift in 1923, his father pulled some strings to get him a summer job as a fireman on a freight locomotive, which satisfied the thirteen-year-old boy’s appetite for freedom and Tim’s desire that he learn the value of a dollar. Rumors of petting parties at the local public high school had persuaded Mabel that Bob needed a private education, and that fall his parents enrolled him at Loyola Academy, a Jesuit college prep school for young men that was located near the Loyola University campus to their north. The experience would shape him not only as a person but also as an artist.

  Loyola was heavily Irish Catholic, the sons of an aspiring middle class, and the class of 1927 would produce an unusual number of Jesuit priests. Tim must have been pleased that his son would be schooled in the Catholic faith, though Mabel valued Loyola more for its academic reputation. The priests were known as stern taskmasters, and the curriculum was tough — along with the arts and sciences, the boys learned Latin, Greek, and Christian doctrine. Later in life, when Bob Ryan’s interests had turned to education, he would take a more skeptical view of Jesuit schooling. “The fathers were well-seasoned men who had a good deal of authority that they seldom used,” he remembered. “Huge areas of a fruitful life were almost ignored. Jesuit education was books and drill and writing and some discussion.”14

  At the new school Bob began to distinguish himself in athletics, especially after a growth spurt propelled him to a height of six-foot-three, only an inch shorter than his father. He played football all four years and competed in track and field. Formidably big and agile on the gridiron, he was an All-City tackle his senior year. In school he struggled with Latin and especially chemistry but excelled in English, joining the literary society and working on the school magazine, The Prep. He read voraciously. “Truly, I may say that a man’s best friends are his books,” he wrote in the magazine his junior year. “Your companions may desert you, but your books will remain with you always and will never cease to be that source of enjoyment that they were when you first received them.”15

  Ryan with his parents, Mabel and Tim. “You cannot know the difficulties that attend an only child,” he later wrote. “It is a feeling of being watched that lingers throughout life.” Robert Ryan Family

  The book that changed his life was Hamlet, which he spent an entire semester studying under the instruction of his beloved English teacher, Father Joseph P. Conroy. The priest led the boys through the Elizabethan verse into the dark heart of the play, the young prince charged by the ghost of his dead father to avenge the treachery of his uncle, Claudius, and the unfaithfulness of his mother, Gertrude. Hamlet was full of moral conundrums, the hero torn between his conscience and his thirst for revenge. Bob was captivated: such rich language, such profound thoughts, such high drama. By the end of the semester he could recite practically the entire text. He fell in love with theater, reading Shakespeare, Chekhov, Shaw, and O’Neill, a writer who spoke to his own Irish melancholy. Their work awakened in him a hunger for self-expression, and he wondered if, instead of following his father into construction, he might become a playwright himself.

  The money kept rolling in at the Ryan Company, and before long the family bought a Cadillac, then a Pierce-Arrow with a chauffeur to drive Tim to work. Bob got his own Ford and tooled around in bell-bottom suits and a fur coat. Tim became a patron of the Chicago Opera Association; he took Mabel to New York City to see all the shows. (Bob shared their love of musical theater; among his favorite performers were Fanny Brice and the great Irish-American showman George M. Cohan.) Tim Ryan, Bob wrote in a letter to his own children, “was always generous and kind to me — in a day when father-son relationships were not thought of as they are now.” His father was “a big man (6′ 4″ — 250 lbs.) with a radiant personality and strong sense of humor, and was idolized by many people. His other side was only displayed at home and was very hard to take.”

  Bob wouldn’t elaborate on this statement, but he would note his father’s ambivalence toward the construction business, which hardly inspired one to join him. “Dad, I think, would have been content to have enough money to live well, eat well, play bridge, and tell stories to his rather small circle of friends.”16 Friction between father and son began to build as Bob’s graduation from Loyola drew near. Tim had mapped out his son’s future: he would stay at home, earn a professional degree at Loyola or DePaul or the University of Chicago, and find a good living for himself as the next generation of the Ryan Company. Bob insisted on going east to school and won admission to Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

  That summer he accepted an invitation from his former camp counselor, a wealthy Yale graduate named Frank Scully, to work at a dude ranch Scully was trying to start on some land his family owned in Missoula, Montana. Bob took the train out West, spent the summer sharpening his horseman skills, and even found time for a first romance with a girl named Thora Maloney. He would remember his awe at seeing “plains that never ended — where one seemed to be becalmed in a purple ocean. As we got into the foothills of the Rockies and finally saw some of the high peaks I was aware of a lift of spirit that I shall never forget. It was strange to be so far from home and yet to feel as if I was coming home.”17

  Back in Chicago he gathered his belongings for school and at long last left his parents behind. His father was pained to see him leave. “He didn’t get the point — packing off 1,300 miles to the state of New Hampshire when there were five colleges to be had within an hour’s drive,” Bob would write. “Mother must have sensed that I should go — though I hope she didn’t know how much I wanted to go.”18

  At Dartmouth he pledged Psi Upsilon (one of his fraternity brothers was Nelson Rockefeller) and went out for track and football. But his real claim to fame was boxing: in his freshman year he won the college its first heavyweight title. His grades were unspectacular; he maintained a C average, studying Greek, French, English, physics, evolution, philosophy, and citizenship. The following summer he returned to Scully’s ranch, pursuing romance with another girl, Thula Clifton, and in the fall he played football again, though his career ended ignominiously after he broke his knee in a game against Columbia University. The injury threw his schoolwork into disarray, and in December 1928 he withdrew from all his classes without receiving any grades, standard procedure for someone flunking out.

  For the next eight months Bob returned home to his parents, who had moved to a new apartment on Lake Shore Drive. Tim insisted that Bob work, so he got a job as a salesman, first for a steel company and then for a cemetery. “I’m offering a permanent product,” he would tell his customers.19 That fall he reenrolled at Dartmouth, starting over as a sophomore, and though he would continue to box, he had resolved to get serious about his studies.

  A month after he returned, the stock market crashe
d. October 23 brought the first wave of sell-offs, then on October 29 — “Black Thursday” — the bottom dropped out. Crowds gathered outside the Chicago Stock Exchange, where a record one million shares changed hands in a single day. The Ryan Company was privately held and, at that point, worth at least $4 million. But each of the brothers was personally invested in the market, and they were all wiped out. All they had left was the promise of more construction work.

  Even that seemed precarious: earlier that year Assistant State’s Attorney John E. Northrup had returned indictments against Ed Kelly and a dozen other men at the sanitary district, charging that they had defrauded taxpayers of $5 million over the past eight years and done a healthy business in bribes and kickbacks from contractors. “A well-greased palm was essential to doing business with the department,” wrote Kelly’s biographer, Roger Biles. “Some trustees received gifts of twenty-five cases of liquor a month from favored contractors.” Others “admitted financing lengthy European vacations with illegally solicited contributions.”20 Kelly would later concede to the IRS that from 1919 to 1929 his income was $724,368, though his salary for that period totaled only $151,000.

  More than seven hundred people were called to testify, many of them against their will. Witnesses exposed gaping discrepancies between the district’s stated expenditures and what contractors were actually paid: the payroll was said to be padded by as much as 75 percent. The trial revealed that bids were submitted in plain envelopes that were later opened and altered so that favored firms could be awarded lucrative contracts. Elmer Lynn Williams, publisher of the muckraking newsletter Lightnin’, alleged that the district’s central auto service had provided high-ranking officials with “young women procured for these tired business men by an older woman who was on the pay roll. The taxpayers were charged for vanity cases, whiskey and the time of the ‘entertainers.’”21