The Lives of Robert Ryan Page 7

  To play something like this at Camp Pendleton in San Diego County, where Marine Raiders would be shot as less fortunate men actually shipped out for the Pacific, must have filled Ryan with the sort of manly shame he had felt as a male model. Stars the stature of James Stewart and Robert Montgomery had enlisted and taken combat assignments; even Pat O’Brien put himself in harm’s way entertaining troops in northern Africa and Southeast Asia. As part of the deal struck by RKO, Ryan asked to be discharged from the army so that he could enlist in the Marines, which would mean a greater chance of seeing combat. The Marines, in turn, would give him a deferment until January 1, 1944, so that he could make the picture.

  Marine Raiders didn’t wrap until late January, however, and by that time the Marines had granted Ryan a second deferment through February 15. Shortly before the picture was completed, the commanding general at Camp Elliott in San Diego wrote to Marine Corps Commandant Alexander Vandergrift to request a third deferment through April 15, so that Ryan could appear opposite Rosalind Russell in Sister Kenny, a biopic of the Australian nurse who had developed a radical new treatment for polio. Vandergrift would have none of this, and Ryan was ordered to report for duty on the fifteenth as previously agreed. RKO was offering him a “duration contract,” which meant that he would be welcomed back to the studio upon his discharge from the service. Behind the Rising Sun had been released in August and, partly on the strength of Ryan’s much-talked-about fight scene, turned a jaw-dropping $1.5 million profit.

  In a movie magazine piece that appeared under her byline, Jessica recalled “the dreary building in downtown Los Angeles” where she dropped Robert off for his Marine Corps induction. “It was that ungodly hour of the morning, at which time all good men seem to have to go to the aid of their country.”12 They said their good-byes, she drove away weeping, and Ryan finally joined the war.

  *Though still working his way up in bit roles, Mazurki would play heavies in movies and TV for another fifty years, most memorably in Murder, My Sweet (1944).

  four

  You Know the Kind

  If Ryan had any hope of remaining unnoticed in the ranks, they were diminished when he learned from a fellow recruit at the LA induction center that a letter from the Marine Corps — which Ryan had never gotten — listed toiletries and other items they should bring with them. A private on duty offered to pick up some things for him, and Ryan got off the bus in San Diego carrying his belongings in a brown paper bag. A Marine Corps photographer was there to meet him, snapping pictures as he turned in his travel orders, got fitted for fatigues, sat for a regulation army haircut, went through a classification interview, and picked up his gear from the quartermaster’s depot. After that he was on his own and wondering how he would be received. When he had been at the base earlier, shooting Marine Raiders, an officer had told him that movie boys were liable to get roughed up in the Corps, but Ryan didn’t have any trouble. He mentioned this to a bunkmate; the man replied, “Most of these guys saw you bat that Jap around in Behind the Rising Sun.”1

  Basic training commenced at Camp Pendleton, about an hour north of the San Diego base. Established as a Spanish mission in 1769 and built up through land grants into the vast Rancho Santa Margarita, the property had been purchased in 1942 by the US government, which was converting it into the nation’s largest Marine Corps base. It was enormous — about two hundred square miles, with eighteen miles of shoreline for amphibious training. According to Pendleton historians Robert Witty and Neil Morgan, the terrain “stretches eastward across twelve miles of rolling hills, broad valleys, swampy stream beds, and steep-sided canyons, rising on its northeast perimeter to a height of 2,500 feet.”2 By the time Ryan arrived, Pendleton had sent two divisions into the war and was home to more than 86,000 people.

  He and Jessica had resolved to keep a stiff upper lip in each other’s absence, but by the fourth week Ryan had written asking her to visit him that Sunday, and she endured the four-hour bus ride to meet with him at the reception center. They went outside, and he spread his poncho over the grass so they could sit and talk. He had learned how to use an automatic rifle, Thompson submachine gun, mortar, bayonet, and hand grenade. The infiltration course, in Wire Mountain Canyon, forced recruits to crawl through three trenches and penetrate a single and then a double apron of barbed wire while dynamite charges went off all around them and live rounds were fired over their heads. The obstacle course, built over a cactus patch, included a 125-foot wooden tunnel, a house whose only exit was through the roof, and a 100-foot cable bridge. He was mastering more mundane skills as well — how to mend his clothes, for instance — and drilling with his platoon. As the tallest marine, he was named honor man and placed in the front rank to set the pace; he took direction well, of course, and had to admit that the theatricality of it appealed to him.

  Following a ten-day furlough in April, Ryan got his first assignment: effective immediately, he would be a “recreation assistant” at Pendleton. This was good news for Jessica, who wanted him out of harm’s way and far from the trigger of a gun, but not for him. The whole idea of enlisting in the Marines was to erase the stigma of all those deferments; now he would be running a sixteen-millimeter projector and directing amateur plays. After fifteen weeks of this, during which time the D-Day landing commenced, he was transferred to the San Diego base, where he continued to thread a projector and also performed on Halls of Montezuma, a weekly radio show broadcast coast to coast. Once Jessica realized he was unlikely to see action, she decided to leave Mabel on her own in Silverlake and moved to San Diego, where she occupied a “tiny box of a house on the pier at Pacific Beach.”3

  By this time Jessica had stopped acting entirely. Back when they were with Reinhardt, she had been considered the better actor, but over the years she had watched Robert work and grow, and she was proud of his success. She had been at it for ten years now, and once Robert had started pulling down $600 a week at RKO, she decided she had had enough. She hated the stage fright and the tedium and the itinerant lifestyle. Instead she would turn to her second love, writing. In addition to the first-person piece about Robert’s induction, which would appear in the October 1944 issue of Movieland, she began placing stories in fan magazines such as Photoplay and Motion Picture and women’s magazines such as Coronet and Mademoiselle. Her immediate success would bring a weird parity to the marriage, since Robert had started out writing and, frustrated, turned to acting.

  Serving on the sidelines must have gotten to Ryan, because on August 25 — the day Paris was liberated — he applied for a commission as a second lieutenant to serve on an aviation ground crew. “I feel that my background would qualify me for any branch of ground duty not requiring technical knowledge or expertise,” he wrote on his application.4 A complete physical found him fit for overseas duty, and his commanding officer wrote him no fewer than three letters of recommendation. He waited the rest of the year for an answer. The Marine Corps was hardly generous with promotions, and he had no way of knowing whether the scuttlebutt about his deferments would hurt his chances, or what RKO might be doing behind the scenes to protect its investment.

  In January 1945, as the Battle of the Bulge raged, Ryan was assigned to the Fortieth replacement draft; he would be shipping out as an infantryman, a development he would later describe to a friend as “swell.”5 His application for a commission was turned down a week later. Ryan would be leaving for the Pacific in late February, which was alarming news to his wife and mother. But things didn’t work out that way: as he would tell his Dartmouth class newsletter, “I was yanked out of the infantry with the proverbial foot on the gangplank and put to instructing troops in bayonet, judo, boxing and such at Camp Pendleton.”6 Now classified as a combat conditioner, Ryan would spend his days training men for battle; in May he was promoted to private first class, and in August he was reclassified again, as a combat swimming instructor.

  Thousands of Americans spent the war this way — not quite at home, not quite at battle. “Theirs is
the task of the damned,” wrote Richard Brooks in a prefatory note to his novel The Brick Foxhole. “These men see others trained and shipped off to ports of embarkation, but they themselves are always left behind. They brood over it, and in the end they become disappointed, introverted, and embittered.”7 Ryan read the book with great interest when it was published in May 1945; the author was actually stationed at Pendleton, and according to scuttlebutt, the publication had brought him a court-martial. At the center of The Brick Foxhole was an ugly sequence in which soldiers at liberty in Washington, DC, go home with a homosexual man for some late-night drinking and wind up beating him to death. Ryan was struck immediately by the book’s frank depiction of the bilious prejudice on open display at Pendleton.

  Robert and Jessica (circa 1944). While he drilled recruits at Camp Pendleton, she struck out on her own as a magazine writer and novelist. Robert Ryan Family

  Of particular fascination was the character of Montgomery Crawford, the bullying sergeant who drags the other men into this murderous episode. Monty has served as a beat cop in Chicago and likes people to know he’s killed a Jew and two black men in the line of duty. He “always shot niggers in the belly because then they didn’t die right away and they squirmed like hell.” Ryan had known guys like this before — cruel, jingoistic, worshipful of authority. Monty “shook hands with too firm a grip and he would openly cry when the post band played ‘God Bless America.’”8

  Ryan tracked Brooks down to tender his compliments, and the two met in the library at Camp Pendleton. Brooks was tall and athletic — for a while he had considered a career as a pro baseball player — and favored a pipe that belied his short temper. Born to Russian Jewish parents in Philadelphia, he had grown up in poverty and gotten his start as a writer during the Depression by riding the rails and reporting on his experiences for local newspapers. From there he had moved into radio drama in New York and, in a weird coincidence, cofounded and then quit the dreaded Millpond Playhouse the summer before the Ryans performed there. Out on the West Coast Brooks found work writing for NBC Radio in Los Angeles, and as a screenwriter at Universal he knocked out a couple of jungle pictures for Maria Montez before enlisting in the Marines. Rumors of a court-martial over The Brick Foxhole were true, though the Marines, realizing that more publicity would only enlarge the book’s audience, had ultimately dropped the case.

  Brooks undoubtedly knew Ryan from his good-guy roles at RKO, and to his surprise the actor told him that, if The Brick Foxhole were ever filmed, he wanted to play Monty. Anyone could see the physical resemblance — Brooks had described Monty as “more than six feet tall” with “a pair of small, bright eyes”9 — but why would a lead player want a role like this? “I know that son of a bitch,” Ryan explained. “No one knows him better than I do.”10

  In fact, Ryan’s experience as a combat conditioner — teaching men to kill and wondering if they would ever come back alive — was turning him against the military. When he wrote to his old Dartmouth pal Al Dickerson in early summer 1945, he took a dim view of his own contribution to the war. “I certainly haven’t made any ‘sacrifice,’” he admitted, “especially when you add the fact that I have sat on my ass stateside for 16 months while a lot of my buddies went on to Saipan and Iwo…. I will not bore you with the too well known complaints against the military. War is a stupid institution when it isn’t being sinful and tragic and catastrophic.”11 By the time he got out of the Marines he would come to share much of Jessica’s pacifist philosophy.

  Meanwhile Jessica had come into her own as a writer. To Ryan’s surprise she announced one day that she had written a mystery novel and wanted him to read it. The Man Who Asked Why was a “literary mystery,” mindful of formula but written with intelligence and wit. Its eccentric sleuth, Gregory Sergievitch Pavlov, “looked like a retired clown”12 but was in fact an eccentric professor of languages, transparently based on the Ryans’ dear friend and acting teacher Vladimir Sokoloff. Ryan passed the manuscript along to someone he knew at Doubleday Doran (publisher of Behind the Rising Sun), and to his and Jessica’s delight the book was accepted for publication as part of Doubleday’s Crime Club imprint, scheduled to appear in November.

  In August the war, and the very concept of war, attained new levels of sin, tragedy, and catastrophe when President Truman ordered the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The blast in Hiroshima on August 6 flattened nearly five square miles and killed seventy thousand people, with tens of thousands more to die from burns and radiation by the end of the year. Few in America could grasp the devastation, but one thing everyone understood was that now Japan would surrender. RKO wasted no time in reasserting its claim to Ryan’s services; the day after Nagasaki was bombed, the Marine Corps director of public information dispatched a letter to the commandant asking that Ryan be allowed to make a “marine rehabilitation picture” called They Dream of Home.* This request was denied, and ten days later Ryan was assigned to the Seventy-Ninth Replacement Draft. His feelings about shipping out may have been different this time, though, because Jessica had discovered that she was pregnant.

  Two weeks after receiving his new assignment, Ryan reported to the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery complaining of neck and back pain. According to the doctor’s summary, Ryan said that he had wrenched his back in May 1939, while lifting a car to change a tire, and subsequently suffered periodic attacks that had sidelined him for two to four days, but that “he did not mention this condition on induction because he considered it of minor importance and he wished to get into the service.”13 Diagnosed with epiphysitis of the spine, he was pronounced unfit for service and recommended for discharge. By this time the Fourth Division had begun arriving home, and Pendleton was discharging 175 men daily. On October 30, 1945, Ryan won an honorable discharge and returned to civilian life, the prospect of fatherhood, and a steady job at RKO. The studio had already slotted him for a melodrama called Desirable Woman that would give him a chance to work with Joan Bennett and the great French director Jean Renoir.

  Years later, press accounts would note simply that Ryan had enlisted in the Marines, which was true but hardly the whole story. His wife’s pacifism, his employer’s opportunism, and his own professional ambition had kept him out of uniform for nine months, but then he had served and sought a combat assignment. He would note with disdain how his friend John Wayne had avoided doing his duty, and his own stint in the Marines would become a much-valued credential as he became more vocal in his commitment to peace. When his teenage son, Cheyney, asked him why he had served, Ryan’s only response was, “What else was I gonna do?”14

  SON OF THE GREAT PAINTER, Jean Renoir had directed some of the best French films of the 1930s — The Crime of Monsieur Lange, Grand Illusion, The Rules of the Game — before fleeing the Nazi invasion in 1940. Since then he had bounced around Hollywood, making one picture at Twentieth Century Fox, another for RKO, and two more as independent productions released through United Artists. His first UA project, The Southerner, was a moving tale of struggling cotton farmers in Texas, but in general Renoir found the Hollywood of the war years to be rocky soil for his kind of left-wing humanism. (His limited fluency in English didn’t help.) After finishing Diary of a Chambermaid for UA, he returned to RKO at the invitation of Joan Bennett to direct Desirable Woman, a romantic melodrama that had been in development for some time. Renoir had enjoyed working at RKO, and he looked forward to collaborating with producer Val Lewton, who had delivered for the studio with a series of artful, low-budget horror films (Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, The Seventh Victim).

  Ryan’s excitement about the picture only grew as he got to know the director. “One of the most remarkable men I’ve ever met,” he would say of Renoir. “Working with him opened my eyes to aspects of character that were subtler than those I was accustomed to.”15 His character was notably darker than anything he had played on-screen, a shell-shocked Coast Guard lieutenant now relegated to patrolling the misty Pacific coast on horseback. In one s
cene a friend at the base hesitantly informs him that the ship he was serving on has gone down, and the lieutenant is crushed. Not long afterward, on one of his lonely rides, he passes a wrecked ship, where he encounters a beautiful woman gathering firewood (Bennett). She brings him home to meet her husband (Charles Bickford), a famous painter now blind and embittered, and the lieutenant, consumed by lust for the woman, becomes an uneasy companion to the fractious couple.

  In fact, Val Lewton had never really been interested in the project, and by the time principal photography commenced in late January 1946, he had been replaced by producer Jack Gross, who let Renoir do pretty much as he pleased. A month into the shoot, Charles Koerner — the head of production who had axed Pare Lorentz and Orson Welles — died suddenly of leukemia, which left Renoir even more unsupervised. He had never made a picture with so much improvisation on the set. “I wanted to try to tell a love story based purely on physical attraction, a story in which emotions played no part,” Renoir said.16 The open adultery of the source novel, None So Blind, already had been scrubbed away by the Production Code Administration, but there was something haunting about the lovers’ wordless attraction playing out right under the blind man’s nose.

  Renoir also was intrigued by the story’s sense of solitude, something he felt was increasingly prized amid the chaos of modern life. “Solitude is the richer for the fact that it does not exist,” Renoir wrote. “The void is peopled with ghosts, and they are ghosts from our past. They are very strong, strong enough to shape the present in their image.”17 One scene showed the lieutenant, Scott, in his bed at the base, consumed by a nightmare. In a feverish montage, an Allied ship hits a mine and goes down, the image of a whirlpool pulls the eye in, bodies and ropes drop through the water, and Scott strides across the ocean floor in slow motion, stepping over the skeletons of his dead crewmates, on his way toward a lovely woman in a flowing gown. Before they can kiss, there’s an eruption of flame, an inferno that jolts Scott out of his dream.