The Lives of Robert Ryan. J.R. Jones

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 married 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