The Lives of Robert Ryan. J.R. Jones

The Red Badge of Courage had never been filmed because no movie star wanted to play a coward.* “The controversial role, like no other, can meet the needs of the actor who feels the void of not achieving professional stature,” he wrote, inadvertently revealing the career frustration that had driven his choice. “It gives one the feeling of accomplishment, of acting with a purpose.”²³ When he reflected on the risk taken by Dore Schary, Adrian Scott, Eddie Dmytryk, and John Paxton, who had dreamed up the picture, his own gamble paled in comparison.

      Ryan looked forward to more such projects, but the political winds were shifting. That fall Schary was approached by two investigators from the House Un-American Activities Committee — “rather gray-looking gentlemen,” he wrote.²⁴ The committee was moving forward with its hearings into communist infiltration of the movie industry, and they wanted to know if he might have any relevant information about Ryan. Schary pointed out that Ryan was a former marine, a credential he felt spoke for itself. They asked him about Scott and Dmytryk, the producer and director of Crossfire. They requested screenings of Crossfire and The Farmer’s Daughter, a Loretta Young comedy that RKO had released in March, and afterward they declared both pictures to be “pro-Communist.”²⁵

      Schary later wrote that he gave the investigators nothing and expressed his lack of regard for the committee. On September 22, Schary, Scott, and Dmytryk all received subpoenas to testify in Washington. Forty other Hollywood professionals were summoned as well, ranging from such right-wingers as Adolphe Menjou, Ayn Rand, Leo McCarey, and Walt Disney to such left-wingers as Charles Chaplin, Clifford Odets, Robert Rossen, and Bertolt Brecht. The Red-baiting Hollywood Reporter labeled nineteen of the forty-three — including Scott and Dmytryk — as “unfriendly” witnesses on the basis of their previous public statements about the committee. The hearings would convene a month later.

      Ryan always would attribute his narrow escape from the blacklist to his war record and his Irish-Catholic heritage (the committee’s equation of communists and Jews was well known). He had just been investigated by the FBI and cleared for travel in the Soviet sector of Berlin. The fact was that Scott and Dmytryk had been Communist Party members, whereas Ryan (for all his willingness to publish in the Worker) was a solid Democrat who could always be counted on to inject a note of ward-heeling realism into the unmoored radicalism of friends and colleagues. During this period, Jessica would write, he had “his first brush with the doubletalk, the rigid doctrinaire attitudes, the attitude of take over or destroy, of some people involved who were or had been truly Communist-minded. At the same time he would not nudge one inch from the position of defending their right to believe as they did.”²⁶ Ryan quickly threw in with the Committee for the First Amendment (CFA), an organization formed by his screenwriter pal Philip Dunne, as well as John Huston and director William Wyler, to protest the hearings.

      Wyler hosted an overflow meeting of the new group at his Beverly Hills home in early October. Outside, FBI agents took down license plate numbers,²⁷ yet the CFA was a safely liberal group: it defended civil liberties in general, not the “Hollywood Nineteen” in particular, and the founders actively discouraged communists and fellow travelers from joining. The group resolved to protest the congressional probe in full-page newspaper ads and organized a large delegation of celebrities to fly east for the hearings. Ryan was stuck in town shooting interiors for Berlin Express, but he agreed to take part in Hollywood Fights Back, a pair of radio programs to be broadcast nationwide on October 26 and November 2.

      Even before that, on Wednesday, October 15, Ryan appeared at the giant “Keep America Free!” rally at the Shrine Auditorium, which benefited a defense fund for the Nineteen. Presented by the Progressive Citizens of America (PCA) — a more radical group that was the Communist Party’s last real lobbying presence in Hollywood — the rally drew some seven thousand people.²⁸ “We protest the threat to personal liberty and the dignity of American citizenship represented by this police committee of Dies, Wood, Rankin, and Thomas,” Ryan declared, naming the congressmen on the committee as he read a proclamation from the PCA. “We demand, in the name of all Americans, that the House Committee on Un-American Activities be abolished, while there still remains the freedom to abolish it.”²⁹

      The following Monday the hearings commenced in the Caucus Room of the Capitol Building, with every seat filled and the proceedings recorded by newsreel cameras, nationwide radio, and a battery of reporters and press photographers. J. Parnell Thomas, the New Jersey Republican who had assumed chairmanship of the committee with the Eightieth Congress, presided over the hearings, which got off to a bang when studio head Jack Warner volunteered the names of twelve people who had been identified as communists and fired from Warner Bros. His action stunned the Hollywood community, especially his colleagues at the Motion Pictures Producers’ Association (MPPA), which had agreed to close ranks against the committee. As the week progressed, the committee called a succession of friendly witnesses, who named some three dozen people as communists.

      The week’s events failed to dent the enthusiasm of the Committee for the First Amendment, whose members took heart from editorials condemning the hearings in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other dailies. On Sunday morning the CFA’s star contingent — including Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Myrna Loy, Gene Kelly, Judy Garland, and Danny Kaye — took off for New York and then Washington, having already recorded their contributions for the Hollywood Fights Back broadcast. Ryan delivered his thirty-second bit live in the studio: “President Roosevelt called the Un-American Committee a sordid procedure, and that describes it pretty accurately,” he declared. “Decent people dragged through the mud of insinuation and slander. The testimony of crackpots and subversives accepted and given out to the press as if it were the gospel truth. Reputations ruined and people hounded out of their jobs.”³⁰

      The tide of public opinion began to turn against the Nineteen on Monday morning, when writer John Howard Lawson accused the committee of Nazi tactics, was charged with contempt of Congress, and had to be forcibly removed from the chamber. As all this was going on, Dmytryk turned to Schary and asked, “What are my chances at the studio now?”

      “You have an ironclad contract,” Schary replied.³¹

      Adrian Scott brought a four-page statement defending Crossfire and noting the anti-Semitism of Mississippi Democrat John E. Rankin, a committee member, which Thomas refused to let him read. Both Scott and Dmytryk were asked repeatedly if they were communists; they declined to answer, citing their Fifth Amendment rights, and were charged with contempt. Schary, asked if he would knowingly employ communists at RKO, replied that he would, “up until the time it is proved that a communist is a man dedicated to the overthrow of the government by force or violence, or by any illegal methods.”³²

      Seven more unfriendly witnesses defied the committee and were cited for contempt, among them screenwriter Dalton Trumbo — whose wartime romance Tender Comrade (1944), directed by Dmytryk, had given Ryan his first big break. The committee had absurdly labeled the movie communist propaganda for its story of four women sharing a house while their men fight in World War II. When Thomas suddenly suspended the hearings on October 30, with Brecht having broken rank and eight witnesses still to be heard, Variety reported that one factor was the reluctance of several committee members to release a long-promised list of subversive pictures. Once these innocuous and well-known titles were made public, the members argued, the committee would become “a laughing stock.”³³

      If Ryan was afraid of the committee, he didn’t show it: while the hearings were in progress, he and his Crossfire costar Gloria Grahame spoke at the annual convention of the American Jewish Labor Council, which would turn up on the US attorney general’s list of communist (but not subversive) organizations.³⁴ The studio moguls, however, were badly spooked by the hearings. On November 24 — the same day the House of Representatives voted 346 to 17 to uphold the contempt citations — the Motion Picture Producers’ Association met at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York to hammer out a strategy. President Eric Johnston insisted that the studios purge their ranks; Schary led the charge against him, backed by independent producers Samuel Goldwyn and Walter Wanger,