The Lives of Robert Ryan. J.R. Jones

Deal funding to the city. He went out on a limb politically with his vocal advocacy of open housing and school integration. To some extent this was pure politics: his success at drawing blacks away from the Republican Party contributed to his success at the polls. But Kelly acted too, appointing blacks to more influential posts, working to integrate the police department, and, at one point, shutting down a local screening of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. “The time is not far away,” he told one audience, “when we shall forget the color of a man’s skin and see him only in the light of intelligence in his mind and soul.”³⁷

      Now Big Ed would come through for the Ryans one more time, with a white-collar patronage job for Tim’s aimless son. Bob joined the Department of Education as an assistant vice superintendent, though his job consisted of little more than filling requisitions for school supplies. Under the leadership of James B. McCahey, a coal company executive and crony of the mayor’s, the board had developed a reputation to rival the sanitary district’s; local muck-raker Elmer Lynn Williams called it “the most corrupt Board of Education that ever cursed the Chicago schools.”³⁸ Down in his little basement office, Ryan recalled, he “had little to do except combat hangovers,”³⁹ so he spent a good deal of time writing, an infraction ignored by the other patronage hires. The boredom drove him mad — this was everything he’d struggled to avoid in his vagabonding days. He was pushing thirty, his father was dead, and he still hadn’t decided what to do with his life.

      The answer came to him one afternoon when he ran into a friend and she talked him into taking a role in a local theater production. Despite his passion for theater, Bob could be painfully inhibited; he still winced at the memory of delivering a speech in grade school and hearing laughter ripple through the audience when his voice cracked. But he took the role, and something happened. “I never even thought of acting until I was twenty-eight,” he later recalled. “The first minute I got on the stage, I thought, ‘Bing! This is it.’”⁴⁰

      Electrified by the experience, Bob signed up for acting classes with Edward Boyle, a stock company actor who charged five dollars a week. “What an audience most likes to feel in an actor is decision,” Boyle would tell him. “Always keep saying to yourself, ‘Decision, decision, decision.’”⁴¹ After Bob’s mother informed him that the Stickney School, whose upper classes were college preparatory instruction for girls, would have to cancel its senior class play because the drama coach had taken ill, Bob managed to convince the principal that he was an experienced stage director and took over the production. The play was J. M. Barrie’s comic fantasy Dear Brutus, and the performance, on May 6, 1938, went off reasonably well. “With kindest regards for the first person who ever wanted my autograph,” Bob would write on a program for a friend.⁴²

      Bob silently hatched a plan that would get him out of Chicago for good: over the next couple of years, he would save a few thousand dollars, move to Los Angeles, and enroll in the acting school at the Pasadena Playhouse. In another era he might have set his sights on New York, but Bob was still smitten with the movies. “The very mention of them excites the imagination and stirs the blood,” he’d written in a high school essay. “We may walk out of our own world into another.”⁴³ By now his focus had shifted from Douglas Fairbanks to the new generation of talking actors: Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, and James Cagney, the latter of whom had become a star playing a Chicago gangster in The Public Enemy.

      His ticket out of town arrived in summer 1938. Years later a couple of news stories about Ryan would refer to an inheritance, but the story most frequently told had him unexpectedly striking it rich on a friend’s oil well near Niles, Michigan, his three hundred dollars’ worth of stock paying a sudden dividend of two thousand dollars. His mother was dumbfounded when he informed her of his plan. “You can’t earn a living that way,” she insisted. “This little acting group you play with is nice, as a hobby. But I know you. You can’t act.”⁴⁴ Act he would, and before long he had kissed his mother good-bye and boarded a westbound train from Union Station. Surely his father would have disapproved. “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child!”⁴⁵ But then, if his father hadn’t struck out on his own as a young man, he would have spent his life caulking boats in Lockport, Illinois. Whatever sort of life Bob found for himself in Los Angeles, at the very least it would be his own.

*His death predated by only a few months the first recorded cases of the Spanish influenza, which would kill at least half a million people in the United States alone.

*Countless news stories would misreport that Ryan retired from collegiate boxing undefeated; in fact, Dartmouth yearbooks indicate he lost to his opponent at Western Maryland College on a close decision in the 1930 season and fought his opponent at University of New Hampshire to a draw in the 1931 season.

       two

      The Mysterious Spirit

      She was gorgeous. Five-foot-seven at least, with dark red hair and cutting, observant brown eyes. Ryan first spotted her in the hallway of the Max Reinhardt School of the Theater on Sunset Boulevard. He had arrived in Los Angeles to discover that the theater school at the Pasadena Playhouse was full, but a fellow named Jack Smart, whom he had met through a girlfriend in Chicago, recommended the Reinhardt School, which had opened just that summer. As Ryan liked to tell it, he decided to enroll the moment he saw the girl in the hallway. Through a school administrator he managed to arrange an introduction; her name was Jessica Cadwalader, she was studying acting as well, and they would begin classes together the next day with Professor Reinhardt. Feeling impetuous, Ryan asked her to dinner, and she accepted.

      Jessica Cadwalader was twenty-three, born in Los Angeles to Quaker parents and, after they divorced, raised in Berkeley by her mother. She had graduated from the private Anna Head School, where she had been a tennis champ, and shortly thereafter she boarded a bus for New York City, where she found an apartment in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Midtown Manhattan, took modeling jobs through a Park Avenue agency, and tried to establish herself as an actress under the name Jessica Cheyney. For some time she had performed with the Wayfarers, a theater group in San Francisco. Now she was back in Los Angeles looking for movie work; she had been an extra in the W. C. Fields comedy Poppy (1936) and gotten a line, only to see it cut, in the Gary Cooper drama The Adventures of Marco Polo (1938). She was formidably well read despite the fact that she had never attended college, and she looked a little startled at dinner when Ryan informed her that the piece he had been rehearsing for the first class was no less than Hamlet’s second soliloquy. He wanted to get Reinhardt’s attention.

      As Jessica already knew, Reinhardt’s attention was a force to be reckoned with. Quiet and stout, with hypnotic blue eyes, the aging Austrian studied you so intensely, and listened with such force, that he seemed to be penetrating your very soul. Reinhardt had made his name in Europe and the United States with spectacular, expressionist stagings of Everyman (for the Salzburg Festival, which he cofounded in 1920 with Richard Strauss), The Miracle, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. His 1934 production of the latter at the Hollywood Bowl became the talk of the town, and the following year Warner Bros. hired him to direct a lavish screen version with James Cagney, Olivia de Havilland, and Mickey Rooney. Born to Jewish parents in Austria-Hungary, Reinhardt had fled the Third Reich in 1938 and settled in Los Angeles. Though he never managed to land another movie assignment, he continued to direct stage productions on both coasts; in fact, the new school would serve as a workshop for plays he wanted to mount commercially.

      Jessica braced herself the next day as her new friend from Chicago came forward to butcher Hamlet’s second soliloquy: “O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain! My tables — meet it is I set it down / That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain!”¹ Reinhardt’s only response was, “With training …”² Ryan took this as a great triumph when Jessica spoke to him afterward. “There is a young man who has just enrolled that I like very much,” she reportedly wrote to her mother, “but he’s the worst actor I’ve ever seen in my life.”³