by J. R. Jones
Two more productions — Goldoni’s Servant of Two Masters, which had been one of Reinhardt’s early triumphs, and Holiday, a romantic comedy by Phillip Barry that had become a screen hit for Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant — followed before the end of the year’s study, at which point the two newlyweds began to reckon with the question of money. As the story goes, word came shortly after their wedding that Ryan’s oil well in Michigan had run dry, which meant an end to their steady dividend.
They supported themselves as best they could: Ryan worked as an assistant director to Reinhardt and taught boxing lessons for a dollar a pop, but Jessica was the real breadwinner, modeling for a photographer and then hiring on with vaudeville producers Franchon and Marco as a chorus girl at the Paramount Theater. “It was a rugged job, and she hated it,” Ryan would write, “but it made it possible for me to work and study and pound on doors and try a little longer to make somebody believe I could really act.”17 The first agent Ryan approached told him to go out the door and come back in again. “Make an entrance. Get it?” When Ryan did, the agent said, “Go back to Chicago.”18
From the house they had rented after their marriage, they moved to a small cottage and then to an apartment above someone’s garage. Their situation was precarious, but Ryan was relatively sanguine. “I thought of what had happened to my father and knew that it was worse than useless to worry,” he recalled. “The moment I stopped worrying, things began to come right for us.”19
In late December 1939, Reinhardt cast Ryan in a commercial production of Somerset Maugham’s drawing room farce Too Many Husbands, to open the following month at the Belasco Theater in Los Angeles. Promoted as “a saucy comedy with music,” the play centered on a woman who believes her first husband has been killed in action during the Great War and takes a second, only to have the first return home; by then she has a child by each man. Marsha Hunt, a young actress who had recently signed to MGM, went to see a friend in the play and was struck by Ryan and the other male lead, former Olympic shot putter Bruce Bennett. “They were remarkable, both of them,” Hunt recalled. “Tall, wonderfully good-looking but, most of all, graceful in their movements onstage.”20 The engagement brought Ryan his first serious attention around town, and by the end of its run a casting director for Paramount Pictures had recommended him to director Edward Dmytryk for the lead in Golden Gloves, an upcoming picture about amateur boxing.
Golden Gloves told the story of a young fighter, mixed up with a crooked promoter, who sees the error of his ways and throws in with a crusading journalist to clean up the sport.† Dmytryk shot a screen test with Ryan as the fighter, then decided to give the role to Richard Denning; as a consolation prize he cast Ryan as Denning’s opponent in the climactic bout. They began shooting the fight in mid-December and finished in seven days; given nothing but a soundstage and three hundred extras, Dmytryk managed to evoke an entire stadium by dimming the lights on the audience, as at a real fight, and using bee smokers to create a cigarette haze over the crowd. Dmytryk was impressed with Ryan in the ring: “He was 6′ 4″, weighed 198 pounds, boxed beautifully, and hit like a mule. He tapped Denning in the ribs during their fight, and Dick made three trips to the hospital for X-rays. To this day he insists his ribs were broken, though the pictures showed nary a crack.”21
With the role came a contract as a stock player at Paramount for $125 a week, and the chance to experience a moviemaking operation from the inside. As Ryan sat with photographers and makeup artists and casting people, his physical attributes were evaluated with cold precision. At thirty years old, he was a seriously handsome Black Irishman, lean and muscular, with a strong jaw and a warm, brilliant smile. Yet his forehead was already lined from years of hard labor, and his brown, crinkly eyes were rather small in his face; if he narrowed them even slightly, they took on a beady, menacing quality. His height was impressive but hardly ideal for someone trying to get a leg up in supporting roles. “The men stars wouldn’t have me in a picture with them,” he recalled. “I towered over so many of them.”22
Paramount threw him bit roles: one morning in January 1940 he shot a scene for Queen of the Mob, based on the story of Kate “Ma” Barker and the Barker-Karpis gang, and a month later he put in two days playing an ambulance driver, barely glimpsed on-screen, in the Bob Hope comedy The Ghost Breakers. From mid-March to early May he was a Canadian mountie in Cecil B. DeMille’s North West Mounted Police, starring Gary Cooper and Madeleine Carroll, and that same month he played a train passenger in the nondescript western The Texas Rangers Ride Again. Ryan was disappointed but not exactly surprised when Paramount cut him loose after six months. Rather than hanging around Hollywood, waiting for something to happen, he and Jessica resolved to look for stage work in New York.
Back in Manhattan, the couple scraped by on Jessica’s modeling gigs and whatever Ryan could find. A year after Hitler’s invasion of Poland had ignited the war in Europe, President Roosevelt succeeded in passing the Selective Service Act, which established the country’s first peacetime draft and required the registration of all men from twenty-one to thirty-five years old. As a married man, Ryan was unlikely to be drafted soon or at all, but Jessica was horrified by the idea of him going to war. Ryan “believed that people should fight their own fights,” their son, Cheyney, later wrote. “Hence, if you believed in a war, you should be ready to fight it yourself.” Yet Jessica had been raised to believe that all war was immoral. “For her, war was not a story of people fighting their own fights. It was one of the privileged sending others to pay the costs while they reaped the benefits and attacked the patriotism of others along the way.”23
By June 1941 they had hired on at the Millpond Playhouse, a summer stock theater in Roslyn, Long Island. The productions tended toward mystery and comedy; the company, Ryan recalled, was “appalling, being mostly bad amateurs.”24 In The Barker he played a carnival barker and Jessica a hootchie cootchie dancer; two weeks later they costarred again in something called Petticoat Fever. Millpond staged a mystery play Jessica had written, The Dark Corner, and in the comedy Angel Child, Ryan costarred with twenty-two-year-old Cameron Mitchell. The highlight of the season was William Saroyan’s philosophical barroom comedy The Time of Your Life, starring Ryan as the rich drunk, Joe, who encourages the other barflies to live life to the fullest.
The Ryans bailed out soon afterward, landing first at the Robin Hood Theater in Arden, Delaware, and then at the Cape Playhouse in Dennis, Massachusetts, where Ryan won a romantic role opposite the celebrated Luise Rainer in J. M. Barrie’s comic fantasy A Kiss for Cinderella. Set in London during World War I, the class-conscious fantasy told the story of a poor cleaning woman, played by Rainer, who dreams that she is Cinderella and the neighborhood constable, to be played by Ryan, is Prince Charming. This guy is going to be a big star, thought Robert Wallsten, a fellow cast member, as he watched Ryan rehearse. “I had no idea about his dramatic ability, and playing this Irish bobby was not a very serious role. But he had a corner on that Irish charm, and there was that magic grin…. It was the smile that was so warm and engulfing, and so endearing.”25 Wallsten would become one of the Ryans’ oldest friends.
From Dennis the production moved to the Maplewood Theatre in Maplewood, New Jersey, where Ryan caught an extraordinary break. Rainer had been married to Clifford Odets, a founder of the Group Theatre and one of the most daring American playwrights of the day (Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing!); with the recent demise of the Group, Odets had sold his play Clash by Night to showbiz impresario Billy Rose, who was mounting a Broadway production with Lee Strasberg, another Group founder, as director. The play dealt with an unhappy working-class couple on Staten Island, but in a larger sense it considered the restive political mood in America as the war in Europe raged on. Tallulah Bankhead, hailed for her recent performance in Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, had signed to play the bored and frustrated wife; Lee J. Cobb, among the Group’s most gifted actors, was cast as her dense but devoted husband; and Joseph
Schildkraut, a longtime stage and screen veteran who had won an Oscar playing Alfred Dreyfus in The Life of Émile Zola, was the husband’s cynical friend, who moves in on the wife. For the minor role of Joe Doyle, a young neighbor with romantic problems of his own, Rainer urged Odets to consider her handsome young lead in A Kiss for Cinderella.
Rose took Bankhead out to Maplewood to see the show, and she liked Ryan. Soon after A Kiss for Cinderella closed on September 23, 1941, he was rehearsing Clash by Night in New York City. One can only imagine his excitement: four months earlier he had been slugging it out at the Millpond Playhouse, and now he would be making his Broadway debut in a cutting-edge social drama, alongside some of the most respected talents in the American theater. He had seen Bankhead in The Little Foxes and thought her an extraordinary actress.26 A world-class diva, she could be witheringly cruel to colleagues, but she took a shine to him during rehearsals. When he introduced her to Jessica, who had been modeling to help meet the rent, Bankhead quipped, “If I was fifteen years younger I’d take him away from you.”27 The Ryans laughed, though Jessica couldn’t have been too pleased. She would spend the next thirty years meeting women who were less frank but similarly inclined.
“Tallulah was a stereotype of what the public thinks star actresses are like: they really aren’t except in her case,” Ryan would remember. “She liked some kind of excitement going on and didn’t much care where it came from.” At the same time Bankhead was a consummate professional, the first to arrive and the last to leave, and always with her part down cold. She might challenge Strasberg or Odets in rehearsal, yet in performance she could be remarkably generous toward other players. “She was a great experience,” Ryan would conclude, “and she came along at a most important time in my life.”28
Unfortunately, the production quickly degenerated into a snake pit of professional rivalries and personal grudges, from which Ryan was lucky enough to be excepted. Bankhead despised Billy Rose, a diminutive casting-couch type whose theatrical résumé consisted mainly of brassy revues. “He approached the Odets play as if he were putting on a rodeo,” she later wrote.29 An elegant presence onstage, Bankhead had taken the role of the drab housewife as a dramatic stretch, but when the play began its out-of-town tryouts in Detroit, critics decided she had been miscast, favoring Lee Cobb’s performance as the husband. “That was when the shit hit the fan,” Ryan remembered.30 Bankhead and Katherine Locke, who played Ryan’s girlfriend, soon fell out, united by nothing except their dislike of Schildkraut, whom Locke later accused of putting the moves on her.31
Though some of these conflicts sprang from ego or personal enmity, the production was built on an artistic fault line that would become more apparent in years to come: on one side were the more traditionally trained actors such as Ryan, Bankhead, and Schildkraut, and on the other were proponents of the Method such as Cobb and Strasberg, the latter of whom would institutionalize the techniques of tapping into one’s own emotional experience when he founded the Actors Studio six years later. Method acting could be fresh, genuine, even explosive, but it could also be unpredictable and inconsistent from night to night. Cobb, the most ardent Method actor among the cast, often seemed to be working through his role onstage, and for someone such as Bankhead, playing against him was one curveball after another. Ryan sympathized with her, and later in his career, colleagues would note his annoyance and even anger over onstage surprises.
From Detroit, Clash by Night moved on to Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia, where Bankhead came down with pneumonia and the show was shut down (as the star, she had no understudy). While the cast and crew cooled their heels in New York, waiting for her to recover, Ryan scored an interview for the lead role in a Hollywood prestige picture to begin shooting the next year. Pare Lorentz — whose acclaimed documentary shorts The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1938) had won him a brief but controversial tenure as director of the US Film Office — had signed with RKO Radio Pictures to direct a dramatic feature about a war veteran trying to make ends meet during the Depression, to be titled Name, Age and Occupation. For six months he had been crisscrossing the country in search of an actor skillful enough to play the role but credible enough to function in the semidocumentary format Lorentz envisioned. Finally, he turned to his friend John Houseman, an erudite British producer who had collaborated famously with Orson Welles.
Working for the Federal Theatre Project, Houseman and Welles had staged the “voodoo” Macbeth (1935), which transplanted the Shakespeare play to a Caribbean island, and the proletarian musical The Cradle Will Rock (1937), which proved too hot for the government and inspired them to launch the independent Mercury Theatre. Houseman and Welles had gone on to create the CBS radio broadcast The War of the Worlds, which had terrified the nation with its too-convincing account of a martian invasion, and the RKO drama Citizen Kane (1941), whose critical acclaim had now emboldened the studio to bankroll Lorentz’s ambitious project. Houseman arranged for Lorentz and himself to spend a week interviewing actors in a Manhattan hotel suite. When Ryan arrived to read for the part, his acting must have impressed them, but what really won over Lorentz was Ryan’s endless litany of soul-crushing jobs in the depths of the Depression. Here was a man who not only could play the part but already had lived it.
In the 1972 memoir Run-Through, Houseman would remember traveling by train with Lorentz through western Kansas and hearing on the radio in the club car that the Imperial Japanese Navy had attacked the US air base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, killing and wounding thousands of Americans. The next day the United States and United Kingdom declared war on Japan. Three weeks later, Clash by Night opened on Broadway at the Belasco Theatre, its take on the national mood decisively outpaced by world events. Reviews were scathing, though the players got good notices for their work, Ryan included; most critics went to town on Odets, citing a lack of passion and fresh characterization. The play closed on February 7, 1942, after only forty-nine performances, but not before Ryan was seen by such luminaries as Greta Garbo, Judith Anderson, Ruth Gordon, and Thornton Wilder.
“Ryan’s was a small part,” remembered Tony Randall, then a young actor starting out in New York, “but he was very, very good.”32 According to one news story, Ryan was “showered” with offers from New York producers, including one from the Theater Guild to appear in a new play with Katharine Hepburn.33 The attention went to his head. He would remember “swaggering” into Bankhead’s dressing room one night and “demanding to know how long it was going to take before I was a really great actor. I expected her to say a year or so. But instead she said very quietly, ‘In 15 or 20 years you may be a good actor, Bob — if you’re lucky.’”34
*For more on this fascinating topic, see Martha Hope Bacon, Mothers of Feminism: The Story of Quaker Women in America (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986).
†The picture was loosely based on the story of Arch Ward, a Chicago Tribune sports editor who had founded the tournament in the 1920s.
three
Bombs Away
Soon after the Odets play breathed its last, Ryan found himself in Tennessee shooting locations for Name, Age and Occupation with director Pare Lorentz and actress Frances Dee. The movie’s story dated back to a novel Lorentz had begun in 1931: an eighteen-year-old boy from North Carolina fights overseas in the Great War but finds nothing waiting for him back home except a series of dehumanizing farm and factory jobs. As Houseman explained, the movie would explore “the condition of the US industrial worker with special emphasis on the economic and emotional effects of the production line.”1
Lorentz already had tried mixing actors with real people, to less than stellar effect, in his documentary The Fight for Life (1940), about the Chicago Maternity Center and infant mortality in the slums. But George Schaefer, president of Radio-Keith-Orpheum, was prepared to take a gamble on the director; before Ryan even reported for work, Lorentz and cinematographer Floyd Crosby had spent twenty days shooting industrial operations at Ford’s River Roug
e Plant and a US Army facility. Location shooting continued through the spring, and in June the company arrived in Los Angeles to spend four weeks shooting interiors on the Pathé lot in Culver City.
That same month, fed up with Schaefer’s artistic pretensions and dismal bottom line, the RKO board replaced him with N. Peter Rathvon and installed Ned Depinet as president of the movie division, RKO Radio Pictures. Charles Koerner, the new, commercial-minded head of production, immediately targeted two runaway films: It’s All True, which Orson Welles had been shooting in Brazil since early that year, and Name, Age and Occupation. Lorentz, observed director Edward Dmytryk, was “a fine critic, a top maker of documentaries, but completely lost in straight drama. After 90 days of shooting, he was 87 days behind schedule.”2
Ryan on location with director Pare Lorentz for the ill-fated Name, Age and Occupation. Their RKO colleague Edward Dmytryk called Lorentz “a fine critic, a top maker of documentaries, but completely lost in straight drama. After 90 days of shooting, he was 87 days behind schedule.” Robert Ryan Family
In late June, RKO halted production of Name, Age and Occupation and asked Lorentz for a financial accounting.3 He must have seen the writing on the wall when Koerner announced his production plans for 1942–43: $12 million was budgeted for only forty-five features, and in contrast to the literary projects favored by his predecessor, RKO would be aiming for good, solid box office by making patriotic movies for the home front. Name, Age and Occupation, with its Depression setting and heavy themes, hardly filled that bill, and after screening rushes, RKO executives killed the project.