The Lives of Robert Ryan

by J. R. Jones

  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, but Johnston carried the day. The MPPA announced that members would no longer employ known communists and would fire the unfriendly witnesses (now labeled the Hollywood Ten), whose actions “have been a disservice to their employers and have impaired their usefulness to the industry.”35

  RKO was the first studio to act, firing Scott and Dmytryk. Schary refused to drop the ax, so Floyd Odlum, chairman of the board, handed the job to Schary’s boss, RKO president Peter Rathvon. Every studio contract included a vaguely worded morals clause allowing the studio to terminate any employee deemed to have disgraced the company. Barred from the lot, their current projects canceled or reassigned to other producers, Scott and Dmytryk turned their attention to the pressing matter of defending themselves against the contempt citations, which could land them in federal prison.

  Support for the unfriendly witnesses wilted. Humphrey Bogart, whose iconic tough-guy persona had been a potent weapon for the CFA, issued a statement describing the PR tour to New York and Washington as “ill-advised a
nd even foolish.”36 He had never been a communist or communist sympathizer, he declared, and he detested communism. The statement caused a collective shudder in Hollywood — if a star of Bogart’s magnitude felt the need to distance himself from the Ten in such strident terms, could anyone be safe? Donations to the Committee for the First Amendment dried up immediately, and members reported pressure to resign. Within three months the organization would fold.

  Amid all this, Berlin Express was still shooting on the RKO lot. The picture’s final scene, with the American and the Russian expressing their fellowship outside the Brandenberg Gate, must have seemed like fantasy now. Closer to the mark was the little speech delivered to the kidnapped peacemaker by the malevolent leader of the right-wing underground: “I too believe in unity. But unlike you I know that people will only unite when they are faced with a crisis, like war. Well, we are still at war; you are not. So we are united; you are not. So we will succeed; you will not.”

  RYAN LIKED TO TELL INTERVIEWERS he wasn’t “a chaser” (which was true — the way women responded to him, he never had to chase anyone). For a man so proud of his family, the affair with Merle Oberon was a strange anomaly, an ongoing adulterous relationship that became an open secret among the cast and crew. Charles Korvin contended that the affair continued on the RKO lot, though production records suggest some turbulence as the picture was drawing to a close. On Wednesday, November 5, Oberon went home sick at noon, forcing Tourneur to scrap the rest of the day’s scenes. The following Monday she didn’t show up for work, and that Friday she left in the middle of the afternoon. According to biographers Higgins and Moseley, she and Ryan never saw each other again after Berlin Express,37 though Ryan and Lucien Ballard would make four more pictures together.*

  Somehow RKO managed to keep the whole mess out of the scandal sheets; however, the much-feared gossip columnist Louella Parsons twitted Ryan about it in a February 1948 profile. (“There had been a lot of talk about feuding in the ‘Berlin Express’ troupe, and I asked Bob if that were true,” wrote Parsons. “I had heard that he and Merle Oberon had been particularly bitter in their quarrel.”)38 From that point on, Ryan’s movie-magazine pictorials stressed fatherhood, with Tim becoming a frequent participant. How Bob and Jessica dealt with the affair would remain private, but soon after he returned from Europe, they decided to buy a house in the San Fernando Valley, far from the Hollywood social scene.

  A certain amount of hobnobbing was required to keep one’s career going, but Jessica didn’t like actors or the parties they threw. “As a wife, you met the same people over and over again,” she wrote in a later memoir, “because they didn’t recognize you unless you were standing right beside your husband, and even then they weren’t always sure you were the wife. It was spooky.” By now she had published her second mystery for Doubleday and was working on a third, but no one was interested in that. She would start conversations with people and then see their eyes darting about in search of someone more important. “If you were a wife you got very tactful about releasing any poor sap quickly to go do business … and then ended up sitting tensely with other tense wives trying their best to look as if they were having a good time.”39

  She reached her limit one night when she and Robert attended a swank party and she was immediately shunted off to the side with her friends Amanda Dunne and Joan Houseman. Robert, Philip Dunne, and John Houseman were off somewhere having lively conversations. “That night Joan Houseman’s solution to the condition of non-being was to retreat to a corner of the vast living room of the vast house and get quietly smashed,” Jessica wrote, “while she stared at the crowd with an expression of splendid French contempt.”40 Amanda and Jessica began tossing back drinks as well, until Amanda stood up suddenly, looking as if she might be ill, and went off in search of a bathroom.

  Left alone, Jessica strolled into the host’s library to find some reading material, and before long Amanda burst into the room, looking rather crazed. “There’s a room full of dead animals out there!” she exclaimed. Jessica followed her back into a coatroom where all the women’s furs were hung. This was too much for Jessica, and she told Robert she was going out for some air. “Once outside in the car, I went quietly into hysterics,” she wrote. “The condition of non-being produces intense anxiety.”41

  On Kling Street, just east of Cahuenga Boulevard in North Hollywood, the Ryans found an A-frame ranch house with a paved terrace and a bare, spacious yard. “It was the biggest house we could get with the most ground for the least money at a time when we still did not trust — I didn’t trust — that the money would keep coming in,” Jessica wrote. “Robert never doubted it, but he had never been as poor as I had been.”42 The couple landscaped the place themselves (planting ivy that eventually ran riot over the house) and began adding wings. The shed in the backyard was converted into Ryan’s private office and workout room. This was the first time Ryan had actually owned a home — his parents had rented all their lives — and the suburban locale suited his reclusive nature.

  The place was modest but comfortable, with plenty of room for the kids to run around; he and Jessica installed a sandbox, a swing set, and a wading pool. “Facing the garden is a wide, airy living room with almost one whole wall of glass, opening onto the terrace,” noted a visiting journalist. “A beautiful antique chest dominates one end. The chairs and divans are tailored and comfortable; the tables low and wide … The muted greens and grays and blues of walls, carpets, and upholstery are brightened by huge bouquets of fresh garden flowers.”43

  Ryan made sure the reporter understood that social gatherings at their home were limited to their close circle of friends, not the movers and shakers of the picture business. He and Jessica were perfectly happy with each other’s company. Philip Dunne would marvel at Ryan’s “tremendous devotion to his family. He was the most family-oriented man I ever knew.”44

  Ryan tending to chores at the new house on Kling Street in North Hollywood. His years there with Jessica and their young children were among his happiest. Robert Ryan Family

  In December 1947, Ryan made a quick trip to Chicago to address the national Conference of Christians and Jews, pinch-hitting for Dore Schary. “He began to be asked to speak before Jewish groups to discuss anti-Semitism,” Jessica recalled. “In the beginning, the doing of it appeared to be for publicity for the movie … but when that phase was over, they wouldn’t let him go. For a long time there he was playing what he called the Synagogue Circuit.”45

  From there Ryan flew to New York to see some plays. Since Crossfire had hit, he had been fielding offers from Broadway, but his calendar for 1948 already was filling up with pictures. RKO announced that he would costar with Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra, and Robert Mitchum in Honored Glory, an episodic drama about nine unidentified men, killed in action during World War II, whose stories make them candidates for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (the film would never be made).46 MGM wanted to borrow Ryan for the revenge drama Act of Violence. And Schary, who had been trumpeting Crossfire as proof that A pictures could be made on B budgets, was ready to move forward with his next such experiment: The Set-Up, a boxing drama about a washed-up fighter staring down his bleak future. The source material was Joseph Moncure March’s narrative poem of the same title, a favorite of Ryan’s at Dartmouth.

  His first assignment that year was RKO’s antiwar parable The Boy with Green Hair, adapted from a short story by Betsy Beaton. Filmed in Technicolor, it starred eleven-year-old Dean Stockwell as a schoolboy who has been passed from relative to relative while his parents are overseas.* Eventually he lands in a bucolic small town with a kindly old Irish-American gent (Pat O’Brien) and begins to make a life for himself, but then he learns the truth about his parents — they were killed in London during the blitz — and the trauma turns his hair green overnight.

  The project had originated with Adrian Scott, himself the adoptive father of a traumatized British war orphan; but after Scott was fired by RKO, Schary handed The Boy with Green H
air over to producer Stephen Ames and firsttime movie director Joseph Losey. A senior at Dartmouth when Ryan was a freshman, Losey had studied with Bertolt Brecht in Germany and in 1935 had traveled to the Soviet Union, where he staged Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty in Moscow. His latest theatrical project had been an acclaimed Broadway production of Brecht’s Galileo, performed in English for the first time and starring Charles Laughton.

  Fresh from the rubble and hungry children of Frankfurt and Berlin, Ryan couldn’t have been more sympathetic to The Boy with Green Hair. His second-billed part consisted of only one extended scene with Stockwell, which took two days to shoot; even so, it would remain one of the picture’s best-liked sequences. At a police station one night, cops fire questions at Peter, the brooding and now bald-headed boy. Ryan plays Dr. Evans, a laid-back child psychologist who arrives with a brown-bag dinner and asks the cops to leave them alone. Children who grew up around the actor would remember his uncondescending manner toward them, and he incorporates it here to fine effect. Evans wordlessly changes the lighting in the room, taking an overhead spot off them, and asks Peter to move to a chair so he can have the bench for his dinner. “Chocolate malted milk,” he notes, frowning into the cup. “I’m sure I asked for strawberry.” They both know it’s a game, but Peter is starving; he takes the malted and digs into a hamburger, and his responses to the doctor’s questions trigger a series of flashbacks.