by J. R. Jones
By August the two school buildings on Moorpark Street had been com pleted, but they were only unfinished concrete shells: the parents would have to finish the buildings and construct a school grounds around them. Chuck Haas — who, with his wife Emilie, became such a devoted backer of the school that Oakwood would later credit them equally with the three founding families — supervised the carpentry work. Bryson Gerard took charge of laying a concrete walk, and Ryan paired off with Sid Harmon to erect a rickety fence around a small yard for the kindergarten. Mothers painted; fathers built furniture. Even then Oakwood was strapped for space; word of the school had spread and enrollment had risen. The school acquired a substantial loan for more building construction, but in the meantime, Gerard suggested that the older children, second through fifth grade, be quietly relocated to parents’ homes.
For several months the fourth- and fifth-grade teacher took up residence in Ryan’s Refuge out in the backyard, while Ryan found refuge elsewhere. Children would come into the house to use the bathroom, Jessica remembered, and afterward might talk to Smith as he gardened or play in the yard with little Lisa trailing after. “Often, having been to the toilet, they would stay inside the house playing with our boys’ things or just wandering around,” she wrote. “It was disconcerting sometimes if one was trying to take a bath or get dressed when one or another unfrustrated child would walk blithely in.”24 This surreptitious home schooling continued until a third building was erected on the Moorpark lot.
THAT SUMMER the Democratic Party, convening at the International Amphitheatre in Chicago, nominated the liberal, well-spoken Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois for president. The Ryans watched on the TV set in their den as Stevenson was chosen on the third draft, beating out Estes Kefauver and Senator Richard Russell of Georgia. “Robert let out a whoop of joy — a whoop repeated that day, I have no doubt, in thousands, no, millions of Democrat homes, ranch-style or otherwise,” wrote Jessica in a later magazine piece that would never see publication.25
In accepting the nomination, Stevenson promised to “talk sense to the American people,” and he made good on that promise in late August when he attacked red-baiting in a speech to the American Legion convention in New York. “True patriotism, it seems to me, is based on tolerance and a large measure of humility,” Stevenson declared, denouncing those who would ex ploit patriotic feeling to oppress minority groups or silence minority opinions. “The tragedy of our day is the climate of fear in which we live, and fear breeds repression. Too often sinister threats to the Bill of Rights, to freedom of the mind, are concealed under the patriotic cloak of anticommunism.”26
Ryan was itching to get involved in the campaign, though as Jessica would observe, many actors still were skittish about supporting liberal candidates; to the self-appointed cops who published red-baiting pamphlets, the merest hint of involvement in the Progressive Party or Henry Wallace’s 1948 presidential bid was considered subversive. A Hollywood for Stevenson committee was formed, and Dore Schary hosted a glamorous launch party at his home in Brentwood; though Jessica noticed a heavy star quotient, she attributed that to Schary more than Stevenson: “When the head of MGM called, you went!”27 She and Robert shook hands with Stevenson and had their picture taken with him and Schary. Then in mid-October, Ryan got a call from screenwriter Allen Rivkin, head of Hollywood for Stevenson. Rivkin was having trouble finding stars to take part in a rally on Wednesday, October 15, at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, so the Ryans made the trip, joining Mercedes McCambridge, Lauren Bacall, and Humphrey Bogart.
Despite his gangster image, Bogart was a cultured man who had grown up in New York City as a child of privilege just like Ryan. The two men got along well; Ryan especially appreciated the fact that Bogart always turned up on time. “Bogey is the only other man in town with a punctuality complex,” he once joked to a fan magazine. “He’s a great comfort to me and the hours we’ve spent waiting for parties to start have allowed us to become intimately acquainted.”28 Appearing at the Cow Palace without his toupee, Bogart did a little comedy routine in his familiar tough-guy persona, ordering the audience to vote for Stevenson or else; Ryan spoke extemporaneously, giving what Jessica considered “a short, articulate, knowledgeable and sometimes funny speech.”29 Ryan claimed he had spoken off the top of his head, and though Jessica knew he had prepared carefully, she still was floored by his poise.
Soon after this the Ryans traveled out to the East Coast to campaign for Stevenson in the final week before Election Day, and during the trip they traveled with Bogart and Bacall. The couples had adjoining rooms at the Statler Hotel in Boston, where the three stars appeared at a rally at Mechanics Hall. “Robert did his extempore thing, but it was strikingly changed from the Cow Palace,” wrote Jessica. “He had familiars before him, Irish city machine politicians, and the blood of Old Tim rose; he almost talked with a brogue, not a new experience for me.”
Back at the hotel Ryan and Bogart invited their driver up for a drink, though Ryan made “a slightly slurring remark” to Jessica that the little Irishman was “a typical ward heeler.”30 The man had no interest in the Stevenson campaign, only the local races that affected patronage hiring. “Bogart and Betty listened with distress and horror, Bogart particularly,” Jessica observed. Ryan enjoyed the experience, always amused to see Hollywood liberals confronted by the sort of down-and-dirty machine politics he had known as a child in Chicago.
The next day began with a breakfast for Governor Stevenson that was being hosted by Governor Paul Dever of Massachusetts at a Cambridge hotel. Out in the hall, Ryan was approached for directions to the breakfast by the young Congressman John Kennedy, who was running for the US Senate against the moderate Republican Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. — and whose father, Joseph, had formed RKO back in 1928. When Ryan introduced himself, Kennedy replied, “I know who you are.”31
After breakfast the Ryans and Bogarts joined a daylong motorcade through the southeast suburbs of Boston. As they neared each stop and the caravan slowed to a crawl, gawkers would move down the line of cars looking for celebrities and waving and yelling at Ryan and the Bogarts. When they peered in at Jessica, though, their faces darkened. “It wasn’t the first time I’d experienced this strange hostility from people who had come to see movie stars and suddenly were cheated by people who weren’t anybody being there too,” she wrote in her notes.32 Bogart won her heart by yelling at fans through the window glass that she was Rosalind Russell, which some of them seemed to buy. Jessica had always swooned for Bogart in the movies, and in person she found him “a bright, gentle, warm, human being…. Sure, there had always been crazy stories about him in Hollywood. He drank a lot and fought with various wives … that’s what they said. It was nothing to me. Bogart was a gentleman.”33 Also a comedian: at one point, when he and Ryan had been signing autographs, Bogart observed, “I notice that your fans are younger than mine, and I don’t like that.”34
There followed a whistle-stop tour from Boston to New York City, where Stevenson addressed a late-night rally in Harlem. Walking down 125th Street toward the Hotel Theresa, Jessica got separated from the group, and Ryan was mobbed in the lobby of the hotel until none other than boxer Joe Louis pulled him out of the crowd to safety. “Respect from the champ,” Jessica wrote. “R has always had respect from them. They recognized in the fight pictures he made that he really knew how to box. They all value him for making The Set-Up.”35 Louis took Ryan out a back exit and enlisted a friend to drive the actor back to his own hotel.
New York City was the final stop on the campaign swing, with a giant rally at Madison Square Garden on Wednesday, October 29. Broadcast live on TV, the program opened with a chorus singing “Stevenson for President” (updated from the old Gershwin tune “Wintergreen for President”). Ryan was supposed to speak first, but through some miscommunication he missed his cue. When he heard himself announced over the loudspeakers, he had to race for the stage. On-screen there was an awkward moment of dead air before a singer launched ba
ck into the song and the other performers shifted around nervously; more than a minute passed before the star appeared to recite his piece. Ryan was angry and embarrassed about the incident, though it seemed to be par for the course in the chronically unorganized campaign.
Election night brought heartache when General Dwight D. Eisenhower handily defeated Stevenson with 55 percent of the popular vote. Ryan was devastated; he generally took a live-and-let-live attitude toward Republicans, but he despised Eisenhower. “My father’s hatred of Eisenhower was over the top,” said his son Cheyney. “And it would always come out as, ‘You can’t let the military do anything. You can’t let a general do anything. Generals and officers just screw it up.’”36 Not only did the Eisenhower victory usher in four years of Republican supremacy, with functional majorities in the House and Senate, it elevated Richard Nixon to the vice presidency, only two years after he had destroyed Helen Gahagan Douglas. At one point during the campaign swing, Jessica was amused when some idiot thought Ryan was Dick Nixon. “It was many long years before I ever told Ryan that someone had taken him for Nixon,” she wrote. “But even that many years after the fact he still got furious.”37
BY THE END OF 1952 about seventeen million homes in the United States had TV sets; the figure had doubled in just two years. The Hollywood studios, scrambling to meet this new assault on their viewership, embraced a strategy of playing up technological innovations that couldn’t be reproduced by a cathode ray tube. At Twentieth Century Fox, Darryl F. Zanuck had placed a large bet on CinemaScope, mounting the widescreen biblical epic The Robe, but while that was in preproduction, the independent Arch Oboler Productions made a small fortune with the first 3-D feature, a low-rent jungle adventure called Bwana Devil. Eager to jump on this bandwagon, Zanuck decided that The Waterhole, a desert survival drama to be directed by Englishman Roy Ward Baker, would be shot in 3-D.
Baker had made two pictures for Fox already (the second a creepy thriller with Richard Widmark and Marilyn Monroe called Don’t Bother to Knock), and he was fascinated by the long stretches of action in Francis Cockrell’s short story “The Waterhole,” about a spoiled millionaire stranded in the Mojave Desert by his scheming wife and her lover. “I had always had an ambition to make a picture in which the leading character spends long periods alone on the screen, where the interest would be in what he does, rather than what he says,” Baker wrote.38 To handle the complicated process of shooting in 3-D, Baker recruited cinematographer Lucien Ballard, who had worked with him on Don’t Bother to Knock.
Ryan couldn’t have been pleased to hear that Ballard was on the picture, having slept with his wife throughout production of Berlin Express, but apparently the shoot passed without incident. Merle Oberon had left Ballard in 1948, shortly after her affair with Ryan, taking up with an Italian shipping magnate. Ironically, an adulterous affair lay at the center of the new picture (later retitled Inferno), yet that element of the story was confined almost entirely to William Lundigan and redheaded Rhonda Fleming as the conniving lovers. Ryan’s scenes as the beleaguered millionaire, shot in the Mojave near Apple Valley, California, were almost entirely wordless (though a superfluous internal monologue would be dubbed in later). Ryan always rose to a creative challenge, and he loved Baker’s idea of shooting a modern silent picture; in fact, the idea of a man trapped in a hellish desert terrain recalled the climax of one of the great silent features, Eric von Stroheim’s Greed (1925).
Stereoscopic images had been around since the early nineteenth century, and the anaglyph process, which split the image into red and green and recombined them with polaroid glasses, dated back to the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Over the years people had tried to release stereoscopic films, but the big studios had never gotten involved until now: Inferno would join a surge of 3-D releases that year, including MGM’s Kiss Me Kate, Warner Bros.’ House of Wax, and Universal’s It Came from Outer Space. Baker described the contraption he and Ballard were using: “Two cameras were bolted onto a large plate at right angles to each other and mounted on the usual dolly. A polar screen was placed in front of the lens of each camera and the two screens were set in opposition to each other. A two-way mirror was set in front of both cameras at 45 degrees: the right-hand camera shot straight through the mirror and the left-hand camera received the mirror image, which was then [flipped] in the processing so as to present it the right way round…. The cameras were interlocked and run in synch. Thus we had two matching films, left eye and right eye.”39
This setup was so unobtrusive that Fleming didn’t even realize until later that the picture was being shot in 3-D.40 Baker mainly avoided the gimmickry of objects flying toward the camera; he was more interested in the way 3-D allowed him to place his actors in front of mountain ranges and capture the skyline in all its wondrous depth.
Four years earlier Ryan had played a fictionalized version of Howard Hughes in Caught, and now he had been cast as another capricious millionaire wrestling with the limits of his wealth. Like Hughes, Donald W. Carsons II disappears on people; his secretary refers to his desk as “the bottleneck,” and his second-in-command at the mining firm is paralyzed waiting for the boss’s signature. “I think he’s always had the fear that without his money he’d be nothing, helpless,” the executive remarks at one point. Meanwhile in the desert, Carsons is discovering the exact opposite: stranded on a mountainside with a broken leg, he manages to straighten the leg, bind himself with splints, lower himself down the rocks to the ground, find a water hole under the surface of the sand, and kill a deer for food. The rock-climbing sequences rival those in The Naked Spur, particularly the tense moment when Carsons lowers himself past a rattler coiling on a rock ledge.
The picture ended with Carsons being rescued, his wife returning guiltily to his side, and her lover, Duncan, fleeing for Mexico. But when Zanuck saw this cut, he decided the picture needed a slam-bang ending that would deliver on the promise of 3-D action. Assisted by fight choreographer Dick Talmadge, Baker staged a scene in which Duncan trails Carsons to a little shack where he’s being sheltered by a local desert rat (Henry Hull); the antagonists go after each other, a flung oil lamp ignites the shack, and Carsons is pulled to safety while the flaming roof caves in on Duncan (in a hair-raising point-of-view shot, to make Zanuck happy).
Retitled Inferno, the picture opened in London, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, but so few theaters in the United States were equipped for 3-D projection that it never got a wide release and soon disappeared, despite strong reviews that singled out Ryan’s work. The picture’s failure was disappointing to him; interviewed in the early ’70s, Ryan would list his best screen work as Crossfire, The Set-Up, God’s Little Acre, and “a picture nobody ever heard of called Inferno which I made for Fox.”41
THAT SUMMER the Ryans rented a beach house in Malibu. The children — seven-year-old Tim, five-year-old Cheyney, and little Lisa, coming up on her second birthday — frolicked in the waves as their parents read or had drinks with Joan and John Houseman, who had a house nearby. Ryan was shooting Alaska Seas, a romantic drama with Jan Sterling and Brian Keith, as part of a two-picture deal with Paramount. The studio that had given him bit parts and then dropped him in 1940 was now paying him $125,000 per picture. The Ryans lived modestly out in the Valley, and the summer rental was something they could easily afford. Besides movies, Ryan moonlighted on radio and TV, and a few years earlier he had signed a lucrative deal as a pitchman for Chesterfield cigarettes. His business manager, Henry Bamberger, advised him to invest in real estate, and Ryan had bought several apartment buildings, as well as a shopping mall in Beverly Hills. Then there was the school, which would cost the Ryans some $40,000 by the end of the decade.42
Houseman, who understood that Ryan was “trying to shed the stigma of playing only brutal and violent parts,”43 recruited him for Her Twelve Men, a women’s picture he was producing at MGM with Greer Garson. The British actress had been at MGM since Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939), but at forty-eight she was nearing the e
nd of her tenure at the studio; shot in color, this last picture evoked Mr. Chips with its story of a beloved teacher at a tony boarding school for boys, coincidentally named the Oaks. Ryan played another teacher at the school and, eventually, Garson’s love interest, but the script was weak. Shortly after the cameras began rolling in August, Houseman disappeared, busy with the editing of Julius Caesar and the preproduction for Executive Suite, and Ryan fended for himself with director Robert Z. Leonard, a longtime MGM hack who had been making pictures since Ryan was in short pants.
The tweedy, upper-class world of the Oaks stood in ironic contrast to the Oakwood School, which seemed to be spinning out of control. The founding parents had launched the school with no clear vision for how it should operate; that had come mainly from Bryson Gerard, who modeled the parent-teacher partnership after Quaker meetings with their vigorous debate and eventual consensus. This proved unworkable: a like-minded congregation might arrive at this “sense of the meeting,” but the Oakwood parents more often fell prey to bickering, backbiting, and political point scoring. The group had split into two factions: a radical wing that kept trying to use the school as a political arena, and the more responsible parents who had sunk their own money into the project. According to Jessica’s memoir, one father, a blacklisted writer, refused to admit a student whose father had informed on him to HUAC; this angered oilman Ross Cabeen, who thought they should keep their politics out of the school.
Gerard had arrived with plenty of ideas about hands-on learning, his curriculum “built around hand-crafts, bug, tree, rock, and bird studies, cook-outs, animal husbandry, and camping trips,” as Jessica reported. The children sang, danced, and acted in plays. But two years in, parents were beginning to complain that their children couldn’t read. When Jessica conferred with Tim’s teacher about his slow progress in reading and writing, the teacher blamed Gerard for failing to provide the proper teaching materials. Mothers were getting back to her with reports that the staff couldn’t get a curriculum or any supervision from him. Rumors were circulating that he had been avoiding parents, and Wendy Cabeen wanted him out.