by J. R. Jones
Jessica called a meeting to clear the air, and the parents unloaded on Gerard, their grievances seeming to come from all directions. As she recalled it, the radical wing argued that Oakwood should be “making a contribution to the community” by “having a series of lectures and discussion groups — child psychology, adult psychology, ceramics, noted psychoanalysts, political experts.” It should “take political action in terms of the reactionary forces in the public school system, fighting for higher salaries, smaller classes, and integration.”44 This provoked Ryan, who had clocked so many hours with his conservative friend Ross Cabeen trying to build up the school. Chuck Haas was absent from the meeting, but he received a report from Sid Harmon: “Bob stood up and said, ‘Look, I agree with your position, but this is not the place for it. If that’s how you feel, goodbye.’”45
Whenever the going got tough, the founders would retreat to the core of families that seemed to share their commitment and good sense. “It was a small group of us who knew exactly what we wanted and that’s what we got,” Haas remembered.46 The Quaker-meeting model, they decided, was too unwieldy, and what the school needed was a board of directors. According to Jessica’s account, a long discussion over Gerard’s future was capped off by her husband, who voiced what no one else would: “It looks as though maybe he will have to go.”47 Gerard was asked to leave at the end of the school year; and according to Haas, the three original founders — Ryan, Sid Harmon, and Ross Cabeen — went to their attorney and drafted by-laws “setting them up as general members perpetually, with the ability to take over the school if necessary, and setting up a board of directors which … would run the school instead of the town meeting.”48
RYAN’S CONCERN about being typecast as a thug was well-founded: in the past two years alone, as Hughes finally coughed up some long-delayed projects at RKO, moviegoers had seen Ryan play nasty, sometimes violent characters in The Racket; On Dangerous Ground; Clash by Night; Beware, My Lovely; and The Naked Spur. He hoped the just-completed Alaska Seas and Her Twelve Men would help reverse this trend, and as the second picture of his deal with Paramount, he would play a quiet, bookish gentleman closer to his actual personality than any other character he had taken on. Adapted from a novel by Vina Delmar, About Mrs. Leslie starred Shirley Booth as a lonely New Yorker and Ryan as a wealthy married man who falls in love with her and funds their annual rendezvous at a little cottage along the Pacific coast. A respected stage actress, Booth had just won an Oscar for her feature film debut in Come Back, Little Sheba, costarring Burt Lancaster; now that picture’s producer, Hal Wallis, and director, Daniel Mann, had sold her on About Mrs. Leslie as a suitable follow-up.
Bringing Delmar’s book to the screen required a fair amount of narrative convolution; the Production Code Administration, undaunted after all these years, wouldn’t permit a story in which adultery was glamorized, so the screenwriters contrived to make the love relationship between George Leslie and Vivien Keeler completely chaste. When Vivien meets George on a Los Angeles airfield and drives with him to his beach home, she doesn’t know he’s married, and there’s a conspicuous scene in which he shows her to a separate bedroom. They meet again the next year before Vivien, back in New York, learns from a newsreel that he is George Leslie Hendersall, an aviation giant vital to the Allied war effort, with a wife and two grown boys.
Shirley Booth and Ryan in About Mrs. Leslie (1954). His role as a quiet, bookish gentleman was closer to his actual personality than any other character he played onscreen. Franklin Jarlett Collection
Ryan would remember Shirley Booth as “uncomfortable working in pictures.” Off-screen she was even more meek than her character. “I picked her up in my car about a quarter of a mile from the studio on three consecutive days, and on the third day I finally asked her why she walked. She said she parked her car where she did because it was the only parking lot she could find — and she paid $3 a day to do it. So I informed her that, as the star of the picture, she had the right to park on Paramount’s lot.”49 Daniel Mann brought a warm, nicely melancholy tone to the picture, but About Mrs. Leslie flopped at the box office and, like Inferno, disappeared completely from circulation, an unjust fate for such a gentle, heartfelt drama.
That fall John Houseman, a little guilty over having abandoned Ryan during Her Twelve Men, approached him with a head-turning offer: he wanted Ryan to star in an off-Broadway production of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. Ryan liked to tell people he’d perform in the men’s room at Grand Central Station if he could do Shakespeare,50 and this would be considerably better: the 1,100-seat Phoenix Theatre on Second Avenue and Twelfth Street, whose new owners wanted to present challenging plays at reasonable ticket prices and had solicited Houseman to direct their second production.
Ryan and Houseman got together to discuss the project, and Houseman was frank with his old friend: this would be a real challenge for an actor who had never performed blank verse and lacked the vocal training of a Shakespearean actor. Ryan’s voice, Houseman later wrote, “was pitched rather higher than it should have been in a man of his size, and his speech — though that of an educated man — had the ineradicable nasality of his Chicago origin.”51 The New York critics might murder him. Ryan understood, but there was no way he could turn this down. Curled up inside him was the solitary teenager who had memorized Hamlet.
nine
Rum, Rebellion, and Ryan
Among Shakespeare’s plays, Coriolanus had the distinction of being both highly regarded and rarely staged. T. S. Eliot called it the Bard’s greatest tragedy, yet the proud protagonist, Caius Martius Coriolanus, is a hard man for audiences to like. A military hero in Rome, he runs for consul of the senate, but his aristocratic contempt for the popular will gets him banished from the city, and he takes up arms against his own people. Houseman understood that the play tended to refract the politics of the day, and three years after President Truman had relieved General Douglas MacArthur of his command in Korea, civilian control of the military was still a provocative issue. “De Gaulle and Churchill (and to a lesser degree Eisenhower) had raised the question of the wartime hero as political leader,” wrote Houseman. “Inevitably, as I edited and prepared the play for production, I found myself emphasizing its political aspects.”1 Ryan, with his long-standing antipathy for generals, couldn’t have been more sympathetic to Houseman’s conception of the play.
Coriolanus takes place in the fifth century BC, when Rome is a republic but not yet a democracy, and Shakespeare is notably ambivalent about the wisdom of popular rule. Coriolanus can barely restrain his frustration with the people: “He that trusts to you, / Where he should find you lions, finds you hares; / Where foxes, geese…. With every minute you do change a mind / And call him noble that was now your hate, / Him vile that was your garland.”2 His controlling mother, Volumnia, persuades him to take up politics, and the senate welcomes him, but street protests organized by his political enemies send him into a rage. Coriolanus reminds the senators that commoners were the downfall of ancient Greece and argues that catering to them will only “break ope the locks o’ the senate and bring in / The crows to peck the eagles.”3 As Houseman noted, Coriolanus had gained a new currency in the 1930s as Hitler and Mussolini took power. Yet its tragic hero was a timeless figure: the warrior with no place in a civil society.
Ryan had links to several of the cast members. Aufidius, the enemy commander, was played by John Emery, who had been married to Tallulah Bankhead when Ryan was appearing with her in Clash by Night. (“I never understood how an essentially gentle man like him could get mixed up with a dreadnought like Tallulah,” Ryan later remarked.)4 Lauri March, cast as Coriolanus’s wife, Virgilia, was the daughter of poet Joseph Moncure March, author of The Set-Up. (Her father disliked the movie version because it had turned his black fighter into a white one.) The players were first-rate: Mildred Natwick as Volumnia, Alan Napier as the wise patrician Menenius, and, providing comic relief as a trio of servants, the young actors Jack Klugman, Jerry S
tiller, and Gene Saks (the first two would become TV stars, the third a successful director). Houseman also made the nervy decision to cast Will Geer as Sicinius, one of Coriolanus’s rabble-rousing antagonists. Blacklisted in Hollywood, Geer had been reduced to working as a gardener in LA (for Sidney Harmon, among others), and Houseman would catch hell at MGM for having hired him.
With this largely American cast, Houseman decided the best vocal strategy for Ryan was to stick with his plain midwestern accent rather than strive for a classical delivery. “Shakespeare can be enjoyed — and understood — just as well if actors perform it in modern theatrical style,” Ryan told a columnist. “Many performers have a tendency to over-act when they get their teeth into a Shakespearean passage — not only with their bodies, but with their voices. The result can quite often be unintelligible.”5 Whatever his vocal limitations, Ryan was a commanding presence onstage. Houseman brought in a judo expert to choreograph Ryan and Emery in hand-to-hand combat, though these rough-and-tumble sequences proved too bruising on the stage’s hardwood floor. Most important, the director understood Ryan’s dark appeal as a performer, the “disturbing mixture of anger and tenderness,” as Houseman phrased it, that had powered On Dangerous Ground.6
The Ryans decided to move their children to New York for the six-week run, and the boys got to see two rehearsals and three performances of Coriolanus. They watched their father applying his makeup, and Cheyney took home one of his putty noses. “This was wonderful for me,” Ryan said. “Movie making is hard to explain to children…. But the theater was different. They could see and feel and understand what I was doing.”7 While he was working, Jessica filled the children’s days with museums and other cultural activities. Having grown up in the San Fernando Valley, the children were a little overwhelmed by the city, where their father’s fame was more of an issue. On one occasion Jessica took them ice skating in Central Park and their father chanced to join them; before long a crowd gathered, and the children were frightened by the crush of bodies. Eventually police had to wade into the crowd, form a protective cordon around them, and remove them to safety.
Coriolanus opened on January 19, 1954, to positive reviews, with much credit going to Houseman for his incisive framing of the play’s politics. Ryan’s delivery was faulted by George Shea of the Wall Street Journal (“His voice was not always under control, and it quickly became obvious that he is not yet sufficiently accustomed in the verse form”)8 but excused by Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times, who liked Ryan’s conception of the Roman general as “an attractive, well-bred son of the upper classes who despises the people more out of intellectual sluggishness than malice…. This is a refreshing interpretation of the massive personality of Coriolanus. Mr. Ryan plays it with warmth, candor, grace, and a kind of artless sincerity.”9 The play enjoyed a successful run of forty-eight performances before closing on February 28 to accommodate the next production in the series. Ryan loved the experience, and he and Houseman made vague plans to collaborate on another Shakespeare play. This would never happen, but as the family returned to Los Angeles, Ryan could take heart in knowing he had grown substantially as an actor.
Back in North Hollywood, the Oakwood School was unraveling again. After Bryson Gerard was let go, the parents launched a national search committee to find a new school director, but it was badly organized and failed to produce a suitable candidate. In desperation the founders hired Mary Bernick, who had studied school administration at City College and been recommended by one of the teachers at Oakwood. According to Jessica’s account, Bernick became a polarizing figure, finding common cause with the more radical parents and communicating to the staff that “the reason the children were not learning any more than they had before was because it was impossible to teach the spoiled children of the rich.”10
Bernick was let go at the end of the school year after the volunteer book keeper, Marvin Brown, announced a $12,000 deficit. Frustrated and confused, the founders debated throwing in the towel and giving the school away. Ryan and Ross Cabeen appeared before the Country Schools’ board of directors to offer them the school — land, buildings, and all — but the board wasn’t interested. The couples discussed simply liquidating the corporation’s assets and giving the money to the United Jewish Appeal. But Sid Harmon insisted on making one last stand and suggested that his wife, Liz, search for a new director while she was visiting her mother in New York City. Liz was still there in late June when Ryan flew out to promote About Mrs. Leslie, and she urged him to meet with a woman who might be the ideal candidate: fifty-seven-year-old Marie Spottswood.
Unlike Bryson Gerard or Mary Bernick, Spottswood was a seasoned educator with a sophisticated understanding of progressive thought. Born in Mobile, Alabama, she had graduated from Randolph-Macon College in Virginia and studied at Tulane University and the University of Chicago before earning a graduate degree from Columbia University. Since 1929 she had been at Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, Liz’s alma mater, though she had recently resigned as principal of the Lower School and was considering job prospects in Chicago, Vermont, and Massachusetts. According to Jessica’s account, Ryan came to her office wearing gray gloves and a hat, the sort of patrician clothing George Leslie Hendersall might have worn. Spottswood, a white-haired woman with a fondness for cats, didn’t know him from the movies, but Ryan could always present himself as an urbane, intelligent man, and did. Attracted by the idea of a warmer climate, she accepted an invitation to come visit the Ryans in North Hollywood.
Jessica liked her immediately. Spottswood had “prematurely white hair brushed back from a strong-featured face — a handsome woman and sometimes beautiful, even awe-inspiring, when the visionary gleam appeared in her eyes. One sensed the presence of a passion in her, put to the service of education and cats.”11
Ryan had promised Spottswood complete control over the educational policy, and she began outlining her plans for a curriculum based on social studies, with a particular focus on California’s early Spanish and Indian cultures. In addition to this, heavy emphasis on the arts would engage the students creatively. But Spottswood also understood that reading instruction at Oakwood was seriously deficient, and she wanted to recruit her friend Mary Davidson, a phonetic reading specialist at Fieldston Lower, to join the staff. The Ryans held a buffet dinner for Spottswood and the parents, at which she was offered, and accepted, the job. That fall, when she took over at Oakwood, the parents began to realize that they had finally turned the corner.
DORE SCHARY LOVED BEING FIRST: no one had ever made a picture about anti-Semitic violence in America before Crossfire, and now MGM would make the first picture about the attacks on Japanese-Americans during World War II. Howard Breslin’s short story “Bad Time at Honda,” about a southwestern town covering up the lynching of a Nisei (second-generation) farmer, had appeared in the January 1947 issue of American magazine, but seven years later it was still controversial for the movies. Having bought the rights, Schary requisitioned an in-house report on violence against Japanese-Americans and read of numerous incidents (mainly arson and dynamite attacks, but also shootings) cited in Life, the Saturday Evening Post, and other publications. He assigned Millard Kaufman to adapt the Breslin story, and for the lead role he set his sights on Spencer Tracy.
Despite the desert setting, “Bad Time at Honda” was more of a mystery than a western. Honda, located between a bluff and a rail line, is so isolated that the Silverliner train screaming westward every morning has become “an event to Honda, a glimpse of the sleekness and wealth, the silver-chromium speed, that belong to other places.” One morning, to the townspeople’s shock, the train slows to a halt and disgorges Mr. George Macreedy of Chicago, who checks in to a local hotel but deflects questions about his business. He hires a young woman, Liz Brooks, to drive him out to a place in the desert called Adobe Wells, where he finds a small complex of burned-out buildings. Someone fires a warning shot at them, and when they return to town, everyone is watching Macreedy. In th
e hotel he’s confronted by a trio of local ranchers, the leader of whom, Coogan Trimble, alludes to the lynching but warns Macreedy that he’ll never prove anything. “Other places … settled it other ways,” Trimble remarks. “Camps. Things like that. We only had the one. We ran him out. Burned him out. That’s all.”12
Macreedy knows he’s licked, and as he waits for his train out of town, everyone in Honda celebrates at the local watering hole. But before he leaves, Macreedy barges into the tavern. Someone silences the jukebox, and they all stare. “ ‘Now, listen,’ said Macreedy. ‘All of you know I came here to find Old Man Kamotka. You know what happened to him. So do I — now.’ He could hear the breathing in the room, and he went on: ‘This is why I came. There was a kid named Jimmy Kamotka. He left here years ago. He never wrote his father. The old man couldn’t read. I met Jimmy in the Army. In Italy. He asked me to look in here…. Jimmy Kamotka was killed in Italy. I think maybe this town should know that. And remember it.’”13
Kaufman made a number of changes to the story, the most significant of which was turning the mob violence into a smaller, more focused attack. In “Bad Time at Honda” Kamotka dies of a heart attack while fleeing the crowd; in the movie, retitled Bad Day at Black Rock, Komoko has been shot to death by the town’s fearsome boss man, Reno Smith (which sounded more menacing than “Coogan Trimble”). The conflict between Smith and Macreedy generated more of a showdown, and Kaufman’s elongated story line borrowed significantly from High Noon, with Macreedy boxed in by the uncooperative townspeople. When Tracy read the script, he complained that Macreedy wasn’t dimensional enough, so Schary, salvaging a story idea from an abandoned project, suggested that Macreedy have a paralyzed arm, which satisfied Tracy. He would play the part in a baggy suit with his left sleeve tucked into its pocket.