The Lives of Robert Ryan

by J. R. Jones

  Bad Day at Black Rock quickly became a sticking point between Schary and Nicholas Schenck, the seventy-two-year-old president of Loews, Inc. (MGM’s parent company). Early in the development, when Schary was at home recovering from a kidney stone, Schenck dropped in on him to insist he cancel the picture. A shouting match ensued, Schary prevailed, and when none of his producers expressed interest in the script, he took on the project himself. A month before production commenced, an interoffice memo notified him that a State Department official had informally complained to the studio about the damage the picture might do to the United States overseas. “Historically there never was a lynching of this kind,” MGM’s Kenneth MacKenna wrote to Schary, “and the whole issue of Asiatic-American relationships is such a touchy matter that such an un-historical incident might be used by our enemies to stir up further misunderstandings.”14 Schary had been through all this before with Crossfire, which turned out to be a huge success, so he simply plowed ahead.

  Given the similarity between the two pictures, Ryan was a natural choice to play the bigoted Reno Smith, and whatever reservations he may have har bored about the role, which was rather thinly written, they paled before the opportunity to make an A picture with Tracy. Ryan trusted Schary, who demonstrated once again his skill at assembling a superb cast. Ernest Borgnine, the brutal sergeant in From Here to Eternity, would play Reno Smith’s hot-tempered strong man, Coley, and lean, mean Lee Marvin, who had given bare-knuckle performances in The Big Heat and The Wild One, was cast as the coolly bullying Hector. Walter Brennan, a three-time Oscar winner, signed on as Doc Velie, the local undertaker who becomes Macreedy’s sole ally and the town’s conscience. The story was a welcome corrective to Behind the Rising Sun, the anti-Japanese propaganda picture that had become Ryan’s calling card in the Marines.

  Production began on Monday, July 19, in Lone Pine, California, about two hundred miles north of LA in the Owens Valley. “The temperature was about a hundred degrees,” recalled Anne Francis, who had been cast as Liz. “And in those days, they used klieg lights to offset the sun. So, with those lights, we were working in 115, 120 degrees. We all lost a tremendous amount of weight; I mean, at the end of the day, who was hungry? Spencer Tracy had a very hard time. They had to coax him more than once to please, please see it through, because it was terribly draining for him.”15 In fact, Tracy had tried to drop out of the picture the week before shooting began, but Schary reminded him that his pay-or-play clause would obligate him to reimburse MGM for nearly half a million dollars. Tracy caved, and to mollify the star, Schary promised to visit the set and suffer in the heat with the rest of them, which he did on one occasion.

  “When I was starting out in Hollywood, I would spend any day off I had or any free time on the set watching Spencer Tracy, who was one of the great masters,” Ryan recalled. In getting to know the actor, he was gratified to learn that Tracy had been the same way. “When he was a young man in New York, he would wait outside a certain theater at a certain time just to see Lionel Barrymore leave. He couldn’t afford to see him act on the stage but at least he could watch and see him walk out of the theater. I think this is terribly important.”16 Tracy, a political conservative, seemed unsure of what to make of Ryan. Anne Francis recalled that after she and Ryan borrowed Tracy’s car to get dinner, “I got the silent treatment because he felt Bob and I were having an affair, which we weren’t.”17 After shooting one of Macreedy’s confrontations with Reno Smith, Tracy asked Millard Kaufman, “Does Ryan scare you?” Kaufman replied, “No, I’ve known Bob Ryan for years. He’s a fine man.” Tracy replied, “Well, he scares the hell out of me.’”18

  Ryan got a chance to hold his own against Tracy at the picture’s midpoint, when Macreedy, trapped in Black Rock until the next day’s train, sits outside a gas station and Smith fills up his wagon. Shooting in CinemaScope, director John Sturges placed Tracy at the left of the frame in his dark suit and hat and Ryan at right, flanked by a pair of ten-foot gas pumps painted bright red, the vast blue sky behind him. “Somebody’s always looking for something in this part of the west,” Smith tells Macreedy. “For the historian it’s the Old West, to the book writer it’s the Wild West, to the businessman it’s the undeveloped west…. But to us, this place is our west, and I wish they’d leave us alone!” The scene ran more than five minutes and was filled with dialogue; as Tracy sat immobile, Ryan kneeled down to face him and paced back and forth. Watching them work, Borgnine thought at first that Ryan was stealing the scene but then realized his gaze had been fixed on Tracy the whole time. When they finished the scene and Sturges asked for a second take, Tracy refused.

  Movie publicists routinely fabricated stories about actors doing their own stunts, but in fact Ryan liked the physical part of his job and would take a crack at something if it didn’t look too dangerous. On Bad Day at Black Rock, though, he gambled and lost. The picture climaxes with a night scene in which Macreedy, pinned down by Smith’s rifle fire, improvises a Molotov cocktail and sets the rancher ablaze. A long shot of a stunt man wearing an asbestos suit resulted in the man scorching his lungs and being taken to the hospital. Ryan completed the sequence with a less risky shot in which Smith, now partially extinguished, flops to the ground with flames still clinging to his left side. “There was a hole in his asbestos suit, so he actually got burned doing that,” said Cheyney Ryan. “That was one of the few times that anything like that had ever happened.”19

  Years later twelve-year-old Lisa Ryan phoned her father during a sleepover at a friend’s house to tell him that Bad Day at Black Rock was playing on the late show. Ryan always disliked the idea of his children seeing him injured or killed on-screen, and he forbade Lisa to watch the movie. “So of course I had to watch it,” Lisa recalled. “And he gets set on fire at the end…. I was so traumatized by that scene that I called him, and I said, ‘Are you all right?’ He said, ‘I told you not to watch that movie!’”20

  TALKING TO COLUMNIST ERSKINE JOHNSON of the Los Angeles Daily News, Ryan disparaged fan-magazine stories about life with the Ryans: “They come rushing over for home layouts and photograph me with my children. And they’ve got their stories already written before they even see me.”21 But an “as-told-to” piece he published in Parents magazine in September 1954 turned out to be unusually reflective and revealing. With all his reading on early childhood development, Ryan had a lot on his mind, not least his own three children: “Tim, the older, is extremely sensitive. I was so much like Tim as a boy that — and I say it in all humility — I truly believe that I have a deep understanding of him through my own past. I too was a completely nonaggressive youngster…. Cheyney gives evidence of being of a totally different mold. He has, we think, just the right amount of aggressiveness. Not so much that he needs his ears pinned back by either parents or playmates, but enough to stand solidly on his rights…. As for Lisa — well, she’s not three yet and we haven’t taken a shot at cataloguing her…. She fits into family life in her own way and altogether is very much the fair-haired girl any father of two sons dreams about.”22

  Ryan took advantage of the piece to plug the Oakwood School, crediting Jessica for her initiative and reporting that the present enrollment had hit sixty-five. The month the story appeared, Marie Spottswood began her first semester as director of the school, and the change was dramatic. To address the reading crisis, she divided all the students into “readiness groups” regardless of grade, and Mary Davidson, the reading specialist newly arrived from Fieldston Lower, began working with the groups individually, using the phonics-based approach advocated by educator and psychologist Anna Gillingham in her book Remedial Training for Children with Specific Disability in Reading, Spelling and Penmanship. By the end of the school year, wrote Jessica, every student was reading at his or her grade level.

  A new board was voted in, with Jessica as president and Marvin Brown, who had uncovered the gaping budget deficit, as treasurer. He set about collecting tuition from deadbeat parents, and the board announced t
hat, for the survival of the school, tuition would have to be hiked from fifty dollars a month to seven hundred annually. Even after that the school would continue to run an annual deficit of about five thousand dollars, which the Ryans and others would cover. That included a scholarship program for minority students, something the founding parents considered crucial. With Spottswood in place, the Oakwood School seemed like a much worthier cause, and the Ryans took pride in what they had managed to accomplish. Ultimately, they wanted to expand the school to include the seventh and eighth grades.

  That fall Ryan reteamed with Barbara Stanwyck for Escape to Burma, a ridiculous jungle adventure that RKO was distributing for the independent Filmcrest Productions. His character, an American businessman, goes on the run after being framed for the murder of his partner, the Burmese prince, and hides out with Stanwyck’s character, who owns a teak plantation. At one point they welcome some locals into her courtyard with a trained baby elephant that does tricks and performs a little dance routine, kicking its back legs in the air. The picture fulfilled Ryan’s one-a-year obligation to Howard Hughes, who had recently cemented his control over the studio by purchasing all the outstanding stock of Radio-Keith-Orpheum for $23 million. But after an experience like Bad Day at Black Rock, the new picture was a pitiful reminder of how erratic Ryan’s career had grown. It was enough to drive a man to drink.

  And it did. Alcohol had been an integral part of Ryan’s life since his Dartmouth days, when he ran for class marshal on the slogan “Rum, Rebellion, and Ryan.” He and Jessica bonded over drinks, and cocktails were central to their little social scene. In her memoir about Oakwood, Jessica remembers going out with Ryan and Sid Harmon to discuss some vexing problem and winding up at a family place called Fatso’s Mile High Ice Cream Cones, where Ryan tried to order scotch and soda, and then beer, to no avail. Harmon asked for an ice cream soda; her husband “ordered two coffees and sat back in a state of shock.”23

  He was a big man who could hold his liquor, and in the booze-soaked ’50s that was good enough. “He told me that when they were doing movies out in the desert, he was drinking about two fifths of whiskey a day, just to get through the day,” said actor James Naughton, who worked with Ryan years later. “That didn’t count wine with dinner, or beer and so on. Because making movies out there in the desert was about the most boring thing anybody could do.”24

  A drink made him more genial and charming, but he could also slip into angry silences that pulled him away from the family and into his little refuge out back (now that he had reclaimed it from the fourth and fifth grades). Everyone knew not to bother Daddy when he was in one of his Black Irish moods. “He had difficulty speaking about personal things,” his friend Millard Lampell explained. “It just wasn’t in his past, it wasn’t in his tradition.”25 Later in life Ryan would confess that he had always been haunted by the death of his brother, Jack, so many years earlier. There was unfinished business with his father, another man of dramatic mood swings. There was the nagging sense that the success he had chased all his life was hollow. And there was the world going to hell all around him.

  “When my father got depressed, it was usually about Richard Nixon, it wasn’t about his life,” observed Cheyney Ryan. “It would be more about what was happening in the world.”26 Ryan was increasingly distressed by the threat of nuclear weapons. Earlier that year the US military had detonated a hydrogen bomb on the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands; the fifteen-megaton blast, the most powerful in human history, was supposed to be a secret, but news of it had spread around the world after the wind carried radioactive fallout to neighboring islands, which had to be evacuated, and infected the crew of a Japanese fishing boat, killing one man. The fallout had spread as far as Southern California. If that didn’t kill Ryan, he’d damn well do it himself. “Cancer by the Carton,” a story in the December 1952 Reader’s Digest, had revealed that cigarettes almost certainly caused lung cancer: “Above the age of 45 the risk of developing the disease increases in simple proportion with the amount smoked.”27 Ryan smoked two packs a day.

  Bad Day at Black Rock opened the first week of January 1955 to stellar reviews. “This is one of the finest pictures ever made,” raved John O’Hara in Collier’s;28 a more measured assessment from Robert Hatch in the Nation lauded it as “a tight, economical work, directed and acted with conviction” that “enlarges the stature of everyone in connection with it.”29 The State Department’s concerns notwithstanding, Bad Day at Black Rock was released overseas in March and collected even more superlatives from critics. That year it represented the United States in the Cannes Film Festival (along with Elia Kazan’s East of Eden), and the following year brought Oscar nominations for Spencer Tracy, John Sturges, and Millard Kaufman. Ticket sales were less impressive: after a year and a half in release the picture had posted a profit of only $600,000.

  Shortly after Ryan hit movie screens as the murderer of a Nisei farmer, he flew to Tokyo to shoot a big-budget crime thriller for Twentieth Century Fox. House of Bamboo was an A remake of an old B movie, The Street with No Name (1948), in which an FBI agent tracks an organized crime operation; Darryl Zanuck, eager to make the first Hollywood feature shot in Japan, had screenwriter Harry Klein write a new version set in Tokyo, where an army investigator going under the name Eddie Spanier (Robert Stack) infiltrates a gang of American ex-G.I.s led by the dapper, calculating Sandy Dawson (Ryan).

  The cigar-chomping director, Samuel Fuller, had worked as a crime reporter and served as an infantryman in the “Big Red One,” experiences that informed his gripping Korean war drama, The Steel Helmet (1951), and his nineteenth-century period picture about newspapermen, Park Row (1952). Having scored at Fox with the itchy crime picture Pickup on South Street (1953), he was looking to move up, and House of Bamboo was a classy project in color and CinemaScope, with exotic locations and a big star. “Robert became a true friend,” Fuller would write. “He was well read and balanced, a kindhearted man with grand democratic ideals.”30

  Fuller had a few twists of his own to add to House of Bamboo. “I moved the entire shebang to Tokyo,” he would later write, ignoring Klein’s contribution, “added stuff about Japanese contemporary life, threw in some sexual exploitation and interracial romance, and then, for some unexpected pizzazz, wrote a violent love scene between two hardened criminals…. Zanuck loved it, even the homoerotic scene with the two gangsters.”31 As conceived by Fuller, House of Bamboo included a male love triangle: Sandy Dawson is intimate with his second-in-command, Griff (Cameron Mitchell), but then falls for the new man, Spanier, and elevates him to Griff’s role. To slip this romantic subtext past the Production Code Administration would require skillful underplaying, and Ryan embraced the challenge. “I like Sam, he’s crazy!” he told an interviewer in the early ’70s. “We were very much in agreement during the filming of House of Bamboo.”32

  Sometimes Fuller seemed like a character in one of his own movies. “He liked to keep a gun strapped to his hip while we were shooting in Japan — he looked like General Patton,” wrote Stack. “And instead of saying ‘Action!’ to start a scene, he would take a .45 out of the holster and shoot it in the air — Boom! And people all around would run and scurry and hide.”33 As Stack remembered it, Fuller didn’t seem to comprehend how the conquered Japanese would feel about an American firing a pistol for emphasis. Still, people stayed out of his way.

  Soon after they arrived in Tokyo, Fuller needed to shoot a simple scene in which Ryan would drive up to a curb and get out, but when the company arrived at the location, they were greeted by anti-American protesters. The director told his cinematographer, Joe MacDonald, to film the people who had gathered, and as soon as the camera was turned on them, the crowd dispersed.

  Ryan and director Samuel Fuller agreed privately that Sandy Dawson (Ryan), the menacing crime lord in House of Bamboo (1955), would be a closeted man lusting for undercover cop Eddie Kenner (Robert Stack). Franklin Jarlett Collection

  Fuller already ha
d shot one picture in CinemaScope (the submarine adventure Hell and High Water), and he took advantage of its extremely long aspect ratio — 1 to 2.55 — to suggest on-screen what he couldn’t get past the censors in typescript. For the interior scenes with Dawson’s gang, he created a series of elegant tableaux showing male bodies in repose, with Ryan bisecting the group and often elevated in the frame to stress his tall, lanky physique. Dawson doesn’t appear until nearly twenty minutes into the picture, but when he does, Fuller employs a startling shift in perspective. Griff finds Spanier trying to shake down a club owner and punches him out; Spanier crashes through a paper screen into a private room, and the tear left by his body frames Dawson, cool and lean as he sits atop a table, surrounded by his boys. From Caught, Ryan recycled the business in which his character banks a cue ball around a billiard table as he holds forth, and as in the earlier picture, the ball’s movement traces a triangle.

  What Fuller described as a “violent love scene between two hardened criminals” was not really a love scene but an execution: Dawson decides that Griff has ratted him out to the cops and arrives at Griff’s home to find him bathing in a wooden tub. The gang leader steps into the room and pumps eight shots into his underling, the bathwater squirting out of the tub through the entrance holes. “You didn’t know what you were doing,” Dawson tells his dead lover, cradling his head tenderly. “I could see you had no control of yourself, absolutely none. And I knew, Griff. I knew when you started blowing your buttons for no reason whatsoever. Griff, I wish I hadn’t been right. But I was, Griff. Like always.” Fuller loved this psychotic moment: “Sandy is gentle for the first time, almost sensual,” Fuller later wrote. “Except the object of his affection is his dead victim, showing just how insane the sonofabitch has really become!”34