The Lives of Robert Ryan
Page 21
Near the end of the year Ryan got an irresistible offer when theatrical producer-director Harold J. Kennedy asked him to appear in a local production of Jean Giraudoux’s antiwar satire Tiger at the Gates. First staged in Paris in 1935, as the Nazi threat gathered in Europe, Tiger at the Gates was a modern-language take on the Iliad, though in contrast to Homer’s epic poem, set near the end of the ten-year Trojan War, the French play takes place on the eve of that conflict. Hector, the Trojan commander whom Kennedy wanted Ryan to play, has just returned from battle and craves peace; reunited with his loving wife, Andromache, he plans to march into the city’s courtyard and close the Gates of War forever. But in his absence another conflict has been brewing: his brother Paris has kidnapped Helen, the beautiful queen of Sparta. “Those poor gates,” observes Andromache’s caustic friend Cassandra. “They need more oil to shut them than to open them.”13
Ryan loved the play, particularly the elegant translation by Christopher Fry. Hector was like a well-spoken version of the weary Lieutenant Benson: confiding in Andromache, the Trojan warrior remembers the precise moment when his sense of glory deserted him, just as he was preparing to slay an opponent. “Up to that time, a man I was going to kill had always seemed my direct opposite,” he says. “This time I was kneeling on a mirror, the death I was going to give was a kind of suicide.”14 He and Andromache plead with the people of Troy to surrender Helen, but their fellow citizens, unacquainted with battle, all have their own agendas. In protest Hector refuses to make the expected oration for the men slain in the last conflict. “An Oration for the Dead of a war is a hypocritical speech in defense of the living, a plea for acquittal,” he declares. “I am not so sure of my innocence.”15
Witty and flamboyant, Kennedy had won a Tony in the mid-1940s performing his own play A Goose for the Gander on Broadway before he branched out as a director on the West Coast. Ryan first met him in 1951, when Kennedy invited him to Lucey’s Restaurant, across the street from the RKO lot, and asked him to play the brutal cop in an LA production of Sidney Kingsley’s Detective Story. Having just played a similar character in On Dangerous Ground, Ryan politely declined, telling Kennedy, “If I’m going to work in the theater, and for no money, I have to have a chance to do something I would never be allowed to do in films, and that probably would never be done in films.”16 Tiger at the Gates certainly fit that description, and Ryan agreed to play Hector for Actors Equity scale, which was fifty dollars a week. A one-week tryout was scheduled in mid-January 1957 at the Sombrero Playhouse in Phoenix, followed by a two-week run at the four-hundred-seat Ivar Theatre in Los Angeles.
A Republican stronghold, Phoenix was hardly the ideal town for a pacifist play, only two months after the Soviets had crushed the Hungarian Revolution. According to Kennedy, opening night was a fiasco, as patrons “stormed out in droves during the first act and fled to the bar, which set a new liquor record for the night.”17 The next morning Ryan came to his hotel room, perspiring heavily — “flop sweat,” he explained. (This was a common physical reaction on his part; Jessica recalled him dripping with sweat at the giant Stevenson rally in San Francisco in 1952.) Kennedy assured Ryan that the play would be more warmly received in Los Angeles, and he was right. Buoyed by positive reviews, Tiger at the Gates sold out in its final week and set a new box office record for small venues in LA. Unable to secure seats, Howard Hughes sent his chauffeur to buy four tickets from waiting patrons at fifty dollars each, and experienced Ryan in the full flower of his liberal pacifism.
A certain amount of offstage drama attended the run. During the final week, Ryan’s seventy-three-year-old mother, Mabel, was hit by a car on her way to the theater, sustaining cuts, bruises, and a five-inch laceration on her head.18 She asked police not to notify anyone until the performance was over, and given the fact that Old Tim had died of complications from being struck by an auto, the news must have upset Ryan when he got it. According to Kennedy, Ryan also stepped out on his wife during a drunken cast party, disappearing with a young actress in the cast who was enthralled by him. Early the next morning, Kennedy wrote, Ryan showed up at his house, sat down in the living room, and told him, “I’ve been on this couch all night.” After Kennedy agreed to stick with this fiction, Ryan remarked, “I wish I had been.”19 Kennedy waited for a phone call from Jessica Ryan, but it never came.
TIGER AT THE GATES might have played well past its scheduled two-week run, but Ryan had committed to joining Aldo Ray on a two-week promotional tour for Men in War, and Kennedy considered Ryan so essential that he decided to close the show rather than replace him. With a financial stake in the new picture, Ryan had promised Harmon and Yordan an intensive publicity push; according to another item in his alumni magazine, he lost thirteen pounds on the road. The effort must have paid off, because Men in War turned out to be a critics’ favorite. “Men in War ranks with the great war pictures,” raved the Washington Post, praising its “commanding use of silence, detail and accent on the crude monotony of warfare.”20 Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Philip Scheuer noted the picture’s documentary feel: “It has something of the on-the-spot reportage of, say, John Huston’s memorable San Pietro, made on the Italian front in World War II.”21 For relatively little money, Security Pictures had made a daringly modern war movie, though its box office performance left something to be desired.
That May the Oakwood School held a groundbreaking ceremony for its new classroom expansion, which would add two classrooms, an instructors’ room, and a conference room for the board, and allow Oakwood to expand its enrollment from sixty-five to ninety-seven students.22 The school continued to operate at a deficit every year, but where Oakwood was involved, Ryan never seemed to reach the bottom of his pocket. Nor was he averse to using his Hollywood connections to help out the school; Lamont Johnson, an Oakwood parent from the beginning, remembered stage-managing one benefit that included Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Peggy Lee, Peter Ustinov, Dean Martin, and Jerry Lewis.
“Marie Spottswood, who was absolutely brilliant, and Bob and Jessica were the soul and the spine of the whole thing,” said Johnson.23 Jessica was still deeply involved in Oakwood, but on a less conspicuous level than her husband, working with Spottswood to create teaching materials for the social studies curriculum. When Spottswood lamented the lack of any suitable children’s books about the Spanish in early California, Jessica wrote one, called Mañana, and followed it with a book about the Aztecs, Teca and the Plumed Serpent. “We needed all sorts of unavailable illustrative material,” Spottswood later wrote, “such as charts of Norse runes, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Chinese calligraphy. No problem: she would do the job. Soon the children were using her beautiful handiwork.”24 The two women grew close. Jessica would portray Spottswood as devoted only to her students and cats, but according to the Ryans’ old friend Robert Wallsten, the older woman “went into an absolute flutter any time Ryan came her way. It wasn’t all education she had in her mind or at least it was another kind of education. And I’m not sure how conscious she was of it. I’m sure Jessica was aware of it.”25
With Men in War in release, Harmon and Yordan turned to God’s Little Acre, an even more ambitious project with serious literary credentials. Published in 1933, this story of a poor, hard-lusting family in rural Georgia had become the center of a landmark First Amendment case when the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice sued the publisher, Viking Press, for violating a state statute against disseminating pornography. The judge in the case ruled for Viking, establishing two important legal precedents: first, the work was judged in its entirety, not on the basis of selected passages, and second, the court considered the opinions of other writers in evaluating the work’s merit (a committee organized to defend Caldwell had included Sinclair Lewis, H. L. Mencken, Sherwood Anderson, Dorothy Parker, and Alexander Woollcott). The publicity from the trial, and from censorship efforts in other localities, stoked the sales of God’s Little Acre; by the time Security Pictures got hold of the book in December 195
5, it had sold eight million copies.
Ryan, Marvin Brown, and Marie Spottswood break ground for a classroom expansion at Oakwood School. It continued to operate at a deficit every year, but where Oakwood was involved, Ryan never seemed to reach the bottom of his pockets. Robert Ryan Family
Ben Maddow would later claim authorship of the screenplay, which Yordan flatly disputed; one can understand why either man would want credit for the elegant adaptation, which highlighted the book’s humor and humanity while deleting or toning down its randier episodes. Even after a quarter decade, God’s Little Acre was too hot for the screen, with open infidelity and crudely sexual talk. Ty Ty Walden, the cracked patriarch at the center of the story, is widowed and celibate, but he cheerfully praises his daughter-in-law’s “rising beauties” in front of his grown children: “They’re that pretty it makes me feel sometime like getting right down on my hands and knees like these old hound dogs you see chasing after a flowing bitch. You just ache to get down and lick something. That’s the way, and it’s God’s own truth as He would tell it Himself if He could talk like the rest of us.”26 The picture was a little more decorous: “If the good Lord seen fit to put a beauty like you in our house, I’m gonna take my fill of lookin’ while I can.” Harmon and Yordan told Variety they were going to bypass the Production Code Administration and seek independent distribution,27 but ultimately they submitted to the usual negotiations with the Breen office.
Ryan’s representative at the William Morris Agency begged him not to accept the role of Ty Ty; the character was seventy years old, and if Ryan pulled it off, he might find himself typecast as an old man. But Ty Ty was too juicy to pass up, a grand, earthy, philosophical fool. The Waldens live in cotton country, but for the past fifteen years Ty Ty has been gripped with gold fever, digging gigantic holes on his land in search of a treasure chest described to him by his dying grandpappy. A good Christian man, Ty Ty reserves one acre of his farm for the Lord, giving everything grown on it to the church; he keeps moving its location around, though, because he needs new places to dig and can’t stand the thought of his preacher getting all the gold. As scripted, the role ranged from raucous physical comedy to quiet drama, with the sort of poignant moments that seldom came Ryan’s way. This was the sort of big, rich part the studios never offered him. According to Yordan, Ryan “just went over his agent’s head, and he did it.”28
Harmon, Yordan, and Mann did their best to reunite the company that had collaborated so well on Men in War: cinematographer Ernest Haller, composer Elmer Bernstein, actors Vic Morrow and Aldo Ray. Tall, curvaceous Tina Louise, a Broadway actress who had appeared in the musical Li’l Abner, would make her screen debut as Ty Ty’s daughter-in-law, Griselda, and rotund comedian Buddy Hackett signed on to play Pluto Swint, the hapless political candidate who’s too busy sniffing around Ty Ty’s youngest, Darling Jill, to canvas for votes. As with Men in War, Aldo Ray shared top billing with Ryan, holding down another story line as Will, the striking millworker married to Ty Ty’s elder daughter, Rosamond. Locked out of work for eighteen months, Will has begun scheming with his fellow strikers to seize the mill and start it up again; this situation added yet another wrinkle to the picture’s release, since it might be attacked as subversive.
The producers had scouted locations in Georgia, but the book’s reputation preceded it, and pressure from business and civic leaders in Atlanta prompted them to look closer to home; in early September, principal photography began in Stockton, California, five hours north of Los Angeles in the San Joaquin Valley. Tina Louise remembered Ryan as distant; she gravitated toward Aldo Ray and Jack Lord, who played her husband, Buck. Ryan preferred the company of Hackett, who could make him laugh until his sides hurt. “He adored Buddy Hackett,” remembered Lisa Ryan. “I think my dad felt more comfortable being around people like Buddy Hackett than people who were more like my dad, who made him nervous.”29 Ryan and Hackett shared some memorably funny scenes together; after learning of Ty Ty’s quest, Pluto persuades him that what he needs is an albino, because these white-skinned people have a special power for divining gold. Ryan’s expression widens in wonder as Ty Ty considers this, and before long the old coot has kidnapped a swamp-dwelling albino named Dave (played by young Michael Landon) and brought him back to the farm.
The character’s saving grace was his humility, which allowed his ludicrously comic moments to coexist with his sincere religiosity. When Dave the albino follows his quivering dowser wand right to the makeshift cross that marks God’s little acre, Ty Ty uproots it once again and ultimately moves it out to the river’s edge. “Now God, I don’t aim to cheat you none, I swear I don’t,” prays Ty Ty, as Bernstein’s score swells. “But what with this unseasonable weather and all, I believe you’d admire to have your acre in a cooler spot. If you don’t like this, if you don’t approve of what I’m doing, Lord, then strike me down dead right here where I stand.” Ty Ty shuts his eyes to wait for the lightning, then opens one eye and grins with satisfaction. “Thank you, Lord, Glory be. Amen.”
Ryan must have known they had something good here, though in a quick note to the president of the Dartmouth boxing club, he was typically self-deprecating. “[Erskine] Caldwell came up to watch us shoot,” he reported, “and is either the quietest man ever born or was stunned at the awfulness of what we were doing to his little epic. It has sold second only to the Bible but as one of our actors said, they do not come as a set.”30
WHILE RYAN WAS SHOOTING God’s Little Acre, an organization that would become his political focus for the next few years was taking shape in New York City. Earlier that year the revered theologian Albert Schweitzer had issued a “Declaration of Conscience” that explained how radioactive fallout from nuclear test explosions was infiltrating the water and food supply. “That radioactive elements created by us are found in nature is an astounding event in the history of the earth and of the human race,” Schweitzer wrote. “To fail to consider its importance and its consequences would be a folly for which humanity would have to pay a terrible price.”31 Published in the Saturday Review, this statement ignited a fierce debate over nuclear testing in the United States, where stories about milk tainted with the radioactive isotope Strontium-90 had been cropping up in the news for the past year. That summer the crusading editor of the Review, Norman Cousins, and two prominent figures in the American Friends Service Committee, Lawrence Scott and Clarence Pickett, summoned various civic leaders to discuss the issue, and from this gathering emerged the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy.
Ty Ty Walden (Ryan) succumbs to gold fever in God’s Little Acre (1958). Erskine Caldwell’s salacious novel, Ryan noted, “has sold second only to the Bible, but as one of our actors said, they do not come as a set.” Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research
The new organization, nicknamed SANE, met again that fall and published a full-page ad in the New York Times, asking readers to press President Eisen-hower for an international test ban, to be enforced by the United Nations, and new powers for the U.N. to monitor all missiles and satellites worldwide and to pool all world science for the purpose of space exploration. The public response was overwhelming, and what began as a small group of intellectual elites broadened into a mass movement with 25,000 members in about 130 chapters nationwide. Ryan was already affiliated with the United World Federalists (UWF) and the American Friends Service Committee, and he threw in with the new group as well, participating in rallies at Madison Square Garden and the Manhattan Center on Thirty-fourth Street, and in smaller public meetings convened to raise awareness of the issue.
Cousins liked Ryan a great deal, finding him not only passionate but also smart, informed, and pragmatic. “He had obviously done the proper homework on these issues,” Cousins recalled, though their discussions focused less on the science and more on political strategy — how to combat the Eisenhower administration’s arguments for nuclear readiness, how to address the Atomic Energy Commission’s promotion of nuclear power, how to count
er the pronuclear lectures being delivered across the country by physicist Edward Teller, father of the H-bomb. Ryan, Cousins discovered, had a shrewd sense of how to put ideas across to the public. “What should a program be, how do we stage them to appeal to people, these were the operational questions. Here, he had a very searching knowledge of the people involved, and could tell you who could do what, and not much time was wasted.”32 Actors involved in political issues could be egotistical and uninformed, Cousins learned, but Ryan was just the opposite, more interested in results than in scoring points.
Though the public support for SANE was encouraging, both Ryan and Cousins knew from bitter experience just how easily pacifist movements could be derailed by assaults from the right and bad news from overseas. As members of the United World Federalists, they had seen the organization swell to a membership of fifty thousand in 1949 and then shrivel after the Korean conflict erupted in June 1950. Protecting its right flank, the UWF supported President Truman’s decision to send US troops to the Korean peninsula, which put the group in the untenable position of seeking world peace even as it endorsed armed conflict. Still the attacks came: in 1951 the Senate Appropriations Committee voted to prohibit funding of groups that promoted world government, and by 1953 government employees were being asked if they had ever belonged to the UWF, regarded now as a communist front organization. By the end of the decade Ryan was serving as president of the Southern California chapter, though the fact that the nation’s third largest metropolitan center sustained just one chapter only highlighted the UWF’s diminishing relevance.*