by J. R. Jones
Ryan had plenty of time for activism, because his picture offers were drying up. After God’s Little Acre he decided to take some television work, appearing simultaneously in three different anthology series during the 1957–58 season. Both Goodyear Theatre and Alcoa Theatre were broadcast Monday nights on NBC and aspired to quality drama, though the half-hour playlets Ryan appeared in sometimes fell short of the mark. He also appeared on an episode of the western anthology Zane Grey Theater, with two more to follow in the 1958–59 season. But no movie star had ever forged a TV career appearing in drama anthologies. Many of Ryan’s young costars in God’s Little Acre would become household names on TV over the next decade, but all in continuing series that identified them with single characters: Vic Morrow as a foot soldier on Combat!, Tina Louise as the starlet on Gilligan’s Island, Michael Landon as the junior brother on Bonanza, Jack Lord as a detective on Hawaii Five-O.
A more enticing TV project came up in summer 1958 when Ryan landed the title role in a Playhouse 90 adaptation of The Great Gatsby. Ryan had always cherished the book. “I was a child of the 1920s — a dream world,” he recalled. “Life was a ball: two Cadillacs, the trip to Hawaii, lots of fun, no problems — and everyone was going to make a million. That’s why Scott Fitzgerald is the best; he got it down the way we lived it.”33 His long history of playing strong, confident men with secret vulnerabilities made him a natural for Jay Gatsby, the wealthy bootlegger pining for his lost love.
Unfortunately, the broadcast would fail to capture the novel’s mystery and only emphasized Ryan’s advancing age. Fitzgerald describes Gatsby as being about thirty-two years old; Ryan was visibly forty-eight. Rod Taylor, as the story’s narrator, Nick Carraway, and Jeanne Crain, as Gatsby’s coveted Daisy Buchanan, were much closer to their characters’ ages. Ryan shone in the scenes where Gatsby, having contrived a meeting with Daisy at his palatial home in West Egg, frets and fusses prior to her arrival, then relaxes into himself when they finally meet. As an adaptation of Fitzgerald, the script was functional but uninspired, and the broadcast, recorded and edited on the new technology of magnetic videotape, suffered from Franklin Schaffner’s clunky direction.
The challenge of adapting classic literature to the movies hit home even harder in the weeks after the broadcast, when Ryan reported for work on a screen adaptation of Nathanael West’s corrosive 1933 novel Miss Lonelyhearts. Fired from MGM, Dore Schary had gone back East to produce a play he had written about Franklin Roosevelt, Sunrise at Campobello, which became a Broadway hit; while in New York he had seen a stage version of Miss Lonely-hearts and bought the rights, then tossed out Howard Teichmann’s script and wrote his own version of West’s story. Financed by United Artists for a modest $750,000 (about the same as God’s Little Acre), the project heralded Schary’s triumphant return to Hollywood as an independent producer, and he filled the cast with old friends: Montgomery Clift as the tormented advice columnist, Ryan as his cynical editor, Myrna Loy as the editor’s unloved and unhappy wife. Vincent Donehue, who had directed Sunrise at Campobello, was brought out West to make his screen directing debut and signaled his stage inclinations immediately by calling for two weeks of rehearsal prior to shooting.
Unfortunately, no amount of rehearsal could compensate for Schary’s script, which suffered from a playwright’s verbosity and a Jewish writer’s indifference to a deeply Catholic work. West’s protagonist, a newspaper writer assigned to his paper’s lovelorn column, has become a connoisseur of human misery: a severely deformed girl who pines for a boyfriend, a woman who fears her eighth pregnancy will kill her, and a deaf girl who has been sexually assaulted are only a few of the anguished souls introducing themselves in the letters that cross his desk. Shrike, his jaundiced boss, has written a little prayer mocking his sense of having taken on the world’s troubles: “Soul of Miss L, glorify me / Body of Miss L, nourish me / Blood of Miss L, intoxicate me / Tears of Miss L, wash me.”34 Schary updated the story to the ’50s and got rid of all the Jesus talk; in place of the novel’s dark ending, when Miss Lonelyhearts finally wins the crucifixion he’s been seeking, he wrote a sunny-side-up conclusion in which the hero — renamed Adam in Old Testament fashion — lives happily ever after with his sweetheart, and even the rancid old Shrike learns to be a little nicer to his woman.
“The picture was a misfire — a compromise,” Ryan would later say. “It would have been much more interesting, and equally commercial, if they had made it really like the book.”35 He admired Nathanael West and must have related to the novel’s eerie mingling of Catholic mysticism and grotesque black humor; as a lapsed Catholic, Ryan was drawn more to the Passion than the Resurrection. “He only went to church once a year; he’d go on Good Friday,” remembered Lisa Ryan. “I went with him a couple of times. Talk about the most depressing service you could go to!”36
Montgomery Clift, doing the picture for a mere $25,000 as a favor to Schary, thought the script was horrendous. It was full of overripe dialogue, and Ryan had more than his share, his arch delivery only emphasizing its stiffness: “Love and kindness. Man is good. Well listen, Little Boy Blue. You’d better take a bath and wash off the eau de cologne — it stinks.” The hero’s Christ complex was watered down to something more revealing of Dore Schary, that tireless supporter of causes and charities: “Is it a sin to feel?” asks Adam. “Is do-gooder a dirty name? Why should it be?” Clift thought the whole thing read like an Andy Hardy movie.37
Perpetually drunk and whacked out on pills, Clift struggled to get through the picture. “He would start to cry in the middle of scenes and they’d have to stop the film,” recalled Cheyney Ryan, who visited the set. “One time he literally lay down and got into a fetal position in the middle of a scene and started crying and rolling around, and everyone’s sitting around waiting for this to end.”38 Some of the crew and minor players began to get fed up with Clift’s behavior, and the situation came to a head during a barroom scene in which Adam punches a colleague at the paper. The punch was choreographed as a right cross, but in the take Clift twisted and around and clocked actor Mike Kellin with his left. Kellin cursed him out and Clift was taken away, after which Robert Ryan donned Clift’s shirt and jacket and stood in for a close-up of the punch that was inserted to rescue the botched take. “I’ve always wanted to work with you,” Ryan told Loy during the production, “and now that I am, I hardly see you. You’re too busy taking care of Monty.”39
Lonelyhearts, as Schary had titled the picture, was Ryan’s first screen work in nine months. He had quit smoking and put on weight. A vague sheen of perspiration — the old flop sweat — clung to him as he tried to put across the turgid dialogue. When the picture was released at the end of the year, critics were merciless. “The play had at least tried to capture some of the book’s agony, but in the film everything is munched down into pablum,” wrote Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic.40 In Esquire, Dwight Macdonald published a feature story on Schary’s return to Hollywood, labeling Lonelyhearts “the apotheosis of the adult soap opera” and observing, “Robert Ryan, a self-conscious and wooden actor who depends for his effectiveness on a sinister cast of countenance, plays Shrike like a Western bad man coached by Noel Coward, nor is he more successful than Clift in making contact with his opposite number, Myrna Loy, who plays Mrs. Shrike in a world-weary manner more suitable to the Oriental vamps she used to do in the Twenties.”41 Macdonald’s piece ended with Schary admitting that he and his wife had felt like outsiders in Hollywood; he would produce only two more pictures before his movie career petered out five years later.
Ryan wound up as the highest paid performer in Lonelyhearts, taking home $75,000. But the job must have put him in an awkward position with his old friend Pat O’Brien, who had played Shrike in the Broadway production but been passed over by Schary for the screen role. Unloaded from RKO in 1949, O’Brien had fallen on hard times in LA, scratching around for B movies and TV guest shots and wondering why every door in town seemed to be shutting on him. In his 1964 auto
biography he would write of being blackballed by liberal studio executives who considered him part of the anticommunist right. Schary had a reputation for getting even with red-baiters — John Wayne liked to say that the only blacklist in Hollywood was the one Schary ran at MGM — and O’Brien would recall Spencer Tracy threatening to quit MGM’s The People vs. O’Hara unless Schary gave O’Brien a role. “I was against communists, I was against the methods and the procedures by which they and fellow travelers had, it was reported, infiltrated the studios,” wrote O’Brien. “But I hadn’t made a full-time crusade of it.”42 Ironically, Joseph Losey would remember O’Brien, whom he directed in The Boy with Green Hair, as one of the few people who came to his aid when he was blacklisted.
“SOME ACTORS think they’re businessmen,” Ryan told Variety earlier that year, “but few of them are. Most of them are going through the motions of playing executives. I’d rather let somebody else take care of the production details. If you are your own producer, you might start making concessions. You can’t do a good acting job and be a producer at the same time.” Most actors didn’t know how to judge a script, he observed, and as producers, “they all wind up making westerns.”43
He preferred the kind of profit-participation deals he had cut with Security Pictures. In his words they constituted “income roulette,” and the promotional tours were grueling: two or three weeks, city after city, each day beginning with press interviews at breakfast and continuing on to nightfall or even midnight screenings. Yet as Ryan explained to one reporter, “The odds are generally in your favor if you get enough of these deals and one comes through to tip the scales.”44 God’s Little Acre had been that picture—according to Phil Yordan, Ryan pocketed a quarter million dollars for it. When Yordan and Sid Harmon offered Ryan another participation deal for their last United Artists release, he readily accepted.
Of course, it was a western, adapted from a novel by Lee Wells called Day of the Outlaw. Director André De Toth had directed six westerns with Randolph Scott, making the occasional detour into crime (Pitfall) or horror (the 3-D release House of Wax). Harmon and Yordan brought back Tina Louise to play Ryan’s love interest and recruited another cast of talented character actors: William Schallert, Nememiah Persoff, and Elisha Cook Jr. Yet Men in War and God’s Little Acre had been happy experiences; Day of the Outlaw turned into a nightmare.
Yordan’s script was intriguing, a chamber drama set in a snowy western outpost, with the balance of power shifting radically at different points. Rancher Blaise Starrett (Ryan) rides into Bitter, a frontier town in the Wyoming Territory, itching to kill a local farmer who has married Starrett’s true love (Louise). But just as this conflict comes to a head, the town is invaded by a renegade army officer (the immense, gravel-voiced folksinger Burl Ives) and his band of violent derelicts. Hunted by a cavalry outfit, they take over the town and threaten to rape the four women. Starrett, once a gunslinger, is forced back into his old role as the town’s protector, though this time he succeeds through cunning: with the cavalry nearing the town, he persuades the outlaws to follow him to safety on a secret path through the snowy mountains, and leads them into the face of a deadly blizzard.
De Toth loved the idea of the fearsome gang “terrorizing a small Western village, and then, by a quirk of nature, becoming equally the prisoners of the white silence in the middle of nowhere.” Harmon and Yordan, he would later argue, “didn’t understand where I was heading — a sphere I had been exploring for some time: is it worse being the jailer, instead of the prisoner?” The producers wanted him to shoot in color, on a soundstage; De Toth insisted on black and white, to make the blizzard sequences as stark as possible, and persuaded them to erect an exterior set of half a dozen building fronts on Dutchman Flat, located southwest of Bend, Oregon, in full view of the Cascade Range. He wanted the buildings up by the fall, so that they would be properly weathered and snow-encrusted when shooting commenced in mid-November. Ryan backed De Toth on this point, and the set construction began. “He was a gentleman, a sincere human being — and what an actor,” remembered De Toth. “He was with me all the way. Without him, I would’ve been laid out in the snow and counted out quickly.”45
The relationship between Harmon, Yordan, and De Toth deteriorated further when the director discovered that the art director had ignored his compass coordinates for the set and built it facing in the wrong direction, which ruined his plans for taking advantage of available light and keeping the snow in the background pristine and untouched. The producers, who had spent most of their UA money on the last two pictures and budgeted this one for a measly $400,000, considered simply firing De Toth, but Ryan stuck by him and the production went forward. “[Ryan] was a loyal man, which is very uncommon in Hollywood,” Yordan said, “in fact it’s very rare in the business world.”46 The set was rebuilt just before the cast and crew arrived, and De Toth shot a few scenes there before taking off for Mount Bachelor, twenty-two miles west, to shoot the blizzard sequences.
The work was punishing, as Ryan, Ives, and the actors playing his henchmen rode on horseback through three-foot snowdrifts. After a few days Ryan was diagnosed with pneumonia; a week was lost before he was well enough to return to work. Snowstorms pushed the production even further behind schedule, and according to Yordan, the location shoot was finally shut down and the cast and crew brought back to Hollywood for interior scenes that would be needed to patch up the story.
Yordan was proud of his script and bitterly disappointed with how the picture turned out: “It could have been a real winner,” he argued.47 The picture’s reputation would grow steadily in the decades ahead, as people began to appreciate its novel plot structure and brutal naturalism. But when Day of the Outlaw opened in July 1959, it bored critics and tanked at the box office, bringing Ryan’s relationship with Security Pictures to an ignominious close. The next time he worked with Phil Yordan and Sid Harmon, he would need them more than they needed him.
*For a definitive account of Yordan’s storied career, see Alan K. Rode’s “‘First Is First and Second Is Nobody’: The Philip Yordan Story,” Noir City Sentinel, November/December 2009.
*This homespun tale was part of the NBC anthology series Screen Directors Playhouse, which showcased the small-screen work of veteran Hollywood filmmakers (in this case, H. C. Potter).
*For a biting history of the UWF, see John A. Yoder’s “The United World Federalists: Liberals for Law and Order” in Peace Movements in America (New York: Schocken Books, 1973), 95–115.
eleven
Beautiful Creatures
Andy Harmon often came over to the Ryans’ house on Kling Street to play with Tim. He liked the atmosphere there, so cool and quiet compared to his own home. “I thought the Ryans were the height of elegance,” he recalled. “It certainly seemed to me like they never argued, whereas we always argued.” The Ryans had dinner every night at 6:30; Jessica said a Quaker grace, and they would talk about politics or current events at the table. But Jessica could be distant, and at times the children were admonished to be quiet around her. “There would be this mysterious thing where one of [the parents] would be in bed for a long time in the mornings, which I didn’t understand, ’cause my dad was literally out of bed and in his tie and jacket at 7:30 in the morning.”1 Like any child, Andy could only puzzle out what was going on in the grown-up world, but Bob and Jessica Ryan seemed even more private than most parents.
As the decade wore on, Jessica grew increasingly troubled, until she suffered a breakdown sometime in 1958. “I don’t think she was hospitalized,” said Cheyney Ryan. “But you certainly had the sense that there was something wrong with her. I remember this in part because we were all supposed to go to Palm Springs and we didn’t do that, and then there was some plan to take a cruise somewhere, we didn’t do that. So things were being canceled because of this, and she went into psychoanalysis.” Jessica had long been an avid student of Jungian psychology, and she became a patient of therapist Max Zeller, a founder of the C. G.
Jung Institute of Los Angeles. “What she said about it afterwards was that … she didn’t want to be just a regular housewife, and people were telling her that she should be.”2
Years later, in the introduction to a scholarly manuscript, Jessica would identify herself as “a middle-aged American woman, wife, and mother of three children, wondering if I can find a better answer than I have yet had, to why I am the way I am, to why I have had an uneasy life with men and them with me.” All around her she saw women who “feel that they were promised something, even if they have no notion of what, or by whom, or when or why; the promise unfulfilled, they continue to resent and rage, while they play the roles they feel have been assigned to them. But underneath, it is as if they suffer a feeling of some great disappointment.”3
And so she withdrew — from the Oakwood School, from her friends, and, to some extent, from her children. She stopped attending school functions and no longer accompanied her husband to political or charity events, not to mention movie promotions or Hollywood parties. She shut herself up in the house and buried herself in books, searching for an intellectual answer to a problem that, as some of her children would later suppose, might have been addressed more effectively with less booze, more exercise, and a mild antidepressant. She wrote incessantly, filling up page after page in longhand. (Despite her feelings of having been squashed professionally, her career wasn’t going badly; her novel City of Angels had been published in France, and she had recently placed a children’s mystery, The Malibu Monster, with Bobbs-Merrill.) Jessica always had been the center of the family, and now her husband and children rallied around her. “There was this kind of thing happened in the family, that Mom was fragile,” said Cheyney. “When you have someone like that, the whole family thinks it’s their role to prop her up.”4