by J. R. Jones
The Ryans drew a cloak of privacy over Jessica’s condition. Cheyney would wonder if his parents were ever physically intimate again after his mother’s breakdown, but there was no doubt of their mutual love and respect. “I never remember their being sarcastic with each other,” he marveled. “I never remember their raising their voices with each other. I never remember them ever acting in any way that suggested that they weren’t taking each other’s views about whatever the issue was with complete seriousness.”5 Ryan may not have understood how women felt in a world dominated by men, or what Jessica experienced as the wife of a movie star, or how his occasional, guilty infidelities had damaged their relationship. But he valued his family, and now his family was in trouble. In any case, he was so reclusive himself that Jessica’s growing agoraphobia seldom presented much of a practical issue.
Regardless of what transpired at home, Ryan was still the breadwinner, so in February 1959 he flew off to New York City to begin shooting a crime thriller with Harry Belafonte called Odds against Tomorrow. At that point Belafonte was one of the biggest recording stars in the world: in the new age of the long-playing record, he had shot to the top of the Billboard album chart with a self-titled LP in early 1956 and four months later followed it with Calypso, which spent a staggering thirty-one weeks at number one and another year on the chart after that. He had started out in show business as an actor in New York, but he was unhappy with the screen roles that had come his way and decided to start his own production company, HarBel, to release through United Artists. Adapted from a novel by William P. McGivern, Odds against Tomorrow combined a heist plot with tense racial drama, as Johnny Ingram, a Harlem musician in debt to gamblers, agrees to stage a daring bank stickup with Earl Slater, a bigoted white Oklahoman. Belafonte hired Robert Wise to direct, and they agreed that the man to play Slater was Robert Ryan.
Ryan didn’t agree at first — when they had sent him the script the previous fall he passed, explaining that he didn’t want to go down that road again. “A great many people realize that the characters they see on the screen are fictional or created but there is a substantial group that does not make that distinction,” he later wrote in a self-exculpatory piece for Ebony, reminiscent of the things he had published when Crossfire was released twelve years earlier. “I changed my mind about playing Slater after re-reading the script and appreciating its excellent qualities…. Odds against Tomorrow says something … of significance and says it well, dramatically, without preaching. The drama strongly suggests that bigotry is based on fear and envy and that the most important thing that keeps a bigot operating is the feeling that he is better than another man.”6
He also liked the script’s evenhandedness: unlike the quietly suffering role models Sidney Poitier often played, Belafonte’s character was embittered by racism and ultimately pulled down to Slater’s level. And here was a chance to work again with Bob Wise, who had done a spectacular job directing The Set-Up and since moved on to such highly regarded dramas as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Executive Suite (1954), and I Want to Live! (1958).
Belafonte had admired Ryan’s work for years, and their paths had crossed during the Stevenson campaign in 1956, but they had never met properly before shooting the picture. “What really surprised me was that, in many of the films that he did, he had always played a heavy villain,” Belafonte recalled, “and to meet the man in person, to find out that his whole persona, and his way of life, and his thinking and his philosophy, was so the opposite…. The contrast was so glaringly evident.” Earl Slater would complete Ryan’s big trinity of intolerance, along with Monty in Crossfire and Reno Smith in Bad Day at Black Rock — “I’m either killing a Jew, a Jap, or a Negro,” he would lament to one reporter.”7
Yet Belafonte came to realize that Ryan’s acceptance of these roles, and the penetrating intelligence and empathy he brought to them, was a kind of activism in itself. “I think he took them because he really believed that he was making a contribution to people’s overall sense of what it was to be a minority or to be discriminated against.”8 Ryan, in turn, was impressed by Belafonte’s humanity and political commitment; he would maintain an affectionate friendship with the younger man for the rest of his life.
Ten years had passed since Ryan and Wise had collaborated on The Set-Up; in the interim, that postwar cycle of shadowy, morally conflicted crime dramas had petered out at the box office, even as French critics dubbed it film noir and, breaking into the movie business themselves, began to draw on its realism and immediacy. Ryan had appeared in numerous pictures now regarded as part of the noir canon — not only Crossfire and The Set-Up but also Act of Violence, The Woman on Pier 13, On Dangerous Ground, The Racket, and Beware, My Lovely. Wise would consciously revisit the genre with Odds against Tomorrow; along with Ryan, the cast included such noir veterans as slimy Ed Begley (On Dangerous Ground) and saucy Gloria Grahame (Crossfire). For the climactic bank robbery sequence, shot on location in the small town of Hudson, New York, Wise would recycle a prominent visual motif from The Set-Up, a street scene with a public clock marking the time.
Belafonte first gave the book to John Oliver Killens, a talented black novelist and a cofounder of the Harlem Writers Guild. But Killens had never written a screenplay; when his effort proved unsatisfactory, Belafonte turned to veteran screenwriter Abraham Polonsky (Body and Soul, Force of Evil), who had been blacklisted since the second HUAC investigation in 1951. Killens gladly agreed to front for Polonsky, and Belafonte approached both Wise and Ryan to explain what was going on. Ryan “threw his lot in with us and said, absolutely, he’d take a stand, and he thanked me for informing him that it was Abe Polonsky. He and Abe became very good friends after that.”9 The script was expertly structured, and Polonsky was an old hand at the cynical poetry of film noir. When Ingram learns about the bank job from seedy Dave Burke (Begley), the disgraced cop masterminding the operation, his first response is, “I did all my dreaming on my mama’s knee.”
Ryan with Harry Belafonte on the set of Odds against Tomorrow (1959). The younger man awakened his interest in the civil rights movement and would introduce him to Martin Luther King Jr. Frankin Jarlett Collection
Ryan initially turned down the role of Earl Slater, the bigoted criminal in Odds against Tomorrow (1959). “A great many people realize that the characters they see on the screen are fictional or created,” he wrote in Ebony, “but there is a substantial group that does not make that distinction.” Franklin Jarlett Collection
“You didn’t say nothin’ about the third man bein’ a nigger!” Slater complains to Burke as the two men case the bank from a hotel room across the street, and Wise accents this declaration of theme with one of the oldest noir tricks in the book, using venetian blinds to cast horizontal stripes across Ryan’s face. Ryan always felt for the soft spot in his most despicable characters, and he would note how Slater was “peculiarly provoked by the kind of Negro he finds himself involved with. It just so happens that this young Negro is better looking, better dressed, more intelligent; is, in fact, everything that Slater would like to be but isn’t…. Slater, therefore, is a many-sided character and this made the problem of projection a lot more difficult.”10 Initially, it also had discouraged him from taking the role; as with Monty and Reno Smith, there was the danger of making this heel a little too sympathetic.
McGivern’s novel ended with Slater and Ingram learning to trust one another, but that denouement was too reminiscent of Stanley Kramer’s recent hit The Defiant Ones, another tale of a black man and a white man yoked together, so Belafonte and Polonsky agreed on something darker. The carefully planned robbery falls apart after Slater, unwilling to leave Ingram with the keys to the getaway car, gives them to Burke, who is shot down by police outside the bank. Slater and Ingram fire angrily on each other even as they flee the cops, and Ingram chases Slater across the giant tanks of a nearby oil refinery. An errant bullet ignites one of the tanks, and — shades of James Cagney in White Heat — the antagonists
are blown to kingdom come; when their bodies are carted off by the police, the black man and the white man are indistinguishable. The finishing touch would be an edgy symphonic score by John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet.
The shoot was mostly uneventful, though actress Shelley Winters, who played Slater’s blowsy girlfriend, was coming unglued over her rocky marriage to actor Tony Franciosa. “My God, we had to nurse her through that sometimes, and Bob was a big help on that,” said Wise. “Bob was very, very patient with her and worked with her and helped her and didn’t get out of sorts, which some actors might have.”11 For his trouble, Ryan would turn up in one of the kiss-and-tell memoirs Winters published in the 1980s, which detailed her affairs with Errol Flynn, William Holden, Sterling Hayden, Burt Lancaster, and Sean Connery. According to Winters, she and Ryan had known each other “not-so-casually” after being introduced by Marilyn Monroe on the set of Clash by Night back in 1951. Reunited for Odds against Tomorrow, she wrote, they spent a good deal of time together between takes, talking about “the theater, organic farming, where Hollywood was going in this age of television, anything but what we were really thinking about.”12
Ryan had more on his mind than Winters might have imagined: he and Jessica had decided to sell the ranch house in North Hollywood and move out of the San Fernando Valley, back to the movie colony in Los Angeles. Numerous factors influenced their decision: Only a block south of Kling Street, construction had begun for the Ventura Freeway, which the Ryans were certain would spoil the quiet little neighborhood. Jessica wanted some physical distance from the Oakwood School, and Ryan hoped a big house might raise his professional profile. After he returned from New York, they settled on a beautiful Georgian Colonial residence in Holmby Hills, just east of the UCLA campus.
The family moved that summer, and the children all started at public schools in the fall, Tim and Cheyney at Emerson in West Los Angeles and Lisa at Warner Avenue Elementary in Holmby Hills. They couldn’t understand why they were being uprooted and moved into this fancy new home, though Cheyney would later attribute the decision to his mother’s unhappiness: “The kind of thing my parents would do is move when there was a problem.”13 His remark echoed Ryan’s recollection of his own parents pulling up stakes after his brother, Jack, died back in 1917: “We had to move and we did.”14
“WHEN WE MOVED TO HOLMBY HILLS, it was like living in a fortress,” said Lisa Ryan.15 The old neighborhood in North Hollywood was built on a street grid, but Holmby Hills discouraged outsiders with its maze of hilly, winding streets, and all the homes were protected by high walls. The one at 301 N. Carolwood Drive had been built in 1937 for Joan Bennett, Ryan’s costar in The Woman on the Beach, by noted architect Wallace Neff, an originator of the California style. Walt Disney lived nearby. The house was luxurious by the Ryans’ standards, backed up by a large patio that gave way to a lawn and then a swimming pool with beach houses on either side. For the first time each of the boys had his own room, but the streets were too steep for bicycle riding and the grounds too landscaped for playing catch. “If you missed the ball, you’d have to spend twenty minutes trying to find it in some thicket or something,” Cheyney Ryan recalled.16 In North Hollywood they could walk a few blocks to the drugstore, but here they had to get in the car and drive out the security gate that cordoned them off from the rest of the world.
The move baffled many of the Ryans’ friends, who had never considered them materialistic despite their comfortable lifestyle. Lamont Johnson thought he understood: “There was a part of [Ryan] that was sort of lace-curtain Irish, that loved not only keeping up with the Joneses but beating the shit out of them.”17 Interviewed at length by columnist Sidney Skolsky, Ryan presented the move as a simple matter of needing more space. “When the children were babies, it was fine; we were all close together, and we had a nice yard and a wonderful life there; but my children are getting quite large now, and we found that we were all bumping into each other. Also, there didn’t seem to be room enough for anything, and I had about exhausted the expansion possibilities of the house we had, having built on it six times already.” The new house, he pointed out, had “a huge playroom downstairs where the kids can go down and turn on the TV full blast, which is the only way they seem to enjoy it. None of us can hear it upstairs. That I think is the outstanding feature.”18
Saddled now with a hefty new mortgage, Ryan took off in August for Petersburg, Alaska, to begin location shooting for Ice Palace, his very first picture for Warner Bros. and the first in three years that he had made for his straight salary of $125,000. A big-budget melodrama spanning almost fifty years, Ice Palace was adapted from a fat best seller by Edna Ferber, author of Giant; when Ryan got a look at the Mendenhall Glacier, which figured in the story, he joked that the picture should be retitled “Giant-on-the-Rocks.”19 He and Richard Burton starred as young entrepreneurs who build a fishing and canning empire together but then grow apart, Burton’s character lusting for wealth and Ryan’s becoming a political crusader for Alaskan statehood and environmental protection; of course, they both love the same woman.
The picture was junk, but at least it presented Ryan as a sympathetic figure. “I think it’s good for business to be liked by the audience every few years,” he told Skolsky. “This particular part involved portraying what you might call a practical saint, and this is a very unusual experience for me.”20 The role also required him to age forty-seven years over the course of the story. “It took me two hours to make up for the twenty-eight-year-old,” he would crack, “and about fifteen minutes for the man of seventy-five.”21 Three weeks later Ryan was back in Los Angeles shooting interiors for the picture, and work continued through December (the final cut would clock in at nearly two-and-a-half hours).
His free time during this period was largely consumed by politics; he and late-night comedian Steve Allen were trying to launch a new chapter of the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, to be called Hollywood for SANE. The inaugural event, a buffet dinner at the Beverly Hills Hotel on September 26, drew about two hundred industry professionals, a healthy turnout by Hollywood standards, and the cochairs announced a drive to raise $50,000 from the entertainment community by the end of the year. Three weeks later, on Saturday, October 17, the Ryans hosted a second meeting at their new home on Carolwood Drive, with Norman Cousins as the guest of honor. “An executive present at both meetings said that film writers were the most prominent industry figures at the initial dinner,” reported the New York Times. “At Mr. Ryan’s house, many more actors and directors attended.”22
This was significant: writers could hide behind fronts, but the large contingent of actors — Rod Steiger, David Niven, James Whitmore, Mercedes McCambridge, Keenan Wynn — suggested that for Hollywood liberals the frost was beginning to thaw. Three months later, director Otto Preminger would announce that Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten, was the screenwriter of his forthcoming United Artists release Exodus, and even before that picture came out, Kirk Douglas credited Trumbo on-screen as the author of Spartacus. After twelve years the blacklist was unraveling. “People in Hollywood are finally ready to speak out for something besides mother love,” Ryan declared after the second Hollywood for SANE gathering.23 Cousins seemed to share his optimism: “The long silence is over,” he observed. “Hollywood is again putting itself on the line for public issues.”24
Ryan’s continuing commitment to Ice Palace prevented him from doing a publicity tour for Odds against Tomorrow, which opened in November, but whenever he got time away from the set, he sat down with press people to talk about the picture and the problem of race prejudice in America. Doing the picture, he wrote in Ebony, had forced him to reexamine his own attitudes and increase his own commitment to ending bigotry. Unfortunately, even as the magazine was hitting newsstands, Ryan committed a cringe-worthy racial gaffe on network TV. After completing his day’s work on Ice Palace, he rushed over to the NBC studios, the fake gray still in his hair, to appear on a prime-time game sho
w called It Could Be You, a hidden camera catching him out in the hall as he got his shoes shined. As part of the show, Ryan surprised the owner of the shoeshine stand, O. C. Jones, by bringing him in front of the studio audience to accept a $200 tip. Ryan towered over Jones, and as he was exiting, he impulsively rubbed the man’s head as if he were a dog.
One benefit of the Ryans’ new house in Holmby Hills was its proximity to UCLA, where Ryan had helped found a fledgling experimental theater company earlier that year as part of the extension program. Along with Sidney Harmon and theatrical producer Eddie Cook, Ryan proposed the idea to Abbott Kaplan, head of the UCLA Extension, who allowed them to use the university’s conference center at Lake Arrowhead for a brainstorming session. Lee Strasberg addressed this gathering of about eighty people, and a subsequent meeting on campus drew such big names as Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Anthony Quinn, and Eva Marie Saint. That summer the newly christened Professional Theatre Group of the UCLA Extension presented three staged readings — Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood, Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage, and Nikos Kazantzakis’s Sodom and Gomorrah — that nearly sold out their six-day runs. Emboldened by this response, Kaplan hired John Houseman as artistic director, and for the first full production, in January 1960, Houseman asked Ryan to play Thomas Beckett, the martyred Archbishop of Canterbury, in T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral.
Remembering the production in one of his memoirs, Houseman was typically rigorous in his assessment of Ryan. “Though he had done some work on his voice since Coriolanus, it remained flat and unresonant,” Houseman wrote, “but, as in Coriolanus, his vocal weakness was offset by his physical presence, his intelligence and his personal experience … of the emotional problems of this profoundly Catholic play.”25