by J. R. Jones
As it opens, Beckett is returning to England in 1170 after seven years in exile, having offended King Henry II by proclaiming his primary allegiance to the Pope; the faithful celebrate the archbishop’s return, but the king dispatches four knights to assassinate him. Beckett is visited by a succession of tempters, each of whom offers him some compromise that will save his life, but he rejects them all and waits in the peace of God for the end to come. After the knights arrive and hack him to death, each offers his justification to the crowd, and the last of them argues with some force that Beckett was no martyr at all but “a monster of egotism.”26 Eliot’s aim, then, was not simply to celebrate Beckett’s spiritual devotion but to note how even the most perfect devotion can be corrupted by the sin of pride.
Murder in the Cathedral opened on January 18 at UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall, a 526-seat classical music venue whose hydraulic orchestra pit enabled Houseman to create various levels in the action as Beckett was addressed by the tempters and a chorus of the faithful. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Philip Scheuer praised the production but faulted the casting of Ryan, who “appears to have bent over backward to emphasize the turn-the-other-cheek side of this dedicated priest.”27 The review pinpointed what a stretch this passive, contemplative character was for Ryan, who had played so many angry, dynamic men. In the Christmas sermon that bisects the play, Beckett explains: “A martyrdom is always the design of God, for His love of men, to warn them and to lead them, to bring them back to his ways. It is never the design of man; for the true martyr is he who has become the instrument of God, who has lost his will in the will of God, and who no longer desires anything for himself, not even the glory of being a martyr.”28
The two-week run was well attended, and the Theatre Group would continue on the campus for eight seasons, staging forty-one productions before it moved to the Mark Taper Forum in 1966. Houseman’s insistence on casting big names from movies and television led to some friction between the company and the university’s theater department, but the Theatre Group became a source of great cultural excitement in Los Angeles. “Going to the plays had the feeling of attending a private party,” wrote critic Cecil Smith in 1981. “You ran into friends there, people of like interests. Intermissions were alive with spirited discussions.”29 Ryan’s founding role in all this would go largely overlooked, and he would never get another chance to perform with the group.
After the play closed, Ryan hosted A Call from…,* a star-studded, hour-long TV special, produced by his friend Marsha Hunt, about the United Nations’ yearlong campaign to address the humanitarian crisis of some fifteen million refugees worldwide. Over the past decade Ryan had developed a reputation in Hollywood as someone who never said no to a good cause — the ACLU, the NAACP, the United World Federalists, the American Friends Service Committee, and so on. “Everyone would like to do things for others,” he told one reporter. “Let’s just say that between acting assignments, I have time to do them.”30
He had an especially hard time turning down Hunt, a probing and articulate woman who had been blacklisted after her name appeared in Red Channels. Her professional hardship hardly had dented her social commitment; she may have been the only liberal in Hollywood capable of exhausting Ryan. At one point she called asking him to appear on a program and heard a sigh on the other end of the line. “Marsha, you know I’m with you, and all of the things that we’re working toward,” Ryan replied. “I think maybe it is someone else’s turn for a while.” Hunt would chuckle at the memory: “He put it so kindly and so gently, but he was perfectly right.”31
Always on the lookout for literate scripts, Ryan agreed to fly to New York in mid-March to appear in a TV adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” for CBS. Sponsored by General Motors, Buick-Electra Playhouse was a series of four 90-minute Hemingway specials scheduled throughout the 1959–60 season, the first two of which — an adaptation of “The Killers” starring boxer Ingemar Johansson and a production of The Fifth Column, Hemingway’s only play, with Richard Burton and Maximilian Schell — had aired the previous fall. The Snows of Kilimanjaro, scheduled for broadcast on the evening of Friday, March 25, was to be shot and edited on videotape by thirty-year-old John Frankenheimer, one of the most talented and innovative of the young directors then coming up through TV. The strong supporting cast included Mary Astor, James Gregory, Brock Peters, and Liliane Montevecchi. But Ryan would be the lynchpin: as Harry Walters, the washed-up writer dying of gangrene on safari in Africa, he appeared in almost every scene, with flashback sequences that followed him to Paris and New York.
Hemingway famously had disliked the 1952 movie version starring Gregory Peck, which replaced the protagonist’s death and spiritual deliverance with a happy ending in which a rescue plane arrives with penicillin just in the nick of time. The TV version promised to be much better: writer A. E. Hotchner had done several Hemingway adaptations, and he made liberal use of Harry’s haunting interior narration, turning it into dialogue or voice-over. He had certainly nailed the character, whose regrets eat away at him even worse than the gangrene. Once a promising artist, Harry has squandered his talent doing mediocre work he thinks will sell, something Ryan might have identified with after Ice Palace. Given the actor’s envy of Peck, he must have relished the opportunity to give a better performance in the same role.
But when Ryan arrived in New York a week before the broadcast, Frankenheimer came to him with bad news: someone at CBS had learned that taping the program would constitute a copyright infringement on the Fox release, so the teleplay would have to be performed live. Ryan, who had never done live TV, asked Frankenheimer what this would mean in terms of staging. “What it means is that you’re gonna be in for the ride of your life,” Frankenheimer replied.32 He was still trying to figure out how on earth they would make the transitions from the jungle set, where Harry is tended by his wife and their African guides, to the flashbacks, which showed his life leading up to the fateful safari.
Brainstorming with art director Burr Schmidt, Frankenheimer came up with a novel solution: their elaborate jungle set would remain, but the bed on which Harry lay dying would be placed on a large turntable unseen by the viewer, and a camera would be mounted on the turntable as well, at the foot of the bed. Whenever Harry slipped into one of his reveries, the camera would zoom in tight on his face, grips would push the turntable counterclockwise into the flashback setting, the camera would zoom out again, and Ryan would simply climb out of bed and walk into the next scene. To make this elaborate floor plan more manageable, Schmidt painted some of the flashback settings on giant sheets of paper that could be drawn behind the action like a curtain, and his impressionistic imagery would heighten the sense of a fevered memory play, turning a problem into a creative advantage. Frankenheimer thought their scheme would work, but the fact that his star had never done live TV was worrisome, to say the least.
To execute this high-wire act, CBS moved the production to Los Angeles, where Frankenheimer could take advantage of the network’s giant Television City complex. The day he began blocking the program, CBS executives brought in the legendary Warner Bros. director Michael Curtiz (Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Yankee Doodle Dandy, Casablanca, Mildred Pierce) to watch him work. Curtiz, whose career had declined in the ’50s, was considering a move into TV, but this was hardly the best introduction.
“The madness of trying to block this thing, I mean, I cannot describe it to you,” Frankenheimer told a seminar audience years later. “Cameras would come crashing through and just missing people … and booms coming and going through the paper, and we’d knock [the paper sets] down and put ’em up again…. We did kind of a stagger-through of this thing — you couldn’t call it a run-through, because it was just insane.”33 At one point Frankenheimer glanced over to the control room and saw the elderly, well-dressed Curtiz with his collar open and sweat running down his face. The old man watched for an hour and then fled, telling Frankenheimer, “You are crazy! Thi
s whole business is crazy!”34 He would never work in television.
The pressure of doing a live drama for network television was incredible; many actors vomited from nerves. As Frankenheimer would recall, the hour between dress rehearsal and airtime was the scariest: “You were sitting there, most of the time, with your own thoughts. And it was a very private time, because going on the air with one of these things — it really wound your watch, let’s put it that way.”35 Ryan always had sought to challenge himself as an actor, but this time he had his work cut out for him: barely leaving the screen for ninety minutes, he would have to turn on a dime from the African scenes, where Harry is swept into delirium by his advancing illness, to flashbacks that took place years earlier, played in a variety of moods. Twenty years into his career, Ryan never had so much riding on a single performance, and at 5:30 PM,* when an assistant director counted down the seconds to air and then cued the action, the actor would draw on everything he had ever learned onstage or in front of a camera.
Not only did Ryan pull off the live broadcast, but he also delivered one of his best screen performances. The extreme close-ups of Harry in his sickbed, closing his eyes and slipping away into the past, showed Ryan’s great subtlety of expression, every thought registering in his strong features as the bed slowly spun beneath him (a faint grinding could be heard at one point, but otherwise the turntable worked like a charm). The flashbacks, by contrast, took advantage of his physical agility: when Harry gets into a fistfight with a British soldier in Paris, Frankenheimer concocted an elaborate ground-level shot in which the triangle formed by a woman’s legs frames a silhouette of the men beating each other, cast in shadow against a brick wall.
The shot would have been difficult even for a movie, and there were plenty more like it. Yet aside from a bit of fumbled dialogue in the first act, Ryan negotiated it all with ease, giving an assured, impressively rich interpretation of the Hemingway character. “For anybody to do something like this, it was fabulous,” Frankenheimer said. “For him to do it, never having done live television, was unbelievable.”36 Then, at 7 PM, the performance was over, and few ever saw it again.*
RYAN LIKED TO TELL PEOPLE that when his agent phoned to offer him a part in King of Kings, a biblical epic being shot in Madrid, he turned to Jessica and said, “Here we go again — Judas.”37 But, in fact, his old friends Phil Yordan and Nicholas Ray, who were making the picture for producer Samuel Bronston, wanted him to play John the Baptist. The salary was $50,000, well below his usual fee, but his scenes would take only a week and then he could go home. From their perspective, attaching Ryan’s name to King of Kings provided some much-needed credibility, given that the New York Times had just published a story about the picture’s shaky financing.
The diminutive Bronston embodied the new breed of international film hustler: born in Bessarabia, then part of Russia, he had made a few pictures in Hollywood during the war but resurfaced more recently as a producer of historical spectaculars in Franco’s Spain, where dirt-cheap labor and favorable banking policies allowed a producer to put a lot on-screen for very little money.** By this time Ray had peaked commercially with Rebel without a Cause (1955), which crystallized the emerging youth culture in America; his masterful Bigger Than Life (1956) and Bitter Victory (1957) both had under-performed at the box office, and a pair of out-and-out flops (Wind across the Everglades, Party Girl) had ended his career in Hollywood. He looked on this Spanish adventure as a chance to get his career back on track.
Attacking the project with his usual vigor, Ray immersed himself in the historical Jesus, fascinated by the political conflicts swirling around this so-called king of Judea. He hired Yordan to crank out a new screenplay presenting Jesus as a radical humanist, and Yordan hit on the plot gimmick of playing up Jesus’ relationship to the criminal Barabbas, portrayed in his script as a violent revolutionary. Script in hand, Ray, Yordan, and Bronston managed to secure $5.5 million in financing from MGM, which hired Yordan to supervise production.
Ryan, having just played a “practical saint” in Ice Palace and a genuine saint in Murder in the Cathedral, now took a crack at John the Prophet, portrayed as a muscular evangelist in animal skins, a bushy wig, and a long beard. After Ryan arrived in Madrid, the company drove out to the countryside to shoot John’s baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan. (Ryan would recall being chauffeured to the location in costume with costar Jeffrey Hunter, who played Jesus, and the two of them startling onlookers when they got out of their stalled car to give it a push.)38 There were a few more scenes, shot on a local soundstage, where John is imprisoned by Herod in a lonely dungeon. When Jesus appears at the window of John’s cell, reaching a hand through the bars to comfort him, John scrambles up the stone incline to the window and manages to clasp his hand. “For the first time in my life,” reported film editor Renee Lichtig, “I saw technicians weeping when silent rushes were screened.”39
Ryan was intrigued by the Spanish movie industry. Cinema was still the national entertainment there, and movie production was a more freewheeling affair than in Hollywood. Bronston burned through MGM’s money at an astonishing rate; a story in Family Weekly described a Sermon on the Mount featuring seven thousand extras “costumed in hand-woven desert fabrics scoured from every corner of the Mediterranean world…. Camels from the Canary Islands mingled with uncounted horses and burros. The sequence is so vast it had to be planned like a military operation.”40 Originally budgeted at $5.5 million, the movie would top out at $8 million; talking to reporters upon its release, Ryan would hasten to point out that his $50,000 salary was for only a week’s labor.
Back home from Madrid, Ryan looked forward to a blissful summer: Katharine Hepburn had asked him to costar with her in Antony and Cleopatra at the American Shakespeare Festival Theatre in Stratford, Connecticut, and the family was coming along for a three-month stay. The 1,500-seat Festival Theatre was located on a lovely stretch of land that ended at the Housatonic River, and the Ryans had a house overlooking the water, only a hundred yards from the theater. Hepburn had been heavily involved with the festival from its inception, performing in three productions there since the theater opened in 1955. She adored Ryan personally and thought him a marvelous talent, and once they arrived she immediately befriended his family, bonding especially with his two sons and taking them on sailing expeditions. Eight-year-old Lisa, who often peeled off from the boys, spent many long afternoons watching in fascination as the company rehearsed. “When I first showed up, Katharine Hepburn was angry that there was a child sitting in the audience, and demanding to know why I was there. And my father said, ‘Well, that’s my daughter. She’ll be quiet.’ I’d just sit there all day.”41
Cheyney, Jessica, Tim, Robert, and Lisa Ryan in Stratford, Connecticut. “The family struck me as a rather private group,” remembered Mike Metzger, who worked for the Ryans while studying at UCLA. “They were quiet and contemplative.” Robert Ryan Family
Bob and Jessica in Stratford, Connecticut. “He was dependent on her for her critical attitudes,” director Arvin Brown observed. “He admired a great deal what she had to say about him in performances, and he took her very seriously.” Robert Ryan Family
Performing Shakespeare and relaxing with his wife and kids — for Ryan, show business didn’t get any better than this, and as he sat in the nearby Fagan’s-in-Stratford pub, having steak and a beer with a reporter from Cue magazine, he was unusually frank about his career. “The junk I’ve played!” he exclaimed. “An actor spends years on junk. And then comes a chance to do something better — by the greatest dramatist that ever lived…. Just the effort to master the master increases the stature of any actor. I think that’s why so many Shakespearean actors get better as they grow older. They grow greater with greater understanding of him.”42 He admitted that his 1954 run as Coriolanus left something to be desired and that he would play the role again, given the chance.
Cleopatra was one of Shakespeare’s strongest female characters, so the play naturally
favored Hepburn, but in Ryan she had selected as her stage lover an actor whose power and virility projected to the back row. Writing about Ryan for the Dartmouth Varsity, fellow alumnus Raymond Buck noted that teenage girls lined the hall outside his dressing room and swooned when he opened the door to admit Hepburn, who had come to introduce her father.43
The critics were considerably less gaga: “Mr. Ryan’s Roman clumps about in what seems to be a perpetual hangover, more stumblebum than fallen hero,” wrote Judith Crist in the New York Herald Tribune. “We see no flashes of past greatness in his meeting with Lepidus and Caesar; he gives no impression of strength beyond the physical. True, he is besotted, but his monotone and single-keyed performance fails to evoke a past image or a present sympathy.”44 Ryan always made a show of laughing off bad reviews, but when it came to Shakespeare, they cut deeper.
The family returned home after Labor Day, and the kids went back to school, though their parents, who knew a thing or two about educating children, had decided they didn’t like the public schools in West Los Angeles. Lisa, who had been miserable at Warner Avenue Elementary, returned to Oakwood, while Tim and Cheyney were enrolled at the Harvard School for Boys, a military academy on Coldwater Canyon Drive in Studio City. Beginning that fall, Solomon Smith began driving them out to the Valley in the morning and picking them up in the afternoon. Lisa was overjoyed to be back at Oakwood, but the boys despised the Harvard School. Their parents were impressed by the school’s academic reputation, though given their politics, the decision to send the boys to a military academy was surprising. “The problem with the school was not just the military side,” Cheyney explained. “It was drawing on a kind of a conservative LA business element that was very racist, anti-Semitic, believe it or not. I don’t think they understood that that was what they were getting into with the school.”45