by J. R. Jones
With the kids squared away, Ryan took off for Cypress Hills, Saskatchewan, to shoot The Canadians, a British adventure about the Royal Mounted Police that would be released in the United States by Fox. It had an interesting historical angle — the Mounties must deal with Sioux populations that have been driven north into Canada following the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876 — but the picture would die at the box office. (“Ryan, expressionless as his horse, gives a stolid performance,” noted Variety.)46 The assignment pre cluded him from doing anything in the 1960 presidential campaign, though he contributed enough to Democratic nominee John F. Kennedy to be invited to the inauguration the following year (he did not attend). Jessica disliked Kennedy for his philandering, which was an open secret around Hollywood, and decided to vote for Eric Hass, the Socialist Labor candidate.47
As a prominent member of SANE, Ryan was concerned chiefly with the nuclear test ban treaty being negotiated between the United States and the USSR in Geneva. The Soviets had unilaterally suspended atmospheric testing in March 1958, to be followed by the United States in August, but since then the talks had stalled. In January 1960, Ryan and Philip Dunne had written an open letter from Hollywood for SANE to the likely presidential candidates, asking them to express their support for the test ban, and the following month Ryan signed and helped pay for a full-page SANE advertisement in the Washington Post and other papers nationwide. “Agenda for Geneva” suggested incremental steps toward disarmament that included dismantling all missile bases and suspending production of all nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.
The letter to candidates notwithstanding, Hollywood for SANE concerned itself mainly with raising funds and corralling celebrities to take part in public-awareness campaigns. A series of radio spots had been recorded and distributed to some 650 disc jockeys and SANE chapters, featuring not only Ryan, Steve Allen, and Allen’s wife, Jayne Meadows, but also such stars as Janet Leigh, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, Anthony Quinn, Keenan Wynn, and Mercedes McCambridge. The two chapter presidents, Ryan and Allen, spoke at civic organizations around the Los Angeles area, along with James Whitmore and Ryan’s friend Lee Marvin. Hollywood for SANE answered letters addressed to the many celebrities on its letterhead and distributed informational audiotapes to schools, universities, and discussion groups (one featured a panel with noted atomic scientists, recorded after the premiere of Stanley Kramer’s postapocalyptic drama On the Beach). SANE chairman Norman Cousins would remember Ryan as a tireless advocate: “I can’t think of an affair for the Federalists or for SANE that he didn’t accept.”48
Earlier that year SANE had suffered the sort of internal convulsion that Cousins always dreaded. A giant rally was planned for Madison Square Garden in May 1960, to be followed by a Harry Belafonte concert at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. But in the days leading up to the rally, Democratic Senator Thomas J. Dodd of Connecticut — a vocal critic of the test ban — charged that the rally’s chief organizer, Henry Abrams, was a member of the Communist Party of America. Abrams, a cochairman of SANE’s West Side New York chapter, was summoned to appear before Dodd’s Senate subcommittee on internal security, and when asked about his political association, he invoked his Fifth Amendment rights. Cousins asked Abrams to come clean with the SANE board, but Abrams refused. Faced with the prospect of SANE going down in flames, Cousins fired Abrams, and the national board instituted a new rule requiring chapters to screen out members of the CPA. A wrenching internal debate followed, and a quarter of the organization’s local chapters, all located in the New York area, were ejected for noncompliance.
Cousins would be pilloried for his decision, yet he knew SANE could never achieve its goal of marshaling public opinion if it were tarred as a front for communists. The skittishness of the Hollywood chapter played no small part in this calculation; as Steve Allen would explain, SANE owed its unusually large star contingent to the fact that it was a squarely liberal organization, “a center to coalesce around that was not extremist, not considered hopelessly idealistic, not denominational, not unrealistically radical … an organization to whose center flocked respectable people of all sorts.”49 Allen served as master of ceremonies that October when SANE met for its annual conference in Chicago; the attendees voted to endorse the new membership standards, but the organization was severely wounded by the whole episode.
After the new year nothing of interest materialized for Ryan. He slept late and puttered around his vast new home, enjoying the quiet while the kids were in school. Since the family’s move to Holmby Hills, Jessica had begun work on a new novel and hired young Priscilla Ulene, a student at UCLA, to type up her longhand drafts, help with the shopping, and pick up the kids from school. She was followed in early 1961 by Mike Metzger, another UCLA student, who took over the same duties. Metzger came from a show business family — his grandfather was the great entertainer Eddie Cantor — and he grew chummy with the kids, introducing Tim to the finger-style guitar playing that would become his lifelong passion. Hammering away at the typewriter in Ryan’s office, Metzger got a firsthand look at the household. “The family struck me as a rather private group,” he said. “They weren’t real social. There weren’t a lot of people hanging around. They kind of went off and did their thing, whatever that was. They were quiet and contemplative.”
Metzger knew Ryan from the movies, but in real life he was a different guy, always deep in thought. One afternoon Metzger was typing away in the office, a TV playing silently in the corner. Passing by the open door, Ryan glanced at the screen and saw one of his old black-and-white RKO pictures playing. “Oh my God, that thing,” he remarked to Metzger. They watched it for a few seconds, then Ryan grunted and walked off. “Two minutes later he doubled back, came back, sat transfixed, turned the sound up, and watched the whole film, with great interest,” Metzger recalled. “And he would make comments like, ‘Ah, Christ!’ as though he were reliving the making of that film. I probably said, ‘Was that a particularly memorable film?’ ‘Nah!’ You know, that kind of thing. But he was definitely interested.”
Ryan always struck Metzger as “a giant animal in a small cage…. He seemed to me like a person who was really born to be out in the woods.” Often Ryan would disappear to go hiking, either in the ravine behind the house or, as Cheyney recalled, up in the Hollywood Hills, around the reservoir where Hollis Mulwray’s body would be recovered in the movie Chinatown. After one of his hikes out back, Ryan came into the office carrying something in a rag and invited Metzger to take a look. “Here was this dead hawk, and it was in perfect condition. He was amazed by it. He said, ‘Look at this thing! It’s beautiful.’ He spread the wings and he said, ‘There isn’t a mark on this thing. Must have just died naturally. This is a beautiful creature.’” He was going to have it stuffed. Ryan walked off with his prize, and Metzger forgot about it.
A week later, Ryan was sitting in his armchair reading as Metzger worked, and from the basement they heard a shriek: Williana Smith had gone into the freezer looking for a package and discovered the dead hawk stowed there. “He jumped out of his chair. I mean, this guy is six-foot-six or something. And she’s four-foot-eleven…. He did one of those, it was almost like a silent-movie take, where he went, ‘Oh, shit!’ And he made it through the French doors out into the yard…. She comes storming into the den, screaming, with this hawk in her hands…. ‘Where is he? Where is he? I’m gonna skin him alive!’ If you can picture seeing this huge man sneaking past the glass windows back and forth, trying to dodge her.”50
WHEN RYAN HEARD that British actor and director Peter Ustinov was developing a screen adaptation of Herman Melville’s seafaring story Billy Budd, he leapt into action, calling Ustinov personally to lobby for a role in the picture. Melville had left this Christian allegory unfinished when he died; published in 1924, it fueled the giant resurgence of interest in his work that had engulfed Ryan in his college years. The story opens in 1797, when the Revolutionary French Republic is flexing its muscles on the high seas and t
he Royal Navy is struggling to maintain order after major mutinies aboard two of its warships. Captain Edward Fairfax Vere, commander of the HMS Bellipotent, fears that the rebellion may spread to his own vessel, and John Claggart, his black-hearted master-of-arms, carefully monitors the crew for any hint of conspiracy. Ryan must have known he would be offered the role of Claggart, but his love of Melville ran so deep that in this instance playing the villain didn’t bother him.
As it turned out, he was a perfect fit for the project: Ustinov needed a Hollywood star to bolster the picture’s commercial prospects in the United States and, as he later wrote, thought Ryan “a massive and wicked presence on the screen.”51 Making Claggart an American actually was consistent with the story, in which he is rumored to be a foreigner — possibly a criminal — serving in a lowly rank with the British Royal Navy. Ustinov gave Ryan top billing but reserved for himself the more sympathetic role of Captain Vere; the title character, an angelic teenage sailor whom Claggart sets out to crush, would be played by a twenty-two-year-old theater actor from London named Terence Stamp, making his screen debut.
Ryan had played some sinister men in his day, but none so cold as Claggart, whose evil, Melville notes, is “not engendered by vicious training or corrupting books or licentious living, but born with him and innate, in short ‘a depravity according to nature.’”52 Perceptive and intelligent, Claggart recognizes in Billy a sort of divinity: “If askance he eyed the good looks, cheery health, and frank enjoyment of young life in Billy Budd, it was because these went along with a nature that, as Claggart magnetically felt, had in its simplicity never willed malice or experienced the reactionary bite of that serpent…. One person excepted, the master-at-arms was perhaps the only man in the ship intellectually capable of adequately appreciating the moral phenomenon presented in Billy Budd.”53
Melville’s story was hardly cluttered with incident — barely anything happens in its first half — but Ustinov and coscreenwriter DeWitt Bodeen had at their disposal an excellent stage version by Louis O. Coxe and Robert Chapman, who had first presented it at New York’s Experimental Theatre in 1949 under the title Uniform of Flesh. From their version came the scene in which Billy approaches Claggart on deck one moonlit night and tries to reach him emotionally. When Billy notes the sea’s calm, Claggart replies, “The sea’s deceitful, boy: calm above, and underneath, a world of gliding monsters preying on their fellows. Murderers, all of them. Only the sharpest teeth survive.” When Billy offers to keep Claggart company during his watches, the older man softens but then recoils: “No! Charm me too, would you? Get away!”54 Ustinov drew heavily on the play’s structure and scenic development, steadfastly ignoring the homoerotic subtext of Melville’s story; he would have enough trouble selling this as a family picture with its multiple lashings and its climactic scene of the hero being hanged.
Ryan and Peter Ustinov shooting Billy Budd (1962) off the coast of Alicante, Spain. For Ryan, starring in a screen adaptation of Herman Melville was a dream come true. Franklin Jarlett Collection
Billy Budd began shooting June 1 off the coast of Alicante, Spain, where Ustinov had expended much of his $1.4 million budget hiring two ships, one to play the Bellipotent (here renamed the Avenger) and another to double as both the Rights-of-Man, from which Billy is impressed, and a French warship that later attacks the British. A solid lineup of English character actors — John Neville, Cyril Luckham, John Meillon, Robert Brown — was embellished by handsome David McCallum (soon to become an American TV star on The Man from U.N.C.L.E.) and Melvyn Douglas, whose wife Helen had been pulverized by Nixon in the 1950 Senate race. Terence Stamp, who was tying himself in knots worrying about his performance, found Ryan distant on the set: “He never said two words to me. And it wasn’t really until after the movie that I realized what a great favor he’d done for me, because the big scene, the pivotal scene between Claggart and Billy, was really difficult and really subtle…. He was a wonderful actor, and I think he sort of anticipated that. And he kept me at arm’s length.”55
The company were met with a terrible storm the first day of shooting but continued undeterred for six weeks, shooting six days a week from dawn. Interviewed by Variety, Ryan said his experiences aboard the City of New York in the early ’30s had steeled him against seasickness. Many of the cast and crew were dosed with Dramamine, and the cameras were equipped with a stabilizer to balance out the swelling and ebbing seas. When the exteriors were completed, the company took a short break, and Ryan traveled to County Tipperary in Ireland to search for his family’s roots. Production resumed at British Elstree Studios in Hertfordshire, England, and continued through August; by the time he returned home in September, another school year had started.
“John the Baptist and Claggart mark a new epoch,” Ryan observed. “I used to feel like a plumber in most of my past movies.”56 Billy Budd collected glowing reviews in the United Kingdom and United States when it opened more than a year later, bolstering the independent Allied Artists. Ryan was delighted with the picture and proud of his performance, a remarkably detailed piece of work reaching deeper into a malignant soul than any other he had given. He dominated almost every scene, finding his match only in Ustinov. His most incisive moment may have been the one in which Claggart, counting off the lashes of a man’s corporal punishment, reaches his proscribed limit, and the grim pleasure in his face gives way to weakness and even need as he is denied any more. In one of the subtle movements that were Ryan’s stock in trade, Claggart turns away, unconsciously swatting his leg with a swagger stick to deliver the additional strokes. No matter how many saints Ryan might play, he would always be more intimately acquainted with the serpents.
*The special was restored in 2009 as A Call from the Stars.
*The program was performed live for the Eastern and Central time zones, and videotaped for broadcast later that evening in the Mountain and Pacific zones.
*The Snows of Kilimanjaro has never been released to home video, though it can be viewed by request at the New York or Los Angeles facilities of the Paley Center for Media.
**His first such effort, the flag-waving flop John Paul Jones (1959), was bankrolled by Pierre du Pont III, an heir to his family’s fortune.
twelve
The Longest Day
While Ryan was in England finishing Billy Budd, he saw a newspaper story about himself whose headline noted he had been married for twenty-two years. “They seemed to be more impressed with this fact than what I did as an actor,” he later joked.1 Yet filming this last picture had kept him away from the family for three long months, during which time he could only monitor by phone and letter the condition of Solomon Smith, their longtime handyman, who was dying of lung cancer.
Smith was more than a servant; after more than twelve years around the house, he had become a surrogate father to Ryan’s children — especially Lisa, who liked to eat dinner in the kitchen with the Smiths while her parents and brothers were yacking about politics in the dining room. “If I was afraid in the middle of the night, I would go and climb into bed with Willie and Smith,” she explained. “They were the people that I would go to before I would go to my parents. I don’t know why exactly, but they were much more accessible. And they were around a lot more than my dad was.”2 Ryan went to visit Smith on his deathbed, where the big man had shriveled to about a hundred pounds, and came home badly shaken.3 Smith died on November 26, 1961, at age sixty-three.
His passing left a hole in the family that Christmas season, and only a few weeks later Ryan departed again, heading this time to France to shoot a few scenes for Darryl Zanuck’s star-studded war epic The Longest Day. Based on a gripping nonfiction book by Cornelius Ryan, the picture chronicled the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, and featured a giant international cast, though few of the actors had much more screen time than Ryan.
As General “Jumpin’ Jim” Gavin, who commanded the parachute assaults of the Eighty-Second Airborne Division (and who now served as a technical
advisor on the picture), Ryan shared his only major scene with John Wayne, playing paratrooper Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin Vandervoort. They enjoyed each other’s company during the shoot, though Ryan never had considered Wayne to be the sharpest knife in the drawer. Wayne was appalled by SANE and all it represented. “He probably wonders why I think the way I do,” said Ryan. “He figures I ought to wear horn-rimmed glasses and be five-foot-four. He’s fairly conservative and I’m fairly liberal — whatever that means.”4
In practical terms it meant a good deal. On Monday, February 5, 1962, Ryan received a long-distance call from Jessica: the previous evening, someone had phoned the house on Carolwood Drive and promised Williana Smith that a bomb attack would follow if Ryan took part in a scheduled radio program about the archconservative John Birch Society. Listener-supported KPFK-FM in Los Angeles had produced a weeklong series, to begin Monday night, that combined panel discussion with recordings of Hollywood stars reading from the society’s “Blue Book.”
The previous week, bombers had struck the homes of two local ministers, John G. Simmons of North Hollywood and Brooks Walker of Canoga Park, as they took part in a public discussion about the radical right. Ryan’s friend Marsha Hunt participated in that same event and remembered leaving the synagogue where it was held to find every car in the parking lot with a leaflet pinned to its windshield: “It had on it the communist hammer and sickle, the Jewish Star of David, and the United Nations wreath of peace, all concentric … and three words across the bottom: Know Your Enemy.”5