by J. R. Jones
KPFK had received three bomb threats as well; one caller warned, “You commies are next.”6 Jessica instructed the station to broadcast her husband’s taped reading as planned, and though Ryan wanted to drop everything and come home, she persuaded him to stay put. He arranged for a security company to guard the house and escort the children to school, which excited Lisa and embarrassed the boys, but there wasn’t much else he could do from across the Atlantic. “I have talked to Mr. Ryan in France and he was quite disturbed,” Leonard Kaufman, a family friend, told the Hollywood Citizen-News.7
Wayne was furious when he heard the news and volunteered to fly back with Ryan and be photographed guarding the family’s home personally, an offer that touched Ryan and later morphed into one of his Irish stories. As Philip Dunne repeated it in his autobiography, Bob and Jessica arrived home one night and “spotted a man armed with a rifle standing at their front door. Bob slammed on the brakes, and was starting to back out, when the intruder waved and stepped forward into the glare of the headlights. It was dedicated right-winger Wayne, on sentry duty to protect his friend and colleague, liberal or not.”8 According to the Ryan children, this episode was pure fantasy.
Despite Jessica’s firm response to the incident, the couple was spooked; and after Ryan returned home from France, they decided to vacate the house in Holmby Hills temporarily and relocate to Ojai, California, an hour and a half northwest of Los Angeles. At first Tim and Cheyney were told they would be boarding at their school, which set Cheyney to wondering, “What can I ingest that will make me so sick that I can’t board at Harvard Military School?”9 But a week later his parents changed their minds and announced that all three children would be accompanying them and transferring to new schools; Willie, still grieving for her late husband, would remain in Los Angeles. At first they rented a cabin at the Ojai Valley Inn and Country Club, a posh resort where Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn had shot their beloved comedy Pat and Mike (1952), then they sublet a home in the area. Tim and Cheyney, whose school routine had included drilling in uniform, now enrolled in a school run by the Krotona Institute of Theosophy, which was even freakier than the Oakwood School with its curriculum steeped in Eastern mysticism.
The kids had been told they would return to LA after things cooled down, but after three or four months their parents dropped another bombshell on them: now the family was moving, at least temporarily, to New York, where their father hoped to jump-start his ailing career by starring in a new Broadway musical called Mr. President. “You don’t mean to tell me that people are going to pay money to hear you sing?” asked fourteen-year-old Cheyney when he heard the news.10 But Ryan was much taken with the idea: Rex Harrison didn’t have much of a voice either, yet he had transformed his career in 1956 with My Fair Lady, and Robert Preston had pulled off the same trick the following year with The Music Man.* Jessica considered the Broadway show a wonderful idea and couldn’t wait to get out of California; after Ryan headed East in July to start working on the show, she began arranging the move to New York.
Mr. President looked like a good bet: producer Leland Hayward, director Joshua Logan, and the writing team of Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse had already collaborated, in various combinations, on such classics as State of the Union, Mister Roberts, South Pacific, and The Sound of Music. Most impressive of all, the songs for Mr. President would be penned by the great Irving Berlin, returning to the theater at age seventy-four after a decade in retirement. Katharine Hepburn, knowing of Ryan’s secret ambition to try musical comedy, had recommended him to her friend Howard Lindsay for the title role, and Ryan had flown out to audition in June, singing Kurt Weill’s “September Song” and Berlin’s “Always” for the composer and Leland Hayward. According to Ryan, Berlin told him, “That last note was great,” and a half hour later he was signing a contract.11 Nanette Fabray, his old friend from the Reinhardt School, would costar as the long-suffering First Lady. After seven weeks on the road in Boston and Washington, DC, Mr. President would open in New York on October 20, at the seventeen-hundred-seat St. James Theatre on West Forty-Fourth Street.
As promising as all this seemed from a distance, Ryan realized once rehearsals began that the show was in deep trouble. Howard Lindsay was suffering from the early effects of leukemia, and Russel Crouse had just undergone surgery to remove a blood clot; in their weakened conditions they couldn’t assemble a decent script by the time rehearsals commenced, and as Logan remembered, they resisted any revisions.12 Ryan later described the show’s genesis as “a dogfight, and one unhappy experience after another. In the first two weeks, the dance director wasn’t speaking to the composer, and the feuds just grew after that.”13 Logan and Crouse clashed over the length of the show and Logan’s desire to underscore some of the dialogue with music. Berlin’s songs were good, and his enthusiasm drove the production along, but Ryan braced himself for the worst as the show lurched toward its Boston opening. Once the curtain rose, he would be at the center of this whole thing, with his homely baritone and negligible dance skills, and at this rate it might crumble around him.
The hype surrounding Mr. President only increased the pressure on everyone involved: news of Berlin’s comeback, combined with the sterling reputations of the producer, director, and writers, had driven advance ticket sales to an astounding $2.5 million. At the same time, rumors swirled that Mr. President would satirize the Kennedy family, when in fact, Lindsay and Crouse had written a rather melancholy story about a lame-duck president, Stephen Decatur Henderson, preparing to leave office, move back to the Midwest, and resume life as a private citizen (only Berlin’s participation had turned the play into a musical). Talking to the press, Ryan did his best to deflate the Kennedy rumor, which might prove fatal once people discovered how apolitical and distinctly old-fashioned the show was. He must have kicked himself for committing to the project without having read the script, but almost everyone else had made the same mistake.
As usual, Ryan kept his head down and worked hard, worrying most about his singing. Berlin had given him some good numbers: “In Our Hide-Away” was a loping, eminently hummable tune in which he held down the melody while the more skilled Fabray snaked around him providing harmony, and the husky ballad “It Gets Lonely in the White House” considered the solitary burden of the presidency, concluding, “The White House is the loneliest place in town.” But the book refused to come to life; in the age of the Cuban Revolution and the Berlin Wall, it seemed irrelevant even for musical theater. Mr. President was savaged by the Boston critics, as well as Time and Newsweek; in late September the cast and crew moved on to the National Theatre in Washington, where the opening performance, a benefit for the Kennedy Foundation, was attended by Jacqueline Kennedy. “There was literally no laughter at all,” Logan wrote. “Every time a joke was launched from the stage, the audience, like an audience at a tennis match, looked to the First Lady to see if she was laughing, and then turned back to the play, stony-faced.”14
The president, preoccupied with top-secret reports of Soviet missile silos in Cuba, missed most of the performance, though he came backstage afterward and, to Ryan’s surprise, brought up their momentary encounter ten years earlier in Boston, during the first Stevenson campaign. A gala party followed at the British embassy, heavily attended by the Kennedy family, administration figures, and the diplomatic corps. Variety reported that the show was being revised throughout its Washington run, as Logan pumped up the production numbers to compensate for the lifeless script. The flag-waving finale, wrote Les Carpenter, could have been topped only by having Ryan “rip off his shirt to display the US Constitution tattooed on his chest.”15
By the time Mr. President arrived on Broadway it was already damaged goods. “It is always painful when a man you admire introduces you to his awkward, charmless fiancée,” wrote Walter Kerr in the New York Herald Tribune, encapsulating the sense of disappointment that surrounded the show.16 Two days after the New York opening, President Kennedy addressed the nation to rev
eal the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba, and Americans held their breath, wondering if nuclear annihilation was at hand, until Premier Khrushchev announced on October 28 that the missiles would be removed. Jessica would remember her eldest, Tim, observing that the crisis must be worse for her generation than for his: “We have always sort of taken it for granted that sooner or later they’d blow up the world. But you can remember a time when it couldn’t be done. So it must be harder for you to get used to the idea that it may happen tonight. Or tomorrow.”17
Ever the good soldier, Ryan always talked up his projects in the press — when King of Kings had opened to scathing reviews a year earlier, he assured one reporter that it would clean up at the Academy Awards (it failed to receive a single nomination). Now he would go to bat for Mr. President too. “Perhaps our mistake was in opening in New York after the critics had been torn to pieces by ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ which is not at all like ‘Mr. President,’” he said. “But the old people like it and I think we should make the old people happy.” Privately he conceded the show was a dud and, according to Harry Belafonte, discouraged his friends from seeing it.18
Unfortunately for Ryan, the advance sales guaranteed Mr. President a long run despite its dim critical reception, and it held out for 265 performances, closing in June 1963. For days, weeks, and then months, Ryan tried to give his best to a show that refused to die despite the fact that nobody seemed to like it much. The loneliest place in town, it turned out, was center stage at the St. James Theatre.
INSTEAD OF MOVING TO MANHATTAN, which seemed too wild for the kids, the Ryans decided to find a place in Westchester County, close enough for Bob to commute into the city every day. Sunday was his only day off from rehearsals, and with Jessica and the children arriving soon, he quickly rented a house in the wealthy village of Bronxville. “The furnishings aren’t very fancy,” he explained, “but it was the only house for rent in Bronxville, and we wanted to live in Bronxville because the public schools here are very good.”19 The children thought they would be returning to Los Angeles after the show closed — whenever that was — but privately their parents had more or less decided to stay on the East Coast for good. For financial reasons, more and more American movies were being shot in Europe now; living near New York would lessen Bob’s travel time and even enable him to come home occasionally during long shoots. The house on Carolwood Drive was put on the market, where it would stay for some time, owing to a recent dip in demand for luxury properties, before finally selling to writer George Axelrod.
The move was rough on Tim, Cheyney, and Lisa — by this time they had changed schools four times in three years — and though Bronxville might have struck Ryan as the sort of quiet bedroom community the family had enjoyed in North Hollywood, they soon discovered that their neighbors were nothing like the ones they had known in the San Fernando Valley. Bronxville was a lily-white suburb, hostile to blacks and Jews and not terribly fond of Catholics either, especially if they were in show business. “I was so shocked, because I’d grown up in this completely Jewish environment,” remembered Lisa Ryan. “I couldn’t understand it. And racist — I mean, it was just awful.”20
Williana Smith had come along with the family but found the experience so dismal that she returned to Los Angeles after a few weeks, ending her employment with the Ryans after fourteen years (the children would keep in touch with her until her death in 1988). Clearly Bronxville was a mistake, but they had signed a lease, and doing Mr. President six days a week was so grueling that for the time being they would just have to stick it out. The bitterly cold winter took the children by surprise, and everyone in the family came down with chicken pox.
Though Mr. President kept Ryan at home, his schedule barely overlapped with the children’s. He slept late and sat around in his pajamas and robe until late afternoon, then showered, dressed, and drove down to the theater off Times Square, returning home around midnight and going to bed a couple of hours later. During the run he granted a long and fascinating interview to Holiday magazine writer Joe McCarthy, who paid him a visit in Bronxville and noted that, in contrast to the Cadillacs and Jaguars parked at other houses in the neighborhood, the Ryan fleet consisted of a Falcon station wagon and a black Buick sedan.
During the interview (which would never run), Ryan reflected on the new experience of doing musical comedy onstage. “There are certain things about acting in a musical comedy that I’ll never learn,” he admitted. “Did you ever notice that a good musical comedy performer, like Bert Lahr or Ethel Merman, or Nanette Fabray in our show, doesn’t speak the lines to the other actors in the scene? They turn and speak to the audience, like the comedians in the old-time burlesque shows. I can’t do that.”21
Bronxville aside, Ryan quite liked being back in New York, where he had lived first as a young man out of college and later as a newlywed husband hitting the straw-hat circuit with his fine young wife. The Ryans had good friends here: Robert Wallsten, who had acted alongside them at the Millpond Playhouse, and his wife Cynthia; married screenwriters Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, whose track record included The Thin Man (1934), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Easter Parade (1948), and Father of the Bride (1950); and Millard Lampell, who had met Ryan through director Dick Brooks back in the late ’40s, before Lampell was listed in Red Channels and his screenwriting career ended. Starring in a Broadway show gave Ryan a good opportunity to renew old acquaintances; he looked forward to the time when he and Jessica could move the family into the city, as they ought to have done all along.
Unwilling to relocate to the East Coast, Mabel Bushnell Ryan had remained behind in Los Angeles, and in March 1963 her son received word that she had died of a heart attack at her home in North Hollywood, at age seventy-nine. “I never saw him so distraught,” said Wallsten, who came over to the house in Bronxville and found Ryan in his bathrobe. “When he burst into tears I was very surprised that he was that moved, although these things are always more important to people than they let on. I remember him putting his arm around my shoulder and squeezing so hard that it hurt as he wept.”22 The family traveled by train to Chicago, and Mabel was buried in Calvary Cemetery beside her son Jack, who would have been fifty-one now, and Old Tim, dead for twenty-seven years. Ryan was the last survivor of the little family in Uptown, yet he couldn’t conceive of being laid to rest anywhere but beside Jessica.
Once the lease in Bronxville expired, the Ryans wasted no time in getting out. That summer they stayed at a place in Westport, Connecticut, and in the fall they moved into a spacious apartment on the top floor of the Brentmore, located at 88 Central Park West and facing the park at the corner of Sixty-ninth Street. “Frances and Albert Hackett lived there,” said Cheyney, “and I remember that was important to Dad because he felt that people he knew lived there.”23
Ryan was entering a scary new period in his career: apparently the stink of Mr. President clung to him, because he couldn’t get a movie to save his life. The Canadians had sunk without a trace in the United States, and King of Kings had been ridiculed in the press (with Jeffrey Hunter tagged the “teen age Jesus”). Ryan’s performance in Billy Budd had won glowing reviews, but the picture was poorly marketed in the United States and failed to have the impact he had hoped for; Terence Stamp won an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor, but the picture had been eclipsed by another maritime drama, MGM’s remake of Mutiny on the Bounty with Marlon Brando. Ryan had abandoned Hollywood to become a Broadway sensation, and now Hollywood had abandoned him.
He kept busy as best he could. Millard Lampell had written a documentary feature called The Inheritance, about immigrant labor and the union movement, and Ryan offered to supply the narration for a token fee of one thousand dollars. Before getting into pictures, Lampell had performed in the Almanac Singers with Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Lee Hays, and the documentary reflected his folk roots; over one section Ryan recites:
Layin’ down track for the west-bound train
Sta
ckin’ up timber in the State of Maine
Diggin’ out coal in the West Virginia hills
Hammerin’ steel in the Pittsburgh mills….
Six-day week and a 12-hour day
And it’s welcome boys to the USA
That November Ryan also managed to pick up a starring role in an hour-long TV drama for NBC’s Kraft Suspense Theatre. “Are There Any More Out There Like You?” was an interesting little piece about a wealthy man whose collegiate daughter, played by young Katharine Ross, is arrested after she and her friends drunkenly run over a pedestrian. The rest of the time Ryan loafed around the house playing pool on his new, regulation-size table in the apartment, or at some of the old billiard parlors on Broadway. By now he was smoking again, and his daily diet of a couple Löwenbräus had given way to a couple glasses of J&B Scotch.
Ryan especially liked slipping out for a game of pool late at night, at some of the old halls where legendary players might turn up. But going out in public could turn sour at a moment’s notice. One evening Ryan took Cheyney with him to shoot some pool, and a crowd gathered around them as they played. “What a nightmare that was,” Cheyney recalled. “These guys were big admirers of the war movies and stuff. Odds against Tomorrow apparently had been on television within the last week, and there’s a scene where Dad is supposed to throw some keys to Harry Belafonte and he doesn’t do it ’cause he’s a racist. We’re trying to play pool and this guy keeps yelling at us, ‘Hey Bob, why didn’t you throw Harry the keys?’ Over and over again, and then laughing. Even if he’d been inclined to do dad things with his son, you’d go out and weird shit like that happens.”24
Now that Ryan lived in New York, he spent more time with Belafonte, getting together for the occasional dinner or game of pool but also becoming more involved in the civil rights movement, which hadn’t reached the same level of intensity on the West Coast as it had in the South and the northern industrial cities. Belafonte had a sixteen-millimeter projector in his home and sometimes hosted movie nights for his friend Martin Luther King Jr., who loved movies but seldom went out to theaters. On one occasion, Belafonte invited Ryan, Anthony Quinn, and other friends to meet the minister, and they watched Come Back, Africa (1959), Lionel Rogosin’s striking drama about apartheid in South Africa, which had introduced the United States to singer Miriam Makeba. Like Ryan, King was a longtime SANE sponsor, and the two men seemed to connect. Ryan “was quite enamored of Dr. King and quite humbled by the experience,” Belafonte remembered.25