The Lives of Robert Ryan

by J. R. Jones

  Ryan signed and bankrolled advertisements supporting the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and at Belafonte’s behest he took part in several civil rights forums around town. In August 1963, he and Belafonte flew to DC for the March on Washington, joining a large contingent of Hollywood celebrities that included Sidney Poitier, Marlon Brando, Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, Sammy Davis Jr., Tony Bennett, Lena Horne, and Charlton Heston. At the Washington Monument, Lancaster delivered a scroll brought from Paris with the signatures of some fifteen hundred French artists expressing their support, and the entertainers joined the march to the Lincoln Memorial, where King captured the nation’s imagination with his historic speech. Tim Ryan attended the march on his own and was startled to see his father onstage. A few months later Ryan would help bankroll an ambitious production slate by the Free Southern Theatre in Jackson, Mississippi, an independent black company that mounted plays by Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Ossie Davis, and John O. Killens.26

  Upon returning to New York, Ryan had also reengaged with SANE, serving as emcee for a program at New York Town Hall in spring 1963, and on November 15 the organization celebrated its fifth anniversary with a dinner honoring Steve Allen at the Biltmore Hotel. SANE had reason to celebrate. After the United States and the USSR had resumed atmospheric testing in March 1962, the organization mounted a vigorous campaign to restart the Geneva talks, including a highly influential advertisement that featured the trusted pediatrician and author Benjamin Spock. In the wake of the Cuban missile crisis, Norman Cousins had served as a secret envoy from President Kennedy to Premier Khrushchev, and subsequently the two superpowers managed to agree on a partial ban that would permit tests underground but prohibit them in the atmosphere. The Senate’s ratification of the ban in September 1963 gave new hope for détente and disarmament.

  A week after the dinner, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. “I remember walking to the window, and cars were going through red lights and driving rather aimlessly,” Ryan recalled. “The whole city seemed to be in shock at that moment, and it stayed that way, all that day and the next.”27 Schools let out early, and Ryan drove across town to pick up Lisa. “I could have just gotten home by myself, but he made a point of coming and getting me,” she said. “He was crying.”28 Like the rest of the country, the Ryans spent the weekend clustered in front of the TV, trying to make sense of what had happened and recoiling in shock as the suspect, Lee Harvey Oswald, was murdered on camera by another mysterious assailant. “Dad was beside himself,” said Cheyney. “I think he felt the whole country was just falling apart, and God knows what was gonna happen next. He didn’t put on his clothes for three days…. I remember him ranting about Texas and how stupid they were down there, and these idiots with their ten-gallon hats.”29

  In early 1964, Ryan turned to TV, doing guest spots on dramatic series and hosting The Bell Telephone Hour; the latter gave him a chance to perform the recitative for an orchestral performance of Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait as Matthew Brady photos of Lincoln filled the screen. It was pretty square stuff compared to The Ed Sullivan Show two nights previous, which had introduced America to the Beatles, but in fact Ryan often characterized himself as a square. Millard Lampell’s documentary, The Inheritance, opened in May at the Carnegie Hall Cinema, and Ryan took part in the premiere, which included folk music by Judy Collins and Pete Seeger. His intelligent handling of the picture’s narration was much noted and led to more voice-over and spoken-word gigs, the honorable piecework of the fading movie star. Later that year CBS hired him to perform the words of Abraham Lincoln for a one hour special, The Presidency: A Splendid Misery, and to narrate an ambitious eleven-hour series, World War I: The Complete Story.

  That summer Ryan finally managed to score a picture, dodgy as it may have seemed, when Argo Film Production, a British independent, cast him alongside English actor Stewart Granger in The Crooked Road, an international intrigue to be shot in Zagreb, Yugoslavia. “When they first discussed this project with me they inquired what my demands might be,” Ryan told the Los Angeles Times. “Only two, I told them — a good script and my salary in advance. I got both.”30 The script wasn’t bad at that; adapted from a novel by Morris L. West, it critiqued the United States’ support of corrupt governments abroad, though its more serious intentions were undercut by a far-fetched love triangle. Richard Ashley (Ryan), an American journalist in a fictional Balkan nation, comes into possession of some letters proving that its silver-haired leader, the Duke of Orgagnia (Granger), has been lining his own and his backers’ pockets with economic aid from the United States. Ashley’s pursuit of the story throws him back into the arms of a former lover, Cosima (Romanian actress Nadia Gray), who is now married to the duke but disgusted by the venality of his rule.

  Ryan must have been drawn to the script’s realpolitik angle. “You, my dear Ashley, are a man of a new world, America,” the duke points out. “A great country, a great people, but sometimes so naïve…. Your country invested millions and millions of dollars here for one reason, to prevent a communist government. Is there a communist government? No! Well then, why are you so outraged at some of the methods we adopt to reach that end?”

  Of course, Yugoslavia had a communist government, one whose leader, Josip Broz Tito, loved Hollywood movies (his favorite stars were John Wayne and Kirk Douglas). Shortly after the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia was declared in 1945, a government order established the Central Film Studio in Belgrade; originally, it operated in partnership with the venerable Soviet studio Mosfilm, but after Tito broke with Stalin in 1948, the Yugoslavian outfit, better known as Avala Film, began courting international co-productions. Studio boss Ratso Drazevic, formerly with the state security apparatus, knew how to move money around, and production funds from Western partners had a way of migrating to other state projects.*

  “For the filmmaker, the conditions are close to ideal,” Ryan told the Los Angeles Times. “They have Westrex sound, all brand-new equipment. The technicians are a little slow, but excellent. The producer has his choice of the finest classical actors in Europe. They speak a myriad of languages and sometimes the set sounds like Babel, but it doesn’t matter.” The dialogue, he explained, was usually postdubbed, though in the case of The Crooked Road, direct sound was recorded and “everyone spoke English, sort of. I imagine there will be considerable rerecording prior to release.”31 Visiting movie stars were treated like royalty in Belgrade, lodging at the lavish Hotel Metropol, and the countryside was stunning; the picture’s big action sequence, with Ryan and Gray tooling down the highway in a Mercedes convertible, was shot along the Dalmatian coast.

  The job forced him to miss a big “Stars for SANE” event, which was a bit embarrassing given that he still cochaired Hollywood for SANE. “I am now in Split, Yugoslavia, trying to start a SANE branch to be known as Split for SANE,” he wrote in a letter to the attendees. “Of secondary importance is the fact that I am also here trying to make a movie and a living.” Ryan took advantage of the opportunity to pay tribute to JFK: “The Test Ban Treaty, for which our late President will indeed be remembered, is the first step of a long trip. We still have the atom and we always will; we still have the bomb and the ever dwindling time before it falls into possibly maniacal and homicidal hands. We must, therefore, work unceasingly to extend and enrich the period of grace in which we now live.”32

  Back in New York, Ryan tried to get used to the idea that his children were growing up. Tim had graduated the previous spring from the Collegiate School on the Upper West Side and spent the ensuing year with the American Friends Service Committee, caring for disabled children at a rehabilitation center in New Hampshire and helping an Episcopal priest dispense social services to the poor in Jersey City. That summer he had returned to Los Angeles, working for an American Friends day camp in Watts prior to his enrollment that fall at Pomona College in Claremont, California. Cheyney, now sixteen, had pulled himself out of an academic rough patch and become a star student at th
e Collegiate School; he was spending the summer in rural Kentucky, teaching literacy for the American Friends. The tumult of moving to New York, combined with the usual stresses of adolescence, had put some distance between the boys and their father; once they grew old enough to converse on his level, they began to understand what a sealed envelope he was. Friends would recall Ryan’s enormous pride when he spoke about his children, but around them he kept his feelings to himself.

  That fall the family moved again, but only three blocks, to a grand twelve-room apartment at the Dakota on Central Park West and Seventy-Second Street. Built in the 1880s, the seven-story, Gothic-style apartment building featured an interior courtyard with an entrance on Seventy-Second; the Ryans’ unit had a large living room facing east and overlooking the park below, while the dining room and kitchen were at the west end of the unit, overlooking the courtyard. “It was an elegant apartment, but he and Jessica didn’t spend any money fixing it up, or making it lavish,” said Millard Lampell. “The old, worn furniture that they had from the California days did them perfectly fine; they weren’t interested in impressing anybody, and although it was a big apartment, it was somehow probably the only apartment in the Dakota that I was ever in that felt kind of homey and comfortable.”33 Lauren Bacall lived in the Dakota with her second husband, Jason Robards; among the other tenants were designer Ward Bennett, author Betty Friedan, and actress Judy Holliday (whose kitchen window was across the courtyard from the Ryans’).

  Ryan took on more TV work, shooting a pilot episode for Indictment, a legal drama to debut the next year on NBC. Produced by Universal-TV and shot in color, it featured Ryan as a crusading assistant DA, with Robert Duvall of To Kill a Mockingbird and Richard Beymer of West Side Story as attorneys on his staff (the series never got picked up). Ryan also guest-starred on episodes of Wagon Train and a new CBS series called The Reporter, starring Harry Guardino.

  Years later, Cheyney met Jerome Weidman, who had created the series and invited Ryan to appear, and Weidman recounted Ryan’s on-set clash with Guardino. Production of TV series was tightly scheduled, and on the first day of shooting Guardino didn’t show up until the afternoon, letting the cast and crew cool their heels. When this happened again the second day, said Weidman, Ryan strode up to Guardino and told him off in front of everybody: “If you pull this again, I’m gonna punch your lights out. Because we’re professionals here, and this is unacceptable.”34After that, Guardino showed up on time.

  “I’m available,” Ryan told the Los Angeles Times. “All I want is a good script. Here at home I won’t require my salary in advance.”35 Even this abject plea failed to elicit a good offer from the studios, so after the holidays Ryan flew off to West Germany to appear in another international co-production, a spy thriller called The Secret Agents. The picture would be shot by four different directors in Berlin, Paris, and Rome, and Ryan would be the character linking these episodes, a US intelligence officer who negotiates with the Soviets for the exchange of captured spies. Henry Fonda had been signed for the Berlin segment, playing an American operative who returns from the German Democratic Republic; the other principals were Italian actor Vittorio Gassman (Big Deal on Madonna Street) and French actress Annie Girardot (Rocco and His Brothers). All three were billed above Ryan, but he liked his world-weary character, and the picture had been conceived as a TV pilot, which might mean a full-time job later. “What I’d really like,” he told one reporter, “is to get a TV series in New York so I could stay home all the time.”36

  Berlin was much changed from the ruined city he had visited in August 1947, when he and Merle Oberon were sneaking around behind her husband’s back during location shooting for Berlin Express. Oddly, both pictures ended the same way, with a friendly encounter between an American and a Russian at the border between East and West. In The Secret Agents two cars meet on a suspension bridge, and Ryan’s general makes an exchange of prisoners with his Soviet counterpart, played by Wolfgang Lukschy. Their business concluded, the men share a smoke; the American promises to have a carton of the cigarettes delivered to the middle of the bridge, and the Russian tells him there will be some caviar waiting. As they’re returning to their cars, Ryan concludes in voice-over, “Hell of a way to make a living, isn’t it?” Unfortunately, The Secret Agents was distributed in the United States by American International Pictures, the cheapo outfit that had given the world Beach Party and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein; chopped down from two hours to ninety minutes, furnished with a cheesy organ score, and retitled The Dirty Game, it quickly disappeared from theaters.

  Back in the States, Ryan played Abraham Lincoln for the fourth and last time when Dore Schary asked him to come to Washington and perform in costume as the sixteenth president on the east steps of the Capitol. Schary was re-creating Lincoln’s second inaugural exactly one hundred years later, on March 4, 1965, and for this kind of oratory, at least, Ryan’s flat, midwestern voice worked to his advantage. Captured on film for later broadcast on TV, the event drew some thirty thousand people, the largest live audience of Ryan’s career.

  “Robert waited for work to come to him, he didn’t go out and seek it,” Millard Lampell observed.37 But when Ryan heard that Sid Harmon and Phil Yordan had cut a deal with Warner Bros. to shoot a Cinerama epic about the Battle of the Bulge, he phoned them and asked if they could find him a part. They did more than that: according to Yordan, when he went to Jack Warner to propose Ryan for the cameo role of General Grey — whose subordinates would be played by Henry Fonda, Robert Shaw, and Dana Andrews — he persuaded the studio chief to pay Ryan his top salary of $125,000. “He would have worked for short money to come back,” Yordan said, “but then it would have been a hard road coming back because everybody watches the salaries. When he came back he worked for his full salary, and from then on he made more money than he ever made in his life.”38 Ryan departed for Spain in March and soon completed his scenes, the best of which paired him with Fonda. The two men became friends and even talked about doing theater work together; Fonda had long wanted to start a company on the East Coast and develop work for the New York stage.

  Cheyney returned to Kentucky that summer to continue his literacy work, while the others — including Tim, who had finished his first year at Pomona — stayed in a rented home on Martha’s Vineyard. Ryan had heard about the place for years, and he looked forward to seeing the Hacketts and Jim Cagney, a quiet and reclusive man who had retired from the screen four years earlier and now spent all his time painting. Millard Lampell and his wife, Elizabeth, visited the Ryans one weekend, though Millard recently had fallen in love with another woman. He and Ryan opened up to one another as they strolled along the beach together, or so Lampell thought. “That was the time I really found out that Robert had never been unfaithful to Jessica,” Millard later said. “He told me about a couple of passes that had been made at him, one by Joan Crawford and one by Rita Hayworth, and some other actresses that I don’t remember … he seemed about women a mixture of naivete and boyishness.”39

  Battle of the Bulge wouldn’t be released until December, but already the news of Ryan’s well-paid cameo brought dividends. That summer his old friend Dick Brooks, author of The Brick Foxhole, offered him a starring role in a new western he was writing and directing for Columbia Pictures called The Professionals. Based on Frank O’Rourke’s potboiler A Mule for the Marquesa, the picture would star Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin, Woody Strode, and Ryan as soldiers of fortune hired by a millionaire to rescue his kidnapped wife from a Mexican revolutionary. Ryan’s part wasn’t as flashy as Marvin’s or Lancaster’s, but at this point both Marvin and Lancaster were Hollywood A-listers, and just working alongside them would restore some of Ryan’s luster. Brooks knew how to write a movie — he had won an Oscar in 1961 for adapting Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry to the screen — and his script for The Professionals was both punchy and philosophical. After two years of forgettable TV shows and half-assed international thrillers, Ryan set out for the West Coast in Octo
ber to shoot the picture that would become his biggest hit since Crossfire. All he had to do was survive six weeks in Las Vegas with Lee Marvin.

  *Preston costarred with Ryan in the RKO western Best of the Badmen (1951).

  *For an eye-opening, if somewhat sentimental, history of Avala Film, see Mila Turajlic’s 2012 Serbian documentary Cinema Komunisto.

  thirteen

  One of the Boys

  The Professionals takes place mostly in Mexico, but shooting there would have required Richard Brooks to submit his script for government approval and transport cast and crew across great distances to get the locations he needed. Instead he stayed in the United States, filming along a rail line in Indio, California, and in Death Valley before moving the cast and crew to Las Vegas for more location work at nearby Lake Mead and Valley of Fire State Park. Woody Strode would remember the trip from Death Valley to Vegas: “Robert Ryan, Lee Marvin, and I made the ride in a limousine. I was riding in the jump seat, and I mixed martinis for 250 miles. By the time we arrived in Las Vegas, we were falling down drunk.”1 (They must have been, because the drive from Death Valley to Las Vegas is less than 120 miles.)