The Lives of Robert Ryan

by J. R. Jones

  The party rolled on at the Mint Hotel, where the cast lodged for six weeks; Marvin remembered it having “seven bars, twenty-seven hours a day gambling, anything you wanted, twenty-one topless Watusi girls in the basement.”2 Their second night at the hotel, Strode — whose character in the picture was an expert archer — crawled out the window of his room onto a ledge and shot an arrow at Vegas Vic, the giant, waving cowboy that decorated the Fremont Hotel across the street. When the arrow connected, the whole statue shorted out. Strode and a drinking buddy raced upstairs to Marvin’s room and asked him to hide the bow before the police arrived. “Well, that crazy son of a bitch got so excited he fired a shotgun out of his window,” Strode wrote. “The cops came and found the bow in his room. Lee was so proud; it got to be the biggest joke in town.”3 Ryan wasn’t inclined to this sort of mischief — for him the highlight of the stay was a visit from Tim, now a sophomore at Pomona — but when you hung around with Marvin, you were bound to hoist a few.

  Theirs was a complicated friendship. Both men had served in the Marines during the war, though Marvin, fifteen years younger, had seen action, narrowly surviving the bloody Battle of Saipan in the summer of 1944. As a young supporting player on Bad Day at Black Rock, he had looked up to Ryan, and his combat experience made him a highly credible spokesman for SANE. But the last few years had reversed their status in the Hollywood pecking order: Ryan’s professional decline had been noted around town, whereas Marvin had just turned in a star-making performance in the western comedy Cat Ballou, with Jane Fonda. They both could put away the whiskey, but as Phil Yordan once explained, Ryan was “a sober drinker. He drank by himself; he never gave anybody any trouble.”4 Marvin was trouble personified, a loud, sometimes belligerent drunk who infuriated Burt Lancaster by showing up blasted one Friday for a scene atop a twenty-five-foot rock and had to be straightened out by Brooks over the weekend. Lancaster, a serious and highly professional man, much preferred the dependable Ryan (and would recruit him for two more pictures down the road).

  In keeping with the popular heist movies of the ’50s, Brooks gave each of his four heroes a specialty: Fardan (Marvin) is an automatic weapons instructor, Dolworth (Lancaster) a dynamite expert, Sharp (Strode) a peerless scout and tracker, and Hans Ehrengard (Ryan) an experienced horseman. Described as an “ex-cavalry man, cattle boss, wrangler, bullwhacker, pack master,” Ehrengard is the group’s senior member and sole bleeding heart: Brooks introduces him on his ranch, where he catches a hired man brutalizing a wild horse and punches the guy out.

  Once these four have set off on their mission to rescue the kidnapped Maria (Italian sex symbol Claudia Cardinale) from the formidable Jesus Raza (Jack Palance), Ehrengard emerges as the weak link in the unit, too old to handle the brutal heat and too merciful to be trusted in such a cutthroat operation. After the professionals fend off an attack by Raza’s men, killing all ten, Ehrengard persuades Fardan to set loose the men’s horses rather than shoot them, which tips off their enemies and results in another attack. As the mission winds on, Dolworth and Ehrengard become moral antagonists, though Brooks comes down time and again with the strong and pitiless. At least two of Ryan’s professional pals, screenwriter Philip Dunne and director Michael Winner, thought his character sadly underwritten.5

  Protesting, Ryan would joke with Winner that he had the most important line in the picture — “If it isn’t hot, it’s cold. If it isn’t cold, it’s raining” — because it explained away the seesawing weather conditions as the company tried to complete an ambitiously long action story shot almost entirely outdoors. Brooks recalled temperatures as high as 115 degrees Fahrenheit during the Death Valley sequences (the heat so overwhelms Ehrengard that he collapses, telling Dolworth, “I hate the desert. It’s got no … pity”). After the company moved on to Valley of Fire State Park, they were pelted with rain, sleet, and even snow. As Lancaster biographer Gary Fishgall reported, “On December 13 a flash flood swept through the area, trapping cast and crew in a box canyon until workers with the requisite road grader and shovel loader could rescue them.”6

  Ryan must have been relieved to wrap the picture and get back to New York, but his time on The Professionals was well spent. Released the following November, it would collect strong reviews from Life, Newsweek, and the New York Times and go on to become Columbia’s highest grossing picture of 1966. Almost as important for Ryan, its modern take on the western would prove influential over the next few years, and a younger generation of filmmakers, such as Winner and Sam Peckinpah, would make similar use of Ryan as they tried to reinvent the genre themselves. In their pictures he would also figure as the odd man out, an outsider among outsiders. He had always been drawn to the offbeat roles anyway; the conventional machismo of westerns and war movies never had appealed to him. In a sense, though, his casting in this new breed of action pictures also reflected how the industry had begun to perceive him; having gone his own way for so long, Ryan now was considered rather an eccentric character himself.

  “HE WAS A WONDERFUL MAN, and it was a privilege knowing him,” Ryan had told a reporter after Adlai Stevenson died of a heart attack in July 1965. “He always wanted to be called governor, rather than ambassador. He considered that his greatest honor.”7 Now, with Kennedy and Stevenson gone, the face of the Democratic Party was President Johnson. “I remember getting into some rant about Lyndon Johnson,” recalled Lisa Ryan, “and my father defending Johnson and saying, ‘Listen, you don’t know what you’re talking about. He’s done a lot of good.’ He was always trying to point out the humanity in everybody.”8

  Ryan admired LBJ for pushing through the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and new educational initiatives such as the Head Start Program, but Vietnam was going to pull him down. SANE had come out against the war in early 1965 as the troop numbers escalated and Johnson began bombing North Vietnam. That November SANE staged a march on Washington, with Ryan as one of its sponsors, and drew an orderly, responsible crowd of thirty-five thousand people, countering the media myth of a peace movement dominated by angry radicals.9

  Though born and raised in the Democratic Party, Ryan was beginning to waver. When liberal Republican Congressman John Lindsay — a key vote on Johnson’s civil rights legislation — ran for mayor of New York in fall 1965, in a three-way race against conservative writer William F. Buckley Jr. and Democratic machine politician Abraham Beame, Ryan finally broke ranks and voted for Lindsay. “By then the dyke of any rational political system — two-party system — had cracked and the waters of chaos were beginning to rush in,” Jessica Ryan observed.10

  They lifted the boat of Hollywood song-and-dance man George Murphy, who mounted a successful campaign against JFK confidante Pierre Salinger that fall for California’s open US Senate seat. Ryan would tell one reporter that he himself was approached to run against Murphy: “So help me God, I was. A very powerful Democrat urged me to consider running for the nomination. I didn’t consider it for a second. I want to make a contribution. I would not like to make an ass of myself. Nor would I want to be a front man for the politicians backstage.”11

  Television was turning politics into show business, which gave any skilled performer the edge. Ryan had become an occasional guest on TV talk shows, especially in the local New York media, where his facility with political issues tended to blur the line between him and the real thing. “Not long ago, Robert was on a TV panel show with a well-known and distinguished United States senator,” Jessica wrote around this time. “After the show, R. got a number of letters from [viewers] that said, not only did he seem to know all about politics, but he looked more like a senator ought. Therefore, they thought he should be the senator.”12

  Director Robert Aldrich reinforced the notion of Ryan as a marginalized figure when he and producer Kenneth Hyman signed him for The Dirty Dozen, a big-budget World War II epic they were shooting for MGM in England in April 1966. Lee Marvin, fresh from a triumphant Oscar win for Cat Ballou, starred as John Reisman, a pugnacious ar
my major handed the assignment of staging a suicide mission against the Germans with a motley crew of military convicts (among them Charles Bronson, Jim Brown, John Cassavetes, Telly Savalas, and Donald Sutherland). To Ryan fell the thankless task of playing Marvin’s nemesis in the first of the picture’s three acts, a prim, vainglorious West Point man with the pedigreed name of Colonel Everett Dasher Breed. Commander of the parachute school for the 101st Airborne Division, Breed bristles when Reisman shows up with his men to train for their top-secret mission, and eventually Reisman’s crew are forced to prove themselves to the shrewd General Worden (Ernest Borgnine) by going up against Breed’s company in a war games operation.

  By 1966 there were 400,000 American troops in South Vietnam, and The Dirty Dozen, with its jaundiced take on the military, would connect with a generation of kids questioning the war and the draft. Yet the picture, adapted by veteran screenwriter Nunnally Johnson (The Grapes of Wrath) from a best-selling novel by E. M. Nathanson, was antiauthoritarian without really being antiwar; opening someone’s throat was okay, it suggested, as long as you were doing it for your own purposes and not getting suckered by the brass. In this context Breed was a priggish heavy, ramrod straight and devoted to the chain of command. By now Ryan had played quite a few career soldiers — in The Longest Day, The Secret Agents, and Battle of the Bulge — but as Colonel Breed he’s the butt of every joke, scowling impressively as he absorbs one insult to his dignity after another. Ryan shouldered the challenge with his usual skill and resolve, turning in a spirited comic performance amid a rogue’s gallery of posturing tough guys.

  Ryan’s standout scene comes when Reisman first arrives with his truck full of reprobates, and Breed, instructed by the higher-ups that a general will command the hush-hush operation, welcomes the truck with a military band and troop inspection. Trim and handsome in his dress uniform, sunglasses, and leather gloves, Breed glows with excitement as the party rolls in. Reisman hasn’t brought any general, however, so he drags the grubby, unshaven goof-ball Vernon Pinkley (Sutherland) from the back of the truck to impersonate one. This charade reduces his fellow convicts to hysterics, and Breed gives Reisman a tongue-lashing. In the sort of comeuppance that was Ryan’s lot for the picture, Reisman silences him with the barbed implication that he’s a bit of a swish: “I owe you an apology, colonel. I always thought that you were a cold, unimaginative, tight-lipped officer. But you’re really … quite emotional, aren’t you?”

  Colonel Everett Dasher Breed, the vain martinet of The Dirty Dozen (1967). In the westerns and war movies of the late 1960s, Ryan increasingly would figure as the odd man out, an outsider among outsiders. Franklin Jarlett Collection

  Despite the large male ensemble, The Dirty Dozen was Marvin’s picture, just as Bad Day at Black Rock had been Spencer Tracy’s. But Ryan was used to that. The job paid well, and the picture would be an even bigger hit than The Professionals, solidifying his comeback as a graying character actor. He always enjoyed England. Lisa, now fifteen, flew in from New York with a girlfriend to visit him and was hanging around the set one day when a soused Lee Marvin reeled into her orbit and began hitting on her. Starstruck, she talked to him for a while until her father spotted them. “The next thing I remember is my dad came marching over and said, ‘Lee! That’s my daughter!’ … [Marvin] literally jumped backwards. I mean it really was like he got zapped with a cattle prod or something.”13

  AFTER RETURNING HOME FROM THE UK, Ryan flew out to Hollywood to costar with TV comedian Sid Caesar in a mystery spoof adapted from Donald Westlake’s novel The Busy Body. Ryan may have treasured the great works of literature — he gave Lisa a copy of Ulysses when she was only fourteen — but he also loved farce; among the few TV shows he could be bothered with were Get Smart, starring Don Adams as a bumbling secret agent, and the campy Batman, whose inane, monosyllabic theme song his daughter heard him singing around the house.14

  The Busy Body had a funny plot: Ryan is a Chicago mob boss and Caesar his wacky lieutenant, who makes the funeral arrangements for one of their men but accidentally buries him in a jacket lined with a million dollars. Unfortunately, the two stars were severely mismatched, Caesar mugging as Ryan turned in his usual meticulously detailed performance. Producer-director William Castle, best known for gimmicky horror movies such as The Tingler and House on Haunted Hill, proved the old showbiz adage that death is easy but comedy is hard, squandering a lively young cast that included Dom DeLuise, Godfrey Cambridge, Bill Dana, and Richard Pryor (he and Ryan shared no scenes).

  From Los Angeles, Ryan then flew to Torreón, Mexico, to costar with his Dakota neighbor Jason Robards and James Garner in an MGM western about the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Director John Sturges had worked with Ryan on Bad Day at Black Rock and since directed two action classics, The Magnificent Seven (1960) and The Great Escape (1963). He had already made one picture about the famous shootout — Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), with Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas — but that one climaxed with the gun battle, whereas this one would open with it. Carefully researched by screenwriter Edward Anhalt, The Law and Tombstone followed the repercussions of the gunfight as Wyatt Earp and the Clanton gang fight for political control of the town. Garner played the legendary marshal, Robards the hard-drinking Doc Holliday, and Ryan the ruthless cattle rustler Ike Clanton, who skips out on the gunfight but then mounts a legal and public-opinion crusade against the two lawmen.

  “It’s a very good part, a very interesting part,” Ryan told a German radio reporter on the set, “because [Clanton] pretends to be a very substantial citizen, a very fine man, but actually he’s using all these killers to do his work.”15 Anhalt had written a sober, thoughtful script, pondering the issues of civil authority that were implicit in the famous tale. After Earp and Holliday kill Clanton’s nineteen-year-old brother, Billy, and two other outlaws, Ike has the corpses displayed for the people of Tombstone in a storefront window and leads a memorial procession through town to protest the killings, glowering at the two lawmen as he passes. Ryan’s interest in the picture must have been stoked by the fact that his wife’s grandfather, George Washington Cheyney, had held a prominent position as superintendent of the Tombstone Mill and Mining Company when the gunfight took place in October 1881.

  Torreón was another of those soul-killing Mexican towns that hosted one Hollywood western after another, and Ryan took advantage of the shoot to get to know Robards, another heavy drinker with a love for Eugene O’Neill. Born in Chicago but raised in LA, the raspy-voiced actor had delivered some extraordinary performances in O’Neill plays: he had made his Broadway debut in 1956 as James Tyrone Jr., the dissolute elder brother, in the original production of Long Day’s Journey into Night, and given what many considered a definitive portrayal of Hickey, the dream-weaving salesman, when Sidney Lumet directed a two-part TV version of The Iceman Cometh for public television in 1960. Two years later Robards had reprised his role as Jamie Tyrone when Lumet directed the heralded screen version of Long Day’s Journey, starring Ralph Richardson, Katharine Hepburn, and twenty-five-year-old Dean Stockwell (The Boy with Green Hair). Ryan’s conversations with Robards must have set him to thinking, because four months later he would star in his own version of the play, tackling the role of the bitter patriarch, James Tyrone Sr.

  That November, to Ryan’s dismay, Ronald Reagan completed his metamorphosis from movie star to president of the Screen Actors Guild (where he helped enforce the Hollywood blacklist) to TV pitch man for General Electric (one of the nation’s top defense contractors) to governor of California. “Ronnie’s a pleasant guy, but I don’t believe the man has any degree of knowledge of what he’s talking about, and I don’t believe he has any strong convictions,” said Ryan on the eve of Reagan’s victory. Most actors, he pointed out, were introverts, but Reagan was “the most gregarious man you ever met…. Ronnie loves campaigning and meeting people and giving speeches.”16 Talking to the Dartmouth College paper a few months later, Ryan found the perfect line for Reagan: �
�There aren’t any series around, so I might as well be governor.”17

  A clause in Ryan’s contract guaranteed him time off for Christmas, and back in New York he attended to Jessica, who was grieving over her mother’s death earlier that month at age eighty-one. (“While it was a blessed release from what had become a meaningless existence, it was difficult,” she wrote to Jean Renoir. “As I guess these things are, regardless of how well-prepared you think you are.”18) Jessica was always encouraging Ryan to return to the theater, and now that he had four successive Hollywood pictures under his belt, he decided to take her advice and also cheer her up with a trip to Europe. Shooting The Dirty Dozen in the UK, he had crossed paths with actor Paul Rogers, one of the sailors in Billy Budd, and through Rogers got back in touch with their old cast mate John Neville, now artistic director of the Nottingham Repertory Theatre in the East Midlands. In March 1967, Ryan flew to England and met with Neville to discuss a residency at the theater that coming fall; announced in the trades a month later, the deal called for Ryan to play the title role in Othello and the father in Long Day’s Journey into Night. His pay would be $150 a week.

  With this engagement in place, Ryan also picked up cameo roles in three pictures that were shooting in Europe that summer; he set off for Italy in late May, and Jessica and Lisa followed in early June, spending the entire summer with him. None of the pictures threatened to set the world on fire: The Prodigal Gun, released in the United States as A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die, was a cheapo spaghetti western with Alex Cord as a storied gunslinger and Ryan as governor of the New Mexico Territory, who has created a volatile situation by declaring an amnesty for local outlaws. Anzio was another thundering World War II epic, this one from Columbia Pictures, that reunited Ryan with his old RKO collaborators Bob Mitchum and Eddie Dmytryk. The picture chronicled the botched amphibious landings at the title beach, with Ryan as an incompetent general based on real-life Allied Commander Mark W. Clark. Before Ryan even arrived, the conservative Mitchum, having just visited American troops in Vietnam, prevailed upon Dmytryk to lighten up on Clark in the script.