by J. R. Jones
The Ryans stayed in Florence for six weeks, making a quick side trip to Madrid so that Robert could appear in Custer of the West for his friend Phil Yordan. Like Battle of the Bulge, it was being shot in Cinerama, an elaborate widescreen process that involved three synchronized cameras, and its intimate character study of the doomed general, played by Robert Shaw, alternated with screaming long shots that showcased the stunning countryside and hundreds of horses and extras. The role gave Ryan a chance to repay the great favor Yordan had done for him two years earlier, when he and Sid Harmon (with whom Yordan had since parted company) hired Ryan at his top salary for Battle of the Bulge and launched him on the comeback trail. “He told his agent that it was between he and I, and that he was going to do the picture for me for nothing,” Yordan recalled. “That’s when he was drawing about $150,000 a picture. It was a magnificent gesture. Even though it was an expensive picture, there was no money at that time, and I would have had to hire some character actor.”19
As Sergeant Patrick Mulligan, a jolly deserter whom Custer sends to the firing squad, Ryan had only three scenes, his little episode taking up ten minutes of a 143-minute release, but he injected more juice into them than Shaw could manage for the balance of the picture. Jessica and Lisa accompanied him to Madrid, and Lisa rarely had seen her father in higher spirits. “He seemed to be incredibly happy when he was making movies,” she recalled. “No matter what the movie was.”20 The man striding around on set couldn’t have been more different from the one she saw at home, lapsing into silent dejection for hours on end.
John Wayne happened to be in Madrid at the same time, and he, Ryan, and Yordan got together for dinner one night. Yordan saw a great many similarities between the two men, politics aside: both were quiet, modest, loyal to their friends, and highly cooperative on the set. “Once they signed to do a picture, you never heard a peep,” Yordan recalled. As the evening progressed and the two actors threw back the drinks, Wayne couldn’t help needling Ryan about some political issue. “Wayne had a real devilish sense of humor…. It got to the point where Ryan said, ‘Okay, Duke, let’s go outside and settle it.’ Now, Duke’s a big man, you know, but Ryan was bigger than Duke, and not only that, he was the heavyweight champion in college. Well, Duke had no intentions of going outside with Bob. He realized he had gone too far, and we both calmed him down.”21
By early August the Ryans had fled the summer heat of Florence and settled in a London flat, where Ryan studied his lines for Nottingham and wrote his old friend Dore Schary to turn down a role in a play back home. “I am very concerned about what I may do (if ever) on the New York stage after the ‘President’ fiasco,” he admitted. When the Nottingham engagement ended, he wrote, his next order of business would be getting another picture to build up their bank account. “As Bernard Shaw said, art is expensive.”22 The letter was illuminating: four years after Mr. President closed, Ryan still couldn’t shake the humiliation of having to front a bad production night after night on the Great White Way, which might explain why his first stage performances since then would be tucked away in the English countryside. At the same time, he expressed little affection for contemporary American theater, telling one reporter, “It stinks.”23 Working with Max Reinhardt and John Houseman had inclined him toward adventurous work; the only recent play he really liked was Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming.
Founded in 1948, the Nottingham Repertory Theatre had moved recently into a modern new building in Wellington Circus, designed by architect Peter Moro, whose circular auditorium accommodated 750 people and whose highly functional performing space could be easily converted from a proscenium to a thrust stage. Hired shortly thereafter, John Neville had revitalized the company, bringing in such fine young talents as Judi Dench and Ian McKellen, and added a youth group, poetry readings, and a weekly jazz night to the theater’s offerings. Ryan’s residency at the Playhouse was another innovation: “There had never been a Hollywood star in regional theatre before,” said Neville.24 Othello and Long Day’s Journey into Night opened in mid-September, shortly after Jessica took Lisa back to the United States to begin the school year, and both productions drew big houses that welcomed Ryan heartily. “The camera never gives you six curtain calls,” he boasted to the New York Times.25
The critics were less starstruck. “Mr. Ryan takes the stage with a brooding, dignified presence, stiff in gait but noble in bearing,” observed John Peter of the Times in his review of Othello. The American’s interpretation, he wrote, lacked “the controlled animal impulsiveness that sets Othello apart from his Venetian masters. Thus portrayed, he is not much of a prey for Iago, and John Neville plays that part in splendid isolation.”26 When Long Day’s Journey into Night premiered a week later, Peter was more impressed, calling Ryan’s performance as the aging matinee idol James Tyrone Sr. “a finely muted portrait of glamour in decay.”27 Ryan had grown philosophical about his limitations as a classical performer — “Shakespeare requires a dimension of acting I probably never will attain,” he confessed to Variety28 — but he considered such work its own reward. Playing O’Neill was gratifying too, though he felt his English costars failed to grasp the Irish-American melancholy so central to the play. Long Day’s Journey, he thought, might be just the thing to revive his stage career in New York.
A few weeks before returning to the United States, Ryan corresponded with Lisa to inform her that he had met her “dreamboat,” Albert Finney, who came backstage and stuck his head through the shower curtain in Ryan’s dressing room to introduce himself. As the performance schedule wound down, Ryan had gotten a chance to see two American pictures at the local cinema: Bonnie and Clyde, which he disliked, and Cat Ballou, which he enjoyed only for “Lee M. who was marvelous.” To his relief, he had just played the last of the school matinees offered by the Playhouse. “Shakespeare naturally is sacrosanct, so 6 yr. old moppets are allowed to watch a play about murder, sexual jealousy, and foul conniving,” he reported. “The results are what you might expect: last week we played the big O to a constant storm of laughter which reached a crescendo in the bedroom scene. My killing of the lady was evidently funnier than the 3 Stooges. We did 6 of these horrendous things and I feel that I have paid for all my sins in this world.”29
WHILE THE RYANS EXPLORED EUROPE, American opposition to the war in Vietnam continued to build, broadening from the loyal ranks of students, professors, and clergymen into a genuine middle-class movement. The father of two draft-age sons, Ryan had a personal stake in the issue; he had never supported the war, and that summer he took advantage of an interview with the New York Sunday News to make his opposition clear. “The thought of sending them off to a war we shouldn’t be in is something that’s awfully hard to live with,” he said. Asked if he thought such statements would hurt his career, he replied, “During the McCarthy era, I had my say — and it didn’t injure me at all. If I didn’t keep my trap closed in those days, I’m certainly not going to remain quiet now.”30 His proud recollection didn’t really square with the careful balancing act he had maintained all through the blacklist years; in fact, a more private concern for him now was how to encourage his sons in the pacifist principles they had been taught but discourage them from marginalizing themselves for the rest of their lives.
Both his sons had made clear that they weren’t going to Vietnam. Tim had applied for conscientious objector status several years earlier but was denied; when he was called for his physical that year, he turned in his draft card in protest but was never prosecuted. Cheyney had been radicalized by his summer social work; once a neighbor of Walt Disney, he had suddenly found himself in the desolate strip-mining community of Hazard, Kentucky. Back in New York he had joined the Catholic Worker Movement, whose founder, Dorothy Day, left a deep impression on him; when his draft card arrived, he informed his parents that he intended to burn it. “My parents correctly said, ‘Well, you haven’t even gone to college yet, and you’ll get yourself thrown in federal prison for doing something like this. I do
n’t see [Dorothy Day] having to face going to jail for the Vietnam War.’”31 When Cheyney won a student deferment and enrolled at Harvard (where he skipped a year and started as a sophomore) the issue subsided temporarily, but the draft wasn’t going away. By the end of 1967 more than twenty thousand Americans had died in the conflict.
Once Ryan returned to the United States, he dove back into the roiling protest culture that had always been a key attraction of life in Manhattan. On a single weekend in January 1968 he participated in two high-profile benefit concerts that brought together some of the biggest stars in the country: on Saturday, January 20, he provided narration for matinee and evening performances of a show memorializing folk singer Woody Guthrie at Carnegie Hall, and the following night, at Philharmonic Hall, he performed in a “Broadway for Peace” concert to raise campaign funds for US congressmen who had taken stands against the war. With the presidential election less than eight months away, the hot topic that weekend was Senator Eugene McCarthy, a vocal opponent of the war who had declared himself a candidate for the Democratic nomination and said he intended to beat President Johnson in the New Hampshire primary that coming March.
“Bob was a great fan of folk music, and his kids were very involved with it,” remembered Millard Lampell, “particularly Tim, who wanted nothing better than to be another Woody Guthrie.”32 The revered songwriter had died the previous October after a fifteen-year battle with Huntington’s disease, and his former manager, folk impresario Harold Leventhal, had organized the Carnegie Hall shows to raise money for Huntington’s research, enlisting Lampell (who had performed with Guthrie in the Almanac Singers) and Will Geer (who had helped care for Guthrie in his last years). Lampell wrote a narration drawn from Guthrie’s writings, to be performed by Geer and Ryan; the singers on the bill included Seeger, Odetta, Judy Collins, Arlo Guthrie, and the little-known Richie Havens, whom Lampell had discovered playing in the East Village. The star attraction, however, would be Bob Dylan, out of the public eye now for twenty months following a much-publicized motorcycle accident. “Carnegie Hall was entirely sold out two hours after the tickets went on sale,” remembered Lampell. “There was a kind of electric excitement and anticipation.”33
Cheyney came home for the show, and Lampell recruited Lisa as a stage manager. Outside the concert hall, Seventh Avenue was mobbed with people trying to score tickets; inside, the performers gathered for a single rehearsal of the program. Dylan had brought his backup band, the Hawks, and when they launched into Guthrie’s “The Grand Coulee Dam” that afternoon and evening, the house went wild. After the evening concert, the performers all were invited back to the Dakota for a party at the Ryans’ apartment, which also drew Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel, and Allen Ginsberg. Lisa listened incredulously as her father — who loved to tease her with his Dylan impersonation — told the wild-haired singer how much he admired his music.34 “Bob [Ryan] sat on the floor with his kids all around him,” Lampell said, “and he listened to the singing, which lasted until two or three in the morning, and then a few of us stayed on rehashing what had gone on, and I had never seen Bob grin so much in my life.”35
The concerts generated $7,500 for Huntington’s research, a relatively meager amount compared to the $100,000 raised for antiwar candidates at Philharmonic Hall on Sunday. “Broadway for Peace” was more of a showbiz affair, with appearances by Ryan, Harry Belafonte, Paul Newman, Tony Randall, Barbra Streisand, Leonard Bernstein, Diahann Carroll, Joel Grey, Alan Arkin, and Carl Reiner. The proceeds all were earmarked for legislative candidates — Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, Representative John Conyers of Michigan — who had voted against either the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized President Johnson to prosecute the war, or the $700 million appropriations bill that followed in 1965.
Newman and Randall both liked Eugene McCarthy and planned to campaign for him as the March 12 primary approached. McCarthy was the sort of politician Ryan respected; he was Catholic and, like Stevenson, a man of learning and of principle. “When he was alone he acted bravely, and I was moved,” Ryan later said.36 On January 27 the national board of SANE cast its lot in a presidential race for the first time, endorsing McCarthy by a vote of thirty-six to zero.
To some degree the McCarthy endorsement was SANE’s attempt to heal a terrible internal schism between energized radicals who wanted to end the war by any means available and conventional liberals who wanted to work inside the system. The leadership maintained a careful distance from communist or radical elements that might besmirch the group’s reputation, even as the grassroots membership pushed for a broad coalition with antiwar groups across the political spectrum. The issue reached a boil in spring 1967 when SANE sat out the giant Spring Mobilization Conference in Washington, and boiled over in the fall when the organization declined to endorse the March on the Pentagon planned for October. Both Norman Cousins, who favored the more isolated approach, and Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose membership in other peace organizations had added to the friction, resigned from SANE. In the wake of this crisis, McCarthy offered SANE something most of its members could latch onto: a credible, articulate candidate who wanted a negotiated settlement between the United States and North Vietnam.
Whatever residual loyalty Ryan may have felt for Lyndon Johnson probably evaporated on January 30, the day he took part in the historic reopening of Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC. Following the Lincoln assassination, the building had stood dormant for nearly 103 years, but now John Houseman was directing an opening-night tribute to the Great Emancipator, to be broadcast live on CBS. Ryan shared the narration with Henry Fonda and Fredric March, the three men positioned at lecterns across the very stage where John Wilkes Booth had cried, “Sic semper tyrannis!” Odetta, Harry Belafonte, Andy Williams, Helen Hayes, Nina Foch, and Richard Crenna rounded out the cast, and the show was to begin with a statement from President Johnson. But that afternoon came reports that the Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army had launched a giant surprise attack on key tactical zones in South Vietnam; the Tet Offensive, so called because it violated a cease-fire set for the Vietnamese new year, severely undercut the administration’s rosy statements about the situation on the ground. Vice President Hubert Humphrey appeared on the program in place of LBJ, delivering a stone-faced introduction on the Lincoln legacy.
Public support for the war crumbled. Later that month, more than five hundred Americans were reported killed in a single week, and the Selective Service System issued a new call for forty-eight thousand soldiers. Ryan’s next picture, a Warner Bros. western called The Wild Bunch, didn’t start shooting until just after the New Hampshire primary, so the month before the vote he made himself available to the McCarthy campaign for the sort of retail politics his father had always practiced. Cheyney had decided to back McCarthy as well and stayed with his father a few times.
Seymour Hersh, the campaign’s thirty-year-old press secretary, had graduated from the University of Chicago and worked as a crime reporter for the City News Bureau. Later he would win a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the My Lai massacre, but at that point he was taking a break from journalism and, with some ambivalence, trying his hand at politics. He remembered eating dinner with Ryan at the Wayfarer Inn in Manchester, ordering a hamburger and slathering it with ketchup. “[Ryan] looked at me and he said, ‘So, what part of Chicago are you from?’ Very funny line.” Ryan told him about his father’s experiences as a Democratic committeeman, and they traded stories of civic corruption. Hersh was impressed by the depth of his affection for the city: “We talked about the fun of Chicago.” With luck, they would be there in August for the convention, with McCarthy as the party’s nominee.
“He was a bit mystified by his son,” remembered Hersh, who lunched once with Ryan and Cheyney during the primary. “As I got to be a father, I could understand it. You know, they grow old, they separate…. There’s this sort of mystery of why they’re not eight anymore.”37 The campaign staff were all young, and college kids flocked to support McCarthy, losin
g their beards, long hair, and psychedelic threads in response to the campaign’s edict that they go Clean for Gene. Yet a large quotient of McCarthy’s financial support came from older, straighter New York liberals like Ryan, who had congregated around Stevenson. Paul Newman and Tony Randall turned up in New Hampshire, along with the poet Robert Lowell. The last weekend of the campaign, Ryan and Randall were “carefully juggled at shopping centers,” according to one memoir,38 while Time reported that “Paul Newman’s appearances had to be circumscribed for fear of a riot among Hampshire women.”39
Watching all this, Hersh would note how savvy Ryan was politically; Newman was always seeking advice on how to handle certain questions, but not Ryan. “He didn’t have to be educated about what the best thing to say about the draft was. And there was never blowback on anything he said. Newman would sometimes be maladroit a little bit, but not really. He was smart enough to know what he didn’t know. Ryan didn’t have to be.”40 The Saturday night before the primary, Ryan took to the podium in a ballroom of the Sheraton Carpenter Hotel to introduce McCarthy as the next president of the United States.41 That Tuesday, McCarthy won 42 percent of the Democratic vote, and Johnson only 49 percent. Exit polls suggested that McCarthy’s strong showing may have been more of a generic no-vote against the president than a protest against the war, but that didn’t matter: Johnson was wounded.
A week later Ryan was back in Torreón, Mexico, rehearsing The Wild Bunch with director Sam Peckinpah. Like The Professionals, it was a strenuous action picture with a tight shooting schedule of eighty days; for the first ten weeks they would be shooting in and around the sun-baked town of Parras, a hundred miles east of Torreón. “Sam takes you to the asshole of creation,” explained crew member Gordon Dawson. “Everyone was worried about dying. You’re rehearsing with full loads in the guns and horses that are skittish. When you’re dealing with thirty or forty horses, a lot of things can go wrong…. Off the set, we spent our time drinking and trying to get good food.”42 Ryan had seen a lot of miserable locations, but this one was like a ghost town. Peckinpah had scouted it out with cinematographer Lucien Ballard, who was working with Ryan for the fifth and last time.