The Lives of Robert Ryan

by J. R. Jones

  Scripted by Peckinpah and Walon Green, The Wild Bunch recalled The Professionals with its story of aging outlaws chafing against the modern age. The year is 1913: Pike Bishop (William Holden), Dutch Engstrom (Ernest Borgnine), and their gang ride into a Texas town, disguised as soldiers, to steal a silver shipment from a railroad office, not realizing that Bishop’s old partner, Deke Thornton (Ryan), waits on the roof of a building across the street with a gang of bounty hunters. Meanwhile, Peckinpah follows the progress of a local temperance meeting as a sermon gives way to a march through town with a brass band. These three narratives intersect when the outlaws emerge from the office with their booty, the parade crosses in front of them, and a rifle fight erupts between the outlaws and Thornton’s crew. The next four minutes were complete chaos, with bullets tearing not only into people but out of them, and blood everywhere. The Motion Picture Association of America, representing the major studios, was in the process of scrapping the old production code in favor of a new ratings system, and The Wild Bunch would put it to the test.

  As in The Professionals and The Dirty Dozen, Ryan’s character was isolated from the macho crew of the title. Thornton once rode with Pike Bishop, until he was captured and sent to prison; now he has been offered his freedom if he captures or kills his old pal. Harrigan (Albert Dekker), the money man behind the posse, tells him, “You’re my Judas goat, Mr. Thornton.” Thornton wrestles with this epithet, and a quick flashback shows him stripped to the waist and suffering under the lash.

  Thornton and his band of grimy reprobates set off in pursuit of Bishop, though Thornton has more respect for his old partner than his new ones. “We’re after men,” he tells the noxious Coffer (Strother Martin), “and I wish to God I was with them.” By this time Bishop, Engstrom, their surviving gang members (Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, Jaime Sánchez), and the cackling desert rat Freddie Sykes (film noir veteran Edmund O’Brien) have ridden into Mexico, where they enjoy themselves in the small town of Agua Verde and get caught up in a train robbery scheme on behalf of General Mapache (Emilio Fernández), its debauched ruler. The picture climaxes with an epic gun battle in the town square between the outlaws and the federales, replete with explosives and machine-gun fire. Thornton watches from a distance through binoculars as this unfolds. By the end of the bravura five-minute sequence, 112 people are dead; the total body count for The Wild Bunch would be 145.43

  Deke Thornton, the conflicted bounty hunter in Sam Peckinpah’s western classic The Wild Bunch (1969). The outcry over its graphic bloodshed put Ryan in a difficult position after his many years of peace activism. Franklin Jarlett Collection

  With plenty of down time during the shoot, Ryan pored over American papers for political news. Four days after the New Hampshire upset, Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York had declared his candidacy, angering the McCarthy faithful. By the end of March, President Johnson had seen the writing on the wall and announced that he would not seek reelection. Four days after that, on April 4, Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on a motel balcony in Memphis; a single bullet from a Remington pump-action rifle broke his jaw and neck and severed his jugular vein. Riots erupted that night in several American cities, including Washington, Baltimore, and Chicago. In Ryan’s hometown — nearly a half century after the 1919 race riots of his youth — a three-mile stretch of Madison Street on the West Side was consumed by fires and looting. Ryan had brushed shoulders with King not only at civil rights events but through SANE; production records show Ryan missing from the set after King was killed, and Variety mentioned him flying to New York. Two weeks later he was back in Parras, where actors were being outfitted with exploding squibs to mimic bullet entry and exit wounds.

  The McCarthy campaign had been turned on its ear by Kennedy’s late entry and President Johnson’s stunning abdication; now the Minnesota senator faced not an embattled president but the young heir to Camelot. Vice President Hubert Humphrey was the party establishment’s choice to succeed Johnson, and though he had entered the race too late to compete in the elective primaries, he had the edge in the ones that were still negotiated in smoke-filled rooms. McCarthy’s uneasy relations with organized labor and the black community made him a problematic candidate to win in the fall, and the contest between him and Kennedy turned bitter as RFK took Indiana and Nebraska and McCarthy defeated him in Oregon. In late May the Wild Bunch company returned to Torreón, where news arrived the morning of June 6 that Kennedy, a decisive victor in the California primary, had been shot by Sirhan Sirhan in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. His assailant emptied a .22 revolver, sending one bullet into Kennedy’s head, a second into his neck, and a third tearing through his chest. Kennedy died twenty-six hours later.

  These horrible events could only have exacerbated the ongoing tension on the set. Peckinpah was a terrible hothead, and he liked to goad and bully his actors. Holden and Borgnine both had run-ins with him, and according to Holden biographer Bob Thomas, Ryan lost his temper with Peckinpah as well. After the company moved to Torreón, wrote Thomas, Ryan asked Peckinpah for a few days off so he could do some campaigning,* but the director turned him down. “For ten days, Ryan reported to the set in makeup and costume. He never played a scene. Finally he grabbed Peckinpah by the shirt front and growled, ‘I’ll do anything you ask me to do in front of the camera, because I’m a professional. But you open your mouth to me off the set, and I’ll knock your teeth in.’”44

  Peckinpah may have provoked Ryan, but he also coaxed a superb performance from him. Like Hans Ehrengard in The Professionals, Deke Thornton is peripheral to the main action, yet he takes center stage in the denouement, after the wild bunch are wiped out and the bounty hunters arrive at the stricken town. Thornton finds his old friend Pike Bishop bloodied and dead, his arm hanging from the handle of a machine gun, and pockets Bishop’s revolver as a memento. As his crew of scalawags loots the bodies, Thornton seems to buckle under the weight of it all; for hours on end he sits at the town gate, his horse standing by, as the bodies are carted out by the townspeople. Finally, the old codger Sykes rides up with a couple of Mexicans and an invitation to head out with them on some unspecified adventure. “It ain’t like the old days,” chuckles Sykes, “but it’ll do.” Thornton laughs, mounts his horse, and rides off with them, into the past.

  Ryan flew home at the end of June, and that summer he and Jessica stayed in the little town of Holderness, in central New Hampshire on Squam Lake. Campaigning in New Hampshire that winter had reawakened Ryan’s love for the state, and the couple had a friend in Holderness — Harold Taylor, who had been president of Sarah Lawrence College and a human-rights advisor to Adlai Stevenson. That summer the film board at Dartmouth College programmed a Jean Renoir festival, and Ryan drove out to Hanover for a screening of The Woman on the Beach. “Most of what I said was about you,” Ryan wrote to Renoir the next day, “how important it has been in my life to have worked with you and to call myself your friend.”45 By the end of the summer the Ryans had bought a piece of land in the Shepard Hill neighborhood of Holderness and were planning to build a second home on it.

  Before returning to New York, Ryan traveled to Chicago to serve as a McCarthy delegate at the Democratic National Convention. McCarthy had no path to the nomination: by the time the elective primaries wrapped up in New York on June 16, Humphrey had a commanding lead in the delegate count, and McCarthy was too diffident a character to woo uncommitted delegates to his side. Senator George McGovern of South Dakota had leapt into the race as well, which would probably divide the anti-Humphrey vote at the convention. Ryan went anyway, largely to please a friend who was the head of the New York delegation. In Chicago he shared a hotel room with his son Cheyney and tended to his duties at the International Amphitheatre, while the younger man demonstrated against the war in Grant Park.

  Cheyney asked his father if he could get him into the convention hall, and Ryan sounded out the head of the New York delegation for a second pass, with no luck. “The convention was
being run by Mayor Daley, who was a big Humphrey supporter,” Cheyney recalled. “So he wasn’t gonna give anything to the McCarthy people.” While Ryan was on the floor of the convention, however, a representative of the Pepsi-Cola Company approached bringing good wishes from Joan Crawford, whose late husband, Alfred Steele, had been president of the company, and who now served on the board of directors. “Ten minutes later, we have a pass to the convention!” said Cheyney. “I always thought, ‘Well, that’s an interesting anecdote about who runs the world.’”

  Tension filled the convention hall: TV screens showed Chicago police clashing with protesters on Michigan Avenue outside the Congress Hotel, where Humphrey was staying. “When you were in the convention they had TV coverage everywhere,” said Cheyney. “And most of the time they weren’t showing what was going on in the convention, they were showing all these battles going on…. I was kind of bouncing back and forth. There was one night when I was there when all the police stuff was going on. And I remember another night I was actually in the convention. So it was quite an experience.”46 Disgusted with the whole situation, his father decided to go home, leaving Cheyney with the hotel room for another few days. Ryan missed the climactic police riot on August 28, but it was all over TV, and as the protesters pointed out, the whole world was watching. Anyone with a grasp of electoral politics knew what all this meant: Richard Nixon was going to be president of the United States.

  *Thomas incorrectly reports that Ryan wanted to campaign for Robert Kennedy, a candidate he never supported and who, on the basis of Thomas’s chronology of events, already would have been dead. A more likely supposition is that Ryan wanted to campaign for McCarthy in the New York primary, which took place on June 16.

  fourteen

  My Good Bad Luck

  Among Jessica Ryan’s papers is a curious fifteen-page typed manuscript that may have been begun by her husband but was certainly finished by her. “My name is Robert Ryan,” it opens. “The vital statistics? Born: Chicago, Illinois. Educated in a Jesuit academy and at Dartmouth College. Married — thirty years — to the same woman. Father of three children, two boys and a girl. (Well, in order not to offend women’s lib — a girl and two boys.)” The next four pages meander, touching on the social upheaval of the ’60s and the author’s experience of being confused with the vicious characters he had played onscreen. By the fifth page, however, another writer clearly has taken over, and the piece becomes a scholarly consideration of movie westerns and the white, patriarchal society they champion. In the old silent westerns of William S. Hart, the author explains, “Women were dance hall girls (never openly identified as whores) or Innocent girls. When an innocent girl appeared, the good man’s concern for her was to rescue her from the bad man. Not for himself, but to protect her virginity. In the end, of course, riding off into the sunset, alone.”1

  The piece was never published; Jessica must have recognized that this wasn’t the proper approach to such a rich topic, and alongside the ghostwritten piece are two longer manuscripts under her own name (Woman — The Mythless American and America — Dream or Nightmare?) in which the same ideas are worked out in much greater detail. She wrote constantly, which encouraged and to some extent excused her cloistered existence. Bobbs-Merrill had published her second children’s book, The Mystery of Arroyo Seco, in 1962, and for a long period afterward she had labored over another novel called The Smoking Mountain, but it never saw print. By the end of the decade she had turned to nonfiction, cranking out not only the two scholarly manuscripts but If School Keeps, a 150-page account of starting the Oakwood School; Recollections of a Pioneer Grandmother, about the frontier women in her family line; and the memoir Campaign–’52, or A Camera’s-Eye View from Two Odd Birds.

  Writing under her husband’s name, and then realizing that she had to take ownership of the ideas herself, must have been a telling experience. Jessica had read Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique when it shot up the bestseller charts in 1964, and she was taken with its clearheaded diagnosis of “the problem with no name” — that vague but gnawing sense among American women that there must be more to life than marriage, children, and creature comforts. “Sometimes a woman would tell me that the feeling gets so strong she runs out of the house and walks through the streets,” wrote Friedan. “Or she stays inside her house and cries. Or her children tell her a joke, and she doesn’t laugh because she doesn’t hear it. I talked to women who had spent years on the analyst’s couch, working out their ‘adjustment to the feminine role,’ their blocks to ‘fulfillment as a wife and mother.’”2 Even a woman such as Jessica, who had published five books and launched one of the most respected private schools in Los Angeles, understood. To the world, she was still Mrs. Robert Ryan.

  Since moving to New York, Jessica had become a patient of psychologist Rollo May, whose books had helped introduce the idea of existential anxiety into American psychotherapy. Interviewed by Psychology Today, May defined anxiety as “the awareness of death…. This comes out in the loss of love, which is a partial death, it comes out when you write a book that turns out not to be publishable or to be a success, when something is not as good as you hoped. All of these things are partial deaths that precede our ultimate death.” From his perspective, some anxiety was a good thing, “the struggle of being against non-being.”3 May became a powerful influence on Jessica, who had wrestled with anxiety all her life, and some of his ideas and terminology would creep into her work.

  When Jessica set out to write a feminist study of her own, she naturally gravitated toward her family history of strong, independent women, and to the Jungian scholarship that so fascinated her, with its emphasis on the psychological repercussions of cultural myths. Jessica opened Woman — The Mythless American by explaining that she had once taken part in a study of violence in America, doing an analysis of how it was fueled by national mythology. “In the course of the work, two things began to be apparent to me,” she wrote. “One, American mythology is entirely for men — and for men at a pre-adolescent, gang-age stage of human development; two, there are no myths for women, nor are there women of any significance in the myths of men.” For her, this cultural mind-set posed a greater problem for women than the more practical matters of equal pay and career opportunities. “All the legislation in the world with respect to women can change nothing if the mythology, the cultural mores of the nation do not change.”4

  The manuscript dead-ends after fifty pages, before the writer can follow her idea from the tall tales of the nineteenth century into the Hollywood dream world of the twentieth; one wonders what Jessica might have said about Ryan’s endless schedule of westerns and war movies. The Professionals, The Dirty Dozen, and The Wild Bunch are all male romances, arguably “for men at a pre-adolescent, gang-age stage of human development,” and their treatment of women ranges from chauvinism to violent misogyny. In The Professionals, the Claudia Cardinale character is a big-breasted trophy, fought over by various macho factions. The only female characters intruding on the large-scale buddy romance of The Dirty Dozen are a band of whores imported by Lee Marvin to service his boys. The Wild Bunch is even worse: when one of the outlaws, Angel (Jaime Sánchez), catches his former lover in the arms of the sinister General Mapache, he pulls out his revolver and murders not the general but the woman.

  Even in its incomplete form, Jessica’s manuscript provides some offhand insights into her personal experience of “the woman problem.” Her parents’ generation, she wrote, came of age as the Victorian era faded away, leaving behind “an aggregation of thrashing about, dissatisfied, frustrated women, taking out their repressed rage, not only on their husbands, but on their children — over-demanding, over-exploitative, over-protective, over-rejecting, over-almost everything, out of a lack of any surety within themselves.” Jessica knew Robert had given her more respect for her ideas than a woman of her mother’s generation might have enjoyed, but he was old-fashioned in his attitudes. “Most women want to discover the truth of the
ir existence within the reality of themselves as women,” Jessica wrote. “They find it mysterious and infuriating when men react to their plea with disinterest, if not out-and-out anger; it is even more mysterious when the reaction comes from the kind of liberal, intellectual-type man who pays lip-service to the cause of women’s rights, publicly supporting their desire for the freedom to assert their power, but who, when that assertion interferes with his own personal preoccupations, retreats in boredom from the engagement.”5

  Jessica found a more sympathetic ear in young Ramona Lampell, the second wife of their friend Millard. Born to a coal-mining family in West Virginia, Ramona had boarded a Greyhound bus for New York City in 1947, on the eve of her seventeenth birthday; and after attending the Barbizon School of Modeling, she got a job in the fur department at Bergdorf Goodman. Millard had met her at a Bloody Mary brunch in Redding, Connecticut, in 1965, shortly before he and his first wife, Elizabeth, visited the Ryans in Martha’s Vineyard; by 1968, when Millard helped stage the Woody Guthrie shows, he had divorced Elizabeth and married Ramona. Jessica loved Millard and took a real shine to Ramona, especially given their shared past as working women modeling clothes in Manhattan. The younger woman was touched and grateful for her friendship. “She was really very sweet to me,” Ramona recalled. “When I first met Millard, he was married previously, and they knew him first. And it was difficult for me to come into the relationship as ‘the other woman.’”6