by J. R. Jones
Ramona was captivated by Jessica, who introduced her to yoga and who stood on her head every day for fifteen minutes. Jessica struck her as enormously shrewd in sizing up interpersonal situations, and careful about whom she allowed into her orbit. “She was fun, she was funny,” Ramona recalled. “She had a very intelligent sense of humor…. And she was beautiful to look at — she was tall and had beautiful skin, and she exercised and kept her weight down…. She was the first person that I met that made her own noodles. She bought a machine, and we had such fun going over there, and her cooking her specialties.” Robert and Millard indulged all the talk of equal rights for women, but they were also strong-willed men. “Millard was very bright and very aware, and so was Robert. But walking the talk didn’t happen. I think they tried, and they were somewhat sensitive to it, let’s say. Intellectually.”7
The Lampells became part of the Ryans’ inner circle in New York (along with Robert Wallsten and the writers George Bradshaw and Robert Thomsen), which put them in a privileged position when Ryan, bowing to the wishes of his publicist, threw one of his semiannual showbiz parties at the Dakota. “Everything else would have to be arranged, usually by public relations firms, and even the guest list was sort of drawn up, about half of it with people Robert didn’t care about, or really know well,” Millard recalled. “It was in order to get mentions in columns, but he did that really with a kind of amused contempt for the whole prospect, and the best part of it would be afterwards when all the guests went home, and Jessica and Robert and Ramona and I would sit around and do a sort of sardonic take-off on the people who had been at the party.”8
At least one of these parties threatened to turn unpleasant — when Millard ran into director Elia Kazan, who had named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Kazan had always portrayed his friendly testimony to HUAC as a matter of principle, but many in Hollywood never forgave him. “We went to a social thing in Connecticut once, and Kazan was there,” Cheyney Ryan recalled. “All that my father talked about on the way there was about what a f___head he was, and how he turned in his friends. And of course, when we get there we’re all very nice to each other.”9 Millard had been blacklisted for years before resuscitating his career in the early ’60s; when he won an Emmy in 1966, he took advantage of the opportunity to note from the podium that he was a victim of the blacklist, and followed this up with a piece about his experience in the New York Times. After he gave Kazan the cold shoulder at the Dakota, the director followed Ramona around, trying to explain his position, while Ryan took Millard aside and assured him that he understood how he felt.10
Among the guests watching this play out were Robert Mitchum, John Houseman, and Henry Fonda, whose friendship with Ryan recently had blossomed into a theater collaboration. On location together for Battle of the Bulge and The Dirty Game, the two men had discussed starting a regional repertory company that would allow them to mount classic plays and even develop productions for New York. Now Fonda had drummed up some interest from actress Martha Scott, who had been hired by the Theatre Society of Long Island as artistic director for the local Mineola Theater. Renamed the Plumstead Playhouse, it would open in fall 1968 with stock performances of two chestnuts: Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, with Fonda as the Stage Manager and Ryan in a minor part as small-town newspaper editor George Webb, and, two weeks later, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s The Front Page, with Ryan as conniving big-city editor Walter Burns and Fonda in a small role as one of the reporters populating the press room at the Criminal Courts Building in Chicago.
The Front Page had been Ryan’s suggestion, inspired perhaps by his recent visit to Mayor Daley’s Chicago and his chats with former City News Bureau reporter Sy Hersh during the McCarthy campaign. The play was forty years old at this point, but its breathtaking cynicism kept it evergreen. Hildy Johnson, a burned-out city desk reporter for the Chicago Herald Examiner, has finally walked out on Burns, his roaring, exploitative boss; but after a condemned man escapes from jail, Burns manages to rope Hildy into covering one last story. Ryan’s old friend Harold Kennedy, who had directed Tiger at the Gates back in 1957, petitioned him for the part of the effeminate reporter Bensinger, which he had played in a previous production, and according to Kennedy’s account, Ryan strong-armed Scott and director Leo Brady into casting him.
Kennedy would recall his growing unease as the director and the supporting players, many of them drawn from Brady’s classes at Catholic University, squandered day after day of valuable rehearsal time, waiting for Ryan and Fonda to open Our Town and then turn their attention to The Front Page. When Ryan arrived and apprehended the situation, he whispered to Kennedy, “What have these people been doing for ten days?”11
Ryan’s anger mounted as he and Fonda — who were already performing Our Town at night — tried to get The Front Page moving and some of the students proved unprofessional. Particularly irritating to Ryan was one student who kept missing his entrance because he was in the basement watching the World Series on TV. “What does he want to be, an actor or a ballplayer?” Ryan asked Kennedy. “He could learn more watching Hank Fonda in rehearsal for half an hour than he could learn at the Actors Studio in twenty years.”12 When the student missed his entrance for the fifth time in a row, wrote Kennedy, Ryan walked up to the footlights and told Brady he would quit the production unless something changed. The Front Page opened October 9, drawing considerably less attention than Our Town. Ryan was doubly frustrated by the experience because the professional actors in the cast — Kennedy, Estelle Parsons, John McGiver, Anne Jackson — were so good.
Privately, Ryan began hatching a scheme to restage the play in New York City. Five days after The Front Page closed on Long Island, he invited Kennedy over to the Dakota and asked him to direct the new production, offering to do the play for nothing but insisting that they recruit a first-rate cast. “I want you and me to have complete artistic control,” he said.13 An experienced producer, Kennedy crunched the numbers and determined that The Front Page, with its twenty-four speaking parts, would be prohibitively expensive off Broadway and could turn a profit on Broadway only if they could persuade star players to work for the Actors Equity minimum of $167.50 a week. Ryan signed on immediately, his name serving as bait for other performers, and Kennedy found financial backing from Theatre 1969, a nonprofit founded by Edward Albee and Richard Barr, for a two-week tryout in Paramus, New Jersey, and a limited, four-week run at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. Leaving Kennedy to assemble the production, Ryan shipped out for the UK in late November to play the title character in MGM’s nautical fantasy Captain Nemo and the Underwater City.
Since Ryan’s comeback three years earlier, his career had evolved into a schizoid cycle of low-paying theater work that gratified him creatively and high-paying pictures that he often preferred to forget. But his years in the desert had taught him a lesson: a movie actor could be so choosy about his scripts that he wound up backing out of the business. “It’s important to continue working in films to keep your image warm,” he told one reporter. “If you insist on turning down bad pictures, people are going to say: ‘Whatever happened to Robert Ryan?’”14 The fact was that he’d done most of his best screen work when he was making pictures back to back; taking more jobs simply increased the odds that once in a while something would turn out well.
But sometimes that logic deserted him. Lisa Ryan, now a senior at the Nightingale-Bamford School, came home to the Dakota one night and found her father sitting in the kitchen alone. He hadn’t heard her come in, and as she neared the door she overheard him muttering incredulously to himself: “God! Captain Nemo!”15
BEN HECHT got his start in the newspaper business as a picture snatcher for the Chicago Daily Journal, using all manner of skullduggery to score sensational photos of crime and accident victims, before he was promoted to reporter and eventually moved over to the Chicago Daily News as a columnist. When he and Charles MacArthur, another veteran Chicago journalist, collaborated on The Front
Page in New York in 1928, they drew on a shared reservoir of colorful characters and outrageous anecdotes. Many of the caustic reporters who clustered together playing cards in the play’s rat-a-tat opening scene were not only based on but named after real-life counterparts from Chicago, who basked in their newfound glory after the play opened. Walter Burns, the barking, scheming editor of the Herald Examiner, was based on Walter Howey, MacArthur’s boss first at the Chicago Tribune and then at the New York Mirror; Hecht described him as “an invisible menace who sat in a Hearst tower, and with the aid of witches’ brews, second sight, and other unethical trumperies, outwitted the town’s honest news hounds.”16
Ryan had played this sort of comic heavy already in The Busy Body, but that picture was stupid and The Front Page was one of the great literary works of the American stage, perfecting the sort of staccato dialogue that Hollywood would embrace in its early talkies (the play was rapturously received in LA, and Hecht became a top screenwriter). For the first half of The Front Page, Walter Burns never appears onstage; he’s heard only through the earpiece of a telephone, ranting at his long-suffering reporter Hildy Johnson. Sick of the newspaper business, Hildy has turned in his resignation and plans to live happily ever after with his new wife, which invites a cascade of abuse from Burns: “You dirty double crossing Swede! … Walkin’ out on me like a stinkin’ yellow belly…. You two-faced bastard! … You goddamn tittering Swede moron — you lousy stewbum.”17 Olivier might do a better Othello, but this was the gutter poetry of Ryan’s youth, and no one could deliver it like he could.
As soon as Ryan returned from shooting Captain Nemo in Britain, he got back to work with Kennedy on the new production. Kennedy’s search for a suitable Hildy was impeded by the low wage they were offering as well as Ryan’s insistence on top billing (he didn’t often fuss about such things, but this was his own project and his Broadway comeback after Mr. President). Van Johnson, Peter Falk, George Segal, Jason Robards, and Richard Benjamin all had been approached but for one reason or another didn’t work out; in the end Ryan and Kennedy went with young Bert Convy, who had appeared in the original productions of Fiddler on the Roof (1964) and Cabaret (1966). Kennedy reprised his role as Bensinger, and from the Plumstead cast they had snagged John McGiver as the mayor and Charles White as the Cook County sheriff. Peggy Cass played Mollie Malloy, the condemned man’s girlfriend, and Katharine Houghton (who costarred with her aunt, Katharine Hepburn, in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner) was Hildy’s love interest, Peggy Grant.
The Front Page opened at the Ethel Barrymore on May 10, slaying the critics and selling out its scheduled run. A few doors down, the Biltmore Theatre was presenting James Rado and Gerome Ragni’s “tribal love-rock musical” Hair, and in the East Village, Kenneth Tynan was about to open his nude revue Oh! Calcutta! Compared to these much-talked-about shows, The Front Page might have seemed hopelessly retrograde, but as New York Times critic Walter Kerr pointed out, “Plays that perfectly represent their own times never have to worry about what time it is.”18 According to Ryan, his old Born to Be Bad costar Joan Fontaine came backstage after a performance and told him, “Oh, Bob, it’s so good to see a real play again!”19 There were plenty of New York theatergoers who felt the same way, and another four weeks were added to the run, extending The Front Page into early July. After that, Albee’s nonprofit group had to bow out, but plans were made to reopen the show under a new producing partnership in October.
Backstage at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre after performing The Front Page; at right are Lisa Ryan and Helen Hayes. The show’s critical and commercial success marked a triumphant return to Broadway for Ryan after the humiliating Mr. President six years earlier. Robert Ryan Family
That summer The Wild Bunch was released, collecting both critical raves and harsh condemnation for its graphic killing; Ryan hadn’t appeared in such a hotly debated picture since Crossfire. “Never have I seen such a bloody, violent, senseless, tasteless manifestation of what ails America as ‘The Wild Bunch,’” wrote one Times reader. “When such violence is depicted on movie screens without eliciting a picket line of protest, it can only mean that our citizenry has become completely immune to mass killing.”20 According to one story, patrons at a Kansas City preview of the new western went out into the alley to puke.21 “I feel sorry for those who saw ‘The Wild Bunch’ and were so repelled they vomited,” read another letter to the editor. “I wonder if they vomit from the real violence that we live with every day. The youths who won’t return home or the ones who return maimed for life.”22 The Times even published a column satirizing the controversy, in which a cosseted Hollywood director is praised by a colleague for his recent feature Mangled Entrails. “That close-up of the girl’s open carotid artery! And the way the sheriff’s face exploded when the hand grenade hit him! You’ve got a beautiful grasp of the medium, baby.”23
Ryan was impressed by The Wild Bunch, though the outcry over the violence gave him pause. After two decades with the American Friends Service Committee, United World Federalists, and SANE, how was he supposed to sell a picture that climaxed with an orgy of murder, a so-called “blood ballet” whose slow-motion shots, as critic Vincent Canby observed, rendered the violence “ beautiful, almost abstract”?24 The contradiction between his politics and the pictures he made for a living had seldom seemed more acute. “I think it put Dad in a difficult situation, because he felt he needed to defend the violence in the movie, but I don’t think he had a very good defense of it,” said Cheyney Ryan. His father, he said, fell back on the canard that “Peckinpah wanted to make a movie that was so bloody that no one would ever want to make this kind of movie again.”25 Of course, Peckinpah made another one just like it, and another after that.
The debate over The Wild Bunch took place in the wider context of the racial rioting that had rocked American cities every summer since 1965 and the conservative backlash against it that had carried Richard Nixon into the White House. “It is time for some honest talk about order in the United States of America,” Nixon had declared in a voice-over for one of his campaign commercials, as images of rioters and burned-out buildings filled the screen. “Dissent is a necessary ingredient of change. But in a system of government that provides for peaceful change there is no cause that justifies resort to violence.”26
This sort of rhetoric incensed Jessica Ryan, who, in her unpublished essay America — Dream or Nightmare?, was quick to broaden the definition of violence: “Law and order, as the term is used by politicians and defenders of the status quo, in itself, represents an act of violence; it blunts awareness of who the victims of violence are: ten percent of the population denied full rights of citizenship; millions of Americans living in poverty and degradation; students demanding that the academies become more relevant to the times…. Law and order allows violence to be done to the dissenters while it frees the general public of the necessity to feel any personal or individual responsibility for the conditions that produced the dissent.”27
Interviewed two years after the initial controversy, Ryan was more philosophical about The Wild Bunch. “Whether or not the portrayal of violence is a good or bad thing no one will ever really know…. I, frankly, don’t much care for the amount of violence shown in pictures. I thought The Wild Bunch in some cases — although it had style and distinction — overstressed the bloodletting…. Violence, however, is an integral part of modern life. You can’t blink at it. I just wish we could find another way.”28 Talking to another reporter, Ryan hastened to put the issue in its historical perspective: “For a good many decades we were the country that led the world in lynching. We almost exterminated the Indians. We treated the blacks in the shameful way we still do…. When we don’t like somebody, we shoot them!”29
During his summer break from The Front Page, Ryan took part in an independent short film that explored man’s violent nature more wisely and subtly than any of the political invective flying around. Written by Arthur Miller as a one-act play, but turned into a thirteen
-minute short by the young filmmaker Paul Leaf, The Reason Why centers on a couple of old friends, Roger (Ryan) and Charles (Eli Wallach), relaxing one fine morning on Charles’s farm. The only props of note are a pair of binoculars, which Roger has been admiring, and a rifle with a telescopic site. Through the binoculars Roger spies a woodchuck about 350 yards away, and Charles tells him how he used to pick off woodchucks with his rifle — dozens of them — because they kept destroying his vegetable garden. Eventually he gave up, though, because the bullets cost more than the vegetables were worth. “Seriously — it kept reminding me of a war,” says Charles. “For what it costs to kill these days, we could put a tractor on every farm in the world and send all their kids to the University of Texas.”30
The Reason Why must have struck a chord for Ryan, who had been sickened by his first hunting expedition with his father decades earlier. When Charles asks Roger if he’s ever hunted, he replies, “Years ago. Birds. But I never really liked it. They’re so beautiful, it breaks your heart.”31 Yet Roger is a combat veteran who has killed two men in battle. When Charles brings up Vietnam, Roger observes, “These goddamn wars — they make everything seem so senseless.” Eventually Charles goes into the house to retrieve his rifle and sights the woodchuck as Roger watches through the binoculars. Charles fires, the woodchuck goes down, and the two men walk out to the corpse and examine it. Charles tells Roger to leave the woodchuck for the circling hawks. When Roger asks him why he killed the animal, Charles replies: “I don’t know. I probably won’t anymore, though.”32