by J. R. Jones
Ryan occupied an interesting position in popular culture at that moment: after twenty-five years as a movie tough guy, he had become a trusted face to a generation of middle Americans, someone who could articulate liberal values without scaring the hell out of people. Later that year Millard Lampell enlisted Ryan to help his friends Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel when their hour-long TV special, Songs of America, ran into trouble prior to its scheduled broadcast on CBS. The original sponsor, AT&T, withdrew after it saw the boldly political program, directed by actor Charles Grodin, in which the duo’s songs accompanied news footage of urban rioting, chaos in Vietnam, Cesar Chavez, and the Poor People’s March. CBS backed the singers, Alberto VO5 stepped in as sponsor, and Ryan taped a thirty-second introduction to explain, “These two young men have attracted a tremendous following among the youth of America with their lyrical interpretation of the world we live in. We think you will find the next hour both entertaining and stimulating.” (It was stimulating, all right: according to Grodin, one million viewers had turned it off by the first commercial break.)33
Much of the cast of The Front Page carried over when the show reopened at the Ethel Barrymore in October, though a few actors had moved on and one small role — Mrs. Grant, Hildy Johnson’s prospective mother-in-law — went to Helen Hayes, not only the first lady of the American theater but the widow of Charles MacArthur. During this third incarnation, Martha Scott of the Plumstead Playhouse produced a fourth for TV broadcast, sponsored by Xerox and starring Ryan and George Grizzard as Hildy. Ryan was proud of the stage production, and like his idol Tallulah Bankhead in Clash by Night, he had no understudy, playing every single performance himself. But as he liked to quote Shaw, art was expensive, and by February 1970, he had left The Front Page and flown out to Durango, Mexico, for another western with Burt Lancaster, Lawman.
Canadian screenwriter Gerald Wilson had conceived of Lawman as a commentary on the US political scene, particularly the recent drumbeat for civil order. After a crew of drunken cowpunchers (led by Robert Duvall) shoot up the town of Bannock, Marshal Jared Maddox (Lancaster) tracks them to the neighboring town of Sabbath, where the cowardly Marshal Ryan Cotten (Ryan) grovels to a local cattle baron. Once a respected lawman, Cotten has long since lost his nerve, tumbling from one bad assignment to the next; the people of Sabbath mock him as “Cotton Ryan.” He covers his cowardice with cynicism: “If you’re a lawman, you’re a disease,” he tells Maddox. “They want you but they hate you.”
Ryan hadn’t been in Durango since 1955, when he was stricken with alcoholic hepatitis during production of The Tall Men. (“The place hasn’t changed much, though I don’t remember it any too well,” he told one reporter.)34 Lawman turned out to be a positive experience: Lancaster ran a tight ship, and Michael Winner, the Englishman directing the picture for United Artists, knew his way around a camera. First-rate actors filled out the cast: Duvall, Albert Salmi, Sheree North, John Hillerman, Ralph Waite, John McGiver (as Sabbath’s deaf mayor, following the action with a listening horn), and, as the powerful cattle baron, Lee J. Cobb, Ryan’s cast mate in Clash by Night on Broadway almost three decades earlier.
“Robert Ryan was an actor I’d admired nearly all my life,” remembered Michael Winner. “He was the sweetest man in the world. He came to my house in Durango to say good-bye when he was leaving. He started to cry. He said, ‘Michael, you’ll never know what you’ve done for me. I can’t thank you enough.’ Tears were rolling down his cheeks.”35 Winner was taken aback by this effusive display, but it began to make sense a few weeks later; after notifying Ryan’s agent that he would need the star to rerecord some dialogue in New York, he received a nonsensical reply that Mr. Ryan had broken his leg and could not oblige, followed by a confidential call from Ryan himself explaining that he was getting radiation treatments for lymphoma. An actor had to keep something like this quiet if he ever wanted to work again, though Ryan assured Winner he could do the recording session. He didn’t tell Winner what his doctors had told him: his chances of survival were less than fifty–fifty.
The cancer was inoperable, so for four months Ryan received cobalt radiation therapy at New York Hospital, suffering the usual side effect of crushing fatigue. The rest of the time he and Jessica retreated up north to their house in Holderness, which had been completed now and offered the utmost privacy. Ryan always had been proud of his looks and his physique, and he refused to let anyone but his family see him this way. Harry Belafonte met with Ryan after he got sick, but not often. “He really went into a social retreat during that period,” said Belafonte. “I think he was just so discomfited by the disintegration, and I think his capacity to maintain social engagement and interest began to wane.”36 Ryan’s doctors had told him that, even if the cancer went into remission, they wouldn’t know he was cured for another five years. Squirreled away in New Hampshire, the Ryans began to reckon with the fact that Robert might not be around much longer.
Jessica had seen many sides of her husband over the past thirty years. “I can almost guess, when we walk into a room full of strange people, which will be his persona for the evening,” she wrote. “If the gathering is primarily one of WASPs or Jews, he immediately becomes Roman Catholic. And with certain non-Catholic, grand types — John Houseman, for instance — also the simple Irish boy, grandson of immigrants…. If we are at a party where there are uninformed R.C.s, he becomes the intellectual Catholic, giving accounts of the sophistication, the intellectualism and the historical conniving of the Church…. On the other hand, should intellectual Catholics be there, Ryan goes Protestant.”37
There were Ryans she didn’t know — according to her friend Robert Wallsten, she once recalled opening a letter addressed to her husband from the Los Angeles Health Department and learning that he had been exposed to syphilis.38 But no one had more pieces of the puzzle than she did, and no one but she saw the Ryan who sat silently in the little A-frame house overlooking Squam Lake, contemplating the end.
During this period, another drama was playing out in Cambridge. The previous fall, Cheyney Ryan and other members of Students for a Democratic Society had occupied a dean’s office at Harvard to demand better treatment of black service workers, and the school had expelled him. He was still in town that spring, working as a dishwasher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, when revelations that President Nixon had widened the war to Laos and Cambodia sent the student antiwar movement off the rails. On Monday, May 4, the nation was shocked by images of students shot and killed by National Guardsmen on the campus of Kent State University. A week later, Cheyney, forbidden to set foot on the Harvard campus, showed up for a protest, and a few months after that he was arrested and charged with criminal trespass; convicted and sentenced to sixty days in jail, he would appeal and be given probation.
Tim had dropped out of school and was trying to launch a career as a folk singer, hitchhiking up and down the West Coast and often playing on the street. On May 15, he was part of the growing protests over the impending shutdown of People’s Park, the free-speech area on the Berkley campus, when riot police waded into the crowd cracking heads and Governor Reagan called in the National Guard. Ryan told one interviewer that his eldest was “going through a great deal of self-searching and examination to find out what he wants to do.”39 Around the same time, in a letter to the alumni office at Dartmouth, Ryan confessed his doubts about the value of a higher education: “My oldest son dropped out of Pomona in his senior year. He didn’t feel what he was doing had any relevance to his life or the world around him. My youngest son was suspended in his senior year for nonviolent political activity. In neither case was the subsequent alternative a life of drugs or blissful inactivity. My youngest son was headed (easily) for a magna cum and is intellectually voracious. Whether or not he gets his Harvard BA is no longer of interest to him. Why?”40
Amid all this youthful alienation, Ryan crossed paths again with Nicholas Ray, whose Rebel without a Cause was only a distant memory now. After King of King
s flopped, Ray collaborated with producer Samuel Bronston and screenwriter Phil Yordan on one more Spanish superproduction, 55 Days at Peking (1963) with Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner, but like the earlier one it spun out of control and the alcoholic director broke down (or was fired, depending on whose story one believed). Subsequent projects had crashed and burned, most recently a documentary about the Chicago conspiracy trial. “Mom, who is that guy sleeping on our couch?” Lisa asked her mother after she found Ray conked out in their living room at the Dakota.41 His shaggy hair had turned white, and a recent embolism had forced him to wear an eye patch. “There’s a pirate here now,” Lisa told Cheyney when he phoned.42 According to Cheyney, his father tried without success to get Ray a teaching job at Brandeis University, though the director would eventually land a two-year gig at Harpur College in upstate New York.
By the fall Ryan’s doctors had pronounced his cancer in remission and said he might return to work, though he was greatly weakened by his ordeal and spending months in the desert on a western location was out of the question. Jessica, knowing how happy The Front Page had made her husband, urged him to return to the stage (before his illness, he and Harold Kennedy had made plans to move their hit out to Los Angeles, and the Plumstead Playhouse had announced that Ryan would star in Archibald MacLeish’s J.B.). But Ryan understood that his big problem now was proving to the movie industry that he could still be insured. His old friend Phil Yordan managed to land him a second-billed role as a TV executive in Columbia Pictures’ The Love Machine, adapted from a trashy best seller by Jacqueline Susann (Valley of the Dolls). Before the deal was sealed, executive producer Irving Mansfield, who was married to Susann, paid Ryan a visit to inquire about his health. “Look, there is one thing about cancer: you don’t die quickly,” Ryan assured him. “I’ll be able to make the picture.”43
The script was putrid, and Ryan disliked costar Dyan Cannon, who played his cheating wife.44 Before long the picture wrapped, though, and he was back in New York at the Dakota with Jessica and Lisa, now nineteen, who had quit school also and was driving a hansom cab in Central Park. Now that Ryan had overcome the professional stigma of cancer, Jessica had less trouble persuading him to consider a play, and a dream project materialized when Jay Fuchs, a producer on The Front Page, put together a deal for Ryan to star in Long Day’s Journey into Night at the Promenade Theater at Broadway and Seventy-sixth. Ryan had been blown away by the first Broadway production in 1958, and his experience playing James Tyrone Sr. in Nottingham four years earlier had only whetted his appetite for a second staging, one that might better capture O’Neill’s bleak vision of an Irish-American clan coming apart at the seams one day in 1912, at their shabby summer home. Ryan’s doctors had advised him against doing the play, which ran nearly three hours, but he ignored them.
With Ryan on board, Fuchs and his partners took a chance on thirty-year-old director Arvin Brown, a Yale School of Drama graduate who had done good things at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven. Brown would recall his trepidation when he arrived at the Dakota to meet the star: “My impressions of him before I met him were from movies, and he scared the shit out of me.” Ryan seemed aloof as he invited Brown in, which did nothing to settle the young man’s nerves. But they connected quickly enough over the play, which Brown had directed at Long Wharf five years earlier (with Frank Langella as young Edmund). Ryan “began to get a little more comfortable, and I saw a man begin to emerge who was so the opposite of … his film persona, that I could hardly believe what I was seeing.”45 Here was a man with a deep emotional, religious, and cultural connection to the play; he still remembered the racial discrimination faced by his grandfather and father, and his own Black Irish moods had made him a connoisseur of O’Neill’s melancholy.
Casting was critical: aside from a maid who appears briefly, Long Day’s Journey has only four roles, all of them demanding. Tyrone, the rigid patriarch, is a mass of contradictions: he frets over the health of Mary, his wife of thirty-six years, and Edmund, the younger of his grown sons, but his own childhood of dire poverty has left him a skinflint who paces around the house extinguishing lightbulbs and skimps on the family’s medical care. To play Jamie — the elder son, whose disillusionment has driven him to a life of whores and whisky — Brown chose twenty-nine-year-old Stacy Keach, another Yale alumnus and already an established Broadway actor. James Naughton, a handsome, twenty-five-year-old member of the Yale Repertory Theatre, leapt at the chance to play Edmund, who learns during the course of the play that he suffers from tuberculosis. For Mary Tyrone, who has slid back into morphine addiction after a brief period of recovery, Brown considered Kim Stanley but ultimately, at Ryan’s urging, cast fifty-seven-year-old Geraldine Fitzgerald, who was Irish through and through.
O’Neill had drawn on memories of his family all through his writing career, but Long Day’s Journey into Night, his last completed work, was so nakedly autobiographical that he never allowed it to be produced in his lifetime. His father, James O’Neill, had shown enormous promise as a young actor but then made a fortune playing the title character in The Count of Monte Cristo and stuck with the play until he was trapped in it for the rest of his career. In the fourth and final act, as Tyrone and Edmund sit alone in the parlor playing cards and waiting for Jamie to arrive home, the father opens up to his son, venting his disappointment in himself as he looks back over his career: “I loved Shakespeare. I would have acted in any of his plays for nothing, for the joy of being alive in his great poetry. And I acted well in him. I felt inspired by him. I could have been a great Shakespearean actor, if I’d kept on…. But a few years later my good bad luck made me find the big money-maker…. What the hell was it I wanted to buy, I wonder.”46
The words might have come from Ryan’s own lips as he considered his straitened career and untapped potential. Friends who saw him perform Long Day’s Journey would be struck and in some cases disturbed by the parallels to his own life: the famous father, the fragile mother, the angry, idealistic sons.
That long, searching conversation between Tyrone and Edmund — over forty minutes of stage time — was the heart of the play, and Brown watched carefully as Ryan rehearsed with Jim Naughton, who was making his New York debut. Looking irritated, Ryan asked to speak with Brown afterward, and the director feared that he would demand another actor. Instead Ryan remarked, “The kid is really good, this was a good choice. But I don’t wanna tell him that ’cause he’ll get a swelled head. So I think you should say that to him.”47 The incident revealed to Brown what a buttoned-down man Ryan was, though in fact the actor had taken this tack before with rising young talents, such as Terence Stamp in Billy Budd. From his perspective, egotism was the Achilles’ heel of many a performer.
Ryan had more trouble acclimating himself to Fitzgerald, who liked to blurt out her character’s thoughts in front of the other actors and whose interpretation of Mary Tyrone turned out to be radically different from the way previous actresses had played her. Researching the role, Fitzgerald had learned that, while morphine abuse reduces most people to dreamy indolence, it can drive others to shrieking fits, and in contrast to the shrinking violet essayed by Florence Eldridge and Katharine Hepburn, her Mary — in keeping with Tyrone’s recollection that she once tried to throw herself off a dock — was forceful, even manic. “Ah, she’s doing Medea tonight,” Ryan cracked one evening as he and Naughton stood in the wings watching her carry on.48 He made the necessary adjustment, but he often thought Fitzgerald was overacting, a cardinal sin for him. Asked about Ryan’s technique, Brown observed, “Above all things, it was economical. I think he loathed extravagance or wasted gesture.”49 Fitzgerald’s performance, however, added a strong feminine will to what always had been a male-oriented play, shifting the balance of power and creating a fresh dynamic.
Long Day’s Journey into Night opened Wednesday, April 21, to rave reviews from the New York Times (“a towering achievement”), New Yorker (“a triumph”), New York Post (“a stunningly acted produ
ction”), Associated Press (“a production of searing splendor”), Cue (“one of the decade’s most memorable theatrical events”), Variety (“best single legit offering off-Broadway this season”), Newsday (“one of the major events of this season”), and on and on. Ryan liked to claim that, following Katharine Hepburn’s advice, he never read reviews until a show was over, but his colleagues knew better, and after getting slammed so often for his serious stage work, he must have been elated by the universal acclaim. As Times critic Walter Kerr noted, the key to Ryan’s performance was his strength: “He silences [Edmund] by the steel in his eyes and the sores on his soul he is perfectly ready to expose. His very candor is kindness; he disembowels himself to show that he was made of good stuff…. In his cups, he has a grip on his psyche that no one can dislodge. He is character locked into itself, aware, obtuse, knowing and unalterable. The portrait, in its all-of-a-piece complexity, is beautifully composed, and Mr. Ryan explores the mea culpa in which no forgiveness is asked with admirable, leather-tough control.”50
That strength may have been illusory; as director of the show, Brown understood better than the other actors how cancer treatment had weakened this vibrant, athletic man. “Compared to what he was used to in himself, I think it was a hard adjustment,” said Brown. “Jessica told that to me privately, too, in the early times of our relationship. It had just not occurred to him that he would be seriously ill…. He had been hit harder by it in certain ways than she ever expected.”51 Brown had assembled and rehearsed a second company to perform the matinees, keeping Ryan down to six shows a week, though even this accommodation upset the actor. “We knew that the doctors had told him they didn’t think he should be doing it now,” remembered Naughton. “So his actions spoke very loudly to us, and set an example for me and for Stacy.”52
Keach and Naughton both adored Ryan, who was generous with them onstage and never pulled rank. “He loved acting, he loved the challenge of a great part,” said Keach, who had admired Ryan on-screen for years. “[He had] an appetite, a wonderful appetite that was very inspiring to me as a young actor because I felt that it was something that I shared.” Once the play had opened, Ryan initiated a little ritual with the young men. “At the end of the night,” Naughton remembered, “when we were all changing to go out into the evening, he’d say, ‘Okay, boys.’ And Stacy and I would go into his dressing room, and he had a bottle of bourbon and three glasses. And he’d pour a shot glass for each of us. We’d have a drink together, and then off we’d go into the darkness, until the next night.”53