by J. R. Jones
As Brown got to know the Ryans better, Bob began talking more openly about his and Jessica’s alcoholism, which figured heavily in his regard for Long Day’s Journey. “That seemed to be an area that, at least privately with me, he wanted to deal with, that he understood in the character and did not want to romanticize,” said Brown.54 Talking to reporters, Ryan always claimed his hard-drinking days were over, and all during The Front Page he had stuck to two beers a night as he dined with Harold Kennedy after every show. But the sixth member of the Ryan family had always been liquor. “I went to a Quaker weekend with my parents once, when I was in high school,” said Lisa Ryan. “I remember very little of it except that they were unhappy because there was no alcohol there. [They] brought booze and they would go back to their room to drink so that they could then go back out and deal with these Quakers.”55
Long Day’s Journey into Night ran for three months, enough time for the quartet onstage to really take each other’s measure. The polarity between Ryan and Fitzgerald persisted all through the run: she loved to improvise, throwing new notes into each performance, whereas Ryan hated surprises onstage. “He planned things, and thought it through,” said Brown, “and needed to rehearse and rehearse and rehearse, and feel absolutely comfortable in what he was doing, so that his process was always this one of stripping away and making it more economical.”56
One night, when an onstage altercation between the brothers got out of hand, Edmund’s shirt was badly torn and Naughton, deciding it was a distraction, shed the garment. No one thought to tell Ryan about this; when he made his next entrance and found Naughton bare-chested, he was flummoxed and more than a little angry. But Ryan might fool around backstage: one night Fitzgerald and Naughton, gazing through a window and ostensibly watching James Tyrone out in the yard, saw Ryan, hidden from the audience, peering back at them in a cat’s-face mask.
Cancer hadn’t impaired his sense of humor. Sometime during the run, Ryan wrote a little prose poem, “The Next Time You Want to Do a Play,” in which he noted the various ego punishments of the New York stage. Among its warnings:
The bad notices will bother you more than the good notices will please you.
Kind friends will not fail to say things like, “I was furious at what John Simon said about your performance.”
Every night at curtain call you will stand up and humbly solicit the approval of a gang of faceless ass-shifters who have spent most of the evening coughing and yawning.
Your days will be completely wrecked, spent in either doing the play or dreading it.
You will be besieged to do “talk” shows which pay nothing and operate solely to enhance the careers of the hosts. Your heart-warming reward will be a letter to your wife from an aging aunt in Round Rock, Texas, who will say, “I saw Robert on the Dick Cavett show.” Her total comment.
Local tradesmen will say something like, “I saw your show last night. That Keach fellow is some actor, isn’t he?”57
Ryan wrote the piece at a time when he could afford to poke fun at himself: Long Day’s Journey was a genuine triumph and the pinnacle of his stage career. The following year, when the New York Critics’ Poll was released, the play took best director, best actress, best supporting actor (Keach), and most promising new off-Broadway actor (Naughton). Even in this instance Ryan had to settle for being an also-ran, placing third behind Jack MacGowran and Harold Gould for best actor, but everyone knew he had left his mark on one of the great roles.
Keach left the show in early June to star in the boxing picture Fat City, and in mid-July, Ryan, Naughton, and Fitzgerald handed the show over to the matinee cast. Jessica wanted Robert to keep working with Arvin Brown, and the young man became an occasional guest at their second home up in Holderness. “They had some of their happiest times up there,” Brown recalled. “The family was very relaxed, and it was wonderful to see them all not kind of edgy with each other. It was really open.” At such close quarters, Brown began to get a sense of the couple’s history. “The marriage that I saw was a very devoted marriage, which you felt had had its problems and traumas — you certainly felt that, it was nothing easy about the marriage or the relationship — but it had become very strong…. He was dependent on her for her critical attitudes, he admired a great deal what she had to say about him in performances and whatnot, and he took her very seriously.”58
Ryan’s next picture was a French crime drama with locations in Montreal and interiors at Boulogne Billancourt Studios in Paris. Director René Clément had made some distinguished films after World War II (The Battle of the Rails, The Walls of Malapaga), but he had reached the tail end of his career, and the script, adapted from David Goodis’s pulp novel Black Friday, undercut its rich characters with an obscure and illogical plot. Charley (Ryan), a career criminal, is the patriarch of a little crime family that occupies a rural house on the water, including his common-law wife (Italian beauty Lea Massari), his thuggish enforcer Mattone (Aldo Ray), and a grown brother and sister whom Charley adopted when they were children. Jean-Louis Trintignant (And God Created Woman) took second billing as Tony, a New York crook being held captive by Charley and his clan because he knows the location of some cash Charley wants.
Ryan excelled in this claustrophobic stretch: there’s a funny scene in which Tony manages to stack three cigarettes end to end, collecting ten dollars from Charley, and the older man, with a series of elegant hand flourishes and wrist flicks, tries to execute the stunt but can’t get the third cigarette balanced without the cylinder crumpling. At the midpoint, though, the movie turns into a garbled heist adventure in which Tony bands together with Charley and his family to kidnap a government witness against an organized crime figure. In keeping with Clément’s pretensions, the French release title was La Course du lièvre à travers les champs (The race of a hare through the fields), though in the United States the picture would open (and quickly close) as And Hope to Die.
Jessica accompanied Ryan to Paris, where the growing fascination with film noir had begun to elevate him to cult-hero status. While they were there, a local cinema held a weeklong retrospective of his films, and according to Lisa, her mother and father ran into a group of film students on the street who began kneeling to Ryan and calling out the names of his old crime pictures. He thought they were nuts.59
Back at the Dakota, Ryan took a breather and began looking into new projects. As United Artists produced a screen version of the Broadway musical Man of La Mancha, a small outfit called International Producing Associates, with offices in Churubusco, Mexico, announced that Ryan would play the title character in a nonmusical adaptation of Don Quixote, with Buddy Hackett as Sancho Panza.60 That spring the Ryans laid down their marker in the 1972 presidential race by holding a party at the Dakota for the dovish Senator George McGovern, then considered a long shot for the Democratic nomination. New York Post columnist Pete Hamill attended, and remembered Ryan telling him, “Maybe this is the last chance we’re going to have.”61 Ryan had received an interesting script from MGM called The Lolly Madonna War, about two feuding families in rural Tennessee, but the shooting schedule conflicted with a trip to Europe he and Jessica were planning, so he turned it down.
Jim Naughton had formed a close bond with Ryan, and as an avid pool player, he had an open invitation to drop in at the Dakota for a drink and a few games. One day in May 1972, he phoned Ryan to see if he was free, but Ryan begged off, explaining that Jessica was ill. Feeling unwell, she had gone into the hospital for some tests, and on Friday, May 12, her doctors came to Ryan with the grave news that she was dying, quickly and incurably, of liver cancer. Stunned, Ryan summoned the children and, at the doctors’ urging, concealed the truth from Jessica. “I asked myself if I was a good enough actor to keep the news from her,” Ryan recalled. “Somehow I did. But after a few days, she knew. ‘You’re all lying to me, aren’t you?’ she asked. I had to admit we were.”62
The news got out, and friends telephoned asking to see Jessica, but they were gently
turned away. “It was very hard for me, because I loved her so much,” said Ramona Lampell. “I’d never known anyone like her. And I’d never had anyone care about me the way Jessica did.”63 But once the Ryan family closed ranks, that was it. According to Arvin Brown, Jessica spoke privately with her husband and each of her children before the end, and her dying request to Ryan was that he stick to the theater and stay true to himself as an artist. Ten days after her diagnosis, Jessica Cadwalader Ryan died at age fifty-seven.
Ryan was thunderstruck: after all these months worrying about his health, how could she be the one who had died? Nothing made sense anymore, but one grim certainty confronted him: like a western hero from the silent era, he would be riding off into the sunset alone.
fifteen
The Loneliest Place in Town
“Dido and I woke up this morning thinking of Jessica,” Jean Renoir wrote his old friend Bob Ryan three days after her death. “It is only a moment of weakness: when we think of her, we know perfectly well that she is still with us. She won’t abandon you: from now on, her spirit is around you.”1 Jessica’s private memorial service was held at the Greenwich Village meeting house of the American Friends Service Committee, with prayers from family and friends and songs from Tim and Cheyney; her ashes were given to Ramona and Millard Lampell, to be mulched into the ground of the New Jersey farm where they had recently moved, and where Bob and Jessica had been guests.
Once the service was over, Tim returned to California and Cheyney to Boston University, where he was teaching and earning a master’s degree in philosophy. Lisa was getting an undergraduate degree at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan and had long since moved out of the Dakota and into her own place. Ryan came home to a twelve-room apartment that now seemed shockingly empty. Eager to get out, he phoned his agent to see if MGM still wanted him for The Lolly Madonna War, and a month after Jessica died he found himself in Knoxville, Tennessee, shooting out in the woods with director Richard Sarafian, costar Rod Steiger, and a fine ensemble of up-and-coming players that included Jeff Bridges, Scott Wilson, Gary Busey, Randy Quaid, Season Hubley, Ed Lauter, and Kiel Martin. “ ‘One-Take Ryan,’ that’s what we call him,” Sarafian told the Los Angeles Times. “When he came in he was great with the young actors, and they have almost adopted him as a father.”2
Adapted from a novel by Sue Grafton (later a best-selling mystery writer), The Lolly Madonna War harked back to the Hatfields and the McCoys but took place in the ’70s: Pap Gutshall, the rustic farmer played by Ryan, tools around in a dilapidated station wagon. He and his neighbor, Leonard Feather (Steiger), have been enemies ever since a piece of Feather’s land was put up for auction by the county to retire back taxes and Gutshall bought it. The men’s grown sons have been pranking each other back and forth for months, but things get out of hand when a young stranger (Hubley) arrives in town, waiting for a connecting bus, and is kidnapped by Hawk Feather (Lauter) and his brother Thrush (Wilson), who have mistaken her for an accomplice in one of the Gutshalls’ conspiracies. Bridges, who had already turned heads with his charismatic performance in The Last Picture Show (1971), played Zack Feather, sobered by the death of his young wife, who strikes up a romance with the captured woman.
“I discovered that the only possibility for now was work,” Ryan wrote to the Renoirs in mid-July, “so I am sweating it out in this steaming place doing a not-bad picture…. Jessica loved both of you so and we talked about you so many, many times — always with love, affection and admiration. She was a very rare lady and I feel a little ashamed to mourn when I should really rejoice that I knew her and that we had so many wonderful years together.”3 The Renoirs were back in Hollywood at this point, and Ryan promised them a visit when he came west to shoot interiors for the picture. People knew him as a solitary man, but now he was desperate for company. With Jessica to confide in, solitude could be rich; without her, he was inconsolably lonely. Cheyney Ryan, who had been covering the Democratic National Convention in Miami for the magazine World, stopped off in Knoxville on his way back to Boston, but then he was gone. “Something very big is missing,” Ryan told a reporter on the set, “and I don’t know what to put in its place.”4
There was always alcohol. Friends and family noticed immediately that Ryan had hit the bottle with a vengeance. Millard and Ramona Lampell were worried by his emotional state — what Millard described as a “black funk” — when Ryan came out to New Jersey to see the pear tree that was growing from his wife’s ashes.5 “He sat on that bench crying,” remembered Ramona, “and [talked about] how much he missed her. And it was just so sad.”6 Sitting out in the country with them, Ryan went over and over Jessica’s life, excoriating himself for the ways he had failed her. Friends saw him filled with regret for the months and years he had spent away from his family. “What the hell did I make all that money for?”7 he asked Philip Dunne, as James Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into Night had asked, “What the hell was it I wanted to buy, I wonder.”
Millard saw Ryan as a pillar: “He was sort of big daddy to everyone around him; that was the way Jessica felt toward him, that was the way his friends felt toward him. If you were in trouble, you could go to Robert.”8 Yet Jessica always had been the emotional center of the family, and once she was gone Ryan and the children began to drift apart. Lisa saw her father the most; now that she was an adult, they could drink together, and as they stayed up late playing pool, he began to open up to her about his life in a way he never had. Cheyney kept tabs on his dad from Boston but was dismayed by what he saw. “I thought my father handled my mother’s death very badly,” he admitted, “and one of the reasons why it was such a traumatic event, I think for all of us, was because my father just did not deal with it…. He thought only of himself; he was drinking all the time. I never got the feeling once that he gave a thought to the impact of this on the three of us, and fairly soon into that year I just started to get sick of it, to feel that this was a completely dysfunctional situation.”9
Ryan returned to New York resolved to move out of the Dakota and buy a smaller unit back at 88 Central Park West, where the family had lived in the mid-1960s. He put out feelers that he wanted to lease the Dakota apartment and almost immediately had two prospective tenants: John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who had been living in the St. Regis Hotel on Fifth Avenue since they moved from England to the United States a year earlier. Ryan took Lisa with him when he went to meet the former Beatle; to her astonishment Lennon was excited to be shaking hands with Robert Ryan. “I guess he liked American westerns,” she recalled. “And I’m just sitting there with my mouth hanging open, ’cause I’m meeting John Lennon.”10 The two men chatted amiably about their family lines back in Ireland, and the deal went through. Lennon and Ono would move into the Ryans’ old home in February 1973, and Ryan rented a unit down the street, where, according to Lisa, he re-created his late wife’s room.
Around that time, Arvin Brown and his wife, Joyce, hosted Ryan at their oceanside home in Branford, Connecticut, and found him grateful for any company. He liked Joyce Brown and went out shopping with her around town. “In certain periods of his life, he had a funny kind of deference in his personality,” said Arvin. “He would sort of go along with what everyone was doing, and just trot along. And it was always great fun, because he was a very famous man, and wherever he’d go and shop everyone would do double takes and whatnot, which he was always delighted by.”11 Ryan filled them in on his children, praising them in a way he never would to their faces. “He was proud of what he felt was their honesty, and their integrity with themselves,” Brown remembered. “Whatever concerns that he might have shared about their direction in life had nothing to do with what he felt was their character.”12
Late that year Ryan was invited to a dinner party and spent a pleasant evening talking to his old friend Maureen O’Sullivan. Born in County Roscommon, Ireland, and educated in a convent school, O’Sullivan was discovered by director Frank Borzage and became a star at MGM in the early 1930s, wor
king steadily for ten years before she retired from show business in 1942 to concentrate on her family. With her husband, John Farrow (who had directed Ryan in the RKO potboiler Back from Eternity), she raised seven children; Mia Farrow had become a star in 1967 with Rosemary’s Baby (which was filmed at the Dakota), and Ryan had recently worked with her younger sister Tisa, one of the crime kids in René Clément’s And Hope to Die. O’Sullivan, who resumed her career in the ’50s, was known around Hollywood as a good mother and a faithful wife, until Farrow died in 1963. She and Ryan crossed paths briefly in January 1970, when she joined the cast of The Front Page just as he was leaving it. After the dinner party, the two of them became an item, spotted together in restaurants and at the theater.
Coming so soon after Jessica’s death, the relationship pained some of those closest to Ryan but warmed others; Robert Wallsten and Albert Hackett thought O’Sullivan a great tonic for their old friend. Few doubted her affection for Ryan, though some wondered if he returned it in equal measure or simply needed a woman’s care. Cheyney, who wound up having more contact with O’Sullivan than his siblings, appreciated what his father saw in her and what she did for him: “I think he liked the fact that Maureen had this kind of Irish Catholic reputation about her,” he recalled. O’Sullivan struck him as “a fairly reserved and a thoughtful person…. You know, my mother was [my father’s] sole emotional connection to reality. He was the kind of guy that was gonna relate to those things through having a female partner.”13