by J. R. Jones
Ryan had never forgotten the experience of filming Billy Budd on the high seas, and before Christmas he traveled to Newport, Rhode Island, to shoot an ABC movie-of-the-week aboard a 1970 replica of the HMS Rose, which had fired on American fortifications during the Revolutionary War. Based on an 1863 story by Edward Everett Hale, The Man without a Country starred Cliff Robertson as army lieutenant Philip Nolan, charged with treason in 1807 for having conspired with former Vice President Aaron Burr to found a new nation in Texas and Mexico. “I wish I may never hear of the United States again!” Nolan shouts at his trial, prompting the judge to exile him for life.14 Over the years he’s transferred from one navy ship to another, never to set foot on US soil again, and his crewmates are forbidden to tell him what’s going on in his native land. Beau Bridges costarred as the career officer who befriends Nolan, and Ryan breezed through his cameo as a navy veteran who narrates part of Nolan’s story. Beautifully written, the movie had a special resonance in a time when some thirty thousand Americans, having evaded the draft by going to Canada, now faced prosecution at home.
Since Ryan’s cancer diagnosis two years earlier, he had become preoccupied with building up an estate, which meant doing pictures; yet Jessica had implored him to pursue theater work. A lovely compromise presented itself near the end of the year when John Frankenheimer, who had directed Ryan in The Snows of Kilimajaro on CBS in 1960, offered him $25,000 (a sixth of what he now commanded, but a decent sum) to play the whiskey-soaked anarchist Larry Slade in a screen version of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh. Since their experience doing live TV together, Frankenheimer had become a top movie director with smart, paranoid pictures such as The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Seven Days in May (1964), and Seconds (1968). The Iceman Cometh would be rehearsed for three weeks in LA and shot in sequence over seven weeks on the Fox lot, with a cast to include not only Lee Marvin and Jeff Bridges, but also Ryan’s hero Fredric March. Ryan flew out to the coast the first week of January 1973, pleased with the new year.
“HAS THE ICEMAN COME YET?” a man calls upstairs to his wife. “No,” she replies, “but he’s breathing fast.”15 O’Neill alludes to this dirty joke several times during The Iceman Cometh — it’s a favorite of his high-spirited traveling salesman, Hickey — but as the biblical conjugation of the title suggests, the iceman is also Death. Running four hours, the play is confined to Harry Hope’s saloon, a Lower Manhattan dive where men come to drink themselves into an early grave. Hope owns the five-story building, an SRO hotel, and by drawing a curtain across the street-level bar he can turn the back section into a “hotel restaurant” and legally serve liquor at all hours. The play opens in early morning, as bartender Rocky (Tom Pedi) arrives and finds the usual assortment of drunks passed out on the tables. But Larry Slade, Ryan’s character, is wide-awake and philosophically inclined. His dreams, he confesses to Rocky, “are all dead and buried behind me. What’s before me is the comforting fact that death is a fine long sleep, and I’m damn tired, and it can’t come too soon for me.”16
The picture was being produced by the American Film Theatre, a high-toned experiment in which faithful screen adaptations of great theater works would be exhibited at local movie houses on Monday and Wednesday nights, with patrons buying subscriptions for an entire “season” through American Express. Producer Eli Landau had already begun or completed adaptations of Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance (with Katharine Hepburn), John Osborne’s Luther (with Stacy Keach), and Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming (with Cyril Cusack); The Iceman Cometh would open the first season. The novel exhibition approach made running time less of an issue than usual, and though Frankenheimer pruned the play down with an editor, so many actors came to him during production with good arguments for restoring deleted dialogue that he wound up shooting close to the entire text at a length of four hours. Landau urged Frankenheimer to alleviate the play’s claustrophobia by moving a few scenes out onto the street, but the director refused, arguing that the sense of enclosure was critical to O’Neill’s take on illusion and reality.
The Iceman Cometh offered a colorful ensemble of characters, the main antagonists being Larry, a former anarchist who’s renounced politics, and Hickey, who drops in at the saloon every few months to dispense good cheer and free drinks. Frankenheimer quickly settled on Ryan as the perfect Larry: “He had a deep sadness inherent in most of these O’Neill characters.”17 Casting Hickey was more difficult: Jason Robards was strongly identified with the role but had played it so many times that Frankenheimer opted for someone new, offering the part to Marlon Brando (who declined, saying he would never be able to memorize the lengthy soliloquies) and considering Gene Hackman before going with Lee Marvin. Fredric March, who had retired in 1970 to battle prostate cancer, returned for one last screen performance in the relatively small role of Harry Hope. Richard Dreyfuss, Keith Carradine, and John Savage all read for the part of Don Parritt, the young radical who arrives at the saloon looking for Larry and reveals their shared past. Savage even shot a screen test, though the role ultimately went to an uncertain Jeff Bridges.
As Bridges recalled, the offer came along when he was worn out from shooting The Last American Hero with director Lamont Johnson (Ryan’s old friend) and, more fundamentally, was unsure whether he wanted to keep acting or pursue a music career. Initially he turned down the role, but when Johnson heard that the young man had passed up the chance to work with Ryan, March, and Marvin, he phoned Bridges, called him a “stupid ass,” and hung up on him.18 Bridges reversed himself, and by his own admission, the experience of making The Iceman Cometh inspired him to take his craft much more seriously. He and Ryan had met the previous year, shooting The Lolly Madonna War (ultimately released as Lolly-Madonna XXX), but shared no scenes together; in The Iceman Cometh they went head to head in scenes that stretched out as long as nine minutes. “He was one of my favorite actors,” said Bridges (who, like Stacy Keach, still remembered Ryan’s chilling performance as Claggart in Billy Budd). “As an actor he stood alone for me.”19
Frankenheimer strived to create a good artistic environment. The ensemble of fifteen actors included such talents as Moses Gunn, Bradford Dillman, Sorrell Booke, and Clifton James, and Frankenheimer gave them all plenty of screen time; copying the Dutch masters, he used deep-focus photography to compose gloomy frames in which various barflies, stiff with drink, listened and sometimes reacted to a central character’s extended speech. Ryan, March, and Marvin showed up whether they had scenes or not, just to watch. Arvin Brown took several phone calls from Ryan during the shoot: “Every time he called me it was to tell me about some brilliant thing that Freddy March had done on the set.”20 March had been ill during rehearsals but showed up on the last day with his part down cold, and he delivered on camera. Evans Evans, who was married to Frankenheimer and played one of the three hookers who frequent the bar, recalled a collegial Friday-night dinner on the set that attracted not only the cast but the entire crew and that Ryan thoroughly enjoyed.21
“As rehearsals progressed we became closer and closer,” Frankenheimer later wrote in a letter to Lisa Ryan. “Naturally he told me of his sickness and your mother’s death. Then the problem became not to let him personalize the role too much. But he didn’t — always the pro — knowing just when to pull away.”22
According to Frankenheimer, Ryan mentored Bridges throughout the shoot, but just watching Ryan work could be a lesson in itself. One day he and Bridges were seated at a table together, waiting for the crew to set up one of their long and demanding dialogue scenes; these had to be played at their full length because Frankenheimer was shooting with two cameras, one for each actor and each with its own cues for zooming in and out. Years earlier, Ryan had confessed to one reporter that, for some reason, nothing fazed him like having to play a scene seated at a table.23 The assistant director announced they were ready, and Ryan lifted his palms from the table to reveal twin puddles of perspiration — the old flop sweat. When Bridges asked Ryan if he still got nerv
ous after all these years, Ryan replied, “If I wasn’t nervous, I’d be really nervous.”24 Yet on-screen, Bridges is the one who looks nervous, giving the role his all but often giving too much; Ryan, ever the minimalist, pared his performance down to the bare essentials but made every reaction count. Spencer Tracy had upstaged Ryan in much the same fashion nearly twenty years earlier, in Bad Day at Black Rock.
Former anarchist Larry Slade (Ryan) confers with Don Parritt (Jeff Bridges) and Hugo Kalmar (Sorrell Booke) in The Iceman Cometh (1973). “As an actor he stood alone for me,” Bridges said of Ryan. Franklin Jarlett Collection
The evolving relationship between Larry and young Don Parritt was steeped in the anarchist politics of the 1910s but still relevant in the bitter era of the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground. O’Neill based Parritt on a real-life figure, Donald Vose, who betrayed his mother and her anarchist comrades to the police after the 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times building; in The Iceman Cometh, the guilt-ridden Parritt comes looking for Larry, his mother’s old lover — and, possibly, his father — hoping to make an emotional connection that the older man steadfastly resists. Larry has given much of his life to the anarchist dream, but he can no longer maintain the fervor it demands. “I was born condemned to be one of those who has to see all sides of a question,” he tells Parritt. “When you’re damned like that, the questions multiply for you until in the end it’s all question and no answer.”25
Cheyney Ryan visited LA during the shoot and spent some time on the set; he and his dad were sharing a car, and none of Cheyney’s friends got up before noon, so he would hang around the Fox lot in the morning and watch the company work. As he later told writer Dwayne Epstein, Marvin showed up one day at 8 AM with a case of beer and proceeded to get hammered. “He got into a thing about what a big star he was,” Cheyney recalled. “It was really unpleasant…. He said, ‘Your father’s not a big star anymore. I’m a big star. He used to be a big star and now I’m the big star.’ This went on and on and on.”26 Frankenheimer took Marvin aside later and read him the riot act about his drinking, just as Richard Brooks had on The Professionals, and Marvin — who confessed to Frankenheimer that he was terrified to be working with Fredric March — promised to straighten up. “Bob did an awful lot toward calming Lee down,” said Frankenheimer, “because Lee had tremendous respect for Bob Ryan.”27
Marvin may have been right about his and Ryan’s relative stardom, but The Iceman Cometh, with its philosophical contest between Larry and Hickey, gave the two actors a parity lacking in any of their previous collaborations. Hickey arrives at Harry Hope’s saloon swearing off booze (though he sets up the drinks for everyone else) and urging his old friends to cast off their illusions and face the world. Larry already has expressed his feelings on the subject: “As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything,” he tells Rocky. “The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.”28 Marvin came into the project at a clear disadvantage: he hardly was known for his theatrical prowess, and he clearly was an offbeat choice to play such a seemingly cheery character. Ryan, however, had found in O’Neill the sort of weighty, tragic characters he had been chasing his entire career. When critic Charles Champlin visited the set, Ryan told him, “This is one I’ll want to be remembered by.”29
RYAN WAS BOOKED into the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, but most nights he stayed at Phil Yordan’s house on Benedict Canyon Drive. “He didn’t want to be alone,” Yordan recalled. “He was a very lonely man.”30 As a houseguest, Ryan was quiet and undemanding: coffee in the morning, a ham sandwich and glass of milk at lunchtime. Yordan was in the process of negotiating a huge deal with Television Corporation of America for the sale of all his films and literary properties, as well as his half-interest in a forty-acre studio in Madrid; Variety reported that he would join the company as a producer and listed as one of his upcoming projects a drama called Riche, to be shot in Yugoslavia the following year with Ryan, Rod Taylor, and Claudia Cardinale.31 After Iceman wrapped in early March, Ryan moved on to The Outfit, a crime drama for MGM with Robert Duvall (who had become a star with The Godfather), Karen Black, and Joe Don Baker. Ryan played a mob boss, the sort of thing he could do in his sleep. “At that point his wife was gone and all he was interested in was creating an estate for his children,” observed Yordan.32
John Flynn, the forty-one-year-old director of The Outfit, had apprenticed with Robert Wise on Odds Against Tomorrow back in 1959, and like Wise he populated his story with familiar noir faces: Jane Greer, Marie Windsor, Timothy Carey, Elisha Cook Jr. An edgy score from Jerry Fielding accompanies the tense opening sequence, in which two mob assassins, disguised as a priest and his cab driver, arrive at the rural home of their target and wordlessly stalk him in his backyard, cutting him down with silencers on their pistols as a German shepherd fights to get off its chain. Paroled from prison, the victim’s brother (Duvall) learns what happened from his girlfriend (Black) and rounds up an old pal (Baker) to get even with the mob kingpin responsible for the hit (Ryan).
Flynn had learned his lessons well: The Outfit harked back to Wise’s early, low-budget classics (The Set-Up, Born to Kill) in its visual economy, inventive framing, and propulsive editing. All things considered, it was a more satisfying genre revival than René Clément’s And Hope to Die. Joe Don Baker, a Texan who had learned his craft at the Actors Studio in New York, came to the project as a fan of Ryan’s performances in The Set-Up and Odds against Tomorrow. He found the elderly actor to be a quiet, modest man; the scuttlebutt around the set was that he was dying of cancer.33
The private home doubling as the mobster’s mansion was located on Sunset Boulevard, only a few blocks from the Ryans’ old house in Holmby Hills. Ryan told Variety that he had sold the place to George Axelrod for $175,000 back in 1962, at the bottom of the market; Axelrod, he reported, had recently sold it to Barbra Streisand for four times that amount. On the last day of shooting, producer Carter DeHaven threw a party in Ryan’s honor, and the City of Los Angeles awarded him a plaque celebrating the completion of his eightieth picture.* Jane Russell attended, and so did Burt Lancaster, who had lined up Ryan to costar with him in a hush-hush project about the Kennedy assassination called Executive Action. Ryan got a laugh when he accepted the award, thanking the city but conspicuously omitting conservative mayor Sam Yorty. “Eighty pictures,” Ryan marveled to Charles Champlin during the party. “And 70 of them were dogs. I mean, dogs.”34
Back in New York, Ryan made the rounds with Maureen O’Sullivan, who spent a good deal of time at his apartment at 88 Central Park West. “He felt that he should wait a decent length of time before he got married after his wife’s death,” remembered Albert Hackett. At one point Ryan and O’Sullivan paid him a visit, and Ryan did a little soft-shoe routine to a song playing on the phonograph. “I never saw him so well and so happy,” said Hackett, “and I thought he was getting ready for the big moment when the year was up, and they were going to get married.”35 Ryan also was plotting his return to musical theater after more than ten years: the Hollywood Reporter soon would announce that he had signed to star in a musical version of the Jimmy Stewart drama Shenandoah (1965), as a Virginia farmer who wants to keep his sons out of the Civil War. The show was scheduled to open on Broadway in March 1974.36
Executive Action, a speculative account of US industrialists plotting to assassinate President Kennedy, originated with Donald Sutherland and attorney Mark Lane, whose 1966 best seller Rush to Judgment had raised serious questions about the Warren Report. Sutherland put Lane together with playwright Donald Freed to draft a screenplay, but when the actor failed to secure financing, the project was taken over by Edward Lewis, an executive producer on The Iceman Cometh and a veteran of left-leaning Hollywood cinema (Spartacus, Lonely Are the Brave, Seven Days in May, Seconds). Dalton Trumbo was brought in to rewrite the script, and though he professed skepticism initially, he was converted after seeing the uncut Abraham Zap
ruder film of the assassination, which had never been broadcast, and concluding that it showed the president being fired upon from two different locations.
With a paltry budget of about $500,000, Lewis persuaded Burt Lancaster to make the film for scale, and Lancaster sold Ryan on doing the same. Cheyney Ryan remembered his father praising the script, which at first he didn’t know had been written by his old colleague Trumbo.37 “I originally bought the lone assassin theory because it’s been American history, at least as far as we know,” said Ryan when he was interviewed on the set for a making-of documentary. “But when I read the script, the machinery of the conspiracy was so convincing that I began to change my mind. I don’t mean I have the answer, but the script itself made me want to do the picture.”38 He always had an eye out for political provocations (for years he had wanted to make a picture about John Brown, the abolitionist who tried to launch a slave insurrection before the Civil War). Executive Action also offered the comfort of familiar faces — not just Lancaster but Will Geer, whose association with Ryan stretched back twenty years to John Houseman’s production of Coriolanus, and who had recently gotten the last laugh on HUAC when he became a beloved figure on the hit CBS drama The Waltons.
Publicity materials would quote director David Miller saying that Ryan likened his Executive Action character — Robert Foster, a Texas millionaire scheming to kill the president — to Montgomery, the murderous bigot in Crossfire. Both men are closet fascists, the millionaire couching his race hatred in the cool, clean arguments of social Darwinism. Strolling around the grounds of his estate with James Farrington (Lancaster), a shadowy paramilitary type, Foster sketches out a dystopian future of exploding minority populations clamoring for limited resources. That’s why victory in Vietnam is crucial: “An all-out effort there will give us control of South Asia for years to come. And with proper planning, we can reduce the population to 550 million by the end of the century…. Not only will the nations affected be better off, but the techniques developed there can be used to reduce our own excess population: Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, poverty-prone whites, and so forth.” One last time Ryan breathed life into an incendiary political picture by embracing the thing he loathed.