The Lives of Robert Ryan

by J. R. Jones

  Now Big Ed would come through for the Ryans one more time, with a white-collar patronage job for Tim’s aimless son. Bob joined the Department of Education as an assistant vice superintendent, though his job consisted of little more than filling requisitions for school supplies. Under the leadership of James B. McCahey, a coal company executive and crony of the mayor’s, the board had developed a reputation to rival the sanitary district’s; local muck-raker Elmer Lynn Williams called it “the most corrupt Board of Education that ever cursed the Chicago schools.”38 Down in his little basement office, Ryan recalled, he “had little to do except combat hangovers,”39 so he spent a good deal of time writing, an infraction ignored by the other patronage hires. The boredom drove him mad — this was everything he’d struggled to avoid in his vagabonding days. He was pushing thirty, his father was dead, and he still hadn’t decided what to do with his life.

  The answer came to him one afternoon when he ran into a friend and she talked him into taking a role in a local theater production. Despite his passion for theater, Bob could be painfully inhibited; he still winced at the memory of delivering a speech in grade school and hearing laughter ripple through the audience when his voice cracked. But he took the role, and something happened. “I never even thought of acting until I was twenty-eight,” he later recalled. “The first minute I got on the stage, I thought, ‘Bing! This is it.’”40

  Electrified by the experience, Bob signed up for acting classes with Edward Boyle, a stock company actor who charged five dollars a week. “What an audience most likes to feel in an actor is decision,” Boyle would tell him. “Always keep saying to yourself, ‘Decision, decision, decision.’”41 After Bob’s mother informed him that the Stickney School, whose upper classes were college preparatory instruction for girls, would have to cancel its senior class play because the drama coach had taken ill, Bob managed to convince the principal that he was an experienced stage director and took over the production. The play was J. M. Barrie’s comic fantasy Dear Brutus, and the performance, on May 6, 1938, went off reasonably well. “With kindest regards for the first person who ever wanted my autograph,” Bob would write on a program for a friend.42

  Bob silently hatched a plan that would get him out of Chicago for good: over the next couple of years, he would save a few thousand dollars, move to Los Angeles, and enroll in the acting school at the Pasadena Playhouse. In another era he might have set his sights on New York, but Bob was still smitten with the movies. “The very mention of them excites the imagination and stirs the blood,” he’d written in a high school essay. “We may walk out of our own world into another.”43 By now his focus had shifted from Douglas Fairbanks to the new generation of talking actors: Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, and James Cagney, the latter of whom had become a star playing a Chicago gangster in The Public Enemy.

  His ticket out of town arrived in summer 1938. Years later a couple of news stories about Ryan would refer to an inheritance, but the story most frequently told had him unexpectedly striking it rich on a friend’s oil well near Niles, Michigan, his three hundred dollars’ worth of stock paying a sudden dividend of two thousand dollars. His mother was dumbfounded when he informed her of his plan. “You can’t earn a living that way,” she insisted. “This little acting group you play with is nice, as a hobby. But I know you. You can’t act.”44 Act he would, and before long he had kissed his mother good-bye and boarded a westbound train from Union Station. Surely his father would have disapproved. “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child!”45 But then, if his father hadn’t struck out on his own as a young man, he would have spent his life caulking boats in Lockport, Illinois. Whatever sort of life Bob found for himself in Los Angeles, at the very least it would be his own.

  *His death predated by only a few months the first recorded cases of the Spanish influenza, which would kill at least half a million people in the United States alone.

  *Countless news stories would misreport that Ryan retired from collegiate boxing undefeated; in fact, Dartmouth yearbooks indicate he lost to his opponent at Western Maryland College on a close decision in the 1930 season and fought his opponent at University of New Hampshire to a draw in the 1931 season.

  two

  The Mysterious Spirit

  She was gorgeous. Five-foot-seven at least, with dark red hair and cutting, observant brown eyes. Ryan first spotted her in the hallway of the Max Reinhardt School of the Theater on Sunset Boulevard. He had arrived in Los Angeles to discover that the theater school at the Pasadena Playhouse was full, but a fellow named Jack Smart, whom he had met through a girlfriend in Chicago, recommended the Reinhardt School, which had opened just that summer. As Ryan liked to tell it, he decided to enroll the moment he saw the girl in the hallway. Through a school administrator he managed to arrange an introduction; her name was Jessica Cadwalader, she was studying acting as well, and they would begin classes together the next day with Professor Reinhardt. Feeling impetuous, Ryan asked her to dinner, and she accepted.

  Jessica Cadwalader was twenty-three, born in Los Angeles to Quaker parents and, after they divorced, raised in Berkeley by her mother. She had graduated from the private Anna Head School, where she had been a tennis champ, and shortly thereafter she boarded a bus for New York City, where she found an apartment in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Midtown Manhattan, took modeling jobs through a Park Avenue agency, and tried to establish herself as an actress under the name Jessica Cheyney. For some time she had performed with the Wayfarers, a theater group in San Francisco. Now she was back in Los Angeles looking for movie work; she had been an extra in the W. C. Fields comedy Poppy (1936) and gotten a line, only to see it cut, in the Gary Cooper drama The Adventures of Marco Polo (1938). She was formidably well read despite the fact that she had never attended college, and she looked a little startled at dinner when Ryan informed her that the piece he had been rehearsing for the first class was no less than Hamlet’s second soliloquy. He wanted to get Reinhardt’s attention.

  As Jessica already knew, Reinhardt’s attention was a force to be reckoned with. Quiet and stout, with hypnotic blue eyes, the aging Austrian studied you so intensely, and listened with such force, that he seemed to be penetrating your very soul. Reinhardt had made his name in Europe and the United States with spectacular, expressionist stagings of Everyman (for the Salzburg Festival, which he cofounded in 1920 with Richard Strauss), The Miracle, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. His 1934 production of the latter at the Hollywood Bowl became the talk of the town, and the following year Warner Bros. hired him to direct a lavish screen version with James Cagney, Olivia de Havilland, and Mickey Rooney. Born to Jewish parents in Austria-Hungary, Reinhardt had fled the Third Reich in 1938 and settled in Los Angeles. Though he never managed to land another movie assignment, he continued to direct stage productions on both coasts; in fact, the new school would serve as a workshop for plays he wanted to mount commercially.

  Jessica braced herself the next day as her new friend from Chicago came forward to butcher Hamlet’s second soliloquy: “O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain! My tables — meet it is I set it down / That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain!”1 Reinhardt’s only response was, “With training …”2 Ryan took this as a great triumph when Jessica spoke to him afterward. “There is a young man who has just enrolled that I like very much,” she reportedly wrote to her mother, “but he’s the worst actor I’ve ever seen in my life.”3

  Meeting with Ryan later, Reinhardt told the young man he had a quality that reached out over the footlights, and with enormous work and commitment he might one day become a great performer.4 These were the right words coming from the right man at the right time, and from that moment onward Ryan entrusted himself to Reinhardt. “Max Reinhardt was not only my first teacher,” he would write near the end of his life (forgetting Ed Boyle in Chicago), “but remains to this day, thirty-two years later, the most tremendous and important person who has ever influenced my career and my work.�
��5 Though Reinhardt was best known for his elaborate productions, incorporating music, choreography, and lighting effects, Ryan saw that the old man was also deeply and personally invested in his smaller projects. “His own obsession was the inner life of man,” Ryan wrote, “the mysterious spirit that both flickers and flames in all of us.”6

  Reinhardt felt that human emotion was stifled by bourgeois life. “Unconsciously we feel how a hearty laugh liberates us,” he wrote in an essay on acting, “how a good cry or an outbreak of anger relieves us. We have an absolute need of emotion and its expression. Against this our upbringing constantly works. Its first commandment is — Hide what goes on within you. Never let it be seen that you are stirred up, that you are hungry or thirsty; every grief, every joy, every rage, all that is fundamental and craves utterance, must be repressed.”7

  How profoundly this idea must have struck his new student from Chicago, this powerfully built but painfully shy man whose parents had shown him the good life but always taught him to keep his feelings to himself. “Only the actor who cannot lie, who is himself undisguised, and who profoundly unlocks his heart deserves the laurel,” Reinhardt wrote.8 Not until years later, after working with numerous pedestrian directors, would Ryan recognize what an enormous gift Reinhardt had given him so early in his development. Yet implicit in that gift lay a great moral and emotional challenge.

  Reinhardt cut an imposing figure, yet he tended to put people at ease because he listened so closely. “He never listened passively,” recalled the composer Bronislaw Kaper, “he listened actively, with the greatest interest reflected in his eyes and his half open lips.”9 In fact, Reinhardt’s ability to listen defined his whole approach to acting. “The best piece of advice I’ve ever received as an actor was given me by Max Reinhardt,” Ryan told a reporter years later. “He put it in one word — ‘Listen.’ If you really hear what other actors say to you, your own reaction and the proper reading of your lines will be easy.”10

  Actors who worked with Reinhardt, among them Stella Adler and Otto Preminger, testified to his talent for bringing an actor out of himself, quite literally — for locating personal traits that one might heighten and project onstage. If you engaged Reinhardt imaginatively, he invested himself in your performance, and you immediately felt the thrill of shared discovery. “He was most effective when he liked an actor, and perhaps only when he liked him,” remembered Preminger. “If he felt that the actor really wanted to be directed by him, then his imagination, the variety of advice, the way he worked the actor in the scene and for the scene, was just fantastic. I don’t think any director ever had that gift. Maybe it was because he was an actor originally.”11

  The Reinhardt School offered a well-rounded education, and Ryan threw himself into his studies, learning about lighting, set design, and direction. But acting was his great love now. His workshop teacher, Vladimir Sokoloff, had performed with the Moscow Art Theatre under the great director Constantin Stanislavski, and from him learned the principle that movement expressed a character’s motivation better than anything else. Yet Sokoloff’s classes were more traditional than the Stanislavski-inspired “method acting” then gaining traction at the Group Theatre in New York, in which the performer used powerful personal memories to trigger onstage responses. “ ‘The Method’ would have driven Sokoloff out of his skull,” Ryan later mused. “He taught action, not ‘memory of emotion.’”12

  Under Sokoloff’s instruction the young man improved rapidly, and during the fall 1938 semester Reinhardt cast him as Silvio and Jessica as Beatrice in a workshop production of Carlo Goldoni’s At Your Service. Ryan played Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the father in Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, “at one of whose unforgettable rehearsals,” wrote Gottfried Reinhardt, “my father showed Bob Ryan how literally to collapse after the discovery of his daughter in a brothel, how to fold up like a jackknife and to exit, his torso bent horizontal, a destroyed human being.” Clearly Reinhardt appreciated the physicality of this boxer who had graduated to the stage, and Ryan would embrace the idea of movement as character.

  ALL THROUGH this great artistic awakening, Ryan was falling in love with Jessica Cadwalader. Their courtship took a rocky turn when he invited her to dinner at the Brown Derby and a miscommunication resulted in each of them sitting alone, waiting for the other to materialize, on successive days. When he called her to complain about being stood up, she hung up on him and went to San Francisco with a girlfriend. But before long the two thespians had become inseparable, going out for drinks when they could afford it or talking all night about books and movies and politics and, of course, acting. Ryan had never met anyone like her; she was introverted, but smart as a whip and passionately idealistic. The more time he spent with her, the more he wanted her in his life. For some reason she always called him Robert; friends and family had called him Bob for years, but to Jessica he would always be Robert Ryan.

  Ryan might have thought he had experienced the West in his Montana adventures, but Jessica’s people were real westerners. Her maternal grandmother, Anno, told Jessica all about the old days. Born Annie Neal in 1859 to an undertaker in Atchison, Kansas, she had been worshipping at the town’s Episcopal church one Sunday morning when she met George Washington Cheyney, a young Philadelphian five years her senior whose wealthy family, alarmed by his indolence, had set him up as manager of a silver mine that some of his father’s colleagues owned in Tombstone, Arizona. On his travels back and forth, George Cheyney changed trains in Atchison, and before long he and Annie had married and moved to Tombstone, to a large house on the hill overlooking the town.

  Jessica Cadwalader (late 1930s). Ryan met her in the lobby of the Max Reinhardt School of the Theater on Sunset Boulevard; they spent the next thirty-three years together. Robert Ryan Family

  By then Tombstone was the fastest-growing boomtown in the Southwest, with a fair amount of culture alongside the roughnecks who poured in hoping to strike it rich. There were decent restaurants, an ice cream parlor, and opera performances at Schieffelin Hall, named for the prospecting family that had founded the town. Jessica pressed her grandmother for details about the famous shootout at the OK Corral in 1881. “I never knew anything about all that riff-raff,” Anno replied. Her husband “did not think such goings-on should be talked about in front of ladies.… I have a feeling George said it was good riddance to bad rubbish.”13 Later Jessica dug up a history of Tombstone that described one George Cheyney ducking behind a counter during the armed robbery of an assayer’s office.

  As superintendent of the Tombstone Mill and Mining Company, George Cheyney branched out from Tombstone and developed a new mine in the Oro Blanco Mining District, but in the late 1880s Tombstone’s mining industry collapsed after the miners began to hit water and the town’s pumping plant was destroyed in a fire. George ran for Congress as a Republican in 1890 and served as school superintendent for the territory, then moved his family to Tucson, where he was appointed postmaster in 1898 and four years later ran a successful campaign for probate judge. Shortly after his election George traveled to San Francisco, seeking treatment for a liver ailment from a Tucson physician who had moved there, and died at age forty-nine from cirrhosis.

  Three years later his second daughter, Frances — Jessica’s mother — married Richard Bacon Cadwalader, a young Quaker in his early twenties who had come West from Cincinnati with his mother, Ella Bacon Cadwalader, after suffering a nervous breakdown in his first semester at Harvard. Ella Cadwalader fought against the union between Richard and Frances, but when Anno traveled from Tucson to Los Angeles to visit her sister, she took the young lovers along and had them married by an Episcopal clergyman. This would have been the ultimate horror for Ella and her husband, Pierce Jonah Cadwalader, whose family had followed the Society of Friends since the seventeenth century and been part of the influential Philadelphia Quakers Meeting.

  In 1907, Frances gave birth to a son, Richard Jr., and seven years later, on October 2
6, 1914, Jessica Dorothy Cadwalader arrived. The family was living in Tucson when Richard Jr., only ten years old, died of influenza in September 1917 (just three months earlier, little Jack Ryan had succumbed in Chicago). Jessica grew up an only child, an introvert, and a voracious reader, closely instructed in her religious beliefs by her great aunt Dora, whom she remembered as “a great and determined Quaker lady.”14 From childhood Jessica learned to value peace over war, mercy over revenge; she learned that God’s spirit, dwelling within her, not only permitted but obliged her to work for peace. Dora liked to recite the “Quality of Mercy” speech from The Merchant of Venice, in which Portia describes mercy as “twice blest: / It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.”15

  Since the beginning the Society of Friends had preached the equality of men and women, allowing women into ecclesiastical positions, and in America the Quakers had provided not only the idealism but also some of the early leaders of the women’s movement: the Philadelphia abolitionist Lucretia Mott, who had helped organize the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention on women’s rights; the great speaker and activist Susan B. Anthony, who spent a lifetime trying to win women the vote; and Alice Paul, who helped pass the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 and wrote the Equal Rights Amendment proposed to Congress three years later.* Dora wanted Jessica to get a good education and become a lawyer like Dora’s brother, Jonah; there was no reason she should have to spend her life in her husband’s shadow.

  ON SATURDAY, MARCH 11, 1939, Bob and Jessica exchanged vows at St. Thomas Episcopal Church in West Hollywood, with their mothers, the Reinhardts, the Sokoloffs, and about fifty of their fellow students attending (including Nanette Fabray, the other big star who would emerge from their graduating class). Anno must have been there as well, a reminder to Ryan of the iron female will surging through his bride’s family. A respectable matron in Tombstone and an example to her children in late middle age, Anno had decided upon her seventieth birthday to please no one but herself. “That evening she drank her first highball and smoked her first cigarette,” her granddaughter wrote. “She went on doing both to the end, chain smoking without inhaling, puffing out great clouds of smoke to wreathe her white head, looking like something between a Chinese ancient and an old madame, while the cigarette ashes spilled down the front of her massive bosom.”16