The Lives of Robert Ryan

by J. R. Jones

  Ryan — whose brother, father, and uncles all had preceded him to the grave — knew all about ghosts, and his strong streak of willful self-isolation made him an ideal collaborator for this kind of story. He would marvel at Renoir’s ability to “discover the true personality of the actor” and integrate it into a performance, a skill he would recognize in no other director but Max Reinhardt.18 Renoir found a neurotic quality in Ryan that had never been captured on-screen and would become the key element in his screen persona. Lying in bed, Scott confesses to his commanding officer that the nightmares have become chronic since he was released from the hospital. Ryan’s gaze shifts back and forth between two fixed points — the officer’s face and something awful a million miles away — as the tension gathers in his voice. The doctors have pronounced Scott healed. “But my head!” he exclaims in anguish, gesturing at it as if it were strange to his body.

  The picture wrapped in late March, leaving Ryan free to tend to his expect ant wife. On Saturday, April 13, Jessica gave birth to a healthy baby boy, whom they named after his grandfather, Timothy, in the Irish tradition. Ryan’s next picture, a mediocre western called Trail Street, didn’t start shooting for three months, so the couple had plenty of time to care for and enjoy their new child and each other. Now that Ryan was back from the military, he worked either six days a week or not at all, loafing around in his mismatched pajamas until noon and working out later in the day. Jessica usually started writing in the morning — her second mystery novel, Exit Harlequin, was scheduled for publication in January 1947 — and worked until mid-afternoon. Determined homebodies, she and Robert relaxed in each other’s company, smoking, drinking, reading, and talking into the night.

  Joan Bennett, Jean Renoir, and Ryan rehearsing The Woman on the Beach (1947). “One of the most remarkable men I’ve ever met,” Ryan called Renoir. “Working with him opened my eyes to aspects of character that were subtler than those I was accustomed to.” Franklin Jarlett Collection

  Trail Street starred Randolph Scott as western hero Bat Masterson; Ryan got second billing as the villain, and whiskered “Gabby” Hayes dispensed cornpone comedy as Scott’s sidekick. (Four-month-old Tim Ryan made his screen debut as a baby being held by a woman in the frontier town.) Director Ray Enright had spent twenty years in the business without making a notable picture; he was quite a comedown after Jean Renoir. At the same time, Ryan’s collaboration with Renoir was in trouble. Desirable Woman was test screened on August 2 in Santa Barbara, where it was laughed at and jeered by an audience full of students. Renoir would confess later that he was the first to get cold feet, and he offered to reedit the film. Five or six weeks later, he emerged with a version that was shown to two disinterested parties: screenwriter John Huston, who argued that the lieutenant’s war trauma should be eliminated entirely, and director Mark Robson, who argued that it was central to the story. Renoir listened to Robson and moved the lieutenant’s fiery nightmare to the beginning of the picture.*

  By late November, when Ryan and Bennett were called in for reshoots, Renoir had lost confidence in his original conception, and the love relationship became more conventional. Several dialogue scenes that explained the characters’ motivations were excised, which gave the action a detached quality. This garbled, seventy-minute cut of the picture, retitled The Woman on the Beach, would flop at the box office eight months later and end Renoir’s association with RKO. By then Renoir had grown close to the Ryans — Jessica adored him and his wife, Dido — and the two couples would keep in touch long after the Renoirs returned to France. “Bob Ryan is a marvelous person,” Renoir would later attest. “Professionally he’s absolutely honest in everything he does.”19 Almost everything — Ryan admired Renoir too deeply ever to tell him he thought The Woman on the Beach was a failure.

  THE MOVIE BUSINESS boomed in 1946 as servicemen rejoined their families, which may explain why Peter Rathvon, the new president of Radio-Keith-Orpheum, allowed most of the year to pass before finally choosing forty-one-year-old Dore Schary to replace the late Charles Koerner as head of production. Schary was a comer: born to Russian Jewish immigrants in Newark, New Jersey, he had written plays in New York before arriving in Los Angeles to write for the screen and winning an Oscar for the MGM classic Boys Town (1938). Since then the tall, bespectacled young man had supervised B-movie production for Louis B. Mayer at MGM, and independent producer David O. Selznick had tapped Schary to head his new company Vanguard Pictures. Schary had great story sense, and he knew how to get the most out of a dollar. Selznick was generous enough to let RKO buy out Schary’s contract, and on January 1, 1947, Schary took charge of the studio’s production slate.

  Two days later the United States experienced a dramatic political shift when the Eightieth Congress convened, its opening session carried for the first time on broadcast television. President Truman, battered by union struggles as he served out Franklin Roosevelt’s fourth presidential term, had been rebuked at the polls in November, when Republicans picked up fifty-five congressional seats and took control of the House of Representatives. Once the new Congress was sworn in, Republicans wasted no time in mounting a frontal assault on the Roosevelt legacy, and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), created in 1938 to investigate subversion against the US government, announced that a top priority would be uncovering communist influence in the motion picture industry.

  A liberal Democrat, Schary took little notice of this as he moved into position at RKO. His formula for success involved socially conscious films that could be made on relatively small budgets, and the first script he sent into production was a murder mystery adapted from The Brick Foxhole, the novel that had so intrigued Ryan when he read it in the Marines. Producer Adrian Scott, who had scored at RKO with the Dick Powell mysteries Murder, My Sweet (1944) and Cornered (1945), had read The Brick Foxhole and was struck by the sequence in which soldiers beat a homosexual man to death. This would never get past the Production Code Administration, but what if the victim were a Jew instead? Scott hired screenwriter John Paxton to take a crack at the novel; their project, Cradle of Fear, would be the first Hollywood picture to deal openly with anti-Semitism in the United States.

  The script had gone nowhere with Charles Koerner in charge, and market research indicated that only 8 percent of moviegoers would go for such a picture (compared to 70 percent for Sister Kenny, the Rosalind Russell drama RKO was still trying to get made three years after the Marines had refused to let Ryan appear in it). Schary was a different story — he read Cradle of Fear one night and pulled the trigger on it the next day, naming Scott as producer and Eddie Dmytryk as director. The budget was around $500,000, but half of that would go for the stars Schary felt would be needed to sell such a controversial picture to the public. Scott and Dmytryk would have to get Cradle of Fear in the can with what remained, shooting for about twenty days on existing sets. Paxton would remember his excitement after Schary gave them the go-ahead, as “a little parade went off around the lot (the writer just tagged along) looking for sets that could be borrowed or adapted, or stolen. An unusual procedure with front office blessing.”20

  “What’s-a-matter, Jewboy? You ’fraid we’ll drink up all your stinkin’ wonderful liquor?” Montgomery (Ryan) and Floyd (Steve Brodie) close in on their victim, Samuels (Sam Levene), in Crossfire. Franklin Jarlett Collection

  Ryan got along well with Schary, and when he learned the picture was in preproduction, he begged the new chief to let him play Montgomery. Schary must have been surprised: this wasn’t the sort of role that would lead to more love scenes with Ginger Rogers. Monty was repellent — ingratiating one moment, bullying the next, especially when he and his drunken pals are boozing it up with Samuels, who has met them at a bar and invited them back to his place. “Sammy, let me tell you something,” Monty slurs. “Not many civilians will take a soldier into their house like this for a quiet talk. Well, let me tell you something. A guy that’s afraid to take a soldier into his house, he stinks. And I mean,
he stinks!” Things only get worse from there: when Samuels tries to get rid of them, Monty snaps, “What’s-a-matter, Jewboy? You ’fraid we’ll drink up all your stinkin’ wonderful liquor?” The word had never been uttered in a Hollywood picture.

  The role might well blow up in Ryan’s face. But he loved the script, valued the idea behind the picture, and knew he was the man to play Monty. “I thought such a part would make an actor — not break him,” he later wrote.21 He lobbied Dmytryk — who, by this time, had directed him in his first picture (Golden Gloves), his biggest hit (Behind the Rising Sun), and his first romance (Tender Comrade). Schary and Dmytryk acceded, billing Ryan third behind Robert Young as Finlay, the pipe-smoking police detective who investigates the crime, and Robert Mitchum as Keeley, a jaded sergeant who tries to save the confused young Private Mitchell from being framed by Monty. Schary also brought in some first-rate supporting players: Sam Levene as Samuels; sultry, blond Gloria Grahame (It’s a Wonderful Life) as a hooker who briefly adopts the private during his nocturnal wanderings; and, in the picture’s second-creepiest role, craggy Paul Kelly as a man who hangs around her apartment and keeps changing his story about their relationship.

  When the picture came out, Ryan would publish two stories under his own byline, in publications no less divergent than Movieland and the Daily Worker, that explained his rationale for taking the role. “Convictions are nice things to have,” he wrote in the Worker, “but when close friends tell you that you’re jeopardizing your career by taking a role you believe in — well, it makes you stop and think.” The picture was unlikely to convert any hardened anti-Semites, he conceded. “No one picture, no one book, no one speech could accomplish that. It’s the cumulative effect that counts.”22 In Movieland he argued that the picture’s subject was broader than anti-Semitism: “We all stand to lose if fascism comes. Not just the Jews. The Irish, the Catholics — and I’m both of those — the Negroes, labor, the foreign born, everyone is done for whose color, or religion, occupation or political belief is distasteful to some new paperhanger-turned-Strong Man.”23

  Once he had been cast, Ryan dove into the part. He studied back issues of Social Justice, a frequently anti-Semitic magazine edited by the Roman Catholic priest and populist demagogue Father Charles Coughlin. Launched in 1936, it had serialized the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which purported to be a Jewish plan for global conquest, and published one article by Coughlin that borrowed passages from a speech by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, about the threat posed by communism, atheism, and the Jewish people. Ryan also paid a visit to Jean Renoir, who was still wrestling with The Woman on the Beach, and asked him about the fascist sympathizers he had known in France. Renoir spent the afternoon telling him stories, and Ryan came away convinced that the key to Montgomery was a deep-seated sense of inferiority.

  If Schary wanted to test the limits of his authority at RKO, he succeeded; in early February, Rathvon sent him a memo expressing his doubts that Cradle of Fear would do anything to reduce racial intolerance. “Prejudiced Gentiles are not going to identify themselves with Monty and so feel ashamed of their prejudices,” wrote Rathvon, a smart and cultured man whom Schary respected. “Rather they may be resentful because they feel we have distorted the problem by using such an extreme example of race hatred.”24

  On another front, Darryl F. Zanuck, president of Twentieth Century Fox, informed Schary that Fox had a picture about anti-Semitism on the boards, Gentleman’s Agreement, and suggested he cease and desist. “We exchanged a few notes,” Schary recalled, “then a phone call during which I was compelled to tell him he had not discovered anti-Semitism and that it would take far more than two pictures to eradicate it.”25 Determined to beat Gentleman’s Agreement out of the box, Schary stepped up production on Cradle of Fear; principal photography would begin Monday, March 3.

  Scott and Dmytryk went over the script carefully, working out every shot in advance to save time on the set. Once the cameras began rolling, Dmytryk fell into a pattern of shooting for about six-and-a-half hours each day, then using the last couple of hours to rehearse the next day’s scenes; this gave the crew time to set up the first shot and enabled the players to come in the next morning ready to go. The sets looked cheap, so Dmytryk placed his key lighting low in the frame to throw lots of shadows; for a scene in which Monty bullies his accomplice, Floyd, the only light source was a table lamp, revealing some of the uglier lines in Ryan’s face. Dmytryk also chose his lenses to make Monty look increasingly crazed: at first his close-ups were shot with a fifty-millimeter lens, but this was reduced to forty, thirty-five, and ultimately twenty-five-millimeter. “When the 25mm lens was used, Ryan’s face was also greased with cocoa butter,” Dmytryk recalled. “The shiny skin, with every pore delineated, gave him a truly menacing appearance.”26

  The real menace, though, lay in Ryan’s deft underplaying. Critics would stress the intelligence he brought to his heavy roles, but in the case of Monty, an ignorant blowhard, the defining characteristic was an animal cunning. In his first two speaking scenes, Monty is interrogated by Detective Finlay, and in both instances he hastens to defend his pal Mitchell, whose wallet has been found at the crime scene, even as he directs suspicion toward him and away from himself. In the second interrogation, with Sergeant Keeley looking on, Monty grows angry at Finlay’s questioning and barks at him, promising, “You won’t pin anything on Mitch, not in a hundred years!” Catching himself, he drops his gaze, glances back and forth at the two men, and apologizes, pleading, “It’s just that I’m worried sick about Mitch.”

  This was Ryan’s first picture with Mitchum, whose roughneck adventures during the Depression (boxing, riding the rails, doing time on a chain gang) were even more dramatic than his. The men liked and respected each other, but their upbringings set them apart; Mitchum had grown up poor and dropped out of high school, and his politics were more conservative. Ryan might have held forth on the dangers of fascism, but according to Dmytryk, when a reporter on the set asked Mitchum why he was making the picture, the actor replied, “Because I hate cops.”27 In fact, he was annoyed at having been lured back from a Florida vacation by Scott with the promise of a great part, only to learn it was no such thing (Scott confessed that they needed him for his box office clout). Mitchum must have realized at some point that Ryan was walking away with the picture.

  The only real complication to emerge during production was how to get rid of Monty after the detective has tricked him into exposing himself. Screenwriter John Paxton wanted to add a scene in which Monty goes to trial, but Schary scotched this idea. Schary later claimed that the picture’s original ending had MPs cornering Monty and shooting him down “like a rat,” which might have increased the audience’s sympathy for him.28 Instead Monty breaks away from the cops and runs out into the street; from a second-floor window, the detective orders him to halt and then calmly dispatches him with a single bullet in the back. Paxton was appalled when he saw this, but he had no say in the matter. Schary also changed the release title to Crossfire, which had no relevance to the story but sounded great.

  Principal photography wrapped on Saturday, March 29, after only twenty-four shooting days. The project had come together so quickly that there was no time for the sort of front-office meddling that might have watered down the story. A few weeks later Ryan attended a rough-cut screening with Scott, Dmytryk, and a handful of RKO executives. None of the other cast members was there, but he was eager to get a look at his performance. Watching the story unfold, Ryan knew he had nailed the character. About fifteen minutes into the picture, the detective interrogates Monty, asking him about the victim. “I’ve seen a lot of guys like him,” Monty explains, conspiratorially. “Guys that played it safe during the war? Scrounged around keepin’ themselves in civvies? Got swell apartments, swell dames? You know the kind…. Some of them are named Samuels, some of them got funnier names.” Later, as Monty smacks Floyd around, his rage boils over: “I don’t like Jews! An
d I don’t like nobody who likes Jews!”

  After the screening was over and the lights came up, the room was silent. Finally, one of the RKO suits spoke up: “It’s a brave thing you’ve done, Ryan. You’re gambling with your career, of course.” Another piped up: “Really courageous.”29 Taken aback, Ryan walked out of the screening room, crossed the lot, picked up his car, and headed home. Given what he had seen in the Marines, talk of bravery embarrassed him. But the executives’ remarks were the first reaction he had received outside of the cast and crew, and their subtext was obvious: if the public turned against Ryan, RKO would simply cut him loose.

  *The film would ultimately be released as Till the End of Time (1946), starring Robert Mitchum and directed by Edward Dmytryk.

  *A definitive genesis of the movie can be found in Janet Bergstrom’s “Oneiric Cinema: The Woman on the Beach,” Film History 11 (1)(1999): 114–125.

  five

  We Will Succeed, You Will Not

  Jessica Ryan hated guns: she had no intention of letting her lovely Tim play with toy guns, learning to fantasize about combat and killing. Robert, a capable marksman in the Marines, didn’t feel that strongly, but he had no fondness for firearms either. “He went hunting once with his father and shot something,” his son Cheyney remembered. “He said he’d never do it again.”1