The Lives of Robert Ryan

by J. R. Jones

  Regardless, the RKO publicists liked nothing better than to send Ryan on a hunting expedition. The previous November he had driven up to Oregon with actor Lex Barker to be photographed hunting geese, and that spring Jessica swallowed her pride and accompanied him on a jaunt out to the desert with a photographer for Photoplay and actress Jane Greer, who had just starred in Out of the Past for RKO. Jessica posed at the wheel of a jeep and stood by as Robert held up a dead jackrabbit for Greer’s inspection; the resulting story claimed that she and Greer each had bagged a rabbit as well.2 This was followed by another trip to a ranch in the San Fernando Valley to hunt pheasants for a four-page pictorial in Screen Guide; one photo showed the couple heading out from their car, Jessica scowling as she carries a rifle at her waist, the barrel pointed to her side.3

  After Crossfire, Ryan strapped on his six-guns again for Return of the Bad Men, another B western with Randolph Scott and “Gabby” Hayes. He couldn’t wait to finish with this tired oater and move on to Berlin Express, an espionage thriller scheduled to begin shooting overseas in July. Dore Schary had been mightily impressed by the documentary authenticity of Roberto Rossellini’s Italian postwar drama Open City (1945), and he wanted Berlin Express to be the first drama filmed inside Germany since the fall of the Third Reich. (Director Billy Wilder would be arriving at the same time to shoot A Foreign Affair for Paramount.) Berlin Express centered on an international group of passengers riding a US military train from Paris to Berlin, and like Crossfire, it would mix genre entertainment with liberal politics, stressing the imperative of world peace.

  Ryan would be gone for more than two months, flying from New York to London and then traveling with cast and crew to Paris, Frankfurt, and Berlin. He was excited about the picture and eager to get a firsthand look at the ravages of war. General George Marshall had just delivered a commencement address at Harvard in which he stressed the danger of allowing the European economy to deteriorate any further; he called for a massive economic aid plan to rehabilitate the victors and the vanquished alike. Berlin Express would carry Ryan right into the heart of this debate. He finished Return of the Bad Men in mid-July 1947, and yet another photographer arrived, this time at the house in Silverlake, to shoot him packing his bags and bidding Jessica and Tim farewell on his way to the LA airport.4 Jessica was afraid of airplanes and begged him to take a train east, but Ryan never passed up a chance to fly.

  The producer, thirty-seven-year-old Bert Granet, was shouldering quite an operation. Military permits were required at each point of travel through occupied Germany, which meant that twenty-seven cast and crew members had to be screened by the FBI* and then cleared by the army and State Department.5 Cinematic resources in Europe were so scarce that nearly all camera and lighting equipment had to be brought over, along with one hundred thousand feet of film that required cool, safe storage in nations where any kind of storage space was prized. Because local film laboratories were so dodgy, all footage had to be shipped back to the United States for processing, so none of the completed scenes could be viewed until the expedition returned to Hollywood.6 Lodging and automobiles were in short supply (there was only one camera truck available in all of Paris); even simple items such as nails, lumber, and rope had to be bought on the black market.

  A native Parisian, director Jacques Tourneur had come to Hollywood in the 1930s and distinguished himself at RKO with subtle, low-budget chillers such as Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943). He had just completed his masterpiece, the wistful film noir Out of the Past. Unfortunately, Berlin Express didn’t have much of a script; inspired by a Life magazine story, it would be a rather awkward marriage of journalism and Hitchcock-style suspense, its harsh scenes of a ravaged Germany punctuating an increasingly far-fetched tale in which a German diplomat critical to the reunification effort is kidnapped by right-wing terrorists. The four heroes pulling together to foil this plot were obvious stand-ins for the occupying powers: Ryan is an American agricultural expert, Roman Toporow a Russian military officer, Robert Coote a British veteran of Dunkirk, and actress Merle Oberon the French secretary of the kidnapped politician.

  Decades later Granet left behind in his papers an account of the personal chaos inspired by Oberon during the trip. The delicate British beauty had outmaneuvered him already by getting Schary to name her husband, Lucien Ballard, as cinematographer; the couple would be rooming together. The company was lodged at the Hôtel George V, just off the Champs-Élysées, but Oberon, in a standard movie-star power play, insisted that she and Ballard stay at the palatial Hôtel Ritz on the Place Vendôme. Ballard, an Oklahoman of part-Cherokee descent, was tall, athletic, cultured, and handsome; he had won Oberon’s heart by inventing a small spotlight that attached to the camera and helped minimize her facial scars from a 1937 car accident.*

  “By the time we settled in Paris, Merle had developed a deep passion for Robert Ryan,” wrote Granet. “He was tough looking but at heart he was a happily married pussycat. He was not even fair game for someone of Merle’s sexual talents. She would tease him then cool it.”7 Born in Bombay to a Welsh father and an Indian mother, Oberon had spent her adult life concealing the mixed parentage that would have ended her career as an actress in Britain and the United States. For six years she had been married to the great British producer Alexander Korda, who cast her opposite Laurence Olivier in Wuthering Heights (1939), but in 1945 she had left Korda for Ballard. She obsessed over her beauty and exulted in her status, spoiling herself with clothing and gems. Oberon was high-strung and wildly romantic — among her previous lovers were Leslie Howard, David Niven, George Brent, and the heroic RAF pilot Richard Hillary.

  During the company’s stay in Paris, wrote Granet, Oberon urged him and his wife, Charlotte, to throw a dinner party in their suite and invite Ryan. That evening she arrived hours late, dressed to the nines in a black evening gown and accompanied by a dapper Englishman; later she confessed to Charlotte that she was trying to make Ryan jealous. “By the time we were shooting in Frankfurt, she had successfully bedded Ryan,” Granet reported. “Since Lucien … was constantly on location, all he could do was develop suspicions. Merle successfully made him believe that it was Charles Korvin who was making a pass at her.”8

  Ryan with Merle Oberon in Berlin Express (1948). Their affair unfolded amid the chaos and deprivation of postwar France and Germany. Film Noir Foundation

  Korvin, a Hungarian actor playing one of the villains, had already shot two pictures with Oberon, and the two despised each other. More than thirty years later, after her death, Korvin told celebrity biographers Charles Higham and Roy Moseley that Oberon deserted Ballard on more than one occasion to spend the night with Ryan, first on the cross-country train from Paris and then in Frankfurt (where the crew lodged at hotels in the center of town and the cast was billeted at a castle in Bad Nauheim, thirty-five kilometers north of the city). “I know that she slept with Ryan both in Hollywood and in Europe and I thought it unfair and cruel of her,” Korvin remembered. “I objected to the affair and so did everyone else on the picture.”9

  Political argument only added to the tension. When Ryan asked his fellow cast members how they felt about General Marshall’s vision for postwar Europe, the idea of economic aid for Germany got a cool reception. Coote and Oberon had endured the London blitz. Korvin and Paul Lukas, both Hungarian, had been personally touched by the Holocaust, and Toporow, who was Polish, loathed the Germans and the Russians alike. “How can you let 80 million people starve?” Ryan would ask.10 Invariably they dismissed him as naïve or softhearted; mass starvation, said one, would be no less than the German people deserved.

  Their resolve began to melt away as they got a look at Frankfurt: entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble, middle-class people reduced to beggars. More than fifty-five hundred had been killed in the bombardment, and the medieval city center, the Römer, had been completely destroyed. In Berlin Express, Ryan and Oberon venture into the neighborhood and discover a maze of shoulder-high rub
ble, like a bizarre sculpture garden. Another scene shows Ryan staring grimly out a bus window as people walk the streets with suitcases full of belongings for sale; in the train station he tosses away a cigarette and two shabby men race like pigeons to scoop it up. The children they encountered on location were “emaciated, shocked and sick,” Ryan later wrote, with “old faces and rickety bodies.”11 By the end of the first week, he remembered, no one talked anymore about the justice of letting people starve.

  From Frankfurt the company flew to Berlin, where principal photography began on Saturday, August 2. This time the company stayed in Zehlendorf, about fifteen miles from downtown, near the US occupation forces headquarters, and cast members were chauffeured about in a car that had belonged to Hitler’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. More than three years after the Allied bombing, Berlin was still a boneyard of gray, jagged, hollowed-out buildings, block after block, mile after mile. Unter den Linden, once the capital city’s most majestic boulevard, was bare now, its namesake linden trees destroyed or chopped down for firewood. The great Reichstag was an empty shell, the lush Hotel Adlon bombed out and boarded up. Out for a stroll one night, Ryan fell into a bomb crater.

  The poverty on the streets was overwhelming: Germans clustered around the locations, pleading for work as grips or extras. One well-known theater actor offered to work for a pair of pants, then came back the next day and said he wanted food for his family instead. Granet gave him both, and a check. “It is hard to visualize a world where the standard of currency is simply the cigarette,” he wrote.12 Chocolate bars were equally prized, and Ryan used them to pay the woman who ironed his shirts. “There seemed to be very little bitterness on the part of the Germans who worked with us,” Ryan wrote. “A grip, hoisting a heavy prop one day, laughed and said, ‘There goes my 1,500 calories.’”13

  Apart from soldiers and government staffers, most of the other Americans in Berlin were journalists, who congregated at the press club and treated the movie people with smirking condescension. “As our visit wore on, the frost melted,” Ryan would write. “Fortunately there were no jokers in our company. Nobody tried to dress up like Hitler and make a speech from the famous balcony. Nobody got drunk or was carted off to jail.”14 The Russians were suspicious when cast and crew arrived to shoot in the Soviet sector, though Ryan saw no evidence of the military might he had expected, “no streets bristling with machine guns, no bayonets — as a matter of fact, almost no Russians.”15 Their chilly reception contrasted sharply with the picture’s final scene, in which the American and the Russian mend their ongoing political quarrel with a brotherly wave outside the Brandenberg Gate.

  The last week in Berlin the company enjoyed a picnic on the Rhine River, courtesy of the US Army, and a party at the press club, attended by reporters and military people. There followed another nine days of photography in Frankfurt and four more in Paris. According to Granet, Ballard and Korvin came to blows during one train trip. When the company arrived in London, Oberon refused to fly back to New York and persuaded Granet to send her, Ballard, and Ryan on the Queen Mary out of Southampton. News photographers snapped photos of Ryan, grinning angrily and fiddling with his hat, as he escorted Oberon through Waterloo Station.

  Decades later, when the affair had become a distant memory, Ryan would share with Harold Kennedy, his theatrical colleague and drinking buddy, a curious anecdote about his Atlantic crossing with a beautiful costar and her cameraman husband. As Ryan framed it, the woman had been making passes at him throughout the journey and cornered him late one night as he was taking the air on deck; getting no response to her come-ons, she pounced, knocked him down, and refused to let him up. Suddenly her husband “materialized on the deck, lifted her up, reached down and took hold of Bob’s shoulder, assisted him to his feet, and then, after apologizing to him profusely, blackened both of the lady’s eyes.”16

  Ryan had an Irishman’s way with a story — he wasn’t the sort of man to stand by while someone was hitting a woman — but then Granet also reported rumors of noisy fights between Ballard and Oberon on the voyage home, and said that she returned to Hollywood with broken teeth. Ryan was staying on in New York for a few days to do promotional work for Crossfire. When the Queen Mary docked on Tuesday, September 9, the first thing he did was to call Jessica in Los Angeles. She put Tim on the phone to hear his father’s voice, and she must have informed Ryan, if she hadn’t already, that she was expecting another child.

  WHILE RYAN WAS IN EUROPE, Crossfire had exploded. The picture opened in late July at the Rivoli, a 2,092-seat movie palace on Broadway, and broke box office records in its first week. “One of the most startling pictures ever to come out of Hollywood,” wrote the New York Morning Telegraph. “A film to be praised, praised again, and seen by all,” wrote the New York Post. “An important, stirring film,” declared the Daily Mirror. “Robert Ryan gives one of the performances of the year.”17 The picture had transformed his reputation overnight: critics and colleagues who had regarded him as a confident but unspectacular leading man now recognized him as an exciting, first-class character actor. There was talk of an Oscar nomination. “I came back to the sort of reception reserved by the New York press for people who had done something,” he later recalled. “Everybody wanted an interview; photographers were everywhere.”18

  Ryan made a rare personal appearance at the Rivoli, where Crossfire was in its eighth week. “It was the first time I had seen the picture with an audience, and I was elated at the reaction,” he said. Afterward, when he was introduced to the crowd and walked onstage, the room suddenly quieted. Monty was the black, unfathomable heart of the picture; moviegoers who reacted to the anti-Semitism in Crossfire inevitably zeroed in on Ryan as the embodiment of all that fear and hatred. “I’m really not that kind of a guy,” he said, bringing down the house.19

  By fall Crossfire had gone into general release and was performing well across the country, racking up impressive numbers not only in the more liberal metropolitan centers but in many small towns and in such conservative communities as Memphis, Omaha, and Oklahoma City. The RKO sales force played down the picture’s anti-Semitic angle, stressing the mystery element and Ryan’s costar Robert Mitchum, whose popularity was on the rise. There were pockets of resistance — “We never have had any racial troubles in this town and I don’t want to put anything before the people that might put ideas into their heads,” declared one theater owner — but RKO pursued a sharply effective strategy of establishing the picture in one cluster of towns and then expanding it to the next.20

  Given the taboo-smashing nature of the story, some conflict was inevitable. The US Navy found the idea of an American soldier murdering a Jewish civilian so inflammatory that it banned Crossfire, refusing to screen it for troops at bases foreign or domestic. The army allowed it to be shown to soldiers at home but nixed any screenings overseas, arguing it might be seen by foreigners on the bases and reflect poorly on the United States. The Motion Picture Export Association, which cleared movies for the international market, turned down Crossfire, citing the same concerns. And though most leaders of the American Jewish community hailed the picture — in Chicago, the Anti-Defamation League had launched a vigorous campaign encouraging local lodges to sponsor private screenings for civic leaders — some argued that Crossfire might harden anti-Semitic feelings and even provoke bigots to violence.

  This opinion emerged most strongly in the American Jewish Committee’s monthly magazine Commentary. Editor Eliot Cohen noted the malign magnetism of Ryan’s hypnotic performance: “You’re drawn to him. He’s big, he catches your eye. His personality overshadows the others. A plain, husky fellow, not much education, visibly troubled, up against a world too smart for him, fighting shrewdly, stupidly, blindly against the ‘others’ who hem him in — before his crime, after his crime. (For the millions near enough like him to identify with him, will Montgomery be the simple bully and villain the producer intended, assuming that was his intention? The chances are just a
s good that he will be taken as a kind of hero-victim — the movie equivalent of the Hemingway-Faulkner-Farrell male, hounded and struck down by a world he never made.)”21

  Ryan was less concerned with anti-Semites or the Jews they hated than with the much larger middle ground of Gentiles who were innocent but ignorant. “What I hope for is that the mass of Americans — those who have never come directly, first-hand, against intolerance — will think about those who daily are exposed to it, and will reflect on their actions to those groups in a new light,” he wrote in the Daily Worker. “Most Americans aren’t intolerant, but neither are they concerned with those who are. Pictures like this will help show how senseless, how ignorant, how detrimental to fundamental American principles … any kind of bigotry is. When people fully realize that, they will stop the careless thinking and the even more careless talk.”22

  One thing Ryan had understood better than the friends who had discouraged him from playing Monty: a controversial role can help an actor’s career. Ray Milland had won an Oscar playing a raging alcoholic in The Lost Weekend (1945). Yet, as Ryan pointed out in yet another first-person piece about Crossfire, Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage had never been filmed because no movie star wanted to play a coward.* “The controversial role, like no other, can meet the needs of the actor who feels the void of not achieving professional stature,” he wrote, inadvertently revealing the career frustration that had driven his choice. “It gives one the feeling of accomplishment, of acting with a purpose.”23 When he reflected on the risk taken by Dore Schary, Adrian Scott, Eddie Dmytryk, and John Paxton, who had dreamed up the picture, his own gamble paled in comparison.

  Ryan looked forward to more such projects, but the political winds were shifting. That fall Schary was approached by two investigators from the House Un-American Activities Committee — “rather gray-looking gentlemen,” he wrote.24 The committee was moving forward with its hearings into communist infiltration of the movie industry, and they wanted to know if he might have any relevant information about Ryan. Schary pointed out that Ryan was a former marine, a credential he felt spoke for itself. They asked him about Scott and Dmytryk, the producer and director of Crossfire. They requested screenings of Crossfire and The Farmer’s Daughter, a Loretta Young comedy that RKO had released in March, and afterward they declared both pictures to be “pro-Communist.”25