The Lives of Robert Ryan

by J. R. Jones

  By the time The Boy with Green Hair finally opened nationwide in January 1949, the man who had initiated the project, Adrian Scott, was persona non grata in Hollywood. The Ten were still fighting their contempt citations in the court system, an ongoing financial challenge, and while the screenwriters among the group began to find work under assumed names, Scott and Dmytryk didn’t have that option. Shortly after RKO fired them, they had launched their own independent production company and tried to secure funding for Albert Sears, a drama about a black family moving into a white neighborhood, but they got nowhere with the project. Dmytryk found work directing two pictures in England and was soon followed there by Scott and his family.

  Act of Violence had opened in December to strong reviews; Caught followed in February, was savaged by critics, and flopped miserably, though by that time Enterprise Studio had already folded. Ryan had high hopes for himself professionally once The Set-Up opened in March. But one assignment weighed heavily on him as he puttered around his new home in the Valley, sleeping late, working out in the shed behind the house, and playing with his little boys. Of all the pictures on RKO’s new production slate, none was dearer to Howard Hughes than I Married a Communist, a Red-Scare melodrama that he hoped would establish the studio’s patriotic credentials under his leadership. As one of the few male stars still employed by RKO, Ryan was a prime candidate for the lead, but to star in something like this would be a slap in the face to his colleagues who were losing their careers.

  I Married a Communist was a title in search of a script, and it quickly became the picture nobody at RKO wanted to make. It gained a reputation as a political litmus test, a way for Hughes to weed out suspected communists at the studio. Joe Losey, the first director to pass on it, recalled Hughes threatening to keep him idle for the full duration of his seven-year contract,39 though eventually he was fired. “Howard Hughes dropped my option when I refused to work on I Married a Communist,” remembered Daniel Mainwaring, who had written Out of the Past for RKO. “He used that project to get rid of a lot of writers, directors, and actors. If you turned it down, out you went.”40

  John Cromwell, the left-wing director first announced for the project, confirmed this story but said he took the job figuring that the god-awful script, something about a San Francisco shipping executive being blackmailed by the party for his past membership, could never be salvaged.41 Hughes dropped Cromwell anyway (after a fifteen-year career at RKO) to avoid paying him a scheduled salary increase. The picture’s dire reputation couldn’t have been much help in recruiting stars. RKO’s shrinking list of contract players included only two suitable actors, Ryan and Mitchum — and Mitchum was currently serving a fifty-day jail term for drug possession, not exactly the credential Hughes needed for his patriotic picture. Hughes had indulged Ryan with Caught and The Set-Up and must have felt he was owed a favor. Ryan talked long and hard about it with Jessica, and in the end he capitulated; Variety announced on February 23 that he would star in I Married a Communist.

  By that time Hughes had finally collared a director: Robert Stevenson, an Englishman whose most respected picture was a Fox adapation of Jane Eyre starring Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles. Script and casting problems delayed principal photography of I Married a Communist until April, when Ryan was joined on the set by Laraine Day, John Agar, and Thomas Gomez, the portly and commanding actor who had competed with Ryan for the Oscar a year earlier and was haunted professionally by his attendance at two Communist Party meetings back in the ’30s.42 Now he was doing penance as the sinister party boss, who summons Ryan’s compromised hero to the docks one night and lets him watch as two thugs tie up a recalcitrant member and throw him into the ocean to drown.

  Once the picture was shot, Hughes began his usual tinkering. He tended to fixate on odd details; during production of The Outlaw he had dispatched detailed memos on the proper presentation of Jane Russell’s breasts, and on I Married a Communist he decided that Ryan and supporting actor William Talman each needed to be taught how to handle a gun. Before retakes commenced in June, RKO executive Jack Gross sent a memo to producer Sid Rogell informing him that Hughes wanted Ryan and Talman “taken out to a target range and taught to shoot, particularly how to draw, shoot, and not flinch when shooting.”43 Hughes further insisted that the instruction be followed by a screen test of their progress, to be delivered to him personally.

  In later years Ryan could barely bring himself to mention the picture. When a teenaged Cheyney remonstrated with his mother over his father’s decision, arguing that his father should have stood his ground, Jessica replied, “Let’s have this conversation when you have a career yourself, and see how you feel about it.”44

  *Hughes fell out with Sturges too, and their partnership collapsed before the picture could be completed; when Hughes finally released Vendetta through RKO in 1950, it was directed by Mel Ferrer.

  *The scene was shot at Ocean Park Arena in Santa Monica.

  seven

  Learning by Doing

  In March 1949 the Ryans decided to celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary with a big blowout at their new home. Everyone they knew in Hollywood was invited, including their classmates from the Reinhardt School who had attended the ceremony a decade earlier. For the most part, though, they preferred small dinner parties with their more educated, writerly, serious-minded friends. “We don’t ask actors home,” Jessica later wrote. “We haven’t, Robert or I, much to say to them privately. Nor do they have much to say to us. We aren’t interested in the same things.”1

  Her own creative life was in flux. After publication of her second mystery, Exit Harlequin, she decided to try her hand at a romance novel, but it was tough going. She wrote in the morning, as Tim, now three years old and the image of his father, roamed around the house and Cheyney entertained himself in his playpen. (Writing to Dido and Jean Renoir, she predicted needing “an eight-foot steel fence to contain these two men.”)2 No one expected her, the wife of a movie star, to do anything but care for him and his children, but being a mother wasn’t enough. She devoted her spare time to the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker-affiliated organization that ministered to Japanese-American interns during the war and now mobilized support for refugees in Europe and Asia. A native of freethinking Berkeley, she studied yoga with Indra Devi, a Russian-Swedish immigrant who had arrived in LA two years earlier, and experimented with homeopathic remedies prescribed to her by Devi’s friend (and eventual husband) Siegfried Knauer, a physician on Sunset Strip whom Jessica referred to as “the Witch Doctor.”3

  She had given up on tennis, given up on acting, and now might fail as a writer. She was prone to anxiety, and nothing stoked it more than the women who threw themselves at Robert. “There was a time when a lot of silly girls wanted my autograph,” Ryan would recall a decade later. “Today my wife remembers that period as the most unbearable part of our … years together.”4 Especially after The Set-Up, Ryan had become a beefcake idol to bobby-soxers; fans often requested photos of him bare chested, and photographers asked him to strip for the camera. “Heck, I’m no Tarzan,” Ryan told the Hollywood Citizen-News that summer. “But if that’s what they want, I’ll give it to them.”5

  Despite his exhibitionism, Ryan struck most people as a good husband. Laraine Day, who costarred with Ryan in I Married a Communist, would describe him years later as “such a gentleman. It was a pleasure to work with him. And especially because he was so devoted to his wife. It was wonderful to listen to him talk about her and their life together, because you felt there was real devotion.”6

  After moving to North Hollywood, the Ryans made another positive change to their lives by hiring Solomon and Williana Smith, a black couple in their early fifties, as household help. Born in Waterproof, Louisiana, a delta town on the Mississippi state line, Solomon had run a radio repair shop in New Orleans, where he married Williana in 1925. During the war, as part of the great migration, they had moved to Vallejo, California, where Solomon worked at the Mare
Island Naval Shipyard, and since then they had come to Los Angeles, buying a house in the Mid-City neighborhood. They had no children. “Smith,” as everyone called him, tended to the Ryans’ house and garden, chauffeured Bob back and forth to the studio, and took Jessica on errands (she hated driving). Willie cooked, cleaned, and minded the children. “Smith was one of these guys that knew how to do everything,” Cheyney Ryan recalls. “They were people who had an enormous amount of practical intelligence.”7 During the week the Smiths stayed in a guest room the Ryans had added to the house, and before long they became part of the family.

  A month after completing I Married a Communist, Ryan began shooting a romance with Joan Fontaine called Bed of Roses. This would be his first women’s picture since Tender Comrade six years earlier; Jessica had urged him to take it, fearing he was in danger of becoming typecast as a heavy. “I spend a lot more time now posing for romantic stills,” he told fan-magazine writers Reba and Bonnie Churchill. “All the photos the studio had on file were shots of me snarling at the camera.”8

  Williana and Solomon Smith worked for the Ryan family from 1948 through the early 1960s, stabilizing a household that was buffeted by the demands of a movie star’s career. Robert Ryan Family

  No less than seven screenwriters and five directors had labored over this adaptation of a 1928 romance novel called All Kneeling, to which Fontaine owned the rights.9 When Hughes assigned Nicholas Ray to direct, Ray and writer Arthur Schnee took yet another crack at the script, working more feverishly perhaps than the material required. Producer Robert Sparks advised Ray not to get so wrapped up in this star vehicle, but Ray was adamant: “This picture shows the turmoil inside a woman’s heart.” Sparks replied, “The only turmoil inside Joan Fontaine’s heart is whether her dressing room is heated in the morning.”10

  Born in 1911, Ray had grown up in LaCrosse, Wisconsin (also the hometown of Joseph Losey), and in the early ’30s studied under playwright Thornton Wilder at the University of Chicago. Through Wilder he won a fellowship to the experimental arts community created by Frank Lloyd Wright at his Taliesin estate near Spring Green, Wisconsin. After moving to New York City in 1934, the young man acted in and directed left-wing political theater for the ragtag Theatre of Action company, during which time he joined the Communist Party. Eventually the Theatre of Action was absorbed into the Federal Theatre Project, and before long Ray was staging community-based theater in the rural Southeast. During the war years, John Houseman had hired Ray to direct radio programs for the Voice of America, and eventually launched him as a Hollywood director.

  Ryan was struck by Ray, who summoned the five lead actors for an initial table reading of the script before shooting commenced, something that rarely happened at RKO.11 Ray had fought to get Ryan on the picture, having admired his low-key charm in The Boy with Green Hair, and the two men connected, though Ryan was a little frustrated to be working with Ray on such a weak story. Christabel Scott (Fontaine), the beautiful schemer at the center of Bed of Roses, climbs the ladder of high society by marrying a millionaire (oily, mustachioed Zachary Scott) but then cheats on him with a mischievous, razor-sharp novelist (Ryan). Ray’s dialogue was witty, and at the very least he concocted a meet-cute that ranked as one of Ryan’s few genuinely comic moments on-screen. Staying with friends, Christabel thinks she’s alone in the house, but her phone call is interrupted by a man’s voice ordering her to get off the line. She races back into the kitchen, where the other phone handset is located, and Ryan’s grinning face pops up from behind an open refrigerator door.

  Ray and Ryan would make two more pictures together in fairly quick succession before the director left RKO; one of the enduring mysteries of the blacklist period is why Hughes protected Ray, a former party member. Earlier in Ray’s career, Hughes had tried to force I Married a Communist on him; after Ray asked his agents to free him from the project, he received a Christmas Eve summons to meet with Hughes at the Goldwyn studios (where he found the boss watching Caught).12 Somehow Ray managed to wriggle out of the assignment without losing his job.

  All spring and summer there had been worrying headlines from Berlin and mainland China. Following the massive Berlin airlift, which had thwarted Joseph Stalin’s blockade of the city, the United States had established the German Federal Republic and the Soviets began constituting the German Democratic Republic. In the East, Mao Zedong’s Communist forces had captured Nanjing, capital of the Republic of China, and driven Chiang Kaichek’s nationalist government south to Canton, hastening the end of the decades-long civil war. Then, on September 23, President Truman grimly announced “evidence that in recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the USSR.” The atomic monopoly of the United States was over.

  Domestically the news itself had the force of a blast, and the confluence of international developments only fed the flames of anticommunism in Washington. A week after Truman’s fateful announcement, Mao Zedong declared the People’s Republic of China; a week after that, I Married a Communist test screened in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Audience response was dismal. After the blacklist hit, several studios had defensively launched anticommunist dramas, but the ones that had opened — MGM’S Conspirator, with Elizabeth Taylor; Republic’s The Red Menace — had bombed. Now people were confronted with the possibility of nuclear annihilation on American soil; in the era of the bomb shelter and the unspeakable end, who wanted to relax at the movies with a picture about scheming communists?

  RKO executives pleaded with Hughes to tone down the politics and change the title; he was incredulous, considering the title “one of the most valuable parts of the picture,”13 but reluctantly agreed. Variety reported that I Married a Communist would open in January 1950 as Where Danger Lives,14 but when it finally arrived in theaters six months later, collecting ho-hum reviews and expiring at the box office, it was titled The Woman on Pier 13.

  The Secret Fury, which began shooting in October and continued through early December, looked to be even worse, a tepid mystery starring forty-six-year-old Claudette Colbert (It Happened One Night) as a classical pianist who may be suffering from amnesia and Ryan, who turned forty during the shoot, as her concerned fiancé. After the holidays Ryan reported back to RKO for a series of retakes on Bed of Roses; Hughes wanted a new ending, but even this failed to mollify him, and four months later he was still dispatching instructions for reediting the picture.15 Like I Married a Communist, the caustic romance would sit on the shelf for the better part of a year, come out under a different title (the saucier Born to Be Bad), and do lackluster business.

  The glacial production pace at RKO had become par for the course under Hughes; all through 1949 the studio had been promising to ramp up the release schedule, but of thirty pictures announced, only a dozen were produced. One executive recalled, “Working for Hughes was like taking the ball in a football game and running four feet, only to find the coach was tackling you from behind.”16 RKO Radio Pictures had lost $5.2 million in 1948, the year Hughes took over, and hemorrhaged another $3.7 million in 1949. “I think he bought RKO as a tax liability,” said director Joe Losey. “He wanted to run it into the ground so he could take a huge loss.”17

  Jean Renoir and Eddie Dmytryk were long gone. Losey, Bob Wise, and Jacques Tourneur had escaped to other studios. Given the dearth of directing talent at RKO, Ryan looked forward to his next project with Nicholas Ray. Ryan’s friend John Houseman had approached him to star in a crime thriller he and Ray were trying to get off the ground at RKO, to be adapted from a 1946 British novel by Gerald Butler called Mad with Much Heart. Ray was fascinated by the book, in which a London police detective tracks a mentally disabled child murderer through the snowbound English countryside, but RKO had passed, and when Houseman sent the book to his friend Raymond Chandler, the writer replied with a withering critique. Ryan agreed to make the picture if he could approve the script, and Sid Rogell, head of production at RKO, relented. The film that finally emerged two years later, retitled On Dangerous Ground, would in
clude one of Ryan’s most indelible performances and become a key film in his screen persona. But first it had to get past Hughes.

  MAD WITH MUCH HEART was an odd novel, a suspense story that evolved into a melancholy romance. In a quiet farming community, two little girls have been strangled, and one dies; the father of the other, Walter Bond, seethes with anger. “Why are such things allowed to happen?” he asks his wife. “Has the eye of the Lord left our village?”18

  Shotgun in hand, Bond hopes to kill the culprit in the ensuing manhunt; holding him in check is James Wilson, a plainclothesman who has been dispatched from London to command the investigation. The two men follow the murderer by car in a blinding snowstorm and eventually spin out into a ditch; after Bond finds the suspect’s deserted vehicle, he and Wilson trudge to the nearest house. Its occupant is a beautiful blind woman, Mary Maldon, who invites them in but acts suspiciously. Wilson guesses correctly that she’s hiding something. The killer is her younger brother, whom she cares for; she says he’s been missing for days, but Bond doesn’t believe her and Wilson isn’t sure if he should.

  Packed with action, Butler’s book was tailor-made for the screen, but what really fascinated Ray was a short passage at the midpoint, after the snowstorm forces Bond and Wilson to suspend the search until morning and the blind woman offers them shelter. Tucked into a chair before the fire, Wilson dwells on his unhappy life in the police force: “There was never anything clear and clean, never any gift without a hook in it, never a meeting without some undercover deceit…. You thought it was going to be a romantic life…. You didn’t know you were simply putting your head into a world that stinks from top to bottom. You didn’t know you were choosing the life of a garbage man, digging and prodding and letting the smell out from human dregs.”19