by J. R. Jones
Unfortunately any parallels to Crossfire end there, because Executive Action is clumsy and inert, more like an illustrated lecture than a story. Trumbo opens in early June 1963, as the genteel Foster hosts a little conference of powerful right-wingers on his estate. Geer, clad in a cream-colored suit, plays Harold Ferguson, a folksy oil tycoon whom the others need to back their covert action against JFK (the reason for this is never really explained). The bespectacled Paulitz (Gilbert Green) predicts that in the next few months the president will back civil rights, endorse a nuclear test ban treaty, and begin a retreat from Vietnam. Farrington presents a slide show detailing past presidential assassination attempts and argues that their best chance of success is triangulated sniper fire during a presidential motorcade; a later slide show acquaints them with their chosen patsy, Lee Harvey Oswald.
Ryan gives his final performance, in Executive Action (1973), as the right-wing oil man Robert Foster. Victory in Vietnam, Foster insists, “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.” Franklin Jarlett Collection
These endless lecture sequences are interrupted periodically by desert scenes in which three snipers (commanded by bald, hawk-nosed Ed Lauter of Lolly-Madonna XXX) practice firing on a moving target. Miller incorporates archival footage to show Paulitz’s predictions coming true: Kennedy makes his famous speech at American University in June 1963 supporting a test ban treaty, states the moral imperative for a civil rights bill in a speech from the Oval Office that same month, and tells a reporter at a press conference that he hopes to have a thousand US advisors out of Vietnam by the end of the year. An obviously phony newscast hammers home the point that Kennedy intends to pull out of Indochina — still a matter of historical debate — and the report so incenses Harry Ferguson that he finally gives the kill order on JFK.
Despite the conspiracy theory, Ryan was fascinated most by the plush train car being used as a set for Executive Action. It must have brought back memories of the New England whistle-stop campaign for Stevenson twenty years earlier. One could rent a furnished train car and travel across the country by connecting with various lines, and Ryan had decided that he and Maureen O’Sullivan would collect family and friends and travel by rail through the mountain country of Tennessee and West Virginia.
In Los Angeles, he visited Philip and Amanda Dunne, and one day he turned up at the doorstep of John and Evans Frankenheimer’s house in Malibu. They invited him to stay over, and before long he was spending every weekend with them. “A lot of it was great reminiscing, just very relaxed,” said Evans. “We would have lunch and then he would read, and then later he would wander off.”39 He drank heavily, talking about Jessica, though otherwise his health appeared to be holding. “He honestly thought he had the cancer licked,” said John Frankenheimer. “He never got over the fact that here he had the cancer and his wife nursed him through it, and after he was somewhat cured, then she came down with it. He couldn’t understand it. He deeply, deeply missed his wife.”40
Onscreen Ryan looked pasty and tired, and after he began complaining of back pains, Miller hastened to complete his scenes so he could return to New York and look after himself. Larry Goebel, a cinema student at the University of Southern California, would write a letter to the Los Angeles Times remembering his visit to the rail yard in Vernon, California, on the day Ryan shot his last scene with Burt Lancaster. When they were done, “the train’s porter served martinis to the two stars. After one sip, Ryan went into one of the funniest drunk routines ever witnessed…. The entire crew was convulsed for five minutes. Shortly afterwards, he shook hands with everyone and left to catch a plane for New York.”41 Against all odds, Ryan’s last performance was pure comedy.
On Tuesday, July 3, Ryan was admitted to New York Hospital. Maureen O’Sullivan informed Cheyney, who drove in from Boston to assess the situation. Along the way he stopped off in Newport, Rhode Island, to visit Mia Farrow, who was shooting The Great Gatsby with Robert Redford, and his sister, Lisa, who had accepted Farrow’s invitation to be an extra in a party scene. When Cheyney arrived in Manhattan the next day, the information on his father was sketchy; he spent a few afternoons in the hospital with Ryan, watching sports on TV, and more time than he would have liked on the phone with John Lennon’s people, trying to retrieve some air conditioners from the Dakota that his father wanted back. Ryan’s mood was dark; at one point he told Cheyney, “I don’t want to live anymore.”42
Ryan and Burt Lancaster on location for Executive Action (1973). After completing their last scenes together, Ryan took one sip of a martini, performed a riotous drunk act for the crew’s amusement, shook hands with everyone, and flew home to look after his health. Franklin Jarlett Collection
The following week the doctors came to Cheyney and O’Sullivan with grim news: the cancer had returned and spread to Ryan’s lungs. Tim and Lisa were telephoned and began heading for New York, where they all were to confer with the doctors about the next phase of their father’s treatment. Lisa and Cheyney visited Ryan on the morning of Wednesday, July 11. That afternoon his lungs hemorrhaged and he began to choke, but the staff managed to stabilize him. O’Sullivan arrived at 88 Central Park West that evening, distraught over Ryan’s condition and unhappy with the care he was getting. Tim flew in from California that night; before he could see his father, though, the hospital phoned to notify them that Ryan had suffered another breathing attack and choked to death.
“I’VE HAD A GOOD SHOT AT LIFE,” Ryan told a Los Angeles Times reporter the previous summer, reflecting on his earlier cancer scare. “So what the hell do I have to complain about. My brother died when he was six, and I’ve thought about it my whole life. He never even got started. I’ve been lucky as hell with my career and my family. We were always close. Still are. How many men can say that?”43
Tim, Cheyney, and Lisa were so shell-shocked that Millard and Ramona Lampell took care of the funeral arrangements. A private service was held on Monday, July 16, at Blessed Sacrament Church on Seventy-First Street, and descended into black comedy when the priest celebrating the funeral mass — a relative of Ryan’s from Chicago — became confused by the English text, having performed the mass only in Latin, and made a mess of things. Jason Robards, Myrna Loy, Dore Schary, and John McGiver attended the service,44 and the guests were welcomed back to 88 Central Park West afterward for what Millard described as “a regular Irish, old-fashioned wake.”45 He and Robards shot a few games of pool. The Hollywood Reporter had reported that Ryan would be buried in Chicago,46 but in fact he was cremated and his ashes taken by the Lampells to be mixed with Jessica’s on the grounds of their farm. His estate, estimated in the press at half a million dollars, was divided equally among the children.47
The tributes that followed praised Ryan’s personal qualities as much as his acting. “There should be a poem of farewell for Robert Ryan, who was a good man in a bad time,” wrote Pete Hamill in the New York Post. Hamill reminded readers of Ryan’s long years in the liberal trenches, founding Hollywood for SANE amid the Red Scare, but also pointed out Ryan’s “refusal to make his life a performance. He saved his private life for himself, and his children, and his wife, Jessica. He took no punches at photographers. There were no drunken car wrecks. There were no messy divorces.”48 In the Los Angeles Times, Charles Champlin connected this same modesty to his onscreen brilliance: “He did what he did with a caring, self-effacing professionalism which illuminated the character rather than his private persona, and he did it so well that the art was, in its paradoxical way, invisible.”49
Newsweek writer Paul Zimmerman would fashion Ryan’s cultural epitaph when he wrote that the actor left behind “a lifetime of roles too small for his talent.”50 This wasn’t entirely accurate — Ryan had tackled great roles onstage and fallen short (Othello, Antony and Cleopatra) — but the consensus view among critics was that he had never gotten his due. For several years he had served on th
e board of governors for the Motion Picture Academy, yet aside from Crossfire, Oscar never had taken the least notice of his finest portrayals, not Stoker Thompson in The Set-Up, nor Jim Wilson in On Dangerous Ground, nor Ben Vandergroat in The Naked Spur, nor Ty Ty Walden in God’s Little Acre, nor John Claggart in Billy Budd, nor Deke Thornton in The Wild Bunch. Released in November 1973, on the heels of The Outfit and Executive Action, The Iceman Cometh became Ryan’s final artistic testament, and attention finally was paid: the National Board of Review named him best actor of the year, and the National Society of Film Critics gave him a special award for “a consummate demonstration of acting skill at the end of a long distinguished career.”51
An even more fitting tribute followed a year later, when John Houseman hosted a performance of Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock at the Mark Taper Forum to benefit the Robert and Jessica Ryan Memorial Foundation. A $10,000 grant from Liz Harmon had established the foundation, which was to fund teacher training and instruction of children with learning disabilities, and to institutionalize the social studies program that Jessica and Marie Spottswood had worked so hard to create. Spottswood wrote that the program still was using the books and materials Jessica had written, praising “her able and courageous leadership in piloting the school through a most harassing and difficult period when rival radical factions among parents and teachers came close to destroying it. More than anyone else, she was responsible for Oakwood’s survival.”52 Even after the Ryans left Los Angeles, they had maintained their connection to the school.
For such a reserved man, Ryan could be surprisingly open with pen in hand; even on something as simple as an alumni questionnaire, he might hold forth on the state of the world and himself. “Our tendency to become a spectator nation has probably benefited me — nevertheless I deplore it,” he wrote on one such form back in November 1956. “I look forward to a world at peace and to my children’s lives. I am grateful for my work, my wife, and my children (not in that order).”53 He always aspired to be an actor, rather than a spectator, in both the political and the theatrical sense, though he would never see a world at peace, and ordering his personal and professional priorities would become more of a challenge than he could have imagined then. The characters Ryan created are all that remain of him now, men for whom shadow is a state of mind.
*Someone had miscounted, because The Outfit was only his seventy-first theatrical feature.
Acknowledgments
I came to Ryan’s work early for someone of my generation. As a freshman at Loyola Academy, a Jesuit school in Wilmette, Illinois, I began my four-year religion curriculum with a class that included a showing and discussion of the 1962 movie Billy Budd. My teacher stressed the Christlike sacrifice of young Billy, but this lesson was subverted by the fact that the most charismatic character in the movie was the evil master-of-arms, Mr. Claggart.
The actor, my teacher explained, was Robert Ryan, class of 1927; when I filed down the hallway that housed the school’s class photos (passing Bill Murray, class of 1968) and found the portrait of seventeen-year-old Robert Ryan, I could barely reconcile it with the lined, hardened face I had seen on-screen. To begin, then, I thank Rev. James Arimond at Loyola for providing copies of Ryan’s earliest published writings, in the school’s newspaper and literary magazine, and other background material on his education.
His generosity has been matched by many others who supplied documents, articles, and photographs that inform this account: Dr. James Astman, headmaster of the Oakwood School; Deanna Chew of the La Jolla Playhouse; Sarah Hartwell of Dartmouth College Library; Eddie Muller and Alan K. Rode of the Film Noir Foundation; Vickie Ryan, the actor’s daughter-in-law (who provided historical material on the Cheyneys and Cadwaladers); Cheryl S. Spiese and Jean L. Green of the Max Reinhardt Archive at SUNY–Binghamton; Tina Louise Happ of Pritzker Military Library in Chicago; and Vivian Teng of Cinema/Chicago. Above all, I want to thank Peter Jarlett, who provided photographs, audiotaped interviews, and transcriptions amassed by his late brother, Franklin Jarlett, author of Robert Ryan: A Biography and Critical Filmography (1990). That book offers a more complete guide to Ry an’s work in various media than I have, and I recommend it to those seeking more information.
I am much indebted to the fine research facilities where I conducted my work. In particular I want to thank Martin Gostanian at the Paley Center for Media in Los Angeles, Mark Quigley of the UCLA Film and Television Archive, Julie Graham and Amy Wong of UCLA Performing Arts Special Collections, Maxine Ducey and Mary Huelsbeck of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, and Jenny Romero of the Margaret Herrick Library, Fairbanks Center for Motion Picture Study, Beverly Hills. I remember fondly my time researching this project with the Herrick Library’s friendly and enthusiastic staff.
This book originated in an October 2009 story in the Chicago Reader, “The Actor’s Letter,” and many Reader colleagues contributed their expertise to that project or to this volume: Andrea Bauer, Michael Miner, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Mara Shalhoup, Alison True, Albert Williams, and Kiki Yablon. Dave Kehr, whose early film writing in the Reader I much admired, urged me to write this book after reading “The Actor’s Letter” and so must be credited with setting it in motion.
My thanks to Chris Linster of Quartet Digital Printing and to my friends and colleagues who read and offered their input on my book proposal and early drafts: Margaret Buchen, Lisa Dombrowski, Joseph C. Heinen, Jonathan Joe, Michael Phillips, Alan Rode, Martin Rubin, Parker Smathers at Wesleyan University Press, and above all my agent, Peter Riva of International Transactions.
I am blessed with family members who aided me in this project. My sister Ruth Ann Jones, a reference librarian, directed me toward countless revealing materials; my sister Julia Macintosh in the UK tracked down reviews of Ryan’s 1967 residency at the Nottingham Playhouse; my sister-in-law, Kelsey Beson, translated a key Ryan interview from a French magazine; and my uncle Tom Jones in Louisville nabbed a story from the local Courier-Journal. My wife, Margaret, has been a constant source of love and encouragement as this project took over my life (and hers).
Many people were generous with their time in sharing their personal reminiscences of the Ryans and their children: Joe Don Baker, Phil Bauman, Harry Belafonte, Jeff Bridges, Arvin Brown, Rhonda Fleming, Evans Frankenheimer, Charles Haas, Andy Harmon, Toya Harrison, Seymour Hersh, Marsha Hunt, Stacy Keach, Ramona Lampell, Tina Louise, Mike Metzger, James Naughton, Rev. Lothar Nurnberger, Nehemiah Persoff, Priscilla Ulene, and Jacqueline White.
I’m especially grateful to Lisa Ryan, Cheyney Ryan, and Walker (formerly Timothy) Ryan for their candor and patience as I reconstructed their parents’ story. Throughout the process they impressed me as people who shared their parents’ desire for privacy but also felt that this story should be told.
Appendix
Robert Ryan Performances
part one Stage Chronology
TOO MANY HUSBANDS (1940) Belasco Theater, Los Angeles, January 15, 1940. Director: Max Reinhardt. Producer: Lloyd D. Mitchell. Playwright: Somerset Maugham. Music: Bronislau (aka Bronislaw) Kaper. Cast: Robert Ryan, Maris Wrixon, Bruce Bennett, Arno Arno, Ernö Verebes, Adele Neff, Helene Hill, Martin Wessner, Millard Vincent, Ralph Freud, Ann Lee.
THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE (1941) Millpond Playhouse, Roslyn, Long Island, June 30 to July 12, 1941. Director: David Lowe. Producer: David Lowe. Playwright: William Saroyan. Cast: Robert Ryan (Joe), Jane Jeffreys, Harald Dyrenforth, James Murray, Cameron Mitchell, Jane Morrisey, Joel Steele, Neville Draper. Note: Staged during the Ryans’ summer repertory season at Millpond Playhouse; among the other productions that season were The Barker (June 9, 1941), starring Robert Ryan, Jessica Cheyney, Edward Thompson, and Kenneth Forbes; Petticoat Fever (June 16, 1941), starring Ryan and Cheyney; and Angel Child (date unknown), starring Ryan, Jane Jeffreys, and Cameron Mitchell.
A KISS FOR CINDERELLA (1941) Maplewood Theatre, Maplewood, New Jersey, September 18 to 23, 1941. Playwright: J. M. Barrie. Producer: Cher
yl Crawford. Cast: Luise Rainer, Robert Ryan (Policeman/Prince). Note: Ryan and Rainer originated their roles at the Cape Playhouse in Dennis, Massachusetts, before the production moved to the Maplewood Theatre.
CLASH BY NIGHT (1941) Belasco Theatre, New York, December 27, 1941, to February 7, 1942. Director: Lee Strasberg. Producer: Billy Rose. Playwright: Clifford Odets. Cast: Seth Arnold, Tallulah Bankhead, Ralph Chambers, Lee J. Cobb, Stephan Eugene Cole, Harold Grau, John F. Hamilton, Katherine Locke, William Nunn, Robert Ryan (Joe W. Doyle), Joseph Schildkraut, Joseph Shattuck, Art Smith.
PETTICOAT FEVER (1949) La Jolla Playhouse, La Jolla, California, August 30 to September 4, 1949. Director: James Neilson. Playwright: Mark Reed. Cast: Robert Ryan, Ruth Warrick, Dorothy McGuire, Dan Tobin, Clifford Brooke, Chris-Pin Martin.
BORN YESTERDAY (1950) La Jolla Playhouse, La Jolla, California, July 4 to 9, 1950. Director: James Neilson. Playwright: Garson Kanin. Cast: Marie McDonald, Robert Ryan (Harry Brock), Tom Powers, Whit Bissell, Johnny Call, Paul Maxey, Louise Lorimer.
CORIOLANUS (1954) Phoenix Theatre, New York, New York, opened January 19, 1954. Director: John Houseman. Producers: T. Edward Hambleton, Norris Houghton. Playwright: William Shakespeare. Music: Alex North. Cast: Alan Napier, Robert Ryan (Caius Martius Coriolanus), Lou Polan, Joseph McCaulay, George Fells, Joseph Holland, John Randolph, Will Geer, Mildred Natwick, Lori March, Paula Laurence, John Emery, Jamie Smith, Gene Saks, Jack Klugman, Jerry Stiller, Terry Nardin.
