The Lives of Robert Ryan. J.R. Jones
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the influential Philadelphia Quakers Meeting.
In 1907, Frances gave birth to a son, Richard Jr., and seven years later, on October 26, 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
Two more productions — Goldoni’s Servant of Two Masters, which had been one of Reinhardt’s early triumphs, and Holiday, a romantic comedy by Phillip Barry that had become a screen hit for Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant — followed before the end of the year’s study, at which point the two newlyweds began to reckon with the question of money. As the story goes, word came shortly after their wedding that Ryan’s oil well in Michigan had run dry, which meant an end to their steady dividend.
They supported themselves as best they could: Ryan worked as an assistant director to Reinhardt and taught boxing lessons for a dollar a pop, but Jessica was the real breadwinner, modeling for a photographer and then hiring on with vaudeville producers Franchon and Marco as a chorus girl at the Paramount Theater. “It was a rugged job, and she hated it,” Ryan would write, “but it made it possible for me to work and study and pound on doors and try a little longer to make somebody believe I could really act.”17 The first agent Ryan approached told him to go out the door and come back in again. “Make an entrance. Get it?” When Ryan did, the agent said, “Go back to Chicago.”18
From the house they had rented after their marriage, they moved to a small cottage and then to an apartment above someone’s garage. Their situation was precarious, but Ryan was relatively sanguine. “I thought of what had happened to my father and knew that it was worse than useless to worry,” he recalled. “The moment I stopped worrying, things began to come right for us.”19
In late December 1939, Reinhardt cast Ryan in a commercial production of Somerset Maugham’s drawing room farce Too Many Husbands, to open the following month at the Belasco Theater in Los Angeles. Promoted as “a saucy comedy with music,” the play centered on a woman who believes her first husband has been killed in action during the Great War and takes a second, only to have the first return home; by then she has a child by each man. Marsha Hunt, a young actress who had recently signed to MGM, went to see a friend in the play and was struck by Ryan and the other male lead, former Olympic shot putter Bruce Bennett. “They were remarkable, both of them,” Hunt recalled. “Tall, wonderfully good-looking but, most of all, graceful in their movements onstage.”20 The engagement brought Ryan his first serious attention around town, and by the end of its run a casting director for Paramount Pictures had recommended him to director Edward Dmytryk for the lead in Golden Gloves, an upcoming picture about amateur boxing.
Golden Gloves told the story of a young fighter, mixed up with a crooked promoter, who sees the error of his ways and throws in with a crusading journalist to clean up the sport.† Dmytryk shot a screen test with Ryan as the fighter, then decided to give the role to Richard Denning; as a consolation prize he cast Ryan as Denning’s opponent in the climactic bout. They began shooting the fight in mid-December and finished in seven days; given nothing but a soundstage and three hundred extras, Dmytryk managed to evoke an entire stadium by dimming the lights on the audience, as at a real fight, and using bee smokers to create a cigarette haze over the crowd. Dmytryk was impressed with Ryan in the ring: “He was 6′ 4″, weighed 198 pounds, boxed beautifully, and hit like a mule. He tapped Denning in the ribs during their fight, and Dick made three trips to the hospital for X-rays. To this day he insists his ribs were broken, though the pictures showed nary a crack.”21
With the role came a contract as a stock player at Paramount for $125 a week, and the chance to experience a moviemaking operation from the inside. As Ryan sat with photographers and makeup artists and casting people, his physical attributes were evaluated with cold precision. At thirty years old, he was a seriously handsome Black Irishman, lean and muscular, with a strong jaw and a warm, brilliant smile. Yet his forehead was already lined from years of hard labor, and his brown, crinkly eyes were rather small in his face; if he narrowed them even slightly, they took on a beady, menacing quality. His height was impressive but hardly ideal for someone trying to get a leg up in supporting roles. “The men stars wouldn’t have me in a picture with them,” he recalled. “I towered over so many of them.”22
Paramount threw him bit roles: one morning in January 1940 he shot a scene for Queen of the Mob, based on the story of Kate “Ma” Barker and the Barker-Karpis gang, and a month later he put in two days playing an ambulance driver, barely glimpsed on-screen, in the Bob Hope comedy The Ghost Breakers. From mid-March to early May he was a Canadian mountie in Cecil B. DeMille’s North West Mounted Police, starring Gary Cooper and Madeleine Carroll, and that same month he played a train passenger in the nondescript western The Texas Rangers Ride Again. Ryan was disappointed but not exactly surprised when Paramount cut him loose after six months. Rather than hanging around Hollywood, waiting for something to happen, he and Jessica resolved to look for stage work in New York.
Back in Manhattan, the couple scraped by on Jessica’s modeling gigs and whatever Ryan could find. A year after Hitler’s invasion of Poland had ignited the war in Europe, President Roosevelt succeeded in passing the Selective Service Act, which established the country’s first peacetime draft and required the registration of all men from twenty-one to thirty-five years old. As a married man, Ryan was unlikely to be drafted soon or at all, but Jessica was horrified by the idea of him going to war. Ryan “believed that people should fight their own fights,” their son, Cheyney, later wrote. “Hence, if you believed in a war, you should be ready to fight it yourself.” Yet Jessica had been raised to believe that all war was immoral. “For her, war was not a story of people fighting their own fights. It was one of the privileged sending others to pay the costs while they reaped the benefits and attacked the patriotism of others along the way.”23
By June 1941 they had hired on at the