The Lives of Robert Ryan. J.R. Jones
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mission in 1769 and built up through land grants into the vast Rancho Santa Margarita, the property had been purchased in 1942 by the US government, which was converting it into the nation’s largest Marine Corps base. It was enormous — about two hundred square miles, with eighteen miles of shoreline for amphibious training. According to Pendleton historians Robert Witty and Neil Morgan, the terrain “stretches eastward across twelve miles of rolling hills, broad valleys, swampy stream beds, and steep-sided canyons, rising on its northeast perimeter to a height of 2,500 feet.”2 By the time Ryan arrived, Pendleton had sent two divisions into the war and was home to more than 86,000 people.
He and Jessica had resolved to keep a stiff upper lip in each other’s absence, but by the fourth week Ryan had written asking her to visit him that Sunday, and she endured the four-hour bus ride to meet with him at the reception center. They went outside, and he spread his poncho over the grass so they could sit and talk. He had learned how to use an automatic rifle, Thompson submachine gun, mortar, bayonet, and hand grenade. The infiltration course, in Wire Mountain Canyon, forced recruits to crawl through three trenches and penetrate a single and then a double apron of barbed wire while dynamite charges went off all around them and live rounds were fired over their heads. The obstacle course, built over a cactus patch, included a 125-foot wooden tunnel, a house whose only exit was through the roof, and a 100-foot cable bridge. He was mastering more mundane skills as well — how to mend his clothes, for instance — and drilling with his platoon. As the tallest marine, he was named honor man and placed in the front rank to set the pace; he took direction well, of course, and had to admit that the theatricality of it appealed to him.
Following a ten-day furlough in April, Ryan got his first assignment: effective immediately, he would be a “recreation assistant” at Pendleton. This was good news for Jessica, who wanted him out of harm’s way and far from the trigger of a gun, but not for him. The whole idea of enlisting in the Marines was to erase the stigma of all those deferments; now he would be running a sixteen-millimeter projector and directing amateur plays. After fifteen weeks of this, during which time the D-Day landing commenced, he was transferred to the San Diego base, where he continued to thread a projector and also performed on Halls of Montezuma, a weekly radio show broadcast coast to coast. Once Jessica realized he was unlikely to see action, she decided to leave Mabel on her own in Silverlake and moved to San Diego, where she occupied a “tiny box of a house on the pier at Pacific Beach.”3
By this time Jessica had stopped acting entirely. Back when they were with Reinhardt, she had been considered the better actor, but over the years she had watched Robert work and grow, and she was proud of his success. She had been at it for ten years now, and once Robert had started pulling down $600 a week at RKO, she decided she had had enough. She hated the stage fright and the tedium and the itinerant lifestyle. Instead she would turn to her second love, writing. In addition to the first-person piece about Robert’s induction, which would appear in the October 1944 issue of Movieland, she began placing stories in fan magazines such as Photoplay and Motion Picture and women’s magazines such as Coronet and Mademoiselle. Her immediate success would bring a weird parity to the marriage, since Robert had started out writing and, frustrated, turned to acting.
Serving on the sidelines must have gotten to Ryan, because on August 25 — the day Paris was liberated — he applied for a commission as a second lieutenant to serve on an aviation ground crew. “I feel that my background would qualify me for any branch of ground duty not requiring technical knowledge or expertise,” he wrote on his application.4 A complete physical found him fit for overseas duty, and his commanding officer wrote him no fewer than three letters of recommendation. He waited the rest of the year for an answer. The Marine Corps was hardly generous with promotions, and he had no way of knowing whether the scuttlebutt about his deferments would hurt his chances, or what RKO might be doing behind the scenes to protect its investment.
In January 1945, as the Battle of the Bulge raged, Ryan was assigned to the Fortieth replacement draft; he would be shipping out as an infantryman, a development he would later describe to a friend as “swell.”5 His application for a commission was turned down a week later. Ryan would be leaving for the Pacific in late February, which was alarming news to his wife and mother. But things didn’t work out that way: as he would tell his Dartmouth class newsletter, “I was yanked out of the infantry with the proverbial foot on the gangplank and put to instructing troops in bayonet, judo, boxing and such at Camp Pendleton.”6 Now classified as a combat conditioner, Ryan would spend his days training men for battle; in May he was promoted to private first class, and in August he was reclassified again, as a combat swimming instructor.
Thousands of Americans spent the war this way — not quite at home, not quite at battle. “Theirs is the task of the damned,” wrote Richard Brooks in a prefatory note to his novel The Brick Foxhole. “These men see others trained and shipped off to ports of embarkation, but they themselves are always left behind. They brood over it, and in the end they become disappointed, introverted, and embittered.”7 Ryan read the book with great interest when it was published in May 1945; the author was actually stationed at Pendleton, and according to scuttlebutt, the publication had brought him a court-martial. At the center of The Brick Foxhole was an ugly sequence in which soldiers at liberty in Washington, DC, go home with a homosexual man for some late-night drinking and wind up beating him to death. Ryan was struck immediately by the book’s frank depiction of the bilious prejudice on open display at Pendleton.
Robert and Jessica (circa 1944). While he drilled recruits at Camp Pendleton, she struck out on her own as a magazine writer and novelist. Robert Ryan Family
Of particular fascination was the character of Montgomery Crawford, the bullying sergeant who drags the other men into this murderous episode. Monty has served as a beat cop in Chicago and likes people to know he’s killed a Jew and two black men in the line of duty. He “always shot niggers in the belly because then they didn’t die right away and they squirmed like hell.” Ryan had known guys like this before — cruel, jingoistic, worshipful of authority. Monty “shook hands with too firm a grip and he would openly cry when the post band played ‘God Bless America.’”8
Ryan tracked Brooks down to tender his compliments, and the two met in the library at Camp Pendleton. Brooks was tall and athletic — for a while he had considered a career as a pro baseball player — and favored a pipe that belied his short temper. Born to Russian Jewish parents in Philadelphia, he had grown up in poverty and gotten his start as a writer during the Depression by riding the rails and reporting on his experiences for local newspapers. From there he had moved into radio drama in New York and, in a weird coincidence, cofounded and then quit the dreaded Millpond Playhouse the summer before the Ryans performed there. Out on the West Coast Brooks found work writing for NBC Radio in Los Angeles, and as a screenwriter at Universal he knocked out a couple of jungle pictures for Maria Montez before enlisting in the Marines. Rumors of a court-martial over The Brick Foxhole were true, though the Marines, realizing that more publicity would only enlarge the book’s audience, had ultimately dropped the case.
Brooks undoubtedly knew Ryan from his good-guy roles at RKO, and to his surprise the actor told him that, if The Brick Foxhole were ever filmed, he wanted to play Monty. Anyone could see the physical resemblance — Brooks had described Monty as “more than six feet tall” with “a pair of small, bright eyes”9 — but why would a lead player want a role like this? “I know that son of a bitch,” Ryan explained. “No one knows him better than I do.”10
In fact, Ryan’s experience as a combat conditioner — teaching men to kill and wondering if they would ever come back alive — was turning him against the military. When he wrote to his old Dartmouth pal Al Dickerson in early summer 1945, he took a dim view of his own contribution to the war. “I certainly haven’t made any ‘sacrifice,’” he admitted, “especially when you add the fact that I have sat on my ass stateside for 16 months while a lot of my buddies went on to Saipan and Iwo…. I will not bore you with the too well known complaints against the military. War is a stupid institution when it isn’t