The Lives of Robert Ryan. J.R. Jones
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share much of Jessica’s pacifist philosophy.
Meanwhile Jessica had come into her own as a writer. To Ryan’s surprise she announced one day that she had written a mystery novel and wanted him to read it. The Man Who Asked Why was a “literary mystery,” mindful of formula but written with intelligence and wit. Its eccentric sleuth, Gregory Sergievitch Pavlov, “looked like a retired clown”12 but was in fact an eccentric professor of languages, transparently based on the Ryans’ dear friend and acting teacher Vladimir Sokoloff. Ryan passed the manuscript along to someone he knew at Doubleday Doran (publisher of Behind the Rising Sun), and to his and Jessica’s delight the book was accepted for publication as part of Doubleday’s Crime Club imprint, scheduled to appear in November.
In August the war, and the very concept of war, attained new levels of sin, tragedy, and catastrophe when President Truman ordered the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The blast in Hiroshima on August 6 flattened nearly five square miles and killed seventy thousand people, with tens of thousands more to die from burns and radiation by the end of the year. Few in America could grasp the devastation, but one thing everyone understood was that now Japan would surrender. RKO wasted no time in reasserting its claim to Ryan’s services; the day after Nagasaki was bombed, the Marine Corps director of public information dispatched a letter to the commandant asking that Ryan be allowed to make a “marine rehabilitation picture” called They Dream of Home.* This request was denied, and ten days later Ryan was assigned to the Seventy-Ninth Replacement Draft. His feelings about shipping out may have been different this time, though, because Jessica had discovered that she was pregnant.
Two weeks after receiving his new assignment, Ryan reported to the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery complaining of neck and back pain. According to the doctor’s summary, Ryan said that he had wrenched his back in May 1939, while lifting a car to change a tire, and subsequently suffered periodic attacks that had sidelined him for two to four days, but that “he did not mention this condition on induction because he considered it of minor importance and he wished to get into the service.”13 Diagnosed with epiphysitis of the spine, he was pronounced unfit for service and recommended for discharge. By this time the Fourth Division had begun arriving home, and Pendleton was discharging 175 men daily. On October 30, 1945, Ryan won an honorable discharge and returned to civilian life, the prospect of fatherhood, and a steady job at RKO. The studio had already slotted him for a melodrama called Desirable Woman that would give him a chance to work with Joan Bennett and the great French director Jean Renoir.
Years later, press accounts would note simply that Ryan had enlisted in the Marines, which was true but hardly the whole story. His wife’s pacifism, his employer’s opportunism, and his own professional ambition had kept him out of uniform for nine months, but then he had served and sought a combat assignment. He would note with disdain how his friend John Wayne had avoided doing his duty, and his own stint in the Marines would become a much-valued credential as he became more vocal in his commitment to peace. When his teenage son, Cheyney, asked him why he had served, Ryan’s only response was, “What else was I gonna do?”14
SON OF THE GREAT PAINTER, Jean Renoir had directed some of the best French films of the 1930s — The Crime of Monsieur Lange, Grand Illusion, The Rules of the Game — before fleeing the Nazi invasion in 1940. Since then he had bounced around Hollywood, making one picture at Twentieth Century Fox, another for RKO, and two more as independent productions released through United Artists. His first UA project, The Southerner, was a moving tale of struggling cotton farmers in Texas, but in general Renoir found the Hollywood of the war years to be rocky soil for his kind of left-wing humanism. (His limited fluency in English didn’t help.) After finishing Diary of a Chambermaid for UA, he returned to RKO at the invitation of Joan Bennett to direct Desirable Woman, a romantic melodrama that had been in development for some time. Renoir had enjoyed working at RKO, and he looked forward to collaborating with producer Val Lewton, who had delivered for the studio with a series of artful, low-budget horror films (Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, The Seventh Victim).
Ryan’s excitement about the picture only grew as he got to know the director. “One of the most remarkable men I’ve ever met,” he would say of Renoir. “Working with him opened my eyes to aspects of character that were subtler than those I was accustomed to.”15 His character was notably darker than anything he had played on-screen, a shell-shocked Coast Guard lieutenant now relegated to patrolling the misty Pacific coast on horseback. In one scene a friend at the base hesitantly informs him that the ship he was serving on has gone down, and the lieutenant is crushed. Not long afterward, on one of his lonely rides, he passes a wrecked ship, where he encounters a beautiful woman gathering firewood (Bennett). She brings him home to meet her husband (Charles Bickford), a famous painter now blind and embittered, and the lieutenant, consumed by lust for the woman, becomes an uneasy companion to the fractious couple.
In fact, Val Lewton had never really been interested in the project, and by the time principal photography commenced in late January 1946, he had been replaced by producer Jack Gross, who let Renoir do pretty much as he pleased. A month into the shoot, Charles Koerner — the head of production who had axed Pare Lorentz and Orson Welles — died suddenly of leukemia, which left Renoir even more unsupervised. He had never made a picture with so much improvisation on the set. “I wanted to try to tell a love story based purely on physical attraction, a story in which emotions played no part,” Renoir said.16 The open adultery of the source novel, None So Blind, already had been scrubbed away by the Production Code Administration, but there was something haunting about the lovers’ wordless attraction playing out right under the blind man’s nose.
Renoir also was intrigued by the story’s sense of solitude, something he felt was increasingly prized amid the chaos of modern life. “Solitude is the richer for the fact that it does not exist,” Renoir wrote. “The void is peopled with ghosts, and they are ghosts from our past. They are very strong, strong enough to shape the present in their image.”17 One scene showed the lieutenant, Scott, in his bed at the base, consumed by a nightmare. In a feverish montage, an Allied ship hits a mine and goes down, the image of a whirlpool pulls the eye in, bodies and ropes drop through the water, and Scott strides across the ocean floor in slow motion, stepping over the skeletons of his dead crewmates, on his way toward a lovely woman in a flowing gown. Before they can kiss, there’s an eruption of flame, an inferno that jolts Scott out of his dream.
Ryan — whose brother, father, and uncles all had preceded him to the grave — knew all about ghosts, and his strong streak of willful self-isolation made him an ideal collaborator for this kind of story. He would marvel at Renoir’s ability to “discover the true personality of the actor” and integrate it into a performance, a skill he would recognize in no other director but Max Reinhardt.18 Renoir found a neurotic quality in Ryan that had never been captured on-screen and would become the key element in his screen persona. Lying in bed, Scott confesses to his commanding officer that the nightmares have become chronic since he was released from the hospital. Ryan’s gaze shifts back and forth between two fixed points — the officer’s face and something awful a million miles away — as the tension gathers in his voice. The doctors have pronounced Scott healed. “But my head!” he exclaims in anguish, gesturing at it as if it were strange to his body.
The picture wrapped in late March, leaving Ryan free to tend to his expect ant wife. On Saturday, April 13, Jessica gave birth to a healthy baby boy, whom they named after his grandfather, Timothy, in the Irish tradition. Ryan’s next picture, a mediocre western called Trail Street, didn’t start shooting for three months, so the couple had plenty of time to care for and enjoy their new child and each other. Now that Ryan was back from the military, he worked either six days a week or not at all, loafing around in his mismatched pajamas until noon and working out later in the day. Jessica usually started writing in the morning — her second mystery novel, Exit Harlequin, was scheduled for publication in January 1947 — and worked until mid-afternoon. Determined homebodies, she and Robert relaxed in each other’s company, smoking, drinking, reading, and talking into the night.