The Lives of Robert Ryan. J.R. Jones
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labeled the Hollywood Ten), whose actions “have been a disservice to their employers and have impaired their usefulness to the industry.”35
RKO was the first studio to act, firing Scott and Dmytryk. Schary refused to drop the ax, so Floyd Odlum, chairman of the board, handed the job to Schary’s boss, RKO president Peter Rathvon. Every studio contract included a vaguely worded morals clause allowing the studio to terminate any employee deemed to have disgraced the company. Barred from the lot, their current projects canceled or reassigned to other producers, Scott and Dmytryk turned their attention to the pressing matter of defending themselves against the contempt citations, which could land them in federal prison.
Support for the unfriendly witnesses wilted. Humphrey Bogart, whose iconic tough-guy persona had been a potent weapon for the CFA, issued a statement describing the PR tour to New York and Washington as “ill-advised and even foolish.”36 He had never been a communist or communist sympathizer, he declared, and he detested communism. The statement caused a collective shudder in Hollywood — if a star of Bogart’s magnitude felt the need to distance himself from the Ten in such strident terms, could anyone be safe? Donations to the Committee for the First Amendment dried up immediately, and members reported pressure to resign. Within three months the organization would fold.
Amid all this, Berlin Express was still shooting on the RKO lot. The picture’s final scene, with the American and the Russian expressing their fellowship outside the Brandenberg Gate, must have seemed like fantasy now. Closer to the mark was the little speech delivered to the kidnapped peacemaker by the malevolent leader of the right-wing underground: “I too believe in unity. But unlike you I know that people will only unite when they are faced with a crisis, like war. Well, we are still at war; you are not. So we are united; you are not. So we will succeed; you will not.”
RYAN LIKED TO TELL INTERVIEWERS he wasn’t “a chaser” (which was true — the way women responded to him, he never had to chase anyone). For a man so proud of his family, the affair with Merle Oberon was a strange anomaly, an ongoing adulterous relationship that became an open secret among the cast and crew. Charles Korvin contended that the affair continued on the RKO lot, though production records suggest some turbulence as the picture was drawing to a close. On Wednesday, November 5, Oberon went home sick at noon, forcing Tourneur to scrap the rest of the day’s scenes. The following Monday she didn’t show up for work, and that Friday she left in the middle of the afternoon. According to biographers Higgins and Moseley, she and Ryan never saw each other again after Berlin Express,37 though Ryan and Lucien Ballard would make four more pictures together.*
Somehow RKO managed to keep the whole mess out of the scandal sheets; however, the much-feared gossip columnist Louella Parsons twitted Ryan about it in a February 1948 profile. (“There had been a lot of talk about feuding in the ‘Berlin Express’ troupe, and I asked Bob if that were true,” wrote Parsons. “I had heard that he and Merle Oberon had been particularly bitter in their quarrel.”)38 From that point on, Ryan’s movie-magazine pictorials stressed fatherhood, with Tim becoming a frequent participant. How Bob and Jessica dealt with the affair would remain private, but soon after he returned from Europe, they decided to buy a house in the San Fernando Valley, far from the Hollywood social scene.
A certain amount of hobnobbing was required to keep one’s career going, but Jessica didn’t like actors or the parties they threw. “As a wife, you met the same people over and over again,” she wrote in a later memoir, “because they didn’t recognize you unless you were standing right beside your husband, and even then they weren’t always sure you were the wife. It was spooky.” By now she had published her second mystery for Doubleday and was working on a third, but no one was interested in that. She would start conversations with people and then see their eyes darting about in search of someone more important. “If you were a wife you got very tactful about releasing any poor sap quickly to go do business … and then ended up sitting tensely with other tense wives trying their best to look as if they were having a good time.”39
She reached her limit one night when she and Robert attended a swank party and she was immediately shunted off to the side with her friends Amanda Dunne and Joan Houseman. Robert, Philip Dunne, and John Houseman were off somewhere having lively conversations. “That night Joan Houseman’s solution to the condition of non-being was to retreat to a corner of the vast living room of the vast house and get quietly smashed,” Jessica wrote, “while she stared at the crowd with an expression of splendid French contempt.”40 Amanda and Jessica began tossing back drinks as well, until Amanda stood up suddenly, looking as if she might be ill, and went off in search of a bathroom.
Left alone, Jessica strolled into the host’s library to find some reading material, and before long Amanda burst into the room, looking rather crazed. “There’s a room full of dead animals out there!” she exclaimed. Jessica followed her back into a coatroom where all the women’s furs were hung. This was too much for Jessica, and she told Robert she was going out for some air. “Once outside in the car, I went quietly into hysterics,” she wrote. “The condition of non-being produces intense anxiety.”41
On Kling Street, just east of Cahuenga Boulevard in North Hollywood, the Ryans found an A-frame ranch house with a paved terrace and a bare, spacious yard. “It was the biggest house we could get with the most ground for the least money at a time when we still did not trust — I didn’t trust — that the money would keep coming in,” Jessica wrote. “Robert never doubted it, but he had never been as poor as I had been.”42 The couple landscaped the place themselves (planting ivy that eventually ran riot over the house) and began adding wings. The shed in the backyard was converted into Ryan’s private office and workout room. This was the first time Ryan had actually owned a home — his parents had rented all their lives — and the suburban locale suited his reclusive nature.
The place was modest but comfortable, with plenty of room for the kids to run around; he and Jessica installed a sandbox, a swing set, and a wading pool. “Facing the garden is a wide, airy living room with almost one whole wall of glass, opening onto the terrace,” noted a visiting journalist. “A beautiful antique chest dominates one end. The chairs and divans are tailored and comfortable; the tables low and wide … The muted greens and grays and blues of walls, carpets, and upholstery are brightened by huge bouquets of fresh garden flowers.”43
Ryan made sure the reporter understood that social gatherings at their home were limited to their close circle of friends, not the movers and shakers of the picture business. He and Jessica were perfectly happy with each other’s company. Philip Dunne would marvel at Ryan’s “tremendous devotion to his family. He was the most family-oriented man I ever knew.”44
Ryan tending to chores at the new house on Kling Street in North Hollywood. His years there with Jessica and their young children were among his happiest. Robert Ryan Family
In December 1947, Ryan made a quick trip to Chicago to address the national Conference of Christians and Jews, pinch-hitting for Dore Schary. “He began to be asked to speak before Jewish groups to discuss anti-Semitism,” Jessica recalled. “In the beginning, the doing of it appeared to be for publicity for the movie … but when that phase was over, they wouldn’t let him go. For a long time there he was playing what he called the Synagogue Circuit.”45
From there Ryan flew to New York to see some plays. Since Crossfire had hit, he had been fielding offers from Broadway, but his calendar for 1948 already was filling up with pictures. RKO announced that he would costar with Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra, and Robert Mitchum in Honored Glory, an episodic drama about nine unidentified men, killed in action during World War II, whose stories make them candidates for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (the film would never be made).46 MGM wanted to borrow Ryan for the revenge drama Act of Violence. And Schary, who had been trumpeting Crossfire as proof that A pictures could be made on B budgets, was ready to move forward with his next such experiment: The Set-Up, a boxing drama