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 Millpond Playhouse, a summer stock theater in Roslyn, Long Island. The productions tended toward mystery and comedy; the company, Ryan recalled, was “appalling, being mostly bad amateurs.”24 In The Barker he played a carnival barker and Jessica a hootchie cootchie dancer; two weeks later they costarred again in something called Petticoat Fever. Millpond staged a mystery play Jessica had written, The Dark Corner, and in the comedy Angel Child, Ryan costarred with twenty-two-year-old Cameron Mitchell. The highlight of the season was William Saroyan’s philosophical barroom comedy The Time of Your Life, starring Ryan as the rich drunk, Joe, who encourages the other barflies to live life to the fullest.
The Ryans bailed out soon afterward, landing first at the Robin Hood Theater in Arden, Delaware, and then at the Cape Playhouse in Dennis, Massachusetts, where Ryan won a romantic role opposite the celebrated Luise Rainer in J. M. Barrie’s comic fantasy A Kiss for Cinderella. Set in London during World War I, the class-conscious fantasy told the story of a poor cleaning woman, played by Rainer, who dreams that she is Cinderella and the neighborhood constable, to be played by Ryan, is Prince Charming. This guy is going to be a big star, thought Robert Wallsten, a fellow cast member, as he watched Ryan rehearse. “I had no idea about his dramatic ability, and playing this Irish bobby was not a very serious role. But he had a corner on that Irish charm, and there was that magic grin…. It was the smile that was so warm and engulfing, and so endearing.”25 Wallsten would become one of the Ryans’ oldest friends.
From Dennis the production moved to the Maplewood Theatre in Maplewood, New Jersey, where Ryan caught an extraordinary break. Rainer had been married to Clifford Odets, a founder of the Group Theatre and one of the most daring American playwrights of the day (Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing!); with the recent demise of the Group, Odets had sold his play Clash by Night to showbiz impresario Billy Rose, who was mounting a Broadway production with Lee Strasberg, another Group founder, as director. The play dealt with an unhappy working-class couple on Staten Island, but in a larger sense it considered the restive political mood in America as the war in Europe raged on. Tallulah Bankhead, hailed for her recent performance in Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, had signed to play the bored and frustrated wife; Lee J. Cobb, among the Group’s most gifted actors, was cast as her dense but devoted husband; and Joseph Schildkraut, a longtime stage and screen veteran who had won an Oscar playing Alfred Dreyfus in The Life of Émile Zola, was the husband’s cynical friend, who moves in on the wife. For the minor role of Joe Doyle, a young neighbor with romantic problems of his own, Rainer urged Odets to consider her handsome young lead in A Kiss for Cinderella.
Rose took Bankhead out to Maplewood to see the show, and she liked Ryan. Soon after A Kiss for Cinderella closed on September 23, 1941, he was rehearsing Clash by Night in New York City. One can only imagine his excitement: four months earlier he had been slugging it out at the Millpond Playhouse, and now he would be making his Broadway debut in a cutting-edge social drama, alongside some of the most respected talents in the American theater. He had seen Bankhead in The Little Foxes and thought her an extraordinary actress.26 A world-class diva, she could be witheringly cruel to colleagues, but she took a shine to him during rehearsals. When he introduced her to Jessica, who had been modeling to help meet the rent, Bankhead quipped, “If I was fifteen years younger I’d take him away from you.”27 The Ryans laughed, though Jessica couldn’t have been too pleased. She would spend the next thirty years meeting women who were less frank but similarly inclined.
“Tallulah was a stereotype of what the public thinks star actresses are like: they really aren’t except in her case,” Ryan would remember. “She liked some kind of excitement going on and didn’t much care where it came from.” At the same time Bankhead was a consummate professional, the first to arrive and the last to leave, and always with her part down cold. She might challenge Strasberg or Odets in rehearsal, yet in performance she could be remarkably generous toward other players. “She was a great experience,” Ryan would conclude, “and she came along at a most important time in my life.”28
Unfortunately, the production quickly degenerated into a snake pit of professional rivalries and personal grudges, from which Ryan was lucky enough to be excepted. Bankhead despised Billy Rose, a diminutive casting-couch type whose theatrical résumé consisted mainly of brassy revues. “He approached the Odets play as if he were putting on a rodeo,” she later wrote.29 An elegant presence onstage, Bankhead had taken the role of the drab housewife as a dramatic stretch, but when the play began its out-of-town tryouts in Detroit, critics decided she had been miscast, favoring Lee Cobb’s performance as the husband. “That was when the shit hit the fan,” Ryan remembered.30 Bankhead and Katherine Locke, who played Ryan’s girlfriend, soon fell out, united by nothing except their dislike of Schildkraut, whom Locke later accused of putting the moves on her.31
Though some of these conflicts sprang from ego or personal enmity, the production was built on an artistic fault line that would become more apparent in years to come: on one side were the more traditionally trained actors such as Ryan, Bankhead, and Schildkraut, and on the other were proponents of the Method such as Cobb and Strasberg, the latter of whom would institutionalize the techniques of tapping into one’s own emotional experience when he founded the Actors Studio six years later. Method acting could be fresh, genuine, even explosive, but it could
