The Lives of Robert Ryan. J.R. Jones
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From Detroit, Clash by Night moved on to Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia, where Bankhead came down with pneumonia and the show was shut down (as the star, she had no understudy). While the cast and crew cooled their heels in New York, waiting for her to recover, Ryan scored an interview for the lead role in a Hollywood prestige picture to begin shooting the next year. Pare Lorentz — whose acclaimed documentary shorts The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1938) had won him a brief but controversial tenure as director of the US Film Office — had signed with RKO Radio Pictures to direct a dramatic feature about a war veteran trying to make ends meet during the Depression, to be titled Name, Age and Occupation. For six months he had been crisscrossing the country in search of an actor skillful enough to play the role but credible enough to function in the semidocumentary format Lorentz envisioned. Finally, he turned to his friend John Houseman, an erudite British producer who had collaborated famously with Orson Welles.
Working for the Federal Theatre Project, Houseman and Welles had staged the “voodoo” Macbeth (1935), which transplanted the Shakespeare play to a Caribbean island, and the proletarian musical The Cradle Will Rock (1937), which proved too hot for the government and inspired them to launch the independent Mercury Theatre. Houseman and Welles had gone on to create the CBS radio broadcast The War of the Worlds, which had terrified the nation with its too-convincing account of a martian invasion, and the RKO drama Citizen Kane (1941), whose critical acclaim had now emboldened the studio to bankroll Lorentz’s ambitious project. Houseman arranged for Lorentz and himself to spend a week interviewing actors in a Manhattan hotel suite. When Ryan arrived to read for the part, his acting must have impressed them, but what really won over Lorentz was Ryan’s endless litany of soul-crushing jobs in the depths of the Depression. Here was a man who not only could play the part but already had lived it.
In the 1972 memoir Run-Through, Houseman would remember traveling by train with Lorentz through western Kansas and hearing on the radio in the club car that the Imperial Japanese Navy had attacked the US air base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, killing and wounding thousands of Americans. The next day the United States and United Kingdom declared war on Japan. Three weeks later, Clash by Night opened on Broadway at the Belasco Theatre, its take on the national mood decisively outpaced by world events. Reviews were scathing, though the players got good notices for their work, Ryan included; most critics went to town on Odets, citing a lack of passion and fresh characterization. The play closed on February 7, 1942, after only forty-nine performances, but not before Ryan was seen by such luminaries as Greta Garbo, Judith Anderson, Ruth Gordon, and Thornton Wilder.
“Ryan’s was a small part,” remembered Tony Randall, then a young actor starting out in New York, “but he was very, very good.”32 According to one news story, Ryan was “showered” with offers from New York producers, including one from the Theater Guild to appear in a new play with Katharine Hepburn.33 The attention went to his head. He would remember “swaggering” into Bankhead’s dressing room one night and “demanding to know how long it was going to take before I was a really great actor. I expected her to say a year or so. But instead she said very quietly, ‘In 15 or 20 years you may be a good actor, Bob — if you’re lucky.’”34
*For more on this fascinating topic, see Martha Hope Bacon, Mothers of Feminism: The Story of Quaker Women in America (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986).
†The picture was loosely based on the story of Arch Ward, a Chicago Tribune sports editor who had founded the tournament in the 1920s.
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Bombs Away
Soon after the Odets play breathed its last, Ryan found himself in Tennessee shooting locations for Name, Age and Occupation with director Pare Lorentz and actress Frances Dee. The movie’s story dated back to a novel Lorentz had begun in 1931: an eighteen-year-old boy from North Carolina fights overseas in the Great War but finds nothing waiting for him back home except a series of dehumanizing farm and factory jobs. As Houseman explained, the movie would explore “the condition of the US industrial worker with special emphasis on the economic and emotional effects of the production line.”1
Lorentz already had tried mixing actors with real people, to less than stellar effect, in his documentary The Fight for Life (1940), about the Chicago Maternity Center and infant mortality in the slums. But George Schaefer, president of Radio-Keith-Orpheum, was prepared to take a gamble on the director; before Ryan even reported for work, Lorentz and cinematographer Floyd Crosby had spent twenty days shooting industrial operations at Ford’s River Rouge Plant and a US Army facility. Location shooting continued through the spring, and in June the company arrived in Los Angeles to spend four weeks shooting interiors on the Pathé lot in Culver City.
That same month, fed up with Schaefer’s artistic pretensions and dismal bottom line, the RKO board replaced him with N. Peter Rathvon and installed Ned Depinet as president of the movie division, RKO Radio Pictures. Charles Koerner, the new, commercial-minded head of production, immediately targeted two runaway films: It’s All True, which Orson Welles had been shooting in Brazil since early that year, and Name, Age and Occupation. Lorentz, observed director Edward Dmytryk, was “a fine critic, a top maker of documentaries, but completely lost in straight drama. After 90 days of shooting, he was 87 days behind schedule.”2
Ryan on location with director Pare Lorentz for the ill-fated Name, Age and Occupation. Their RKO colleague Edward Dmytryk called Lorentz “a fine critic, a top maker of documentaries, but completely lost in straight drama. After 90 days of shooting, he was 87 days behind schedule.” Robert Ryan Family
In late June, RKO halted production of Name, Age and Occupation and asked Lorentz for a financial accounting.3 He must have seen the writing on the wall when Koerner announced his production plans for 1942–43: $12 million was budgeted for only forty-five features, and in contrast to the literary projects favored by his predecessor, RKO would be aiming for good, solid box office by making patriotic movies for the home front. Name, Age and Occupation, with its Depression setting and heavy themes, hardly filled that bill, and after screening rushes, RKO executives killed the project.
They liked Ryan, however, and signed him to a $600-a-week contract; under Schaefer the movie division had developed a shortage of leading men, exacerbated now by the many actors enlisting in the armed forces. “Without the talent shortage I would very likely have still been grubbing around New York for 40 a week jobs where I more or less belonged at my stage of the game,” Ryan confessed in a letter to a friend.4 He and Jessica moved their belongings back to Los Angeles and rented a house in Silverlake, which they shared with Ryan’s fifty-nine-year-old mother, Mabel. By October he had his first assignment from RKO, a picture about the US Army Air Forces called Bombardier. With this new job, the couple decided the time had come for children. Before long Jessica was pregnant, but she miscarried early the next year, another sad bond for two partners who had each lost a sibling in childhood.
With Clash by Night and now Name, Age and Occupation, Ryan had been involved with two prestigious dramas that crashed and burned yet elevated him professionally. Two years after his pink slip from Paramount, he was back in Hollywood earning nearly five times as much from RKO. Boom times had returned to Hollywood with