another script. Pat O’Brien wanted Ryan to costar with him in a war picture called Marine Raiders, about the Marines’ new amphibious commando units. The script was lousy, with tedious love scenes and chest-thumping heroics. In one jungle scene Ryan’s impetuous captain finds a fellow marine who has been killed and desecrated by the Japanese; enraged, he goes charging into the enemy’s position spraying machine gun fire.
To play something like this at Camp Pendleton in San Diego County, where Marine Raiders would be shot as less fortunate men actually shipped out for the Pacific, must have filled Ryan with the sort of manly shame he had felt as a male model. Stars the stature of James Stewart and Robert Montgomery had enlisted and taken combat assignments; even Pat O’Brien put himself in harm’s way entertaining troops in northern Africa and Southeast Asia. As part of the deal struck by RKO, Ryan asked to be discharged from the army so that he could enlist in the Marines, which would mean a greater chance of seeing combat. The Marines, in turn, would give him a deferment until January 1, 1944, so that he could make the picture.
Marine Raiders didn’t wrap until late January, however, and by that time the Marines had granted Ryan a second deferment through February 15. Shortly before the picture was completed, the commanding general at Camp Elliott in San Diego wrote to Marine Corps Commandant Alexander Vandergrift to request a third deferment through April 15, so that Ryan could appear opposite Rosalind Russell in Sister Kenny, a biopic of the Australian nurse who had developed a radical new treatment for polio. Vandergrift would have none of this, and Ryan was ordered to report for duty on the fifteenth as previously agreed. RKO was offering him a “duration contract,” which meant that he would be welcomed back to the studio upon his discharge from the service. Behind the Rising Sun had been released in August and, partly on the strength of Ryan’s much-talked-about fight scene, turned a jaw-dropping $1.5 million profit.
In a movie magazine piece that appeared under her byline, Jessica recalled “the dreary building in downtown Los Angeles” where she dropped Robert off for his Marine Corps induction. “It was that ungodly hour of the morning, at which time all good men seem to have to go to the aid of their country.”12 They said their good-byes, she drove away weeping, and Ryan finally joined the war.
*Though still working his way up in bit roles, Mazurki would play heavies in movies and TV for another fifty years, most memorably in Murder, My Sweet (1944).
four
You Know the Kind
If Ryan had any hope of remaining unnoticed in the ranks, they were diminished when he learned from a fellow recruit at the LA induction center that a letter from the Marine Corps — which Ryan had never gotten — listed toiletries and other items they should bring with them. A private on duty offered to pick up some things for him, and Ryan got off the bus in San Diego carrying his belongings in a brown paper bag. A Marine Corps photographer was there to meet him, snapping pictures as he turned in his travel orders, got fitted for fatigues, sat for a regulation army haircut, went through a classification interview, and picked up his gear from the quartermaster’s depot. After that he was on his own and wondering how he would be received. When he had been at the base earlier, shooting Marine Raiders, an officer had told him that movie boys were liable to get roughed up in the Corps, but Ryan didn’t have any trouble. He mentioned this to a bunkmate; the man replied, “Most of these guys saw you bat that Jap around in Behind the Rising Sun.”1
Basic training commenced at Camp Pendleton, about an hour north of the San Diego base. Established as a Spanish 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
