judo, boxing and such at Camp Pendleton.”6 Now classified as a combat conditioner, Ryan would spend his days training men for battle; in May he was promoted to private first class, and in August he was reclassified again, as a combat swimming instructor.
Thousands of Americans spent the war this way — not quite at home, not quite at battle. “Theirs is the task of the damned,” wrote Richard Brooks in a prefatory note to his novel The Brick Foxhole. “These men see others trained and shipped off to ports of embarkation, but they themselves are always left behind. They brood over it, and in the end they become disappointed, introverted, and embittered.”7 Ryan read the book with great interest when it was published in May 1945; the author was actually stationed at Pendleton, and according to scuttlebutt, the publication had brought him a court-martial. At the center of The Brick Foxhole was an ugly sequence in which soldiers at liberty in Washington, DC, go home with a homosexual man for some late-night drinking and wind up beating him to death. Ryan was struck immediately by the book’s frank depiction of the bilious prejudice on open display at Pendleton.
Robert and Jessica (circa 1944). While he drilled recruits at Camp Pendleton, she struck out on her own as a magazine writer and novelist. Robert Ryan Family
Of particular fascination was the character of Montgomery Crawford, the bullying sergeant who drags the other men into this murderous episode. Monty has served as a beat cop in Chicago and likes people to know he’s killed a Jew and two black men in the line of duty. He “always shot niggers in the belly because then they didn’t die right away and they squirmed like hell.” Ryan had known guys like this before — cruel, jingoistic, worshipful of authority. Monty “shook hands with too firm a grip and he would openly cry when the post band played ‘God Bless America.’”8
Ryan tracked Brooks down to tender his compliments, and the two met in the library at Camp Pendleton. Brooks was tall and athletic — for a while he had considered a career as a pro baseball player — and favored a pipe that belied his short temper. Born to Russian Jewish parents in Philadelphia, he had grown up in poverty and gotten his start as a writer during the Depression by riding the rails and reporting on his experiences for local newspapers. From there he had moved into radio drama in New York and, in a weird coincidence, cofounded and then quit the dreaded Millpond Playhouse the summer before the Ryans performed there. Out on the West Coast Brooks found work writing for NBC Radio in Los Angeles, and as a screenwriter at Universal he knocked out a couple of jungle pictures for Maria Montez before enlisting in the Marines. Rumors of a court-martial over The Brick Foxhole were true, though the Marines, realizing that more publicity would only enlarge the book’s audience, had ultimately dropped the case.
Brooks undoubtedly knew Ryan from his good-guy roles at RKO, and to his surprise the actor told him that, if The Brick Foxhole were ever filmed, he wanted to play Monty. Anyone could see the physical resemblance — Brooks had described Monty as “more than six feet tall” with “a pair of small, bright eyes”9 — but why would a lead player want a role like this? “I know that son of a bitch,” Ryan explained. “No one knows him better than I do.”10
In fact, Ryan’s experience as a combat conditioner — teaching men to kill and wondering if they would ever come back alive — was turning him against the military. When he wrote to his old Dartmouth pal Al Dickerson in early summer 1945, he took a dim view of his own contribution to the war. “I certainly haven’t made any ‘sacrifice,’” he admitted, “especially when you add the fact that I have sat on my ass stateside for 16 months while a lot of my buddies went on to Saipan and Iwo…. I will not bore you with the too well known complaints against the military. War is a stupid institution when it isn’t being sinful and tragic and catastrophic.”11 By the time he got out of the Marines he would come to 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,
