an account of the personal chaos inspired by Oberon during the trip. The delicate British beauty had outmaneuvered him already by getting Schary to name her husband, Lucien Ballard, as cinematographer; the couple would be rooming together. The company was lodged at the Hôtel George V, just off the Champs-Élysées, but Oberon, in a standard movie-star power play, insisted that she and Ballard stay at the palatial Hôtel Ritz on the Place Vendôme. Ballard, an Oklahoman of part-Cherokee descent, was tall, athletic, cultured, and handsome; he had won Oberon’s heart by inventing a small spotlight that attached to the camera and helped minimize her facial scars from a 1937 car accident.*
“By the time we settled in Paris, Merle had developed a deep passion for Robert Ryan,” wrote Granet. “He was tough looking but at heart he was a happily married pussycat. He was not even fair game for someone of Merle’s sexual talents. She would tease him then cool it.”7 Born in Bombay to a Welsh father and an Indian mother, Oberon had spent her adult life concealing the mixed parentage that would have ended her career as an actress in Britain and the United States. For six years she had been married to the great British producer Alexander Korda, who cast her opposite Laurence Olivier in Wuthering Heights (1939), but in 1945 she had left Korda for Ballard. She obsessed over her beauty and exulted in her status, spoiling herself with clothing and gems. Oberon was high-strung and wildly romantic — among her previous lovers were Leslie Howard, David Niven, George Brent, and the heroic RAF pilot Richard Hillary.
During the company’s stay in Paris, wrote Granet, Oberon urged him and his wife, Charlotte, to throw a dinner party in their suite and invite Ryan. That evening she arrived hours late, dressed to the nines in a black evening gown and accompanied by a dapper Englishman; later she confessed to Charlotte that she was trying to make Ryan jealous. “By the time we were shooting in Frankfurt, she had successfully bedded Ryan,” Granet reported. “Since Lucien … was constantly on location, all he could do was develop suspicions. Merle successfully made him believe that it was Charles Korvin who was making a pass at her.”8
Ryan with Merle Oberon in Berlin Express (1948). Their affair unfolded amid the chaos and deprivation of postwar France and Germany. Film Noir Foundation
Korvin, a Hungarian actor playing one of the villains, had already shot two pictures with Oberon, and the two despised each other. More than thirty years later, after her death, Korvin told celebrity biographers Charles Higham and Roy Moseley that Oberon deserted Ballard on more than one occasion to spend the night with Ryan, first on the cross-country train from Paris and then in Frankfurt (where the crew lodged at hotels in the center of town and the cast was billeted at a castle in Bad Nauheim, thirty-five kilometers north of the city). “I know that she slept with Ryan both in Hollywood and in Europe and I thought it unfair and cruel of her,” Korvin remembered. “I objected to the affair and so did everyone else on the picture.”9
Political argument only added to the tension. When Ryan asked his fellow cast members how they felt about General Marshall’s vision for postwar Europe, the idea of economic aid for Germany got a cool reception. Coote and Oberon had endured the London blitz. Korvin and Paul Lukas, both Hungarian, had been personally touched by the Holocaust, and Toporow, who was Polish, loathed the Germans and the Russians alike. “How can you let 80 million people starve?” Ryan would ask.10 Invariably they dismissed him as naïve or softhearted; mass starvation, said one, would be no less than the German people deserved.
Their resolve began to melt away as they got a look at Frankfurt: entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble, middle-class people reduced to beggars. More than fifty-five hundred had been killed in the bombardment, and the medieval city center, the Römer, had been completely destroyed. In Berlin Express, Ryan and Oberon venture into the neighborhood and discover a maze of shoulder-high rubble, like a bizarre sculpture garden. Another scene shows Ryan staring grimly out a bus window as people walk the streets with suitcases full of belongings for sale; in the train station he tosses away a cigarette and two shabby men race like pigeons to scoop it up. The children they encountered on location were “emaciated, shocked and sick,” Ryan later wrote, with “old faces and rickety bodies.”11 By the end of the first week, he remembered, no one talked anymore about the justice of letting people starve.
From Frankfurt the company flew to Berlin, where principal photography began on Saturday, August 2. This time the company stayed in Zehlendorf, about fifteen miles from downtown, near the US occupation forces headquarters, and cast members were chauffeured about in a car that had belonged to Hitler’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. More than three years after the Allied bombing, Berlin was still a boneyard of gray, jagged, hollowed-out buildings, block after block, mile after mile. Unter den Linden, once the capital city’s most majestic boulevard, was bare now, its namesake linden trees destroyed or chopped down for firewood. The great Reichstag was an empty shell, the lush Hotel Adlon bombed out and boarded up. Out for a stroll one night, Ryan fell into a bomb crater.
The poverty on the streets was overwhelming: Germans clustered around the locations, pleading for work as grips or extras. One well-known theater actor offered to work for a pair of pants, then came back the next day and said he wanted food for his family instead. Granet gave him both, and a check. “It is hard to visualize a world where the standard of currency is simply the cigarette,” he wrote.12 Chocolate bars were equally prized, and Ryan used them to pay the woman who ironed his shirts. “There seemed to be very little bitterness on the part of the Germans who worked with us,” Ryan wrote. “A grip, hoisting a heavy prop one day, laughed and said, ‘There goes my 1,500 calories.’”13
Apart from soldiers and government staffers, most of the other Americans in Berlin were journalists, who congregated at the press club and treated the movie people with smirking condescension. “As our visit wore on, the frost melted,” Ryan would write. “Fortunately there were no jokers in our company. Nobody tried to dress up like Hitler and make a speech from the famous balcony. Nobody got drunk or was carted off to jail.”14 The Russians were suspicious when cast and crew arrived to shoot in the Soviet sector, though Ryan saw no evidence of the military might he had expected, “no streets bristling with machine guns, no bayonets — as a matter of fact, almost no Russians.”15 Their chilly reception contrasted sharply with the picture’s final scene, in which the American and the Russian mend their ongoing political quarrel with a brotherly wave outside the Brandenberg Gate.
The last week in Berlin the company enjoyed a picnic on the Rhine River, courtesy of the US Army, and a party at the press club, attended by reporters and military people. There followed another nine days of photography in Frankfurt and four more in Paris. According to Granet, Ballard and Korvin came to blows during one train trip. When the company arrived in London, Oberon refused to fly back to New York and persuaded Granet to send her, Ballard, and Ryan on the Queen Mary out of Southampton. News photographers snapped photos of Ryan, grinning angrily and fiddling with his hat, as he escorted Oberon through Waterloo Station.
Decades later, when the affair had become a distant memory, Ryan would share with Harold Kennedy, his theatrical colleague and drinking buddy, a curious anecdote about his Atlantic crossing with a beautiful costar and her cameraman husband. As Ryan framed it, the woman had been making passes at him throughout the journey and cornered him late one night as he was taking the air on deck; getting no response to her come-ons, she pounced, knocked him down, and refused to let him up. Suddenly her husband “materialized on the deck, lifted her up, reached down and took hold of Bob’s shoulder, assisted him to his feet, and then, after apologizing to him profusely, blackened both of the lady’s eyes.”16
Ryan had an Irishman’s way with a story — he wasn’t the sort of man to stand by while someone was hitting a woman — but then Granet also reported rumors of noisy fights between Ballard and Oberon on the voyage
