Express’ troupe, and I asked Bob if that were true,” wrote Parsons. “I had heard that he and Merle Oberon had been particularly bitter in their quarrel.”)38 From that point on, Ryan’s movie-magazine pictorials stressed fatherhood, with Tim becoming a frequent participant. How Bob and Jessica dealt with the affair would remain private, but soon after he returned from Europe, they decided to buy a house in the San Fernando Valley, far from the Hollywood social scene.
A certain amount of hobnobbing was required to keep one’s career going, but Jessica didn’t like actors or the parties they threw. “As a wife, you met the same people over and over again,” she wrote in a later memoir, “because they didn’t recognize you unless you were standing right beside your husband, and even then they weren’t always sure you were the wife. It was spooky.” By now she had published her second mystery for Doubleday and was working on a third, but no one was interested in that. She would start conversations with people and then see their eyes darting about in search of someone more important. “If you were a wife you got very tactful about releasing any poor sap quickly to go do business … and then ended up sitting tensely with other tense wives trying their best to look as if they were having a good time.”39
She reached her limit one night when she and Robert attended a swank party and she was immediately shunted off to the side with her friends Amanda Dunne and Joan Houseman. Robert, Philip Dunne, and John Houseman were off somewhere having lively conversations. “That night Joan Houseman’s solution to the condition of non-being was to retreat to a corner of the vast living room of the vast house and get quietly smashed,” Jessica wrote, “while she stared at the crowd with an expression of splendid French contempt.”40 Amanda and Jessica began tossing back drinks as well, until Amanda stood up suddenly, looking as if she might be ill, and went off in search of a bathroom.
Left alone, Jessica strolled into the host’s library to find some reading material, and before long Amanda burst into the room, looking rather crazed. “There’s a room full of dead animals out there!” she exclaimed. Jessica followed her back into a coatroom where all the women’s furs were hung. This was too much for Jessica, and she told Robert she was going out for some air. “Once outside in the car, I went quietly into hysterics,” she wrote. “The condition of non-being produces intense anxiety.”41
On Kling Street, just east of Cahuenga Boulevard in North Hollywood, the Ryans found an A-frame ranch house with a paved terrace and a bare, spacious yard. “It was the biggest house we could get with the most ground for the least money at a time when we still did not trust — I didn’t trust — that the money would keep coming in,” Jessica wrote. “Robert never doubted it, but he had never been as poor as I had been.”42 The couple landscaped the place themselves (planting ivy that eventually ran riot over the house) and began adding wings. The shed in the backyard was converted into Ryan’s private office and workout room. This was the first time Ryan had actually owned a home — his parents had rented all their lives — and the suburban locale suited his reclusive nature.
The place was modest but comfortable, with plenty of room for the kids to run around; he and Jessica installed a sandbox, a swing set, and a wading pool. “Facing the garden is a wide, airy living room with almost one whole wall of glass, opening onto the terrace,” noted a visiting journalist. “A beautiful antique chest dominates one end. The chairs and divans are tailored and comfortable; the tables low and wide … The muted greens and grays and blues of walls, carpets, and upholstery are brightened by huge bouquets of fresh garden flowers.”43
Ryan made sure the reporter understood that social gatherings at their home were limited to their close circle of friends, not the movers and shakers of the picture business. He and Jessica were perfectly happy with each other’s company. Philip Dunne would marvel at Ryan’s “tremendous devotion to his family. He was the most family-oriented man I ever knew.”44
Ryan tending to chores at the new house on Kling Street in North Hollywood. His years there with Jessica and their young children were among his happiest. Robert Ryan Family
In December 1947, Ryan made a quick trip to Chicago to address the national Conference of Christians and Jews, pinch-hitting for Dore Schary. “He began to be asked to speak before Jewish groups to discuss anti-Semitism,” Jessica recalled. “In the beginning, the doing of it appeared to be for publicity for the movie … but when that phase was over, they wouldn’t let him go. For a long time there he was playing what he called the Synagogue Circuit.”45
From there Ryan flew to New York to see some plays. Since Crossfire had hit, he had been fielding offers from Broadway, but his calendar for 1948 already was filling up with pictures. RKO announced that he would costar with Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra, and Robert Mitchum in Honored Glory, an episodic drama about nine unidentified men, killed in action during World War II, whose stories make them candidates for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (the film would never be made).46 MGM wanted to borrow Ryan for the revenge drama Act of Violence. And Schary, who had been trumpeting Crossfire as proof that A pictures could be made on B budgets, was ready to move forward with his next such experiment: The Set-Up, a boxing drama about a washed-up fighter staring down his bleak future. The source material was Joseph Moncure March’s narrative poem of the same title, a favorite of Ryan’s at Dartmouth.
His first assignment that year was RKO’s antiwar parable The Boy with Green Hair, adapted from a short story by Betsy Beaton. Filmed in Technicolor, it starred eleven-year-old Dean Stockwell as a schoolboy who has been passed from relative to relative while his parents are overseas.* Eventually he lands in a bucolic small town with a kindly old Irish-American gent (Pat O’Brien) and begins to make a life for himself, but then he learns the truth about his parents — they were killed in London during the blitz — and the trauma turns his hair green overnight.
The project had originated with Adrian Scott, himself the adoptive father of a traumatized British war orphan; but after Scott was fired by RKO, Schary handed The Boy with Green Hair over to producer Stephen Ames and firsttime movie director Joseph Losey. A senior at Dartmouth when Ryan was a freshman, Losey had studied with Bertolt Brecht in Germany and in 1935 had traveled to the Soviet Union, where he staged Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty in Moscow. His latest theatrical project had been an acclaimed Broadway production of Brecht’s Galileo, performed in English for the first time and starring Charles Laughton.
Fresh from the rubble and hungry children of Frankfurt and Berlin, Ryan couldn’t have been more sympathetic to The Boy with Green Hair. His second-billed part consisted of only one extended scene with Stockwell, which took two days to shoot; even so, it would remain one of the picture’s best-liked sequences. At a police station one night, cops fire questions at Peter, the brooding and now bald-headed boy. Ryan plays Dr. Evans, a laid-back child psychologist who arrives with a brown-bag dinner and asks the cops to leave them alone. Children who grew up around the actor would remember his uncondescending manner toward them, and he incorporates it here to fine effect. Evans wordlessly changes the lighting in the room, taking an overhead spot off them, and asks Peter to move to a chair so he can have the bench for his dinner. “Chocolate malted milk,” he notes, frowning into the cup. “I’m sure I asked for strawberry.” They both know it’s a game, but Peter is starving; he takes the malted and digs into a hamburger, and his responses to the doctor’s questions trigger a series of flashbacks.
The Boy with Green Hair can be cloying and moralistic, but there are genuine moments of fear and anger as well. Peter, having learned of his parents’ death, is stocking shelves at a local grocery and overhears three women debating the Cold War. Losey follows his face, shooting him through cabinets and shelves as the women’s voices hover off-screen. “People say another war
