ever let on. “Every actor has at least two selves,” he said. “There’s the outside self that takes part in family life and society and the inside self who is someone else.”5
I gained an unexpected insight into Ryan’s inner life in 2009, when I got the chance to read an undated, twenty-page manuscript he had written for his children and then filed away and forgotten. Uncovered by his youngest child, Lisa, and passed along to Michael Miner, my colleague at the Chicago Reader, it was a brief history of Ryan’s years growing up in the city, warmly nostalgic in its recollections of the North Side and his extended Irish family. But it also contained references that, as I began to investigate, led me to a scandal undocumented in any account of Ryan’s life. His father, Timothy, and three uncles operated the politically well-connected Ryan Company, a firm that specialized in rail and sewer tunnel construction. In April 1931 Timothy Ryan was personally responsible for a South Side project where a disastrous subterranean fire lasting some twenty hours claimed the lives of twelve men and injured another fifty.
One should always take care when connecting an actor’s life to his roles. But if Ryan was indeed the puzzle that so many claimed, this tragic story supplies at least one piece of it, helping us understand the power and insight he brought to so many of his tortured characters. Conscience runs like a gold thread through many of his key performances. Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground (1952) presents Ryan as a brutal policeman forced to reckon with his rage when he meets a blind woman, played by Ida Lupino, who challenges him to find his better self. In The Professionals (1967) he’s a horse wrangler who hires on to help rescue a kidnapped woman but antagonizes his partners by peeling away the heroic façade of their mission; in The Wild Bunch (1969) he’s an outlaw who can barely live with himself after cutting a deal with the law to track down his old friend. More broadly, Ryan’s political and social conscience sharply influenced his choice of roles, especially after he was freed from his RKO contract in the early 1950s and could exercise somewhat more control over the films he was making.
Even more revealing than Ryan’s manuscript are the several unpublished memoirs Jessica Ryan left behind at the time of her death in 1972. Witty and acutely observed, these pieces illuminate her husband’s character and her own, particularly their aversion to Hollywood social life. They provide the clearest picture of Ryan’s political skills, honed from years of exposure to the inner workings of machine politics. They also offer a rare female perspective on a Hollywood dominated by men and, in Ryan’s case, populated by such macho characters as Mann, Fuller, Lee Marvin, Robert Mitchum, Richard Brooks, André de Toth, Sam Peckinpah, and John Wayne. Ryan may have been famous for his tough-guy roles in westerns and crime pictures, but when his wife passed away, his sense of self began to crumble.
The more I explored the Ryans’ lives, the more I realized that here was not just the story of a movie star but a pocket history of American liberalism, stretching from a war against fascism in Europe that united the country to a war against communism in Southeast Asia that bitterly divided it. This struggle played out in Ryan’s screen life, which he began as an eager army flyboy in Bombardier (1943) and ended as a right-wing millionaire conspiring to kill President Kennedy in Executive Action (1973). It defined his public life, where he fought the good fight in the coldest years of the Cold War, his compromises as revealing as his victories. It also animated a good deal of his inner life, a place where men guard their secrets and, sometimes, take them to their final rest.
the lives of ROBERT RYAN
one
Inferno
The day Robert Ryan turned nine, the entire nation celebrated. All weekend long had come word that the Armistice was about to be signed, bringing home a million American soldiers from the trenches of France. In Chicago, where the boy lived, whistles began to sound and guns to go off in the predawn darkness of Monday, November 11, 1918. Women ran from their homes with overcoats tossed over their nightgowns, beating on pots and pans. The elevated trains coming from the Loop tied down their whistles and went screaming through the neighborhoods, confirming that the nation was at peace. People who ventured downtown for work were sent home by their employers, and by noon the neighborhood parties were rolling.1 In Uptown, on the city’s North Side, young Bob ran around telling people this was his birthday and returned home with a few dollars in change. His parents, Tim and Mabel, made him give back most of the money, but even so this was a great day. Everyone had called this “the war to end war” — if that were true, then he would never have to die in a trench.
The Ryans had no need for their neighbors’ charity; they were respectable, middle-class people who had worked their way up. Bob’s great-grandparents, Lawrence and Ellen Fitzpatrick Ryan, had immigrated from County Tipperary, Ireland, in 1852 during the Great Famine and settled in Pittsburgh, where times were tough (their son John would later tell Bob about the “No Irish Need Apply” signs that greeted them on their arrival). The family moved to Chicago four years later and eventually retreated about thirty miles south to the heavily Irish Catholic river town of Lockport, Illinois, along the Illinois and Michigan Canal.
John and his older brother, Timothy E. Ryan, worked together as boat builders in the 1860s, then went their separate ways as John established his own business in town and Timothy (known as “T. E.”) returned to Chicago to try his hand at real estate speculation. John served as superintendent of the canal at one point and, with his wife, Johanna, raised a family of eight children. He liked his glass. “Although my grandfather drank a quart of whiskey a day for sixty-five years, he was never drunk or out of control,”2 Bob later recorded in a memoir for his children.
Up in Chicago, T. E. Ryan prospered, cofounding the real estate firm of Ryan and Walsh and building his family a mansion on Macalister Place on the Near West Side. He also established himself as a political brawler in the city’s well-oiled Democratic machine. Through the 1890s he won five terms as West Side assessor, and from 1902 to 1906 he served as Democratic committeeman for the Nineteenth Ward. T. E. was widely regarded as boss of the West Side, so popular and influential that, during the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, he was named grand marshal of the Irish Day parade. A portrait reproduced in an 1899 guidebook to state politics shows a handsome man with swept-back hair, a handlebar mustache, and a hungry glint in his eye. “One of the most popular men on the West Side,” the guidebook reported, “and a politician whose power is as strong as ever.”3 His success exerted an irresistible pull on John’s sons, and one by one they all drifted to Chicago.
Timothy Aloysius Ryan was the second of John’s children, born in 1875, and in the 1890s he headed north to board with his illustrious uncle and get into business in the city. Tim proved to be an eager political protégé: in 1899 he was appointed chief clerk in the city attorney’s office, and five years later he ran for the state board of equalization in the Eighth Congressional District, billing himself as “T. A.” Ryan. His uncle bankrolled all this, apparently seeing in his tall and handsome young nephew a rising political star. Tim got himself started in the construction business and ran an unsuccessful campaign for West Town assessor, his uncle’s former position. “Father’s duties have always been somewhat vague in everyone’s mind,” Bob wrote. “In his twenties he seems to have been occupied principally with fancy vests, horse racing, attending prizefights, and a great deal of social drinking. In short, a rather well-known and well-liked man about town.”4
By 1907, Chicago was home to five of John and Johanna’s sons. They were big men — one of Bob’s uncles stood six feet eight inches tall — with ambitions to match. Larry, Tim’s younger brother by eight years, had come north to clerk for T. E.’s real estate firm, and Tom, Joe, and John Jr. wanted to start their own construction firm so they might capitalize on their uncle’s political influence. But the brothers’ relationship with their uncle ruptured. According to Bob, Larry’s job “involved handling some funds and he was ultimately accused by his uncle of a minor embezzlement. Larry was
