from the private Anna Head School, where she had been a tennis champ, and shortly thereafter she boarded a bus for New York City, where she found an apartment in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Midtown Manhattan, took modeling jobs through a Park Avenue agency, and tried to establish herself as an actress under the name Jessica Cheyney. For some time she had performed with the Wayfarers, a theater group in San Francisco. Now she was back in Los Angeles looking for movie work; she had been an extra in the W. C. Fields comedy Poppy (1936) and gotten a line, only to see it cut, in the Gary Cooper drama The Adventures of Marco Polo (1938). She was formidably well read despite the fact that she had never attended college, and she looked a little startled at dinner when Ryan informed her that the piece he had been rehearsing for the first class was no less than Hamlet’s second soliloquy. He wanted to get Reinhardt’s attention.
As Jessica already knew, Reinhardt’s attention was a force to be reckoned with. Quiet and stout, with hypnotic blue eyes, the aging Austrian studied you so intensely, and listened with such force, that he seemed to be penetrating your very soul. Reinhardt had made his name in Europe and the United States with spectacular, expressionist stagings of Everyman (for the Salzburg Festival, which he cofounded in 1920 with Richard Strauss), The Miracle, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. His 1934 production of the latter at the Hollywood Bowl became the talk of the town, and the following year Warner Bros. hired him to direct a lavish screen version with James Cagney, Olivia de Havilland, and Mickey Rooney. Born to Jewish parents in Austria-Hungary, Reinhardt had fled the Third Reich in 1938 and settled in Los Angeles. Though he never managed to land another movie assignment, he continued to direct stage productions on both coasts; in fact, the new school would serve as a workshop for plays he wanted to mount commercially.
Jessica braced herself the next day as her new friend from Chicago came forward to butcher Hamlet’s second soliloquy: “O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain! My tables — meet it is I set it down / That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain!”1 Reinhardt’s only response was, “With training …”2 Ryan took this as a great triumph when Jessica spoke to him afterward. “There is a young man who has just enrolled that I like very much,” she reportedly wrote to her mother, “but he’s the worst actor I’ve ever seen in my life.”3
Meeting with Ryan later, Reinhardt told the young man he had a quality that reached out over the footlights, and with enormous work and commitment he might one day become a great performer.4 These were the right words coming from the right man at the right time, and from that moment onward Ryan entrusted himself to Reinhardt. “Max Reinhardt was not only my first teacher,” he would write near the end of his life (forgetting Ed Boyle in Chicago), “but remains to this day, thirty-two years later, the most tremendous and important person who has ever influenced my career and my work.”5 Though Reinhardt was best known for his elaborate productions, incorporating music, choreography, and lighting effects, Ryan saw that the old man was also deeply and personally invested in his smaller projects. “His own obsession was the inner life of man,” Ryan wrote, “the mysterious spirit that both flickers and flames in all of us.”6
Reinhardt felt that human emotion was stifled by bourgeois life. “Unconsciously we feel how a hearty laugh liberates us,” he wrote in an essay on acting, “how a good cry or an outbreak of anger relieves us. We have an absolute need of emotion and its expression. Against this our upbringing constantly works. Its first commandment is — Hide what goes on within you. Never let it be seen that you are stirred up, that you are hungry or thirsty; every grief, every joy, every rage, all that is fundamental and craves utterance, must be repressed.”7
How profoundly this idea must have struck his new student from Chicago, this powerfully built but painfully shy man whose parents had shown him the good life but always taught him to keep his feelings to himself. “Only the actor who cannot lie, who is himself undisguised, and who profoundly unlocks his heart deserves the laurel,” Reinhardt wrote.8 Not until years later, after working with numerous pedestrian directors, would Ryan recognize what an enormous gift Reinhardt had given him so early in his development. Yet implicit in that gift lay a great moral and emotional challenge.
Reinhardt cut an imposing figure, yet he tended to put people at ease because he listened so closely. “He never listened passively,” recalled the composer Bronislaw Kaper, “he listened actively, with the greatest interest reflected in his eyes and his half open lips.”9 In fact, Reinhardt’s ability to listen defined his whole approach to acting. “The best piece of advice I’ve ever received as an actor was given me by Max Reinhardt,” Ryan told a reporter years later. “He put it in one word — ‘Listen.’ If you really hear what other actors say to you, your own reaction and the proper reading of your lines will be easy.”10
Actors who worked with Reinhardt, among them Stella Adler and Otto Preminger, testified to his talent for bringing an actor out of himself, quite literally — for locating personal traits that one might heighten and project onstage. If you engaged Reinhardt imaginatively, he invested himself in your performance, and you immediately felt the thrill of shared discovery. “He was most effective when he liked an actor, and perhaps only when he liked him,” remembered Preminger. “If he felt that the actor really wanted to be directed by him, then his imagination, the variety of advice, the way he worked the actor in the scene and for the scene, was just fantastic. I don’t think any director ever had that gift. Maybe it was because he was an actor originally.”11
The Reinhardt School offered a well-rounded education, and Ryan threw himself into his studies, learning about lighting, set design, and direction. But acting was his great love now. His workshop teacher, Vladimir Sokoloff, had performed with the Moscow Art Theatre under the great director Constantin Stanislavski, and from him learned the principle that movement expressed a character’s motivation better than anything else. Yet Sokoloff’s classes were more traditional than the Stanislavski-inspired “method acting” then gaining traction at the Group Theatre in New York, in which the performer used powerful personal memories to trigger onstage responses. “ ‘The Method’ would have driven Sokoloff out of his skull,” Ryan later mused. “He taught action, not ‘memory of emotion.’”12
Under Sokoloff’s instruction the young man improved rapidly, and during the fall 1938 semester Reinhardt cast him as Silvio and Jessica as Beatrice in a workshop production of Carlo Goldoni’s At Your Service. Ryan played Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the father in Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, “at one of whose unforgettable rehearsals,” wrote Gottfried Reinhardt, “my father showed Bob Ryan how literally to collapse after the discovery of his daughter in a brothel, how to fold up like a jackknife and to exit, his torso bent horizontal, a destroyed human being.” Clearly Reinhardt appreciated the physicality of this boxer who had graduated to the stage, and Ryan would embrace the idea of movement as character.
ALL THROUGH this great artistic awakening, Ryan was falling in love with Jessica Cadwalader. Their courtship took a rocky turn when he invited her to dinner at the Brown Derby and a miscommunication resulted in each of them sitting alone, waiting for the other to materialize, on successive days. When he called her to complain about being stood up, she hung up on him and went to San Francisco with a girlfriend. But before long the two thespians had become inseparable, going out for drinks when they could afford it or talking all night about books and movies and politics and, of course, acting. Ryan had never met anyone like her; she was introverted, but smart as a whip and passionately idealistic. The more time he spent with her, the more he wanted her in his life. For some reason she always called him Robert; friends and family had called him Bob for years, but to Jessica he would always be Robert Ryan.
Ryan might have thought he had experienced the West in his Montana adventures, but Jessica’s people were real westerners. Her maternal grandmother, Anno, told Jessica all about the old days. Born Annie Neal in 1859 to an undertaker in Atchison, Kansas, she had been worshipping at the town’s Episcopal church one Sunday morning
