The Lives of Robert Ryan. J.R. Jones
tended toward mystery and comedy; the company, Ryan recalled, was “appalling, being mostly bad amateurs.”24 In The Barker he played a carnival barker and Jessica a hootchie cootchie dancer; two weeks later they costarred again in something called Petticoat Fever. Millpond staged a mystery play Jessica had written, The Dark Corner, and in the comedy Angel Child, Ryan costarred with twenty-two-year-old Cameron Mitchell. The highlight of the season was William Saroyan’s philosophical barroom comedy The Time of Your Life, starring Ryan as the rich drunk, Joe, who encourages the other barflies to live life to the fullest.
The Ryans bailed out soon afterward, landing first at the Robin Hood Theater in Arden, Delaware, and then at the Cape Playhouse in Dennis, Massachusetts, where Ryan won a romantic role opposite the celebrated Luise Rainer in J. M. Barrie’s comic fantasy A Kiss for Cinderella. Set in London during World War I, the class-conscious fantasy told the story of a poor cleaning woman, played by Rainer, who dreams that she is Cinderella and the neighborhood constable, to be played by Ryan, is Prince Charming. This guy is going to be a big star, thought Robert Wallsten, a fellow cast member, as he watched Ryan rehearse. “I had no idea about his dramatic ability, and playing this Irish bobby was not a very serious role. But he had a corner on that Irish charm, and there was that magic grin…. It was the smile that was so warm and engulfing, and so endearing.”25 Wallsten would become one of the Ryans’ oldest friends.
From Dennis the production moved to the Maplewood Theatre in Maplewood, New Jersey, where Ryan caught an extraordinary break. Rainer had been married to Clifford Odets, a founder of the Group Theatre and one of the most daring American playwrights of the day (Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing!); with the recent demise of the Group, Odets had sold his play Clash by Night to showbiz impresario Billy Rose, who was mounting a Broadway production with Lee Strasberg, another Group founder, as director. The play dealt with an unhappy working-class couple on Staten Island, but in a larger sense it considered the restive political mood in America as the war in Europe raged on. Tallulah Bankhead, hailed for her recent performance in Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, had signed to play the bored and frustrated wife; Lee J. Cobb, among the Group’s most gifted actors, was cast as her dense but devoted husband; and Joseph Schildkraut, a longtime stage and screen veteran who had won an Oscar playing Alfred Dreyfus in The Life of Émile Zola, was the husband’s cynical friend, who moves in on the wife. For the minor role of Joe Doyle, a young neighbor with romantic problems of his own, Rainer urged Odets to consider her handsome young lead in A Kiss for Cinderella.
Rose took Bankhead out to Maplewood to see the show, and she liked Ryan. Soon after A Kiss for Cinderella closed on September 23, 1941, he was rehearsing Clash by Night in New York City. One can only imagine his excitement: four months earlier he had been slugging it out at the Millpond Playhouse, and now he would be making his Broadway debut in a cutting-edge social drama, alongside some of the most respected talents in the American theater. He had seen Bankhead in The Little Foxes and thought her an extraordinary actress.26 A world-class diva, she could be witheringly cruel to colleagues, but she took a shine to him during rehearsals. When he introduced her to Jessica, who had been modeling to help meet the rent, Bankhead quipped, “If I was fifteen years younger I’d take him away from you.”27 The Ryans laughed, though Jessica couldn’t have been too pleased. She would spend the next thirty years meeting women who were less frank but similarly inclined.
“Tallulah was a stereotype of what the public thinks star actresses are like: they really aren’t except in her case,” Ryan would remember. “She liked some kind of excitement going on and didn’t much care where it came from.” At the same time Bankhead was a consummate professional, the first to arrive and the last to leave, and always with her part down cold. She might challenge Strasberg or Odets in rehearsal, yet in performance she could be remarkably generous toward other players. “She was a great experience,” Ryan would conclude, “and she came along at a most important time in my life.”28
Unfortunately, the production quickly degenerated into a snake pit of professional rivalries and personal grudges, from which Ryan was lucky enough to be excepted. Bankhead despised Billy Rose, a diminutive casting-couch type whose theatrical résumé consisted mainly of brassy revues. “He approached the Odets play as if he were putting on a rodeo,” she later wrote.29 An elegant presence onstage, Bankhead had taken the role of the drab housewife as a dramatic stretch, but when the play began its out-of-town tryouts in Detroit, critics decided she had been miscast, favoring Lee Cobb’s performance as the husband. “That was when the shit hit the fan,” Ryan remembered.30 Bankhead and Katherine Locke, who played Ryan’s girlfriend, soon fell out, united by nothing except their dislike of Schildkraut, whom Locke later accused of putting the moves on her.31
Though some of these conflicts sprang from ego or personal enmity, the production was built on an artistic fault line that would become more apparent in years to come: on one side were the more traditionally trained actors such as Ryan, Bankhead, and Schildkraut, and on the other were proponents of the Method such as Cobb and Strasberg, the latter of whom would institutionalize the techniques of tapping into one’s own emotional experience when he founded the Actors Studio six years later. Method acting could be fresh, genuine, even explosive, but it could also be unpredictable and inconsistent from night to night. Cobb, the most ardent Method actor among the cast, often seemed to be working through his role onstage, and for someone such as Bankhead, playing against him was one curveball after another. Ryan sympathized with her, and later in his career, colleagues would note his annoyance and even anger over onstage surprises.
From Detroit, Clash by Night moved on to Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia, where Bankhead came down with pneumonia and the show was shut down (as the star, she had no understudy). While the cast and crew cooled their heels in New York, waiting for her to recover, Ryan scored an interview for the lead role in a Hollywood prestige picture to begin shooting the next year. Pare Lorentz — whose acclaimed documentary shorts The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1938) had won him a brief but controversial tenure as director of the US Film Office — had signed with RKO Radio Pictures to direct a dramatic feature about a war veteran trying to make ends meet during the Depression, to be titled Name, Age and Occupation. For six months he had been crisscrossing the country in search of an actor skillful enough to play the role but credible enough to function in the semidocumentary format Lorentz envisioned. Finally, he turned to his friend John Houseman, an erudite British producer who had collaborated famously with Orson Welles.
Working for the Federal Theatre Project, Houseman and Welles had staged the “voodoo” Macbeth (1935), which transplanted the Shakespeare play to a Caribbean island, and the proletarian musical The Cradle Will Rock (1937), which proved too hot for the government and inspired them to launch the independent Mercury Theatre. Houseman and Welles had gone on to create the CBS radio broadcast The War of the Worlds, which had terrified the nation with its too-convincing account of a martian invasion, and the RKO drama Citizen Kane (1941), whose critical acclaim had now emboldened the studio to bankroll Lorentz’s ambitious project. Houseman arranged for Lorentz and himself to spend a week interviewing actors in a Manhattan hotel suite. When Ryan arrived to read for the part, his acting must have impressed them, but what really won over Lorentz was Ryan’s endless litany of soul-crushing jobs in the depths of the Depression. Here was a man who not only could play the part but already had lived it.
In the 1972 memoir Run-Through, Houseman would remember traveling by train with Lorentz through western Kansas and hearing on the radio in the club car that the Imperial Japanese Navy had attacked the US air base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, killing and wounding thousands of Americans. The next day the United States and United Kingdom declared war on Japan. Three weeks later, Clash by Night opened on Broadway at the Belasco Theatre, its take on the national mood decisively outpaced by world events. Reviews were scathing, though the players got good notices for their work, Ryan included; most critics went to town on Odets, citing a lack of passion and fresh characterization. The play closed on February 7, 1942, after only forty-nine performances, but not before Ryan was seen by such luminaries as Greta Garbo, Judith Anderson, Ruth Gordon, and Thornton Wilder.
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