The Lives of Robert Ryan. J.R. Jones
he was very, very good.”32 According to one news story, Ryan was “showered” with offers from New York producers, including one from the Theater Guild to appear in a new play with Katharine Hepburn.33 The attention went to his head. He would remember “swaggering” into Bankhead’s dressing room one night and “demanding to know how long it was going to take before I was a really great actor. I expected her to say a year or so. But instead she said very quietly, ‘In 15 or 20 years you may be a good actor, Bob — if you’re lucky.’”34
*For more on this fascinating topic, see Martha Hope Bacon, Mothers of Feminism: The Story of Quaker Women in America (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986).
†The picture was loosely based on the story of Arch Ward, a Chicago Tribune sports editor who had founded the tournament in the 1920s.
three
Bombs Away
Soon after the Odets play breathed its last, Ryan found himself in Tennessee shooting locations for Name, Age and Occupation with director Pare Lorentz and actress Frances Dee. The movie’s story dated back to a novel Lorentz had begun in 1931: an eighteen-year-old boy from North Carolina fights overseas in the Great War but finds nothing waiting for him back home except a series of dehumanizing farm and factory jobs. As Houseman explained, the movie would explore “the condition of the US industrial worker with special emphasis on the economic and emotional effects of the production line.”1
Lorentz already had tried mixing actors with real people, to less than stellar effect, in his documentary The Fight for Life (1940), about the Chicago Maternity Center and infant mortality in the slums. But George Schaefer, president of Radio-Keith-Orpheum, was prepared to take a gamble on the director; before Ryan even reported for work, Lorentz and cinematographer Floyd Crosby had spent twenty days shooting industrial operations at Ford’s River Rouge Plant and a US Army facility. Location shooting continued through the spring, and in June the company arrived in Los Angeles to spend four weeks shooting interiors on the Pathé lot in Culver City.
That same month, fed up with Schaefer’s artistic pretensions and dismal bottom line, the RKO board replaced him with N. Peter Rathvon and installed Ned Depinet as president of the movie division, RKO Radio Pictures. Charles Koerner, the new, commercial-minded head of production, immediately targeted two runaway films: It’s All True, which Orson Welles had been shooting in Brazil since early that year, and Name, Age and Occupation. Lorentz, observed director Edward Dmytryk, was “a fine critic, a top maker of documentaries, but completely lost in straight drama. After 90 days of shooting, he was 87 days behind schedule.”2
Ryan on location with director Pare Lorentz for the ill-fated Name, Age and Occupation. Their RKO colleague Edward Dmytryk called Lorentz “a fine critic, a top maker of documentaries, but completely lost in straight drama. After 90 days of shooting, he was 87 days behind schedule.” Robert Ryan Family
In late June, RKO halted production of Name, Age and Occupation and asked Lorentz for a financial accounting.3 He must have seen the writing on the wall when Koerner announced his production plans for 1942–43: $12 million was budgeted for only forty-five features, and in contrast to the literary projects favored by his predecessor, RKO would be aiming for good, solid box office by making patriotic movies for the home front. Name, Age and Occupation, with its Depression setting and heavy themes, hardly filled that bill, and after screening rushes, RKO executives killed the project.
They liked Ryan, however, and signed him to a $600-a-week contract; under Schaefer the movie division had developed a shortage of leading men, exacerbated now by the many actors enlisting in the armed forces. “Without the talent shortage I would very likely have still been grubbing around New York for 40 a week jobs where I more or less belonged at my stage of the game,” Ryan confessed in a letter to a friend.4 He and Jessica moved their belongings back to Los Angeles and rented a house in Silverlake, which they shared with Ryan’s fifty-nine-year-old mother, Mabel. By October he had his first assignment from RKO, a picture about the US Army Air Forces called Bombardier. With this new job, the couple decided the time had come for children. Before long Jessica was pregnant, but she miscarried early the next year, another sad bond for two partners who had each lost a sibling in childhood.
With Clash by Night and now Name, Age and Occupation, Ryan had been involved with two prestigious dramas that crashed and burned yet elevated him professionally. Two years after his pink slip from Paramount, he was back in Hollywood earning nearly five times as much from RKO. Boom times had returned to Hollywood with the US military mobilization against Germany and Japan: as defense plants hummed in the nation’s industrial centers, workers with good wages packed the movie palaces in search of solace, inspiration, or just relief from their worries. The studios cooperated eagerly with the Office of War Information to rally moviegoers to the war effort, and of the seven features Ryan would make over the next sixteen months, every one addressed the war in some way.
Even as he cranked out these patriotic pictures, Ryan waited for his own draft notice to arrive. After Pearl Harbor the draft age had been widened to include all men from twenty to forty-four years old; he was thirty-two, but Congress and public opinion favored drafting single men over husbands and fathers. In February 1942 the director of selective service, Lewis B. Hershey, had ruled that movies were “an activity essential in certain instances to the national health, and in other instances to war production” and had granted deferments for essential “actors, directors, writers, producers, camera men, sound engineers and other technicians.”5 The outcry in Congress and around the country was immediate, and within forty-eight hours the board of the Screen Actors Guild had voted to oppose the order, arguing that “actors and everyone else in the motion picture industry should be subject to the same rules for the draft as the rest of the country.”6 Hershey soon reversed the policy, but California draft boards were generally cooperative toward the big studios.
Bombardier had been in development for two years already and took as its inspiration not a play or novel but a piece of military hardware, the top secret Norden bombsight, which used a mechanical computer to calculate precision bombing at high altitudes. Pat O’Brien starred as an air force major preaching the virtues of the new contraption, and Randolph Scott was his friendly antagonist, a captain who favors traditional dive-bombing attacks. Ryan was cast as a jaunty young cadet at the new aerial bombardment training school (one scene has him reciting for O’Brien a pledge similar to that taken by real-life bombardiers, that he will “protect the secrecy of the American bombsight, if need be with my life itself,” as strings swell and O’Brien looks on in misty-eyed sanctification).
Most of the movie was shot on Kirtland Army Air Base in New Mexico, whose bombardier training program was the model for the one in the movie. RKO vetted the script with the Office of War Information in exchange for access to planes and other resources; one fascinating scene in Bombardier shows Ryan’s cadet practicing atop a bomb trainer, a twelve-foot frame on wheels that simulates bombing trajectories as it rolls toward a small, motorized metal box representing the target. In return the army got a wholesome, rousing picture that reasoned away any qualms one might have had about raining death from above. One cadet is torn by letters from his mother, who belongs to a peace organization and fears for his soul. “Peace isn’t as cheap a bargain, Paul, as the price those people put on it,” his commander explains. “Those people lock themselves up in a dream world. You see, there are millions of other mothers that are looking to you.”
Ryan put in five weeks on the shoot, though the cast was large and he didn’t get much time in the foreground. At one point he bursts into a funeral service for a young trainee to announce in close-up, “The Japs have bombed Pearl Harbor!” During the climax, as Scott and Ryan fly a nighttime scouting mission over Japan in advance of the squadron, their plane is hit;