The Lives of Robert Ryan. J.R. Jones
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 when she met George Washington Cheyney, a young Philadelphian five years her senior whose wealthy family, alarmed by his indolence, had set him up as manager of a silver mine that some of his father’s colleagues owned in Tombstone, Arizona. On his travels back and forth, George Cheyney changed trains in Atchison, and before long he and Annie had married and moved to Tombstone, to a large house on the hill overlooking the town.
Jessica Cadwalader (late 1930s). Ryan met her in the lobby of the Max Reinhardt School of the Theater on Sunset Boulevard; they spent the next thirty-three years together. Robert Ryan Family
By then Tombstone was the fastest-growing boomtown in the Southwest, with a fair amount of culture alongside the roughnecks who poured in hoping to strike it rich. There were decent restaurants, an ice cream parlor, and opera performances at Schieffelin Hall, named for the prospecting family that had founded the town. Jessica pressed her grandmother for details about the famous shootout at the OK Corral in 1881. “I never knew anything about all that riff-raff,” Anno replied. Her husband “did not think such goings-on should be talked about in front of ladies.… I have a feeling George said it was good riddance to bad rubbish.”13 Later Jessica dug up a history of Tombstone that described one George Cheyney ducking behind a counter during the armed robbery of an assayer’s office.
As superintendent of the Tombstone Mill and Mining Company, George Cheyney branched out from Tombstone and developed a new mine in the Oro Blanco Mining District, but in the late 1880s Tombstone’s mining industry collapsed after the miners began to hit water and the town’s pumping plant was destroyed in a fire. George ran for Congress as a Republican in 1890 and served as school superintendent for the territory, then moved his family to Tucson, where he was appointed postmaster in 1898 and four years later ran a successful campaign for probate judge. Shortly after his election George traveled to San Francisco, seeking treatment for a liver ailment from a Tucson physician who had moved there, and died at age forty-nine from cirrhosis.
Three years later his second daughter, Frances — Jessica’s mother — married Richard Bacon Cadwalader, a young Quaker in his early twenties who had come West from Cincinnati with his mother, Ella Bacon Cadwalader, after suffering a nervous breakdown in his first semester at Harvard. Ella Cadwalader fought against the union between Richard and Frances, but when Anno traveled from Tucson to Los Angeles to visit her sister, she took the young lovers along and had them married by an Episcopal clergyman. This would have been the ultimate horror for Ella and her