The Lives of Robert Ryan. J.R. Jones

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      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 husband, Pierce Jonah Cadwalader, whose family had followed the Society of Friends since the seventeenth century and been part of the influential Philadelphia Quakers Meeting.

      In 1907, Frances gave birth to a son, Richard Jr., and seven years later, on October 26, 1914, Jessica Dorothy Cadwalader arrived. The family was living in Tucson when Richard Jr., only ten years old, died of influenza in September 1917 (just three months earlier, little Jack Ryan had succumbed in Chicago). Jessica grew up an only child, an introvert, and a voracious reader, closely instructed in her religious beliefs by her great aunt Dora, whom she remembered as “a great and determined Quaker lady.”¹⁴ From childhood Jessica learned to value peace over war, mercy over revenge; she learned that God’s spirit, dwelling within her, not only permitted but obliged her to work for peace. Dora liked to recite the “Quality of Mercy” speech from The Merchant of Venice, in which Portia describes mercy as “twice blest: / It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.”¹⁵

Since the beginning the Society of Friends had preached the equality of men and women, allowing women into ecclesiastical positions, and in America the Quakers had provided not only the idealism but also some of the early leaders of the women’s movement: the Philadelphia abolitionist Lucretia Mott, who had helped organize the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention on women’s rights; the great speaker and activist Susan B. Anthony, who spent a lifetime trying to win women the vote; and Alice Paul, who helped pass the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 and wrote the Equal Rights Amendment proposed to Congress three years later.* Dora wanted Jessica to get a good education and become a lawyer like Dora’s brother, Jonah; there was no reason she should have to spend her life in her husband’s shadow.

      ON SATURDAY, MARCH 11, 1939, Bob and Jessica exchanged vows at St. Thomas Episcopal Church in West Hollywood, with their mothers, the Reinhardts, the Sokoloffs, and about fifty of their fellow students attending (including Nanette Fabray, the other big star who would emerge from their graduating class). Anno must have been there as well, a reminder to Ryan of the iron female will surging through his bride’s family. A respectable matron in Tombstone and an example to her children in late middle age, Anno had decided upon her seventieth birthday to please no one but herself. “That evening she drank her first highball and smoked her first cigarette,” her granddaughter wrote. “She went on doing both to the end, chain smoking without inhaling, puffing out great clouds of smoke to wreathe her white head, looking like something between a Chinese ancient and an old madame, while the cigarette ashes spilled down the front of her massive bosom.”¹⁶

      Two more productions — Goldoni’s Servant of Two Masters, which had been one of Reinhardt’s early triumphs, and Holiday, a romantic comedy by Phillip Barry that had become a screen hit for Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant — followed before the end of the year’s study, at which point the two newlyweds began to reckon with the question of money. As the story goes, word came shortly after their wedding that Ryan’s oil well in Michigan had run dry, which meant an end to their steady dividend.

      They supported themselves as best they could: Ryan worked as an assistant director to Reinhardt and taught boxing lessons for a dollar a pop, but Jessica was the real breadwinner, modeling for a photographer and then hiring on with vaudeville producers Franchon and Marco as a chorus girl at the Paramount Theater. “It was a rugged job, and she hated it,” Ryan would write, “but it made it possible for me to work and study and pound on doors and try a little longer to make somebody believe I could really act.”¹⁷ The first agent Ryan approached told him to go out the door and come back in again. “Make an entrance. Get it?” When Ryan did, the agent said, “Go back to Chicago.”¹⁸

      From the house they had rented after their marriage, they moved to a small cottage and then to an apartment above someone’s garage. Their situation was precarious, but Ryan was relatively sanguine. “I thought of what had happened to my father and knew that it was worse than useless to worry,” he recalled. “The moment I stopped worrying, things began to come right for us.”¹⁹

      In late December 1939, Reinhardt cast Ryan in a commercial production of Somerset Maugham’s drawing room farce Too Many Husbands, to open the following month at the Belasco Theater in Los Angeles. Promoted as “a saucy comedy with music,” the play centered on a woman who believes her first husband has been killed in action during the Great War and takes a second, only to have the first return home; by then she has a child by each man. Marsha Hunt, a young actress who had recently signed to MGM, went to see a friend in the play and was struck by Ryan and the other male lead, former Olympic shot putter Bruce Bennett. “They were remarkable, both of them,” Hunt recalled. “Tall, wonderfully good-looking but, most of all, graceful in their movements onstage.”²⁰ The engagement brought Ryan his first serious attention around town, and by the end of its run a casting director for Paramount Pictures had recommended him to director Edward Dmytryk for the lead in Golden Gloves, an upcoming picture about amateur boxing.

Golden Gloves told the story of a young fighter, mixed up with a crooked promoter, who sees the error of his ways and throws in with a crusading journalist to clean up the sport.^† Dmytryk shot a screen test with Ryan as the fighter, then decided to give the role to Richard Denning; as a consolation prize he cast Ryan as Denning’s opponent in the climactic bout. They began shooting the fight in mid-December and finished in seven days; given nothing but a soundstage and three hundred extras, Dmytryk СКАЧАТЬ