The Lives of Robert Ryan. J.R. Jones

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СКАЧАТЬ Nineteen” in particular, and the founders actively discouraged communists and fellow travelers from joining. The group resolved to protest the congressional probe in full-page newspaper ads and organized a large delegation of celebrities to fly east for the hearings. Ryan was stuck in town shooting interiors for Berlin Express, but he agreed to take part in Hollywood Fights Back, a pair of radio programs to be broadcast nationwide on October 26 and November 2.

      Even before that, on Wednesday, October 15, Ryan appeared at the giant “Keep America Free!” rally at the Shrine Auditorium, which benefited a defense fund for the Nineteen. Presented by the Progressive Citizens of America (PCA) — a more radical group that was the Communist Party’s last real lobbying presence in Hollywood — the rally drew some seven thousand people.²⁸ “We protest the threat to personal liberty and the dignity of American citizenship represented by this police committee of Dies, Wood, Rankin, and Thomas,” Ryan declared, naming the congressmen on the committee as he read a proclamation from the PCA. “We demand, in the name of all Americans, that the House Committee on Un-American Activities be abolished, while there still remains the freedom to abolish it.”²⁹

      The following Monday the hearings commenced in the Caucus Room of the Capitol Building, with every seat filled and the proceedings recorded by newsreel cameras, nationwide radio, and a battery of reporters and press photographers. J. Parnell Thomas, the New Jersey Republican who had assumed chairmanship of the committee with the Eightieth Congress, presided over the hearings, which got off to a bang when studio head Jack Warner volunteered the names of twelve people who had been identified as communists and fired from Warner Bros. His action stunned the Hollywood community, especially his colleagues at the Motion Pictures Producers’ Association (MPPA), which had agreed to close ranks against the committee. As the week progressed, the committee called a succession of friendly witnesses, who named some three dozen people as communists.

      The week’s events failed to dent the enthusiasm of the Committee for the First Amendment, whose members took heart from editorials condemning the hearings in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other dailies. On Sunday morning the CFA’s star contingent — including Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Myrna Loy, Gene Kelly, Judy Garland, and Danny Kaye — took off for New York and then Washington, having already recorded their contributions for the Hollywood Fights Back broadcast. Ryan delivered his thirty-second bit live in the studio: “President Roosevelt called the Un-American Committee a sordid procedure, and that describes it pretty accurately,” he declared. “Decent people dragged through the mud of insinuation and slander. The testimony of crackpots and subversives accepted and given out to the press as if it were the gospel truth. Reputations ruined and people hounded out of their jobs.”³⁰

      The tide of public opinion began to turn against the Nineteen on Monday morning, when writer John Howard Lawson accused the committee of Nazi tactics, was charged with contempt of Congress, and had to be forcibly removed from the chamber. As all this was going on, Dmytryk turned to Schary and asked, “What are my chances at the studio now?”

      “You have an ironclad contract,” Schary replied.³¹

      Adrian Scott brought a four-page statement defending Crossfire and noting the anti-Semitism of Mississippi Democrat John E. Rankin, a committee member, which Thomas refused to let him read. Both Scott and Dmytryk were asked repeatedly if they were communists; they declined to answer, citing their Fifth Amendment rights, and were charged with contempt. Schary, asked if he would knowingly employ communists at RKO, replied that he would, “up until the time it is proved that a communist is a man dedicated to the overthrow of the government by force or violence, or by any illegal methods.”³²

      Seven more unfriendly witnesses defied the committee and were cited for contempt, among them screenwriter Dalton Trumbo — whose wartime romance Tender Comrade (1944), directed by Dmytryk, had given Ryan his first big break. The committee had absurdly labeled the movie communist propaganda for its story of four women sharing a house while their men fight in World War II. When Thomas suddenly suspended the hearings on October 30, with Brecht having broken rank and eight witnesses still to be heard, Variety reported that one factor was the reluctance of several committee members to release a long-promised list of subversive pictures. Once these innocuous and well-known titles were made public, the members argued, the committee would become “a laughing stock.”³³

      If Ryan was afraid of the committee, he didn’t show it: while the hearings were in progress, he and his Crossfire costar Gloria Grahame spoke at the annual convention of the American Jewish Labor Council, which would turn up on the US attorney general’s list of communist (but not subversive) organizations.³⁴ The studio moguls, however, were badly spooked by the hearings. On November 24 — the same day the House of Representatives voted 346 to 17 to uphold the contempt citations — the Motion Picture Producers’ Association met at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York to hammer out a strategy. President Eric Johnston insisted that the studios purge their ranks; Schary led the charge against him, backed by independent producers Samuel Goldwyn and Walter Wanger, but Johnston carried the day. The MPPA announced that members would no longer employ known communists and would fire the unfriendly witnesses (now labeled the Hollywood Ten), whose actions “have been a disservice to their employers and have impaired their usefulness to the industry.”³⁵

      RKO was the first studio to act, firing Scott and Dmytryk. Schary refused to drop the ax, so Floyd Odlum, chairman of the board, handed the job to Schary’s boss, RKO president Peter Rathvon. Every studio contract included a vaguely worded morals clause allowing the studio to terminate any employee deemed to have disgraced the company. Barred from the lot, their current projects canceled or reassigned to other producers, Scott and Dmytryk turned their attention to the pressing matter of defending themselves against the contempt citations, which could land them in federal prison.

      Support for the unfriendly witnesses wilted. Humphrey Bogart, whose iconic tough-guy persona had been a potent weapon for the CFA, issued a statement describing the PR tour to New York and Washington as “ill-advised and even foolish.”³⁶ He had never been a communist or communist sympathizer, he declared, and he detested communism. The statement caused a collective shudder in Hollywood — if a star of Bogart’s magnitude felt the need to distance himself from the Ten in such strident terms, could anyone be safe? Donations to the Committee for the First Amendment dried up immediately, and members reported pressure to resign. Within three months the organization would fold.

      Amid all this, Berlin Express was still shooting on the RKO lot. The picture’s final scene, with the American and the Russian expressing their fellowship outside the Brandenberg Gate, must have seemed like fantasy now. Closer to the mark was the little speech delivered to the kidnapped peacemaker by the malevolent leader of the right-wing underground: “I too believe in unity. But unlike you I know that people will only unite when they are faced with a crisis, like war. Well, we are still at war; you are not. So we are united; you are not. So we will succeed; you will not.”

RYAN LIKED TO TELL INTERVIEWERS he wasn’t “a chaser” (which was true — the way women responded to him, he never had to chase anyone). For a man so proud of his family, the affair with Merle Oberon was a strange anomaly, an ongoing adulterous relationship that became an open secret among the cast and crew. Charles Korvin contended that the affair continued on the RKO lot, though production records suggest some turbulence as the picture was drawing to a close. On Wednesday, November 5, Oberon went home sick at noon, forcing Tourneur to scrap the rest of the day’s scenes. The following Monday she didn’t show up for work, and that Friday she left in the middle of the afternoon. According to biographers Higgins and Moseley, she and Ryan never saw each other again after Berlin Express,³⁷ though Ryan and Lucien Ballard would make four more pictures together.*

      Somehow RKO managed to keep the whole mess out of the scandal sheets; however, the СКАЧАТЬ