The Actor’s Letter 

On-screen, Robert Ryan was a man with secrets. Film noir fans remember him as the bigoted army sergeant concealing his murder of a Jewish man in Crossfire (1948), or the small-town projectionist eaten up by his love for another man's wife in Clash by Night (1952), or the seething detective whose closed-door brutality against witnesses has begun to soil his reputation in On Dangerous Ground (1952). Born in Chicago on November 11, 1909, Ryan enjoyed a 30-year career in movies, and by the time he died of cancer in 1973 he'd played everything from romantic leads to western heavies, from Jay Gatsby to John the Baptist. But the persona that lingers is that of a strong, intelligent man guarding some storm of emotion—fear, guilt, helpless rage. Even in broad daylight he seemed cloaked in shadow.

Offscreen, he was also something of a mystery. In Franklin Jarlett's Robert Ryan: A Biography and Critical Filmography (1990), even Ryan's closest friends describe him as moody and intensely private. Interviewed for this story, his children concurred."He was a very sweet guy," remembers Lisa Ryan, who lives in San Francisco and works for a green nonprofit. "He was incredibly shy, although—I guess this is what actors can do—he could just turn on when the situation called for that. But basically he was a very quiet, introverted guy. You wonder, looking at some of the parts that he played in movies, what it was in him that was able to access those really dark, scary characters."

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• Robert Ryan in The Wild Bunch (1969)

"He wasn't an easy guy to be close to," says Cheyney Ryan, Lisa's older brother, a professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon. By all accounts, the person who knew Ryan best was his wife of 33 years, Jessica Cadwalader, a writer of mystery novels and children's books who helped inspire his devotion to liberal social causes. They had a passionate commitment to education and together founded the Oakwood School, a progressive grade school in Los Angeles. "They had enormous respect for each other," Cheyney recalls. "It's not easy being married to a movie star. And also, you know, my father drank. My mother drank too—they both drank a lot. So I think there was a fair amount of moodiness around sometimes."

"I think he had a lot of demons," says Walker (formerly Tim) Ryan, a musician and teacher in Eugene, Oregon, and the eldest of the three children. "He certainly talked about his depressions as he got older. And he came from a generation where, if you were a man, you just stuffed all that stuff. As far as the darkness, he used to talk about Black Irish moods. . . . I think that's what part of his attraction to [Eugene] O'Neill was. The Irish are essentially either really happy or really depressed. He enjoyed a joke, he did like to have a good time. And then there were these days when he would just sort of sit in his room. I think he had ghosts. And what they were, I don't know."

Ryan never told his children much about his years growing up in Chicago—both Walker and Cheyney say they learned more about his youth from Jarlett's book than they ever heard from their father. But earlier this year Lisa discovered a 20-page letter by Robert Ryan, addressed to his children and probably written in the early 1950s, in which he detailed his family history and his memories of the city. She's shared this document with the Reader (the full text can be found here). Nostalgic and sometimes drily witty, it offers a revealing glimpse into Ryan's stoic personality as well as evocative recollections of Chicago in the teens and 1920s. It also alludes to some of the pressures and traumas that may have shaped him, including one that completely escaped Jarlett: the involvement of Ryan's father in a horrific south-side construction fire that claimed at least a dozen lives.

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• courtesy robert ryan family
• Ryan as a child in Uptown

John Ryan, Robert's paternal grandfather, emigrated in 1862 from Thurles, County Tipperary, and settled in Lockport, 30 miles southwest of Chicago. At the time Lockport was headquarters for the Illinois and Michigan Canal, which predated the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, connecting the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River. John Ryan established a boatyard that enabled him to support his wife, Johanna, and their eight children, and according to his grandson he once served as superintendent of the canal's Lockport section.

Robert's father, Timothy Aloysius, was born in June 1875, the second child of a Roman Catholic family that his son described in the letter as "hard-working, devout, honorable, and fine looking. . . . Although my grandfather drank a quart of whisky a day for sixty-five years, he was never drunk or out of control. My father was the only one of the sons who drank, and after a rather fast start he stopped entirely when he married—never to drink again. The Ryans did not gamble, loaf, swear, drink, smoke, break the laws, cheat, or hurt people in any way. (Except my father, who did the first five of these things at one time or another.)"

As a teenager, Tim moved to Chicago and lived with his uncle, Timothy E. Ryan, who occupied a mansion at 63 Macalister Place in what's now the Near West Side neighborhood. Fourteen years older than his brother John, T.E. Ryan, as he was known, had made a fortune in real estate and established himself as a major political force in Chicago. In the 1890s he served three terms as West Town assessor, and from 1902 to '06 he would serve as Democratic committeeman for what was then the 19th Ward. His popularity and influence were such that during the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition he was named grand marshal of the Irish Day parade. Tim proved to be an eager political protege of his uncle, and in 1899 he was appointed chief clerk in the city attorney's office. Five years later, when he ran for the state board of equalization in the eighth congressional district, he billed himself as T.A. Ryan.

"Father's duties have always been somewhat vague in everyone's mind," Ryan wrote. "In his twenties he seems to have been occupied principally with fancy vests, horse racing, attending prizefights, and a great deal of social drinking. In short a rather well-known and well-liked man about town. These entertaining activities were all financed gladly by his uncle. He also seems to have been one of the first men in America to own an automobile."

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• courtesy robert ryan family
• Timothy Aloysius Ryan

During these years, Tim Ryan "evidently was in the construction business briefly (which he ignored) and ran for political office (as west town assessor)—wherein he was defeated. His subsequent stories were all of practical politics as opposed to academic or theoretical politics—about which he knew little. He also worked for the Peoples Gas Company. This job lasted one day and was always good for a one-hour story."

By 1907, Chicago was home to at least five of John and Johanna Ryan's eight children—Timothy, Lawrence, Thomas, Joseph, and John Jr. That same year Larry Ryan introduced Tim to Mabel Bushnell, a 24-year-old secretary at the Chicago Tribune. Raised in Escanaba, a port town on Michigan's Upper Peninsula, she was of English descent and an Episcopalian, but Tim went for her anyway. "Father subjected mother to a 1907 version of the high life—fancy restaurants, champagne, hansom cabs, and the theater every night," Robert wrote. "The two impediments to marriage were Dad's religion (Roman Catholic) and his drinking (habitual). He finally convinced mother that she was not obliged to become a Catholic; he also quit the bottle for life. They were married sometime in 1908 by a priest and a minister and retired to a very different life than they had been living."

Mabel Ryan turned out to be the only paternal grandparent Robert Ryan's children would ever know; after he found success in the movie business, she moved to Los Angeles along with her sister, Blanche. "She was this kind of high-Anglican Church person," recalls Cheyney. "I always got the feeling that her family might have thought she seriously married down by marrying my grandfather."

If so, that feeling may have been more about ethnicity or religion than finances. "The Bushnells were considerably less affluent than the Ryans," Robert wrote, "and over the years my father made several advances to various members of the family. He was pretty good about it but occasionally found it helpful to remind mother of this fact."