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CHAPTER 1
Inferno
The day Robert Ryan turned nine, the entire nation celebrated. All weekend long had come word that the Armistice was about to be signed, bringing home a million American soldiers from the trenches of France. In Chicago, where the boy lived, whistles began to sound and guns to go off in the predawn darkness of Monday, November 11, 1918. Women ran from their homes with overcoats tossed over their nightgowns, beating on pots and pans. The elevated trains coming from the Loop tied down their whistles and went screaming through the neighborhoods, confirming that the nation was at peace. People who ventured downtown for work were sent home by their employers, and by noon the neighborhood parties were rolling. In Uptown, on the city's North Side, young Bob ran around telling people this was his birthday and returned home with a few dollars in change. His parents, Tim and Mabel, made him give back most of the money, but even so this was a great day. Everyone had called this "the war to end war" — if that were true, then he would never have to die in a trench.
The Ryans had no need for their neighbors' charity; they were respectable, middle-class people who had worked their way up. Bob's great-grandparents, Lawrence and Ellen Fitzpatrick Ryan, had immigrated from County Tipperary, Ireland, in 1852 during the Great Famine and settled in Pittsburgh, where times were tough (their son John would later tell Bob about the "No Irish Need Apply" signs that greeted them on their arrival). The family moved to Chicago four years later and eventually retreated about thirty miles south to the heavily Irish Catholic river town of Lockport, Illinois, along the Illinois and Michigan Canal.
John and his older brother, Timothy E. Ryan, worked together as boat builders in the 1860s, then went their separate ways as John established his own business in town and Timothy (known as "T. E.") returned to Chicago to try his hand at real estate speculation. John served as superintendent of the canal at one point and, with his wife, Johanna, raised a family of eight children. He liked his glass. "Although my grandfather drank a quart of whiskey a day for sixty-five years, he was never drunk or out of control," Bob later recorded in a memoir for his children.
Up in Chicago, T. E. Ryan prospered, cofounding the real estate firm of Ryan and Walsh and building his family a mansion on Macalister Place on the Near West Side. He also established himself as a political brawler in the city's well-oiled Democratic machine. Through the 1890s he won five terms as West Side assessor, and from 1902 to 1906 he served as Democratic committeeman for the Nineteenth Ward. T. E. was widely regarded as boss of the West Side, so popular and influential that, during the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, he was named grand marshal of the Irish Day parade. A portrait reproduced in an 1899 guidebook to state politics shows a handsome man with swept-back hair, a handlebar mustache, and a hungry glint in his eye. "One of the most popular men on the West Side," the guidebook reported, "and a politician whose power is as strong as ever." His success exerted an irresistible pull on John's sons, and one by one they all drifted to Chicago.
Timothy Aloysius Ryan was the second of John's children, born in 1875, and in the 1890s he headed north to board with his illustrious uncle and get into business in the city. Tim proved to be an eager political protégé: in 1899 he was appointed chief clerk in the city attorney's office, and five years later he ran for the state board of equalization in the Eighth Congressional District, billing himself as "T. A." Ryan. His uncle bankrolled all this, apparently seeing in his tall and handsome young nephew a rising political star. Tim got himself started in the construction business and ran an unsuccessful campaign for West Town assessor, his uncle's former position. "Father's duties have always been somewhat vague in everyone's mind," Bob 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."
By 1907, Chicago was home to five of John and Johanna's sons. They were big men — one of Bob's uncles stood six feet eight inches tall — with ambitions to match. Larry, Tim's younger brother by eight years, had come north to clerk for T. E.'s real estate firm, and Tom, Joe, and John Jr. wanted to start their own construction firm so they might capitalize on their uncle's political influence. But the brothers' relationship with their uncle ruptured. According to Bob, Larry's job "involved handling some funds and he was ultimately accused by his uncle of a minor embezzlement. Larry was about as liable to have done this as to burn down the Holy Name Cathedral. Father sided with his brother and left his uncle's bed, board, and generous patronage for good." From T. E.'s power base in the west, Tim and Larry relocated to the relatively unpopulated North Side, where they banded together with their siblings to turn the newly christened Ryan Company into a going concern.
Tim was thirty-two the night Larry introduced him to Mabel Bushnell, a lovely twenty-four-year-old secretary at the Chicago Tribune. Raised in Escanaba, a port town on Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Mabel was descended from some of the first English families of New York, though her father was a cruel and alcoholic newspaper editor from Gladstone, Michigan, whose career ultimately had given way to a tougher life as a tramp printer operating out of Rhinelander, Wisconsin. Tim took Mabel out on the town, squiring her to restaurants and theaters, springing for hansom cabs. He wanted her badly, but she took a dim view of his boozing, not to mention his political ambitions. Tim agreed to swear off liquor and politics, and in 1908 they were married, in a ceremony conducted by both a priest and a protestant minister. They moved into the apartment on Kenmore, and Robert Bushnell Ryan arrived late the next year — November 11, 1909.
Two years later Mabel gave birth to a second child, John Bushnell, and the two boys slept in the same bed. "Very early in my life I remember the lamplighter," Bob wrote, "a solitary youth who went around lighting the street lamps." He and Jack enjoyed an idyllic life in Uptown, frolicking every summer on Foster Avenue Beach and running up and down the alley behind their house, an avenue for commercial activity. "Almost all heavy hauling was done by horse and wagon," Bob remembered, and the alley "was full of various dobbins hauling ice, garbage, groceries, etc. In the hot summers the horses wore straw hats. The horses got to know the various stops and often would break in a new driver by showing him where to go."
The brothers' friendship ended in June 1917 when Jack — "a rather solemn, gentle little fellow," Bob wrote — died of lobar pneumonia, probably brought on by flu. He was not quite six years old. "I remember the terrible day that he died," Bob would write, "and the feeling of my mother and father that he might have been saved." Devastated by the boy's death, Tim and Mabel vacated their little apartment at 4822 Kenmore, blocks from Lake Michigan, and moved slightly northwest to a one-bedroom on Winona Street. "The neighborhood was somewhat less desirable," Bob wrote. "But nothing mattered. We had to move and we did." His parents, craving a portrait of little Jack, took a photograph they had of their sons on a dock and had Bob airbrushed away.
Now Bob slept alone, in a Murphy bed that folded out from the wall, like the one Charlie Chaplin had wrestled with in his two-reeler One a.m. He went to school alone, having transferred from Goudy Public School, which he remembered as mostly Jewish, to Swift Public School nearer his home. His parents were Victorian people, reserved even with their own child; and as the years passed, Bob learned to keep his own company, reading endlessly and roaming around the new neighborhood.
One unique attraction was the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company on Argyle, founded a decade earlier and now the city's premiere movie studio. Chaplin had made films for Essanay in 1915, and Gloria Swanson and Wallace Beery had gotten their start there; Bob would remember seeing them all on the streets of Uptown. He and his school friends even spent their Saturday afternoons appearing as extras in the two-reel comedies of child star Mary McAllister, each earning the princely sum of $2.50 a day.
He was naturally quiet, even withdrawn, and his parents worried over his introverted nature. Mabel gave him a violin that once had belonged to her brother and every Friday marched Bob to the elevated train and downtown to Kimball Hall for a lesson. His teacher, a Scandinavian player for the Chicago Symphony, couldn't do anything with him. Tim, knowing full well that a boy carrying a violin down the streets of Chicago would be a magnet for bullies, signed Bob up for boxing lessons at the Illinois Athletic Club, where a coach by the name of Johnny Behr taught him how to fight. Bob loved boxing: he was smart and quick in the ring, and he realized that if you didn't worry about the punch it didn't hurt as much. "Athletic prowess did a lot for my ego and my acceptance in school," he later told an interviewer. "The ability to defend yourself lessens the chance you'll ever have to use it."
Chicago could be an ugly place. Eight months after the Armistice was signed, Bob saw the city erupt again, this time in violence. Temperatures in the nineties had irritated tensions on the Near South Side between blacks confined to the Twenty-Fifth Street Beach and their white neighbors on the Twenty-Ninth Street Beach. On July 27, 1919, a black boy rafting near the shore at Twenty-Ninth Street was killed by a white man hurling rocks, and the incident touched off five days of murderous rioting. "As rumors of atrocities circulated throughout the city, members of both races craved vengeance," wrote historian William M. Tuttle Jr. "White gunmen in automobiles sped through the black belt shooting indiscriminately as they passed, and black snipers fired back. Roaming mobs shot, beat, and stabbed to death their victims."
Thirty-eight people died, and more than five hundred were injured. An official report would blame much of the initial violence on Irish athletic clubs such as Ragen's Colts and the Hamburg Club, but the rage had spread like an infection, creeping into the West and North Sides. (Just south of Uptown lay one of the North Side's isolated pockets of blacks.) For a boy not yet ten, the riot must have been a frightening experience. Not only could war go on forever, it could happen right in your own backyard.
THE RYAN FAMILY'S FORTUNES began to turn in 1920 when Tim's friend Ed Kelly was appointed chief engineer of the Chicago Sanitary District. Son of a policeman, Kelly had started out with the district at age eighteen, and though he had studied engineering at night school, he displayed more talent as a South Side politician, having founded and been elected president of the two-hundred-member Brighton Park Athletic Club. The Irish athletic clubs were mainly social, organizing team sports, but they were also politically oriented, and Kelly soon made a name for himself in the Cook County Democratic Party. By the time he became chief engineer, he had put in more than thirty years with the district. His spotty formal training was much noted in the press (one muckraking journalist accused him of farming out his technical work to consultants). Yet Kelly understood and had mastered the operating principle of Chicago politics: take care of your friends and they'll take care of you.
Under Kelly, the Ryan Company won lucrative city jobs paving streets and building sewer tunnels. Tim, who supervised sewer construction, worked from 5:30 AM until 8 or 9 PM at night; he and his son barely saw each other except for weekends. With his winning manner and many connections, Tim was critical to the operation, though according to Bob, the man who really ran the company was his Uncle Tom, "a rather cold and shrewd businessman." Flush with the company's profits, Tim and Mabel decided to move again, this time to a bigger apartment, in the northerly Edgewater neighborhood, that was only a block from the lake. They bought their own automobile and furnished their new home well. During the summers Bob went to Camp Kentuck in Wisconsin, while his parents enjoyed golfing weekends in Crystal Lake, northwest of the city. Mabel might have succeeded in keeping Tim away from drink, but politics was another matter, and Kelly could always rely on T. A. Ryan as a Democratic Party committeeman for the Twenty-Fifth Ward.
Haunted by the memory of little Jack, Tim and Mabel would never have another child, choosing instead to spoil and smother Bob. "You cannot know the difficulties that attend an only child," he would write years later, in a letter to his own children. "Two big grown-ups are beaming in on him all the time — even when he isn't there. It is a feeling of being watched that lingers throughout life." He hid in the darkness of the movies, spending countless afternoons at the Riveria Theater on Broadway or the smaller Bryn Mawr near the "L" stop. The charm and dash of Douglas Fairbanks were his greatest tonic, and he never missed a picture: The Mark of Zorro, The Three Musketeers, Robin Hood. Bob had seen how motion pictures were made and was fascinated by the results. Yet he could barely conceive of the movies as an occupation; his father and uncles considered the Ryan Company a legacy for their children.
After Bob graduated from Swift in 1923, his father pulled some strings to get him a summer job as a fireman on a freight locomotive, which satisfied the thirteen-year-old boy's appetite for freedom and Tim's desire that he learn the value of a dollar. Rumors of petting parties at the local public high school had persuaded Mabel that Bob needed a private education, and that fall his parents enrolled him at Loyola Academy, a Jesuit college prep school for young men that was located near the Loyola University campus to their north. The experience would shape him not only as a person but also as an artist.
Loyola was heavily Irish Catholic, the sons of an aspiring middle class, and the class of 1927 would produce an unusual number of Jesuit priests. Tim must have been pleased that his son would be schooled in the Catholic faith, though Mabel valued Loyola more for its academic reputation. The priests were known as stern taskmasters, and the curriculum was tough — along with the arts and sciences, the boys learned Latin, Greek, and Christian doctrine. Later in life, when Bob Ryan's interests had turned to education, he would take a more skeptical view of Jesuit schooling. "The fathers were well-seasoned men who had a good deal of authority that they seldom used," he remembered. "Huge areas of a fruitful life were almost ignored. Jesuit education was books and drill and writing and some discussion."
At the new school Bob began to distinguish himself in athletics, especially after a growth spurt propelled him to a height of six-foot-three, only an inch shorter than his father. He played football all four years and competed in track and field. Formidably big and agile on the gridiron, he was an All-City tackle his senior year. In school he struggled with Latin and especially chemistry but excelled in English, joining the literary society and working on the school magazine, The Prep. He read voraciously. "Truly, I may say that a man's best friends are his books," he wrote in the magazine his junior year. "Your companions may desert you, but your books will remain with you always and will never cease to be that source of enjoyment that they were when you first received them."
The book that changed his life was Hamlet, which he spent an entire semester studying under the instruction of his beloved English teacher, Father Joseph P. Conroy. The priest led the boys through the Elizabethan verse into the dark heart of the play, the young prince charged by the ghost of his dead father to avenge the treachery of his uncle, Claudius, and the unfaithfulness of his mother, Gertrude. Hamlet was full of moral conundrums, the hero torn between his conscience and his thirst for revenge. Bob was captivated: such rich language, such profound thoughts, such profound thoughts, such high drama. By the end of the semester he could recite practically the entire text. He fell in love with theater, reading Shakespeare, Chekhov, Shaw, and O'Neill, a writer who spoke to his own Irish melancholy. Their work awakened in him a hunger for self-expression, and he wondered if, instead of following his father into construction, he might become a playwright himself.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Lives of Robert Ryan"
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Copyright © 2015 J.R. Jones.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
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