The full autobiographical letter that Robert Ryan wrote to his children can be found here; for more on Ryan’s filmography and an appreciation of his work, see “The Essential Robert Ryan.”
“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.”
“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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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 the time Mabel was expecting her first child, however, Tim Ryan was “broke,” possibly the result of having fallen out with his uncle. Larry, seven years younger than Tim, had been working for T.E. as a clerk and was accused by him of having embezzled a small amount of money. “Larry was about as liable to have done this as to burn down the Holy Name Cathedral,” Ryan wrote. Tim sided with his brother and moved out of T.E.’s mansion; when Robert was born, his parents were living in a six-unit apartment building at 4822 N. Kenmore in Uptown.
Following their break with T.E., Tim and Larry had joined their brothers Tom, Joe, and John as partners in their fledgling business, Ryan Construction. “The principal jobs were street paving and large sewer building,” Ryan wrote. “They became very prominent in the business and at the time of the 1929 crash were probably worth four or five million dollars. Dad’s duties were in the beginning as a superintendent of sewer construction—this finally became the important part of their business. He also was immensely valuable as the contact who knew and was liked by the big Chicago politicians who doled out the jobs.”
In 1923 Tim and Mabel Ryan enrolled Robert at Loyola Academy, a Jesuit high school for boys then located in Dumbach Hall on the Rogers Park campus of Loyola University. (The school moved to Wilmette in the 50s and went coed in 1994.) Tall and muscular, he distinguished himself in athletics (football and track), but he also excelled in rhetoric (the debating society, the literary society, the school magazine) and in his senior year won an award for “combined excellence in scholarship and athletics.” According to Cheyney, Robert spoke most fondly of his English teacher, Father Conroy, who introduced him to Shakespeare. The priest spent an entire semester on Hamlet and, probably more than anyone else, was responsible for Robert’s interest in theater.
