The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan

by Rick Perlstein

  He retreated to Catalina, a more suitable setting for dreams: yachts, beach houses, a cocktail bar thirty yards long, a Moorish casino, an entire abandoned South Sea movie set left over from a Gloria Swanson picture. The Cubs’ manager complained Reagan wasn’t showing up to watch practice. Instead he spent his days daydreaming. He had already cast himself in his life’s next role.

  Joy Hodges was performing at the Biltmore Bowl, the ballroom where the Oscar ceremonies were held. He ambushed her backstage after the show, begging for a studio tour. She agreed—at which point he upped the stakes: an entry for a screen test. She agreed, introducing him to her agent, George Ward of the Meiklejohn Agency. Ward found Reagan just the type he preferred to sell: “likable, clean-cut all-American,” with “good looks that appealed mostly to young girls and old women.” And he knew just whom to approach. An up-and-coming contract player at Warner Bros. with just such all-American good looks, Ross Alexander, had just shot himself. Hollywood studios being factories, with Warners the most factory-like of them all, nothing could be allowed to slow down the assembly line; Warners would need someone to slot into Ross Alexander’s roles. That was how George Ward got his prospect a screen test. However, Ronald Reagan would never tell the story this way himself. In his version, it happened just like a movie—and in 1937, movies did not feature handsome young studs shooting themselves in the head.

  His version read like this:

  “ ‘Look, Joy told me that you would level with me. Should I go back to Des Moines and forget this, or what do I do?’ ”

  (The melodramatic turning point, when all hung in suspense.)

  “He didn’t answer. He just picked up the phone, dialed a number which turned out to be Warners Brothers studio . . . and said, ‘Max, I have another Taylor sitting in my office.’ ”

  (From the other end of the line: “God made only one Robert Taylor!”—comic relief.)

  Cue happy ending. He’s led to the Warner Bros. lot, he aces the audition, and returns to Des Moines, where a telegram arrives:

  WARNERS OFFERS CONTRACT SEVEN YEARS, ONE YEAR’S OPTION, STARTING AT $200 A WEEK. WHAT SHALL I DO?

  He answered:

  SIGN BEFORE THEY CHANGE THER MINDS. DUTCH REAGAN.

  How could it have happened any other way?

  SO IT WAS THAT ON June 1, 1937, Ronald Wilson Reagan was delivered unto the doorstep of an American company town, its practices as routinized as those of General Motors’ Detroit, Kodak’s Rochester, or Goodyear’s Akron. Its product was not even motion pictures, really. It manufactured something called “stars.” For when the Jewish immigrant tycoons who had run nickelodeons in New York invented a mass entertainment industry of a scope never before seen in the world, one of the first things they discovered was that the most efficient way to lure customers into an unfamiliar story was to put a familiar face on the poster. People like Florence Lawrence, the “Biograph Girl.” Or Rudolph Valentino. Or, when sound came in, a fast talker like James Cagney. Such figures weren’t merely actors: they were fully integrated personae. Their ineffable essence—their “type”—lingered from one picture to the next. Their skill as much as or more than their acting was in their ability to project that type to the public offscreen as well: at Hollywood bistros, in autograph sessions, in “candid” at-home shots in the fan magazines that women devoured by the millions, at the beauty parlors, beside the ironing board, between infant feedings, awash in reverie—an emotional cathexis the studio wizards worked so desperately to produce. Souls simultaneously larger than life and yet somehow familiar.

  Could “stars” be unearthed like precious gems? Could they be made? No one ever figured that one out. And so the first step, “discovery,” was a volume business, one that operated, as a book on the process by the film historian Jeanine Basinger, The Star Machine, described it, “on the principle that if it dropped a lot of nubile young blondes into its star-making machine, at least one of them might come out looking like a heartbreaker.” Scouts fanned out everywhere, to vaudeville theaters, nightclub acts, Miss Blossom of 1937 pageants—and radio stations. If anything was remarkable about this chapter in Ronald Reagan’s story, it was that it took so long to get started.

  Then came that screen test, which was divided in three parts: first, acting a scene; second, trying on wardrobe; and finally, the test that Basinger describes as “all-important”—the personality test. In it, the “newcomer was photographed while off-screen ‘testers’ asked questions designed to relax the performer and reveal the natural personality.” Then and only then might a provisional contract be conferred, and the real work begin: a “looking over” period in which the “talent” was weighed, measured, and prodded; studied under a literal magnifying glass (for skin blemishes . . .); glimpsed at every angle and under every condition of natural and studio light; and more—with “no parallel outside a tenth-century Arab slave-trading market.”

  The body thus revealed was then suitably transformed: platform shoes for the too-short; girdles for the too-fat; a hair color that showed up just right on black-and-white stock; plastic surgery. (The hairline of a prospect named Margarita Carmen Cansino sat too low, implying the fact that her father was Spanish; electrolysis took care of that, and turned her into “Rita Hayworth.”) The “natural personality,” as revealed in the personality test, was but raw material. James Stewart’s, for example: in real life he attended a tony prep school, then Harvard, before MGM turned him into a scourge of the Ivy League swells.

  Aspiring stars could be trained in just about everything: how to talk, how to walk (MGM starlets were recognizable for their “Metro walk”: stomach tucked in, shoulders squared, right foot first), how to be interviewed. How to ride a horse, how to dance. How to be photographed, by both motion picture and still cameras. The latter were just as important—for instance, for those all-important movie fan magazine spreads, where the actor might be depicted in pursuit of some hobby invented out of whole cloth. Mickey Rooney allegedly raised his own chickens. He was featured in Modern Screen in 1940 gathering eggs. “I’d read stories about Alice Fay in the papers,” one star, née Alice Leppert, recollected, “and I would wonder who that girl was.”

  Ronald Reagan arrived ahead of the game. He already came packaged inside a persona—one he’d been building himself since he was a boy.

  He had chosen his movie star name (though the brass rejected it as too over-the-top, so his pals back in Iowa were shocked to see “Ronald” on marquees; they’d only ever known him as Dutch). He had fashioned his sumptuous voice (“Dear Mr. Reagan: You have the most wonderful voice in pictures,” read one early fan letter), and had been studying himself being studied by the camera since he was a little boy. As in that group shot of the Dixon YMCA boys band where his elbow was cocked just so, his cape flared instead of lying just flat, and he handled his drum major scepter like a king.

  Which was why the studio was able to shoot him off like a rocket, practically from the day he arrived.

  Most first deals included a reassessment period after six months; Reagan landed a seven-year deal right away. The standard formula was to test newcomers in a series of walk-on roles before any real investment began. But eleven days after his arrival in Hollywood, the Chicago Tribune headlined its regular Hollywood dispatch “SPORTS WRITER IS FEATURED IN FIRST MOVIE.” In the dispatch, the “athletic looking, brown haired . . . former lifeguard” named his favorite role from Eureka College theatricals: Captain Stanhope in Journey’s End—“same role at Pomona College which called Bob Taylor to the attention of movie scouts,” Dutch, who’d clearly been paying attention to such things, later noted to an interviewer. He’d been preparing for this all his life.

  That first movie, a B picture of about an hour’s length, was Love Is on the Air. In the trailer, he introduced himself to the nation with an aw-shucks just-so story, leaning jauntily against the camera in a tweed three-piece suit, holding a fedora:

  “My name is Ronald Reagan. A few months ago I was a sports announcer
on a radio station in Des Moines, Iowa. One day I ran into one of these movie talent scouts. I think I caught him off guard because the next thing I knew I was taking a screen test for Warner Brothers in Hollywood!”

  (He cocked his head to the side earnestly, puppyish.)

  “I guess it was OK. At least I liked Hollywood! So here I am.”

  He played a local radio announcer who in the nick of time and with the pretty girl at his side tricked the racketeers and leading citizens conspiring to defraud the town into exposing themselves before an open microphone. Then came the nifty fight sequence, which Variety’s reviewer singled out for praise. The Prescott (Arizona) Evening Courier’s review paraphrased the press release—and since Warners put out a fantastic press release (“a big, good-looking athletic lad named Ronald Reagan . . . going places in pictures”), it was a splendid review. Warners had him going places. The first fan magazine shoot came soon after: “New Answer to Maidens’ Prayers” was illustrated with Dutch in a bathing costume, leaping out of a chair, eyes set stalwartly at the horizon, telling the same story (“Ronald ‘Dutch’ Reagan chalked up a record for himself of having saved seventy-seven lives in seven summers. But he declines to say how many of them were females”) he’d managed to get told about him since his first appearance in the Dixon Telegraph in 1928.

  He could only dream things would have jumped off this well.

  Then, things promptly flatlined.

  IN THE COMPLEX MULTIVARIATE ANALYSES of the studio wizards about which of the players they were throwing up against the wall were sticking, reviews played an outsize role: with so many pictures, some with a dozen or more billed actors, whether any given actor got mentioned was grounds for promotion. It wasn’t happening for Reagan. When he was several spots down the bill from Humphrey Bogart in a cornpone comedy about pro wrestlers, Swing Your Lady, the Chicago Tribune didn’t notice him; neither did the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times when he played in the goofy satire Cowboy from Brooklyn. In 1938 he got eight credits, each less memorable than the last. (“Doesn’t add up to a masterpiece,” Variety said of Naughty but Nice. “But it won’t chase them out of the theaters.”) The trailer for a particularly silly sequel in the “Tugboat Annie” series mispronounced his name. That happened again and again. Sometimes it was misspelled—“REGAN.”

  Maybe he had just chosen the wrong studio. Each had a personality, the lengthened shadow of a dictatorial czar—and at cheap Jack Warner’s shop, famously averse to raising up too many swelled-headed stars, the signature product was the dark, brooding “social problems” picture, a genre uncongenial to the genial Dutch. “This fellow Reagan is a hard one to peg,” a 1940 fan mag feature observed. “He’s been in Hollywood for three years, so you’d think people would begin to have a fairly definite idea of what he’s like. But all you’re sure about is that everybody is fond of him.” Not enough, apparently, for star billing.

  Of course, a particularly charismatic player could single-handedly invent a type, often accidentally: Humphrey Bogart, as the hard-bitten, forlorn loner who opts for softhearted sacrifice in the last reel; Errol Flynn, the devil-may-care swashbuckler who made it all look so easy. Reagan did not reveal that sort of genius. When Warners finally did find a niche for him it was in the notoriously cheap “B unit” run by producer Bryan Foy. In his first picture as Secret Service Agent Brass Bancroft, Variety liked the “scrap scenes, one aboard a plane”; of the second, it opined, “Will be limited to bookings in lower half of duals as filler footage”; the third was so bad Reagan begged his bosses to keep it on the shelf. Now he had his type—and a humiliating nickname: the “Errol Flynn of the B’s.” It was as if he’d never left the Republic Pictures lot at all. As for Foy, the reason he said he liked working with Reagan was that “he showed up for work in the morning sober.”

  Sometimes he floated up to a “prestige” picture, as the star’s amiable foil—almost as if his worth rested in his ability not to convey depth of emotion. (Nearly three decades later, when Jack Warner heard his former charge was running for governor, he protested: “No, no, Jimmy Stewart for governor; Ronald Reagan for best friend.”) In a 1939 hit, he played pal to a dying Bette Davis; within Hollywood’s unspoken codes, the nonromantic complement to the leading lady was, generally speaking, a homosexual—and there was Dutch, in Dark Victory, gallivanting around in a tuxedo, always on call with a cocktail shaker when she needed a shoulder to cry on at 5:30 A.M. At one point in the shoot he begged the director for a story change that would mark him as a romantic rival. The director shot back, “ ‘Do you think you are playing the leading man?”

  His self-worth had always come from being a star. He had brought an admiring crowd of Drake frat boys with him to Hollywood. His little brother, his parents—with whom, for a time, he lived—came, too. They were supposed to be witnessing his triumph. Instead they watched him become a face in the crowd.

  And then, light broke through the clouds.

  After an ill-fated engagement to marry his costar in Secret Service of the Air, Ila Rhodes (he never talked about it, and decades later was dismayed when an enterprising interviewer dug up her name), he married a button-nosed starlet named Jane Wyman, who played ditzy blond chorus girls in pictures like Gold Diggers of 1937 and George White’s 1935 Scandals. One of the gifts of his marriage, then of the birth of his first daughter, Maureen, in 1941, was the emergence of a marketable offscreen persona: now he was patriarch of a “perfect” young family. It was a role within which he could not have felt more comfortable. It made sense: his marriage had almost been produced like something out of the Bryan Foy unit. Their flirtation had begun on a nationwide vaudeville-style tour sponsored by a Hollywood power broker, columnist Louella Parsons, a fellow native of Dixon; they announced their engagement from her stage, then her column announced the romance to the world. The wedding reception took place in “Lolly’s” home, and she henceforth featured the “great personality . . . being rapidly groomed by Warners for stardom” on a regular basis. (Perhaps it was Parsons who advised him that his original fiancée was miscast. “EXOTIC STAR IS PART INDIAN,” ran one early feature on Ila Rhodes; “BLOND INDIAN PITCHES TEPEE AT STUDIO,” headlined another—no fit partner for a clean-cut all-American.)

  He found increasing representation in gossip columns and fan magazines.

  RONALD REAGAN and Jane Wyman have often been called “Hollywood’s nicest young couple.” They have successfully managed to combine two active careers with maintaining a happy home and being parents. Jane attributes a great deal of their success to the fact that Ronald makes the decisions in the family. Another factor is that Ronnie has the disposition of an angel, according to Jane, who should know. They’ve never had a quarrel. And he never forgets an anniversary or a birthday. What a guy!

  He would henceforth be featured far out of proportion to his box-office success—one of only three male stars to appear on the cover of Photoplay more than once. Then he got his breakthrough picture, one that blurred actor and role in just the way studio publicists liked best. In the storybook world of Grantland Rice, the only hero who loomed larger than Babe Ruth was Knute Rockne, the legendary Notre Dame football coach. Studebaker named a car after him. When he died in a plane crash in 1932 the king of Norway knighted him posthumously. Ten thousand were in attendance at Dearborn Station when his funeral train arrived in Chicago. And—to pick a certain Midwestern newspaper as an example—the Dixon Evening Telegraph ran nine stories about his passing over four days, upstaging news of one of the most catastrophic earthquakes in the history of the world. “KNUTE, SPINDLY BOY IN CHICAGO, SAW IN ‘ECKIE,’ HIGH SCHOOL QUARTERBACK, HIS IDEAL”: the real world was trading places with legend, in just the way Reagan adored.

  He wasn’t long at Warners before he suggested they make a Rockne picture. Unsurprisingly, the studio ignored him. Also unsurprisingly, when a Rockne biopic was finally put on the schedule, with Pat O’Brien as star, it ignored him again, testing ten other young blades for George Gipp, the r
ole Dutch burned to play. He got that audition only upon the intervention of a man whose appearance in his life marked another turning point in his fortunes: Lew Wasserman. In 1940, his agent’s firm was acquired by the entertainment conglomerate MCA, whose chief executive, Wasserman, would soon become the closest thing Hollywood ever had to a king. He had already taken a shine to young Reagan—they’d socialized together, frequently in the company of Sidney Korshak, the colorful attorney of Chicago’s organized crime syndicate. Wasserman decided to take Reagan on personally as his client. Their first coup was the Gipp audition—which Reagan won after telling the producer he had studied the story in Rockne’s diaries so closely he practically wouldn’t have to learn lines.

  Knute Rockne never published a diary.

  He did, however, publish a book. Coaching: The Way of a Winner argued that “the history or traditions of the school are a great thing to recite to your team, and to keep before them. Exaggerate these as much as you can.” Such cynicism was not displayed in Knute Rockne, All-American—even as its plot turned on one of Rockne’s most cynical acts, which became in the telling his most pure.

  In real life George Gipp had been an inveterate gambler who cared for neither discipline nor corny school spirit, and who died a fortuitously storybook death. As he sat on the bench with a cold during a losing game against Northwestern, the crowd clamored for Gipp to be put in; the ailing hero single-handedly won the game with two glorious touchdowns, then died from pneumonia. And, eight years later, it is verifiably true, a player did cry something like “That’s one for the Gipper” while scoring a game-winning touchdown against Army.