According to a story Grantland Rice told that was not verifiably true, this was because at halftime Knute Rockne tearfully regaled the team with the story of how George Gipp on his deathbed had begged him to stir them to victory by invoking his martyrdom—just the kind of story the cynical Rockne thought it was the coach’s prerogative to invent. It was like the time in 1922 when he read his faltering team a “telegram” from his sick child Billy, who actually was in the pink of health. Or one of the five times he pretended he was about to quit, when he had no intention of quitting at all.
For Hollywood such details need not matter. Nor did they matter to Ronald Reagan, who had been telling such stories—“To every man comes Gethsemane!”—about how the world worked his entire life. He played the climactic scene of Gipp’s spiritual rebirth from selfish playboy to stout-hearted man to within an inch of his life: “Rock, sometime when the team is up against it and the breaks are beating the boys, tell them to go out there with all they’ve got and win just one for the Gipper. I don’t know where I’ll be then, Rock, but I’ll know about it and I’ll be happy.” When he lived again in its last reel, his ghost inspiring a bedraggled team to victory, teary-eyed audiences left the theaters with a new star in mind—Ronald Reagan.
He brought his parents to the gala debut in South Bend, Indiana, the thrill of his Catholic father’s life. Jack, many years on the wagon, enjoyed one last spree with his fellow Irish Catholic rogue, Pat O’Brien, and died shortly after. (Dutch told the story of Jack’s funeral to his daughter Maureen: “My soul was just desolate, that’s the only word I can use . . . all of a sudden I heard somebody talking to me, and I knew that it was Jack, and he was saying, ‘I’m OK, and where I am it’s very nice. Please don’t be unhappy.’ And I turned to my mother . . . and I said, ‘Jack is OK, and where he is he’s very happy’ . . . the desolation wasn’t there any more, the emptiness was all gone.” Everything always works out in the end, gloriously.)
His next picture, Santa Fe Trail, was an honest-to-goodness Western. For his next he was “loaned out” to MGM—the sign of a suddenly hot property. Hollywood’s preeminent columnist brought Reagan and Wyman along for “Louella Parsons Day” in Dixon, and he was received as a fellow superstar alongside Bob Hope and Ann Rutherford by a parade crowd estimated at fifty thousand. There he promoted International Squadron—his first leading role in a prestige picture (he “carries the starring burden,” the New York Times said, “and proves he can carry it”). In August 1941 he came in fifth in the “rising star” section of the Motion Picture Herald’s annual poll of 13,900 exhibitors. And when Warners needed a young player for a key role in a major melodrama, King’s Row, Reagan was one of the only actors it considered—as a young playboy victimized by a cruel physician who maliciously amputated his legs, who matures from the hardship into a hero. Reagan was so pleased with his performance he started screening the picture at his dinner parties.
By playing the character of the young blade traveling the journey from diffidence to stout-hearted manhood, in Knute Rockne, in King’s Row, at last Ronald Reagan had a “type.” By the unwritten rules of Hollywood, that meant he could now be a star. Warners tripled his salary (it was Lew Wasserman’s first million-dollar deal). King’s Row was nominated for a best picture Oscar. On December 3, 1941, Warners announced that Ronald Reagan got more fan mail that year than James Cagney, and that only Errol Flynn had received more. The world was his oyster. Life was again just one grand sweet song.
Then came December 7, 1941: a day that would live in infamy, and a day when his life began falling apart.
Other stars went overseas after Pearl Harbor and came back heroes—after enlisting as a private, James Stewart flew twenty dangerous missions in a B-17 Flying Fortress, and rose to colonel. Reagan’s poor vision meant he couldn’t see combat. Lew Wasserman was determined he stay home entirely. Wasserman himself, though twice classified as 1A, had managed to defer his own service for the duration. Doing the same for investments like Reagan was a specialty of both MCA and Warner Bros.
The first deferment came before Pearl Harbor, with the birth of Maureen. Then Warners, advised by Wasserman to make the case to the Pentagon that Reagan’s absence would “represent serious financial loss to the studio,” asked for him to be placed in the reserve pool. When that request was denied, Warners deployed a secret weapon: the studio’s crooked military liaison, who kept a stack of pilfered blank U.S. Army commissions to steer Warners favorites into the safe assignments the studio preferred. Jack Warner himself had been instrumental in inventing one such assignment: the Army Air Corps’ “First Motion Picture Unit,” set up to produce training pictures and headquartered at a mothballed studio in Culver City where Hal Roach had once made the Our Gang shorts. This was where Reagan ended up. Though he himself told the story of his deployment a little differently. “I’ve just been told, here at the studio, of two very important parts that were to be mine,” ran an article under his byline in Photoplay. “But I won’t be doing these pictures. Uncle Sam has called me, a Reserve officer in the Cavalry, and I’m off to the war.”
“Fort Roach,” “Fort Wacky,” and the “Culver City Commandos” were the nicknames Hollywood wags coined for the faintly ridiculous outfit, whose base commander was a stunt pilot who described their job as “putting a square peg in a square hole.” Reagan alone took to the posting with utmost seriousness: the military breeches, the shiny leather boots, the jeeps, the “troops” he got to lead in formation like the toy soldiers he so adored in 1919. However, these soldiers talked back. “Knock it off with the marching around!” one of the hacks serving under him—producers, directors, and the like, many of them, unlike him, not fighting because they were simply too old—demanded. He was just a contract player who’d barely broken into the prestige ranks; these guys might later be his bosses. He had no choice but to comply.
He turned his attention to diversions like memorizing each issue of Reader’s Digest, which he somehow managed to obtain before anyone else (“When we finally got our own copies,” the writer Irving Wallace complained, “we’d already heard the whole damn issue from Reagan”); playing basketball on the base recreation league team; devouring a book by a mystic named Manly P. Hall, The Secret Destiny of America, whose rhetoric about Providence’s great plan for the land between the oceans would recur often in Reagan’s speeches in decades to come; and, as the post’s director of administration, sending out disciplinary notes about the overflowing ashtrays in the script clerk’s and assistant manager’s offices. He didn’t even get to shine in the training films: in Jap Zero, he played the schlemiel who accidentally shot at one of his own planes; in The Rear Gunner, in which he had only five lines, he played the officer who talked the hero into taking the job. He did star in one picture at Fort Roach: in an in-house gag as a general briefing a squadron before a vital mission, stabbing the wall map, barking “This is our target!”—at which the map rolled up like a window blind to reveal a naked girl.
Late in 1942 the Allies invaded North Africa and a movie was rushed into theaters. The New York Times called it “a picture which makes the spine tingle and the heart to take a leap.” Variety called it a genuine contribution to the war effort. Made by the same producer as Knute Rockne, All American, it was the seventh-highest-grossing film of 1943; in March 1944 it won three Academy Awards. And, the Hollywood Reporter had reported a month after the war began, Ronald Reagan was supposed to play Casablanca’s lead instead of Humphrey Bogart. So close, and yet so far.
He looked dashing in his captain’s uniform on the October 1944 cover of Modern Screen; meanwhile, the humiliations compounded. The star system was in churning transformation, as studios replaced actors sent to war with a different brand of leading man: younger, leaner, brooding—sensitive types, to match the tastes of young men and women thrown into serious adult responsibilities at younger and younger ages. Reagan overheard their names from the mouths of the swooning secretaries in Fort Roach’s stenography pool—names like
Van Johnson. Johnson had a plate in his head that saved his life after a car crash and rendered him ineligible for military service. He had been released from his contract at Warner Bros. just as the studio was tripling the value of Reagan’s; then, in 1945, Johnson scored second place in the Motion Picture Herald poll of top Hollywood stars. Reagan never cracked the top ten.
He overheard the name “Jane Wyman” around town more frequently, too. A fan magazine began a new series letting its women readers imagine themselves in the lives of female stars; “Let’s Pretend You’re Mrs. Ronald Reagan” depicted her positively thriving in a husband’s absence—“from being Jane Wyman, supporting player, to Jane Wyman, star.” The former light-comic ingenue gave an Oscar-worthy performance in 1945 as the girlfriend of a desperate alcoholic in The Lost Weekend. “Our Child Must Not Hate,” a magazine primer on how to raise children during a war, featured Jane Wyman’s byline, and a subhead that made her husband the afterthought: “A new ‘mother’ code—one every man will support as strongly as Ronald Reagan.” Another piece framed Jane as a feminist heroine (“The assumption that the place of every woman is in the home is obsolete”), and ran a family picture with Dutch barely even in the background. “Oh, Janie, dear, you’re doing so well now,” movie colony gossip recorded a friend of hers gushing. “Is it true that when you went to a restaurant the other night the waiter said, ‘What does Captain Wyman want?’ ”
And then, one night, Reagan left the exclusive Hollywood bistro Ciro’s an hour before Jane Wyman, at which she danced with Van Johnson. According to the gossip item the next morning, she was seen “looking into Van’s eyes.”
And then, one day, passing a radio, he overheard an announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, the war in Europe is over.” His response, as he remembered it for a 1985 interview, was curious: “I felt a chill, as if a gust of cold wind had just swept past.” The rest of the nation was jubilant. But it was almost as if he felt afraid to face the rest of his life.
MODERN SCREEN: “HE’S BACK IN tweeds again, is ex-Capt. Ronald Reagan, and still tops with fans after three years in service.” Which was how fan magazines worked: in close consultation with studio publicists, they told the stories Hollywood wanted told about itself. Even if they were not true. Warner Bros. didn’t call Reagan back to the set to shoot a picture for another six months. The picture, a melodrama slated for Bogart and Bacall, Stallion Road, had been downgraded to a low-budget black-and-white. And it wasn’t released for two years.
The motion picture business was changing. The Justice Department went after a source of Hollywood’s monopoly power: the chains of theaters each studio owned, which had to show all the pictures the studio shoveled at them whether local audiences wanted to see those pictures or not. In 1940 the two sides agreed to the “Paramount Decree,” meant to break that system up, driving picture volume down; that same year Warners shut down the Foy Unit. By the end of the war Warners was making but twenty movies a year where it used to make sixty—which amplified the value of “superstars,” who could earn their keep making but two “prestige” pictures a year. Reagan’s dazzling seven-year contract, $3,500 a week for five pictures a year, was now a relic—and Henry Fonda, after returning from hard service overseas in the Navy (“I don’t want to be in a fake war in a studio,” he had insisted), won a contract worth $6,000 a week to make only one movie a year. Reliable stock players who showed up sober and on time no longer counted for much.
Joy Hodges had advised Reagan that a key to success in the movie colony was playing the political game. He had played it like an obedient boy. More and more actors had complained of the unceasing indignities of star manufacture: the poking, the prodding, the flacking, the twenty-four-hour nature of the job, from the shooting days that “started” at seven (actually six, for you had to show up on set looking perfect) to the “breaks” taken standing against ironing boards to keep costumes from wrinkling (you “relaxed” on set only for staged photo shoots) to the fake “dates.” Then there were the contracts themselves, in which refusal to take an assigned roll was punished by a six-month penalty tacked onto the end of a contract. Gone With the Wind star Olivia de Havilland filed suit against the practice in 1943, under California’s indentured servitude law, and won.
But Reagan never complained. He worked earnestly and doggedly at building relations with fans—a free gift to the studio and its bottom line. He gave his mother—“Moms Nelle” in the argot of the fan club—a full-time job handling mail. A Reagan fan newsletter began publication in 1940; typical article: “I have met Ronald and his dear mother several times. They are both the most thoughtful and sweetest persons a body could ever meet . . . a ‘regular guy’!” One enthusiastic correspondent, Lorraine Makler, started writing to him in 1943. He wrote to her as if she were a friend—and, soon, with her husband, Elwood Wagner, she indeed became one of his best friends.
The devotion he was inspiring was epic. So was his own devotion to the Hollywood grind. He was perfect star material. So why wouldn’t they let him be a star?
Errol Flynn was a star. Errol Flynn, who rarely showed up for work sober, or free of bruises from fights—a severe frustration for the cinematographers seeking angles for close-ups. Errol Flynn, infamous for on-set tantrums, for upstaging other actors—like Ronald Reagan, in one of his few featured scenes in Santa Fe Trail. Even when Flynn gave Hollywood its worst public relations black eye in a generation when he went on trial for statutory rape, in 1943, he still stayed a star—starring as an RAF pilot in Desperate Journey, playing above Reagan, even though he collapsed twice on set, forcing the picture over budget.
Jane Wyman was also a star. Two months after V-J day she was on the front page of the Los Angeles Times B section in a big pinup spread. The accompanying article, by the Times’ drama editor, lauded her emergence as a great actress, announcing her work in The Yearling as an old woman, acting without makeup, wearing burlap.
Ronald Reagan was not a star. He got a photo spread, too, around that time—as a Hollywood househusband: “The Reagans—Ronnie (Dutch), sprout Maureen (Mermy)—have the place to themselves while mom Jane Wyman is on location for MGM’s The Yearling. And do they keep busy! . . . Parcheesi is Mermy’s racket, but Ronnie isn’t throwing the game to be acknowledged champ without a struggle. . . . It’s a good thing he’s at work in Stallion Road—the guy would be plumb wore out with a little more of this relaxation.”
But Stallion Road wouldn’t be released for more than a year. When that excruciating wait finally ended, he complained bitterly to Lorraine Wagner that the industry shot itself in the foot by not releasing movies in color (his reactions to his professional misfortunes were frequently to blame them on what he claimed were poor business practices). It was four years since he’d last appeared on a motion picture screen. If he hadn’t been auditioning a new identity in which to assert himself, he might have gone just about insane.
THE FLYER SHOWED A GENIE rising from a mushroom cloud. The caption read, “ATOMIC ENERGY—SLAVE OR MASTER?” The event was scheduled for December 12, 1945, and Reagan was to feature alongside Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas and the sentimental liberal radio star Norman Corwin—although, since the ad ended up on Jack Warner’s desk first, and one of the sponsors was a leader of the Communist Political Association in Los Angeles, there was some question if Reagan would appear.
“We feel that such a performance on your part would be in violation of the exclusive rights to your services as granted under to us under your employment contract,” read the telegram posted to Reagan from Warner Bros.’ legal department. Lew Wasserman called Warners executives the next day to reassure them Reagan wouldn’t be anywhere near the thing. Reagan went anyway—then fired a broadside at his staunchly Republican boss. “REAGAN DEFENDS ACTOR’S RIGHT TO VOICE AN OPINION,” read the headline of Associated Press Hollywood correspondent Bob Thomas’s column six weeks later. “I didn’t recall that he had been a political thinker,” Thomas wrote, “and I asked him if this was a devel
opment of the war.” Reagan responded: “Before the war I did a lot of talking about politics, but mostly in back rooms. Now that I have seen what war means, I am more determined that my sons won’t have to fight a third world war.” (At that point he had only one son, Michael, whom he and Wyman adopted in 1945.) He continued: “Some people think an actor should keep his mouth shut. I think that is wrong. An actor should be careful to know that no group is using him for a selfish purpose, but if he sincerely believes in something he should use his voice.”
The article also said Jane Wyman was merely “tolerant” of his “new political life.” She was quoted complaining that the phone had rung sixteen times with political calls that morning. “Ronnie is a former sports announcer,” she said, “and you know how they love to talk.”
By the spring his political life was as busy as his screen life was fallow. In March he joined Gregory Peck, Edward G. Robinson, two Democratic congressmen, and the celebrated bass-baritone Paul Robeson on the sponsoring committee of a dinner at the Roosevelt Hotel for the Los Angeles Committee for a Democratic Far Eastern Policy; in April he served as toastmaster for the Americans Veterans Committee’s state convention, where the liberal group resolved for United Nations control of atomic energy, the worldwide abolition of forced military conscription, and an end to racially restrictive covenants in housing; in May he joined the executive council of the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions (HICCASP), along with Olivia de Havilland, James Roosevelt, and producer Dore Schary. It had been chartered as a counterweight to the anti–New Deal group the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals—which had been formed by, well, people like Reagan’s boss, Jack Warner.
Jack Warner wasn’t the only concerned party who noticed. Now that human beings had the power to destroy the earth—“stealing God’s stuff,” as the New Yorker’s E. B. White called it—atomic energy’s scientist-inventors felt a special responsibility to advocate politically for its control. The new Federation of Atomic Scientists unveiled a book, One World or None, at a November 1945 press conference in the Capitol Hill office of Helen Gahagan Douglas, arguing that atomic development “should be in harmony with an international system of control and cooperation and should further provide for scientific freedom and peacetime utilization of atomic energy in the interests of the whole people”—the position advanced at the December 12, 1945, nuclear rally that Jack Warner so desperately did not want Ronald Reagan to attend.
The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan Page 49
