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

by Rick Perlstein

  Even if he himself had no set to show up on, he showed up instead in Bob Thomas’s gossip column: “It looks as though Errol Flynn is set for Frontiersman. . . . That’s too bad because the role was much wanted by another star who appears to be the least temperamental on the Warner lot—Ronald Reagan. Sometimes temperamental pays off?” Nine days later, he was mentioned in the column again—this time in an item about all the work Jane Wyman was getting: “Says husband Ronald Reagan, her home lot is the only studio that hasn’t discovered her.”

  At least he got to enjoy a real-life role straight out of film noir. One day, he recalled being summoned to a pay phone at a service station.

  “ ‘There’s a group being formed to deal with you. They’re going to fix you so you won’t ever act again.’

  “I took it as a joke,” he wrote. “When I got back to Warner’s I found they took it very seriously. The police were waiting with a license to carry a gun. I was fitted with a shoulder holster and a loaded 32 Smith & Wesson.”

  He stuck to his script even as evidence bulked that it made little sense. A Jesuit priest from Loyola University in Chicago, Father George Dunne, traveled to California to mediate between the IA and CSU. He found the CSU’s Herb Sorrell conciliatory. He found the IA’s Roy Brewer little more than a criminal thug. Brewer told the priest, “The Conference of Studio Unions was born in destruction and will die in destruction.” In January 1947 Father Dunne announced that the CSU “had justice on their side” and that if only the Screen Actors Guild would follow its “moral obligation” to stop going to work, the strike could be over in a day. He recalled in an oral history what happened next: the guild’s second vice president, Ronald Reagan, traveled to his Chicago rectory to argue “that Herb Sorrell and the CSU and all these people were Communists, and this was a Communist-led and inspired strike and that I was simply being a dupe for the Communists.”

  Shortly after Reagan’s visit to Chicago, in March 1947, Sorrell was kidnapped by men dressed up as police, beaten, and left to die in the desert—by, a studio labor relations executive later revealed, Chicago gangsters working for Brewer. Reagan still held fast to his conviction that Brewer was unsullied—even after, upon Sorrell’s miraculous return, alive, Sorrell once more embraced reconciliation, accepting an arbitration proposal that included major concessions from his union. Los Angeles’s conservative diocese newspaper the Tidings begged the IA and management to accept, complaining that the producers “have taken a most negative attitude by doing little to settle the dispute . . . with cries of Communism and radicalism.”

  Their refusal to settle, in fact, began to seem almost inscrutable—until, later that year, a congressman from Pennsylvania named Carroll D. Kearns held extraordinarily detailed hearings on the dispute. One fact that emerged was that Herb Sorrell was despised by actual Hollywood Communists, who considered him something like a traitor, and that the producers’ own in-house labor relations expert, a right-winger named Pat Casey, said of the CSU leadership, “I do not know of one that I would say was a Communist.” (“My God, I have heard ‘Communist, Communist, Communist,’ ” Casey testified in annoyance. “It gets down to where if you do not agree with somebody, you are a Communist.”)

  Another fact that emerged was that both sides were not equally culpable in this war at all. One day the hearings were rocked by a bombshell: someone introduced leaked minutes of a series of meetings that proved the violence beginning in September 1946 had been deliberately induced by the movie studios and the IA, conspiring to crush the Conference of Studio Unions. The plan had been to unilaterally replace CSU carpenters, building sets in accordance with a compromise arrived at by the “Three Wise Men,” with IA carpenters. When the CSU threw up picket lines in response, Teamsters were to truck IA carpenters through the lines. (The Teamster who led the operation was rewarded with a studio executive position.) That, in words quoted from instructions to all studio department heads, would “create an incident.” “Assign someone to see no damage is done to the electric generators,” ran another part of the instructions; thereupon friendly police, sheriffs, and the district attorney’s office would frame the CSU as violent extremists—which is exactly what had happened. In November, six CSU leaders had been charged with criminal conspiracy “to commit acts to pervert and obstruct” the law and “commit assault with a deadly weapon and to commit extortion”—but no charges were issued against the equally violent IA.

  The Screen Actors Guild was in on the conspiracy. The same document named a SAG staff member as observing that it was “advisable not to have stars see the picket line broken—but to hold them somewhere until they can enter the studio peacefully.”

  Reagan probably hadn’t been in on the plotting. But shortly after Father Dunne proposed his mediated settlement and a week after Sorrell’s kidnapping, Reagan was chosen as interim Screen Actors Guild president. The marquee Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper recounted that when the old president, hunky Robert Montgomery, informed her he was leaving the office, Montgomery said, “Whatever you do, don’t sell my successor short. He’s a brilliant, earnest man whose heart and mind are in the right places.” She wrote, “Then I almost gasped when he named the fellow as Ronald Reagan.” She soon changed her mind, she related: he handled the strike “with courage and intelligence.” Hopper, a dyed-in-the-wool conservative who deeply identified with studio management, had reason to think so. In his new role, his greatest passion became blocking impartial arbiters such as the Catholic archdiocese, the National Labor Relations Board, and an interfaith council of Los Angeles divines from settling the conflict.

  Impartial mediation would have allowed the CSU to survive, where the IA and industry sought to crush it. Did Reagan intend this? Was he serving the studio heads’ malicious designs? In his testimony to the Kearns Committee, Father Dunne offered a theory: “There is a certain mentality in the leadership of the Screen Actors Guild which is a producer’s mentality, rather than a workingman’s mentality.” He singled out Reagan by name: “His interest as an actor naturally tends, it seems to me, subconsciously to coincide with the producers.” Garry Wills, in his book about Reagan, offered another suggestion: that he may have been simply oblivious that his refusal of outside mediation made him the producers’ cat’s-paw—that he “knew nothing of the plans that had been concerted to break the CSU.”

  Either way, the result is the same. A very Ronald Reagan result—one strikingly similar to his achievement in another complex dispute, nineteen years earlier. As a freshman at Eureka College he had in just this way reduced the fog of bureaucratic war into a crystal simplicity, claiming his faction’s “policy of polite resistance” had united the campus once and for all, purged a villain, and saved the university, bestowed upon all and sundry an “education in human nature and the rights of man to universal education that nothing could erase from our psyches.” The gift he provided to his fellow Screen Actors Guild members was similar. Many of them wished to see themselves as liberals, but also just wanted to keep on making movies, not go on strike. What he gave them was a story that turned them into moral innocents instead of scabs. He soon won nomination for a full term as Screen Actors Guild president. He made others feel good.

  Except, as ever, those who considered him a fraud and a joke—like a Canadian actor named Alexander Knox, who took the podium at a SAG mass meeting deciding whether to honor the picket line and proceeded to parody its president as a simpleton. “Reagan spoke very fast,” Knox later reflected. “He always did, so that he could talk out of both sides of his mouth at once.”

  MEANWHILE, THERE WAS THAT ACTING career. Father Dunne Said at the hearings that it “very clearly would have been injured had he taken the other stand.” But that wasn’t the case at all. Reagan’s career appeared beyond salvation, whatever political stand he did or did not take.

  Jack Warner had praised Reagan as “a tower of strength, not only for the actors but for the whole industry” in the strike. It didn’t keep Warners from promptly cast
ing Reagan in the worst movie of his career, That Hagen Girl, starring Reagan alongside Shirley Temple in her first grown-up role. The newly married Temple, who insisted on being called “Mrs. Agar,” looked like a little girl playing dress-up. Reagan played her romantic interest. A Hollywood Citizen correspondent visited the set, where the “handsome actor and president of the Screen Actors Guild makes no secret of the fact that he yearns to gallop over movie prairies.” The correspondent quoted his complaint, “We are making too many ‘parlor stories.’ Moviegoers have enough of their own problems today. When they go to see pictures they want some entertainment that will take them out of their own locale and away from their troubles,” and then noted, “Ronnie thinks the Western is the answer.”

  Actually Westerns were Hollywood’s most prevalent genre. Though he had an answer to that as well. “ ‘Too often,’ he lamented, ‘producers will take a story and set it in the outdoors in an attempt to label it a Western. That isn’t the way to do it.’

  “His suggestion: look into American history, where many unmoviefied characters with interesting and exciting stories are still hidden. But steer clear of the Civil War, he advised, because there can only be but one ending to such a picture. Even Hollywood can’t change that.”

  And Hollywood Citizen reported on his “campaign to escape Warners temporarily to play ‘Only the Valiant,’ a story of the Indian War which is owned by the Cagneys.” But that campaign failed. Nowadays the only place he was starring was behind the podiums.

  He skipped his thirty-sixth birthday dinner to give a speech for Truman’s housing program; spoke at a fan banquet for baseball stars (the papers identified him as “Ronald Reagan of the movies”—as if readers might not know who he was); emceed the Oscars alongside Jack Benny; helmed a dinner honoring school superintendents; then, still waiting for Stallion Road to debut, addressed the convention of the International Association of Y’s Men’s Clubs. (“As we enjoy the rights and privileges of American citizenship, we must acknowledge a corresponding duty to safeguard those rights to everyone lest they be lost to all . . . and give the bum’s rush to the notorious hucksters whenever and wherever they may be found.”) And when a Harvard sociologist said the nation was harmed by the “synthetic childless population” and “disintegrated people in Hollywood,” it was Reagan, his wife pregnant with their third child, who rose for the defense: “If the professor could be persuaded to leave the cloistered halls where intellectual inbreeding substitutes for the ‘synthetic’ life of Hollywood, I believe we could show him that the people in the studios, gathered from the cities, towns, and farms, are a pretty good cross section of American life, no worse, no better.”

  In May 1947 Hedda Hopper published an appreciation of Reagan as a reasonable liberal. “I believe the only logical way to save our country from all extremists,” he said, “is to remove conditions that supply fuel for the totalitarian fire. . . . The Reds know that if we can make America a decent living place for all of our people, their cause is lost here.” He also said, “I’m not in favor of banning any political party. If we ban the Communists from the polls we set a dangerous precedent. Tomorrow it may be the Democratic or Republican Party that gets the ax. Rather than ban the party, we should force all issues into the open.”

  These were the standard liberal anti-Communist positions. They were also radically disingenuous. Only one month earlier, Reagan had once more invited two FBI agents into his home. He told them two of his rivals on the SAG board (who were also rivals of each other) “follow the Communist Party line.” Then he singled out eight more suspected Communists—including Alexander Knox, the actor who had mocked him at the SAG meeting.

  J. Parnell Thomas, the fearsome chair of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, set up shop at the Biltmore Hotel to hold secret hearings on Communist infiltration of Hollywood. That hinge in Hollywood history was followed by yet another hinge in Reagan’s own. In June, after plunging into a river to rescue Shirley Temple’s character from a suicide attempt, he contracted viral pneumonia. He was resting at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital on June 26 when his wife gave birth three months prematurely—at a hospital three miles away. Hedda Hopper rushed to print to report the child’s condition was “satisfactory.” But the child, whom the parents named Christine, was dead by the time the column appeared. Reagan would never acknowledge that his wife gave birth. Instead he called it a miscarriage, blaming it on his wife’s overwork.

  JANE WYMAN WAS WORKING HARD, and extraordinarily well. For The Yearling she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress. For her next picture, Johnny Belinda, she prepared to play a deaf-mute by studying sign language, learning lip reading, and, not satisfied that she knew what it was like to feel deaf, wearing wax earplugs for hours at a time and spending days in isolation, deliberately terrifying herself. “I Broke Myself Down for Johnny Belinda,” she wrote in an exceptional article in the Los Angeles Mirror—a particular challenge, she said, because there was “nothing groping or uncertain about me. I’m pretty much of a girl who knows her own mind. I’ve taught myself to make decisions. It’s the story of any career woman.”

  Her husband’s acting method, contrastingly, had been recently described by “Hollywood Is My Beat” columnist Sidney Skolsky: “He studies his role by merely sitting down in a comfortable chair and reading and rereading the script until he knows it.” Soon after, Dutch attended a preview screening of That Hagen Girl. When the audience moaned as he kissed Shirley Temple, he sank down in his chair, then snuck out before the lights went up. (The kiss was cut from the final edit.)

  The marriage was falling apart. Jane Wyman was not shy about telling the world she came by these portrayals of lonely women honestly; everyone in Hollywood by then knew that Reagan never shut up, and that Wyman called him “diarrhea mouth.” At a dinner party at Dick Powell and June Allyson’s house, George Murphy tried to talk him into becoming a Republican. Allyson asked Reagan a question; the answer went on and on and on, until Wyman leaned over and whispered, “Don’t ask Ronnie what time it is because he will tell you how a watch is made.” Allyson replied, jokingly, “He’ll outgrow it.” Wyman didn’t laugh.

  She had also made no secret to friends that Reagan had once responded to one of her periodic melancholy fugues with “We’ll have an ideal life if you’ll avoid doing one thing: don’t think.” When Johnny Belinda was shot on location in a remote stretch of Mendocino County, just after the death of their infant daughter, she befriended her costar Lew Ayres, an extraordinary figure who had published an open letter in 1942 announcing he was a conscientious objector. (A front-page editorial in the Hollywood Reporter begged the public not to blame the motion picture industry for the heresy.) They would disappear for long conversations about the meaning of life, and Hollywood gossip linked them romantically. Reagan promptly visited the set—as if to spy on this coward his true love was choosing over him.

  Then, he had to leave. For a crucial appointment beckoned.

  The CSU had been crushed. The brass launched the studio on a new project. The Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, the coalition of right-wing actors and executives launched in 1944 to combat “the growing impression that the industry is made up of, and dominated by, Communists, radicals, and crackpots,” joined forces with the House Un-American Activities Committee to purge the Communists, radicals, and crackpots once and for all. HUAC’s chief Hollywood investigator, Allen Smith, who had grown up in Dixon, recommended Reagan be summoned as a “friendly” witness. “He has no fear of anyone and is a nice talker,” he reported. “He is of course reticent to testify, because he states that he is a New Deal Liberal, and does not agree with a number of individuals in the Motion Picture Alliance. I believe we straightened him out on a number of differences.”

  “Hearings Regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry” opened in Washington on October 20, 1947, with testimony from the friendly witnesses. The urbane, mustachioed Adolphe Menjou—a far-right ideolo
gue when he wasn’t playing well-dressed men-about-town—said that only the “vigilance” of anti-Communists like himself prevented “an enormous amount of sly, subtle, un-American class-struggle propaganda from going into pictures” (though “a communistic actor, even if he were under orders from the head of the studio not to inject communism or un-Americanism or subversion into pictures, could easily subvert that order”—by, say, changing the inflection of his voice). A screenwriter said Communists had mastered the art of introducing a “little drop of cyanide in the picture” that “makes every Senator, every business, every employer a crook and which destroys our beliefs in American free enterprise and free institutions.” Writer Ayn Rand had written a guidebook to help producers on the lookout for such surreptitious Communism. (Make sure your pictures “don’t smear wealth”; “don’t glorify failure”; “don’t deify the ‘common man.’ ”) At the hearings, she took on Song of Russia, that supposedly innocent effort to help defeat Hitler, for daring to depict Soviet citizens who smiled. Ginger Rogers’s mother told of how she had forbidden her daughter to act in the film version of Theodore Dreiser’s classic novel Sister Carrie because it was “open propaganda.” Jack Warner held up a picture of John Lawson on the picket line in the 1945 strike—proving, since Lawson was a Communist, that the strike was only “supposedly on account of the carpenters and painters.” The IA’s John Brewer testified of his hope that “with the help of the committee the Communist menace in the motion picture industry may be destroyed, to the end that Hollywood labor may be spared in the future the strife and turmoil of the immediate past”—the same strife and turmoil he himself had deliberately engineered to break a rival union.