This does not sound like a man realistically worried about the tax penalties of taking on extra work. His obsession with the unfairness of the IRS may be better explained by a secret that came out only after his death. A researcher discovered a tax lien against Reagan in the amount of $24,911 (some $200,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars), apparently related to income he had deferred during World War II, when he was pulling down only $280 a month. Who knows what frustrations, during this most frustrating period of his life, lay behind that? What endless phone calls with IRS bureaucrats, what tortured discussions with accountants, what fears that this man for whom appearances counted for everything might be found out? Who knows. If he ever talked about it, no one ever told.
Perhaps he talked about it with Lew Wasserman. Wasserman, though nominally a Democrat, was Hollywood’s preeminent tax-hater. Gaming the IRS was at the heart of his business genius. MCA had an “incredibly complicated structure,” wrote a biographer, “with ultimately more than two hundred subsidiaries incorporated in many different states as well as abroad.” In one dodge, Wasserman figured out that if his clients did all their work outside the country for at least eighteen months, they would receive all their income tax-free; in another, he decorated MCA offices with antiques on which the company claimed depreciations, even while they were gaining in value.
Reagan had always sought older mentors, surrogate fathers; now here was something to more deeply bind him to Wasserman, And he would soon find his animus toward the IRS resonating with a new social circle. That came of a new romantic relationship—the next station in his ideological Wanderjahr.
THERE ARE SEVERAL STORIES ABOUT how Ronald Reagan met an actress, new in town in the fall of 1949, named Nancy Davis. In one version, both attended a dinner party at the home of Dore Schary, whose back her physician stepfather had once fixed. Schary pooh-poohed the seriousness of the Communist threat; Reagan vociferously argued otherwise. Nancy, seated opposite, “kept smiling at him in agreement.” In another, Nancy Davis tried to run for the Screen Actors Guild board but was left off the ballot owing to confusion involving another “Nancy Davis” on the membership rolls. In still another story, Davis kept a list of Hollywood’s most eligible bachelors whom she wished to woo: actors, lawyers, agents, producers, power players every one—and the Screen Actors Guild president topped the list.
Ronald and Nancy, however, always told still another version. Theirs was a story of rescue.
The story went that a list of Communist sympathizers was published in the Hollywood Reporter. “Nancy Davis” was one of them—again, a different Nancy Davis. Director Mervyn LeRoy asked Reagan to meet with her to help clear up the matter. That would have been consistent with Reagan’s immersion in a new aspect of film colony culture: the evolving bureaucracy by which accused Communists and sympathizers were ritualistically “cleared” of suspicion. It was a sordid and arbitrary process—for instance, in the case of Alexander Knox, the actor Reagan named to the FBI after Knox mocked him at a SAG mass meeting. Suddenly Knox found himself having to answer fantastic and foundationless charges: that he had attended a meeting at a left-wing bookshop he could not recall entering in his life; that he had protested against the American Nazi Gerald L. K. Smith at a meeting of the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions (he hadn’t, though he wondered what was wrong with protesting against a Nazi, and also hadn’t belonged to HICCASP); that he had signed a petition asking SAG to review its neutrality policy in the jurisdictional strike (he had, but was baffled as to why that made him a suspected Communist); that he had signed a full-page ad protesting HUAC’s investigation (he hadn’t). It didn’t matter: Knox was unable to make another movie in America until 1967.
Neither Ronald Reagan nor Nancy Davis, however, found the clearance regime sordid. For them it was a prop for a gauzy, romantic fairy tale—like finding the maiden for whom the slipper fit. They met over dinner, where the gentleman agreed to save the damsel from distress. They moved on to the nightclub Ciro’s, where they partied into the night. Then, wrote Nancy in her autobiography, “We had dinner the next night and the night after that.” They “went together,” she wrote, “for about a year.”
It was more like two and a half years. And in any event, their story wasn’t factual on its face. The mix-up with another “Nancy Davis” believed to be a Red took place not in 1949 but in 1953, when she and Reagan were already married and he was no longer a SAG officer. It was Louella Parsons, not Reagan, who cleared her from the taint. But Nancy Davis had no less a taste for tidying up stories than the man who would become her husband. The truth is that Ronald Reagan did rescue Nancy Reagan—who had developed a taste for being rescued since she was a girl.
Her mother, Edith Luckett, had been an itinerant actress whose first husband was a serial failure. They divorced. Edith refused alimony, struggling to raise her daughter alone while she trod the boards up and down the Eastern Seaboard; when that became too much, she left Nancy with her sister’s family in Bethesda, Maryland. There Nancy was able to grow up with a double dose of glamour: at Sidwell Friends, the exclusive private school of the Washington elite (though her foster family was poor, and she always had to share a room); and visiting her mother on the road, where she mingled with the likes of Spencer Tracy and the exotic silent film star Alla Nazimova (her godmother), swaddling herself in Edith’s dazzling costumes.
In 1927, on a cruise to join a production in England, her mother met a taciturn Chicago professor of medicine, Dr. Loyal Davis, scion of one of the oldest families of Galesburg, Illinois. When Dr. Davis proposed marriage, Edith traveled to Bethesda for a rare visit with her daughter to seek her approval—promising that upon her marriage, she would bring Nancy to live with them in Chicago. Nancy approved. In short order Dr. Davis became a progressively more important figure in Chicago, rising to chief of surgery at Northwestern. Edith landed an easy role on a radio soap opera, contributing to the family’s increasingly ample income. Nancy was enrolled in Chicago’s toniest high school, Girls Latin. (The caption beneath her photo in the 1939 yearbook read, “Nancy’s social perfection is a constant source of amazement. She is invariably becomingly and suitably dressed.” In fact she was always afraid her classmates would think she had a weight problem.) Their Lake Shore Drive home became the center of a social whirl: Chicago’s towering mayor Ed Kelly was a regular; the legendary Walter Huston was “Uncle Walter”; family friends like Mary Martin, Lillian Gish, and Katharine Hepburn flitted by. Vacations were at the sumptuous Arizona Biltmore.
At age sixteen, Nancy made the rescue legal. She was invited by her biological father, Ken Robbins, and his new wife for a visit. They quarreled; he locked her in a bathroom. Returning home, she asked a retired judge about how she might go about being adopted by her stepfather. She filed the petition herself. Decades later, a reporter confronted her: Who’s Who said she had been adopted. Her official biography as first lady of California said she “was born in Chicago, the only daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Loyal Davis.” She replied, “I don’t care what the book says. He is my father.” She repeated herself: “In my mind, he is my father. I have no father except Loyal Davis.”
In Chicago, Dr. Davis, whom even his grandchildren would later call “sir,” was infamous for his conservatism. How conservative? A story about medical interns who prevailed upon the parents of babies they delivered in charity cases on Chicago’s black South Side to name their sons “Loyal” to snub their racist boss sounds apocryphal. The one about syphilis has more of a ring of truth: Dr. Davis, suspecting that a well-to-do patient had a tumor, turned the case over to two medical students, who did a positive test for the venereal disease. They were shocked when he responded to their presentation of their findings by imperiously pronouncing: “My patients don’t have syphilis.”
“My patients don’t have syphilis”: that unbendable will to divide the world into the virtuous and the wicked, never the twain shall meet—a family trait. Though at that, once Nancy loose
d herself on the wider world with the ambition to become an actress, a crisis developed: she found herself on the wrong side of that particular divide. Which was where the need for her rescue came in.
Nancy Davis majored in drama at Smith College, then struggled to make it as an actress on Broadway. She did better in her social life. Spencer Tracy suggested Nancy as a date for his widowed friend Clark Gable when Gable traveled to New York. Gable ended up squiring Nancy around town for three straight days. “Nancy was one of those girls whose phone number got handed around a lot,” a contemporary recollected. She developed what used to be known as a “reputation.”
It is hard to put a polite coloration on what happened next. One of the men given her number—“She’s a nice girl who likes company,” he remembered being told—was the head of casting at MGM. Benny Thau was fifty-one; she was twenty-eight. Before the evening was out, he invited her to come to Hollywood for a screen test. However, he later expressed severe reservations about her talent: “Stars like Elizabeth Taylor, she couldn’t compete with that. She was attractive, but not what you’d call beautiful.” Nancy Davis appeared to have a guilty conscience about the coup; she told her mother she earned that screen test after someone at MGM saw her in a television play.
The screen test was directed by MGM’s legendary George Cukor, and filmed by the studio’s best cinematographer, George Folsey; it followed, on Benny Thau’s order, three weeks of training from the studio’s drama coach. “All Nancy Davis had to do,” an MGM producer later told a scandal-mongering biographer, “was show up . . . and not upchuck on camera.” She signed one of those seven-year contracts they weren’t giving out very many of in March 1949. On her studio publicity questionnaire, asked what she would do if not acting, she answered, “Lord knows!” She said her greatest ambition outside her acting career was “to have a successful happy marriage.” However, the social mores of the time would make that ambition difficult. She was twenty-eight, older than the ideal marriageable age. And there were those delicate stories that began to circulate around town, in which she left the offices of powerful men at odd hours . . .
Then she met a man who lived to rescue, who treated her like a queen, swaddled her in innocence, and gazed upon her with nothing but reverence for the rest of their lives.
As their romance blossomed, Ronald Reagan was embarked on a crusade against Hollywood gossip. One consequence of the softening of Old Hollywood’s autocracies was more autonomy for the fan magazines that once had been all but adjuncts for the studio publicity shops. In February 1951, emceeing Photoplay magazine’s annual awards show, he shocked the assembled luminaries by saying from the podium, “We as an industry have suffered from irresponsible journalism.” The New York Times published an article on the controversy that followed. On a TV show he argued that the only reason newspapers ever began reporting on movie stars in the first place was as “a circulation gimmick,” as if studio publicists did not exist; then, in the same interview, he said that “the anxiety of studio press departments for publicity” was the source of the problem. Thereupon he blamed Hollywood’s box-office woes on media gossip—and concluded with a right-wing fillip: that such gossip threatened the “rights of a private industry to go on and maintain itself.” Now he was in those fan magazines’ sights—those magazines that had made his career. The editor of Motion Picture disemboweled him in an open letter: “You cited fan magazine stories about your divorce from Jane Wyman as ‘false and irresponsible invasion’ of your privacy . . . you apparently didn’t feel the marriage itself was a private affair in 1943 [when] our photographers were permitted to take all the pictures they wanted of your home, your wife and your family, and in 1941 you talked freely to our reporter concerning your expected baby, and posed buying toys, baby powder, and bassinets.” Reagan sent an angry several-page open letter in return. But Motion Picture would not publish it.
This was not how Hollywood as he understood it was supposed to work. Perhaps, with Nancy, order could once more be restored. “They go as ‘steady,’ ” ran a fan magazine item on the courtship, “as any couple in Hollywood. . . . For Ronnie, whose last wife was bored by his serious attention to union matters, etc. Nancy’s a good listener.”
“REAGAN WILL WED SOCIALITE,” was how the nuptials were announced in one news clip. They married on March 3, 1952, in a little private ceremony with William Holden as best man and his wife, Ardis, as matron of honor. It was a nice Hollywood contrivance: as a general rule, the Holdens were not speaking to one another at the time.
NANCY HAD HOPED TO SETTLE down as a housewife. But Reagan got only three pictures in 1952; they had a mortgage on a home overlooking the ocean in the tony suburb of Pacific Palisades, another on the ranch bought the previous summer (350 acres in some accounts, 600 acres in others; it was actually 236), payments on a green Cadillac convertible, child support. They also soon had a new child, Patricia Reagan, born seven and a half months after their nuptials. At that potential scandal, another Hollywood contrivance was generously provided by Louella Parsons: “They were at the horse show Monday night when Nancy was taken directly to the hospital,” she columnized. “The baby wasn’t due until Christmas.” (Actually, Patricia had been conceived before they were married. “My parents have never gone for simple, state-of-the-art lies,” she wrote. “They weave bizarre, incredulous tales and stick by them with fierce determination.”) So Nancy supplemented the household income by playing in a sci-fi groaner called Donovan’s Brain and doing ads for Blue Bonnet margarine. (“Mrs. Ronald Reagan, popular wife of the famous movie star, is a winsome socialite of Pacific Palisades, California. . . .”)
She did not care for ranch life—though for the sake of the columnists, she made do: “Here Ronnie and his wife, Nancy (Davis), get into blue jeans and tend to the cattle and horses, milk the goats, feed the chicken, and have the time of their lives.” That piece, which ran in the Los Angeles Examiner at the end of June 1952, was slugged “NICE GUY REAGAN FIGHTS FOR WHAT HE BELIEVES IN” and noted, “His interest in civic and state affairs is so keen, a group of California citizens recently invited him to run for senator. He turned it down with thanks. ‘I’m a ham—always was and always will be,’ he laughed.” It did not note that the citizens were Republicans, and included car dealership magnate Holmes Tuttle, who was at least as conservative as Loyal Davis.
Reagan had just delivered a commencement address at a Disciples of Christ college in Missouri, a curiously nervous performance. “This is a role which, believe me, I approach with more fear than any role I have played,” the seasoned podium pro began, before moving on to several disjointed, self-effacing anecdotes and winding up with a series of patriotic bromides—as if what he currently believed was not clear at all, for the first time in his life.
ONE MONTH LATER HE WOULD deliver something else: a legal document, signed by him in his capacity as union president, granting MCA exclusive right to ignore a crucial Screen Actors Guild rule: a ban on agencies producing TV shows. It was a conflict of interest, because agents had the obligation to get their clients paid as much as possible, and producers had an interest in having them paid the least. But Lew Wasserman saw television as his next gold mine, and he wanted in.
There were 1,126 times more televisions in American homes than there had been in 1946. Studio bosses feared the infernal machines like the plague (for a time Jack Warner banned them as set dressing in Warner Bros. films). Hollywood actors came to fear them, too. “Thousands of hours of entertainment must be available to the television public,” the Saturday Evening Post reported early in 1952, “and any guess as to where it will come from is as good as another.” TV production was almost exclusively done in New York, live, instead of in Los Angeles, where shows were shot on film. If TV shows were filmed, producers were worried that actors would demand payment every time a show was rerun—what was known as a “reuse” payment; producers adamantly refused to even entertain the idea of reuse payments. In Los Angeles, these were perilous times: If actors held t
he line and continued to demand them, and movies continued to lose market share to TV, Hollywood as an institution might shrivel at an alarming rate.
Within this matrix, Wasserman spied a bonanza business opportunity.
He set up a TV production subsidiary in Los Angeles called Revue—this was, on its face, against SAG rules. Wasserman, however, convinced his favorite client to sell the SAG on the idea of granting MCA a “blanket waiver” of that rule. Wasserman and his lawyer Laurence Beilenson sold the idea to Jack Dales by arguing that the acting game in Los Angeles would die without it—that TV production would stay in New York. But the argument didn’t really make sense. For if letting one agency have a blanket waiver, as a monopoly, might open the floodgates to Hollywood TV production, wouldn’t it help Los Angeles all the more to let all agencies enjoy the same right?
It made more sense when you considered the sweetener MCA added to the deal: a secret quid pro quo. Revue would give SAG what the studios adamantly refused to grant: reuse fees. How secret was that part of the deal? It may have even been kept from Reagan, who seemed quite in earnest when, asked at a 1962 hearing on MCA’s alleged monopoly power, said there was no quid pro quo. At that, a letter from Beilenson to Wasserman recollecting the secret terms—that Revue was willing to sign a contract giving the guild members reuse fees when no one else was willing to do so—was read out. Reagan was asked the question again. He replied, guilelessly, “It’s quite conceivable then if he says it in this letter.” By that time, Revue was so gigantic that MCA had a direct hand in the production of 45 percent of all network shows.
The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan Page 53
