by Anne Edwards
The next day he returned to the studio with two suits from his own wardrobe (which included only one more—the white linen). In all contemporary B films, male contract players were expected to wear their own clothes. The role he was to play, Andy McLeod, did not require much in the way of sartorial attire. His film debut presented him as a crusading small-town radio announcer. The rakish hat brought from Des Moines, the polka-dot ties, the slightly rumpled three-piece suit, even the large Eureka class ring he wore looked so much the part that Nick Grinde, the director, thought they had come from the wardrobe department. Wardrobe also suggested he wear his oversized wristwatch as he had it—the face on the inside near his palm—a habit he had developed at WHO to enable him to glance quickly at the time during a broadcast (this positioning of his wristwatch became a trademark he maintained during his entire film career). He posed for publicity photographs, but was not yet given a script since the writer was still working on it. On the weekend, he moved from the hotel to the Montecito Apartments near the Boulevard with little to recommend his small accommodation except its location. (For many years, Reagan would live in the heart of Hollywood, within sight of those landmarks—the Boulevard, Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, Sunset Boulevard, the Garden of Allah and Schwabs Drugstore—which spelled Hollywood to him.) Monday morning he appeared on the set early, ready to shoot his first movie, which—though being made on the Warners lot and distributed by them—was filmed under the aegis of First National, a company they had absorbed in the late twenties and whose banner they now used to protect Warner Brothers’s prestige.
Nick Grinde called the cast together, handed out freshly mimeographed scripts and asked for a reading of the scene to be shot. Reagan thought he might be booted out of the studio right then. Reading cold had always been his bete noire. If he had to concentrate on seeing the lines, he could not inject them with any interpretation. The dialogue he spoke for a “fast-talking, high-pitched argument between McLeod and his boss” came out flat, with no personality. Grinde was puzzled. He had shot Reagan’s test and had been impressed with his work. But, of course, Reagan had had time to memorize that scene.
Joe Graham, the dialogue director, took Reagan aside. Reagan confessed his inability to read cold and a decision was made to shoot an alternative scene and to postpone Reagan’s until the next day. On Tuesday he came in with both his and Robert Barratt’s (the actor playing his boss) lines memorized. Everyone relaxed. He conveyed all the personal appeal and enthusiasm that had prompted Warners to offer him a contract. From that day forward, he would never appear on the set without having memorized his lines. Seldom did a scene have to be reshot because of him. Occasionally, he would flub a line, but usually this was caused by a difficulty in coordinating action with dialogue; the sheer concentration of having to react physically to something or someone he could not see pushed the dialogue right out of his mind.
Originally Love Is on the Air was conceived as a modest musical. A song had been written for it before Bryan Foy realized the story would not work in that form. So as not to waste the song, Dick Powell sang it in Varsity Show, which he was then filming. Powell also made a Decca recording of the song, now titled “Love Is on the Air, Tonight.” (Since both Powell’s record and movie were released about the same time as Reagan’s film, the critics were understandably confused.) The final script of Love Is on the Air still retained vestiges of its musical past.
The original story, by Roy Chanslor, had been made only three years earlier, titled Hi, Nellie and starring Paul Muni in one of his few light-comedy appearances. In that version, Andy McLeod had been a newspaper editor demoted by his publisher to lovelorn columnist until he uncovers evidence of a crime syndicate of which the publisher is a part. With the recent success of Front Page, Warners thought they might cash in on a trend. When this did not occur, the studio blamed it on its too-close similarity to Front Page. The script was then rewritten (by Morton Grant), first as the aforementioned musical, and then in the version Reagan made using the radio networks as a background. McLeod in this rehash is reduced from newscaster to kiddie-show host usurping the job of Jo Hopkins (June Travis), who is resentful for a reel or two before becoming his girlfriend and ally.
The film was shot in three weeks (A films generally had a minimum six-week schedule). The company called him “Ron” or “Ronnie,” a new sound to him, but he quickly got used to it. The cinematographer, James Van Trees, proved to be his best teacher, taking him aside to warn him to control his inclination to sway or suddenly lift his chin or cock his head when the camera moved in for a close-up. He also taught him “about chalk marks, those footprints on the floor which marked where you were to come to a halt regardless of how fast you burst into a scene—the problem was you could not look down to find them.” (Twenty years later, fellow actors commented that Reagan still could not find the chalk marks easily and would lean forward a bit like Groucho Marx when entering a scene to measure his distance from them.)
The camera did not intimidate him. Once he learned the technique, he was able to play to it in a completely natural way, and the camera responded by transmitting his ease and winning personality onto film. He claims that seeing himself in the rushes at the end of his first day of shooting was a shock to him, for here he was, “plain old everyday [me]—up on the screen. It [was] one hell of a let down.” In the beginning, Warners saw him as a beach-boy type. He had a good physique and his first publicity pictures show him bare-chested amid an array of admiring bathing beauties. (Early in the filming of Love Is on the Air, the film censor wrote Bryan Foy: “Please be careful that Andy [Reagan] be not unduly exposed in this scene [page twelve of script] where he strips off his pajamas and starts dressing.”)*
Once again, Reagan contracted leading ladyitus. He saw Joy Hodges, but they would become only good friends (“To my regret,” she commented). For the three weeks of filming, he fell quite hopelessly under the spell of the radiant, self-possessed, athletically inclined June Travis, a green-eyed beauty. They had much in common. Her father, Harry Grabiner, was the vice-president of the Chicago White Sox and she had also been raised in the Midwest.* Their weekend dates were spent miles away from the social spin of Hollywood. They went horseback riding in Griffith Park and drove down to Santa Monica Pier at night, where they rode the roller coaster and June “knocked off every clay pigeon in [a shooting gallery] and then rang the bell with that 50 point shot that means sharpshooter.… She even managed to beat [him] throwing baseballs at milk bottles.” He confessed to being pleased with her show of sports ability that put him to shame. June had grown up in a thoroughly masculine atmosphere and the ballplayers on her father’s team had seen to it that she knew how to throw and catch a ball with near-professional precision. Her athletic prowess extended to water sports and hockey. And while attending the University of California (where she was discovered), she had been considered “one of the best feminine hockey players in the country.” When production ended on Love Is on the Air, so did their romance.
Conservative and as responsible as always, Reagan still sent Nelle and Jack a weekly check and put money aside so that they could soon join him. He found glamour and excitement in his life at the studio—seeing the stars he so admired at lunch in the commissary, or walking in full makeup and costume through the flower-hedged paths between their dressing-room bungalows (he shared a trailer with other members of the cast) and the huge sound stages where the major films were shot. It took a long time for his life to seem real. Nothing in his past had prepared him for his current day-to-day existence. He remained star struck for years. When he was introduced to James Cagney, he was unable to remind him that he had once interviewed him in Des Moines.
Making films is often a boring task. For the actors, it involves hour upon hour of waiting as a setup is being prepared by technicians to shoot three minutes of film. Those three minutes in turn are repeated six, eight, twelve times, as first one actor then another flubs a line, the lighting goes wrong or a prop is placed on the w
rong table. “[Movies are] a specialized sort of business,” Larry (Lawrence) Williams, who appeared with Reagan in five films,* commented. “Boredom simply goes with the territory. Movie actors are supposed to be bored, so what the hell, the pay is good.
“Ronnie [however] was never bored. You noticed it at once. There was something about all that idle time on the movie set that seemed to stimulate him in some private way. Far from finding the long dreary hours a drag like the slothful rest of us, Ronnie seemed to embrace them as a happy challenge. To him this time appeared to represent… a chance to express his animated views on an infinite variety of subjects to us, his fellow actor-captives on [the] set trapped as we all were for ten hour working days.…
“Statistical information of all sorts was a commodity Ronnie always had in extraordinary supplies, carried either in his pockets or in his head. Not only was this information abundant, it was stunning in its catholicity. There seemed to be absolutely no subject, however recondite, without its immediately accessible file. Ron had the dope on just about everything: this quarter’s up-or-down figures on GNP growth, V. I. Lenin’s grandfather’s occupation, all history’s baseball pitchers’ ERAs, the optimistic outlook for California sugar-beet production in the year 2000, the recent diminution of the rainfall level causing everything to go to hell in summer [in] Kansas and so on. One could not help but be impressed.”
As the days progressed, cast and crew also became irritated, and their ability to concentrate flagged. No one quite understood where Reagan came from, how and why he was able to have such an astonishing fund of statistics. Most of his fellow actors were involved with their careers. They read The Hollywood Reporter, Variety and Louella Parsons’s daily column. A few were deeply concerned with world conditions—the war in Spain, the encroachment of fascism in Europe. Both groups considered him naive, a memory bank without purpose. One co-worker invited him to a pro-Communist meeting. He refused to attend. Father Coughlin’s radio diatribes had not been lost on him. Anything pro-Communist was anti-American where he was concerned.
He missed his Des Moines friends, the camaraderie of Cy’s Moonlight Inn, the debates with Hal Gross and Voith Pemberthy, the sense of being number one, as he had been at WHO and in Des Moines. The studio worked on a “cast” system—A casts and B casts (even Hollywood society entertained with A parties and B parties). The commissary had two rooms for lunch, executives and “stars” having a private area, which Reagan did not attend in the beginning. For the first year he was not well known enough to be recognized by studio visitors or by people he came in contact with.
His mind was in ferment, but as was his habit, he kept his confusion to himself. His co-workers and the few outside people he saw (Joy Hodges for one) were exposed to that habitual control on his true emotions that had disturbed Nelle—the easy smile, his rather juvenile sense of humor. On the surface he gave the impression of being shallow. When Bette Davis first met him, she thought he was a “silly boy.” No one, therefore, could comprehend how the person they thought he was could have such an incredible store of facts—and a knowledge of complicated subjects. Studio friendships were not at all like those at WHO. They did not carry over after working hours. Left alone for long patches of his private time, he read voraciously.
On the set, according to Larry Williams, “Ronnie might… [sit] down next to you peering through his big glasses and suddenly [say] something like, ‘Larry, before I run down for you this Far Eastern concept I’m sort of kicking around in my mind, answer me a background question: What would you say is the current population of Formosa?’
“‘Ronnie, I don’t know things like that.’
‘“Right. Most Americans don’t. No need to apologize.’
“‘I’m glad.’
“‘I’ve got the figure right here, but before I give it to you maybe I should just jog your memory a bit about Chinese history in the last three thousand years.’… [Soon] I began to notice a curious, perhaps unconscious behavior in some of us relating to our lunch hour. When we were released around noontime to walk over to the studio commissary, the thing got to be to see who could come in last—or at any rate behind Ronnie. This way you could figure in advance just where old Ron was going to settle down for lunch before you picked your own table. Once this was established, as if by some mysterious prearrangement… our company would then steal off to a corner with our tuna-fish sandwiches and eat them in amiable but total silence.…”
During the first few months in Hollywood he saw quite a lot of Joy Hodges. They would go to Dubars, a stable in Hollywood, and ride (Joy turned out to be quite adept once she had the proper clothes). “We discussed politics more than any other subject. I was so fond of him, but he was a passionate Democrat and I a Republican and we used to go round and round about that.… He loved anything and everything about Government, History and Politics. So did I and I loved hearing him relate accounts of Indian battles.” Hodges had been dropped by RKO without ever having uttered a line of dialogue into the microphone. Reagan now had the opportunity to cheer her up. He did not have to do so for long, as Universal signed her to appear in a leading role in Merry-Go-Round (released as Merry-Go-Round of 1938). That September she met Moss Hart, who had written a play called I’d Rather Be Right. “She’s a young Gertrude Lawrence,” he told Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, who had written the score. A few days later, she was off to New York to play the lead in the show opposite George M. Cohan.
Reagan’s life appears to have been stultifying during his early Warner years. At Radio WHO he had been involved with the news and farm staff. He had met and interviewed people in all walks of life. Once the newness of film acting wore off, he suffered some of the same boredom as his co-workers. The roles he played did not even call for great feats of memory. Six days after he completed Love Is on the Air, he began work on Sergeant Murphy* Originally developed by Sy Bartlett (who went on to write many major films, including Twelve O’Clock High), the script was several cuts above Love Is on the Air. Reagan’s role was that of a cavalry private, Dennis Murphy, dedicated to his horse (Sergeant Murphy). The horse eventually justifies his master’s faith, along with that of Mary Lou Carruthers (Mary Maguire), the colonel’s daughter (the colonel was played by Donald Crisp), by winning the Grand National at Aintree after being mustered out of the service and smuggled into England.
Reagan felt comfortable as soon as the company reached the location where the outdoor shooting would take place, Monterey Peninsula, because it was the home of the 11th Cavalry. The scenery was spectacular. The town sat on sloping shores at the southern end of Monterey Bay, protected from high seas and high winds. Settled by Mexico, it still looked as though it belonged to that country, with its adobe buildings and red-tiled roofs, white-sand beach and green pines edging a deep-blue bay. On Saturdays, the main street was wide awake. Ford pickup trucks belonging to ranchers and cowboys in blue jeans and high-heeled boots lined up while their occupants shopped for supplies and ended the day in one of the beer halls on the wharf, rubbing shoulders and matching drinks with the fishermen and the cavalrymen from the post. The company stayed at a resort lodge where white tie and evening dress were de rigueur in the evening, but for the ten days of location, Reagan preferred to stick with the cavalrymen. (A long-range friendship with Colonel Robert Fer-kuson began in Monterey.) After all, he was a second lieutenant in the Reserve.
His director on the film was B. Reeves Eason, who had staged the famous chariot race in Ben Hur (1927) and the final masterly charge in The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936).* “Breezy,” as he was called, had a special talent for directing animals and action. Because of this, the film moved briskly and the race sequences were far above the quality of the rest of the film. He also used Reagan’s equestrian skills and his affinity with horses well.†
The leading lady in Sergeant Murphy, Mary Maguire, was a winsome eighteen-year-old from Australia. Reagan seemed more in love with his horse than his girl in this movie. Upon the film’s release (February
1, 1938), Dorothy Masters, in the New York Daily News, wrote, “… the most exciting thing about the Brooklyn Paramount show [Tovarich with Charles Boyer and Claudette Colbert topped the bill] is that it returned Ronald Reagan to palpitating proximity.” Prophetically, she continued, “In the movies only because television isn’t yet equipped to do him justice, this erstwhile radio announcer’s… looks and personality scoop out toeholds for a plot that can barely make the grade. There are the thrills attendant to daring horsemanship, comedy is in abundance, but the scenario… has no villain [and therefore no suspense].”
By the time Sergeant Murphy was completed, Love Is on the Air had been released and Reagan’s reception by critics and fans was good but not startling. Warners decided to cast him in small roles in two A films, Hollywood Hotel and Swing Your Lady. In both his appearance is brief. He comfortably plays an announcer in the first and a sportscaster in the second, wearing his old hat at its set angle. (Reagan said of these early roles, “… remember the guy in movies who rushes into the phone booth, pushes his hat to the back of his head while the tails of his trench coat are still flying, drops a nickel in the box, dials a few numbers and then says, ‘Gimme the city desk. I’ve got a story that’ll split this town wide open!’ That was me.”)
Hollywood Hotel starred Dick Powell and introduced Louella Parsons to the screen. Parsons’s successful radio program of the same title had been the inspiration for the film story. Although Parsons’s few minutes of gossip reporting had been the high point of the program’s four-year tenure, each week new players would be introduced. The studios, who saw this as an opportunity to put their contract players before the public, were extremely obliging. Whomever Louella wanted, she generally got.
Hollywood Hotel was a fictionalized account of the weekly broadcast and the young performers who got their breaks on it. Busby Berkeley supplied some lavish musical numbers. Reagan’s role was straight and had no connection with the plot.* The most important thing about his appearance in Hollywood Hotel was his meeting with Parsons and her discovery that he was also from Dixon. (Frank S. Nugent, of The New York Times, commented on Parsons’s acting debut: “Miss Parsons plays herself better than anyone else could hope to, or possibly want to.”)
