Early Reagan

by Anne Edwards

  His work in Hollywood Hotel took only a few days. He then walked into the Humphrey Bogart film Swing Your Lady. In the few minutes that he is onscreen in this slapstick comedy, Reagan looks more at home than Bogart, who plays the role of a desperate promoter stuck in a hick town who matches an Amazonian woman (marvelously played by Louise Fazenda) against the professional wrestler (Nat Pendleton) he manages.

  After his five-day assignment on Swing Your Lady, Warners sent Reagan on one day’s notice to Coronado, about a hundred miles south of Los Angeles near San Diego, for the role of a Navy flier in another major film, Submarine D-1,† starring Pat O’Brien, George Brent and Wayne Morris. Reagan explained: “Some place in the studio higher echelons it had been decided to provide a surprise ending to the picture so that neither [sic] of the three stars would end up with the girl. I would come in as her finace in the last reel.” After a week’s shooting, Reagan claimed, the decision was reversed, his footage cut, and “Wayne Morris won the girl [Doris Weston].” However, no one gets the girl in the released film; the men’s dedication to the submarine they command wins out.

  When he returned to Hollywood from Coronado, the reviews had not yet come in on Sergeant Murphy. He feared the worst. To his relief, the studio picked up his option. A six-month stretch lay before him with $250 a week for a guarantee of sixteen weeks’ work (standard in Warner Brothers’ contracts). The studio could keep him working if they chose, but they could also leave him off salary for as long as ten weeks. He sent Nelle and Jack the railroad fare and rented an apartment for them in the fiats of West Hollywood (near Beverly Hills). The location was chosen so that Jack could take a walk, and Nelle, who did not drive a car, could get around on her own. His expenses were going to be hard to meet, but he was determined that he keep his promise to Nelle. He met them at the train and drove them to their new home. Out back was a small yard with rose bushes crowding it and their ground-floor apartment looked out on all kinds of tropical flora. He noted that Jack was more dependent on Nelle than before, that he was often short of breath and that his left hand, the muscles atrophied in it, had a frightening, somewhat clawlike shape. (Jack’s unexpected deformity was to have a lasting effect on Reagan, who as the years progressed feared a similar affliction.)

  He had learned much in his six months in Hollywood, although not necessarily about acting. Movies were made and players were shuffled around so fast that close friendships had no time to develop. He extended himself in every way possible and was always the first to offer assistance. Aware that his co-workers thought him a bit of an odd fellow, he determined to win them over.

  One late afternoon, after a long day at the studio, Larry Williams learned that the work that was to be done on his car had not been finished in time and he was without a ride home. Reagan offered to drive him and the stranded Williams accepted, unaware of the distance between their homes. “I was up at the top of the Mulholland Hills, he was across and somewhere down the other side.”* Nor did he learn until he got into Reagan’s old car that Reagan had misplaced his glasses.

  “It was casually taken for granted that Ronnie was blind as a bat without his glasses,” Williams said. “He normally wore large, sensible spectacles through which he saw as well as anybody.… The drive was a memorable one for several reasons… Ronnie was a red-hot Roosevelt Democrat and he took the occasion of our trip home to fill me in on some of the subtler political goals of the New Deal.…

  ‘“Now, you take a good man like Harold Ickes,’ Ronnie began. ‘He’s experienced…’

  ‘“RON! That big gray truck!’

  ‘“What truck?’

  “ ‘The one you just cut in front of when he was making a left turn!’

  ‘“I did?’

  “‘… he’s screaming something at you.’

  ‘“Those teamsters! They’re tough babies, won’t take any pushing around. Building a strong union.’

  “We drove on up into the hills.

  “ ‘RONNIE!’… We were only a couple of inches from the edge of a two-hundred-foot drop on the right side!

  “‘Your imagination. I stay in the middle of the road. Is that your house? Good. I’ll pick you up and take you out to the studio in the morning.’“

  Williams declined, but he recalled his co-worker as not being just “fuzzyvisioned” but “eager to be loved.”

  Right after Nelle and Jack arrived, so did some of his old TEKE fraternity brothers who had followed Dutch west, hoping they too might hit it big in Hollywood in some capacity or other. It did not happen, and since Dutch was the only one employed, he became their sole and uncomplaining support. The next few months were to be the happiest he had experienced since coming to California. With these old friends he could be a “rubber neck” himself. They toured the Beverly Hills homes of movie stars: Charlie Chaplin’s at 1085 Summit Drive (and, up the road from it, Fred Astaire’s house at 1121 Summit Drive); Harold Lloyd’s estate, Green Acres, at 1225 Benedict Canyon (“the second largest [next to Pickfair] in Southern California, includes a 25 room house with 27 telephones, canoe stream and waterfall, private 9-hole golf course, handball court, swimming pool, and a four room playhouse for the Lloyd children. Mr. Lloyd breeds great Danes and St. Bernards”); Ginger Rogers’s at 1605 Gilcrest (“… the highest point in Beverly Hills. There is a shining, well-stocked soda fountain in the house, to fulfill a childhood dream”). He gleaned such other sterling pieces of information (from tour guidebooks sold at stands on Sunset Boulevard) as the fact that Greta Garbo’s house had a five-foot wall to ensure her privacy; and that Joan Crawford had a private motion-picture theater.

  Such extravagance exceeded any of his wildest dreams for himself. It belonged to the world of millionaires like the Wal-greens. He and his Eureka cohorts liked piling into the convertible (you could manage three; the fourth passenger had to sit on the rim and hang on) and driving down to Barney’s Beanery on Santa Monica Boulevard (about five minutes from his apartment), where they could argue politics and football. (Two of the gang had been members of Mac’s Golden Tornadoes.) Barney’s was just a shack with walls precariously angled, a counter, a few tables (none of the legs the same height) and a patio, but for fifteen cents they could buy the best bowl of onion soup in town. Barney (Anthony) also kept a stock of beers in the back that would please any aficionado. Gruff, cynical, “a no-nonsense guy who could see right through you,” Barney could “accept your frailties with off-hand tolerance” while defending his own strong prejudice—one only, it seemed—against homosexuals. Behind the bar at Barney’s, a large sign was posted that read FAGOTS [sic] STAY OUT. Barney’s was a gathering spot for young male actors and its proprietor did not want his clientele “approached.”*

  Reagan had not become part of Hollywood life and he was not sure he ever would. He confessed to being restless. His friends from college considered him a star. He knew he was not. More than that, he was not sure now that being a star was what he wanted. Less than a year after he arrived in Hollywood, his major concern was how badly actors were treated by studios. He kept talking about the inequities and servitude of a seven-year contract, of the loan out and the lay-off, and the ridiculously low pay of extras. To Bill Meiklejohn’s surprise, at the time of his second option he insisted on reexamining every clause in his contract. Meiklejohn told him, in effect, that it was a hopeless exercise.

  Reagan grinned less boyishly than usual. “Well, a way has to be figured to turn that around,” he replied.

  * Later to become his executive assistant.

  * Warners did not put Reagan on loan until 1941. Whether a request for his services was ever made previously is unknown. However, it seems unlikely that Warners would not have accepted such a proposition if it had been forthcoming.

  * Love Is on the Air opened on November 12, 1937, at the Palace Theater, New York, as “decided second fiddle” to Stage Door starring Katharine Hepburn.

  * June Travis’s real name was Dorothea Grabiner. She returned to Chicago in February 1939, did
some radio work and married Fred Friedlob, who owned a large mail-order company.

  * The five films in which both Reagan and Lawrence Williams appeared were Girls on Probation, Brother Rat, Going Places, Secret Service of the Air, and Brother Rat and a Baby.

  * Released out of sequence as his third film.

  * In 1939, B. Reeves Eason staged, for David O. Selznick, the spectacular burning-of-Atlanta sequence in Gone With the Wind.

  † Reagan’s riding his own horse was okayed by Warner himself, who dispatched a memo to his concerned location man (June 15, 1937): “If any horses are thrown on this I will throw someone myself… for $7.50 per day the SPCA will put a man on any picture… testifying to the effect that no cruelty to animals was done [in the course of the filming].”

  * Reagan’s name is not always listed in the credits for Hollywood Hotel because the role is so small.

  † Though films like Swing Your Lady and Submarine D-l were booked as major films, they actually fell somewhere between A and B and were shown on weekdays. Another, stronger film supplanted them on weekends, when audiences were heaviest.

  * Reagan was still living at the Montecito Apartments in Hollywood. Mulholland was not only miles out of his way, but involved traveling some precarious roads.

  * In the early sixties, when the West Hollywood section where Barney’s Beanery was located became a center for Gay Rights groups, Barney told Life magazine (June 26, 1964), “I don’t like ‘em. There’s no excuse. They’ll approach any nice-lookin’ guy. Anybody does any recruiting [here] I say shoot him—who cares, anyway?”

  9

  IN THE TWENTIES, A VETERAN SAN FRANCISCO showman, Sid Grauman, decided that it was “meet and proper” that Hollywood, the film capital of the world, should have “the finest, the most artistic movie theatre in the world.” He bought a large piece of property on the Boulevard and built the first “movie cathedral.” Bizarre would be a mild word to describe the final result—Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre—an architectural crazy house of Chinese, Greek and Egyptian design. The official description of Grauman’s (as it came to be called) ran in part: “This temple of art is a replica of a palace of ancient Thebes, profusely embellished with Egyptian hieroglyphics, drawn from the monuments to the Theban kings and presenting the symbolic stories of the gods and goddesses of the Nile. At night it glistens in the aura of brilliant lights. The facade of the theatre presents huge Egyptian columns surmounted by a massive strut of stone. Along the top of the walls all day long silently promenades a Libyan sheik in the garb of the desert. Entering the great foyer, the visitor is greeted by beautiful girls as usherettes, dressed in the manner of handmaidens of Cleopatra. The auditorium is surmounted by a great dome from which hangs an enormous chandelier of Egyptian design, all wrought in colors of gold with golden iridescent rays emanating from an ingenious system of concealed lights, giving the effect of a colossal sunburst.”

  Realizing that the stars would come to his theater to be seen by their public and that the public would pay huge prices to see the stars in person, Grauman conceived the “premiere,” the initial showing of a top super-special film. By three or four o’clock in the afternoon of one of these galas, the huge plaza in the forecourt of Grauman’s (a re-creation of a Polynesian village) was jam-packed with fans equipped with camp stools and box lunches to help them endure the five-hour wait until “the first royal carriage” arrived. (In the early years, Grauman even had footmen with powdered wigs help the stars out of their limousines, despite the fact that their costumes had no connection with his leitmotiv.)

  A premiere at Grauman’s offered the greatest publicity a film and its top performers could achieve. The event also gave the studios a chance to parade some of their would-be stars before the public. Warner Brothers’s big film in 1938 was Jezebel, starring Bette Davis and Henry Fonda. The studio had rushed this pre-Civil War story set in the South into production when they lost out on the bidding for Margaret Mitchell’s best seller, Gone With the Wind. Reagan was notified he was expected to attend. (He claimed he asked someone, “Do I have to go?” and that person replied, “No, but you’ll be around longer if you do.”) He was also asked to escort another contract player, Lana Turner, who, though only eighteen at the time, had played small roles in six or seven films, and had been dubbed “the sweater girl” because of her appearance in a clinging knit sweater in They Won’t Forget.

  Turner had been born in Wallace, Idaho, and much of her small-town background clung to her. When she was nine, her father, a mine foreman, had been murdered and she and her mother moved to California where Mrs. Turner hoped to find work as a beauty operator. Lana (then called Julia) had been sixteen when she played a bit part in the Janet Gaynor-Fredric March version of A Star Is Born. Young and beautiful, her hair not yet bleached blond, her figure full but a bit pudgy, she was unsure of herself and was as terrified as Reagan was of attending the premiere. In gown and dinner jacket borrowed from the Warners wardrobe department, and having never met before, they headed toward Grauman’s in a taxi because Reagan was too embarrassed to drive up to the theater in his old convertible.*

  As their taxi moved slowly up the Boulevard, huge klieg lights scraped the night sky with “monstrous brushes of light.” Anne O’Hare McCormick, writing in The New York Times Magazine, described the event they attended: “The elite of the movies crossed a high bridge erected across the street in front of the theatre. This ‘bridge of the stars’ was a temporary gangway ablaze with clusters of huge incandescent flowers and raked by klieg lights like a battery of suns.

  “The throng was so dense that the pedestrian could not fight his way within a block of the place. The parade took place under an awning a block long, lighted like an operating table, between solid walls of gaping people. In the theatre the spotlight was thrown upon the audience, always the feature of these entertainments. Here, indeed, were the real figures of the screen in full gala.

  “They were a little stiff with awareness of that fact, a little blank with make-up and self conscious.”

  Not only were Hollywood’s stars living in a totally unreal world where obscene displays of wealth were expected, most of the films they played in were equally unreal. The studios hired some of the world’s greatest creative and performing artists and then hamstrung them. In July 1938, a distributors’ boycott of Blockade, Walter Wanger’s melodrama of the Spanish Civil War (starring Henry Fonda and Madeleine Carroll), crystallized the artists’ discontent. At a meeting of 300 delegates, representing 150,000 members of motion-picture unions, guilds and other organizations, these artists demanded that gag rule be removed from the industry, “so that motion pictures may become as they rightfully should be, a very important part of the democratic structure.”

  Reagan was not known to discuss the content of films often. He went to the movies to be entertained and his favorites were still those packed with action. If he had a vision of what he wanted to achieve in movies, his image of himself would have been as a John Wayne (who, after all, had gone from football to cowboy star). But the incident involving Blockade had a great impact upon him. He became aware of the potential power of the Screen Actors and the Screen Writers guilds. He had joined the SAG (Screen Actors Guild) when he first came to Hollywood. Now he took a vital interest in it.

  Her son’s success and her new home had not changed Nelle’s habits. Almost immediately upon arriving in California she became an active member of the Hollywood-Beverly Christian Church. “One of the church ladies came to call on me yesterday afternoon to sign me up with the Missionary Group, belonging to this section,” she wrote Mrs. Hazel Emmert, back in Dixon, on December 10, 1937. “How I wish you could all see beautiful Hollywood Blvd. with all its wonderful Christmas decoration. Yet it makes my heart ache when I think of all the good that could be done with the thousands of dollars spent on it, which might better be used to alleviate some of the suffering in this old world. Please don’t think anything about not receiving a Christmas card from me, for I have decide
d to just send a greeting to the whole Sunday school and take the money I would have to spend for postage and give it as a gift to your Sunday school instead; but please know that I love you all and am wishing everyone a gloriously Merry Christmas and the happiest New Year you have ever known.” Under separate cover she sent a one-dollar contribution to the Sunday School (postage was two cents per Christmas card).

  Being exposed to Nelle’s “Christian ways” revived many of Reagan’s childhood habits. He had not been particularly church-going during his Des Moines years. Now he accompanied Nelle to services on a fairly regular basis. He returned to the custom of giving a percentage of his weekly income to the church, but curiously did not join at this time. The few self-indulgent extravagances he had allowed himself before his parents’ arrival were greatly curtailed by the added responsibility of supporting a second household. This could easily have accounted for his spending so much time with old friends who enjoyed simpler, less expensive pleasures than his Hollywood associates (a day at the beach, a beer at Barney’s Beanery, a game of bridge at home). Nelle’s near presence also might have encouraged his generosity to these old friends, for she held strongly to the idea that one must help one’s close associates. His mother’s approval was important to him, there was no doubt about that. “Look at your son,” he had a habit of saying with a proud smile on his face at a time of accomplishment. “Look at your son—he’s making $300 a week now!” he crowed after having his option picked up the second time. “Look at your son—he’s starring with Pat O’Brien [in Cowboy from Brooklyn].” One of his former TEKE friends who was a houseguest was impressed enough to remember the grown, successful Reagan’s courting of his mother’s approval. Nelle was proud of him, but her values and concerns were not the same as his.