Early Reagan

by Anne Edwards

  O’Brien claimed Reagan approached him and asked if he would “put in a word” for him with Warner and Wallis. “I’ve been a great fan of Gipp’s throughout his career, and I’ve read just about everything that’s been written on him and Rockne.”

  “They may want a name actor,” O’Brien hedged.

  “I can play the part. I won’t let you down if I get the assignment.”

  O’Brien spoke to Wallis, who was unimpressed. The role called for a top performer. Reagan was “a hick radio announcer from the Middle West.”

  “Hal, I’ve watched this kid around the lot,” O’Brien pressed. “He not only resembles Gipp but his knowledge… of football should help the picture.”

  Wallis was still not convinced.

  Reagan took his pleas to Foy, who told him to go see Wallis, who was responsible for the production. Wallis told Reagan he could not envision him as a strong football type. “I was still too new in this business and too recent from the sports world to be polite,” Reagan admitted. “So I said, ‘You are producing the picture and you don’t know that Gipp weighed five pounds less than I weigh right now. He walked with a sort of slouch and limp. He looked like a football player only when he was on the field.’“ Wallis remained dubious. Reagan left the studio, drove home and returned an hour later with an old photograph of himself as one of Mac’s Golden Tornadoes. Wallis, weakening, asked Reagan to test and Reagan agreed.

  Graciously, Pat O’Brien did the test with him. (O’Brien had “sweated out a series of tests… that were subject to Mrs. Rockne’s approval.” Still photos had been made of him “in ten different sets of wigs,” and he was sensitive to Reagan’s uneasiness.) “I really didn’t have to learn my lines,” Reagan claimed. “I had known Gipp’s story for years. My lines were straight from Rock’s diary. Our test scene was where Gipp, ordered to carry the ball at that first practice, cocked an eyebrow and asked Rockne, ‘How far?’“ He got the part, which did not have a lot of footage but was an actor’s dream with “a great entrance, an action middle, and a death scene to finish up.”

  William (“Bill”) K. Howard was set to direct. Howard had made a number of successful films in the early thirties, notably the 1932 version of Sherlock Holmes starring Clive Brook; in 1933, The Power and the Glory (thought by many to have been the prototype for Citizen Kane), a story of the rise and fall of a tycoon starring Spencer Tracy; and in 1937, Fire over England, made in Great Britain and which produced a memorable portrait of Queen Elizabeth I by Flora Robson and striking portrayals of star-crossed lovers by Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. Howard had remained in England for two years and returned to Hollywood to find studio gates closed to him, partly because of his defection to England and partly because his emotional behavior often made working with him difficult. His temperament would not have mattered had his more recent films been money-makers, but they had been programmers that had not done well. Hal Wallis hired him recalling some of the good work he had done for Warners in the past, but after one week of shooting believed he had made a mistake; Lloyd Bacon was assigned to the film before Howard had been informed that he had been fired. Robert Fellows, the associate producer, was given the job of breaking the news to Howard, and he in turn appealed to O’Brien (a friend and neighbor of Howard’s) to accompany him on this difficult chore.

  “We walked over. It was like going to a wake—the ‘Dead March’ from the opera ‘Saul.’ Bill [Howard] greeted us enthusiastically, with the script in front of him.… Bob [Fellows] said softly, ‘I don’t know how to tell you this, Bill, the easy way. They’re taking you off the picture.’

  “Howard walked to the end of the room and beat his fists together. ‘… this will destroy me,’ he cried.”*

  O’Brien tried unsuccessfully to comfort him and the two men left. Bacon was on the set early the next morning. “Hell, I’m a great friend of Howard’s,” he protested, “and his chair is still warm.” But he plunged into his job with a vengeance.

  Nick Lukats, a former all-star halfback and punter at Notre Dame, and Jim Thorpe (probably the greatest all-around athlete America had produced—Olympic gold-medal winner for broad jump, shot put and decathlon and former halfback for Carlisle Indian School and the Canton Bulldogs) were technical advisers on the picture, but neither O’Brien nor Reagan used doubles. “I was forty years old but I blocked and tackled and was on the receiving end of all the passes in every one of the scrimmage plays,” O’Brien proudly stated. To Wallis’s great surprise and relief, Reagan looked every inch a champion on the field, although his virtuoso scrimmage scenes were the combined efforts of talented technicians on-camera and in the cutting room. Wallis grew more enthusiastic about Reagan as the shooting progressed.

  Reagan’s career looked as though it had taken an upward swing. He had married a terrific lady whom he loved and who loved him, his option had been picked up and there were plans to renegotiate it. Warners had hopes that Knute Rockne might make him a star. A company known as Music Corporation of America (MCA) had bought out the Meiklejohn Agency and Art Parks and Lew Wasserman were now representing Reagan and Wyman. In fact, they represented almost every major star on the Warner Brothers lot.

  The MCA/SAG forces that were to bind the restless, disparate parts of Ronald Reagan’s personality had clicked into place. The final force, the one that would give him his ultimate direction—his connection with General Electric and big business—would not happen for another decade. Reagan was in Act Two of his career. Hollywood took surprised note. This Reagan guy was not the naif they thought he was.

  A stubby, wispy-voiced, former ophthalmologist named Julius Caesar Stein, but who preferred to be called “Jules,” was the man who ran MCA. He had financed his medical studies at the University of Chicago by playing the violin and saxophone in clubs around town, and finally by promoting bands. After two years (1922-24) at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital, he realized he could make more money as a booking agent than as an eye doctor. He founded Music Corporation of America with one thousand dollars in 1924. Five years later, he had a 10 percent interest in half of the major bands in the country, booking them into hotels and nightclubs. Radio was the next medium to conquer.

  He turned to his boyhood chum, labor boss James Caesar Pe-trillo, the founder and head of the American Federation of Musicians (AFM). Petrillo was a powerful ally, described in his time as “a small man with a gruff style, [who] speaks salty, ungram-matical English in a grating voice… rides around in a bullet proof limousine… [and is] a shrewd and treacherous political infighter who rules his union like a dictator.” Petrillo exerted his power to block other talent agencies from obtaining licenses to represent band musicians, thereby giving Stein a monopoly over big bands in America. The MCA/AFM alliance smacked of the kind of control practiced by Chicago mobsters. In any dispute between a musician and MCA, Petrillo’s union always sided with the agency.*

  Stein had been dealing with Al Capone and the Chicago mobs since his early agency days, when bootleg whiskey was part of the deal for booking bands. Somewhere along the line, he had arranged a truce with the Chicago Mafia, cutting them in for a healthy percentage of both talent and alcohol. Petrillo’s union salary was twenty-six thousand dollars a year at its peak, yet he, along with Stein, was a millionaire by the mid-forties, feeding the fire of accusations that Stein gave cash and other payoffs to Pe-trillo to build his personal empire.

  Mobster tactics were not unknown to Hollywood. Willie Bioff, a minor Capone thug whose Chicago days had included pimping and “shaking down Kosher butchers,” had been operating in Hollywood since 1933. Bioffs partner and buddy was George Browne, former head of Chicago’s union for stagehands. The two men began their partnership by extorting twenty thousand dollars from Barney Balaban, owner of a midwestern theater chain, under the threat of initiating a projectionists strike. Bioff then took over the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Motion Picture Operators (IATSE) and headed for Hollywood. By this time, many craft unions had sprung u
p in Hollywood and each was struggling for dominance. BiofPs union, although one of the smallest, controlled the projectionists. BiofTs scam (which worked for many years) was to threaten the men who ran the major studios (MGM, Warner Brothers, Twentieth Century-Fox and Paramount) with a projectionists strike. Darkened theaters in the midst of the Depression would have meant economic doom. George Browne became president of the IATSE. Within two years that union went from 168 members to 12,000 of Hollywood’s crafts people and technicians, absorbing numerous small unions which had had little clout with the studios. In 1936 Bioff and Browne made a deal with the four major studios for each of them to pay fifty thousand dollars annually (the independents were to pay twenty-five thousand) to “keep labor peace.” But IATSE still did not represent all studio workers. SAG was one of the unions that remained independent. Robert Montgomery, SAG president at the time (1938-39),* described his union’s situation: “There was an attempt on the part of IATSE to take over the Screen Actors Guild because they felt they would strengthen their organization… we were simply between the racketeering union which was attempting to destroy us by force and the attempt on the part of the producers to simply demolish the organization through negotiations—we were having a very rough time.…”

  For the next few years Bioff was at the height of his power and SAG fought grimly to retain its independence. Then Montgomery had a “brainstorm.” He appealed to the executive board for $5,000 (guaranteed by him)—no questions asked. They gave the money to him and he hired an ex-FBI man turned private detective to ferret out something in Bioff’s past that would incriminate and remove him from Hollywood. Montgomery’s daring idea worked; the detective uncovered a 1922 Chicago conviction for pimping that Bioff had “slipped out of serving.” SAG urged extradition and California’s Governor Olson agreed to sign the order. Bioff might have been able to fight this charge successfully had a $100,000 “loan” to him from movie mogul Joseph Schenk (chairman of the board of Twentieth Century-Fox) not led to the latter’s conviction on a charge of income-tax evasion. Schenk plea-bargained to minimize his sentence to one year and told all he knew (which was a lot) about Browne and Bioff’s game of extortion. Both were convicted and began twenty-year prison terms in 1941. But in 1940, when Reagan and Wyman attended SAG meetings together, the role these gangsters had played in controlling the Hollywood studios was a major point of discussion. Privately, the meteoric rise and the power of Jules Stein and MCA were hotly debated.

  When Stein moved MCA to Hollywood in 1937, he began to represent general talent as well as musicians. His intention was to sign the industry’s most famous and established stars. If he could accomplish this, he would have the same strong-arm hold on the major studios that thugs like Bioff had. Without stars, film companies could not make films. By controlling the biggest names, he could get exorbitant deals for lesser players as well. The first star to come through was Bette Davis. It has been said that Stein was so obsessed with landing Davis as a client that he hired her husband Harmon Nelson’s best friend, Eddie Linsk (nicknamed “the Killer”), at a high fee to do nothing else but convince her to sign with MCA, a feat that was accomplished in three weeks. Errol Flynn, John Garfield and Barbara Stanwyck soon followed suit. For the next five years, Stein and MCA would purchase a large number of smaller agencies.*

  Power was Stein’s objective, anonymity his credo. An air of mystery around MCA was created by design. In the world Stein came from, talk could get a man killed. Publicity was for his clients, not the company. Stein altered the plaid-jacketed, flesh-peddling image of the Hollywood agent. By decree, his management team was ordered to wear only black or dark-gray suits, starched white shirts and conservative narrow ties. Hair was to be trimmed close, nails polished and shoes shined. Competitors soon derisively called MCA’s executives “the black-suited Mafia.” The dress code for secretaries and receptionists was equally austere.

  The offices, housed in a large, rambling, well-manicured complex across the street from the Beverly Hills courthouse, looked as though it could have been an extension of the courthouse itself. Inside, Stein had created the same atmosphere of respectability. All the offices resembled each other and had dark paneled walls and maroon fabrics and carpets. Framed English hunting prints—obviously bought by the gross—decorated the walls. The carpets were so thick that no one could be heard coming or going.

  Stein’s protege and MCA’s vice-president was Lew Wasser-man, a “tall, lanky, soft-spoken” former theater usher from Cleveland, Ohio. At age twenty-two, in 1936, Wasserman had met Stein when he was moonlighting as the publicity director for a local nightclub. Wasserman held only a high school diploma, but he was sharp and Stein immediately recognized his potential. When the Reagans met him in 1940, Wasserman was only twenty-seven, but he was fast becoming both Hollywood’s most powerful executive and well on his way to the presidency of MCA. (In 1946, when Wasserman was named president, Stein told a reporter, “Lew was the student who surpassed the teacher. I made him president.”) Jack Dales, who was director of SAG, said Wasserman got what he wanted “one way or the other. He had enemies all over town and still does [1981]. But people respect him, because he has power.”

  Wasserman could have been easily mistaken for a funeral director. Rarely did he smile and he always wore the dark suit-white shirt uniform. A workaholic, he could be found in his office seven days a week, sixteen hours a day. Underlings feared his irascible temper, describing him as a “cold, brusque” man when angry. As a deal-maker, he was a “ruthless, hard-nosed negotiator.” Yet, he knew how to be smooth and charming when he needed to win over a client or an adversary. Wasserman had not sought the Reagans as clients. They had come to him as part of the Meiklejohn takeover. But once they were at MCA, Wasser-man knew exactly how to use them.

  From Reagan’s first connection with MCA, he and Wasser-man hit it off. Taft Schreiber, a top executive and the man who would later oversee Reagan’s personal finances, said that Reagan “accepted MCA’s career guidance without a fuss. He only had this one agency. This was it. It wasn’t the agent’s fault if things didn’t go well. Most actors blamed their agents. He understood. He had a very sound grasp of the situation.”

  The situation was not all that difficult to grasp, especially at the time when the Reagans signed with MCA. Not only was Wyman earning the low Hollywood salary of $500 a week, in the year since her marriage she had played in a succession of forgettable films (Flight Angels, My Love Came Back, Tugboat Annie Sails Again, Gambling on the High Seas and Honeymoon for Three). Yet, on August 25, 1941, MCA negotiated a three-year contract with Warners for her, starting at $1,500 a week and rising to $2,500 a week. Reagan’s contract was renegotiated by Wasserman in November to an increase to $1,628 a week for three years, rising to $2,750 a week in its last year. Wasserman had managed to triple the Reagans’ earning capacity. No wonder Reagan was so respectful in doing whatever MCA suggested.

  Knute Rockne—All American was ready for release by the first week in September. Reagan called the filming of it “a thrilling experience.” (He later said: “I’ve always suspected that there might have been many actors in Hollywood who could have played the part better, but no one could have wanted to play it more than I did.”) Mrs. Rockne was on the set each day as technical adviser. (The writing credits onscreen read: “Original Screenplay by Robert Buckner, based on the private papers of Mrs. Rockne and the reports of Rockne’s associates and intimate friends.”) Reagan was enraptured as Rockne’s widow reminisced about her husband and Notre Dame between takes. And there he was wearing the great Gipper’s football number, running eighty yards down a football field with a pigskin clutched tightly in his hand, crowds on the sidelines cheering wildly. His greatest fantasy had been realized.

  The story followed the facts of Rockne’s life explicitly, beginning with his arrival in the United States from Norway as a boy and continuing through his early struggle for an education, his college football years and, finally, his career as the football coach at Not
re Dame. It ended with his own premature death in 1931 in an air crash. But the most moving moments in the film come with Reagan’s death scene when he (as George Gipp) whispers to Rockne, “Someday, when the team’s up against it, breaks are beating the boys, ask them to go in there with all they’ve got. Win one for the Gipper.” Things got tough and “the boys” did exactly that.*

  Reagan was counting on his role in Knute Rockne—All American to boost him to real stardom. He had made three films since Brother Rat and a Baby—An Angel from Texas; the last of the Brass Bancroft movies, Murder in the Air; and Tugboat Annie Sails Again, which brought back to the screen the character created by the incomparable Marie Dressier. In the last, Marjorie Rambeau took over as Tugboat Annie. Wyman played a debutante who falls in love with a penurious sailor (Reagan), and Moon Reagan appeared in a small role as one of Reagan’s sailor friends (the performance that ended his career). The script demands were few and the humor was of the Billingsgate variety, with Miss Rambeau “lustily tossing harmless oaths and malapropisms.” When the executives in Warners’ front office saw the first print of Knute Rockne—All American in mid-September, they decided to hold back the release of Tugboat Annie Sails Again, a decision based on the hope that Reagan’s appearance in the former might catapult him into becoming a box-office draw and so carry the latter with it.

  Santa Fe Trail, starring Errol Flynn as the Confederate leader Jeb Stuart, was set to start shooting just two days after Warners saw the first print of Knute Rockne—All American. Jack Warner had originally sought John Wayne for the role of Custer, planning to make Santa Fe Trail a co-starring film. Wayne wired Warner:

  I MUST REFUSE THE ROLE OF CUSTER IS NO MORE THAN A FOIL TO JEB STUART [Flynn’s role].

  Wayne Morris was cast, but after a few days of shooting he was pulled and Reagan was handed the part. The first day of shooting, Reagan recalled being witness “to something I hope I will remember as long as I’m in this business [1964].* On a rack in the fitting room were cavalry uniforms tagged with the name of the actor [Morris] who, until that moment, had been assigned to the part. Into the room rushed a wardrobe man arms filled with uniforms hastily basted together for a first fitting. Without a word, he gathered the completed uniforms in one arm, threw them in a corner and hung the new ones in their place.” He had learned how expendable an actor could be in Hollywood, and how cruelly competitive the business was.