Early Reagan

by Anne Edwards

  “He had a wonderful store of marvelous and funny stories and had that great gift of being so articulate,” Jane Bryan Dart remembered. “[He] followed the political news as enthusiastically as he followed events in the motion-picture industry.” Where he had once monopolized gatherings with his play-by-play descriptions of sports events, he now dominated any group with a replay of speeches given in Congress. This involved a prodigious amount of time spent reading a large number of newspapers: The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor and even printouts, obtained through friends, of the daily Congressional Record.

  Maureen Reagan was born on January 4, 1941. The Reagans were referred to as the perfect family by the press. (A few months later, Jane told the Dixon Evening Telegraph in a telephone interview: “I wanted a boy… and was terribly disappointed for a few moments. I can’t for the life of me understand why…”) The Londonderry View apartment soon proved to be too small. On Maureen’s arrival, the couple had taken over an adjoining bachelor apartment and made it a nursery and bought new furniture for Reagan’s small office (including a copy of the George Washington desk) and the living room. At best, Jane found their housing situation inadequate and finally convinced Reagan that they had to move. The savings-account baby was followed soon by a savings-account house. The Reagans attended a showing of a Rosalind Russell film, This Thing Called Love. The house in it appealed to them and Wyman asked the film’s designer to let her copy the plans. He agreed. They then bought a lot with a spectacular view on a twisting, steep hill above Sunset Boulevard, less than five minutes from their apartment, and began construction on an eight-room house, which Wyman supervised. Her life during this period was taken up with domestic matters, Maureen, the building of the house and its decoration and furnishing, which was to be in a style that both called “comfortable Reagan” (“We don’t want to go out on a limb,” Reagan kept reminding her), and her career. She made four films in 1941, none of them substantial.

  John (“Jack”) Dales, executive secretary of SAG, called Wyman in early July and asked her if she would consider being an alternate on the board for Heather Angel while she was on location. Wyman said she would think about it and let him know later that afternoon. To Dales’s surprise, she turned up at the SAG offices with Reagan. “Jack,” she said, “I don’t think you’ve actually met my husband, Ronald Reagan, but I think he’ll make a better alternate than me.” Dales claimed “a bright look came in her eyes” and she added, “He might even become president of SAG one day—or maybe America.”

  Dales had no objection to Reagan’s taking a seat on the board as an alternate, but he had to put the matter before the other members, some of whom knew Reagan from Warners (Powell and Cagney were both on at that time) and “spoke up” for him. But Dales added, “It was primarily Jane Wyman’s boost for him” that convinced the board to accept him. “He certainly made himself felt… not immediately but in the weeks and months that followed. He was articulate. He spoke with reason, not with experience. Yes, he made an impression.” What was more pertinent was the impression the SAG made on Ronald Reagan. His interest deepened with each board meeting. He could see how important good negotiation and political action were to getting actors the most favorable terms for employment. Friends noted a change in him from the time he went on the board of the SAG. He took each issue that came before the board with great seriousness. Studio and union problems began to share equal time with world conditions in his heated discussions.

  “Reagan was an unbelievably strong Roosevelt supporter,” Jack Dales says. “He idolized him as some people would idolize a film star—he thought he was almost a godlike man.… He felt very much that he could work with the Guild in the same way that Roosevelt worked with the country.” Dales was a mild man with a pedantic manner and a slow smile. He lived perhaps a little too vicariously in his work and never seemed to lose his admiration for actors or his great pleasure in being able to associate with so many famous members of that profession. He got on especially well with Reagan.

  Reagan felt proud of being a movie actor, a career he had coveted since childhood. But what had been the strong attraction—money, fame, adulation? Certainly it had not been a dedication to the art of acting. Except for his years at school, he had never pursued any form of dramatic training. Viewing the films he made in his first five years in Hollywood (and there were thirty of them), one can see little growth in the depth of understanding of a character or in mastering the craft of acting. He appears almost consistently “boyish of face and gleaming of tooth,” as a Time correspondent described him. His best early performances were given in the films in which he played a brash radio announcer and in the Brass Bancroft Secret Service serial, where he engaged in comic-strip heroics. Warners might have developed the qualities he exhibited in these films and found him able to fulfill top-star potential. But, he lacked friction, passion, the kind of presence that rivets an audience. His likability, his voice, his ease before the camera got him through. None of his performances was wooden, but he often appeared shallow. Even his portrayal of George Gipp did not stir the emotions until Knute Rockne evoked his dead spirit to rouse a losing Notre Dame football team to victory.

  His idols and role models were the actors who played heroes on the screen. Such had always been the case. Since childhood, he often fantasized about ridding the West of the bad men, rescuing those unable to save themselves, dying for honor, for love, for country. The intensity that should have been channeled into his craft was spent in his passion for economics, politics and now union tactics. Except for his one desire to play the Gipper, he had not displayed any initiative in seeking a good role, nor had he ever refused an obviously inferior part.

  Warners had loaned him to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in January 1941 for the juvenile lead in The Bad Man, a Wallace Beery-Lionel Barrymore film. (Metro paid Warners two thousand dollars a week for Reagan, who under his old contract received five hundred dollars per week from Warners.) Metro had not sought out his services. Instead, he had been part of a trade that involved other contract players. Metro had many actors on salary who could have put some sparkle into the lackluster role of Gil Jones—Van Johnson, James Craig, Richard Carlson, Lew Ayres and Robert Walker to name a few. But the part was not one that could have displayed any one of these actors to good advantage. Also, stealing a scene from two such veterans as Beery and Barrymore would have been an impossible feat for even the best of players. Certainly, Jack Warner could not have thought the loan-out would improve Reagan’s status, for he was to receive fourth billing after Beery, Barrymore and Laraine Day.

  Porter Emerson Browne’s The Bad Man had been filmed twice before, and although one version had starred Walter Huston, both had been dismal failures. One wonders what else other than Beery’s marquee appeal could have decided Metro to try again. But by now Beery’s screen personality had become a cliche. Whatever good footage is contained in The Bad Man Barrymore commands. Beery portrays a Mexican bandit (shades of his famous Viva Villa!) who shows up at Barrymore’s hacienda to rescue it from foreclosure because Barrymore’s nephew (Reagan) had once inadvertently saved his life. Laraine Day was cast as Reagan’s childhood sweetheart, married unhappily but returning to Reagan’s side at his time of need.

  “I had been warned about Beery,” Reagan recalled, “but no one said anything about Barrymore.… Lionel was, of course, theatre through and through, and you were made better by his great ability—provided you kept from being run over. He was confined to his wheelchair at the time and he could whip that contrivance around on a dime. It’s hard to smile in a scene when your foot has been run over and your shin is bleeding from a hubcap blow.”

  “Ronald Reagan makes an ineffectual hero,” wrote the reviewer on The New York Times, words that could not have raised Reagan’s stock when he returned—as he put it—”to the meat and potatoes atmosphere” of Warners (Reagan had referred to MGM as “sort of the Tiffany of Hollywood”), where he continued to make “some shaky A
pictures with now and then a lesser role in the class product.”

  The contents of Reagan’s films could not have been farther from the realities of the times. As German armies closed in on Paris, a grave Roosevelt had gone before a hurriedly convened joint session of Congress to reassure a deeply frightened country and call it to arms. Despite Roosevelt’s support of a Selective Service Act and the overwhelming public approval for America’s preparedness, Congress was extremely reluctant to enact a peacetime draft (for the first time in American history). Angry congressional debates followed. Many members of Congress did not want to be burdened with the responsibility of having voted for peacetime conscription if the necessity of America having to defend itself in a war somehow disappeared. Despite much opposition, Congress passed the act in August 1940, and the country went to work to build and supply planes, ships and ammunition to the new recruits. Everywhere there were flags as Americans shook the mothballs off their patriotism. All the musical shows on Broadway featured the national anthem as a curtain raiser or finale. Hollywood was dragging its tail. Chaplin poked fun at Hitler and Mussolini in The Great Dictator, but most major filmmakers seemed not to hear the trumpets of approaching war.

  As an officer in the reserves, Reagan received his first induction notice on February 9, 1941. Jack Warner personally wrote the army on behalf of Reagan and his company asking for, and receiving, a deferment in view of the films Reagan was then signed to do. Reagan had dependents and would have never passed an eye test, so Warner felt certain that he could be kept out of the service as long as the country remained at peace.

  The studio next cast him as Peter Rowan in a ridiculous film called Million Dollar Baby, which also starred Priscilla Lane, Jeffrey Lynn and May Robson. His co-workers noted that he was unsettled by his deferment, displaying guilt. The inconsequential screenplay could not have helped assuage his unrest. The original story by Leonard Spigelgass, titled Miss Wheelwright Discovers America, had been considered a hot property when Warners bought it, and they proceeded to give it a production and running time (102 minutes) commensurate with its advance publicity. Unfortunately, “[The screenplay] seems to be put together like a prefabricated house, strictly according to blueprint, with each piece turned out of a mold,” wrote Bosley Crowther. “It is one of the most formula-made pictures ever to come along and smells of antiseptic.” The formula chosen was simply boy-meets-girl in reverse. An old grumpy lady (Robson) gives a young girl (Lane) a million dollars. Her boyfriend (Reagan) is a struggling concert pianist who breaks off their engagement because she is now too rich for him and she gives away the money to win him back. Spigelgass’s original script had been larded with sharp wisecracks. The adapters replaced these with “a string of old gags that a third-rate m.c. at a fourth rate bistro would have ducked.”*

  Reagan’s most vivid recollection of Million Dollar Baby was of the two weeks preproduction, during which he spent considerable time every day at a dummy piano following “the hand movements of a pianist at a real piano playing Chopin and all the music the picture called for.” A memo from the film’s director, Curtis Bernhardt, to Jack Warner gives an even clearer vision of Reagan’s fortnight of piano practicing. “Max Rabinovitz of the music department saw me yesterday after having worked with Ronald Reagan for his piano playing and said that the man is without any musical feeling and sense, and that it would be impossible to ever show his hands while playing the piano.” In the end, Reagan was seen seated at the piano, hands poised, and then cuts were made to a professional pianist playing.

  Curtis Bernhardt had been known in Germany as Kurt Bernhardt, but he was renamed by Warners in 1940 when he escaped the Nazis and came to America. The name change reflected Hollywood’s acute awareness of the anti-German sentiments sweeping the country at the time. Warners also displayed a total lack of judgment in assigning a director with a heavy European hand who had not yet mastered English to a project that relied on the subtleties and innuendo of language.

  Reagan next did Nine Lives Are Not Enough, a “classy little B film” directed by a former protege of Charles Chaplin, Edward Sutherland, who had contributed a lot to the early musical film. The pace of the movie was above par. Sutherland saw the quality in Reagan that gave him some extra dimension onscreen—that flip brashness. Reagan’s character was “a frantic newspaper reporter who’s always getting in a jam, but invariably seems to land on his feet,” Variety commented. “Ronald Reagan is not only a brash reporter to end all screen reporters; he’s also hilariously scatterbrained and devilishly resourceful.… Reagan gives a superbly helter-skelter performance.” The script was “a blazing whodunit, with suspense piled up and action so fast that the average spectator won’t have time for the moment of calm thought needed [to discover the villain].”

  On seeing the rough cut of the film, Jack Warner had written Foy:

  Dear Byrnie,

  I saw Nine Lives Are Not Enough and it is a peachy picture.… I have about a half dozen more revamping shots, inserts, and effects to put in, and I cannot understand why they were not done in the first place, especially in the off-scene fight where [Reagan] slugs the newspaper reporter and throws him off-scene. Undoubtedly they had mufflers on their black jacks.

  Warner wanted to retitle the film (made in twenty-one days), but this was never done.

  Nine Lives Are Not Enough, with its cumbersome title, low budget, short running time (sixty-one minutes) and weak marquee value (Reagan was the major name in the movie), had too many strikes against it to make the grade as a sleeper. Reagan’s performance did set the front office to reevaluating his career, and they cast him in the starring role of International Squadron, an up-classed B script with plenty of action. Previously filmed as Ceiling Zero with James Cagney (in the Reagan role) and Pat O’Brien only five years earlier, the story had been reset from World War I to the Battle of Britain. Reagan played a cocky American who joins the RAF, creates havoc among his buddies’ fiancees and grows up after his breaches of discipline have cost the lives of two of his companions.

  All the care usually given an A film was lavished on International Squadron, except that the cast and the director were not from the more select company of players, which kept the budget low. Warner had originally wanted the old Ceiling Zero script refurbished for Errol Flynn and John Wayne (he seemed determined to team these two, but was never to succeed). When this did not develop, Warner turned to Hal Wallis for suggestions for substituting a less stellar cast. Wallis sent back a list of contract players he thought adequate, Reagan among them. His performances as the Gipper and in the action film Nine Lives Are Not Enough won him the Flynn castoff. Lothar Mendes, a German-born director, was assigned the film. Mendes worked well with Reagan, appreciating his professionalism. He was not, however, able to draw from him the sexuality that Flynn might have given the daredevil role. Nonetheless, the brash Jimmy Grant in International Squadron is one of Reagan’s better roles. (Mendes was also a taskmaster. One scene called for Reagan as an RAF pilot to take a mop, which was saturated in oil, light it inside the cockpit, pull back the hood and hook it outside the plane as a decoy for the Germans. The hood jammed before he could release the mop and Reagan was overcome by smoke and oil fumes during the minutes it took to pry open the hood. Mendes refused to bring in a double, and the next morning Reagan repeated the scene—this time without incident.)

  Warner and Wallis sensed a new and more enthusiastic audience reaction for Reagan when they saw the rough cut of the film—at least three full months before its release. Both agreed that the “hick midwest sportscaster” might have star potential; and by casting him in their biggest budget film yet that year, Kings Row, in the co-starring role of Drake McHugh, they exercised their confidence.

  In June 1940, Warner had paid thirty-five thousand dollars for the Henry Bellamann best seller (he had offered only five thousand dollars more five years earlier for Gone With the Wind). Wallis was ecstatic about the purchase since he considered the project one of social importance, but
his task in assembling staff and cast would not be easy. Within a week of the Kings Row acquisition, Wolfgang Reinhardt, who had been assigned as associate producer, wrote Wallis:

  Dear Hal,

  It is only with reluctance that I bring myself to report unfavorably on a prospective assignment as important as Kings Row. Yet I prefer not to kid myself or you regarding the enormous difficulties that a screening of this best seller will undoubtedly offer. As far as plot is concerned, the material in Kings Row is for the most part either censurable or too gruesome and depressing to be used. The hero finding out that his girl has been carrying on incestuous relations with her father, a sadistic doctor who amputates legs and disfigures people willfully, a host of moronic or otherwise mentally diseased characters, the background of a lunatic asylum, people dying from cancer, suicides—these are the principal elements of the story. The balance of the plot-elements, the ones that are not objectionable, unfortunately are very much on the hackneyed side: A banker who steals trust funds, real estate speculations and some other typical occurrences of a small town. In my opinion the making of a screenplay would amount to starting from scratch, practically writing an original story about the life of a small town, using the same characters but inventing more or less new circumstances for the action.…