Early Reagan

by Anne Edwards

  The quintessence of the author’s [Henry Bellamann] ideas is an accusation against the hypocrisy, the narrow-mindedness and the cruelty of the typical midwestern rural town or if you will, of American society as a whole. In the novel this is done in a rather mellow way, without too much bitterness, in the style of a philosopher who knows too much about the evilness of men to get too excited about it.

  In the picture we would have to hit much harder, we must let facts speak for themselves, we cannot rely on a Greek chorus to explain the meanings of the plot. We would have to build up dramatically the contrasts that are rather mildly touched upon in the novel.…

  Casey Robinson, who had successfully scripted Dark Victory, The Old Maid and All This and Heaven Too (all Bette Davis films), was assigned to write the screenplay.* Before he had a chance to begin, Joe Breen, of the Production Code Administration, which censured all American films, sent Wallis notification that the film script should not be attempted and the project should be abandoned because his administration would unequivocally ban the film:

  … Before this picture can be approved under the provision of the Production Code, all the illicit sex will have to be entirely removed; the characterization of Cassandra will have to be definitely changed; the mercy killing will have to be deleted; and the several suggestions of loose sex, chiefly in the attitude of Drake with reference to the Ross girls, will have to be entirely eliminated. In addition, the suggestion that Dr. Gordon’s nefarious practices are prompted by a kind of sadism will have to be completely removed from the story.

  You will have in mind, also, I am sure, that a picture of this kind could not be released in Britain, where any suggestion of insanity is always entirely eliminated from films.…

  To attempt to translate such a story to the screen, even though it be re-written to conform to the provisions of the Production Code is, in our judgment, a very questionable undertaking [and]…

  … even though your present script is re-written to bring it within the provisions of the Production Code, it will still be necessary, before approval can be given to the script, that a decision as to its acceptability, from the standpoint of industry policy, be rendered by the Board of Directors of this Association in New York.

  I am sending a copy of this letter to Mr. [Will H.] Hays [President of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association of America and author of its strict Production Code] for such comment, or observation, as he may care to make in the circumstances.*

  Despite the fact that Breen and Hays had the power to stop production of the film or at least to forbid its distribution, Robinson plowed into work on the script”†” and, on February 4, Steve Trilling, Warners’ casting director, sent his first memos to Wallis and Warner on casting. As was the custom, all possibilities were included. Every player on contract who was approximately the right age for a role was listed, no matter how bizarre the choice would have been, along with players from other studios who were considered “right.” The lists looked like score sheets for a tournament. Trilling placed his top choices at the head of each column under the characters’ names (added to those below were lists for six other characters):

  Parris Drake Cassandra

  Try Power Dennis Morgan Ginger Rogers

  Henry Fonda [Warners] Ida Lupino

  Laurence Olivier Franchot Tone [Warners]

  Cary Grant Fred MacMurry Olivia de Havilland

  Robert Taylor Ray Milland [Warners]

  Douglas Fairbanks Lew Ayres Vivien Leigh

  Glenn Ford Robert Cummings Joan Fontaine

  Alexander Knox Robert Preston Linda Darnell

  [none of the above Eddie Albert Adele Longmire

  was under contract [Warners] [Warners]

  to Warners] Ronald Reagan Anita Louise

  Michael Ames [Warners] [Warners]

  Arthur Kennedy John Garfield Bette Davis

  John Garfield [Warners] [Warners]

  Errol Flynn Arthur Kennedy

  Ronald Reagan [Warners]

  [all Warners] Michael Ames

  [Warners]

  The list was soon narrowed down. Tyrone Power and Henry Fonda were Wallis’s first and second choices for the idealistic Par-ris Mitchell, but both were under contract to Darryl Zanuck, who would not release either of them. Olivier had abruptly returned to his war-plagued England (with Vivien Leigh). Wallis next turned to Michael Ames, a “young, handsome actor… he had a fresh quality that made up for the fact that he had no name.” Ames had played one of the juvenile leads in the Broadway production of My Sister Eileen before being signed by Warners, where he was given minor roles in Now Voyager and Dive Bomber and appeared as the Frenchman in International Squadron with Reagan, his few moments onscreen registering well. Wallis tested him three times as Parris and finally agreed to his having the role, at which point Ames was drafted into the army. Warner could possibly have tried for a deferment, but war clouds were hovering and Ames, although married, had no children. What good would it have been to star him in a film and then lose him to the army anyway? Therefore, Ames went off to boot camp and Trilling sent a new casting memo, which now placed Robert Cummings’s name in the top position for the role of Parris since John Garfield and Errol Flynn were thought by Wallis to be too sexy. Cummings had been Wallis’s choice for Drake McHugh. With the switch, he turned to a revised list:

  Drake McHugh

  Eddie Albert

  Ronald Reagan

  Arthur Kennedy

  In April, the Breen office rejected Robinson’s screenplay as still unsuitable. The veteran writer went back to work again. Final casting had not been made. Reagan did not know that he was being seriously considered for the film. While he had a direct line to Bryan Foy’s group, he was not close to anyone in the Wallis camp. International Squadron was filmed in May and June. After Wallis viewed the rushes, he decided Reagan would play Drake McHugh. When notified, Reagan had not yet read the script and had no knowledge of the complexity of the role.

  Second, third and fourth drafts of the screenplay had been submitted to Breen and rejected. Start of production was postponed a month. Cummings now had to fulfill a commitment to Universal—It Started with Eve, a Deanna Durbin picture. Production on Kings Row finally began the second week in August. Cummings was a much-harried star making both films simultaneously, one a musical and the other heavy drama, shuttling back and forth between Warners and Universal and “changing costumes and characterizations en route.” The delay in production had also forced the distinguished English actress Judith Anderson, another performer in the film, to make two films at the same time, but at least she was on the Warner lot for both.* The movie still had no Cassandra and all scenes involving that character were scheduled for the end of shooting. However, Drake McHugh’s girlfriend, Randy, was being played by Reagan’s former co-star, Ann Sheridan.

  While the battling over the casting of Cassandra raged,† and Cummings and Anderson sweated out the pressures of two coinciding schedules, director Sam Wood juggled Reagan’s scenes to fill in. As usual, Reagan was extremely cooperative, a fact well appreciated by Wood, who reciprocated by giving Reagan a large slice of his directorial attention. (Reagan would later say: “I owe Sam Wood a great debt. If he were alive today [Wood died in 1949], he could tell me on the phone he had a part for me and I’d say yes without waiting to hear the title of the script let alone read it. It was a long, hard schedule and my first experience, I suppose, with an acting chore that got down inside and kind of wrung me out.”) Wood and Reagan shared an enthusiasm for politics which carried over on the set. The often underrated Wood, once Cecil B. DeMille’s assistant, had made some diverse and entertaining films, ranging from the Marx Brothers’ comedies A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races to the sentimental Our Town, Kitty Foyle and Madam X to the adventurous Rangers of Fortune (he had also directed several uncredited scenes of Gone With the Wind). About one thing he was unequivocal: Sam Wood was dedicated to conservative-hawkish politics and was president of the Mo
tion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals.

  (One day after Wood and Reagan had been expounding politics between takes, Bob Cummings asked him, “Ronnie, have you ever considered becoming President some day?”

  “President of what?” he asked.

  “I told him President of the United States.”

  “What’s the matter, Bob,” he replied, “don’t you like my acting either?”

  Because of Wood’s conception of the role of Parris Mitchell, Cummings wore heavy makeup. A critic later wrote: “Bob Cummings plays Parris Mitchell like the third girl on the line.”)

  Reagan wore contact lenses for the first time during the making of Kings Row, but although he tried to convert the nearsighted Nancy Coleman (cast as the girl whose doctor-father amputates the legs of her boyfriend, Reagan) to their use, he never was able to rely on them for any length of time.

  Actress Marguerite Chapman remembered that one day during the shooting of Kings Row she sat across from Reagan in the commissary and called to a friend at the table behind them to join her at mass on Sunday.

  “Are you a Catholic?’“ Reagan asked.

  “I said, ‘Yes.’

  “He said, ‘Why?’

  “I said, ‘I was bom one.’

  “He went on, ‘That doesn’t mean you have to stay one.…’ He continued to put me on about it and embarrassed me in front of everyone… I never liked him since then.”

  Joseph Breen had provisionally approved the shooting script, which had been laundered about as Oxydol clean as possible, but he still had objections to a scene in which Drake (Reagan) said to his friend Parris (Cummings), “You have to bunk with me. I hope you don’t mind the change.” Wallis protested vainly that the men and the actors who played them “were entirely masculine and the line contained no suggestion of homosexuality.” Breen was adamant and Reagan’s line was changed to, “You have to bunk with me. I hope you don’t mind, Mr. Mitchell!”

  But of greater consequence to Reagan’s role was the famous amputation scene, which gave him his finest moment onscreen and his most famous film quote: “Where’s the rest of me?”

  This time Sam Wood created the problem. He did not want Drake McHugh’s legs amputated after a freight-car accident “because he was afraid the audience would assume castration and regard Drake as a freak.” Wallis pointed out that legs were “normally… amputated just above the knee. Drake might be affected psychologically, but not sexually. Wood refused to accept this. He insisted that the surgeon who hated Drake would have wanted to take his manhood.” But by the time the scene was to be shot on September 7, Wood had had a complete turnaround in thinking. On September 4, David Lewis, the associate producer, memoed to Wallis: “On the matter of shooting the lines to cover the possibility of only taking off one of Drake’s legs… I think you should discuss this with Sam Wood. He [now] feels it means a total rewrite of the end of the picture… and feels very strongly about it [retaining the original].”

  Reagan claimed that the night before the scene was to be shot, he was so terrified of what it would demand of him that he could not sleep. Drake McHugh was to recover consciousness in an upstairs bedroom after the amputation, and had to come “from unconsciousness to full realization of what had happened in a few seconds… worst of all, I had to give my reaction in a line of no more than five words [“Where’s the rest of me?”].”

  They shot the scene without a rehearsal on Reagan’s request. There were cries of “‘Lights!’… I heard Sam’s low voice call, ‘Action!’ There was the sharp clack which signaled the beginning of the scene. I opened my eyes dazedly, looked around, slowly let my gaze travel downward.… I can’t describe even now [1964] my feeling as I tried to reach for where my legs should be. ‘Randy!’ I screamed. Ann Sheridan (bless her), playing Randy, burst through the door. She wasn’t in the shot, and normally wouldn’t have been on hand until we turned the camera around to get her entrance.… I asked the question—the words that had been haunting me for so many weeks—’Where’s the rest of me?’ There was no retake… and it came out that way in the picture.…”*

  Reagan’s major scenes were complete the same day that Wallis finally signed Betty Field (who had tested earlier and was borrowed from Paramount) for the role of Cassandra. On August 29, Reagan received another letter from the army calling him to active duty, and obtained a second deferment based on the studio’s claim that he was set to go from Kings Row to Juke Girl and could not be replaced without great hardship to the company. He received a deferment to October 10, 1941.

  Jane Wyman, pressured by the building of the new house, the baby and her heavy working schedule, had not been well and Reagan went almost directly from the shooting of his “Where’s the rest of me?” scene to the hospital where she had undergone minor surgery (a curettage). Although she was doing well, they decided she would remain at home while he joined Louella Parsons on another tour—this time to Dixon, a personal appearance that had been planned and scheduled before the delays in the filming of Kings Row, and during which International Squadron would hold its “world premiere.”

  He would be returning to Dixon for the first time as a movie star, having just played his best role and at a time when another picture touted as very good and in which he was the major star was to open, and Nelle was going to accompany him. Life had given him more than he had even dreamed of possessing when he had left Dixon for Davenport back in 1932.

  * The screenplay of Million Dollar Baby was by Casey Robinson, Richard Macaulay and Jerry Wald.

  * Robinson, as noted, had also worked on the script of Million Dollar Baby.

  * Italicized words are underscored in original letter.

  † Wallis, Warner and Robinson went personally to see Breen to argue the case. Finally, Breen agreed to reconsider if the script had no reference to incest or nymphomania (dementia praecox was to be used instead). The characters were not to go to bed together. The mercy killing was to be removed, as was a nostalgic scene of young kids skinny-dipping. Robinson had no idea how all this could be taken away and the story still be valid—but he agreed to try.

  * Anderson was simultaneously filming a Warner spy thriller, All Through the Night. In 1960 she was named Dame Commander of the British Empire. Dame Judith had been one of the leading performers of the English stage. Her most memorable film role had been that of the housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, in Rebecca (1940).

  † Warner had fought long and hard to cast the untried studio player Adele Longmire as Cassandra. As late as September 13, 1941, he wrote Wallis: “The woman is a great actress.” Wallis, the only man with the power to veto final casting, disagreed. “Warner made some [other] ridiculous suggestions,” Wallis recalled, “among them Joan Leslie, Susan Peters, and that buxom example of normal, middle-class, healthy womanhood, Priscilla Lane. In mid-August [with production in progress], I was still trying to get Gene Tierney, whose unusual face and temperament made her ideal casting, but Darryl Zanuck got her first [for Tobacco Road]… Marlene Dietrich’s publicist announced that she had won the role, which gave us all a much-needed laugh.”

  * When the first print of the film was shown to Sam Wood on October 20, 1941, he had reservations about this scene. Paul Nathan, Wallis’s assistant, memoed to Wallis the next morning: “Wood was greatly disturbed… by your cutting Dr. Gordon’s line, ‘Amputation—both legs’ (scene 159). He felt that this would take away from the rest of Drake’s scenes and the audience wouldn’t feel sorry enough for him. For Wood insists that many people will think it might have been a toe, or perhaps just one leg—and wonder why the hell this guy feels so sorry for himself.

  “Last night I agreed with Wood. However, I have thought about it since then and now think it is wrong. For the scene is certainly gruesome enough and horrible enough no matter what Gordon cut off, later when Drake calls to Randy and screams, ‘Randy, where’s the rest of me?’ you surely know that both legs have been cut off.” Dr. Gordon’s line, “Amputation—both legs,” remain
ed in the final cut so that there would be no doubt that Drake had lost both extremities.

  12

  REAGAN AND NELLE—WITH PULLMAN-CAR BEDROOMS ADJOINing—remained much to themselves during the two-day train ride from Los Angeles to Dixon. Louella Parsons occupied a private car with her daughter Harriet, her publicists, Sam Israel and Virginia Lindsey, and several of the other members of the tour (which included Ann Rutherford, George Montgomery and Parsons’s brother, Ed Oettinger). Joe E. Brown, Bob Hope, his radio sidekick, Jerry Colonna, and Bebe Daniels and Ben Lyon were to meet the group at their final destination.

  Mother and son were not antisocial. They met with the others for all meals except breakfast (the Reagans rose at dawn), and sat around after dinner in Parsons’s car, laughing at the ebullient Oettinger’s comments and jokes. Parsons made note that Reagan was a “far more serious fellow” than the young man who had accompanied her on the 1939 tour less than two years before. She attributed it to his concern for Jane and his loneliness without her. Perhaps, but except for the fact that they earned their living in the same profession, Reagan had little in common with his fellow passengers. He also had a great deal on his mind. Returning to Dixon was only a part of it.

  That week, Dick Powell had indicated to him that if he joined the Republican party, friends of his would finance a campaign to help elect him to Congress. Reagan had laughed it off with a quasi-joke about the “Democratic Reagans.” Powell had countered with his usual arguments—Roosevelt was not the Democratic party; the president’s liberal left-wing friends were, and the liberal Left was being infiltrated with Communists and fellow travelers. Reagan was naive if he thought the Democrats were the party of the people. He was being duped, deceived. The Republicans were the true people’s party because they had become the keepers of “the American Way of Life.”

  “Why me?” Reagan might well have asked. The answer was simple. Reagan was a celebrity, articulate, a passionate speaker, had an impeccable past and was as American as hot dogs at a baseball game. He had said no, but the discussion had planted a seed in a newly plowed garden of ambition.*