Early Reagan

by Anne Edwards

  Stone also remembered that as far as Hollywood was concerned, “we rated as stars only in the service flag. We weren’t allowed to eat in the same room with the studio’s featured players, or talk to stars or the director [Reagan generally ate with co-star Murphy and director Curtiz]. We had no dressing rooms and had to check on and off the sound stage when we went to the latrine.”

  George Murphy made much of the fact that he was (like George M. Cohan) a true Yankee Doodle boy born on the Fourth of July. Only nine years older than Reagan, he had to wear heavy makeup to appear paternal. The two men played well together. Reagan had a great deal of respect for Murphy and they shared many interests. (They also had numerous strong differences of opinion.) Murphy’s father had been a dedicated Democrat and a noted track coach who had prepared the U.S. team for the 1912 Olympics. From youth, Murphy’s interest in politics had been as strong as his involvement in theater and films. A Democrat like his father, he arrived in Hollywood in 1934 after a successful career on Broadway as a duo dance act with his wife, Julie Johnson. For eight years he tap-danced through a series of musicals, and in 1939 switched allegiance to the Republican party, becoming active in politics and in the Screen Actors Guild, where, in 1943, during the filming of This Is the Army, he was vice-president.

  Unquestionably, Reagan’s army years imbued him with an even deeper sense of patriotism and shifted him to a somewhat more conservative viewpoint. Murphy’s influence during the making of This Is the Army cannot be discounted. Throughout the film they were constantly seen by others in “animated debate.” And Reagan’s already keen interest in the Screen Actors Guild intensified during this time.

  Breen’s censorship office presented the one major hurdle in Warners’ way in the making of This Is the Army. Breen at first flatly refused to allow the soldiers to masquerade as women performers in the show within a show. These female impersonations had provided some of the best scenes in the stage version. After an exhaustive exchange of letters in which the approval of the U.S. Army was noted, the studio was allowed to include the footage. The film was rushed through postproduction with the hope that the premiere could be held on July 4, but Warners’ technical departments simply could not meet the deadline.*

  On July 17, a day decreed “This Is the Army Day” by Mayor Fletcher Bowron of Los Angeles (the entire week was dubbed “This Is the Army Week” by California’s Governor Earl Warren), “a powerful display of military equipment, a glittering assembly of motion picture stars and society leaders… marked the [Los Angeles and Hollywood] premiere of Irving Berlin’s ‘This Is the Army’…” The film opened in five local theaters simultaneously, each with bands blasting, army exhibits and movie stars. Included in the outdoor displays were four-thousand-pound “Block Busters” (bombs), General Sherman tanks, howitzers, machine guns, half-tracks, jeeps and antiaircraft guns never before on exhibit. (The Block Busters were identical to those that had been used just that week in destroying Hamburg, Berlin and Rome.)

  At the Hollywood Theater, the crack drill cadre of forty men from Santa Anita (by December 1942, Santa Anita Park had been converted for use as an army ordnance training center under the command of Brigadier General B. W. Simpson) performed spectacular maneuvers with the accompaniment of the Santa Anita Band led by Sergeant Skinny Ennis. Hundreds of other soldiers from Camp MacArthur massed in drill formation. Just about everyone who was anyone in Hollywood was there, and just about all the women, in a touch suggested by the premiere committee, wore black or white gowns. Jane, escorted by Lieutenant Reagan in dress uniform, proved the exception and attended in a short dinner dress of shocking cyclamen with a wide gold kid yoke at the neck, a silver fox cape over her shoulders (the temperature was 82 degrees that day) and massive amethyst jewelry.

  “It’s socko entertainment… dynamite.… It’s democracy in action to the hilt. It’s showmanship and patriotism combined to a super-duper Yankee Doodle degree,” the Hollywood trade papers pronounced. And eleven days later, on July 28, Broadway welcomed both productions—the street display and the film. “Broadway strollers flocked into the area [from Fifty-first to Fifty-second Street] as though drawn by a giant magnet. They stood in silent wonderment as the battle-clad gun crews pointed long muzzled 44mm AA and five 50-caliber AA machine guns into the night sky, maneuvering them as though enemy planes were streaking down in attack.… Military airs and [musical] numbers from the movie filled the air from 8 to 9 P.M. when a bugler sounded assembly inside the theater and the show… got under way.”*

  New York was as enthusiastic as Hollywood. This Is the Army, the critics agreed, had “the unslackening tempo and the highhearted spirit of a country that can keep its songs and its humor even in a war.… It is from beginning to end, a great show.” Reagan was not singled out for any praise. In fact, the Times reviewer did not even mention his name. Still, he did acquit himself well as Jerry Jones—the butt of the song “This Is the Army, Mr. Jones,” and was believable throughout. The film made more than ten million dollars, a sizable gross in 1943, and Warner Brothers did turn over all the profits to AER. That is not to say the studio came away empty-handed. Part of the acceptable expenses was the rental of their sound stages and equipment. The salaries of their nonmilitary contract players—George Murphy, Joan Leslie, George Tobias, Alan Hale, Una Merkel and Rosemary De-Camp—were deducted, as were the pay of the director and all technical staff (which meant the studio did not have to pay these salaries as per their employees’ contracts). In essence, the film cost Warner Brothers nothing—and received for them the exhibition fee when shown in their theaters in addition to overwhelming publicity and goodwill. Additionally, like Rear Gunner, it kept Reagan before the public without any investment on the studio’s part.

  Jack Warner considered This Is the Army one of the best films ever made for the studio, and his part in it of prime importance. This fact was, however, to cause an irreconcilable rift between him and Hal Wallis.† On November 23, Wallis gave the Los Angeles Times an interview about his responsibility for This Is the Army and other Warner films. Warner telegraphed him a few days later:

  I RESENT AND WON’T STAND FOR YOUR CONTINUING TO TAKE ALL CREDIT FOR… THIS IS THE ARMY, GOD IS MY COPILOT, PRINCESS O’ROURKE … I HAPPENED TO BE ONE WHO SAW THESE STORIES, READ PLAYS, BOUGHT AND TURNED THEM OVER TO YOU. YOU COULD AT LEAST SAY SO, AND I WANT TO BE ACCREDITED ACCORDINGLY. YOU CERTAINLY HAVE CHANGED…

  Wallis wired back:

  … ARTICLES APPEARED WITHOUT YOUR PROPER CREDIT DUE UNFORTUNATELY TO OMISSION BY INTERVIEWERS. SORRY YOU FEEL I HAVE CHANGED. I HAVE NOT CHANGED AND DON’T WANT TO IN MY REGARD FOR YOU. HAL.

  Warner, refusing to accept this explanation, telegraphed Charles Einfeld (Warners’ director of publicity):

  MEAN WHAT I SAID MY WIRE [TO WALLIS] AND WILL DEFINITELY TAKE LEGAL ACTION IF THIS ISN’T STOPPED… SICK, TIRED EVERYONE TAKING ALL CREDIT AND I BECOME SMALL BOY AND DOING MOST OF WORK…

  The same day [November 30] he dispatched the following to Wallis:

  STOP GIVING ME DOUBLE TALK ON YOUR PUBLICITY. THIS WIRE WILL SERVE NOTICE ON YOU THAT I WILL TAKE LEGAL ACTION IF MY NAME HAS BEEN ELIMINATED FROM ANY STORY IN ANY FORM, SHAPE OR MANNER AS BEING IN CHARGE OF PRODUCTION WHILE YOU WERE EXECUTIVE PRODUCER…*

  Reagan returned to his desk at Fort Roach, where he was “swept up” in what he refers to as “another frantic bit of picture-making.” Hap Arnold (a good friend of Jack Warner’s) thought it might be amusing to present to his fellow officers a film compiled of humorous outtakes of documentaries and training pictures made on the post that year. Jack Warner had pulled the same gag on various occasions for his own staff with his own films. Outtakes were pieces of film where performers blew or forgot their lines—using profanity or some outrageously amusing reaction, or where the camera or sound crews miscalculated. However, at Fort Roach, outtakes were not saved. Reagan, rather than disappointing the general or gaining his wrath, set about to fake it.

  Colonel Owen Crump, who had been a producer at W
arners, “called an emergency meeting and gave the unit’s top writers, including Norman Krasna, forty-eight hours to come up with a script. A week later General Arnold’s guests [all top-ranking officers] are sitting back at the Pentagon party. Lights dim. The film rolls. Reagan, chewing on a cigar and stabbing his pointer at a wall map, briefing a squadron of bomber pilots on a vital mission [stands there].

  “‘This is our target for tonight,’ he declared. The wall map rolls up like a runaway window blind, and there stands a naked girl.”

  Don Dwiggins remembered another incident when a Fort Roach commando, Sergeant Charles Tanne, an actor and a clever impersonator who “one night when Reagan had the duty [telephoned from another office]:

  “ ‘Uh, Lieutenant,’ he said in a Southern accent, ‘we all jus’ arrived at Union Station from Ft. Leavenworth. I’ve got me 500 cavalry troops here with their horses. Would you kindly tell me the best route to Fort Roach? And has the hay arrived yet?’“

  For about “a minute and a half” Reagan bought the gag.

  Night-duty officer could be a boring assignment, and Reagan lightened it by writing some arresting entries in the log. One such entry read: “3 a.m.—Post attacked by three regiments of Japanese infantry. Led Cavalry charge and repulsed enemy. Quiet resumed.” Another time, he noted: “Special instructions passed on to New Officer of the Day. New Officer indeed! Did they see me in those West Point pictures?”

  The first Allied air raid on Rome took place on July 19. By the twenty-third of that month, Palermo was occupied; and on the twenty-sixth, Benito Mussolini fell from power and a new government was formed. Within three months, the Allies had invaded Italy, the Fifth Army occupied Naples, and on October 13, Italy declared war on their former ally, Germany. But the war was far from over, and indeed, some of the most bitter campaigns, both in Europe and in the South Pacific, remained to be fought.*

  Reagan was stationed at Fort Roach throughout the war and helped in the making of several good training films. He also retained an ongoing working relationship with Warner Brothers. On March 18, 1943, Warner had telegraphed:

  DIRECTOR, WAR DEPARTMENT BUREAU OF PUBLIC RELATIONS, WASHINGTON: WARNERS REQUESTS PERMISSION FOR LT. RONALD REAGAN TO APPEAR 15 MINUTE PROGRAM BLUE NETWORK [NBC] NIGHT 3-27-43 STOP THIS IS VETERAN OF FOREIGN WARS ANNUAL PROGRAM STOP REAGAN WILL ACT AS NARRATOR OF PROGRAM TAKEN FROM AIR FORCE WARNER PICTURE.†

  The War Department granted Lieutenant Reagan permission. Reagan was not personally involved in this request or its granting, but by his appearance on the show the War Department was technically approving the film. Patriotic though it was (it focused on a bombing crew over the South Pacific), Air Force was still a commercial venture. (“Fried Jap going down,” a bombardier sneers after scoring a hit.) Warner Brothers seems to have had a relationship with the War Department not accorded the other major studios.

  The war created a bonanza for Hollywood. Within a year of Pearl Harbor, movie attendance went up 50 percent as each week eighty million customers bought tickets. Across the country, boomtown movie theaters remained open around the clock to accommodate swing and graveyard shifts. The studios increased production to fill the growing demand. To keep the films rolling, they turned to whatever resources they had at hand. In most cases, they relied on stars who were too old or who had other reasons for being unable to serve. (At Warners, Errol Flynn, for instance, had once had tuberculosis and suffered a weakened lung; Bogart, forty-three at the beginning of the war, had been injured as a seaman during World War I; James Cagney and Paul Lukas were even older; Paul Henreid [born in Trieste] became an American citizen in 1940, but his birthplace made him exempt from service). Warners, which had a great many women under contract, made a large number of films calling for more mature or older men and melodramas that featured women. Former casting director Steve Trilling had now become Jack Warner’s production chief, but with his background he had a practiced eye for star-making roles. Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Crawford had to battle for the best roles as Trilling worked to create a wartime roster of new stars from among those under contract—Lauren Bacall, Olivia de Havilland, Ida Lupino, Joan Leslie, Susan Hayward, Ann Blyth, Brenda Marshall, Julie Bishop, Ann Sheridan, Priscilla Lane, Alexis Smith and Jane Wyman, to mention a few.

  Wyman was cast in one inane comedy after the other. A Warners film always had a special stamp that identified it—well described in one film history as: “Murky and somber, with every cocktail bar seemingly full of cigarette smoke, streets and piers gleaming with rain, and heroines mink-clad and ready with convenient pistols to be produced at moments of stress to the strains of rich scores by [Max] Steiner, [Franz] Waxman, or [Erich Wolfgang] Korngold.” But the wartime public desired lighter films, and comedies did well at the box office. Warners, however, had under contract only a few writers and directors who were adept at comedy and no star performers (with the exception of Eve Arden) who were known in this medium. Wyman’s pert looks, bantering past roles and likability made her a natural candidate.

  What Trilling and Wallis did not see, for the simple lack of looking, were Wyman’s large sad eyes—those brown wells of emotion that everyone else, from her first-grade teacher to June Al-lyson, had observed. Wyman had a depth of character that scratched its way through the sleek veneer of such roles and made her dialogue seem more inane than it was. Finally she decided to do something about it. She spoke to Trilling. She wanted a chance to try a straight dramatic role. She was told that the studio had enough dramatic stars. How about a loan-out then? she asked. Warners was amenable.

  Current on The New York Times best-seller list was The Lost Weekend, Charles Jackson’s stark, unrelenting novel of a man’s descent into the hell of alcoholism. The book contained one woman’s role of depth, although quite small.* Paramount had bought the rights and Billy Wilder was to direct. With the advent of war, the problem- and social-conscious films of the Depression and post-Depression were almost obliterated by topical or escapist material. But Wilder was riding high. His Double Indemnity, an “archetypical film noire,” brilliantly made and incisively written (by Wilder), had just won him an Academy nomination for best picture, script, performance by a female star (Barbara Stanwyck, also borrowed from Warner Brothers for this film), cinematography (John Seitz) and music (Miklos Rozsak). Technically a suspense/crime melodrama, Double Indemnity dealt with the themes of greed and middle-class tragedy. The war had turned Wilder, a German Jew whose family had either died or were still incarcerated in concentration camps (all to perish), away from his early Lubitsch-like comedies (Ninotchka, The Major and the Minor). A Billy Wilder film had stature and would be seriously considered at award time. No matter how small the woman’s role, appearing in such a film could only help a career. Wyman wanted such a chance desperately, and once she had convinced Lew Wasserman, he fought hard to sell Wilder on the idea that “pert” Wyman could pack a wallop if given the opportunity.

  By this time, Wilder and his collaborator, Charles Brackett, had adapted the book The Lost Weekend, and to give it a slightly more upbeat quality, they had created a new character, Helen St. James, a woman in love with the alcoholic. To pass censorship demands they had also substituted writer’s block for the character’s latent homosexuality. Wilder (director and co-producer and co-writer) tested Wyman for this role—a sympathetic, winning young woman who could, when called upon, be tough—and she was signed to co-star with Ray Milland. The role was subordinate to Milland’s, but it was solid. She began shooting on October 1, 1944 (all New York location scenes had been filmed without her). Principal photography was completed ten weeks later. She expected the film to turn her career immediately around. But the liquor industry lobbied against its release, exerting strong pressure on Paramount.

  The Reagan marriage was in a holding pattern. Wyman was frustrated and depressed with her situation at Warners, where she felt she was not getting the proper attention. The war bore on longer than American optimism had thought probable. Even so, the Reagans we
re one of the luckier couples. Reagan stood no chance of being sent overseas and he got home frequently. But their lives were pulling apart. He lived totally in a man’s world, removed from the everyday concerns of being dependent on the film industry. She suffered some of the isolation she had felt when he was surrounded by his old TEKE buddies or debating with his political friends. The day-to-day care of Maureen was her responsibility, as was supporting the household and Nelle, Warner’s loan payments having stopped in April 1943. The couple’s time together, though frequent, was brief and seemed inappropriate for a discussion of small concerns and anxieties.

  Early in 1944, Wyman went on a grueling twelve-week personal-appearance tour for the studio. The tour (which promoted U.S. bonds and Wyman’s last Warner film, The Dough Girls, a wartime comedy that also starred Alexis Smith, Jack Carson and Ann Sheridan) took her home to St. Joseph for the first time in sixteen years. Few people she had known were still there, but she went back to the school she had once attended, visited the classrooms and had dinner with the Rudy Hofheimers, former classmates of hers. When she arrived back in California, she was exhausted and had only a week to prepare for a supporting role (Alexis Smith was assigned the female lead) in Warners’ musical biography of Cole Porter (played with a poker face by the usually smoothly charming Cary Grant). The studio next cast her in a watered remake of The Animal Kingdom, fifth billing with Ann Sheridan and Alexis Smith again, in a role that was a throwback to her old hotcha-blonde days.