Early Reagan

by Anne Edwards

  Sherman struggled to reduce costs, and finally on December 10 was able to telegraph Warner (who was in the hospital recuperating from a gallbladder operation):

  ENGLISH SCHEDULE SET FOR NINE WEEKS OR 45 DAYS OF SHOOTING. REAGAN AND NEAL HAVE RETURNED FROM A PUBLICITY STINT AT CARDIFF AND DUBLIN AND WE ARE DOING MAKE UP TESTS AND WARDROBE OF BOTH TOMORROW.

  Reagan and Sherman had both started at Warners in 1937, when Sherman was a writer on B films. Their paths had crossed at least twice. He had directed a scene of Reagan doing a radio broadcast for Hollywood Hotel, and had stepped in to do some retakes for Curtis Bernhardt on Juke Girl. “He [Reagan] had really hoped to play the dramatic part of the Scot, ‘Lachie,’ [in The Hasty Heart],” Sherman confirmed. But a young Englishman, Richard Todd, was cast in the role. Although Todd had only made one other film, he had worked in repertory for a number of years and was a fine and sensitive actor.

  While Reagan waited for the filming to start, he interested himself in British politics and spent a large chunk of his time reading what he could to get a better understanding of them. These months he had in Great Britain, unhappy as he was at the time, did have a strong influence on him. He began to see the world beyond the boundaries of the United States. On November 29, Bertrand Russell had created quite a furor by stating in The Times that the West should make war on Russia “while we have the atomic bomb and they have not.” Harold Nicolson commented, “I think it is probably true that Russia is preparing for the final battle for world mastery and that once she has enough bombs she will destroy Western Europe, occupy Asia and have a final death struggle with the Americas. If that happens and we are wiped out over here, the survivors in New Zealand may say that we were mad not to have prevented this while there was still time.… It may be true that we shall be wiped out, and that we could prevent this by provoking a war with Russia at this stage. It may be true that such a war would be successful and that we should then establish some centuries of Pax Americana.… But there is a chance that the danger may pass and peace can be secured by peace. I admit it is a frail chance—not one in ninety. To make war in defiance of that one chance is to commit a crime.”

  Reagan liked to go down to the bar in the Savoy and expound on such weighty topics. But he also would hire a car and driver and go sightseeing in the English countryside. He was not generally known in England—his films had not had much international appeal—and he was seldom recognized. “Toward the end of one such day [a ride in the countryside],” he later recalled, “we stopped at a pub and it was getting twilight. The driver apologized because this one was only 400 years old. He called it one of the younger ones.” England’s history did, indeed, fascinate him and he was quick to tell everyone that his ancestors came from Ireland and from Surrey. He also told a few people that he was related to General Napier (“looking proudly out from his pedestal in Trafalgar Square”).

  On November 1, he had been included in the list of notables invited to the Royal Command Film Performance of the film Scott of the Antarctic starring John Mills. “It was a thrilling evening,” Virginia Mayo recalled. “The Queen [the present Queen Mother] was so charming and beautiful. Princess Elizabeth was pregnant so she didn’t attend, but Prince Philip and Princess Margaret were on the reception line and we all bowed and did the appropriate things. While watching the movie, Mike and I were in the same row with Ronnie, Pat, Alan and Sue Ladd and Vivien and Larry Olivier. Vivien fell asleep (the film was terribly dull and this was her one night off from playing the demanding part of Antigone in her husband’s production), and her breast popped out. Sue and Alan were next to us. Alan said to Mike, ‘Tell her.’ Mike said, ‘You tell her.’ No one did.”

  The fog was so thick some nights in November and December that it rolled in through the doors and windows of the hotel and filled the lobby and corridors. Food rationing was still in effect, and central heat nonexistent. Reagan sent Warner an envelope addressed: “To the finder: Please see this letter reaches J. L. Warner, Warner Bros. Studio, Burbank, Cal.” The contents read:

  Dear J. L.

  I am putting this letter in a bottle and throwing it on the tide with the hope that somehow it may reach you. Perhaps my report of life here in this dismal wilderness will be of help to future expeditions.

  You will recall with what light hearts we set out such a long time ago—optimistic about an ability to find and thaw the “frozen dollar.” If we could have known then what lay (“lay”—there’s a word I no longer experience or understand) before us how different would have been our mood.

  Our first glimpse of this forbidding land was almost as frightening as a look at “The Horn Blows at Midnight.”* There seemed to be a heavy fog but it had the odor of cow dung and coal soot—fearing an explosion of this gaseous stuff, I ordered “no smoking.” Better I should have ordered “no breathing.”

  The natives were friendly in a sort of “below freezing” way but were won over by gifts—mostly cash. We were quite generous in this inasmuch as it was YOUR cash. They speak a strange jargon similar in many ways to our language but different enough to cause confusion. For example—to be “knocked up” here refers in no way to those delights for which “Leader swam the Hillespond.” It merely means to be awakened from a sound sleep by a native device somewhat like our telephone. Another instance of this language difference is the word “bloody.” You could see a native cut stern to stern but to describe the spectacle as “bloody” would get you thrown out of a saloon in London. Mentioning a pain in my “fanny” (which is easy to get here) I was distressed to learn that even this standard American term has an opposite meaning. If I had what they call “a fanny” I could be Queen of England!

  Another misleading term has caused me some distress. There is a cleared space near the center of the native capital called Piccadilly Circus. I have gone there many times and have yet to see an elephant or an acrobat. In fairness I must admit how even there are some characters (mostly female) who seem to be selling tickets to something. They keep pulling my sleeve and saying “two bob, Governor.”

  One of the most interesting customs of the higher class natives is something of a sport. They all wear red coats to chase some dogs which in turn are chasing a fox. I should add the natives are mounted on horses. This affair is mistakenly called “a fox hunt.” I say mistakenly because the red object has nothing to do with the fox, they actually are doing this to muscle up the horses which are then served for dinner. I have been very lucky so far in that I have been able to avoid the horse and eat only the saddle and harness.

  In connection with this let me write a word about English cooking. What they do to food we did to the American Indian. The average meal should go from “kitchen to can” thus avoiding the use of the middlemen.

  My strength is failing now, so I’ll hasten to put this in the bottle before I’m tempted to eat the cork. We think of you as we sit around the campfire and what we think could curl your hair and make H.M.’s horses seem backward. Come to think of it that might be an improvement.

  Cheerio! (that is the native word for goodby. It is spoken without moving the upper lip while looking down the nose).

  Ronnie

  P.S. Due to the fuel shortage we are keeping the fire alive with “frozen dollars”—(yours).

  Dollars were not the only thing frozen in England that winter. The weather was bitter cold, one of the worst the country had experienced in three decades. Since the film was set in a hospital ward (supposedly in Burma in the blazing heat of summer), the wardrobe for the actors portraying patients consisted of pajamas and shorts and nearly all the cast came down with bad colds at one time or another. Pat Neal was under tremendous pressure, in love “wildly,” as she told Vincent Sherman, with Cooper, who was married and in the States.

  Vincent Sherman wrote Warner on December 23, the first day of shooting:

  … practically everything happened to drive a director crazy… about 10:30 we were lining up and rehearsing for the first sequence and suddenly we
had trouble with the arcs [lights]. Then as we were ready to shoot—came a tea break. This meant that everybody from way up high on down—had to stop to get tea!! From the time that the tea break was called until the men got back, a half-hour was consumed. Then the actors had to be warmed up again, and we finally got our first shot around 11 o’clock. In the afternoon the machine which produces fog broke down (we should have moved outside). We finally got it fixed and when we started to roll along in the afternoon, the sound broke down for almost an hour. Then when the sound was fixed and we were ready to start again, came another tea break.

  Sherman feared from the start that the film would never be done on schedule and it is obvious he was preparing Warner for the worst. To Steve Trilling, he confessed on January 3, 1949:

  Working Pat Neal hard. Wanted to keep her crisp which is an English quality, perhaps, and to take away the Southern drawl [Neal was from North Carolina] and I believe that what is coming through is good even though it’s hard to get.… On Friday [she] began to cry in the middle of the day because she could not get one of the scenes right, and I spent a little while comforting her, trying to assure her that she was doing very well. I think she is a very fine actress… she has problems at home [Cooper] and is quite nervous and really only 22 years old. She said she felt she was not right for the part, perhaps, that it needed a British girl. Anyway… she cried a lot of things out of her system and last night we all had dinner together [Reagan, Todd, Sherman, Neal] so I feel there will be nothing but sweetness and light generating from her henceforth. The scene where Ron has to recite Bible names—there were nine takes… because in seven, the arcs were flickering or the bamboo [set decoration] was popping.

  The first rushes were flown out to Warner ten days after the start of production and he immediately wired back:

  GET PROTECTION SHOTS OF ALL CHARACTERS YAWNING IN OPENING [shots] YOU PUT AUDIENCE TO SLEEP BEFORE PICTURE STARTS CONVEY TO NEAL REAGAN REST [of] CAST THEY [are] DOING EXCELLENT JOB.

  The last frame of the film was miraculously finished on March 31, just five days over schedule. Eight days remained before Reagan, Neal and Sherman were to sail on the Queen Mary. Reagan decided to drive from England across to France with a Warner executive (living in England), and then on to the Riviera for some “sunshine and warmth.” Reagan, who had had two years of high school French, was the only one who spoke even a smattering of the language. He counted the journey “a huge success” and won sixty-five dollars in Monte Carlo. The trip contained sad moments too, for “On the ride south our heads were on swivels, turning from burned-out tanks that still could be seen in peaceful grain fields, to temporary graves along the road. Clusters of white crosses, each hung with a helmet.” The drive to Monte Carlo was two days each way, which left the two men only a few days on the Riviera.

  With all his complaining and sarcasm about the foibles of the British, Reagan did feel close to the English people and sad about leaving them. “I wished that my own country could slow down just a little to have time for such graciousness,” he wrote later. “There were friendships made and cherished to this day [1964] with these wonderfully cheerful, warmly humorous people.…”

  The day he docked in New York, Variety carried a story that Errol Flynn had been slated by Warners to star in Ghost Mountain, a film Reagan had wanted to do and had spoken to Warner about before leaving for England.* One can visualize Reagan’s self-image by the choice of the role he became incensed at having lost—that of a courageous Yankee army officer who joins forces with his Rebel equivalent to fight off an Indian attack during the Civil War. The script was lumbering, dull, and the Yankee officer was a John Wayne clone.

  Without consulting Lew Wasserman, he wired Jack Warner that he simply could not believe the studio had given the role to Flynn.

  WHEN I’VE ALWAYS BEEN GOOD AND DONE EVERYTHING YOU’VE ASKED—EVEN “THAT HAGEN GIRL.”

  But while Reagan had been in England, Night Unto Night had been released to devastating reviews, John Loves Mary had already been a disappointment to the box office and That Hagen Girl was a disaster.

  He arrived back in Hollywood ready to do battle with Warner (“pull all the tricks that had ever been invented in past studio feuds to induce ulcers at the executive level…”) and to attend the Academy Awards. Wyman was up for best actress for Johnny Belinda against such formidable performances as Ingrid Bergman as Joan of Arc, Olivia de Havilland in The Snake Pit, Irene Dunne in / Remember Mama and Barbara Stanwyck in Sorry, Wrong Number. Wyman came with director Clarence Brown and his wife, but left with Lew Ayres. Dark-haired, wearing a high-necked, long-sleeved classic gown with two strands of pearls and no other jewelry, Wyman, in one of the shortest acceptance speeches on record, took the Oscar and said, “I accept this very gratefully for keeping my mouth shut. I think I’ll do it again,” and elegantly walked offstage to thunderous applause.* Jerry Wald was the winner of the Irving Thalberg Award for “most consistent high quality of pictures,” an honor given Hal Wallis twice and which Warner, to his great disappointment and long-lasting bitterness, was never to receive.

  Wyman, “escorted by her beau,” Lew Ayres, attended Jack Warner’s celebration party for her at the Mocambo, at the time one of Hollywood’s most popular and exotic nightclubs. Reagan was not present, but at a second celebration the next evening at the Cocoanut Grove, Wyman and Reagan both appeared. They each came and went alone and spoke for only a few minutes during the evening. The inevitable item appeared in the Hollywood gossip columns, hinting at a possible reconciliation, especially when shortly after the Academy Awards Wyman and Ayres were no longer seen together. But on July 16, with one final stroke of a judicial pen, Superior Court Judge Joseph B. Maltby severed the marital ties between Reagan and Wyman. Ironically, Reagan, recuperating from yet another accident inadvertently caused by Eddie Bracken, in which he had broken a leg while both were playing in a charity baseball game, was staying at Wyman’s beach house with his children, whose mother had gone to England to co-star with Marlene Dietrich in the Hitchcock thriller Stage Fright.

  Reagan’s bachelorhood was now official.

  * Reagan had agreed to contribute $500 a month toward the support of the children. Wyman was to receive alimony of $500 a month only if illness or injury prevented her from work. Otherwise, the pact provided for virtually equal division of some $75,000 of community property (the equity in the house). Reagan was to pay half of the upkeep and taxes on the house until it was sold and maintain $25,000 insurance policies on his life in each child’s name. Each also retained their own personal possessions (cars, etc.), Wyman the furniture, Reagan his horses.

  * In January 194-9, Wyman and Gregory Peck were named the world’s most popular film actors, according to moviegoers and the Foreign Press Association. Wyman’s closest competitor was Ingrid Bergman.

  † The musicians had won the copyright to their filmed music. No filmed music made to the date of their contract with the producers could be televised without negotiation of a separate contract. The Writers Guild was fighting for the same stipulation. Reagan added in the Riesel column: “A playwright who sells a play for the legitimate stage collects additional money if the play is made into a movie. And in television itself even prize fighters whose bouts are televised get a portion of the money paid by television stations to the fight promoters.”

  * The labor dispute ended, but had not been settled, in the first week of November 1947.

  * The title of a Jack Benny film that had received bad reviews.

  * Ghost Mountain (1950) was filmed as Rocky Mountain and starred Flynn and his wife, Patrice Wymore.

  * The 1948 Oscar for Best Picture went to Hamlet; Best Actor, Laurence Olivier (Hamlet); Best Director, John Huston (Treasure of Sierra Madre); Best Supporting Actor, Walter Huston (Treasure of Sierra Madre); Best Supporting Actress, Claire Trevor (Key Largo).

  ENTER

  NANCY

  “Love is lovelier the second time around, Just as wonderful with both feet on the grou
nd…”

  —”The Second Time Around,”

  by Sammy Cahn and James van Heusen

  Copyright © 1960 Twentieth Century Music Corporation

  18

  NANCY DAVIS WAS BROUGHT TO HOLLYWOOD IN March 1949 to make a screen test. She possessed neither spectacular talent nor great beauty. She had appeared in small, forgettable roles in summer stock and a few Broadway shows and had been seen briefly in two documentary pictures for RKO Pathe, New York—one for the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis and the other a propaganda film titled This Is America. Despite the apparent lack of razzle-dazzle in her background, the great George Cukor directed her test and Metro star Howard Keel played a scene with her from East Side, West Side, an adaptation of a Marcia Davenport novel that the studio planned shortly to film. “I don’t know what I would have done without them [Cukor and Keel],” she wrote ten days later in her first studio biography. “I had always thought reading for a play was difficult—but I didn’t know about screen tests! Most terrifying experience I’ve ever had—not only making it—but then having to see it!”

  What she saw was a somewhat antiseptic-looking twenty-eight-year-old, stilted in speech but with an ability to pose gracefully and attentively while listening to someone else. George Folsey, a master at photographing women at their flattering best (Harlow, Hepburn, Crawford, Lamarr), moved in close to her dark-brown eyes and backlit her brunette hair to soften her look and bring up some highlights. Cukor coached her painstakingly in her lines, allowing her to react more than to act. Keel did his best to put her at ease. (Asked on her Metro biographical questionnaire what she would do if out of pictures, Davis typed in, “Lord knows!” To the question “What is your greatest ambition?” she replied, “Sure to have successful marriage.” She confessed that she followed the rule “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you—I believe strongly in the law of retribution—you get back what you give.” And she added, “My most treasured possessions are two baby pictures of my mother and father*—never am without them, and a locket of my great grandmother’s with a baby picture of my mother inside. Why? Because I’m a sentimentalist, I guess.”)