Early Reagan

by Anne Edwards

  Film people were tougher than they looked. They had survived innumerable scandals, the evolution of sound, the advent of radio, the Depression and a war. Pioneering greats like Warner and Mayer didn’t scare easily. But in 1950, Americans owned more than five million television sets. Neighborhood theaters had closed by the hundreds with former box-office stars unable to draw audiences. Harry Cohn at Columbia said, “There’s nothing wrong that good pictures and showmanship cannot cure.” Jack Warner and Louis B. Mayer never admitted harboring fear, but both studios had cut back considerably in production.

  “It is not the golden time [1950],” Bob Thomas observed. “The boom is long past. It is not the world that Hollywood would have chosen for itself. But the essential thing is survival, and it appears contrary to all consensuses, that Hollywood will survive.”

  George Cukor added wisely, “The secret of survival is not to panic and not to wilt… and not to ape the times when you feel you’re not part of them. Just try and understand them and continue on your own feet… [in Hollywood] you need a great deal of character to withstand the way you’re treated sometimes. With a successful picture you’re good news. When you’re not, people become rather offhand and casual.”

  Reagan did not fall into either category—success or failure. He was somewhere in the lower end of the great yawning inbe-tween. Despite Miss Multz’s enthusiasm, he was not what the studios referred to as a hot property—a phrase which in 1950 would have applied to Marlon Brando (The Men) and Marilyn Monroe (The Asphalt Jungle, All About Eve). Television was squeezing out the second feature. Method theater had ushered in a new kind of film hero. Hollywood did not know what to do with the ones they had. Jerry Wald realized, sensibly, that Reagan’s clean-cut appeal was too ingrained to change. Hollywood was in considerable confusion, and Reagan, as usual, had a few things to say about the current condition.

  “Did you know there are 65,000,000 people who don’t go to the movies with any degree of regularity?” he asked an interviewer for the Chicago Tribune. “Most of them are over 30 years of age. That’s the group we need to bring back into theatres. We’ve been using the selling psychology of the carnival midway, whose sole object is to shill people into the shows and get their quarters.… Exhibitors could do a little experimenting.… Let them try shifting their showtime, for instance. The average American probably would like to go to theatres at 8:15 in the evening. But if he does, under the present system, he arrives right in the middle of a picture.”

  Reagan eventually got around to his own films. “I think we’ve got a good, solid picture in ‘Louisa.’… I have ‘Storm Warning’ coming out at Warners. That’s about the Ku Klux Klan. I’m doing ‘Bedtime for Bonzo’ in which ‘I’ll try to steal scenes from a chimpanzee. Then, after all these years, I finally snagged a western with Pine and Thomas. It’s called ‘The Last Outpost.’ My screen career is in good shape.” He did not feel that confident when he saw the first ad copy for Storm Warning. Ginger Rogers had received top billing.

  As always, none of the films that he had on his agenda touched upon any issue that occupied any part of his life. Truman was halfway through his second term. The shadow of the Bomb hung over him and the Democrats. Postwar prosperity had peaked and deflated, and people blamed the Democrats for that as well. No Democrat running for office in 1950 had been a shoo-in. Senate races across the nation were particularly nasty. Smear campaigns were common, as television was used for the first time to sell or abuse a candidate. Red-baiting became a political sport, and Reagan’s old friend Helen Gahagan Douglas kept getting caught on her opponent Richard Nixon’s hook.

  Nixon called the liberal Democrat “decidedly pink,” then “pink shading into deep red.” He toured the state with Pat Nixon in a station wagon equipped with a record player and a loudspeaker. He hoped that by having Douglas tagged a Communist (which she was not) he could win both the Democratic and the Republican primaries. “If he could win both,” Douglas wrote in her autobiography, “he would be spared the need for an election. Murray Chotiner, his campaign manager who was introducing a personality-based, media-blitz campaign… sent out one piece of literature which was titled ‘As One Democrat to Another.’“

  Douglas’s political career had continued to prosper since the HICCASP meeting five years earlier.”[Helen] had been dedicated heart and soul to the development of the Central Valley of California,” Leo Goodman, who had worked for her in this campaign, said. “That was part of a campaign which actually started back with Abraham Lincoln to establish ‘family farms’ (small—under 240 acres as a rule) in this country. She and Sheridan Downey [who backed Douglas’s opponent] clashed head on whether or not one supported the family farm as against the great big agricultural interests owning tens of thousands of acres.”

  No one knew much about Richard Nixon in 1950. He had been on the HUAC and in the House of Representatives (1946-50) and had been instrumental in bringing Alger Hiss to trial to be sentenced for perjury. But there was no real indication of the kind of campaign he would run. Goodman claimed Nixon had bales of hay thrown at Douglas when she spoke and that Murray Chotiner was the author of many similar humiliating tricks.

  “It took the Watergate investigation to really go into it in depth [Nixon’s alleged dirty tricks] and show how despicable it really was,” Goodman explained. “Back then when you alleged these things, people would look at you. And, of course, there was the obfuscation there—The Pink Sheet [a list of Douglas’s activities published on pink stock]… was, of course, the symbol, and how could you attack a Pink Sheet? She had a great attribute of picking a social issue and carrying it to the public, to the Congress, so that it would have a chance for consideration. As a matter of fact, when she lost in Congress, they didn’t have too many like her.”

  Douglas’s advisers felt what her campaign needed now were supporters who could command media attention and knew how to use the camera to their advantage. Reagan was asked for his support late in April, and he pledged it. He would later state that his switch to the Republican party did not come about until 1962, but in fact it took place during the Douglas-Nixon campaign. He might well have been registered as a Democrat, but his position was aligned with the Republican ticket.

  Reagan was dating Nancy during the campaign. One night she took him with her to listen to a “particularly vicious” speech given by Zasu Pitts (campaigning for Nixon) on the subject of communism and Helen Gahagan Douglas. “The Pink Lady who would allow the Communists to take over our land and our homes as well.”

  Robert Cummings recalled that shortly after this date, “A telephone rang in the middle of the night. I was sound asleep. I had to film in the morning. Groggily, I picked up the receiver and someone said, ‘It’s Ronnie.’

  ‘“Ronnie who?’

  “ ‘Ronnie Reagan. I’m trying to help a senator [Nixon] get elected and we’re giving a party for him tomorrow night. Can you come?’

  “I said, ‘You know I’m not political, Ronnie.’ And he answered, ‘Couldn’t you just come and be there anyway?’“

  Neither Douglas nor her staff was ever aware that Reagan had quit in his support of her in favor of Nixon. The campaign had moved into its last and most vitriolic stages after he had gone on the road to promote Louisa. Douglas subsequently lost the election, but many Democrats working for her still assumed Reagan was with them. Reagan, in talking about his switch in parties, would refer to a time when he suddenly realized that most of the people he admired were Republicans. In fact, his closest friends had always been Republicans. With his father’s and FDR’s deaths, his own connections to the Democratic party had become increasingly tenuous. Since taking office as president of the Guild, he had moved closer and closer to the Republican philosophies. This is not to say that the SAG’s battles, principles or decisions were motivated by the executive board’s allegiance to any one party. On major issues, the membership had a vote and could and did overthrow propositions of their board. But during the Reagan years (1947-60), the boa
rd was overwhelmingly conservative. Reagan was a union leader, but this did not translate into meaning he was also a liberal. His stand on HUAC, on blacklisting, on the taking of a loyalty oath, and his constant preaching that the liberals were being duped by the Communists indicate his beliefs.

  Between 1947 and 1960, of the more than two thousand men and women who were black- or graylisted, less than one hundred were ever proven to have any Communist connections.* A great many did contribute to charities and causes that also had Communist members. However, to sign the Amicus Curiae for the Hollywood Ten was to register a voice in a battle to sustain the Constitution, the First and Fifth Amendments having been grievously abused in their trials.

  The dark cloud of McCarthyism did not appear until 1950. In the late forties, Joseph Raymond McCarthy was a new senator from Wisconsin. He studied engineering, nearly flunked his first-year courses and switched over to law, where he received the lowest grade in a course called Legal Ethics. Nonetheless, in 1940, at the age of thirty-two, he became a circuit judge. He fought with the marines during the war, rising to the rank of captain, and was elected to the Senate on the wave of returning servicemen who ran successful campaigns in 1946. For two years he remained resentfully obscure. Then, in 1948, he saw a way of making both money and a name for himself.

  Aligning himself with Lustron, one of the giant manufacturers of prefabricated housing (McCarthy received ten thousand dollars cash, a twenty-thousand-dollar unsecured loan and payment of his steep gambling debts by lobbyists during this time), McCarthy went on the road to decry the false promises of public housing; his solution was veterans’ loans to finance private prefabricated houses (sold by Lustron). He left no brick unturned to defame every public housing development he visited. After a trip to the 1,424-unit Rego Park Veterans’ Housing Project in New York City [in early 1949], he pronounced the place “a breeding ground for Communism,” and for the first time received national press coverage. Throughout the rest of the year McCarthy’s name frequently appeared in the national press, almost always with a similar accusation.

  One witness to McCarthy’s rise wrote: “He was the master of the scabrous and the scatological. He understood the perverse appeal of the bum, the mucker, the dead-end kid, the James Jones-Nelson Algren hero to a nation… in which everyone was sliding, from one direction to another, into middle-class respectability.… He was a fighter who used his thumb, his teeth, and his knee.… Hitler discovered the uses of the Big Lie—the falsehood so large and round that reason, which deals in particulars, was almost powerless to combat it. McCarthy invented the Multiple Lie—the lie with so many particulars… that reason exhausted itself in the effort to combat it. He said so many different things about so many different people… that no one could keep it all in focus.… He brought to perfection a kind of shell game to be played with facts, or what George Orwell called ‘unfacts’… and he knew how to get into the news even on those rare occasions when invention failed him and he had no unfacts to give out.”

  Another contemporary historian reported: “One night in January 1950, [McCarthy] dined with several acquaintances, including the dean of Georgetown University’s foreign-service school, Father Edmund Walsh. McCarthy confessed to him that he needed an issue on which to base his reelection campaign, and Father Walsh suggested, ‘How about Communism?’“

  McCarthy was scheduled to give a speech over the Lincoln birthday weekend to three hundred members of a women’s Republican club. As he stood staring out at the group assembled in the Colonnade Room at the McClure Hotel in Wheeling, West Virginia, “he suddenly brandished a sheet of paper which he contended bore the names of 205 known Communists working in the Stite Mcwttncpt Shortly aff°r tne Wheeling speech the cartoonist Herblock coined the term ‘McCarthyism’—he wrote it in crude letters on a drawing of a bucket of mud.… The newspaper columnist Max Lerner took up the new coinage and spread it further.” Clearly a term of opprobrium, McCarthy delighted nonetheless in the notoriety it brought him and would crow, “McCarthyism is Americanism with its sleeves rolled up.”

  Nancy Davis was a lively, attractive and intelligent companion. Unlike Jane Wyman, she was vitally interested in politics and listened with glazed, admiring eyes to Reagan’s retelling of his day-to-day conflicts at the SAG. He has claimed he “did everything wrong, dating her off and on, continuing to volunteer for every Guild trip to New York—in short, doing everything which could have lost her.…” Nancy had no intention of being lost. The pride in her glance when they were together was not just a feminine wile. Nancy Davis was wholeheartedly in love. All the statements she had made and written about wanting a marriage above a career, of knowing when the important man came into her life, were now valid.

  She did not complain when he chose Guild business over a date. She played no games, made no attempt to make him jealous or to pressure him into a proposal. The Next Voice You Hear had not made her a star. She was cast in Night Into Morning, a well-meaning but maudlin melodrama about a college professor (Ray Milland) who loses his wife and child in a fire and falls prey to alcoholism and attempted suicide. The film did not do well. Davis had then been given a cameo with Fredric March in It’s a Big Country, an episodic film with guest appearances by many Metro stars. On September 7, 1951, she was told the last option on her three-year contract would not be picked up.

  She and Reagan no longer frequented the nightclub circuit where he had originally taken her dancing. Most of their dates were spent at his apartment or at the homes of their mutual good friends, such as Bill and Ardis Holden. Ardis had been known on the screen as Brenda Marshall. A ravishing brunette with marvelously exotic eyes, she had walked away from a successful career as a leading lady in Warner A films to marry Holden.* She returned to make two more films, but in 1950 quit for good to devote herself to her family. William Holden was one of the friends Reagan has claimed to have much admired. The two men could not have come from more different backgrounds. Holden (real name William Franklin Beedle, Jr.) was the son of a wealthy family in the chemical business. He had lived a privileged life, traveled abroad with his family and attended Pasadena Junior College, where a Paramount talent scout spotted him in a school production and signed him to a film contract. At age twenty, with his first real screen role,”†” he became a star as the boxer-violinist hero in the film version of Clifford Odets’s Golden Boy. In the years of his close Hollywood friendship with Reagan (1949-53), Holden had moved into the golden circle of film immortals with Sunset Boulevard, Born Yesterday and Stalag 17 (for which he won the 1953 Best Actor Academy Award), and was well on his way to becoming a multimillionaire. Despite the differences in their backgrounds, Holden and Reagan had much in common personally—they liked horses and were wine connoisseurs. Holden was first vice-president of the SAG and they shared the same political philosophies. For that matter, Holden was born in O’Fallon, Illinois, and his parents were personal friends of the Walgreens.

  Reagan had brought Holden into the “inner workings” of the SAG and, according to Jack Dales, had “made him an interested, active participant.” But Hold en’s influence was greater on Reagan than the other way around. In his next few films, Reagan can be seen modeling his performances on those of Holden. He copied a trick Holden had of lighting a cigarette. He wore clothes that had a decided Holden look to them. He even aped Holden’s raised-eyebrow cynical expression.

  When Louisa was finally sent out into general release (October 24, 1950), the reviewers found it a “jovial little picture about a gloriously giddy romance between a pleasantly plump grandmother [Spring Byington] and a beamingly sixtyish swain [Charles Coburn].” Both The New York Times and the New York Post devoted almost two columns to the delights of the geriatrics in this film (which also featured Edmund Gwynn). Somewhere around ten lines from the end of the reviews, Reagan is mentioned.*

  Late in 1950, Reagan went into the Universal production of Bedtime for Bonzo.’† Playing stooge to a chimpanzee was a losing battle. The film was referred to as
“an animal starrer,” and indeed, Bonzo held the camera for most of the action, either mugging away or getting psychology professor Reagan and his housekeeper, Diana Lynne, into complicated and humorous situations. (“They haven’t a chance,” wrote Abe Weiler in The New York Times, “Bonzo makes monkeys of them.”) He had fared far worse under his Universal contract than at Warners, where reviewers might have ignored his performance in The Hasty Heart but the film at least had stature. ‡ And when Storm Warning was finally released, his personal reviews had been good (“Reagan gives a splendid performance”), however mixed the critics felt about the melodramatic nature of the film.

  He took out the disappointment he felt over the properties given to him by Universal on Warners. Warners had chosen a musical, She’s Working Her Way Through College, as the second of Reagan’s three-picture commitment. The Warners musical was an adaptation of The Male Animal, but the central role of the professor (played by Henry Fonda in the nonmusical film version) had been diminished to showcase Virginia Mayo as the burlesque star who decides to continue her education. Gene Nelson co-starred, and his spectacular acrobatic dancing and Mayo’s bumps and grinds were almost stiffer competition than a ga-ga chimp.

  “We had a rather feisty little director named Bruce Hum-berstone,” Nelson recalled. “He liked to have his scapegoat on the set whom he would tease and make the brunt of his lame jokes.… I had to nail him one day because he was making some unnecessary remark… [another time] I’m bringing Virginia Mayo home [in a scene] and I’m kissing her good-night and then, suddenly the hall lights go on and there’s Ron, the professor… now when Virginia Mayo came in they had lit for dark for a silhouette effect, and Bruce kept saying, ‘Cut, let’s do it again.’ He’d never tell me why he wanted to do it again. Then he came over to me and he says, ‘I can keep on retaking this as much as you want if you give me a case of champagne.’ That was not only juvenile it was damned insulting to Virginia, and I got very angry. ‘You know, you’re a pretty smart guy. You oughta be a director!’ I said. He was a real pain in the ass.…” Reagan had his problems with Humberstone, which prompted Jack Warner to send him one of his habitual telegrams: