Early Reagan

by Anne Edwards

  “I’m always being told [by Nancy and Reagan] to watch my language,” Edith laughed. “I guess no one had to remind Nelle Reagan.”

  With Nancy having been on her own for ten years, asking for parental approval to marry had seemed odd, even to Edith. Her parents had heard she was dating Reagan, but since Nancy had not said anything about him to them during the two years of their courtship, they had not given him much thought. Reagan has said he got the idea during a SAG meeting and slipped a note to Holden. “To hell with this, how would you like to be the best man when I marry Nancy?” Holden had blurted out loud, “It’s about time.” Eight weeks after the wedding the Reagans announced that they were expecting a baby. A few weeks later it became self-evident.

  They moved into Nancy’s apartment in Brentwood not far from Zasu Pitts while they looked for a house suitable for a growing family. Reagan did not give up the Londonderry flat until they occupied their first home at 1258 Amain Drive in Pacific Palisades (five miles west of Brentwood and only a short drive from Yearling Row Ranch). The seven-room two-story frame house, with rambling roses and bay windows, looked like a builder’s rendering of an idealized, cliched honeymoon cottage. The most distinctive feature of the house was its very ordinariness, hemmed in as it was driveway to driveway with houses on either side of its flat well-manicured frontage. Inside, the rooms were generous (the living room was twenty-five feet by twenty-three feet) and light. Bow windows faced the front, and sliding glass doors led to a rear bricked terrace. There were three bedrooms and a bath upstairs. A bath also adjoined the downstairs den, so that room, in the front of the house, was converted into a nursery.

  Missing from the Amalfi Drive house—perhaps with intent—were the glamour, cachet and spectacular views of the places in which Reagan and Wyman had lived. But Pacific Palisades offered untrafficked, wide residential streets, a minimum of smog and was only a short drive to the ocean. With the escalation in prices of Beverly Hills real estate, the Palisades was becoming increasingly popular with upwardly mobile, young film stars (Arlene Dahl and her husband, Fernando Lamas, lived six streets away). The Reagans paid approximately twenty-three thousand dollars, for the house.* A comparable house in Beverly Hills would have been at least double that figure. Nancy was a practical woman; she did not want her husband to have any more financial pressures than necessary. She had at least temporarily retired, and her husband’s career was in low gear. Not only had he made his last film on his Warners contract but two weeks earlier had been informed that the third and fourth film commitments on his Universal contract had been canceled. A studio board meeting had been held on January 15, 1952, at which the following memo from the legal department was discussed:

  Matters to Review—Ronald Reagan

  Expiration of 2nd year of five year contract. This is a multiple picture contract covering five pictures to be made in the five year period, one of which is to be in technicolor, at the rate of $7,500 per week, ten week guarantee, plus two free weeks [for retakes] in connection with each picture. He rendered services in “Louisa” and “Bedtime for Bonzo.” We have exercised our right to terminate the third and fourth employment periods by reason of his refusal to render services in “Fine Day” and “Just Across the Street,” respectively.*

  When he married Nancy, Reagan had only the commitment to do one more film at Universal. He doubted his wisdom in turning down the ones the studio had sent him earlier, even though he and Nancy had decided he should not accept second-rate material. He talked to Lew Wasserman about the possibility of reactivating his Universal contract, which was easier said than done. He now had two families that would require his support. Jane had been nominated for an Academy Award for her performance in The Blue Veil† and had signed a new multimillion-dollar contract, so there was no danger that Michael and Maureen would be in need. But Reagan’s background decreed a man must take care of his children. Then there was Nancy, the baby that was due, the house and the high upkeep of Yearling Row Ranch.

  The outdoor drama for Pine and Thomas ‡ he had so fiercely wanted to make when he lost Ghost Mountain had turned up in general release as The Last Outpost, an unimaginative epic of the Santa Fe Trail with Reagan in a stereotyped role of a good-fellow Confederate cavalry captain whose brother (Bruce Bennett) is a Union colonel. The script was “rambling, obscure.” Reagan rode well and there was lots of action in the last fifteen minutes of the film, too late to save the film from being “an awful lot of talk-talk-talk.” Pine and Thomas now offered him a turgid drama titled Hong Kong. Despite his and Nancy’s decision that he should not make any film he knew was less than good, with Universal still being uncooperative, he agreed to go ahead, but the salary he was paid—forty-five thousand dollars (less MCA’s 10 percent commission)—fell a good deal short of the money he had been receiving.

  But before filming started, and as a favor to Pine and Thomas, he went into their production of Tropic Zone, a Western transplanted to a tropical banana-growing country in Central America. Reagan was a banana expert illegally in fictional Puerto Barrancas to avoid political trouble in a neighboring country. Rhonda Fleming is a banana-farm owner he risks his life to save from ruin and the skullduggery of villain Grant Withers. The film was “a pulp fiction affair” and ironically ended up as the second feature to the William Holden film The Turning Point in many theaters.

  Hong Kong (The New York Times asked in its review, “or was it Ping-Pong”) had Reagan as an ex-GI drifter (“played in his solid citizen style”) who finds himself in charge of a fatherless five-year-old Chinese boy (Danny Chang). The boy has in his possession a jeweled idol obviously of great value. Reagan plans to sell the statue to crooked art dealers and desert the boy, but his better nature and the child’s beguiling personality save the day. The boy is kidnapped and Reagan battles the law and the crooks to get him back—which he does—and gets a mission schoolteacher (Rhonda Fleming) in the bargain.

  Prospects were not hopeful. Reagan was forty-four years old, not an age to suddenly become a John Wayne or a Bill Holden. He had appeared in forty-five films. Superstardom looked as if it would always be beyond his grasp. He threw himself into his work at the SAG while putting the pressure on Art Parks at MCA to “bring the money” (meaning a paying job).

  The juxtapositions in Reagan’s life were difficult to place in perspective. At the same time that he was appearing in films that were often inane and sometimes worse, having to rattle off dialogue to a chimpanzee, an Indian chief (who spoke no English) and a five-year-old Chinese boy (with a minuscule vocabulary), he was debating technical and controversial issues on which the lives of many thousands of people were balanced. He had also begun to be invited to give lectures and commencement addresses. In June 1952, he received a standing ovation from the graduating class of William Woods College in Fulton, Missouri (a Christian Church school). His impassioned speech, entitled “America the Beautiful,” was perhaps the only time he would come close to anything like poetic language. In it he revealed his view of America and his philosophy as an American.* The speech owed much to Lincoln, much to Will Rogers and much to Louis B. Mayer (“momism,” the theme of many Mayer films, was strongly emphasized). He could not have helped but feel that his potential had never been realized, that the power and charisma he exuded in his SAG dealings and in his speech givings should have been transferred to his image on film.

  Jack Dales has said Reagan was an ardent and inspired worker in 1951 and early 1952. The SAG were still in constant negotiation over the television contracts. The blacklisting of members had caused bitter disputes. “He wouldn’t get discouraged,” Dales insisted. “He would suffer as we all did… but, no, he didn’t get discouraged. He was always seeking, always seeking, and he didn’t necessarily expect to come up with the answers himself. But he would come in, and he would have a dozen different ideas: ‘What do you think about this?’ ‘Have we ever tried this?’ Now where he got them from I don’t know. Whether he thought them up or whether in the days between times
that we would meet he’d talk to other people… he was always exploring, and then he would listen most attentively to our reactions to those suggestions… he would take criticism very well. I would say, ‘That just won’t play… for these reasons.’

  “‘I understand that. Never thought of that.’ He wouldn’t fight it.”

  One issue had commanded a great deal of his attention in the early months of 1952. “We [SAG] were fighting for [television] jurisdiction but nothing was going to happen in that jurisdiction,” Dales explained. “It was all live, the networks and the advertising agencies controlled television, and we wanted to hold television here, and no studio at that time would touch it [television production]… television was their enemy… I’m sure they believed that. I’m sure Frank Freeman [Paramount], Eddie Mannix [MGM], Ben Kahane [Columbia] really believed that television had the threat of knocking their studios out of the box, at that time they believed it. And nobody was making product for television.

  “So [MCA] came to us [Reagan and the board] and said, ‘Do you know what’s happening? It’s all going to New York. Your membership is going to be a New York membership. Your guys here are not going to get a whiff of it,’ which we already knew. [They said] the only reason they brought it [a proposition for MCA to produce television films] to us was that ‘We would like to do it [bring television production to Hollywood]. We’d like to go into it, and we’ll guarantee to make lots of filmed television if you can work it out with us as an agent.’“

  That was a shocking proposition for MCA, or any theatrical agency, to make because it was against the SAG bylaws to accept an agent (who took 10 percent of a member’s earnings to represent them) as the producer or hiring company.

  “Well, we were shocked of course… but we thought about it… the deal that we made… they could not charge their own clients any commission; if they ever put their client in a picture made by them, he had to get the highest salary he’d ever gotten in any picture in his life. It was just loaded with that kind of thing. We were scared that we were going to lose television, and that’s the way it started [a waiver that allowed MCA, a talent agency, to become a hiring company].”

  Dales called an emergency meeting of the board to consider this flagrantly monopolistic proposition on the night of July 14, 1952. Reagan and six other board members were present. After a lengthy debate, the group signed a blanket waiver stating that MCA could engage in television production and still represent clients.* Occasionally a very limited waiver had been granted by the SAG to talent agencies wishing to produce motion pictures. The MCA “special agreement” for television production was unprecedented.

  The minutes of the July 14, 1952, board meeting state: “MCA is hesitant about signing the basic television contract without some sort of assurance that the Guild will not thereafter adopt agency regulations which would prohibit their continuance in both fields. Further meetings were held with Laurence W. Beilen-son, representing Revue Productions, and an agreement was reached which permits MCA to enter and remain in the field of film television during the life of the present Agency Regulations but prohibits them charging commission to any of their clients who appear in their television films.”*

  Ten years later, on February 5, 1962, Reagan was called before a Los Angeles federal grand jury to testify in the United States Department of Justice’s investigation of MCA’s alleged monopolistic practices and the possibility of Reagan and the six other board members having received bribe money or (in the case of the actors) promises of future jobs in television.

  “I must tell you,” Reagan testified, “that I always told Jack Dales… that I felt a little self-conscious about that [the waiver] lest there might ever be a misunderstanding with MCA and sometimes I kind of ran for cover and was very happy to duck a committee duty in these matters.”

  “Because of the possibility of some conflict of interest that might arise?” the Justice Department attorney, John Fricano, asked.

  “That’s right,” Reagan replied. He added that he had been in favor of the waiver since he felt MCA “filled a great gap in giving employment at a time when unemployment was quite heavy.”

  FRICANO: Why then, Mr. Reagan, was Music Corporation of America the only talent company ever issued such a blanket waiver?

  REAGAN: Well, that is very easy to recall.… We felt we were amply protecting, that if any harm started from this, if anything happened to react against the actors’ interest—we could always pull the rug out from under them [MCA]. No great harm would be done before we could ride to the rescue, that our feeling was here was someone that wanted to give actors jobs.…

  FRICANO: Do you know whether any talent agents applied for blanket waivers subsequent to the time SAG granted one to MCA?

  REAGAN: NO, I don’t.

  FRICANO: Did Screen Actors Guild attempt to induce agents to enter TV film production subsequent to the time it granted a blanket waiver to MCA?

  REAGAN: NO, I don’t think we ever went out and asked anyone to do that.

  FRICANO: That would be consistent with the rationale behind the granting of a blanket waiver, would it not?

  REAGAN: No, I don’t think the Screen Actors Guild is an employment agency. I think we can well recognize our not putting out blocks in the way of anyone who wanted to produce but I don’t think ours was the point of trying to go out to get someone to produce.

  FRICANO: In other words, [had] the blanket waiver been asked by talent agents subsequent to 1952 in July when SAG granted the blanket waiver to MCA, such requests would have been considered by the Guild and granted, correct?

  REAGAN: If all of the circumstances were the same as, they would be.

  Fricano paused dramatically, crossed to the government table, picked up an envelope, and then slowly walked back with it to Reagan.

  FRICANO: Did you ever hear it said, Mr. Reagan, that [the] Screen Actors Guild granted a blanket waiver to MCA due to the fact that MCA was willing to grant repayment for reuse of TV films to actors [one of the basic conditions Reagan and the SAG negotiating team were fighting for in their producer-actor contract]?

  REAGAN: No sir.

  Fricano withdrew a paper from inside the envelope, and read into the record the contents of a letter from Laurence Beilenson to Lew Wasserman which included the statement, “The waiver was executed under a specific set of circumstances where Revue [the name of MCA’s production company] was willing to sign a contract giving the Guild members reuse fees when no one else was willing to do so.” (Beilenson appears to have been pressing Wasserman to uphold the agreement.)

  Fricano stared up at Reagan, waiting.

  REAGAN: Well, then I was wrong, but, and I can understand that, but I certainly, I am afraid when I answered before that I was under the impression you were trying to make out that in negotiating a contract we made this as a bargaining point of giving a waver.

  FRICANO: Isn’t it conceived from this language?

  REAGAN: Mr. Beilenson is a lawyer and in charge of negotiations. It’s quite conceivable then if he says it in this letter.

  FRICANO: Does that refresh your recollection, sir?

  REAGAN: I don’t recall it, no… I don’t honestly recall. You know something? You keep saying 1952 in the summer. I think maybe one of the reasons I don’t recall was because I feel that in the summer of 1952 I was up in Glacier National Park making a cowboy picture for RKO, Ben Bogeaus Productions, so it’s very possible there were some things going on that I would not participate in, but I have no recollection of this particularly*… I can only say this. That in all of my years with the Screen Actors Guild I have never known of or participated in anything, nor has the Guild, that ever was based on anything but what we honestly believed was for the best interest of the actor, and, however it may look now as to the point of private negotiations or anything else…

  In view of what is shown in Mr. Beilenson’s letter, it is very possible at that time, in spite of my not remembering, it is very possible that we saw an opportunity
to break the solid back of the motion picture industry with regard to (TV return) residuals and if we saw that kind of thing we moved in…

  The 1952 deal with the SAG, undoubtedly won with the help of Reagan’s position within the SAG, made MCA the only company that operated as a talent agency, a producer and a selling agent. “The deal vaulted MCA to the head of the television industry with advantages that its competitors could never hope to equal… with the granting of the waiver,” a Justice Department memo explained, “the battle [among the Hollywood talent agencies] took on a one-sided aspect. Since MCA had the rights to as many television shows as it wanted, it could also guarantee [its] talent worked in television. Therefore, the talent left the other talent agencies in droves.… The central fact of MCA’s whole rise to power… was undoubtedly the [SAG] blanket waiver.”

  Insinuations beleaguered Reagan from the time the waiver became public. Did he or did he not receive money or a career boost in exchange for his work in the SAG-MCA dealings? No substantiating proof appears in the six-thousand-page transcript of the Justice Department’s investigation into MCA’s monopolistic practices, nor in the subsequent Internal Revenue investigation. But certain questions remain unanswered.

  Reagan’s career and his income took a sharp decline in July 1952. The only chance he had to bounce back and cover his expenses was to get MCA to reactivate his contract with Universal, for nowhere else could he get seventy-five thousand dollars for a film. And, indeed, in January 1953 he was cast by Universal in Law and Order, a low-budget Western that co-starred Dorothy Malone and Preston Foster. Reagan played a retired lawman who takes up ranching and then runs into an old enemy-outlaw (Preston Foster) in Cottonwood, Arizona. The citizens and his sweetheart (Dorothy Malone) press Reagan into taking on the task of marshal to clean up the town. His last task as a lawman is to bring in his own brother for murder. Reagan told the press at the time of Law and Order (general release, April 1953): “Westerns will never become passe. Trends may come and go, but it’s the top Westerns that outdraw ‘em all!” Law and Order never made it into the galaxy of classic horse operas. It managed to break even at the box office, but The New York Times did not review it. “Reagan handles himself easily…” Variety said. He looked rangy enough and he rode better than most Western actors, but his voice did not have the craggy edge of sage and his eyes did not move fast enough to make anyone believe he was a true Western hero.