by Anne Edwards
Dr. Davis had talked seriously to Reagan about the possibility of a political career. Reagan still feared there was no real future in it for him. He had gone from being honorary mayor of Malibu Lake to honorary mayor of Thousand Oaks (a San Fernando Valley community) and a candidate for mayor of Hollywood. The loss of that election was a personal blow to him. Then, “someone seriously approached me with the suggestion that I run for Congress. That proved to be the last straw! I realized then that I was becoming a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and the two characters were competing to control me.”
In the spring of 1956, Reagan continued to remain active on the board of the SAG and was now president of the Motion Picture Industry Council, which was formed as a public-relations group to combat unflattering stories about Hollywood. His tours for General Electric had gained occasional national coverage. He was much more than a salesman or pitch artist. As he was becoming a spokesman for the majority views of big business, so was he growing as a public speaker and media personality. He now made as many as fourteen speaking dates per day on his tours, addressing not only General Electric’s seven hundred thousand or more employees but an equal number of representatives of local business and civic groups in the forty-two states in which G.E. had plants and offices.
“From my own viewpoint,” commented Reagan, “my kind of an association with a big business firm not only adds half or better to the economic value of my name, but provides a degree of security entirely foreign to the movie business, which is ruled so much by suicidal fluctuations, fads and whims.”
In the fall of 1955, Reagan’s sense of security had been strong enough for him to begin construction on a new house that would have “everything electric except a chair.” General Electric was supplying all the electrical equipment, which included kitchen appliances not yet on the market (a dishwasher with a built-in garbage disposal), a retracting canopy roof for indoor or outdoor dining, and a film projection room. The spectacular site in Pacific Palisades that Reagan and Nancy had chosen was a steep, densely wooded shelf carved into the southern slope of the Santa Monica Mountains, high above the street and affording an unlimited view of Los Angeles and the ocean. The Reagans had asked their architect* to build them a modern ranch house. Interior walls were largely of stone and glass. Every one of the house’s main rooms—living room, den, dining room, enclosed patio, master suite and Patti’s two-room area—had unobstructed views across the city to the ocean. (In a corner of the patio floor, Reagan had fingered entwined hearts with the initials “NDR” and “RR” while the cement was still wet.) The house (1669 San Onofre Drive) was almost hidden from the street and a massive iron gate ensured further privacy.
Nancy furnished the house with contemporary furniture—large couches, giant tub chairs, low, roomy ebony-and-glass coffee tables—and red splashed everywhere—the upholstery, the drapery fabric, the paintings on the wall—set against plush gray carpeting. Red was their favorite color and Nancy wore it often. “Nancy and Ronnie are just alike,” Edith laughed. “They don’t care—just so it’s red… it makes her furious and it makes him upset too, when I say that… but [it’s] like I tell you—like the niggers—any color so it’s red.”
Despite Dunckel’s objections to it, “The Speech,” as his main lecture on the horrors of the welfare state became known, was serving as a bridge for Reagan between show business and the business of government. The theme that he kept pounding away at (“Government—staffed by professional politicians and career bureaucrats—is by nature more wasteful than most human institutions, and should be reduced to the barest minimum”) had first been hummed by Hal Gross in his early Des Moines days.
Nancy backed everything her husband said. She did not travel with him on the tours, but they would meet in New York when they could. The marriage was a good one, better than that of any of their friends. Reagan never could wait to get home. Nancy never tired of hearing him speak, but she enjoyed being a wife, running the house, entertaining, gardening. She took an interest in whatever he liked most—the horses, baseball, politics. Although well informed, she seldom shared the limelight with him if he was talking in a group. She had matured well and was more attractive in her mid-thirties than she had been a decade earlier. Security and Reagan’s tender regard had erased some of the hardness that had formerly narrowed her mouth. The brown wide-apart eyes that dominated her face were warmer, more vital, the slim body more rounded. Nancy had a clean, petite beauty, and it seemed to match up well with Reagan’s tall-framed, brawny-armed, weathered good-guy looks, the crinkly grin and the jaunty stance. Olivier and Leigh have been referred to as “the golden couple.” From their appearance, Nancy and Reagan might well have been named “the cowboy and his lady.”
“There was a joke about someone listening to Ronnie’s spiel for the G.E. nuclear submarine, and remarking, I didn’t really need a submarine, but I’ve got one now,’“ longtime Hollywood columnist Sheilah Graham remembered. “He believes what he says and he says what he believes he should say. But he can compromise. He can change from the strongest of his stands. I remember a meeting at the Screen Actors Guild [1952, Graham also acted from time to time] when he exhorted the members, I don’t want to see any of you going over to the enemy,’ meaning television. The last time I talked with Ann Sheridan [she died in 1967] we discussed this meeting, and she said, ‘When I came back to Hollywood after living in New York, I turned on my seven inch set and there was that son-of-a-bitch on television.’“
By 1957, the film industry had tagged him “the Actor in the Gray Flannel Suit.” CBS publicity releases referred to him as “a dual personality, devoting at least equal parts of his inexplicable energy to both worlds of acting and business.” He spent about sixteen weeks each year on the road, and these tours were the fuel that propelled him forward. G.E. dubbed him “the Ambassador of the Film World.” Reagan claimed at one meeting that “the unwashed public” (a phrase he used in an interview) made him aware of what the man in the living room watching television was thinking, “and don’t you think that some of their ideas haven’t helped in mapping out our programming and television policy… and helps make for a sincere performance [by him].”
Reagan had a say in the selection of scripts, and had absolute control over those in which he appeared. The half-hour format, whittled down to twenty-four minutes after Reagan’s hosting and the commercials, allowed little in the way of story or character development. Nonetheless, it commanded the viewers’ attention and for years enjoyed high ratings. The lack of competition from the other networks during the nine to nine-thirty Sunday night time slot was one factor. Another was the known performers who were guests on the shows: Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Ethel Barrymore, James Dean—the list was impressive. The stories were often entertaining, occasionally gripping and generally well-produced.
By 1958, in the show’s fourth season, the program’s choice of scripts exhibited Reagan’s viewpoints and philosophies almost exclusively. The need to lure a major star to television with an extra lump of sugar—a role he or she chose—was unnecessary. Films were in a severe depression and the studios that had not already capitulated would soon begin producing for television themselves. The blacklist had deprived Hollywood of a large segment of its earlier creative and productive force at the same time as it undermined the former cohesiveness of the studios’ production teams. An epidemic of fear had spread throughout the community, and just as Hollywood was terrorized by the words guilty by association, so it lived in dread of making a film that might later be banned by groups like the American Legion as being Communist inspired.
The independent producers had stepped in and offered work and high salaries to stars. But this frequently came at a great cost to the artists, who were assured of only one film at a time and who more often than not had to shoot in foreign countries away from their families and under conditions they would previously, as Hollywood studio employees, never have considered. To cut costs, films were being produced in Spain and Italy, where labor was
cheap and union restrictions almost nonexistent. Television, although an undesired alternative, was at least a way to stay home and remain visible.
Reagan’s roles on General Electric Theater increasingly became either evangelistic or moralistic. One, “No Hiding Place,” found him a “wretched Skid Row drunk, who overcomes his craving for alcohol and devotes himself to rehabilitating other human derelicts along the Bowery.” Another episode had him and Nancy as an American Indian couple, members of the Turkey Growers’ Association, whose son’s pet turkey is selected for the Thanksgiving bird at the White House. The boy turns down the honor, but a kindly president arranges for the boy to keep his pet and the family the honor by substituting another bird. In “The House of Truth,” Reagan starred as “a member of the United States Information Service in a strife-torn Asian village… who is shocked when he learns that Communist agitators have burned the American library… but with the help of the oppressed villagers who offer their most-prized possessions to keep the library in operation… helps to rebuild the structure.”
Earl Dunckel was transferred to another executive job within General Electric in 1956 “because I was so protective of Ron, and very effectively protective… against the criticism from the left-wing G.E. executives.” George M. Dalen, a former FBI man, took Dunckel’s place. Dunckel admitted Dalen “was not as conservative as me, but he was pretty darned conservative.”
For two years after Tennessee’s Partner, Reagan received no film offers. Television performers were “verboten on the big screen,” he claimed. “It didn’t matter that my Sunday night stint was a quick forty-five seconds [the time allotted his introduction and sign-off was closer to two minutes]—I had a weekly show and that was that.” This did not reflect the true picture. Reagan also appeared in at least six half-hour G.E. shows a year (plus reruns), clocking up enough film time for two feature films. Columbia Pictures did, however, send him Hellcats of the Navy, and he and Nancy decided to accept. For the first time, Reagan had his choice of director, and he chose Nathan Juran, with whom he had worked on Law and Order. Juran had been a fine art director before becoming a director in 1952. He had won the Academy Award (Best Art Direction, 1941) for How Green Was My Valley and was nominated several times thereafter.* He had not fared that well as a director. His films since Law and Order had been low-budget action and horror pictures distinguished only for the professional way they had been photographed and the quality of their sets.
Reagan liked working with Juran. He was low-keyed, respectful, and the two men had much in common. Columbia set a budget on Hellcats of the Navy lower than Reagan had anticipated. He had hoped for a big-action patriotic film like The Wings of Eagles or Jet Pilot, both made that year by John Wayne. Instead, he got a “jingoistic potboiler.” The “Hellcats” of the title are the troubleshooters of the submarine service. Reagan played Commander Casey Abbott, sent to Japan during World War II on a daring mission to scout enemy waters for Japanese mines. Nancy was cast as the navy nurse he loves in this, their only film together. Reagan had suffered from a “life long tendency to claustrophobia” (one of the major reasons for his not flying), and the hours spent in the small, cramped (fourteen-man) conning tower of the submarine were hard on him. He has said he could not wait to get out of there at the end of every take. Movie audiences suffered the same feelings. Hellcats of the Navy only broke even at the box office. Reagan, thinking his film career had ended, went about his work in television with greater enthusiasm.
The speeches he delivered around the country in 1958 for General Electric had little to do with bringing Hollywood to the people or the people’s choice to Hollywood. They dealt mainly with political and business issues. He spoke in Schenectady about “Professional Patriots” (who did not want the Bill of Rights taught in the schools for alleged fear of revolution), in Los Angeles about “Tax Curbs” and in Des Moines on “Business, Ballots and Bureaus” (the evils of burgeoning government). In 1959, however, he cited the Tennessee Valley Authority as a horrible example of governmental excesses. T.V.A. was a $50 million customer for G.E. equipment. The T.V.A. reference was swiftly dropped from any further speeches after G.E. chairman Ralph Cordiner conceded—when Reagan asked him—”that the exclusion would make my job easier.”*
Ronald Prescott Reagan, the Reagans’ second child, weighed in at eight pounds, eight ounces at his birth at 8:04 A.M. on May 21, 1958. Nancy again had the baby by Cesarean section. Reagan had been determined that his son would not be called junior, and therefore the difference in the middle name. The Reagans called their son “Skipper” (and would do so for all the years he lived at home). Reagan was a happy man. His personal life was of the sort he had always wanted, with a wife who thought about him above and before anyone or anything else. His career in television had brought him financial security (more than two hundred thousand dollars a year now), the horse farm was doing well (and had tripled in value), the house on San Onofre was still a dream house (and, with increasing real-estate values and all the additions put in and paid for by G.E., also worth several times what he had paid to build it). He wished he did not have to spend so much time away from Nancy. He thought he should see Maureen (eighteen) and Michael (fifteen) more often; he knew he was a better husband than a father. Nancy was the center of his life, his four children on the perimeter, and he did not see that as bad. He called her “honey,” and whenever he phoned her she was there. They held hands in public “for real” and were not embarrassed to display their affection for each other before the children or close friends.
What he did not need were complications when he had none and yet another demand on his time that would keep him away from Nancy even more. But in October 1959, the Screen Actors Guild board, with Reagan and Nancy on it, was determined, as 1960 approached, to press forward in their battle for residuals from old pictures being released to television. Howard Keel was then president, but he had tendered his resignation to accept a role in a Broadway musical, Saratoga.
“We knew that [there] was going to be a battle—there was no secret about it,” Jack Dales says. “The producers made no secret about it—so we wanted a strong leader, and everybody’s mind [the board] turned back to Ronnie Reagan.” A meeting of the executive committee (which excluded Reagan) was called—Walter Pidgeon, George Chandler, Leon Ames.
Representing the committee, Jack Dales rang Reagan and asked if he would consider returning for another term as president. “Convinced as I was that my previous service had hurt ca-reerwise, and feeling the upsurge of success in the G.E. Theater after the lean period, I didn’t want to answer the question at all—I just wanted to hide someplace. Nancy was even more upset, and felt there was every justification for saying ‘No thanks.’“ He did not. He said, “Give me a few days to think about it.”
He called Lew Wasserman for counsel. To his surprise, Wasserman advised him to take the position. Reagan has never given Wasserman’s reasons, but he accepted the SAG nomination as he had almost all the other arrangements MCA had urged upon him.
* The first publicity announcement (“New General Electric series starts in September [1954] with Ronald Reagan as Host”) was dispatched on April 21, 1954, but Reagan had not yet signed his contract.
† The G.E. Theater shows are still (1986) being distributed around the world.
* Edward Arnold and Walter Pidgeon were considered.
† Nancy Reagan played opposite Reagan in three G.E. Theater episodes in eight years.
* The company manufactured everything from refrigerators and other appliances to medical and industrial equipment.
* Reagan has been accused of giving the same “company” talk on these tours made during his years with General Electric.
* William R. Stephenson, A.I.A.
* Juran was also art director on The Razor’s Edge (1946), Body and Soul (1947) and Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (1948).
* Reagan’s reference to the T.V.A. in his speech was as follows: “… sacred as motherhood, is T.V.A. This program s
tarted as a flood control project; the Tennessee Valley was periodically ravaged by destructive floods. The Army Engineers set out to solve this problem. They said that it was possible that once in 500 years there could be a total capacity flood that would inundate some 600,000 acres. Well the Engineers fixed that. They made a permanent lake which inundated a million acres. This solved the problem of the floods, but the annual interest on the T.V.A. debt is five times as great as the annual flood damage they sought to correct. Of course, you will point out that T.V.A. gets electric power from the impounded waters, and this is true, but today 85 percent of T.V.A.’s electricity is generated in coal-burning steam plants. Now perhaps you’ll charge that I’m overlooking the navigable waterway that was created, providing cheap barge traffic, but the bulk of the freight barged on that waterway is coal being shipped to the T.V.A. steam plants, and the cost of maintaining that channel each year would pay for shipping all of the coal by rail, and there would be money left over.” Reagan cut this out of the speech he gave on tour. Yet, five years later when he published his autobiography, he included the lengthy paragraph in a reprint of an almost identical speech given in support of Barry Goldwater, which his co-writer, Richard C. Huber, noted, “represents sentiments he has publicly expressed across the nation for the past 15 years [that would place these views as early as 1950]—regardless of political parties or programs that had happened to be in power.”
