Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  Robert Ardrey, quoted by Stephen Vaughn

  in Ronald Reagan in Hollywood 1

  ON DECEMBER 2, 1941, FIVE DAYS BEFORE PEARL HARBOR, WARNERS’ PUBlicity department announced that Ronald Reagan had received more fan mail that year than any other male star at the studio except Errol Flynn; James Cagney was in third place.2 A few months earlier, a Gallup survey had ranked Reagan 82nd among the top 100 stars. By the beginning of 1942, he was tied for 74th place with Laurence Olivier, and Gallup estimated that he was earning $52,000 per film, while Flynn was earning $157,000 and Clark Gable, America’s box office king, $210,000.3

  Reagan was getting leading roles in A movies consistently now, and in early 1941 Warners had even lent him to MGM for The Bad Man, with Wallace Beery and Lionel Barrymore. He was “duly impressed” by the poshest of the studios but was also happy to return to “the meat and 1 4 9

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  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House potatoes atmosphere of Warners,”4 where executive producer Hal Wallis promptly cast him as a concert pianist in Million Dollar Baby. He was in such demand that he had to do reshoots for International Squadron and the opening scenes of Nine Lives Are Not Enough on alternating days during June 1941; the latter would win him critical praise for his comic turn as a hapless newspaper reporter.5

  Reagan was filming Kings Row when he received his first call to active duty in August 1941, but the studio was able to secure a deferment for him until the end of production. “The first time I ever met Ronald Reagan was on the set of Kings Row, ” the set designer and producer Jacques Mapes told me. “Ann Sheridan was a friend of mine, and she was shooting Kings Row in the morning and The Man Who Came to Dinner in the afternoon. That’s the way they used to work at Warners. I thought what he was doing was really remarkable—that role was such a stretch for him. It’s too bad that he didn’t have more properties like that earlier. And then the war came in.”6

  Reagan received two more deferments and starred in two more A movies produced by Hal Wallis— Juke Girl, a message movie about migrant farm workers in Florida, co-starring Ann Sheridan again, and Desperate Journey, a pro-British war picture directed by Raoul Walsh and co-starring Errol Flynn—before he went into the Army on April 20, 1942. Jack Warner tried to pull strings in Washington until the last minute, hoping to pair Reagan and Sheridan for a third time in the upcoming Casablanca, after the tremendous box office success of Kings Row, which had been released that February. There was also talk of the studio’s casting Reagan in Frank Capra’s Arsenic and Old Lace and giving him the title role in The Will Rogers Story, a biography of the plainspoken cowboy-philosopher.7

  One of Ronnie’s major concerns before going away was arranging for his fifty-nine-year-old mother’s well-being. He had no trouble supporting Nelle on the $1,650-a-week salary that Lew Wasserman had secured when he renegotiated his contract with Warners the previous fall. But Jane, who was making $1,450 a week, would now have to pay the mortgage and support herself and Maureen on her own. There was no question of Nelle’s moving in with her daughter-in-law. According to Leonora Hornblow, Jane was not very fond of Nelle—or her brother-in-law, Neil, for that matter—and “had them around as little as she could.”8 Reagan tried to get the studio to pay his mother $75 a week to answer his fan mail, but Jack Warner refused on the grounds that other stars going off to war would Ronnie and Jane: 1941–1946

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  make similar demands. He finally agreed to give Reagan an interest-free loan of $3,900, from which Nelle would draw a weekly salary for one year.9

  (The arrangement was not renewed at the year’s end, though Warner, in a typically paternalistic gesture, later forgave the loan.)10

  Although Ronnie and Jane had bought the land on Cordell Drive and started building their dream house in 1941, they did not move in until March 1942. Jane was still furnishing it with decorator Connie Rennick on the eve of her husband’s departure for Fort Mason, in San Francisco.

  On Saturday, April 18, she gave Ronnie a surprise farewell party at home with many of their Hollywood friends, including Pat O’Brien, Ann Sheridan, Jack and Mary Benny, and Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor.

  Ronnie knew something was up when he returned home from a baseball game with Bob Cobb, the owner of the Brown Derby restaurants, and saw sixteen Cadillacs lining the driveway.11 On Sunday night the Reagans were photographed having dinner at the Hollywood Brown Derby—he in uniform, she in a dark dress, matching hat, and fur wrap—before driving to Glendale, where he boarded the overnight train to San Francisco.12

  The following morning Reagan reported for duty as a second lieutenant in the Army Cavalry and was given a physical examination. His eyesight was so poor that one of the examining doctors told him, “If we sent you overseas, you’d shoot a general.” A second added, “Yes, and you’d miss him.” Thus disqualified for combat, he spent his first seven weeks in the armed forces as a “liaison officer loading convoys with troops bound for Australia.”13 His greatest triumph was persuading Jeanette MacDonald, the favorite movie star of Fort Mason’s commanding general, to give a concert on I Am an American Day—a new national holiday created by Congress earlier that year—for seventeen thousand soldiers waiting to be shipped overseas.14

  Three days before Reagan reported for duty, Jack Warner had been sworn in as a commissioned officer in the Army Air Corps, the predecessor of the U.S. Air Force. The patriotic mogul had been lobbying Washington for months to establish “a very effective propaganda department” at his studio, with him in charge.15 At a meeting in March with General Henry “Hap”

  Arnold, chief of staff of the Army Air Corps, Warner, not entirely in jest, proposed that he be made a one-star general. He didn’t get the rank he wanted, but by late June the newly established First Motion Picture Unit of the Army Air Corps (FMPU) was temporarily installed at Lieutenant 1 5 2

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Colonel Warner’s Burbank studio, and Second Lieutenant Reagan had been transferred there from San Francisco.16

  “Jane Wyman and wee daughter are probably the happiest people in town since husband and daddy Ronald Reagan has been temporarily sent back to Burbank to make Government shorts,” reported Photoplay. 17 The new assignment meant that Reagan frequently spent evenings and weekends at home, a comfort to Jane in the jittery atmosphere of wartime Los Angeles. Fear of an imminent Japanese attack was acute during the first half of 1942, when the Japanese fleet still dominated the Pacific. Paranoia about a fifth column among the city’s large Japanese population was so widespread that on February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the internment of 112,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans at inland military camps for the duration. On February 23, a Japanese submarine shelled an oil field near Santa Barbara, damaging a derrick and a pier. The following night, Los Angeles residents were awakened at 2:30 in the morning by air-raid sirens responding to reports of as many as one hundred unidentified aircraft flying over the coast, and antiaircraft fire lit up the sky for five hours. The so-called Battle of Los Angeles was a false alarm,18 but the city remained on complete war status, with gun batteries installed at Pacific Palisades, Playa del Rey, Manhattan Beach, and Redondo Beach, klieg lights spaced along the shore at five-mile intervals scanning the ocean nightly, and frequent air-raid drills and blackouts keeping people on edge.19

  Although Reagan would later quip that he “flew a desk” during the war, his military service, in Hollywood terms, fell somewhere between that of Captain Jimmy Stewart, who volunteered as a bomber pilot and won a Distinguished Flying Cross for his 25 combat missions over Germany, and that of John Wayne, who was so determined not to put his career on hold that he managed to secure deferment after deferment while making movies with—and love to—Marlene Dietrich at Republic Pictures.20 Errol Flynn, Cary Grant, and Frank Sinatra also avoided wartime service, while Robert Montgomery and Robert Taylor joined the Navy, and Tyrone Power became a Marine. Jack Warner wasn’t the only mogu
l who signed up: Darryl F. Zanuck, the head of Fox, “donated his entire string of 20 Argentine polo ponies to West Point”21 before flying off to the European front as a colonel in the Army Signal Corps. Director John Ford, who served as a captain in the Navy, earned a Purple Heart for wounds suffered during the tide-turning Battle of Midway in June 1942.22 According to Otto Friedrich in Ronnie and Jane: 1941–1946

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  City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940’s, “By October 1942 some 2,700 Hollywood people—12 percent of the total number employed in the movie business—had joined the armed forces.”23

  Those who did not don uniforms entertained the troops and promoted the sale of war bonds—337 stars sold almost $850 million in bonds in September 1942 alone.24 Bette Davis was the president and MCA chairman Jules Stein the chief underwriter of the Hollywood Stage Door Canteen, where every night thousands of GIs danced and socialized with gorgeous movie stars. Bob Hope kicked off his Hollywood Victory Caravan at a White House garden party in April 1942; after touring sixty-five military bases across the country, he took the show overseas.25 Hedy Lamarr and Lana Turner sold kisses, for $25,000 and $50,000, respectively, to aid the war bond drive, which had been initiated by Treasury Secretary Henry Mor-genthau and was spearheaded by MGM publicity director Howard Dietz.

  As head of the actors’ division of the Hollywood Victory Committee, Clark Gable sent his wife, Carole Lombard, on one of the first tours, in January 1942, to her home state of Indiana, where she sold $2 million worth of bonds. Lombard, her mother, and her publicist were killed when the plane taking them back to Los Angeles crashed near Las Vegas. After six months of heavy drinking, Gable enlisted as a private in the Army Air Corps, where he served as a combat cameraman in Britain, rose to the rank of major, and eventually was furloughed to Fort Roach, as the First Motion Picture Unit headquarters came to be known. Gable’s discharge papers were signed by Ronald Reagan, who by then had risen to the rank of captain.26

  Reagan would later claim that he had turned down a promotion to major—“who was I to be a major for serving in California, without ever hearing a shot fired in anger?”27—and he was undoubtedly self-conscious about his lack of combat service. But the FMPU was doing important work at Fort Roach, and Reagan was well suited for his assignment. As Stephen Vaughn explains in Ronald Reagan in Hollywood, “General Arnold’s headquarters used its films to several ends: to increase enlistments, train servicemen, build morale, define the enemy, create unity, and promote air power.

  . . . Reagan seemed an appropriate choice to narrate and appear in the FMPU’s films, even if in reality he did not like to fly. Warner Bros. had already created an image for him as a pilot-hero skilled at using aviation technology in Secret Service of the Air, Murder in the Air, International Squadron, and Desperate Journey.”28

  Reagan’s first film for the military was Rear Gunner, which was designed 1 5 4

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House to make turreteers seem as heroic as bomber pilots. He would go on to act in or narrate such indoctrination movies as Target Tokyo, Beyond the Line of Duty, Fight for the Sky, Land and Live in the Desert, Fighter Bomber Against Mechanized Targets, and For God and Country (in which he played a Catholic chaplain whose two best friends are a Protestant and a Jew and who dies in battle trying to save an American Indian buddy).29

  Reagan also emerged as an effective administrator in the military. Shortly after arriving at Burbank, he was made personnel director of the FMPU, charged with interviewing and processing producers, directors, writers, technicians, and fellow actors. “A great many people to this day harbor a feeling that the personnel of the motion picture unit were somehow draft dodgers avoiding danger,” he later wrote. “The Army doesn’t play that way.

  There was a special job the Army wanted done and it was after men who could do that job. The overwhelming majority of men and officers serving at our post were limited service like myself, or men who by reason of family, age, or health were exempt from normal military duty.”30

  In the fall of 1942, Jack Warner gave up his commission—though he still insisted on being called Colonel—to turn out his own war movies at his own studio, and the FMPU leased the nine-acre Hal Roach complex in Culver City, which had five soundstages and state-of-the-art special effects facilities. Warner was replaced as commanding officer by Major Paul Mantz, a stunt pilot who won his appointment because he was the only man at Fort Roach—also dubbed Fort Wacky—who could actually fly a plane. For all the jokes, however, by early 1943 the “Culver City Commandos” numbered more than one thousand enlisted men and officers who were turning out eight films a month, featuring such stars as Alan Ladd, Arthur Kennedy, and Lee J. Cobb.31 That July, Reagan received his promotion to captain, and in December he was made post adjutant, the second-highest position at Fort Roach.32 He was known as a stickler for following rules and respecting rank. When Lieutenant William Holden was transferred to Fort Roach in early 1945, Captain Reagan kept him standing at attention for twenty-five minutes while he recited the regulations.

  Holden called him a son of a bitch behind his back, but the two actors soon became best friends.33

  Warner Bros. did its best to keep Reagan in the limelight while he was in uniform. Ronnie and Jane were on Modern Screen’s January 1943 cover, and they were frequently photographed on his weekend leaves at events Ronnie and Jane: 1941–1946

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  such as the premiere of Yankee Doodle Dandy and the California State Military Guard Ball at the Hollywood Palladium. In February 1943, Jack Warner arranged for Reagan to take the lead in This Is the Army, a musical based on Irving Berlin’s Broadway show of the previous year. The premiere at the Hollywood Theater in July was a major publicity event—Ronnie wore his dress uniform, Wyman a hot-pink cocktail dress with a silver-fox cape and gobs of amethyst jewelry. The movie was a huge hit, taking in $10 million at the box office, with Warners donating its profits to Army War Relief.34 As a result of its success and that of Kings Row, Reagan was rated Hollywood’s top box-office draw for 1942–43.35 He was on the cover of Modern Screen solo in October 1944, looking as handsome and comfortable in uniform as he had in ten of the thirty movies he had made at Warners before he entered the military.36

  Jane’s career, however, remained in the doldrums, with Warners continuing to cast her in run-of-the-mill comedies, musicals, and war movies. In early 1944 she went on a twelve-week tour to promote war bond sales and The Doughgirls, “a honey of a funny—about love and money!,” as the ad campaign put it, in which she co-starred with Ann Sheridan and Alexis Smith.37 Like a good soldier’s wife, Jane also put in many hours at the Hollywood Canteen, and was rewarded with a part in Warners’ 1944 musical of the same title, along with the studio’s reigning triumvirate of strong-willed leading ladies: Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Barbara Stanwyck. At the end of that year she was finally given a dramatic role in a major picture when Warners loaned her out to Paramount for The Lost Weekend, directed by Billy Wilder and starring Ray Milland as an alcoholic writer. Jane was cast as Milland’s almost masochistically devoted girlfriend. It would prove to be her breakthrough role to stardom.

  In August 1944, as Allied forces pushed the Japanese back across the Pacific, the FMPU embarked on a top secret project designed to assist in the bombing and invasion of Japan itself. The film unit’s set designers and special effects wizards built a miniature replica of Tokyo and other targets on the floor of one of the soundstages and mounted cameras on cranes above it so that simulated bombing runs could be filmed and sent to the front to brief bombing crews before they took off for Japan. In turn, footage from the actual raids was sent back to Fort Roach, where the model was adjusted to reflect bombing damage. Security surrounding the project was so tight that, Reagan later wrote, “it was enough to make all of us fearful of talking 1 5 6

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House in our sleep, or taking an extra drink. We knew the bomb targets well in advance, including the propose
d time of the bombing raid, because our geniuses—informed in advance of possible weather conditions—were even floating the right kind of clouds between the camera and the target.”38

  He played the briefing officer in these films, directing the pilots toward their targets as if he were sitting in the cockpit with them, thirty thousand feet above the Pacific, rather than in a projection room in Culver City—a task not so different from giving play-by-play descriptions of baseball games he wasn’t actually watching. “I would usually open with lines such as, ‘Gentlemen, you are approaching the coast of Honshu on a course of three hundred degrees. You are now twenty miles offshore. To your left, if you are on course, you should be able to see a narrow inlet.

  To your right . . .’ ” His closing line was always the same: “Bombs away.”39

  Reagan later said that his disillusionment with big government—“the first crack in my staunch liberalism”—began during his last year and a half in the Army. He attributed his nascent doubts to his experience with the civil service bureaucrats who arrived at Fort Roach halfway through the war. Until then, the FMPU, because of the sensitive nature of its work, had made do without civilian workers. According to Reagan, the new arrivals were transferred to Culver City after the Army, acting under pressure from Congress, ordered a 35 percent cut in civilians at all installations that employed them. “Neither Congress nor the military had figured on the ability of the Civil Service to achieve eternal life here on earth,” Reagan later wrote. “As fast as reductions took place, new positions were found for the displaced.”40 Whereas the FMPU’s personnel section had eighteen employees to handle the records of 1,200 men, he noted, the civil service sent more than twice that number to keep track of the 250 civilians assigned to Fort Roach. Furthermore, Reagan asserted, incompetent workers could be removed only by promoting them to better jobs, supervisors opposed reductions in the workforce because their own pay was based on how many workers they had under them, and requests to destroy unnecessary documents were met with orders from Washington to copy each document before destroying it. Although Reagan would one day de-ride such inefficiency and empire building as “the peculiar ways of the federal bureaucracy,” and use his Fort Roach anecdotes in political speeches, during the war years his New Deal beliefs were still strong.41