Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  While filming This Is the Army, he spent his lunch hours debating politics with his Republican co-star, George Murphy, who like Reagan had been Ronnie and Jane: 1941–1946

  1 5 7

  brought up a Democrat and was hooked on politics at an early age. Murphy, however, had switched parties in 1939, and was heavily influenced by his good friend FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who told him that the New Deal was a Communist plot.42 For all their heated arguments, the two actors grew close. Two decades later Senator Murphy and Governor Reagan would be the first and second movie stars, respectively, to hold high government office, and the latter would write of the former, “I owe a great deal to this cool, dapper guy who had to deal with me and my early white-eyed liberal daze.

  There were some of our associates, I’m sure, who believed I was as red as Moscow, but Murph never wavered in his defense of me even though I ranted and railed at him as an arch-reactionary (which he isn’t).”43

  As his words make clear, Reagan moved left—not right—during the war, along with the Roosevelt administration and most of the movie industry’s liberal Democrats. The Soviet Union was now America’s ally, and once again Hollywood Communists, leftists, and liberals were united in the great anti-Fascist battle, as they had been from 1936 to 1939, when the Hitler-Stalin pact tore the first Popular Front apart. Even Louis B. Mayer and Jack Warner, prodded by the White House, joined the pro-Soviet campaign, releasing Song of Russia and Mission to Moscow, respectively, in 1943: the first was scripted by secret Communist Party members Paul Jarrico and Richard Collins; the second, written by leftist Howard Koch, was so soft on Stalin that conservative critics called it Submission to Moscow.44

  In 1943, Reagan became friendly with Bernard Vorhaus, an FMPU

  writer-director who had been active in the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League in the late 1930s and would be blacklisted as an alleged Communist. The New York–born, Harvard-educated Vorhaus was Fort Roach’s resident left-wing intellectual, and Reagan was no doubt flattered to be taken seriously by him.

  Vorhaus directed Reagan in the instructional short Recognition of the Japanese Zero Fighter in January 1943, and according to Edmund Morris, Reagan and Vorhaus developed the same kind of “political intimacy” that Reagan would later share with his longtime California aide and national security adviser, William Clark. Although Vorhaus was never able to win Reagan over entirely to his pro-Moscow views, he told friends at the time, “Dutch R.

  knows more about politics than any other actor in Hollywood.”45

  That year Reagan joined the Hollywood Democratic Committee—curiously, for someone so highly opinionated, he had managed to avoid joining any political organization until then. The HDC had been formed as a

  “support group” for the Roosevelt administration after the Republicans 1 5 8

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House made significant gains in the 1942 midterm elections, but it was more radical than its name suggested. Several Communists, including the Party’s not-so-secret Hollywood leader, screenwriter John Howard Lawson, sat on its board, alongside such liberal stalwarts as Walter Huston, Gene Kelly, Olivia de Havilland, and Ira Gershwin. So did Herbert Sorrell, the fiery Hollywood union leader, who may have been a Communist.

  Officially chaired by liberal screenwriter Marc Connelly, the HDC was actually run by George Pepper, “an energetic young violinist whose career was cut short by a hand injury” and who was later identified as a Communist Party member.46

  With nearly one thousand members by January 1944, the HDC had

  “emerged as the most sophisticated partisan political organization Hollywood had ever seen: well-funded, fluent in the latest campaign technology, and committed to hardball campaigning,” according to Ronald Brownstein in The Power and the Glitter: The Hollywood–Washington Connection.47

  In the July primaries, it was credited with unseating anti-FDR Representative John M. Costello—a Rita Hayworth broadcast castigating him as a

  “renegade Democrat” was thought to be the final blow—and with securing the party’s nomination in a second Los Angeles congressional district for one of its members, actress Helen Gahagan Douglas.

  As the influence and prestige of the HDC grew, the movie colony’s frustrated right wing reacted by forming an activist organization of its own. In February 1944, one hundred industry conservatives, including Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Ginger Rogers, Irene Dunne, Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor, Adolphe Menjou, and Walt Disney, met at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel to announce the formation of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Director Sam Wood, with whom Reagan had argued politics on the set of Kings Row, was named president, and MGM screenwriter and producer James Kevin McGuinness, a favorite of Louis B. Mayer’s, became executive committee chairman. Both were fanatic anti-Communists, eager to purge Hollywood of what they saw as a dangerously subversive minority and convinced that the Roosevelt administration was a Trojan horse packed with Reds and pinkos poised to take over the government.48

  “The American motion picture is, and will continue to be, held by Americans for the American people, in the interests of America, and dedicated to the preservation and continuance of the American scene and the Ronnie and Jane: 1941–1946

  1 5 9

  American way of life,” Wood declared at the Beverly Wilshire meeting.49

  The group’s Statement of Principles—which attempted to cross Harry Warner with Abraham Lincoln, but now sounds proto-Nixonian—was reprinted in full-page ads in the trade papers the following morning: In our special field of motion pictures, we resent the growing impression that this industry is made of, and dominated by, Communists, radicals, and crackpots. We believe that we represent the vast majority of the people who serve this great medium of expression.

  But unfortunately it has been an unorganized majority. This has been almost inevitable. The very love of freedom, of the rights of the individual, make this great majority reluctant to organize. But now we must, or we shall meanly lose “the last, best hope on earth.”

  As members of the motion-picture industry, we must face and accept an especial responsibility. Motion pictures are inescapably one of the world’s greatest forces for influencing public thought and opinion, both at home and abroad. In this fact lies solemn obligation. We refuse to permit the effort of Communist, Fascist, and other totalitarian-minded groups to pervert this powerful medium into an instrument for the dissemination of un-American ideas and beliefs. We pledge ourselves to fight, with every means at our organized command, any effort of any group or individual to divert the loyalty of the screen from the free America that gave it birth.50

  The launching of the Alliance, as it came to be known, was timed to coincide with a dinner in honor of Vice President Henry Wallace hosted by the liberal Free World Association, and it was the opening shot in the ideological war that would dominate Hollywood politics well into the 1950s.

  Less than three months after its first meeting, The New York Times reported,

  “A wide cleavage in Hollywood’s political and economic thought . . . has resulted in the breaking up of some long-established writing teams and has even extended into the colony’s social life. The factional spirit is most pronounced in studio commissaries at lunchtime. Talent groups—particularly writers and directors—have broken previous bonds of friendship, the so-called liberal thinkers grouping at certain tables, the conservatives at others.

  But in their references to one another they are ‘Fascists’ or ‘Communists.’”51

  As the 1944 presidential election approached, the fledgling Alliance was no match for the thriving HDC, which went all-out to win a fourth term for FDR, despite his replacement of Henry Wallace, the darling of the left, 1 6 0

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House with the provincial but less controversial Harry Truman. Working closely with the California State Democratic Committee and the Democratic National Committee, George Pepper deployed hundreds of mo
vie stars across the nation, culminating in an election eve broadcast on all four major radio networks. Humphrey Bogart narrated, Judy Garland sang, Groucho Marx told jokes, and lyricist E. Y. Harburg, who had written “Over the Rainbow,” provided jingles. As a finale, one star after another stepped up to the microphone and endorsed the Democratic ticket: Tallulah Bankhead, Joan Bennett, Irving Berlin, Joseph Cotten, John Garfield, Rita Hayworth, George Jessel, Danny Kaye, Gene Kelly, George Raft, Edward G. Robinson, Lana Turner, Claudette Colbert, and even the supposedly apolitical Jane Wyman.52

  Although Reagan did not take part in the broadcast, he gave $100 to the HDC during the 1944 campaign.53 Along with Wyman, he was among the horde of stars who turned out to hear Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, give a speech attacking the Republican candidate, New York governor Thomas Dewey. Neil Reagan recalled the endless political arguments he and Ron had then: “On Sunday afternoon up at his house above Sunset Boulevard . . . there used to be a big gathering of the

  [Jack] Bennys and the [George] Burnses. . . . If they were all out around the pool, in about thirty minutes the Reagan brothers would have driven everybody into the house with our battles on politics. His statement to me always was: ‘That’s the trouble with you guys. Anybody who voted for Roosevelt is a Communist.’ And I used to agree with him heartily, at which point he’d get the screaming meemies.”54

  Ronald Reagan was crushed to hear the news of FDR’s death on April 12, 1945. Nearly fifty years later, Elvin Crawford, who served with Reagan at Fort Roach, remembered how upset he looked: “That weekend I had to stay over at the base, and Ronnie was Duty Officer. Saturday afternoon the whole place was empty. I saw him coming down Main Street, past Stage 2, with his head down and slowly shaking. He seemed really stricken, like he had a migraine. When he looked at me I saw he was in despair. ‘Oh, ser-geant, I don’t know what’s going to happen to this country.’”55

  Eighteen days after the President’s death, Hitler committed suicide as Allied troops closed in on Berlin; Victory in Europe was declared on May 8. Shortly after, raw footage filmed by FMPU combat-camera crews at German concentration camps arrived at Fort Roach to be edited for viewing at the Pentagon. Reagan was among the handful of officers on the base Ronnie and Jane: 1941–1946

  1 6 1

  to see the “ghastly images,” an experience that only intensified his anti-Fascism, as well as the sympathy for Jews and other minorities drilled into him by his father. Reagan would later say that he kept a print of one of these films to show his children.56

  Japan surrendered on August 14, 1945, and Reagan was released from active duty later that month, although he was not officially discharged until December 9.57 “By the time I got out of the Army Air Corps,” he would later write, “all I wanted to do—in common with several million other veterans—was to rest up awhile, make love to my wife, and come up refreshed to a better job in an ideal world. (As it came out, I was disappointed in all these postwar ambitions.)”58

  Reagan had every reason to be optimistic. The victorious Allied Powers were in the process of setting up the United Nations, Lew Wasserman had a seven-year, million-dollar contract from Warners ready for him to sign, and Jane and Maureen were waiting at home with an adopted baby boy named Michael Edward Reagan. What’s more, he was now looking at the world through contact lenses and, as cumbersome as they were, he found them preferable to the options he’d had since age thirteen—thick glasses or extreme myopia.59

  With his uncommon ability to be sentimental and elegant at the same time, Reagan writes in his memoir: “Michael came to us in March of 1945—closer than a son; he wasn’t born unasked, we chose him.”60 The legal arrangements had been handled by Betty Kaplan, one of Jane’s bridesmaids, and her lawyer husband, Arthur; on March 18 they delivered the infant to the Reagan house, where Lew and Edie Wasserman were keeping the new parents company. Michael had been born three days earlier to a twenty-eight-year-old would-be actress from Kentucky who had had a wartime fling with a married Army Air Corps man. Jane had gone to meet her first in the hospital.61

  Modern Screen reported, “In a world where there are many children who never have proper care or love and who never know real home life, Jane thinks it is important for people like herself and Ronnie to add, from the outside, to their family—and then to regard the newcomer as flesh of their flesh, bone of their bone.”62 The family would later say that four-year-old Maureen had wanted a baby brother so badly that she tried to buy one on a shopping trip to the toy department of Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills with her father, and that when Michael was brought home, she ran to her 1 6 2

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House room to get her piggy bank and gave her entire savings, 97 cents, to a woman from the adoption agency who had presumably accompanied the Kaplans.63

  In her 1989 memoir, First Father, First Daughter, the late Maureen Reagan wrote, “It’s always been my understanding that my parents didn’t think they could have any more children naturally. I’ve also sensed that my mother didn’t want to go through the pain and suffering of childbirth again, not after what I’d put her through. She can tell you the most adorned story of the day I was born—right down to what she was wearing when she went into labor and how much pain she endured throughout.

  You can hear every minute of eight and a half hours of agonizing labor, and a minute and a half about me. That’s my mother.”64

  Reagan’s new contract, guaranteeing him $3,500 a week whether he worked or not, went into effect on September 12, and Jack Warner told him, “Just relax until we find a good property for you.”65 He spent his first weeks out of uniform in a rented house at nearby Lake Arrowhead, where Jane, on loan to MGM, was filming The Yearling. Her career was about to ignite: Lost Weekend opened that fall to rave reviews, and The Yearling, a big-budget Technicolor drama co-starring Gregory Peck, would win her an Oscar nomination the following year. While “Nanny” Banner, their Scottish governess, took care of the children, Ronnie spent his days speed-boating around the lake and building models of ships.66

  Decades later, Neil Reagan would complain that he, and not his former lifeguard brother, had to teach little Maureen how to swim.67 Maureen, however, recalled her father as an attentive parent: telling her stories about growing up in Illinois and reading her fairy tales at bedtime; acting out her favorite poem, Robert Service’s “The Shooting of Dan McGrew”; doing vaudeville routines with her when they had company. Both parents, noted Maureen, “encouraged me to be independent. One of [my mother’s] favorite expressions was, ‘If I get hit by a Mack truck tomorrow, you’ll have to take care of yourself.’ At four I had the dubious distinction of being the only kid on the block who knew what a Mack truck was.” She also noticed that her mother tended to become more involved in her roles than her father did in his: “When she was doing Ma Baxter in The Yearling, we hardly saw her smile for six months. No exaggeration. She was this earth-mother-dirt-farmer-starving-to-death-type person every hour of the day.”68

  Jane “would come through the door thinking about her part,” Reagan Ronnie and Jane: 1941–1946

  1 6 3

  later said of his wife at this time, “and not even notice I was in the room.”69

  Jane Wyman explained to a reporter in 1948, “It was my biggest chance yet, and I was determined to make the most of it. I determined to act from the inside out, to disregard all surface effects, and delve into the character of a sturdy woman who endured hardship stoically and who concealed a deeply emotional nature under a frosty, pragmatic exterior. I meditated on the role at great length; I wanted to get to the bottom of this woman’s psyche. And in doing so, I dredged up all the early hardship and disappointments in my own life, looking constantly for some points of reference that would link our respective inner schemes.”70

  By the time Jane finished shooting The Yearling, in January 1946, Warner Bros. still hadn’t put her husband to work, and Ronnie could not have been happy to read in Photoplay: “Will
there be room for both the male wartime and male peacetime stars in movies, Hollywood is asking? During the war an amazing number of men stars burst into being: Van Johnson, Peter Lawford, Robert Walker, Tom Drake, Cornel Wilde, Gregory Peck, John Hodiak, and many more. But already out of uniform or soon to don mufti again are such peacetime favorites as: Jimmy Stewart, Tyrone Power, Robert Montgomery, Henry Fonda, Clark Gable, Ronald Reagan, Lon McCallister, Donald O’Connor, Gene Kelly, Victor Mature, Wayne Morris, and many other golden boys.”71

  Reagan’s first postwar picture, Stallion Road, did not begin shooting until April. A black-and-white melodrama co-starring Alexis Smith, this tale of a selfless veterinarian who gets the girl but contracts anthrax would prove noteworthy only for the fact that it led to the purchase of the first of four Reagan ranches. “I’d been a long time away from horses,” Reagan recalled, “and I desperately wanted to do my own riding and jumping.”72 An army friend, Oleg Cassini, the designer who would dress Jacqueline Kennedy in the White House, introduced Reagan to Count Nino Pepitone, who impressed him because he had been an officer in the famously stylish Italian cavalry. Reagan hired Pepitone as his riding coach, and when shooting was finished on Stallion Road that summer, they decided to go into racehorse breeding together. Reagan bought an eight-acre ranch at Northridge in the San Fernando Valley, then still largely agricultural, which Pepitone and his wife managed for him.