Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  together. We get along so beautifully with other partners but I suspect that I unconsciously do the leading. You never say anything.52

  The week after Labor Day, Ronnie drove Jane to Mendocino, a hundred miles up the coast from San Francisco, where she would spend the next six weeks filming Johnny Belinda. Jane had wanted this part since she saw the original play by Elmer Harris on Broadway in 1939, while she and Reagan were touring with Louella Parsons. Producer Jerry Wald, who had first worked with Jane as the screenwriter on Brother Rat, pushed hard for the studio to buy the rights and give her the lead.53 Lew Ayres was cast as the compassionate doctor who teaches Wyman’s character to speak.

  Charles Bickford played her father, Agnes Moorehead her spinster aunt, and Stephen McNally the rapist she kills when he tries to kidnap their baby. This was high Hollywood melodrama, but filmed with such spare artistry and directed with such subtle intelligence that the finished product transcended the genre.

  Away from home, the thirty-year-old actress seemed to blossom. The cast and crew lived in an old lumber camp outside town and spent their Divorce: 1947–1948

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  evenings singing songs around a campfire. After getting over their mutual wariness—he assumed she was an insipid chorus girl, she had hoped Joseph Cotten would get the part—Jane and her leading man became nearly inseparable.54 They spent hours together every day, talking, listening to classical music, discussing philosophy and poetry. Jane told friends that Lew really listened to what she had to say and took her ideas seriously—in contrast to a husband who usually dismissed her thoughts with a “That’s fine, Jane,” and then went back to expounding his own views and opinions. Ayres was only two years older than Reagan, but to Jane he seemed years wiser, much more refined and thoughtful. If Ronald Reagan was the eternal lifeguard, Lew Ayres—tall, dark, and tweedy—was the perpetual professor.

  A Quaker from Minnesota, Ayres was the son of divorced musicians.

  He had been signed by MGM in 1929, when Greta Garbo chose him out of a line of young actors to play opposite her in The Kiss, and he won fame the following year as the lead in All Quiet on the Western Front. Between 1938 and 1942, he solidified his stardom in the title role of nine Dr. Kil-dare movies. But when he declared himself a conscientious objector in March 1942, the studio was flooded with letters branding him a coward and a traitor. He turned public opinion around by serving as a battlefield medic in the Pacific, and by the time he was discharged in 1945, even Hedda Hopper was calling him a man of principle.55

  It was rumored that Wyman and her co-star had an affair while making Johnny Belinda. She always denied it, and the consensus seemed to be that the relationship was more spiritual than carnal. “It was platonic,” said studio publicist Jim Reid, adding “but it was intense.”56 Ayres had been married and divorced twice in the 1930s, to actresses Lola Lane and Ginger Rogers. (Of the latter, he said, “Ginger Rogers was married to her career and that mother of hers. I interfered with both relationships.”)57 There can be little doubt that working with and being around Ayres did wonders for Wyman’s confidence personally and professionally. “No matter what they do,” she told director Jean Negulesco, “the Oscar is mine this year.”58

  While his wife was in Mendocino, Reagan was between pictures and almost totally focused on his duties as SAG president. The Guild finally concluded negotiations with the producers in mid-September, though the new contract, unlike the ten-year pact it succeeded, was for only two years. In Reagan’s account, “Actors had gotten raises ranging from 52 to 166 percent. Working conditions had been vastly improved and we had wearily 2 1 0

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House agreed to a stopgap clause that settled nothing with regard to movies someday being reissued on television—but then everyone said they’d be crazy to sell their movies to a competing medium.”59

  SAG members approved the agreement 3,676 to 78, but there was little cause for celebration. On September 15 the board was shaken by the resignation of its treasurer, Anne Revere. A well-liked character actress who had won an Oscar as Elizabeth Taylor’s mother in National Velvet in 1945, Revere had been identified to the FBI by Reagan in April as someone who always voted the Party line, though the rest of the board did not know that he had done so. Now she was the only Guild officer who refused to sign an affidavit stating that she was not a Communist, as required of union officials by the Taft-Hartley Act.60

  Reagan and the board had been struggling with this issue since the controversial labor law was passed in June. The following day Reagan offered an explanation in a New York Post guest column. Speaking for himself and former SAG presidents Montgomery, Murphy, and Edward Arnold, he wrote, “We are violently opposed to indiscriminate Red-baiting, but believe that every union in our country must awaken to the menace of Communist party members who are seeking to destroy our trade unions by boring from within.”61 Most of the board resented the government’s intrusion into union affairs, a position shared by the AFL’s national leadership, which considered the legislation unconstitutional and supported its repeal. Reagan said he agreed, but he also argued that the Guild faced sanctions from the National Labor Relations Board if its officers did not comply, and he convinced his three vice presidents, Kelly, Holden, and Murphy, to sign the affidavits “voluntarily.”62

  On September 19, U.S. marshals began serving bright pink subpoenas on more than forty Hollywood figures, including Reagan, commanding them to appear before HUAC in Washington the following month for hearings on “Communist Infiltration of the Motion-Picture Industry.” Since the committee’s visit to Hollywood in May, its chief investigator, Robert E.

  Stripling, abetted by the right-wingers of the Motion Picture Alliance, as well as the Los Angeles office of the FBI, had been compiling lists of suspected subversives. As Stripling later wrote in The Red Plot Against America, “We obtained enough preliminary testimony to make a public hearing imperative.”63 In Stripling’s opinion, Hollywood was the headquarters of a plot to “communize the country” and its films were saturated with sublim-Divorce: 1947–1948

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  inal propaganda: “The rich were grasping, greedy exploiters of the poor, who were always honest and down-trodden. Bankers were generally despotic; landlords cruel, and tenants noble. Judges and political figures were either crooked or fatuous fools.”64

  A large number of those subpoenaed were Alliance members, including Sam Wood, Walt Disney, Gary Cooper, Robert Taylor, and Adolphe Menjou. These so-called friendly witnesses couldn’t wait to get to Washington and publicly point fingers at those they had already named in secret. A second group, dubbed “the unfriendly nineteen” by the Hollywood Reporter, included eleven screenwriters, six directors, the actor Larry Parks, and the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, who had been living in exile in Los Angeles since 1940. Occupying the middle ground, sort of, were a handful of industry leaders, including Louis B. Mayer and Jack Warner, as well as the former SAG presidents George Murphy and Robert Montgomery.

  Reagan apparently owed his place among them to Warner, who had told J. Parnell Thomas that he would make an effective public witness.65

  HUAC’s newest member, Richard Nixon, apparently also had a hand in Reagan’s selection. According to Irwin Gellman in The Contender: Richard Nixon: The Congress Years, 1946–1952, the freshman congressman had been impressed by the SAG president when they crossed paths for the first time in California that spring, and he thought that Reagan should be called to testify in Washington, since he was, in Nixon’s words, “classified as a liberal and as such would not be accused of simply being a red-baiting reactionary.”66

  Most of Hollywood reacted to HUAC’s summonses with outrage. The Unfriendly 19 gathered at the house of director Lewis Milestone—the director of All Quiet on the Western Front, and the only one in the group who had definitely never been a Party member67—with a team of five lawyers to plot a legal strategy. A few days later, John Huston, fellow director William Wyler, and the screenwrite
r Philip Dunne founded the Committee for the First Amendment “to protest the procedures of the House Committee and to head off [a] blacklist and censorship.”68 The first meeting was held at Ira Gershwin’s house. “You could not get into the place,” one attendee recalled.

  “The excitement was intense. The town was full of enthusiasm because they all felt they were going to win. Every star was there.”69

  “In my estimation, Communism was as nothing compared to the evil done by the witch-hunters. They were the real enemies of this country,” declared John Huston.70 The younger Huston was realistic about the political 2 1 2

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House sympathies of the unfriendly witnesses. “They were mostly all Communists,” he later said, “well-intentioned boobs, men mostly from poor backgrounds, and out in Hollywood they sort of felt guilt at living the good life.”71 But for Huston the issue was bedrock civil liberties: Parnell Thomas and company were infringing on the rights of free speech and free assembly, and therefore must be stopped. The Committee for the First Amendment took full-page ads in the trade papers, deploring the investigation and the mass hysteria it was encouraging. “Our position was greeted with unanimous enthusiasm in Hollywood,” Huston noted, “but HUAC was not deterred.”72

  Huston, Wyler, and Dunne quickly rallied more than five hundred Hollywood personalities to their cause—not only such committed liberals as Humphrey Bogart, Rita Hayworth, Frank Sinatra, Gregory Peck, Burt Lan-caster, and Judy Garland but also such moderate Republicans as Irene Dunne, Jimmy Stewart, and William Holden, and even the anti-political Spencer Tracy.73 Reagan apparently decided not to get involved. “Willy Wyler has told me he was present at an early meeting,” Dunne wrote in his memoir, Take Two.74 But one of the Unfriendly 19, screenwriter Lester Cole, remembered “the conspicuous absence of such self-proclaimed liberals as Ronald Reagan.” According to Cole’s memoir, Hollywood Red, early one evening he went “to Ronnie Reagan’s . . . house to ask him to a meeting of the First Amendment group. . . . Wyman told me Reagan was lying down, not feeling well, but she’d talk to him. She was back in moments, seemingly embarrassed, and asked me to tell Humphrey Bogart and Willie Wyler that he was not well, but was thinking seriously about joining them. He would let them know the next day. He didn’t.”75

  Perhaps Reagan was just too busy to join one more committee. He was in Illinois doing a celebrity turn at Eureka’s annual Pumpkin Festival when the first subpoenas were served in Los Angeles, which, given his aversion to flying, meant a three-day train ride each way. He was still an active member of ADA’s Hollywood organizing committee, which ran ads of its own in the trades urging HUAC to respect due process and “creative freedom.”

  He continued to assist the ADA’s recruitment drive, and was one of fifty guests at a cocktail party Melvyn Douglas, its California state chairman, gave in early October to enlist new members, with Hubert Humphrey as guest of honor.76 The day after the party, Reagan set out for Mendocino, an eighteen-hour trip by car, and he spent ten days there waiting for Jane to finish location shooting on Johnny Belinda. They returned home on Octo-Divorce: 1947–1948

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  ber 17, and that night he left for Washington by train, a four-day trip. If Lester Cole came calling that afternoon—and it appears to be the only day before the HUAC hearings when Ronnie and Jane were both home—is it any wonder he was sent away?

  HUAC’s “Big Show,” as The New York Times called “the most thoroughly publicized investigation [the committee] has ever undertaken,” opened on Monday, October 20. The hearings were held in the Caucus Room of the Old House Office Building, the largest auditorium on Capitol Hill after the House and Senate chambers, with batteries of klieg lights aimed at the witness table and floodlights hanging from the chandeliers. Six newsreel crews, announcers from the three major radio networks, and 120 newspaper and magazine reporters covered the proceedings, and D.C. police had a hard time holding back the throng of movie fans who rushed the doors as each session opened, hoping to get one of the four hundred seats reserved for spectators.77

  Jack Warner was the first to testify. “Ideological termites have bur-rowed into many American industries,” he declared in a prepared opening statement. “Wherever they may be, I say let us dig them out and get rid of them. My brothers and I will be happy to subscribe generously to a pest-removal fund. We are willing to establish such a fund to ship to Russia the people who don’t like our American system of government and prefer the Communistic system to ours.”78 Mayer, who came next, also read an opening statement designed to please his inquisitors, asserting that he had personally “maintained a relentless vigilance against un-American influences” at MGM and calling for “legislation establishing a national policy regulating employment of Communists in private industry. . . . It is my belief they should be denied the sanctuary of the freedom they seek to destroy.”79

  The tough-talking studio chiefs were thrown off balance, however, when pressed to name names. When Warner hesitated, Stripling read out the list of sixteen screenwriters the mogul had so willingly fingered in May. Mayer coughed up Dalton Trumbo, Lester Cole, and Donald Ogden Stewart as MGM writers he had heard might be Communists. Asked why they hadn’t fired such employees, Warner waffled, and Mayer blamed his lawyers. Congressman Nixon asked Warner why his studio had made so many anti-Nazi movies but no anti-Communist ones, and both bosses were stunned to find themselves defending the pro-Russian films they had 2 1 4

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House produced during the war. Warner, who would later brag in his memoir that he had made Mission to Moscow at the personal behest of FDR, claimed he wasn’t quite sure where the idea had come from. Mayer was reduced to insisting that Song of Russia was just another boy-meets-girl picture, which, “except for the music of Tchaikovsky, might just as well have taken place in Switzerland.”80 As Representative Emanuel Celler of New York later commented, “If Chairman Thomas sought to strike terror into the minds of the movie magnates, he succeeded. They were white-livered.”81

  To make matters worse, Mayer’s shilly-shallying was directly contradicted by the next witness: Ayn Rand, the Russian émigré author of the 1943 best-seller The Fountainhead, which would soon be made into a movie starring Gary Cooper. Rand was the intellectual star of the Alliance, and her scene-by-scene analysis of Song of Russia left little doubt that MGM had put a positive gloss on conditions in the Soviet Union. “Anything that sells people the idea that life in Russia is good and that people are free and happy would be Communist propaganda. Am I not correct?” she argued, adding that she believed such was the case even if it had been done for the sake of Allied unity.82

  The parade of Alliance witnesses who followed Rand lacked her rhetorical finesse. Sam Wood asserted that if you pulled down the pants of Communists “you would find the hammer and sickle on their rear ends,”83 and he accused four fellow directors of trying “to steer us into the red river.”84

  Walt Disney mistakenly included the League of Women Voters on his list of Communist front organizations and had to issue a public apology.85 “This may sound biased,” said matinee idol and Reagan’s pal Robert Taylor.

  “However, if I were even suspicious of a person being a Communist with whom I was scheduled to work, I am afraid it would have to be him or me, because life is a little too short to be around people who annoy me as much as these fellow travelers and Communists do.”86

  The message that came through—from both the committee’s loaded questions and the friendly witnesses’ loaded answers—was persistent and threatening: Hollywood was riddled with Reds, and the studios were doing nothing about it. Adolphe Menjou reprised the Hollywood strikes of 1945 and 1946, labeling CSU boss Herbert Sorrell a card-carrying Communist and praising Reagan for “the magnificent job” he had done in trying “to settle this strike in every way possible.”87 He carried guilt by association to new extremes in a prize exchange with Congressman Nixon: Divorce: 1947–1948

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/>   Mr. Nixon: Have you any other test which you would apply which would indicate to you that people acted like Communists?

  Mr. Menjou: Well, I think attending any meetings at which Mr.

  Paul Robeson appeared, and applauding or listening to his Communist songs in America. I would be ashamed to be seen in an audience doing a thing of that kind.88

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  It was against this backdrop of hype and hysteria that Reagan testified, on the fourth day. If the press covered the hearings like a spectacle, Reagan seemed to approach his appearance like a performance. He had observed the proceedings of the previous afternoon from the spectators’ section and had rehearsed his testimony in his hotel room with Stripling.89 “There was a long drawn-out ‘ooooh’ from the jam-packed, predominantly feminine audience,” The New York Times reported, as Reagan strode to the witness table the following morning, dressed for the part of youthful white knight in a tan gabardine suit, white shirt, and navy knit tie.90 Lest he come across as too glamorous or lightweight, he carefully put on his glasses as he began his testimony. One could say that this was the moment when Ronald Reagan perfected the public persona he had been developing since he took to the speaking circuit at the end of the war—a finely calibrated mixture of small-town friendliness, movie star shine, and political gravitas. His testimony was balanced, sober, clear, and forceful.

  “As president of the Screen Actors Guild,” Stripling asked, “have you at any time observed or noted within the organization a clique of either Communists or Fascists who were attempting to exert influence or pressure on the guild?”

  “Well, sir, my testimony must be very similar to that of Mr. Murphy and Mr. Montgomery,” Reagan replied, referring to the former SAG presidents whose testimony had just been heard. “There has been a small group within the Screen Actors Guild which has consistently opposed the policy of the guild board and officers of the guild, as evidenced by the vote on various issues. That small clique referred to has been suspected of more or less following the tactics that we associate with the Communist Party.”