Reagan

by Bob Spitz

  While Brother Rat and a Baby edged into production in late 1939, Germany invaded Poland, plunging Europe into war. Would the crisis give FDR the impetus to run for an unprecedented third term? Would he, should he, involve America in the conflict? As a loyal Democrat and avowed pacifist, Reagan was consumed by the drama. He pored through the newspapers each day, arming himself with an arsenal of facts to justify his political opinions. “Ronnie always had a cause,” said Leon Ames. “And he loved to talk.” He was a font of knowledge and information offered generously, whether requested or not. Some considered him a know-it-all, a nuisance. He held fellow actors captive during the long stretches of downtime on the set. “This time appeared to represent a splendid opportunity for serious social discourse,” recalled Larry Williams, “a chance to express his animated views on an infinite variety of subjects to us.” Williams, who worked on five movies with Ronnie, acknowledged that the novelty soon wore out its welcome. The worst that could befall you as an actor during camera setups and rehearsals, he said, was to have Ronald Reagan sit down next to you, push on a pair of oversized glasses, spread out a sheaf of notes, and launch into one of Professor Reagan’s rambling discourses from which there was no escape. “When we were released around noontime to walk over to the studio commissary, the thing got to be to see who could come in last—or at any rate behind Ronnie.” It gave them a chance to scope out where he’d be sitting so as to eat undisturbed, “in amiable but total silence.”

  If in general his colleagues were far from appreciative, Reagan did have a small, eager band of political sparring partners. Jane Bryan’s boyfriend, a retailer named Justin Dart, looked forward to going head-to-head with Ronnie. Dart was from the opposite end of the political spectrum. His expertise lay in economics, and his conservative approach to all things financial began to chip away at Ronnie’s New Deal resolve. Theirs was the kind of heated give-and-take that Ronald Reagan thrived on; Justin Dart provided it for the next forty years.

  Ronnie also went at it with Dick Powell. They’d already appeared in a number of movies together and enjoyed a casual friendship, occasionally playing golf and double-dating. Powell was one of the few actors—and even fewer Hollywood Republicans—who regularly engaged him in political debate. “Arguing politics drew them together,” June Allyson, Powell’s wife, wrote in her autobiography. The two men’s views were light-years apart. Powell hewed vehemently to the Republican Party line and spent countless hours attempting to convert Ronnie, warning him about the manipulation of left-wing radicals. It was futile. “I was a loyal New Deal Democrat,” Ronald Reagan recalled. “I always believed that all of this left-wing talk was Republican propaganda.”

  Ronnie could always count on Jack when in need of support. His father might have lost a step or two as a result of the stroke, but he continued to be a liberal firebrand. Politics was the one issue that never failed to invigorate. If anything, the move to California gave Jack Reagan a prominent soapbox. In Los Angeles, unlike Dixon, he was surrounded by Democrats who were willing to listen to his fiery rhetoric, and who gave support to a president who was worshipped unconditionally.

  Ronnie had moved out of the hotel in Hollywood to a snug cottage on a lovely palm-lined street just north of Sunset Boulevard, within proximity to his parents. The day was rare that he didn’t visit. He’d stop by their place on his way home from the studio to fill them in on his work on the set as well as to keep tabs on his fan mail. Since Brother Rat’s release, the requests for autographed photos had swelled. Rather than handling the chore of responding to them himself, he created a job for Jack, who bemoaned his inability to do meaningful work. As a result, Jack made weekly trips to Warner Bros. where he interacted with the mail department and drew a steady if nominal paycheck.

  Frequently, Ronnie would bring Jane Wyman along on his visits, which might have been a miscalculation. She had never come to terms with being abandoned by her own parents, and Reagan’s closeness to his generated complicated emotions. “Ronnie had this wonderful relationship with his mother,” Wyman said. “I sensed it. I wanted to have a part of it.”

  Marriage would seal the deal, but Ronnie was in no hurry to make the commitment. The former husbands, the unquenchable thirst for nightlife, the impulsiveness, the unrelenting drive, the neediness conspired to keep him at bay. For all the body heat he generated, Ronald Reagan was basically a down-to-earth man. Some friends questioned whether they were suited for each other. “She was so experienced, hard-boiled, intense, and passionate,” observed an intimate of Jane’s, who thought Ronnie “was so pragmatic . . . rather a square . . . a little earthbound” for her. Even Louella Parsons found Jane “so nervous and tense” compared with “steady, solid, decent young Ronnie.” Leaping into marriage seemed loaded with risk.

  Jane claimed he eventually gave in, proposing on the set of Brother Rat and a Baby. In fact, evidence points to a different scenario. Their relationship had reached an intractable impasse. Jane couldn’t stand it any longer, at which point she performed the ultimate act of desperation. As principal photography on the movie concluded, the Hollywood trades announced on October 4, 1939, that she had suffered the recurrence of an old “stomach disorder” and was hospitalized. It was the kind of vague press release that studios put out about stars to conceal a more serious disorder, like a breakdown—or worse. Years later, Nancy Reagan disclosed that Jane threatened to kill herself if Ronnie didn’t marry her—and followed through by taking a stash of pills and leaving a suicide note to explain. At the hospital, she refused to see him. This tactic had the desired effect. The next day, he returned and demanded entry to her room. By the time he left, they were officially engaged.

  * * *

  —

  Warner Bros. press-managed the marriage announcement. Louella Parsons was given the scoop, but she put off revealing it for another few months until her own plans were finalized. She had talked Warner Bros. into underwriting a traveling variety show—Hollywood Stars of 1940 on Parade—which would feature six of the studio’s most promising contract players in a series of skits, and was designed as a starring vehicle for Parsons. There was plenty of groundwork yet to be laid—whittling down the cast, writing a script, booking an itinerary that would take them across the country. In the interim, she dropped hints in her column that “two of Hollywood’s very nicest young people” were heading to the altar. The studio had already put out word that Ronnie had been “wooing the blonde Miss Wyman” and had given her a fifty-two-carat amethyst ring, leaving little doubt as to who Parsons’s mystery couple might be.

  In any case, Jane and Ronnie’s presence would give her show the requisite sparkle. They were announced for the cast, along with actresses Susan Hayward, June Preisser, and Arleen Whelan. Joy Hodges was also recruited to provide musical relief. The focal point, however, was Louella’s column, which would be “dictated” by her and “filed” live each night from a Teletype machine that was rolled onstage. Of course, it was so much hokum; the Teletype was a nonfunctioning prop, as was the telephone she used to “interview” Charlie Chaplin and Claudette Colbert. Her coup de théâtre would be the revelation that the two lovebirds, Jane Wyman and Ronald Reagan, were engaged.

  Parsons took the show to Santa Barbara for a tryout, then moved the company to San Francisco, where subtle tensions surfaced among the cast. Jane’s sonar picked up vibrations between Ronnie and Susan Hayward during a corny skit they mugged their way through, flinging her into a jealous funk. The discord didn’t help the company’s performance, which local critics found overly long and lackluster. It took everything Ronnie could muster to pacify Jane. He showered her with attention, teaching her his Eureka College songs, which they sang in harmony on buses transporting them to the theaters. On the trip east, during a terrifying plane ride—Ronnie’s first—in which they were forced down in a blinding snowstorm, he comforted a distraught Jane Wyman, despite his own deepening dread, a dread that kept him off airplanes for the next twenty-sev
en years.

  Once Jane’s insecurity was neutralized, the show hit its stride. On Ronnie’s first visit east, in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and New York, the actors played to sold-out audiences and were mobbed at the stage doors for autographs and photos. Ronnie found his footing as the troupe’s amiable emcee, playing straight man to his various co-stars. His facility onstage seemed effortless, his charm infectious. He had a real gift for connecting with an audience that proved more potent in person than on a movie screen. He was obviously more comfortable playing himself than burrowing into the inner lives of fictional characters. Too often, he disappeared in a picture, unable to capture sustained emotions. He couldn’t convey the necessary temperament that superior acting required. It was an entirely different story onstage, where he communicated an affability that was honest, and appreciated.

  As 1939 drew to a close, the Hollywood Stars revue rolled into Washington, D.C., and Ronald Reagan got his first look at the nation’s capital. To Ronnie’s starry eye, Washington was still a city that symbolized the spirit of American democracy and national identity. He could feel it emanate from the rock-solid landmarks that set off the skyline—the awe-inspiring monuments to his boyhood heroes George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and the White House itself, venerable home of his idol, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  Politics was very much on his mind. The papers had been full of reports that week about Finland’s “stout resistance” to an attempted Soviet invasion and how Russian planes had dropped leaflets urging the Finns to rebel against their leaders “and join your Russian friends.” During interviews with the Washington dailies that had been set up to publicize the show, Finland and politics-politics-politics was all Ronnie could talk about. “He did not always pick his spots to expound on such knowledge,” Joy Hodges recalled. Louella Parsons seethed as he frittered away her moment in the spotlight.

  Being in Washington captivated Ronnie. In between six days of shows at the Capitol Theater, with Jane and Joy in tow, he headed to Mount Vernon, to visit George Washington’s homestead. “He was eager to absorb as much as possible about the history,” Hodges recalled. He seemed particularly fascinated by Washington’s rolltop desk. It was a magnificent piece—a bureau à cylinder–style console of mahogany and pine with maple inlay. Ronnie stood in front of it for an inordinate amount of time, “practically salivating over it.” Jane also took note and decided to surprise him with a replica for a wedding gift.

  The big day was drawing close. The tour officially ended on January 14, 1940, with the ceremony set for January 26. After an exhausting four-day train ride back to Los Angeles, there was little time left to finalize arrangements. No sooner had they set foot back in town than Warner Bros. seizing the chance to make hay of the marriage, slapped Ronnie and Jane into a paper-thin movie, announcing that “they’ll be husband and wife for the first time in . . . Angel from Texas.” Warner was doing them no favors. The vehicle was a tired, old warhorse—George S. Kaufman’s 1925 Broadway farce The Butter and Egg Man—dusted off and re-saddled for the fourth time by the studio. (It had been made as The Tenderfoot in 1932, Hello, Sweetheart in 1935, and again as Dance Charlie Dance in 1937.) Most of the cast of Brother Rat was reassembled in the hope of making it a familiar, more audience-friendly movie, but nothing could salvage it.

  In the meantime, the wedding came together with stunning swiftness. Louella Parsons stage-managed the affair, ensuring she’d have access to all the behind-the-scenes details. She even maneuvered her husband into giving the bride away and arranged for a gala reception following the ceremony at her house. Otherwise Jane and Ronnie opted to keep the chapel service small. Only their immediate families and a few close friends were invited to attend the rites at the Wee Kirk o’ the Heather Church in Glendale, where Bill Cook, one of Ronnie’s Drake College pals, stood in as best man. Jane, in a pale-blue satin gown and matching sable muff and hat borrowed from the studio’s wardrobe department, stole the show, as expected. She was “beautiful beyond dreams,” according to a guest—and visibly assured, optimistic, radiant. There was no trace of the awful insecurity or desperation that had plagued her earlier, no residue from the two hasty marriages that were over practically before they’d begun. “Third time’s a charm,” her appearance seemed to convey as she stood for pictures next to her dashing husband. They looked every inch the movie stars destined for a happy ending.

  “Theirs is the perfect marriage,” Louella Parsons gushed in print the next day. Not everyone saw it that way. “I hope my Ronald has made the right choice,” worried Nelle Reagan in a letter to a Dixon friend. “I was in hopes he would fall in love with some sweet girl who is not in the movies.”

  No such luck, not in Hollywood, where the girl always gets her man.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “WHERE’S . . . WHERE’S THE REST OF ME?”

  “Talk about a dream, try to make it real.”

  —BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, “Badlands”

  The movie business was a disconcerting dance. Every picture seemed to take Ronald Reagan one step forward followed by two steps back. His admirers saw the advances as part of a progression, moves up a ladder, that eventually led to stardom. Others, like Hal Wallis, who ran the Warner Bros. production line, felt that Reagan “was not an actor of depth or intensity,” and was more suited to trivial adventure yarns and light romantic comedies. Each time Reagan edged close to prestige, as he did with fifth billing in Dark Victory opposite Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart, he followed with a clunker, reprising Brass Bancroft or playing off the Dead End Kids. Rightly or wrongly, he’d been typecast as a lightweight. Even the relative acclaim that greeted Brother Rat hadn’t been enough to raise his status. An actor’s success was measured by the strength of upcoming projects on his schedule. “When you were struggling for recognition they only put you in the B’s,” recalls Olivia de Havilland. “As soon as you made an impact in one or two, the scripts they offered got measurably better, which meant you’d graduated to the A list. If you registered there, you had it made.” De Havilland says that Ronnie “generated so much good will by his affability that everyone wanted him to make an impression in an important film.” But good will didn’t count in the Warner Bros. executive suite. When he and Jane returned from their Palm Springs honeymoon, the studio played them up as “romantic young marrieds,” but stuck them in a pair of inconsequential retreads—him in Murder in the Air, her in Flight Angels, and both in Tugboat Annie Sails Again. Ronnie determined to take matters into his own hands. He always felt that the right dramatic story would deliver a breakthrough role and that it might ultimately fall to him to track one down. From the moment he joined the Warner Bros. roster, he began waging an intense, unfaltering campaign to convince Bryan Foy that the saga of football hero Knute Rockne was worth a major feature. Foy never responded one way or the other, but shortly before his wedding Ronnie spotted an announcement in Variety that Warner Bros. was putting The Life of Knute Rockne into production, with Pat O’Brien in the title role.

  Reagan felt he’d been had, but he also sensed an opportunity. There was a plum part for him in that story, not the title role of the Notre Dame coach, but that of George Gipp, the legendary all-American halfback who died of a throat infection at the age of twenty-five just days after leading the Fighting Irish to a win over Northwestern. Rockne used the apocryphal story of Gipp, with his deathbed line—“win just one for the Gipper”—to fire up his team in an improbable victory against Army in 1928. Ronnie knew that playing Gipp could steal the show. Never mind that George Gipp was a reprobate who drank, smoked, hustled pool, rarely practiced with the team, bet on Notre Dame games, and was expelled from the university for misconduct. In the movie version, he’d be a saint.

  Unfortunately, Hal Wallis wanted no part of Ronald Reagan. In truth, he wasn’t thrilled about Pat O’Brien, either. Casting the picture had proved nothing but a headache. Wallis always envisioned Spencer Tracy in the role of Rockne, but Tracy was under contrac
t to MGM, which refused all entreaties to loan him out. James Cagney had been the studio’s second choice, but the good fathers of Notre Dame balked. Cagney, the studio’s spokesman argued, portrayed too many roles of “the gangster type,” which would cast a pall over St. Knute, to say nothing of its opposition to Cagney’s support of “the Loyalist Cause” in Spain. Pat O’Brien was a perfectly inoffensive substitute, which Warner Bros. reluctantly agreed to support, pretty certain “we could get those double chins off and knock ten or fifteen years off his looks.”

  Ronald Reagan was a harder sell. He’d never been on Wallis’s radar. For Gipp, Wallis had already rejected John Wayne, Robert Cummings, Robert Young, and William Holden, all certified stars, but not his idea of football players. Scripts were out to Dennis Morgan and Donald Woods, both beefier, more rugged specimens. A plea to Bryan Foy landed Ronnie in Wallis’s office. This time, he came prepared with props—college photos of him in uniform as a Eureka College Golden Tornado. Grudgingly, Wallis agreed to shoot a test.

  He needed no further convincing after screening clips of Ronnie, Morgan, and Woods, each competing in a scrimmage scene with O’Brien. It was clear from the outset that Ronald Reagan was a much more plausible football player, and he had Gipp down cold.

  Winning the role was a turning point for Ronnie. And other things were falling into place, too. As of April 11, 1940, the day Knute Rockne, All-American began production on location at Loyola University, he was comfortably resettled into Jane’s spacious apartment with a view of Los Angeles practically to the ocean. His brother, Neil, had moved to the city, and true to form, Ronnie got him work, bit parts in Tugboat Annie Sails Again and an Edward G. Robinson vehicle called Destroyer. In addition, Ronnie’s Warner Bros. contract was being renegotiated, this time with more muscle. Only a month earlier, he had been notified that Bill Meiklejohn’s agency had been absorbed into MCA—the powerful Music Corporation of America—which meant he would henceforth be represented by Lew Wasserman, a twenty-seven-year-old power broker whose furtive, low-key manner, it was said, was similar to a panther’s that purred before it struck.