by Bob Spitz
Being a client of MCA signaled a huge step forward. The agency had changed the way entertainment business was conducted. It already represented more than half of the big bands in the country, using tactics that some viewed as unethical. A pact with the American Federation of Musicians’ union boss, James Petrillo, prevented competing agencies from obtaining licenses to operate, giving MCA a virtual monopoly of the business. The agency also received a pass to sidestep union rules prohibiting it from acting as both agent and radio production company—an obvious conflict of interest—thus allowing MCA to package a program from top to bottom with only its clients for as much as 30 percent of the profit. Rumors of mob influence were rife.
By 1937, MCA had spread its tentacles to motion pictures and landed Bette Davis, just nominated for her second Best Actress Oscar, as its first nonmusical client. Her stamp of approval touched off a wave of movie-star signings that included Joan Crawford, John Garfield, Betty Grable, Errol Flynn, Barbara Stanwyck, and Jane Wyman. The agency pushed to get bigger fast. By signing up the most important names in Hollywood, it could put the same squeeze on studios that it had on ballroom owners. To strengthen its roster, MCA began raiding smaller agencies or, like Meiklejohn’s, gobbling them up whole. Within eight years MCA represented practically a third of all Hollywood stars, including directors and producers, and had earned the nickname “the Octopus.”
The agency’s power delivered immediately for the Reagans. Jane, who was earning a pitiful $500 a week in trifles like Gambling on the High Seas and Honeymoon for Three, won a new three-year contract, with guarantees of $1,500 a week, escalating to $2,500. Ronnie’s was an even better deal. On August 25, 1940, based on favorable word of mouth from Knute Rockne previews, Wasserman renegotiated a contract that would bring him $2,750 a week. For the newlyweds, it was a king’s ransom.
Warner Bros. was betting on Ronnie’s brightening luster. A week after seeing the finished print of Knute Rockne, they sent him the script for Santa Fe Trail. The movie, a Civil War adventure, had been conceived as a vehicle for its indisputable superstar, Errol Flynn. From his debut as the title character in Captain Blood in 1935, Flynn had emerged as an overnight sensation. Young, virile, and dashing, he gave off the kind of electricity few actors could match on the screen. He was a great physical presence, what critics call a “camera actor.” In scene after scene, the camera loved him, as much for his charisma as his ability to wear costumes. How many male actors could strut around in tights, as Flynn did, in The Adventures of Robin Hood, and not get laughed off the screen? When he made his entrance in that movie with a deer slung over his shoulder, knocking people out of the way, the effect was hypnotic. It was impossible for the audience to take its eyes off the man. Ronnie considered him “a magnificent piece of machinery.” Such flash came with a prodigious ego. Flynn was notoriously difficult—and arrogant. He refused to eat lunch with his fellow actors in the Green Room of the commissary, insisting on a seat at Jack Warner’s table in an adjacent private dining room. He often holed up in his cushy bungalow on the lot, draining its well-stocked bar. His drinking binges and incessant lateness drove Warner crazy. During the filming of The Adventures of Don Juan, for example, Flynn grabbed co-star Robert Douglas and said, “On Saturday, let’s go out on my boat”—and neither man showed up on the set until the following Wednesday. His misbehavior created enormous headaches for the studio, but none of that mattered, because Flynn’s movies were blockbusters. Putting Ronald Reagan in Santa Fe Trail as a follow-up to Rockne was a calculated tactic. It would enhance his career to play opposite Flynn.
It also paired Ronnie with a first-class director in Michael Curtiz. One of Jack Warner’s trophy European imports, the Hungarian had distinguished himself in the silent era with his deft, expressive camera work. He was a master of montage and loved chiaroscuro, most expertly demonstrated in his silent spectacle Noah’s Ark. Some critics considered his direction of The Charge of the Light Brigade a masterpiece of action photography. “He loved motion and exciting scenes,” says the film professor Alan Spiegel, “everything except developing the emotional life of a character.” Later, during the filming of Casablanca, Curtiz made that sentiment perfectly clear. “Who cares about character?” he announced between scenes. “I make it go so fast nobody notices.”
Actors were not Curtiz’s cup of tea. “He was a bully,” says de Havilland, who worked with Curtiz in four previous pictures before being cast in Santa Fe Trail. “He was rude, caustic, abusive, and we all dreaded working with him. Besides, he had no regard for actors or their craft.” His battles with actors were legendary. Though he worked with Bette Davis in five Warner Bros. films, he dismissed her as a “goddamned nothing, no-good sexless son of a bitch.” And he butted heads consistently with Errol Flynn. They had already made seven pictures together, including Robin Hood and The Prince and the Pauper. It didn’t help matters that Flynn was married to Lili Damita, Curtiz’s ex-wife.
To add to the volatility on the set of Santa Fe Trail, the script was a mess. It was a story about John Brown that couldn’t make its mind up about slavery. Early on, Brown’s abolitionist crusade is portrayed as just, but later he’s presented as a demented fanatic and assassin who has to be destroyed. Van Heflin, who plays an abolitionist, is inexplicably the villain in the piece. And the central friendship between General J. E. B. Stuart, played by Flynn, and George Armstrong Custer, a dashing Ronnie sans the traditional Custer beard and mustache, is more than a bit preposterous, considering the two men never met and were adversaries in the Civil War. The casting had itself ignited controversy. John Wayne initially agreed to play Custer, but he backed out after reading the script. Soon afterward, the studio announced that Wayne Morris, a highly regarded member of its stock company, had assumed the role. Once the Knute Rockne previews were seen, however, Morris was summarily replaced by Ronnie, which sowed little goodwill on the set. No one, least of all Errol Flynn, was happy.
“Flynn saw Ronnie as a threat,” de Havilland recalls. “They were both strapping, incredibly handsome men, but one was the star and the other was gaining ground on him.” She describes a publicity photo shoot that was scheduled between scenes, in which Flynn’s Confederate troops were to be lined up around him. “Ronnie was centered behind and above him in the second row,” de Havilland says. “Flynn noticed the placement and huddled with the director, who saw to it that the area was leveled. When the company was called together again for the actual shooting of the picture, Ronnie [noted] the change right away and quietly and inconspicuously began shifting the earth with his feet, forming a mound. Seconds before the photo was taken, he mounted that small knoll, his head rising above Mr. Flynn’s.”
Most of the scenes for the movie were shot on location at the Warner Ranch, a rural 2,300-acre spread of rolling hills and oak trees in Calabasas, where Harry Warner raised thoroughbreds and where the studio had constructed western sets and a facsimile Mexican town. The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Charge of the Light Brigade had done principal photography there. Juarez, with Paul Muni and Bette Davis, had just finished production.
From the outset, problems arose with Flynn. According to de Havilland, “Flynn repeatedly showed up hours late for outdoor night shooting, prolonging our work until sunrise.” The actors joined forces to register a formal complaint with the company’s union representative, Ronald Reagan, who was reluctant to take on the star. “Ronnie asked me to speak to Flynn on his behalf, figuring Flynn would not respect him. And he was right. Plus, there was too much rivalry. So the dirty work was left to me.”
It was a rare instance of Ronnie backing down from a position he relished and took seriously. From 1938 through the summer of 1940, he’d acted as the designated union monitor on each picture he made, not only advocating on behalf of his fellow actors but promoting the Screen Actors Guild itself, an outfit he considered “a damned noble organization” that was instrumental in adjusting the balance of power in Hollywood at a time when acto
rs had no rights.
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Before SAG’s formation in 1933, most movie actors toiled in conditions not unlike workers on a sweatshop assembly line. Not the stars, the actors whose marquee value gave them leverage, but the segment known industrywide as “day players,” the almost 90 percent of the acting community who earned fifteen dollars for one day’s work, which is about all they worked each week, if they were lucky. “There was a caste system at the studios,” says de Havilland. Actors of her stature were protected by contracts, which limited the number of hours they worked and guaranteed livable salaries. Most, however, were on their own and subject to the whim of the owners. Freelance actors hired for a movie were on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, often for weeks on end, but only got paid for the few hours they worked. There was no overtime, no compensation for late nights or travel. And they could be terminated at any time, without reason or means of relief.
The owners rule was all-powerful—despotic. At a meeting of the producers’ association in early 1933, Louis B. Mayer and his head of production, Irving Thalberg, suggested “non-raiding” agreements between the studios to force actors to remain where they were. Only producer B. P. Schulberg spoke out against it, saying, “You know we had a war to solve that. It was called the Civil War and it freed the slaves.”
The first shots were fired in March 1933, when the studios, feeling the pinch of the Depression, notified all actors making more than fifty dollars a week that they’d be taking a 50 percent pay cut. Actors earning less would be docked 25 percent. Without any recourse, the actors caved in. They’d attempted to organize before and were blacklisted for their efforts. This time, a cell of six actors met in secret at the home of Kenneth and Alden Gay Thomson to sow the seeds of a self-governing union. Papers of incorporation for the Screen Actors Guild were filed on June 30, 1933.
Studios threatened all kinds of repercussions, but the biggest stars rushed to the rescue. James Cagney, Cary Grant, Harpo Marx, Walter Pidgeon, Dick Powell, Joan Crawford, Boris Karloff, and half a dozen others signed their names to the guild charter, providing the actors with a wall of invincibility. “We were all from different studios and hadn’t ever met each other,” de Havilland recalls. “This brought us together in a powerful way.” That exclusive star-studded committee had a snowball effect; by the end of the year, most of the industry superstars had pledged.
Still, the studios refused to surrender. It took another four years, and the threat of a strike, before they agreed to a union shop. But as of 1937, all actors were required to join SAG, a stipulation that at first bugged new Warner Bros. employee Ronald Reagan. He resented being forced to join a union and paying its quarterly dues of $7.50. It took an elderly silent-film actress named Helen Broderick to set him straight. He recalled how “she nailed me in a corner of the commissary . . . after I made a crack about having to join a union, and gave me an hour’s lecture on the facts of life.” He’d never realized the degree to which the studios had exploited its day players, the deplorable working conditions imposed on its ranks before collective bargaining took hold. Jack also helped to bring him around. His father was a flag bearer for workingmen’s rights. But by the time he met Jane Wyman, Ronald Reagan’s conversion was complete.
Jane Wyman was an active member of the Screen Actors Guild, “a good, solid board member,” as she was recalled, “a hard worker, but not a leader.” As far as leaders went, Jane told her fellow board members as early as 1938 that she “knew a guy who really had a lot on the ball,” an actor she was dating named Ronald Reagan, who would be a valuable addition to their group. In fact, the way she introduced him—“I want you to meet the man who will one day be president of the Screen Actors Guild, and you’re going to be delighted”—struck Jack Dales, the board’s executive secretary, as a bit much. Nonetheless, Ronnie made an impression. Later, Dales would acknowledge, “Jane Wyman wasn’t wrong. From the very start . . . one knew that he was in the presence of a fairly extraordinary man in terms of his ability to negotiate and to deal with union terms.” Ronnie was a very quick study. His oratorial ability, coupled with strong social and political convictions—that attracted immediate attention. “Actors much better known and obviously more successful,” Dales said, “accorded Ronnie tremendous respect from the beginning.”
Again and again, he was nominated to be the guild’s monitor—the actors’ rep—on the sets of his films. He didn’t mind standing up to management and had a way of airing grievances that didn’t alienate them. According to an observer, “He seemed to enjoy the challenge.”
Ronnie was settling into his skin. For the first time since he arrived in Hollywood, he was being taken seriously. He was married to an actress of great promise, his movies were garnering critical notice, and he was routinely being mentioned for projects earmarked for A-list stars. In a 1940 year-end wrap-up, Variety named him Warner Bros.’ top contract player, which followed on the heels of a Louella Parsons announcement that “the whole country is getting Reagan conscious.” The right movie, he knew, could catapult him onto the same plane as Pat O’Brien and Dick Powell, maybe even Errol Flynn. For a man who’d come west three years earlier with next to nothing, the view was promising indeed.
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The year 1941 began and ended with a bang, with tremors reverberating from pole to pole.
Four days after celebrating the new year, Jane gave birth to a five-and-a-half-pound girl they named Maureen Elizabeth. According to Ronnie, Jane had begun campaigning for a baby practically from the day they were married. “I wanted one, too,” he said to a reporter, “but I used all my male logic to persuade her that every young couple ought to wait a year. She agreed I was right as usual and she was wrong. So we had a baby.”
Convinced it was going to be a boy, they printed up a humorous military birth announcement for “General Ronald Reagan Jr.,” a play on Ronnie’s upcoming role in Flight Patrol (released as International Squadron). Jane made no bones about her initial disappointment. “I wanted a boy,” she admitted in a sulky postpartum moment. But she recovered quickly, and they both doted on their daughter, Maureen.
For a while, the Reagans fashioned a nursery in a vacant apartment adjoining their own, but they outgrew it almost from the outset. The apartment simply wasn’t conducive to raising a child. Within weeks, they purchased a lovely plot of land on a secluded side street high in the hills above Sunset Boulevard. They would build from scratch. But—what? Not a palatial Hollywood “manse,” as the trades called sprawling movie-star estates. Not one of the gaudy Spanish-style villas or Norman chateaus that begged for envy in exclusive Beverly Hills. It had to be tasteful, a place where they could entertain but still be comfortable, livable, modest, something that reflected their current status. Ronnie, a stickler for budgets, was determined to economize. “We don’t want to go out on a limb,” he cautioned his wife.
Keeping house plans modest seemed like an impossible task. Their social circle—the Dick Powells and Jack Bennys—lived like pashas, with screening rooms and cabanas overlooking Mediterranean tiled pools. Stars were tempted to live up to their fairy-tale existences, but the Reagans struggled to stay low-key. That meant keeping things under control. For several months they pored over and rejected plans that made no sense, financial or otherwise. One night, while Nelle and Jack babysat Maureen, Ronnie and Jane slipped out to the movies and saw This Thing Called Love, a lowbrow comedy with Rosalind Russell and Melvyn Douglas. The couple in the film had little chemistry, but Jane couldn’t take her eyes off their house. The layout was exactly what she wanted. “Next morning, we dashed over to Columbia [Pictures] and got the plans,” she recalled. The house itself was a fairly middle-class affair: seven sun-washed rooms that included an open living room–den configuration, featuring built-in bookshelves on either side of a brick fireplace, three bedrooms, dressing areas for each of the movie stars, and a shaded flagstone patio fro
nting a breathtaking sweep of lawn with plantings that afforded plenty of privacy. Scaling back and counting pennies as they compromised, revised plans, then revised again, the house came in at an affordable $15,000. With a twenty-year government-backed mortgage, their monthly payment was a manageable $125.
Now more than ever, they swore to a budget. Ronnie continued to shoulder his parents’ living expenses and Jane had gone overboard furnishing the house. Fortunately, however, neither was a spendthrift. Their impoverished childhoods remained a strong part of who they were, making them conscious of every dollar they spent. They pledged to adhere to strict allowances: no more than twenty-five dollars each per week.
Their finances took on more significance as the months passed and their respective careers suffered a series of setbacks. Jane had gotten sidetracked by “putting wifehood and motherhood first,” while overseeing the house construction. Even though she’d gone swiftly back to work, the studio stuck her in a series of slapdash B’s—Honeymoon for Three, Bad Men of Missouri, The Body Disappears, and You’re in the Army Now. “I was twenty-seven years old, had been in films for nine years, and felt like a total beginner,” she complained. Ronnie’s career slid in the same sorry direction. After the promise of Knute Rockne, a superficial film like International Squadron did him no favors, nor did The Bad Man or the silly, slender Million Dollar Baby.
And the quality of the parts coming their way increasingly seemed like the least of their worries. America was on the verge of war. Western Europe had fallen into Nazi hands with horrifying swiftness. Hungary and Romania had joined the Axis. Japan was on the move. Up to now, America had remained assiduously neutral, but that was about to change. On October 29, 1940, FDR, poised for an unprecedented third term in office, ordered the first peacetime military draft in U.S. history. Defying widespread isolationist sentiment, in March 1941 Congress authorized FDR’s Lend-Lease program to aid England, which was a virtual declaration of war against Germany.
