Reagan

by Bob Spitz

  The assignments he was getting vexed Ronnie. It was difficult to determine what the studio had in mind for him. He’d shared star billing with Errol Flynn, but what did it matter if the movie stank? He was being passed over for pictures like Casablanca and Now, Voyager. Maybe he shouldn’t have said yes to every script put in front of him. Bill Meiklejohn recalled that “he did more or less what the studio asked him to do” without exercising much critical judgment. Perhaps if he had declined a few of the lamer scripts, as Bogart, Cagney, and Flynn had done, he might have found himself in a better negotiating position—or at least in better movies. He was still putting finishing touches on Desperate Journey and wrestling with his frustrations on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

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  Now America was finally at war. Reagan would most likely see it from a distance. He’d be thirty-one in another two months, just about the top age limit set by the Selective Service. He had a dependent child, as well as being the sole supporter of his mother. If nothing else, his eyesight remained disqualifying. Besides, Jack Warner had secured another deferment for him, keeping him off the active duty rolls until April 9, 1942. But the War Department made it clear that Ronnie’s name was on a priority list and would be called whenever his name reached the top. Studios were hemorrhaging male stars who rushed to enlist in the weeks immediately following Pearl Harbor. Jimmy Stewart was already gone, along with Clark Gable. Warner was determined to keep Ronnie working for as long as possible. To be on the safe side, Warner had his general counsel, Roy Obringer, petition the U.S. Army on March 28, explaining the studio’s “tremendous investment” in its current production and requesting an extension on Ronnie’s deferment so that he could complete “the patriotic film” Desperate Journey.

  Someone must have slipped the Army a copy of the script, because on April 2, they sent Warner a telegram denying his request due to a “shortage of available officers.” They expected “2nd Lt. Ronald Wilson Reagan” to report for duty at Fort Mason, California, no later than April 19, 1942.

  Jane didn’t take the news well. She was enjoying a late-afternoon visit with Claudette Colbert when Ronnie arrived home and blurted out the details of his orders. “She was furious with him,” Colbert told Edmund Morris. “She said he’d gone behind her back to sign up,” stranding her at home to take care of Maureen at a time when she’d planned to relaunch her career. And that wasn’t all. Jane also knew that, patriotism aside, Warner Bros. stood by a strict policy to suspend actors’ salaries the same day they went off to war. His Army pay amounted to a measly $250 a month. How did he expect they’d make payments on their new home, raise a child, and maintain a Hollywood standard of living on only her income?

  And there was the cost of supporting Nelle, with the house rental and weekly allowance. Ronnie dashed off a memo to Jack Warner’s office, suggesting that his mother be put on the studio payroll at a cost of $75 a week to answer his fan mail and take care of other minor details. Warner didn’t even draft a personal response. He simply scrawled “We can’t set a precedent” across Ronnie’s request and had it returned. It took several additional pleas until Warner relented, agreeing to take Ronnie’s note for an interest-free loan of $3,900 repayable upon his return to work, against which the studio would send Nelle $75 a week for a year.

  There were still fourteen days of work left on Desperate Journey, requiring the production to shuffle the schedule in order to complete Ronnie’s scenes. “Long shots and shots of my back were saved for a double after I was gone,” he recalled.

  There were plenty of other loose ends to wrap up, including the final details on his new contract that would be in force—but on suspension—while he served in the military. Kings Row was set for release after he left for Fort Mason, but there was no reason to worry about publicizing the movie. There was a war on. He was in the Army now.

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  After a nine-hour train trip from Los Angeles to a fog-bound San Francisco, Ronnie flagged a taxi to take him the last few miles to Fort Mason. Just past Russian Hill, the cab headed toward the corner where Franklin intersected Bay Street, plunging down the hilly landscape as though on a final hair-raising roller-coaster drop. Looking down from the road, Ronnie could see the chalky ramparts of the fort stretched out like a mirage over the Pacific Ocean. Wedged between Fisherman’s Wharf on the northern rim of San Francisco Bay and the Marina District to the south, the fort was an enormous compound of forty-nine buildings situated on a headland close to water level.

  Fort Mason served as the principal logistical and transport hub for U.S. military operations in the Pacific. No other port aside from New York harbor had a more vital strategic function. In the eighty years since the government had seized the site for use as coastal defense, an extensive sprawl of warehouses, batteries, and tunnels had been added to shore up its fortification.

  It took Ronnie hours to locate his commanding officer, Colonel Philip T. Booker, a no-nonsense military lifer with a ramrod-straight bearing and clipped way of delivering orders. Booker was specific and to the point. Ronnie was to act as a liaison officer, directing a company of ROTC cadets who were in the process of loading convoys of troops headed to Australia. Two days earlier, the last U.S. forces holding on to the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines had surrendered to the Japanese, necessitating a build-up of American strength to protect its forces in the southern Pacific.

  It was tedious work. Long days were occupied greasing the wheels of a lumbering bureaucracy—cataloging orders, assigning itineraries, sorting baggage and food requisitions, shuffling paper. Ronnie preferred to keep a low profile, but as the only celebrity on the base he was roped into performing in several military sideshows—as the centerpiece in a Sunday-newspaper spread in full dress uniform, at a Hollywood rally to launch the USO program, in bond drives, at charity benefits, at several dinners with high-ranking officers, and, worst of all, at a squirmy screening at the post-theater of Kings Row, his first opportunity to see the final print, in which he was introduced from the audience and prodded to speak. He grew “tired of being used as a showpiece.”

  A remedy arrived just in time. In late May 1942, after only five weeks at Fort Mason, Lieutenant Reagan was notified that he was being reassigned—transferred out of the cavalry into an Air Corps unit. How ironic—he a man who refused to fly. There was no telling where he would wind up. One could only imagine the outposts where wartime efforts were churning around the clock—places like Kearney, Nebraska; Spartanburg, South Carolina; Paris, Texas; Neosho, Missouri; Camp Breckinridge in the extreme western part of Kentucky; Camp Blanding in Florida, described as “a playground for . . . the most stylish group of alligators this side of the Congo.” When his assignment came through, it was all he could do not to burst out laughing. He was being sent to . . . Hollywood. His orders were to report to 4151 Prospect Avenue, the old Vitagraph Studios in East Hollywood that the Warner brothers had purchased in 1925 when they gambled their future on talking pictures.

  Since 1940, Hollywood had been doing its part in the U.S. military’s propaganda efforts. All of the major studios had been commissioned to make short training films for the Army Signal Corps. Disney had made a number of aircraft identification films. Warner Bros. was responsible for producing a slew of military shorts, including 1940’s March On, Marines, Meet the Fleet, Service with the Colors, and Wings of Steel. The next year, the studio doubled down, producing Here Comes the Cavalry, Soldiers in White, and The Tanks Are Coming.

  Now that America was at war, each branch of the military reassessed how it was perceived by the public and how best to attract new recruits.

  The Air Corps had its own particular image problem. After a long, enervating battle to free itself from Army control, the Air Corps was determined to assert its autonomy through a vigorous public-relations effort. By coincidence, in 1941 Jack Warner wrote to Lieutenant General Henry “Hap”
Arnold, chief of the U.S. Army Air Corps, to gauge the possibility of making a feature based on the life of William “Billy” Mitchell, the charismatic World War I flying ace who was court-martialed for insubordination. The project was eventually shelved; however, in Warner, Arnold had found the perfect partner for his autonomy message.

  Later that year, the studio put itself in service to the Air Corps by making a short recruiting film, Winning Your Wings, narrated by Jimmy Stewart. The pitch it made was so effective that Arnold later claimed it helped attract more than a million cadets. Still, he and Warner knew there was more work to be done.

  The two men met in Arnold’s Washington office on March 8, 1942, at which time Warner, toting a sheaf of carefully typed notes, floated the idea of producing and distributing Air Corps short subjects and feature films. “After the war is won,” he emphasized, “we want to be sure that the American people will realize that it was the Air Corps that was responsible for achieving victory.” Warner proposed forming an Air Corps film-production unit under his supervision, utilizing the greatest talent Hollywood had to offer. In return, he expected to be commissioned as a “high ranking” Air Corps officer to ensure “people will know we really mean business and will be much more willing to cooperate.” The upshot was the formation of the First Motion Picture Unit—known as FMPU—under the guardianship of Lieutenant Colonel Jack Warner, Public Relations Division, Army Air Corps.

  Owen Crump, one of Warner’s short-subject producers, now an Air Force colonel, was holding down the Vitagraph post when the division got under way. The old studio donated by his boss was “virtually in shambles,” he recalled, “and with no equipment for filmmaking.” Nothing was available from the regular military supply. Warner finally sent over “three old cameras and film for training” inexperienced camera crews. However, the immediate problem wasn’t moviemaking; it was hospitality. Recruits, from technicians and craftsmen to writers and actors, were pouring in without essential facilities. Only the officers were allowed to go home at night, which left most of the company stranded at the studio. According to Crump, “We had to have cots so men could sleep on the soundstages . . . a mess to feed them.” They borrowed beds, installed showers. Crump felt increasingly overwhelmed.

  On June 8, 1942, a knock on the office door signaled unexpected relief. “I looked up and Ronald Reagan was standing there, and he had on cavalry boots,” Crump recalled.

  “Sir, I’m reporting,” Ronnie announced.

  Crump waved him inside and immediately promoted him to personnel officer, largely dumping the housing responsibilities into Ronnie’s hands. There were three hundred men under his care stationed at Vitagraph, nearly four hundred a month later. Reagan was also given the job of expanding the production ranks. “My first assignment was to recruit technicians and artists from the movie business,” he recalled. Those eligible for the draft were off-limits. His conscripts were drawn from the pool of leftovers—men deemed either physically unfit or exempt from military duty but willing to serve. There were plenty to choose from; in early 1942 “less than three percent of Hollywood was in the service.” But getting top-tier talent took some arm-twisting. “I was offering majors’ insignias to half-million-dollar-a-year movie directors.”

  The First Motion Picture Unit was officially activated on July 1, 1942. By this time, the regiment had outgrown the shabby Vitagraph quarters and was moved across town to the fully operational Hal Roach Studios in Culver City, where production on its first film, Learn and Live, was under way. At the same time, work had begun at the Las Vegas Gunnery School on The Rear Gunner, another recruiting effort. Ronnie and Burgess Meredith co-starred as a wayward youth from Kansas and his Air Corps mentor who gives him a chance to blossom into an expert marksman, eventually winning the Distinguished Service Medal. It was twenty-six minutes of pure Hollywood corn, and young men took it to heart, in some cases rushing from theaters directly to local recruitment centers.

  Once enlistment quotas increased, the FMPU turned its attention to instructional films, believing that movies offered the most efficient methods to teach raw recruits. One of the earliest efforts in this vein, released in the spring of 1943, was Recognition of the Japanese Zero Fighter, in which Ronnie played a hotshot pilot who must learn—the hard way, by accidentally shooting at the wrong plane—to distinguish between American P-40 Warhawk aircraft and Japanese Zero aircraft.

  Reagan’s work as adjutant and personnel officer kept him busy with administrative duties, but he also narrated a number of films. Cadet Classification, made in early 1943, illustrated the process whereby cadets in flight training are selected for positions as pilots, navigators, or bombardiers. In Behind the Line of Duty, chronicling the heroic exploits of Captain Hewitt T. Wheless, Ronnie’s narration was paired with President Roosevelt’s to explain how to conduct a successful mission. The Fight for the Sky followed bombing raids from the English coast into northern Germany, and featured Ronnie’s prediction that “when we start heading over Berlin and Tokyo it’s really going to be a picnic.” Another film, Westward Is Bataan, was noteworthy for its graphic depictions of American servicemen wounded or killed in the Pacific. The gain was to convince audiences that drastic action was essential to ending the war soon. In a voice-over, Ronnie warned viewers that Japan was “prepared to lose ten million in its war with America.” As the scene cut away to a Japanese woman cradling a receptacle containing the ashes of her son, he said, “We don’t raise our boys to be gods in little white boxes.”

  On February 23, 1943, Jack Warner arranged leave from the FMPU for Ronnie so that he could appear in This Is the Army, a joint venture of the War Department and Warner Bros. that was to begin filming in Burbank. Warner Bros. had purchased the rights to two Irving Berlin musicals, his 1917 soldier revue, Yip, Yip, Yaphank, and the 1942 Broadway stage sensation This Is the Army, which had helped to raise $10 million for war relief. The screenplay was a mash-up of the two shows, and George Murphy and Ronald Reagan were cast as father and son, both producers of Army spectacles but a war and a generation apart. Directed by Michael Curtiz and loaded with seventeen heart-stirring patriotic songs, including Kate Smith’s legendary rendition of “God Bless America,” the movie built to a grand finale that featured a platoon of soldiers high-stepping like Rockettes out of the theater and off to war. “All this,” as Variety wrote in typical breathy excess, “is morale in capital letters. It’s democracy in action to the hilt. It’s showmanship and patriotism combined to a super-duper Yankee Doodle degree.”

  In between all the showmanship and patriotism, there were long stretches of mundane administrative duties—the paperwork involved with staffing thirteen hundred soldiers, the endless housekeeping, personnel requests, facility maintenance. And training—roll call each morning, calisthenics, drills, marching. There was plenty of downtime confined to the fort. To stem the boredom, Ronnie played on the post basketball team and read. He combed through four or five daily newspapers, studying the progress of the war, struggling to understand and make sense of the flow of events. He had always been curious about the world at large, more curious than a lot of his fellow actors. He wasn’t a deep thinker, but his thinking was deeply felt, personal. What animated him the most was how the news of the world affected everyday people.

  It was during this period that Reagan began reading a publication that would have an outsize and enduring influence on his thinking. It is unclear who first put a copy of Reader’s Digest in Ronald Reagan’s hands, but he began reading each monthly issue from cover to cover while on duty at Fort Roach. He loved the magazine’s breadbasket offerings—homespun stories, can-do tales, inspirational pieces, condensed articles of topical interest, all aimed squarely at the American heartland. The magazine offered just what he needed on any given subject—not a fact-riddled academic thesis, but the broad strokes, enough information to provide a good overview, allowing him to decide where he came down on an issue. Sixty years later, his private files—those
that had accompanied him through every phase of his career—would contain reams of clippings from Reader’s Digest, all dog-eared and underlined, reflecting ideas he’d co-opted, positions he’d agreed with, homilies he’d used in various speeches.

  He’d pounce on each issue as soon as it hit the fort PX and practically memorize the new batch of articles, regurgitating them for anyone who would listen. He sounded off on anything that had captured his attention—FDR, whom he still revered, the $109 billion federal budget, the lack of a decent American diet, a new miracle drug called penicillin, various state laws requiring students to salute the flag, the volcano Paricutin that erupted in Mexico. No subject was outside his expertise. He could do twenty minutes without coming up for air on the war, the economy, religion, foreign policy, the military, socialized medicine, or the dwindling rights of screen actors. Enlisted men had difficulty escaping the nonstop chatter. He’d corral them at various points in the fort and launch into the topic du jour, much like Plato lecturing students in the Agora. Screenwriter Irving Wallace, who was stationed at Fort Roach, often found himself a captive of these ongoing monologues, recalling Ronnie as “a lovable scatterbrain,” but basically a “man who parrots things—shallow and affable.” And he regaled Jane when he was home on leave, sitting for hours over the morning papers, then holding forth about the stories he found interesting, giving each his own interpretive slant. “All he talks about morning, noon, and night is world affairs,” she told Robert Cummings. She could never get a word in edgewise. More than one mutual friend suspected that his constant sermonizing put a crimp in their relationship. “Ronnie,” Jane reportedly told Ann Sheridan, “was such a talker, he made speeches in his sleep.”