Reagan

by Bob Spitz

  The war, which had sidelined many actors, actually gave the careers of Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman an unforeseen boost. Fan magazines like Photoplay, Motion Picture, and Modern Screen featured spread after spread of the Reagans as the ideal wartime couple, Ronnie pictured in uniform as “the perfect American officer who had gone to war”—gone to war!—“despite the responsibility of a wife and daughter”; Jane by his side, the supportive wife, the woman left behind, who kept the home fires burning while holding down a job of her own. “My Soldier, by Jane Wyman” appeared in January 1943, followed by “You’re Mrs. Ronald Reagan,” and similar mawkish items. Warner Bros. sent out publicity shots of Jane writing letters to her soldier as if Ronnie were stationed somewhere overseas. His leave was documented in excruciating detail. Practically every fan knew he always said “So long, Button Nose” when getting ready to leave for duty. The public couldn’t get enough.

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  At home, the reception was mixed.

  Resentful of Ronnie for stranding her in the house and furious with Warner Bros. for spoon-feeding her syrupy scripts, Jane treated his homestays with a frosty detachment. It aggravated her to put a good face on the situation. She was trying to juggle raising Maureen and pursuing a precarious acting career. Edward G. Robinson recalled, “I always felt it was most patient and steady of her to take all those undemanding, silly roles they handed her.” One after the other—My Favorite Spy, Footlight Serenade, The Animal Kingdom, Crime by Night, Make Your Own Bed, The Doughgirls. She grumbled about the roles to Louella Parsons, “asking why, why wouldn’t someone give her a real chance.”

  In truth, she was lucky to be working at all. All Hollywood studios had scaled back production during the war years. Most B pictures were eliminated altogether, making competition for leading roles in the A’s much keener. Raw film stock was being rationed, creative crews and craftsmen diverted to the military. Equipment was redistributed for defense purposes.

  To spell time between pictures, Jane joined the Hollywood Victory Committee, a loose organization of screen and stage performers not engaged in military service who contributed to the war effort by entertaining troops, boosting morale, and raising money through various bond drives. She could sing, and she entertained regularly at the Hollywood Canteen, a club for servicemen on their way overseas. And she waited, holding out hope that a choice movie role would come her way.

  The WAC officer wife she played in Princess O’Rourke toward the end of 1943 was not such a role. The picture was an absurdly labored, lightweight fable that spotlighted Olivia de Havilland in the title role. Still, a poignant restaurant scene allowed Jane to show something more than the usual flaky comic turn, and the consequences of that scene redirected her career.

  Someone slipped a workprint of the film to Charles Brackett, a producer on the Paramount lot who was preparing The Lost Weekend for Billy Wilder to direct. It was a serious drama about the horrors of alcohol addiction that most studios were loath to tackle. Jane wasn’t the obvious choice to play the woman who stands faithfully by a lover, Ray Milland, with a lethal drinking problem, but Brackett saw something in her that conveyed exactly the quality he was looking for. Jack Warner was more than happy to lend her out. There was nothing for Jane in the works at Warner Bros. Besides, he was convinced “that drunk film,” as he referred to The Lost Weekend, was box-office poison. He knew the liquor industry had offered Paramount $5 million to bury the picture. It’d probably never see the light of day.

  Other opinions were more admiring. In fact, all other opinions, once the film opened in early December 1945. The New York Times’ formidable critic Bosley Crowther, a hard-to-please, snappish iconoclast, led the adoring press, declaring, “The Lost Weekend is truly a chef d’oeuvre of motion-picture art.” He lauded the movie for being “shatteringly realistic” and singled out Jane Wyman’s “quiet authority.”

  The movie upended the industry’s appraisal of her. Jane Wyman could act—not just act as she’d done in the Warner Bros. comedies, but . . . act. She had what Stanwyck had and Davis and de Havilland and Hepburn had. The Lost Weekend had succeeded in outing her as an actress. “It changed my whole life,” she later admitted.

  Only Jack Warner didn’t grasp her potential. He, alone among fellow moguls, still saw Jane as a blond, feisty, wisecracking comedienne more suited to pedestrian fare. Which is why he was willing to lend her out once again, this time to MGM, for another picture trailing built-in difficulties.

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  Ronald Reagan spent much of 1944 as the narrator of the FMPU’s Special Film Project 152 series, a succession of bomb-run simulation films shown to pilots as a kind of visualization of what they should expect to see when flying tactical missions over Japan. Once these raids were devised as an endgame strategy, the FMPU’s creative staff moved quickly. A team of movie special-effects men who had been drafted into the unit built a replica of Tokyo on a Fort Roach soundstage that was sealed off to visitors by a phalanx of MPs. “Above this they rigged a crane and camera mount and could photograph the miniature,” Ronnie recalled, “giving the effect on the screen of movies taken from a plane traveling at any prescribed height and speed.” The films were then airlifted to bomber bases in the Pacific to update pilots on visuals and targets.

  Ronald Reagan might have never left California during the war, but his military service projected him to America as a war hero. He appeared constantly in uniform, wearing wings, in color layouts for recruiting efforts, and at events around the country on a bond-selling tour. On the screen, audiences repeatedly saw his character confront the enemy and display courage under fire. It was difficult to equate his war experience with that of, say, Jimmy Stewart, who flew actual combat missions, or Clark Gable, who was with a bomber squadron overseas. But there were patriotic optics to exploit, rooted in a genuine effort to do his part—and he made the most of them. As a Reagan historian noted, “No twentieth-century president, with the exception of Dwight D. Eisenhower, had been seen in uniform by more people.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “A DANGEROUS MAN”

  “An actor is not a person apart from life, but a citizen who should participate actively in his government.”

  —EDWARD G. ROBINSON, 1947

  When he was discharged, on December 9, 1945, having been promoted to the venerable rank of captain, Ronald Reagan was eager to pick up where he’d left off. He hung up the uniform, had his contract reinstated, and made quick for the sanctum of Hollywood. Ronnie knew that readjustment was inevitable. He’d been away for four years, and there were no guarantees, but he’d left on a high note. He still had the same square-jawed features, the same good-guy demeanor, the all-American movie-star image. Warner Bros. was up and running at peak production. It was cranking out films.

  He looked the same—but Hollywood didn’t.

  In the four years since America entered World War II, Hollywood had undergone a top-to-bottom makeover. Studios reorganized their vast operations to reflect the retrenchment in the number and cost of movies they were making. It was no longer feasible to churn out sixty pictures a year. Audiences’ tastes had changed, and the studios were scrambling to keep pace. Darryl F. Zanuck was one of the first to see the handwriting on the wall. He recognized that servicemen who had been stationed overseas were “coming back with new thoughts, new ideas, and new hungers.” Their attitudes and perceptions had changed, and as a result audiences were more sophisticated, perhaps more cynical. “We’ve got to start making movies that entertain but at the same time match the new climate of the times. Vital, thinking men’s blockbusters, big-theme films.”

  Those kinds of movies required actors with nuance—they were no longer all good or all bad. To that end, a cluster of new stars had emerged like Gregory Peck, William Holden, Robert Mitchum, Cornel Wilde, and Zachary Scott—rugged, flawed, rough around the moral edges. Humphrey Bogart, who used to play a bad
guy, now played a good guy—or, at least, a better guy—with elements of darkness. Tyrone Power, once strictly a paragon of swashbucklers, sought to portray tormented characters searching for meaningful experience. Modern heroes could be haunted, self-interested, or even corrupt. Ronald Reagan’s relatively bland, one-dimensional persona—the idealistic, likable best friend—felt dated in this new atmosphere.

  It didn’t help Ronnie’s career that he was no longer protected by the old studio system that slotted him into six or eight quickie films a year. As Otto Friedrich noted in City of Nets, “the sprightly little movies of the 1930s, the B-pictures, the cheap westerns and detective stories, would never again support the Hollywood studios.” The Brass Bancrofts and Tugboat Annies and Dead End Kids were the past. Studios, in 1946, were releasing Notorious, Duel in the Sun, To Each His Own, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and The Best Years of Our Lives. Even Jane Wyman had elevated her game.

  The structure of the business worked against Ronnie as well. In August 1943, Olivia de Havilland sued Warner Bros., arguing that her seven-year contract—suspended six times by the studio, each suspension adding months to the term—violated an archaic California law that forbade binding someone to an employer beyond seven years as being tantamount to slavery. When the court ruled in her favor a year later, the entire studio system came undone. Suddenly, every contract player who had put in his seven calendar years became a free agent. Actors could now move from studio to studio, from picture to picture, renegotiating their deals as the situation demanded. High-profile movie stars rejoiced that the business no longer resembled high-security feudal plantations where they toiled in servitude.

  But the studio system had been helpful for some actors—those who weren’t skilled enough or aggressive enough or in great enough demand. At Warner Bros., it was those actors who suffered most after the war as the studio prepared to release more emotionally complex films like Rhapsody in Blue, Mildred Pierce, Night and Day, Of Human Bondage, and Deception.

  Ronnie found himself sitting on the sidelines from his Air Force discharge on December 9, 1945, through the end of the year. “Just relax until we find a good property for you,” Jack Warner advised him, but it was clear that scripts weren’t coming Ronnie’s way. Even so, there was no reason for panic. He remained a popular face for moviegoing audiences—ranked sixth among male Hollywood stars. And he had a new, long-term contract that guaranteed him $3,500 a week for forty-three weeks a year, whether he was working or not, a nice little nest egg.

  Relax, as Warner had said. It wasn’t such a bad idea.

  The war had forced him to recalibrate his career, and there were personal issues that required attention as well. On March 18, 1945, just months before Japan surrendered, Jane and Ronnie sent out a communiqué from the adjutant’s office of the FMPU announcing the birth of their son Michael Edward. In fact, they adopted the infant boy, who was twelve hours old when he was given to them by his birth mother, Irene Flaugher, a Kentucky farm girl. Speculation was rife as to why they chose to adopt. “Sources,” which usually meant Hollywood gossip mills, intimated that either Jane was no longer able to conceive or that she was too busy with her flourishing career to risk another year’s hiatus from the screen. Whatever the case, the Reagans explained that there were too many orphans in need of loving homes and they felt it was important “to add from the outside to our family.”

  For a while, Ronnie puttered around their new house, building a sidewalk and laying flagstone for a patio. Soon, however, he grew bored and lonely. Jane was away on location at Lake Arrowhead in the San Bernardino Mountains filming The Yearling, based on the Pulitzer Prize–winning Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings novel. With the children in tow, it was the perfect place for Ronnie to “laze around and take time to figure things out” until Warner Bros. came calling.

  In September 1945, with the summer crowds departed, Lake Arrowhead was blissfully serene. MGM had rented the Reagans a cottage at the edge of the lake, so close to the water that runabouts were needed to take Jane to and from the set. From the front porch, they could see co-star Gregory Peck’s house with its long dock jutting over the shoals. In the evenings, the Reagans and the Pecks would often carry food back and forth, sharing dinners and doting on each other’s kids. Occasionally, June Lockhart, another cast member, would join them, and afterward, with the kids tucked in bed, the actors retired to the porch, talking over the day’s work and gossiping, while a choir of cicadas communed in the trees.

  The time away from Los Angeles was leisurely, even therapeutic, but for Ronnie it proved a mixed blessing. His wife was kept busy from dawn to dusk, working on the kind of important, star-making vehicle he’d been hungering for, while nothing much was stirring on his end. He passed most of the days building a two-foot-long replica of the SS America, an ocean liner converted to troop transport during the war, taking long walks around the lake, tooling a rented speedboat from shore to shore, and tending the kids. When Jane returned from the set, she was still in character, spent, oblivious to Ronnie. It irked him how “she would come through the door, thinking about her part, and not even notice I was in the room.” He felt neglected. It was galling enough being out of work. Jane’s behavior only served to rub it in his face.

  Late in 1945, Warner Bros. finally came through with the promised “good property,” attaching him to Stallion Road, a big-budget Technicolor feature that was the cornerstone of the studio’s upcoming slate. A first-draft script by no less than William Faulkner was developed from Stephen Longstreet’s bestselling novel. It was a story dear to Ronnie’s heart—a western about horse ranching, allowing him to do his own riding and giving him plenty of screen time to gambol across the gorgeous mountain meadows of the Sierra Madre Range. To top it off, he was co-starring with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, the hottest properties on the Warner lot. What a comeback this would be for him! The picture was scheduled to begin shooting in March 1946. In the meantime, Ronnie shuttled between Lake Arrowhead and Hollywood, where broader issues for the industry were heating up.

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  The world might have been racked by war from 1940 to 1945, but it had been a period of relative peace for the Hollywood studios. The American Federation of Labor had given Franklin Roosevelt its pledge that there would be no slowdowns or strikes for the duration of the war. The union had been good for its word, but now that the war was over all bets were off.

  What seemed at first like standard union-management horse-trading would in fact prove to be the beginning of Reagan’s involvement over the next five years in what would become the most divisive issue in the history of Hollywood—the role of communists in the shaping of the movies and public life, and the frenzy to stamp it out. This marked a radical switch from an era when talking politics was a harmless sport at social events to a climate in which there was an ongoing toxic debate that could destroy lives and careers.

  Trouble was brewing from an unexpected source: a jurisdictional dispute involving two competing local unions representing the craftsmen whose work was critical to every phase of moviemaking. Since before the turn of the twentieth century, these craftsmen had been represented by the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees, known by its acronym, IATSE. A couple of Chicago mobsters—Willie Bioff and George Browne—took control of the union in 1934 and set about bilking the studios out of hundreds of thousands of dollars through threats and intimidation. When they were convicted of extortion and went to jail in 1941, control passed into the hands of Roy M. Brewer, a union strongman who sought to preserve IATSE’s dominance as Hollywood’s main labor organization.

  In 1941, Herbert Sorrell, who ran the painters’ guild, began building an independent alternative to IATSE, establishing locals to unite the unorganized trades—film technicians, carpenters, cartoonists, and machinists, among others—into the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU). By 1945, it had enrolled nearly ten thousand members, a serious challenge to I
ATSE’s control, setting the stage for an inevitable confrontation. When interior decorators sought to decamp from IATSE to the CSU in January 1946, they were refused recognition by the producer’s association—and promptly went on strike.

  Ronnie read about the walkout from his Lake Arrowhead retreat. The action was confined to the Warner Bros. lot, where strikers had overturned cars at the Olive Street gates. The destructive demonstration wasn’t the kind he subscribed to, but he sympathized. “What I heard and read in the papers placed me on the side of the strikers,” he recalled. He was a union man. He believed strongly in the right of workers “to refuse to work for just grievances.” He favored cooperation and compromise, but if all else failed and it meant striking for an honorable cause, then so be it.

  At first, it didn’t trouble Ronald Reagan that opponents had smeared the CSU’s Sorrell by spreading rumors that he was a Communist. Everyone knew CSU supported and was supported by a number of progressive and Popular Front organizations. But communist? Ronnie was convinced that label was flung around anytime a right-winger wanted to impugn a liberal cause. His brother, Neil, the family Republican, who had drifted by now into an advertising career, was always warning him that such-and-such was a “commie front.” Moon would “bring up the names of people who were ‘bad actors’”—wink-wink—and “Ronald would immediately rear up on his hind heels” and fire back: “Oh, you’re coming out with the Communist story.” They’d gone head-to-head on this topic so often it was like an Abbott and Costello routine.

  Reagan was a “hemophiliac liberal,” as he put it, who attached his name to every left-leaning organization whose goals ostensibly were peace, disarmament, and equality. According to FBI files, Ronald Reagan joined the Hollywood Democratic Committee, the Committee for a Democratic Far Eastern Policy, the United World Federalists, the International Rescue and Relief Committee, and the American Veterans Committee. He wrote articles denouncing Gerald L. K. Smith, the firebrand clergyman and right-wing political organizer, and others he referred to as “home-grown fascists.” He joined with internationalists advocating a ban on the atomic bomb and signed a petition protesting U.S. support for Chiang Kai-shek against Mao Tse-tung. Later, in hindsight, he would say, “I was not sharp about Communism.”