Reagan

by Bob Spitz

  The next day she made good on her threat. There were some final retakes scheduled for Johnny Belinda in a soundstage on the Warner Bros. lot. After the last scene wrapped, Jane announced that she was heading to New York—alone. She needed to get away and think things over. The studio covered for her to avoid starting rumors. It issued a press release claiming she was visiting a girlfriend who’d just had a baby. That might have been the end of it, except that Harrison Carroll, the Herald-Express’s East Coast gossip columnist, spotted her alone in Manhattan and wheedled an interview that broke as news. “There’s no use in lying,” Jane told him. “I am not the happiest girl in the world.” She implied her marriage to Ronnie was on the rocks, although optimally they’d try to “avoid a separation.” But to Joy Hodges, with whom she spent an evening during that trip, Jane came clean. “We’re through,” she confessed. “We’re finished. And it’s all my fault.”

  The news took Hollywood by surprise. In a town where marriage was the shakiest of propositions, the Reagan-Wyman union had seemed like a solid bet. An eight-year stretch was considered practically eternal. It was almost as though the film community had a stake in its success. Friends like the Powells and the Hustons were disheartened by the news, but no one took it as badly as Ronnie. He was back in Eureka, Illinois, back as Dutch, for the weekend, visiting his old coach Ralph McKinzie and anointing the Pumpkin Festival queen, when the story broke in the local Illinois papers. It hit him, people said, “like a ton of bricks.”

  When he returned home, Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons circled like a pair of vultures. Louella, his longtime advocate, picked at him first. No match for her meddling, Ronnie poured out his heart, unmindful that the seal of the confessional didn’t apply. Indiscreetly, he admitted that Jane had told him she still loved him but was no longer in love with him. That distinction seemed beyond his grasp. Even so, he was willing to give her plenty of space, hoping it would reignite a flame. “Right now, Jane needs very much to have a fling,” he said. “And I intend to let her have it. She is sick and nervous and not herself.” Hedda Hopper piled on in a subsequent Modern Screen column that aired the couple’s private affairs.

  The holidays that season were a dismal affair. Together, Jane and Ronnie celebrated Christmas with the kids and discussed a reconciliation, but Jane took off again soon afterward. At a New Year’s party in Beverly Hills, Ronnie showed up stag, but sulked through most of the festivities, coming undone when the clock eventually struck twelve and every couple around him fell into each other’s arms. Pat Neal, who was brought in to replace Jane in John Loves Mary, saw him stumble outside, supported by an older woman, where, oblivious to watchful eyes, he wept on her shoulder.

  The new year brought no hopeful outlook. The Reagans made a few abortive stabs to get back together, with little progress. Jane was overheard telling friends, “I’m in a situation a lot of women are in. I don’t know whether it is better for the children’s sakes to hold an empty marriage together, or to start afresh and hope for future happiness.”

  Toward the end of January 1948, Ronnie moved into the Garden of Allah, a legendary celebrity residential hotel on Sunset Strip that had, at one time or another, given refuge to Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, and Bogie and Flynn, as well as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Igor Stravinsky, and Ronnie’s boyhood idol Edgar Rice Burroughs. There was plenty of work to keep him occupied. John Loves Mary was finally under way, and he agreed to segue into The Girl from Jones Beach, another frothy comedy, as soon as it ended.

  But Jane wasn’t waiting around for the credits. In early February, she had her lawyer get Ronnie’s signature on a separation document, a preamble to an inevitable decree. Five days later, she flew to Las Vegas in order to set up the required residence for an eventual divorce. Then Jane experienced a sudden change of heart. Without explanation, she headed back to Los Angeles, more uncertain than ever of what to do. Throughout the spring, the couple oscillated between blame and forgiveness, rejection and reconciliation. Friends tried everything—pleading, commiserating, sweet-talking—in an effort to keep them together. Richard Carlson and his wife staged an intervention with other actors at their home in the Hills. Dana Andrews recalled that it was Ronnie who eventually sabotaged the affair. “[He] started talking and talking and talking . . . just holding forth.” Before he finished, Jane stalked out, saying, “I came here hoping that you had changed, but you haven’t. You’re still the same loudmouth. I might as well go home.”

  They had been through these scenes before, but this one was different. Days passed, then weeks, without any further contact between them. On July 28, 1948, Jane filed suit in Superior Court. She appeared before Judge Thurmond Clarke, testifying that Ronnie spent “too much time in film colony politics.” She felt left out, she said, “because my ideas weren’t considered important.” In the end, none of that mattered. The verdict rested on her argument that “there was nothing in common between us,” and she was granted an uncontested divorce that gave her custody of Maureen and Michael.

  Divorce. “Such a thing was so far from even being imagined by me,” Ronnie later admitted. He had a more conventional outlook, the product of Midwestern expectations, but in Hollywood such conventions were for the other side of the camera, not real life.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THE BLUE PERIOD

  “Alas, how love can trifle with itself!”

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  Divorce knocked Ronald Reagan flat. He mourned, he grieved, as if a death had occurred. Errol Flynn encountered him on the lot soon afterward, ever the inappropriate guest at the wake. “Be happy, old sport,” Flynn told him with swashbuckling esprit. “Think of the parties, think of the girls. Do what I do.”

  What Flynn did was anathema to Ronnie. He was in no shape to date a woman, much less . . . no, he couldn’t even go there. He wanted to be left alone. The gossip columnists took to labeling him “one of Hollywood’s most eligible bachelors,” but the only thing he felt eligible for was counseling. He found it impossible to conceal his hangdog gloom. Eddie Bracken, his co-star in The Girl from Jones Beach, typed him as “a lonely guy” who craved nothing more than honest companionship. In the months that followed, Ronnie avoided the Hollywood social scene and especially the spotlight. He clung to the set all week long. Otherwise, he drifted out to the Northridge ranch, where he had three horses that required his attention, or stayed holed up in the Garden of Allah, “often in its bar, talking politics by the hour.”

  Politics had become a more confusing discipline for him. Ronnie still identified as a liberal Democrat—he’d signed on as co-chairman of the 1948 “Hollywood for Harry Truman” reelection committee—but a disillusionment with the federal bureaucracy was tugging him steadily to the right. He was furious with a snafu over his taxes that began during World War II. He had read that veterans of the First World War had been forgiven their tax assessments for the years they had served, and he had withheld his wartime payments assuming that the same amnesty would apply to him when the war was over. But no such amnesty was offered, and he was now in a financial bind as a result. He cursed the government every time he wrote a quarterly check to pay off the debt. Reagan wasn’t a stingy man; he continued to pay a tithe to the church throughout his life. But that was his choice, not a burden imposed by a government bureaucracy. For someone who’d grown up with his family scraping for every extra penny, having the government’s hand in his pocket rankled, even though his pockets were now full beyond his boyhood imagination. Reagan wasn’t the first or the last person to feel a greater resentment of taxes as he had greater means to protect.

  Robert Montgomery and George Murphy—both former presidents of SAG whom he greatly respected—stoked his discontent. They blamed the Democrats for excessive taxes and for creating and expanding government agencies, taking money from their pockets to fund social programs that Montgomery and Murphy felt were best left to private enterprise. To them, this reeked of socialism, and
Ronnie couldn’t help but agree. They also saw eye to eye when it came to opposing government regulation of the movie business. “The Justice Department issued a series of decrees that the studios could either make pictures or operate theaters—they couldn’t do both,” he lamented, so studios like Warner Bros. were forced to divest their theater-chain holdings to comply with antitrust laws. Ronnie abhorred any further interference. He remained a staunch anticommunist and an FBI informant whose conversations with agents helped to shift his positions. The divisive Hollywood politics, the disruption in his chosen industry, the upheaval of the divorce—all contributed to a restlessness that pushed him to reevaluate his longtime ideals.

  He struggled with his political identity, unable to reconcile his current thinking with his lifelong beliefs. His father’s New Deal principles were so deeply ingrained. His own convictions—as a staunch Social Security advocate and self-proclaimed “rabid union man”—were at odds with these new buttoned-down stirrings.

  Just then a new union squabble gave him a new sense of purpose. The labor peace was only months old when the gods of entertainment sent a lightning bolt into the proceedings. It was called television. Old movies were turning up on TV, filling up hours of broadcasting time without the necessity of having newly produced shows. The new medium was ushering in a revolution, and the potential for new revenue streams put men like Jack Warner and Louis B. Mayer into a trance. Studios realized they could recoup some of the income they’d lost to the theater divestiture by giving their movies a second life on the small screen. No one begrudged them this new revenue stream so long as everyone involved participated. “The actors feel they should get a reasonable portion of the additional revenue,” Ronnie argued in a July 1948 newspaper column. The producers, unsurprisingly, disagreed. They claimed the right to use their films for any purpose they desired. The actors were their well-paid employees. There was no reason to cut them in.

  As president of the Screen Actors Guild, it was Ronnie’s job to step into the ring against management in an effort to negotiate a compromise. It was a good distraction from the stress of the divorce. He sensed this was an issue that would have tremendous consequences. “Everyone said [the studios would] be crazy to sell their movies to a competing medium,” he wrote, but they never foresaw the pending financial windfall. Both screens, large and small, had found a way to not only coexist, but to feed off each other. And television was only in its infancy, its potential untapped. Its impact was going to be enormous—incalculable. If the actors didn’t take a stand now, they would be left out of the equation.

  The studios stalled, delaying a confrontation. It wasn’t in their interest to reach an extra-royalty agreement with the actors’ union, and they sensed there would be no end to actors’ tapping into their profits. They certainly didn’t want to go up against Ronald Reagan—not again, not after the last bitter go-round. Jack Warner knew what to do. Ronnie’s next assignment, Warner announced, would be The Hasty Heart. In England.

  If it ever occurred to Ronnie that he was being strategically sent into exile, he never said so. His objection to the project was purely artistic. The movie was another Broadway retread, another pawky melodrama, another “breezy, amiable”—inconsequential—“piece of escapist filmfare” that would do nothing to advance his reputation. Postwar audiences, he believed, “wanted adventure and excitement,” the kind of pictures John Wayne and Gary Cooper were making. Ronnie saw his future in action-packed, outdoorsy shoot-’em-ups, depicting a time, he mused wistfully, “when our blue-eyed cavalry stayed on a wartime footing against the plains and desert Indians.” It was an old refrain, and Jack Warner had heard him sing it too many times.

  He wanted Ronnie in England—yes, to get him out of his hair, but there were other factors that figured in. The studio altruists felt that Ronnie was “on the verge of emotional collapse” and that a change of scenery would do him good. And the bookkeepers needed his assistance to overcome a financial issue. With so many films being made overseas, Great Britain had imposed a requirement that box-office receipts earned in the country remain there to fund new productions. If The Hasty Heart shot at a London facility, Warner Bros. could pay for it with the frozen funds. Jack Warner explained this to Ronnie and said he’d consider it a personal favor.

  What about That Hagan Girl? Ronnie reminded Warner. That had been a favor, too. And John Loves Mary?—he’d made that one, as well, against his better instincts. There were half a dozen others he could add to the favor list. Warner proposed a trade-off. He suggested that after making The Hasty Heart, Ronnie could find a project that suited him, and the studio would do its part to accommodate him.

  A few weeks later, he sent Warner a story called Ghost Mountain, by Alan Le May. It was a morality play about a Confederate cavalry detachment and its heroic failed attempt to plant its flag atop a mountain in California. A post–Civil War western, the kind of picture Ronnie longed to make. Warner dragged his feet. The story line, as he read it, was lumbering and banal. And it was expensive—$35,000 to acquire the rights. As a result, the deal between the two stalled, and Ronnie sulked around the lot, implying he was in no condition to work. When it became clear he needed incentive to go abroad, Warner pulled the trigger. His hatchet man, Steve Trilling, called Ronnie with the news. “We’ve bought it,” he reported. Ronnie, delighted, upheld his end of the bargain. On November 20, 1948, at two in the morning, in high spirits and low-visibility fog, he set sail from Halifax, Nova Scotia, on the Britannic, his first trip out of North America.

  * * *

  —

  The fog was thick in war-torn London, an opaque miasma mixed with soft-coal smoke that lodged in the lungs like a fur ball. Even from his aerie in the über-posh Savoy Hotel, the ravages of conflict were readily visible. Whole sections of neighborhoods were reduced to rubble, rows of houses gap-toothed and cordoned off to traffic. He thought he’d seen it all in the Fort Roach footage, but this was devastation up close and personal. In a moment of naïveté, he was overheard asking Richard Todd, his British co-star, “What’s rationing?”

  During the two weeks before production began, he could gauge the deprivation for himself in a country he described as “dismal wilderness.” Every commodity was in short supply—fuel, food, medicine, tobacco, grain. Pubs were even thinning their beer with water. Newspapers were full of stories speculating that the new Marshall Plan might generate relief, but Ronnie dismissed it as “overgenerous.” To him, it was another example of governmental excess, forcing American taxpayers to pay for rebuilding Europe.

  Of course, The Hasty Heart company lacked nothing. The Savoy imported luxuries the destitute British masses only dreamed about, and Warner Bros. ensured every other comfort imaginable. A chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce limo was put at the actors’ disposal, they dined on pheasant under glass, and a dozen steaks were sent over from the 21 Club in New York. The studio strove to make amends for the dismal conditions at Elmstree, a series of bone-chilling soundstages an hour’s drive from London, where the production set up shop for the next three months. The facility, only recently abandoned by the War Office storage depot, was a nearly deserted outpost during the winter of 1949. It was a thoroughly disagreeable work environment.

  Ronald Reagan made the best of it. The work wasn’t that demanding, and his director, Vincent Sherman, ran a fairly tight ship. Reagan was already familiar with co-star Patricia Neal from their recent John Loves Mary outing. Neal was just twenty-two, with statuesque Tennessean beauty and a charm she had cultivated in the same Northwestern drama program Ronnie had established himself in fifteen years earlier. In London, they kept each other company on weekends, and shared adjoining suites at the Savoy, where they were frequent dinner companions. There were, however, limits to their intimacy. Studio publicists hoped to spark an off-screen romance, but neither of the stars’ hearts was in it. “Although I was a young, pretty girl,” Neal recalled, somewhat incredulously, “he never made a pass at me.”
Ronnie was “in a depressed state,” according to an eyewitness in London.

  Instead, he spent most of his evenings doing what he loved most—talking politics at the Savoy’s art deco bar. He was fascinated by the British appetite for politics and world affairs. London published an astounding eight daily newspapers. Over cocktails, he and Vincent Sherman regularly went at it. Sherman knew Ronnie by his reputation on the Warner lot as “a walking encyclopedia” who could “expound on almost anything.” In London, he didn’t disappoint. The Soviet Union was a favorite whipping boy. Bertrand Russell had touched off a public firestorm by suggesting that the West should deal with Russia “while we have the atomic bomb and they have not.” Ronnie didn’t agree, but he didn’t go out of his way to disagree, either. But he had plenty to say about socialism. The British system of government confounded him—a “womb-to-tomb utopian benevolence,” he called it. Ronald Reagan was not a man given to abstract thought. Socialism versus capitalism, for him, was obvious, a black-and-white issue. “I saw firsthand how the welfare state sapped incentive to work from many people in a wonderful and dynamic country,” he said. Socialism, in his view, was an obvious stepping-stone to communism, and he vowed to prevent its possible migration to America.