Reagan

by Bob Spitz

  Vincent Sherman, “a liberal, left-wing Democrat,” took the nightly polemics in stride, but he couldn’t help detecting that Ronnie, whom he’d long known to share his political views, had made a “move toward the right.” There was a stridency to his opinions. Any challenge to its precepts struck a blow against liberty. Even Richard Todd, who stayed out of the fray, was impressed by the power of Ronnie’s faith in the system. “I have never met an American,” Todd concluded years later, “who so profoundly believed in the greatness of his nation.” At the time, he wondered how Ronnie could possibly channel all that conviction.

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  Ronald Reagan had more than a vague idea. He found that politics captivated him. His position as president of the Screen Actors Guild gave him just enough of a taste. He loved the strategizing, the intrigue, and the challenge, using the powers of persuasion, fighting for something he really believed in. Apparently, he was good at it, too. His popularity with the membership had earned him reelection to the post. It was a function for which he seemed better equipped than for acting. He demonstrated a real aptitude for expressing the will of his constituents. All his life he’d been unafraid of the spotlight. He wasn’t afraid to stand up, to speak out—to speak his mind—and to lead. Perhaps acting was only the warm-up to a larger role in the public sector. Admittedly, he was ambitious and he harbored dreams. In an unguarded moment, he confided to Pat Neal that he wanted to be “President of the United States.”

  But as he sailed back to the States on March 24, 1949, the only thing on Ronald Reagan’s mind was resurrecting his career. While he was overseas, Night After Night had opened to less than enthusiastic notices. The New York Times, in a particularly scathing review, said, “The Warner Brothers went to the bottom of the well” in their effort to bring the film to the screen, and castigated Ronnie “who,” the paper said, “wears a fixed troubled look and moves about stiffly as a scientist who can do with some mental and physical therapy himself.” He’d always known that picture was a loser. But it came on the heels of The Voice of the Turtle and the lingering stench of That Hagan Girl. He was in a tailspin.

  Fortunately, there was Ghost Mountain. But as the Queen Mary docked in New York, Ronnie learned from an announcement in Variety that Errol Flynn had been signed to star, not him. He felt blindsided—and betrayed. Jack Warner had promised him that picture—promised. Ronnie had brought it to the studio! A jolt of rage and adrenaline got the best of him, and before anyone could say “Call Lew Wasserman!” he dashed off a telegram to Warner feigning disbelief in the Variety story, knowing Warner couldn’t have gypped him out of the role “when I’ve always been good and done everything you’ve asked.”

  Worse, the studio blamed the role reversal on him. How could it entrust him with such a prominent part after the string of duds he’d been in? Those were your duds! he wanted to scream. You put me in them! The studio also denied promising him a starring role in any property he brought in. It was clear Ronald Reagan’s star had faded at Warner. “He was not clicking at the box-office,” the studio explained, “and the company was a little cold on him.” There were three years remaining on his studio contract. One could only imagine how Warner Bros. would fill out the term.

  Other factors contributed to his distress. Jane Wyman had been nominated for an Academy Award for her performance in Johnny Belinda, and she was pegged as the favorite. The scuttlebutt was she’d asked Lew Ayres to escort her to the ceremony. Ronnie would have gladly skipped the event, but as president of the Screen Actors Guild he was expected to attend. In any case, he decided not to take a date. He’d been seeing writer Doris Lilly on and off since the divorce, but realized that if it was going to be Jane’s night, he’d be wise to keep a low profile. Under no circumstances, however, would he put in an appearance at Jack Warner’s post-Oscars bash at the Mocambo. That was also Jane’s turf, and anyway he remained furious at Jack.

  In the meantime, Ronnie had Lew Wasserman renegotiate his studio contract to extricate him from Jack Warner’s oppressive stranglehold. There was little resistance on management’s part. It had gone about as far as it could with him, taken him as high as he was going to climb. At thirty-eight years old, he was no longer in his prime; he’d never emerged as an A-list star. To retain him as a contract player, the studio offered him a deal worth $75,000 for one picture a year for three years, basically half of what he was guaranteed previously. In exchange, he got his independence; he was free to make pictures for other studios as well.

  It was a calculated gamble on Ronnie’s part. He’d no longer be assured a six-figure yearly income—he was banking on his appeal to land deals elsewhere. But with thirty-nine pictures to his credit, none of them a game changer, it was debatable whether there would be any takers. Incredibly, it paid off. Only one week later, he noted, “Lew added a five-year, five-picture deal at Universal,” worth $350,000. It would net him a very cushy nest egg, more than he was making at Warner Bros. What he never mentioned—or might not have understood at the time—was that Wasserman’s agency, MCA, was busily buying up shares in Universal Pictures, which it planned to take over as soon as the agency gained a majority share of the company. Negotiating for MCA clients at a company owned by MCA—it made for a sticky situation further down the road.

  Ronnie was thrilled. Financial security was a huge relief. “I didn’t exactly know how to be a bachelor all over again,” he wrote, but he had always been a quick study. He moved out of the Garden of Allah into his old bachelor pad on Londonderry Terrace above Sunset Strip and proceeded to hit the town. Chasen’s, Ciro’s, the Cocoanut Grove, and Slapsy Maxie’s became part of his regular circuit. “He loved to go out and be seen at all the nightclubs,” recalled Doris Lilly. “He also loved the comedians, so we’d go to hear George Jessel and Sophie Tucker.” He began to spread his wings. Hollywood served up a feast of gorgeous young women eager to socialize with eligible movie stars. Ronnie wasn’t in Errol Flynn’s league—he wasn’t a swinger by any stretch of the imagination—but he began to play the field with great enthusiasm. There was a revolving cast of young, blond, outdoorsy, all-American beauties—his frisky “cocker spaniels,” he called them. A twenty-three-year-old knockout named Betty Bligh, who was purported to have “the best figure in Hollywood,” took him home to her parents for Sunday dinners. In New York, where he maintained an apartment at the Sherry-Netherland, he saw quite a bit of Betty Underwood, a twenty-one-year-old Powers model who found him “charming and delightful and very romantic,” and Monica Lewis, an MGM starlet, who became a steady crush. Actresses Ruth Roman, Adele Jergens, Ann Sothern, and a relative newcomer to the screen—big-band vocalist Doris Day—provided regular company. “There was a little place on La Cienega that had a small band and a small dance floor where he often took me,” Day recalled. But there were other, more intimate rendezvous, and eventually all the carousing started catching up with him. His nightclub bills had gotten out of hand—$750 a month, by his own estimate—and his retinue of women was spinning out of control. Many years later, he admitted “to sleeping with so many girls that the morning came when he did not know who one of them was.”

  On Sunday, June 20, 1949, Ronnie’s carousing was brought to a violent stop. He’d agreed to appear in the Movie Star World Series, a charity baseball game between leading men and comedians at Wrigley Field in L.A. to raise money for the City of Hope. On the day itself, Ronnie planned to skip the event. He was scheduled to begin shooting his first Universal feature, a thriller with Ida Lupino, the next morning and decided to take the day off to recharge. But a chance encounter with Eddie Bracken, his co-star of The Girl from Jones Beach and the ball game’s organizer, shamed him into keeping the date. “We put him up to bat first, so that he could go home early,” Bracken recalled. Taking a few warm-up swings, showing his old Dixon High form, Ronnie stepped in to face a star-studded battery—Bob Hope on the mound with Ward Bond behind the plate. Hope lobbed the kind of softballs he
used in his routines, so Ronnie had no trouble making contact. He hit the first pitch he saw to Bracken at short and legged it out down the first-base line, hoping to beat the throw. Before he reached the bag, he went into a slide, then grabbed his right leg high on the thigh as he writhed on the ground. At first glance, it seemed he had strained a ligament, but X-rays at Santa Monica Hospital revealed a multiple fracture—the bone was shattered in six different places, requiring a traction cast and bed confinement. He’d be out of action for six to eight weeks.

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  From a bed with a view of the Pacific Ocean, Ronnie could envision his acting career washing out to sea. Just as the support structure of a Warner Bros. contract could no longer protect him financially, his relationships with women, after all this time, could no longer sustain him emotionally. As he lay bedridden, contemplating the future, he faced a kind of existential crisis. He was thirty-eight years old and felt every day of it, bone-weary, his body aching in places he’d never identified before. Creases had begun to appear at the corners of his eyes and around his mouth—faint, but plain enough to age him. He no longer met the requirements for the strapping young star featured in a studio’s beefcake photos. The playboy roles lay slightly out of his reach. There were younger, hunkier actors waiting in the wings to eclipse him—Jeffrey Hunter, Marlon Brando, and James Dean, among a crowded field. His desirability quotient in Hollywood rated highest at the Screen Actors Guild or the Friars Club, where the membership was graying. By the fall of 1949, when he struggled gingerly to get back to his feet, Ronald Reagan’s mood was fairly bleak.

  And sometime just after that, Nancy Davis phoned him.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “NANCY (WITH THE LAUGHING FACE)”

  “Henceforth, I ask not good fortune, I myself am good fortune.”

  —WALT WHITMAN

  According to family legend, Nancy Davis was born on July 6, 1921, two days after her scheduled due date. A prospective actress, she was poised to make her entrance punctually on the fourth, so the story went, but her mother, a rabid New York Yankees fan, somehow—inexplicably and beyond all medical science—delayed the birth in order to watch the Bombers whip the Philadelphia Athletics, 56–4 and 14–4, in a doubleheader in the Bronx. And the next day, too, when they beat the A’s again. Luckily for Edith Luckett the Yanks had a day off on the sixth, otherwise she might have delivered her daughter during the seventh-inning stretch.

  Luckett, Nancy Davis’s mother, had been center stage since she was twelve, at the dawn of the new century, when she made her debut in a play at Washington’s Columbia Theater. A fearless competitor and gifted self-promoter, she hit the road at the age of sixteen and never looked back. By 1905, Luckett was appearing with a succession of top-notch touring companies, alongside Chauncey Olcott, the celebrated Irish tenor, and Broadway wunderkind George M. Cohan, whose musical revues—Broadway Jones and The Fortune Hunter—played to packed houses in every major city between New York, Chicago, and Miami. One of Luckett’s earliest notices praised her “beauty, wit, and talent,” and the presence of “remarkable cleverness.” Glamour as well as grace impressed. She had soft, delicate features, a creamy complexion framed by straight blond bangs, with dazzling cornflower-blue eyes. A Southern, sugarcoated drawl conveyed culture and refinement.

  But they were stage props. “Edie had the foulest mouth in the world,” a friend told a biographer, “and she told the dirtiest, filthiest jokes you ever heard in your life.” Another person described her as an outrageous character, unfiltered, “exuberantly unshockable.” The ladylike, antebellum facade was pure self-invention. Fellow actors who gravitated to her during the run of a play were entertained by the evocative details of her classy background—the idyllic childhood on a Virginia plantation, a prestigious ancestry with roots on the Mayflower, education in the finest private boarding schools, aristocratic parents whose generosity left her wanting for nothing. Mark Twain couldn’t have concocted a more fanciful tale.

  As Twain might have said, Edith Luckett was born with a tin spoon in her mouth—the youngest of nine children, in a hardscrabble section of Washington, D.C., known as Swampoodle for its fetid, heavily rutted streets. The “plantation,” so to speak, was a series of scrubby, cramped tenements near the railroad tracks—the wrong side of the tracks—where her father, Charles, worked as a shipping clerk for Adams Express and her mother, Sarah, ran a squalid boardinghouse. Private education wasn’t even a pipe dream to the scrum of neighborhood children. Very few local families sent their girls to school, but those like Edith who gained the opportunity attended whatever public facility had a spare desk available.

  Edith never graduated. By the time she turned sixteen, she was appearing steadily on provincial stages, inching her way toward Broadway. In 1910, Alla Nazimova, the theater world’s reigning superstar, provided Luckett with her break by casting her in a production of Drifting at New York’s 39th Street Theatre. It was there, in the city, that she acquired the nickname Lucky, though her luck lasted only until the end of the play’s run. Three years later, she gravitated to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, performing as a member of the popular Parke Stock Company, managed by local impresario William Parke. While seguing from production to production at the Capitol Theater, she met the feckless but handsome scion of an old New England family, who fell for this rather earthy twenty-eight-year-old actress six years his senior.

  Kenneth Robbins was a pale, sandy-haired, well-built young man— soft-spoken and polite to a fault. He’d led a fairly sheltered and pampered life, “kind of a mama’s boy,” according to a relative’s account, “sweet and charming,” but lacking any worldly experience. He had only recently weaned himself from the ancestral nest, and Edith served as his first serious relationship. In Pittsfield, where an actor was regarded with about as much respect as a stray dog, the Luckett-Robbins liaison was a scandale. Theatergoers craned their necks to see young Robbins seated front and center nightly in the Capitol audience, staring moon-eyed as the leading lady swept across the stage.

  His mother, Anne “Nanee” Ayres Robbins, was a steely New England matriarch, someone not to be trifled with, especially by an actress with her sights set on Nanee’s son, her only child destined to carry on the family name. Her firm, upper class, Episcopalian ethos hardly sanctioned such an inauspicious match. But Kenneth saw in Edith much of the same spunk and tenacity embodied by his mother, and this mama’s boy found comfort in that.

  Despite the family’s disapproval, the romance flourished. Nanee Robbins, to her credit, overcame her prejudice and allowed Edith to gradually win her admiration. On June 27, 1916, Edith and Ken drove north to Burlington, Vermont, and got married quietly in a simple ceremony in a Congregational church.

  If only married life had progressed as smoothly. Edith vowed to quit the stage in order to commit herself wholeheartedly to a wifely routine. Preposterous though it sounded to anyone who knew her, she attempted to take on a traditional role. Ken’s parents contributed a farmhouse in the Berkshires. It wasn’t long, however, before Edith got antsy. Her foulmouthed, chain-smoking, and lusty nature didn’t play well in New England. Besides, she missed the theater. Obligingly, Nazimova came to her rescue. She was about to star in a new Broadway play, ’Ception Shoals at the Princess Theatre, and offered Edith a part in the cast. Persuading Ken to move took little effort, and by the first week in 1917 they were in New York City, where Edith jumped right into rehearsals and Ken took a job selling automobile insurance.

  The play, which opened on January 10, lasted only thirty-seven performances, the marriage not much longer. The Robbinses remained together, but in name only. Edith went on the road with a touring company of ’Ception Shoals, and in April, following the U.S. declaration of war against Germany, Ken enlisted in the Army and shipped out overseas. When he returned two years later, the couple made an effort to rekindle their relationship. Again, Edith abandoned her acting career to play the compl
iant wife, and they set up home on Amity Street in Flushing, a middle-class neighborhood in the borough of Queens. Not long afterward Edith became pregnant.

  New York City, Ken argued, was no place to raise a child. He was miserable in his job. He insisted they move back to Pittsfield, where a tidy inheritance awaited along with plenty of family support, but Edith wasn’t about to revisit that scenario. At thirty-three, playing the happy homemaker was about as absurd an image as she could imagine for herself. Acting was her life’s blood; it was impossible to pretend otherwise any longer. Pittsfield, in any case, was out of the question.

  That was all Ken needed to hear. He decamped to his mother’s house, leaving Edith Luckett to fend for herself through the last stages of her pregnancy. When she gave birth to a baby girl, on July 6, 1921, “their relationship was so tenuous,” Nancy Reagan later wrote, “that Kenneth Robbins wasn’t even at the hospital.”

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  The birth certificate recorded her name as Anne Frances Robbins, but her mother never called her anything but Nancy. She was an adaptable, well-behaved baby, Edith Luckett recalled. Nevertheless, it was a challenge raising the child in a cramped New York apartment, with auditions and the burdens of a show-business life. Ken drifted in and out of the city, but by 1922 the couple had divorced. Though the great Nazimova served as Nancy’s godmother, it was purely ceremonial. In the two years since ’Ception Shoals had closed, Nazimova had taken Hollywood by storm in a series of silent blockbusters. Edith was left to juggle new motherhood on her own.

  She and Nancy became a familiar duo on the demanding theater circuit. They went everywhere together, day and night—to casting calls, talent showcases, agency conferences, rehearsals, even parties. Colleen Moore, the silent-screen star, was taken aback when she encountered Edith at a First National studio party “carrying a tiny baby in her arms.”