by Bob Spitz
Since 1949, General Electric had been sponsoring a half-hour program with bandleader Fred Waring on Sunday night at nine o’clock following Toast of the Town, a variety show hosted by Ed Sullivan, another MCA client. When the ratings for GE’s show began to slip, the company, disinclined to give up that plum Sunday slot, began looking around for a replacement for Waring.
MCA rode in like the cavalry. It knew that nothing attracted viewers like Hollywood stars, despite the reluctance of big names to appear on TV. “MCA promised us that they would be able to break that barrier if we would go along with a plan they had,” recalled Earl Dunckel, GE’s advertising account supervisor. The strategy the agency laid out was simple: if GE agreed to replace Fred Waring with a dramatic anthology series—something along the lines of, say, General Electric Theater—MCA would paper it with its big-name clients. To test it out, beginning in July 1953, GE alternated weeks with Fred Waring and General Electric Theater, and MCA delivered the stars. That first year alone, Cary Grant, Ronald Colman, Van Johnson, William Holden, Joan Fontaine, Judy Garland, James Mason, and Jane Wyman appeared in the half-hour-long dramas. The show was an instant smash—gorgeous adaptations of short stories, novels, plays, or films performed live, without a safety net, by rotating casts of actors. By summer 1954, it was clear to all concerned that Fred Waring’s services were no longer required.
General Electric Theater was scheduled to begin airing weekly on September 26, 1954, but the show’s format still lacked a key element. It begged for a host, someone to introduce each week’s drama, which would give the series a sense of continuity. Taft Schreiber proposed Ronald Reagan for the position, even though Ronnie had put his foot down about attaching himself to a full-time TV job. “I was always gun-shy of television,” he acknowledged. Years later, long after the show was committed to legend, Ronnie spun the story that what ultimately sold him was an offer of “some personal appearance tours, in which for a number of weeks each year [he would] visit GE plants,” acting as the company’s goodwill ambassador. That hardly seemed like an irresistible perk. In the end, it really came down to money. He was just about tapped out, with nothing in the pipeline, and GE was offering him $125,000 a year, plus an open-ended expense account. He wasn’t about to get that anywhere else, a detail his agent, Art Park, underscored in so many words. MCA turned up the pressure. “Not only would MCA have Reagan on GE Theater, but we also produced the show,” Park explained. “So it was a very, very large commission for our company.” If Ronnie didn’t accept the role, if he rejected television out of hand, if his screen test wasn’t an absolute knockout, it was unlikely that MCA would keep coming to his rescue.
The screen test was only part of GE’s selection process. Whoever hosted the show had to be the right person, someone who not only looked good on camera but conveyed a personal outlook that corresponded to the company’s underlying philosophy. As historian Rick Perlstein noted, “Few corporations were as obsessed as GE with the problem of corporate image—an image, it was at great pains to establish, of GE as a keystone institution of the American Way.” Since the end of World War II, General Electric had been engaged in a stealth crusade to keep the power of organized labor in check. But unlike companies constantly at odds with its unions, GE utilized a novel approach, initiating informative programs designed to influence its employees—many of them blue-collar workers—not only to win them over on labor issues but also to enlist them as emissaries of the company, to have them, in effect, sell the company’s image to the general public. It was an audacious strategy, and for the most part it worked.
Thanks to measures instigated by a revolutionary thinker named Lemuel Boulware, GE dispatched executives on regular outreach visits to all of its plants, speaking with plant managers as well as workers, constantly seeking feedback through focus groups, in order to gauge the most intimate attitudes and economic interests of its employees—the better to influence their politics. GE’s conservative agenda was straightforward. It sought to ensure corporate well-being by turning people against government encroachment and regulatory interference, while neutralizing the union’s effectiveness. Ronald Reagan chose to view it as a management-labor partnership.
Whoever hosted General Electric Theater would have to carry the company torch. “We had been very, very definite as to the kind of person we wanted,” Earl Dunckel recalled, “good moral character, intelligent . . . a good, upright kind of person.” Both Edward Arnold and Walter Pidgeon had been considered, but neither man apparently fit GE’s criteria. Ronald Reagan “was accepted almost by accord.” He was telegenic, with a down-home, folksy appeal—“as natural as anyone you would ever meet . . . a regular guy,” Dunckel thought—and eager to take on the diplomatic role. Equally important, Dunckel noted, was Ronnie’s choirboy image—he didn’t come “with the reputation for the social ramble.”
Like its biweekly predecessor, General Electric Theater hosted by Ronald Reagan was a success right out of the box. His first year, introducing thirty-seven episodes, the show jumped into the top ten in television ratings and continued to build a tremendous audience on the strength of its cast. Long-established movie stars sprang into the series—Joseph Cotten, Alan Ladd, Myrna Loy, James Stewart, Joan Crawford, Dick Powell, Henry Fonda, and Jack Benny, to name a few—but also fascinating newcomers like Natalie Wood, Lee Marvin, and James Dean, who appeared twice.
In the third episode, “The Long Way Round,” shot live on a set at the old Republic Studios, Nancy starred as a wife so intent on helping her husband recover from a nervous breakdown that she nearly drives him over the edge. It was such a good script that Ronnie couldn’t resist playing opposite her, an experiment they repeated occasionally over the years. The hosting duties required little preparation—a two-minute introduction that he memorized, along with a brief sign-off at the end of the show. There was plenty of time and incentive for him to act, an assignment he undertook four times a season. The parts were diverse, wonderfully atmospheric, pressure-free, and “hand-tailored for him,” allowing him to project something richer than what he had done in the movies. The shows provided the perfect outlet for his small-screen talent, extending Ronald Reagan’s acting days and serving as a bridge into a new media era.
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In mid-September 1954, concurrent with the launch of General Electric Theater, Ronnie and Earl Dunckel left for their first two-week promotional swing of GE factory visits. They kicked it off at a plant in Schenectady, New York, on the campus of the company’s vast, thirty-one-acre headquarters. It was a huge plant, comprising 240 buildings, in which twelve hundred workers made everything from steam turbines to waterwheel generators and the parts that went into them. In the giant maw of that facility, Ronnie couldn’t help but feel the company’s almighty power. The place churned with noisy productivity, which ground to complete silence as he made his way inside. It was as impressive an entrance as he’d ever made. Because many of the workers led the kind of blue-collar lives that often left them feeling marginalized and at times underprivileged, the appearance of a movie star in their midst delivered a prodigious jolt of morale. Ronnie seemed larger-than-life, even among those enormous turbines. Tall, impossibly good-looking, and serenely self-contained, he embodied the workers’ very ideal of a big-screen hero come to life. It was as if the Gipper or Grover Cleveland Alexander or . . . Brass Bancroft . . . had stepped out of the frame, and the impact it made was galvanizing. It was something for the GE employees to take pride in. He was GE’s personal Hollywood star—their star—who looked into the camera at the end of each week’s show and paid them tribute by invoking the company motto, “Here at General Electric, progress is our most important product.” Seeing him there, on their turf, they considered him one of their own.
Ronald Reagan didn’t waste the opportunity. He spent four hours making his way around the mazy factory floor, stopping to talk with the workers and signing autographs. He didn’t function as a celebrity on
a pedestal. He worked that plant feverishly, making a real connection with those people, a personal connection, calling them by name and asking after their families. It was a Friday afternoon, with gorgeous fall weather enveloping upstate New York, leading to questions about how they would spend their weekend. He’d always find something pertinent with which to establish a rapport. Otherwise, he chatted about Hollywood because he knew how much people loved a peek behind the scenes. There was a set reservoir of stories he drew from—fond recollections about working with Flynn, Bogie, and those two chimps: Bonzo and Jack Warner. The ghost of Knute Rockne never failed to rear its head. But there was also a round of obligatory PR, perhaps a reflex left over from the Screen Actors Guild. “His main talk was in defense of Hollywood,” Dunckel remembered, how “the divorce level in the nation-at-large was higher than the divorce rate in Hollywood.” Ronnie lamented how actors were regarded as second-class citizens, how until recently, churches refused to bury actors in the same cemetery with their parishioners. He expressed an unflagging pride in his profession, a profession too easily misunderstood and maligned.
A lot of effort went into that performance, and it paid off: his audience loved it. And the type of performance that Ronald Reagan was making now was about to have an impact on his audience unlike anything he’d ever experienced before.
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That Friday, after every last hand had been shaken and they were on their way to the hotel bar, Earl Dunckel got called to the phone. He was informed that Dr. Alexander Stoddard, the controversial Los Angeles school superintendent and scheduled dinner speaker at a convention of teachers at the Schenectady Armory, had suffered a heart attack. The person on the other end of the line asked, “Can Mr. Reagan speak to us Saturday night?”
It was out of the question. A major talk on education by his prize property meant writing a speech that required considerable research. They’d need to know what issues were of critical importance to the teachers, as well as how to address them. There was no time to prepare. They were committed to GE business through most of Saturday afternoon. Besides, education was an area outside of Ronald Reagan’s expertise. Dunckel knew that if such a speech went badly, it would leave “a real black mark on [his] career,” threatening the rest of the tour.
Ronnie, who happened to overhear the call, insisted that he take a shot at the speech. This was right up his alley, he argued. All those banquet groups and civic organizations he’d spoken to over the years had given him plenty of practice for just such a speech. In fact, he’d cobble one together in his room later that night. Cobble together? Dunckel was distraught. He did everything he could to talk Ronnie out of it, but it was useless. Ronnie was adamant and instructed Earl to accept the invitation.
Neither man expected to face the crowd that greeted them when they entered the Schenectady Armory at eight o’clock the next night. This wasn’t a tidy conclave of educators. There were three or four thousand high school teachers packed into the hall, making as much racket as the turbine plant. Dunckel wasn’t just nervous. “I was scared stiff,” he admitted. When he realized Ronnie wasn’t going to fall back on his Hollywood spiel, he imagined the worst: “I could see him falling dead on his face.”
What he didn’t take into account was Ronald Reagan’s ability to speak extemporaneously on any topic he was passionate about. All actors have lines to say and the innate gift of delivery, whether they are playing a G-man, a sports hero, or even a president. But they didn’t all have Ronnie’s gift of speaking his mind, to aggregate facts and statistics from reliable sources, to create instant empathy on subjects as diverse as communism, overpopulation, taxes and, as luck would have it, areas of interest to teachers.
“He got up there and gave a speech on education that just dropped them in the aisles!” Earl Dunckel recalled. It was a heartfelt address that mixed the challenges of an overtaxed and underrated American public school system with a young, idealistic generation facing a communist threat. Granted, a lot of his comments were uninformed by any in-depth knowledge of the issues. He quoted sources like Reader’s Digest and Human Events, a conservative political newspaper founded in 1944. In between, he touched on aspects of the good ol’ days, when he was growing up in the Midwest, where teachers were as respected—and as feared—as the gods. That really brought those teachers to their feet. They were still standing and applauding ten minutes later, when Ronnie finally left the stage.
No one was more roused than Earl Dunckel. His job had been to shape Ronald Reagan into a glorified glad-hander, someone who could promote GE’s image and raise company morale. But this guy, he realized, was made of something more. He had more “breadth and depth” than anyone expected. He had substance, he was a communicator. Ronnie had reached out to an audience he had nothing in common with, and the audience reached out to him in return. It was something to see, Dunckel reported back to his superiors, “an amazing tour de force.”
And it didn’t end in Schenectady.
That initial tour of plant visits hit GE’s major East Coast facilities in Erie, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Boston, and Philadelphia. In every city the itinerary was the same. They started early—a 6:30 a.m. arrival on the red-eye special at a local train platform (Ronnie still refused to fly), where a GE factotum separated them from their luggage before whisking them straight off to the factory. As always, Ronnie would begin a slow, earnest trek circulating through the aisles, making contact with as many employees as time allowed. And, as always, the first few minutes had the awkwardness of a junior high school dance. The women came rushing up, fluttering around Ronnie with mash notes, autograph books, and lips eager to be kissed, while the men huddled against a wall, eyeing him with squinty suspicion. Often, they made a disparaging remark—“I’ll bet he’s a fag” or some similar insult. Ronnie pretended not to hear—a ruse he would perfect during his days in political office—but “he knew what was going on,” according to Earl Dunckel. It was part of his performance. A seasoned actor knows you time your entrance to have the greatest effect, and Ronnie was waiting for the right moment. When it came—and it was at a point only he seemed to know—he made a move toward his cynical antagonists.
In the short time it took to introduce himself, the men’s whole mood did a sharp about-face. Their shoulders came unglued, scowls disappeared, clenched fists reached out to shake Ronnie’s hand, even to slap him affectionately on the back and elsewhere. “That’s the way, Ron!” one of the men might say, before summoning buddies from a neighboring production line to join them. Whatever Ronnie said, whatever it was he did to break the ice—an inside joke, a self-deprecating remark, a reference to something one of the women had confided—it instantly cemented a rapport that allowed these men to drop their tough-guy armor. Earl Dunckel, watching the polished yet homespun actor work that crowd, decided “this guy was so charming, so nice” that “he could convince a skeptic of anything.”
Plant tours that were supposed to take a few hours created havoc with their schedules. It began with fifteen-minute talks with plant and section managers before huddling with the hourly employees who manned the machinery. A conversation with, say, a drill-press operator would drag on and on, despite an effort by Dunckel to lead Ronnie away. And the operator would latch on and walk off right along with them, still chatting, keeping pace, picking up other workers as they made their way from station to station, so that pretty soon a crowd had formed in the aisle. Brief exchanges meant to take a few minutes or more would stretch into hours. Running to an office phone, Dunckel would frantically shuffle appointments, canceling dinners, rearranging train times, so that often they wouldn’t get to their hotel until well past midnight.
Then, the next morning, they’d be up at dawn, ready to repeat the routine with unflagging enthusiasm.
“Boy,” Dunckel recalled of the experience, “we walked our legs right down into stumps.” Those concrete floors took their toll. And the handshakes—hundreds of h
andshakes every day—were crippling. The wear-and-tear on the body was tremendous. It was a test of physical endurance.
But it wasn’t enough to tour the plants. As word of Ronnie’s virtuosity spread, invitations for speeches began pouring in. Wherever he went, the question was the same: Would he speak to the Chamber of Commerce, the Lions, the Rotarians, the Elks, the Kiwanians, the California Fertilizer Association, the National Association of Manufacturers? GE sponsored husband-and-wife book clubs and coed bowling leagues. Could he put in an appearance and say a few words? How about an address to local hospital administrators? No opportunity was left unexploited. He said yes to everything. GE gave Ronald Reagan a platform. It gave him a chance to speak about issues he cared about, to get things off his chest.
It often started with a few humorous Hollywood anecdotes. And jokes—he had a slew of them ready for every occasion, set pieces that never failed to warm up an audience. A seasoned GE plant manager said, “He was the most inventive man with a dirty joke I’ve ever known,” although he whitewashed them in the retelling. But then the jokes gave way to economic and philosophical patter, and it might veer off to the right—how “the Communists had pretty much taken over the Screen Actors Guild, that they had taken over most of the unions involved with making films.” Maybe your union. That struck a chord. So did his rant about taxes. “There can be no moral justification of the progressive tax,” he said, tracing its origin to the Communist revolution. Ronnie groused about being in the ninety-first percentile. The ninety-first percentile! Imagine that. You worked like a dog, put every effort you had into your best work, and the government took the bulk of what you earned. It wasn’t fair, he complained. Taxes were too high. He’d really get going, making his case, and the crowd would be listening hard, nodding its agreement.
