by Bob Spitz
General Electric preferred to keep him on the road. The company’s TV show was scoring huge with home audiences opposite a new, struggling NBC western called Bonanza, while its host and spokesman made great inroads spreading GE’s policies and ideology to the provinces. It was essential that GE keep him visible, focused—and happy. He was compensated more than adequately, but to sweeten the deal, General Electric offered to outfit the Reagans’ new home in the Upper Riviera section of Pacific Palisades with every electrical convenience known to man. The house, by its sheer size alone, gorged on power. It was a rambling, five-thousand-square-foot ranch at the top of San Onofre Drive, one of the highest points in the Palisades, with each room overlooking the ocean. Once GE’s contractors got their hands on it, the place required its own three-thousand-pound switch box to handle the enormous output of current. They went to town installing an array of gadgets and contraptions: a heated swimming pool with underwater lights, a retractable roof over the central atrium, an intercom in every room, a state-of-the-art screening room with high-fidelity sound, an electric-eye security system, remote controls that opened and closed the drapes, elaborate colored mood lights on the dining room dimmers so that “everybody would look better,” heat lamps in the bathrooms, an outdoor electric barbecue pit with a rotisserie, and numerous television sets scattered throughout. The pièce de résistance was the ultramodern kitchen that fairly gleamed with GE appliances—three refrigerators, two ovens, a dishwasher with built-in garbage disposal, a high-end washer and dryer, and a full range of what Ronnie referred to as “electrical servants,” such as a toaster oven, a waffle iron, a skillet, and a vacuum cleaner from the company’s Monogram housewares division in Louisville. “We found ourselves with more refrigerators, ovens, and fancy lights than we could use,” Nancy groused. Ronnie sent the company a bill to the tune of $17,000 to cover the installation of an air-conditioned wine cellar and other upgrades.
When all was said and done, General Electric showcased 1669 San Onofre Drive as “The House of the Future,” featuring it prominently in a series of three-minute commercials with “television’s first all-electric family,” in which Nancy and Patti occasionally appeared and Ronnie assured viewers that “when you live better electrically, you lead a richer, fuller, more satisfying life.”
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His life was also filling out in ways that weren’t solely electrical. In the summer of 1957, shortly before moving into the new house, Nancy became pregnant again. It was cause for as much anxiety as celebration. She’d withstood two miscarriages since Patti’s birth, and Ronnie was panicked over the state of her health. Nothing discouraged Nancy, not even strict doctor’s orders that she remain in bed, flat on her back, and take weekly hormone shots throughout the final three months of her pregnancy. They weren’t taking any chances this time; from the outset a cesarean section was prescribed. Nancy was determined to have a boy, and have one she did—Ronald Prescott Reagan—on May 20, 1958.
Nancy’s mother, Edith, flew in to assist with the baby, but her presence underscored a notable absence. Nelle Reagan, who had been bedside at the birth of each of her grandchildren, wasn’t up to the burden this time around. It was obvious that Nelle was failing—for the past year she had suffered through a wave of memory lapses and related heart problems that all but sidelined her. “I have hardening of the arteries in my head—and it hurts to think,” she complained early in 1954. The neurological disease, not yet known familiarly as Alzheimer’s, had started to spread its crippling roots. She fought increasingly long spells of forgetfulness, her bright blue eyes struggling behind clouds of confusion. By the time of Ron’s birth in 1958, her condition had deteriorated. “I am a shut in,” she wrote, opening her heart to a friend back in Dixon. She was no longer allowed to drive and restricted by a wave of small strokes and their aftershocks, and the seeming solitary confinement crushed her aging spirit. A lifelong stoic, Nelle had fears that began to show through. But, as always, she found solace in her religious convictions. “I will be 74 years young this month of July, and am grateful to God, to have been spared this long life. Yet when each attac [sic] comes I whisper—‘Please God, let it be now, take me home.’”
When Nancy was back on her feet, she arranged to have Nelle Reagan moved to a nursing home. Nancy didn’t need a battery of doctors to tell her that Nelle needed round-the-clock care. Even at the time, Ronnie sensed an eerie familiarity in Nelle’s condition. His father, Jack, had experienced memory loss in the years just prior to his death. At first, Ronnie attributed it to the effects of alcoholism, the age-old mantra “It’ll rot your brain,” and, of course, the cigarettes—Jack was what he called “a three-pack, one-match-a-day man.” But Jack’s and Nelle’s symptoms foretold a darker story, that his parents’ afflictions might have hereditary implications. Moon’s power of recall was already a bit wobbly.
Ronnie adored his son Ron, whom he’d nicknamed Skipper. Nancy was smitten with her tiny new son, too. He was a beautiful baby, with his mother’s voluptuous cheekbones and his father’s strong jaw and penetrating eyes. According to a friend, Nancy “worshipped at the altar of little Ron”; she went overboard indulging him, perhaps to the exclusion of the other three kids. Michael Reagan, who visited on weekends, acknowledged, “I was a little jealous of him because he got the attention I wanted.” And Patti certainly felt a chill. At first, she took a special interest in her little brother. But she was put off by all the cooing and aahing, by being forbidden from entering the young heir’s nursery. Instead, she took to stealing in for a clandestine peek, tiptoeing to circumvent the intuitive intercom system. Patti lost the exclusivity of being the only child in the home. She was no longer the family’s center of attention. But Patti didn’t surrender her standing without a fight. She morphed from the perfect precocious daughter into a “sullen” child who stood her ground by acting out and going head-to-head against her mother. This attitude didn’t sit well on San Onofre Drive. Nancy sanctioned no disrespect, especially with Ronnie away on the road much of the time. Patti was equally obstinate. The mother-daughter relationship would be rocky for years.
The situation with Michael was also tempestuous, but a different kind of tempestuous—bottled-up, subject to an extraordinary build-up of pressure. Mostly, he’d lived with his mother, Jane Wyman, but her unstable lifestyle and succession of boyfriends and marriages wreaked havoc on Michael’s adolescence, in which he was bounced from stepfather to stepfather, from boarding schools to military academies. The constant turmoil set the tone for what he described in retrospect as “a lifelong roller coaster ride.” He was molested by a camp counselor at the age of eight, became a chronic bed wetter, set fire to the house, slapped Jane Wyman, contemplated suicide, and grappled with anger and depression. Later, he haunted dingy sex shops and trolled for sex with streetwalkers. Michael’s greatest grievance was that he felt unloved. His mother had no time for him and left him feeling not only that he “couldn’t seem to do anything right in her view” but that she didn’t like him. Maureen, who had always served as an intermediary, now spent most months away at a boarding school in Tarrytown, New York. Without her, the friction between mother and son hit an incendiary pitch. When Michael turned fourteen, Jane Wyman had had about all she could take and, at the suggestion of a psychiatrist, shunted him off to his father’s house, where “a family environment” presented a foreseeable antidote.
What at first seemed like a godsend to the boy devolved into a series of demoralizing revelations. Most upsetting was learning that Nancy’s condition for allowing him to move in was that he board at school during the week and accompany Ronnie to the Malibu Hills ranch on weekends. On the few occasions when Michael stayed at San Onofre Drive, his sleeping arrangement was the living room couch. Nancy intimidated him, and his father was away much of the time, traveling for General Electric, forcing Michael to compete for his father’s attention during the days he was home, a situation that only fed his resentment.
Reflecting on this disruptive time, Ronald Reagan wrote, “Although GE kept me on the road a lot, there were long stretches of my life during that period when my daily routine focused entirely on my family.” Perhaps in the abstract, that is. His family life resembled a sequence of guest appearances. Every few weeks he turned up on San Onofre Drive, picking up the threads from where the last episode left off. Even then, he gave the children only passing attention. It was primarily through Nancy that Michael’s and Patti’s issues were raised, and then only as she chose to present them. He went on to describe his short bursts of home life in terms of time spent stealing away to the Malibu ranch, where he felt alive and able to relax. In Ronnie’s world, “the kinship between man and animal you find on the back of a horse” was commensurate with, if not a substitute for, what the family offered.
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In November 1959, Reagan was dragged back to another Screen Actors Guild mediation battle, this time with film and television producers over residual payments to actors for the rebroadcast of old movies and the establishment of a pension and welfare fund.
Howard Keel, the sitting SAG president, had abruptly resigned in the middle of negotiations, and “so everybody’s mind turned to Ronald Reagan,” Jack Dales recalled.
Nancy, fearing a vengeful backlash, urged him to turn the guild down. Still, it killed Ronald Reagan to let the studio bosses dictate the terms of how actors got paid. Someone had to push back against the machine. Wrestling with whether to accept the challenge, Ronnie called Lew Wasserman for advice. It seemed almost certain that Wasserman would counsel him to back off. Ronnie was convinced that serving as SAG’s president had damaged his career—that Jack Warner never looked at him again without seeing the face of the opposition, someone trying to put the squeeze on him and the other moguls. Lew would see the wisdom in keeping a low profile. There was nothing to gain by angering the gods. Surprisingly, however, Wasserman pressed him to accept.
It never dawned on Ronnie that Wasserman’s company, MCA/Revue Studios—a company in which Ronnie was a client and now indirectly worked for—had so much at stake in the negotiations. Or if he had understood the conflict, he never admitted it. Should the guild order a walkout or a strike, MCA stood to lose a fortune. In 1958, the company had shrewdly purchased the TV rights to Paramount Pictures’ backlist of films and had already earned $60 million on that investment. How much, if any, of that would flow back to actors was up for grabs.
Ronald Reagan’s election to fill the top post at SAG—his sixth term—was pro forma. His name was placed in nomination without opposition, requiring a simple voice vote in lieu of a ballot. But other voices began sounding a note of disenchantment. No sooner had Ronnie taken office than a conservative faction led by Hedda Hopper staged a smear campaign to favor the producers. And word circulated through the guild membership that the man spearheading their fight was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Didn’t Ronnie’s cozy situation with General Electric give him a controlling interest in its TV show? The way some actors saw it, there was a giant conflict. A committee was formed to investigate and sort things out. Its findings, published in the December 1959 issue of Screen Actor, SAG’s in-house bulletin, offered a rebuttal in the form of an exoneration. Of Ronald Reagan, it said, “He has no ownership interest, percentage, participation or otherwise in the General Electric Theater, or any other picture or series. He is not the producer of the series and he has no voice in the selection or approval of the actors employed.”
In fact, the opposite was true. Months earlier, when Ronnie’s contract came up for renewal, in addition to a significant raise in salary, the company kicked in an astonishing benefit: 25 percent ownership in all GE Theater productions, not just those that he appeared in. The perk was an annuity—it would pay enormous dividends for years to come through the selling and rebroadcasting of episodes worldwide. It also compromised his position in the ongoing negotiations. He didn’t see it that way, of course. He was an ethical man, and fiercely vigilant about his integrity; instinctively, he took a hard line in his official role as the actors’ emissary. Also, the thought that management might be strong-arming his protégés put his back up. But he was compromised just the same. A conflict of interest did exist.
The producers, his ostensible adversaries, also dug in; they refused to negotiate on any movie made before 1960, arguing that the TV revenues kept the studios solvent. When the studios refused to even discuss a compromise, the SAG membership voted to strike on March 7, 1960.
Reagan knew which side of the picket line his bread was buttered on. Most of the B movies he made were pre-1960, but his status as a producer—a status with a much greater upside—lay ahead, not in the past. It behooved him to resolve the situation as quickly as possible to keep the financial pipelines flowing. To hasten things along, he proposed a deal he felt both sides could accept. The actors would forfeit their claims to residual payments for TV broadcasts of all movies made prior to 1960—“thousands and thousands of pictures,” by Bob Hope’s accounting. In return, a pension plan would be created and funded by the producers with a one-time contribution of $2.65 million, a relative pittance that covered only the pre-1960 pictures. Actors would be entitled to a 6 percent residual on sales of movies made after 1960 to TV, but only after the producers deducted their distribution costs, which were often front-loaded and padded, lessening the payout. It was a mediocre deal at best, heavily weighted in the producers’ favor, but one the guild was likely to ratify. Only a tiny fraction of SAG’s 13,403 members were stars who could afford to stay out of work. As the strike stretched into its sixth week, the majority, in debt and with cash running out, was desperate to reach a settlement. To no one’s surprise, it was put to a vote and authorized on April 18, 1960.
The deal was a particularly difficult one to swallow for longtime established stars who had been working steadily since the introduction of sound—screen veterans like Johnny Weissmuller, whose thirty Tarzan and jungle films were shown “eighty million times,” it was said—an exaggeration, but germane nonetheless—and now earned him nothing as a result of the deal. The same with Bob Hope, who had made forty-six movies prior to 1960 and felt he was “sold down the river” by Ronald Reagan. Mickey Rooney, who had been making movies from the age of four and considered it a “crime showing our pictures on TV without paying us residuals,” aired his blunt disapproval to anyone who listened. Years later, broke and resentful, he attempted to sue to reclaim those rights.
“Ronald Reagan,” Rooney concluded, “was only a pawn at the time the deal was made.” Rooney didn’t hold him responsible for the pitiful outcome. “I believe that he did what he thought best at the time.”
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On June 7, 1960, as soon as the ink was dry on SAG’s agreement with the producers, Ronnie submitted his resignation as guild president in a letter to the board of directors. “I plan to change [my] status by becoming a producer with an interest in profits,” he wrote, trusting it would put an end to questions about his motives.
His primary concern now was keeping things on track with his duties at GE. There was a general concern that Bonanza was gaining ground on General Electric Theater, putting pressure on the anthology to revitalize its format. The new arrangement gave Ronnie input on the show’s scripts and actors, which bit heavily into his speaking schedule. He enjoyed his new producer status, but it was essential, he knew, to continue making speeches, staying connected to “the unwashed public,” as he referred to his audience, with his ear to the ground. Other people and experiences might have shaped Ronnie’s attitudes toward life in general, but nothing had the impact of those GE tours. His early political thoughts were little more than the fanciful speculations of an impressionable, perhaps even a naïve, young man on what he perceived as “the American dangers.” The tours were where he finally understood his political inclinations—his tilt to more conservative positions—and deve
loped a way to convincingly express them.
Occasionally, however, they collided with his sponsor’s interests, precipitating what GE called “a customer relations problem.” On May 4, 1960, during a speech to the company’s regional directors at its Nela Park facility in Cleveland, Ohio, Ronald Reagan cited the Tennessee Valley Authority as an example of how a New Deal program becomes bloated beyond its original purpose, putting the squeeze for its upkeep on U.S. taxpayers. The way he saw it, the country would be better off if the government turned the TVA over to private developers—or shut it down. Unbeknownst to him, the TVA was a contractor for electrical equipment—the apparatus, in manufacturing parlance—built by GE. Worse, GE was in the process of bidding for a $50 million contract for the TVA’s generators, turbines, and switch gear. It didn’t help matters that the tone of his remarks became more and more strident. He chastised the TVA for being “unfairly competitive with private business.”
Word filtered back that he’d sunk the deal. He hadn’t—but certain mid-level bureaucrats at GE and their sidekicks in Congress were up in arms. They wanted him muzzled, thrashed, if not fired. He prepared for the worst. His reigning handler, an ex-FBI agent named George Dalen, manned the phones in their hotel suite, awaiting a “no clemency” call from GE’s president, Ralph Cordiner. After a few days of silence, however, Ronnie decided to go on the offensive. He picked up the phone and called Cordiner, a man whose power was legendary.
“I understand you have a problem and it concerns me,” Ronnie said.
Cordiner was unconcerned to the point of uninterest. “I am never going to have GE censor anything you say,” he told him. If a client of the company wanted to take its business elsewhere—so be it. Ronnie was free to speak his own mind.
