Reagan: The Life

by H. W. Brands

  The studio’s first star was a dog, a German shepherd named Rin Tin Tin who drew huge audiences into the theaters to watch his canine heroics. Jack Warner dubbed Rin Tin Tin the “mortgage lifter” for his ability to erase debts the studio and its affiliates incurred. Warner liked the canine better than he liked most human actors. “He didn’t ask for a raise or a new press agent or an air-conditioned dressing room or more close-ups,” he said. In fact Rin Tin Tin got a raise, to $1,000 per week; he also acquired doubles to relieve him of the most onerous and dangerous stunts.

  But he didn’t survive the shift from silent films to movies with sound tracks, not at Warner at any rate. Sam Warner persuaded his brothers to purchase a technology that allowed the attachment of sound recordings to film. The initial appeal was that sound would permit theaters to dispense with the orchestras that played accompaniment to otherwise silent films. When Sam suggested that the technology could also record actors’ voices, Harry snorted, “Who the hell wants to hear actors talk? The music—that’s the big plus about this.” The studio produced The Jazz Singer in 1927; the film contained orchestral music, singing, and only a few lines of spoken dialogue. But it was the talking that captivated audiences and shortly rendered silent films obsolete. Rin Tin Tin received his walking papers. “The making of any animal pictures, such as we have in the past with Rin Tin Tin,” the studio informed its erstwhile star, through his master and agent, “is not in keeping with the policy that has been adopted by us for talking pictures, very obviously of course because dogs don’t talk.”

  Rin Tin Tin caught on with a different studio, which was more than could be said for some other silent-film stars, who lacked voices for the talkies and couldn’t even bark. Jack Warner and the rest of the industry learned that voices counted a great deal in the new films, a fact that worked in Ronald Reagan’s favor when his radio-trained voice recorded well in his screen test. Meanwhile, the Warner brothers elbowed their way forward, until their firm became one of the five major Hollywood studios.

  And the one that took the grittiest view of life. The leading brand in Hollywood belonged to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the movie conglomerate headed by Louis B. Mayer, who consorted with the Southern California establishment and upheld the conservative business virtues personified by Herbert Hoover, California’s gift to America, as it seemed in those pre-depression days. Mayer dined at the Hoover White House and benefited from the tax cuts implemented by the Republican administrations of the 1920s.

  Jack Warner was, in many ways, the self-conscious opposite of Mayer. Warner applauded Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, and his studio shot movies that showed the seamier side of American life. Gangster films became a Warner Brothers staple; James Cagney was Jack Warner’s personal discovery. Keepers of the American conscience chided Warner Brothers for touring the gutter; Harry Warner defended their films by saying, “The motion picture presents right and wrong, as the Bible does. By showing both right and wrong, we teach the right.”

  REAGAN HELPED. He headed for Hollywood in May 1937 in a used Nash convertible packed with nearly all his earthly possessions. His journey recapitulated the trek Americans had been making since the days of the California gold rush; the West had long been the land of opportunity, the glittering destination of the American dream. Hollywood was simply its latest incarnation. Reagan stopped at the Biltmore to thank Joy Hodges for her part in opening opportunity’s door, and he presented himself, a week early, at the Warner Brothers studio.

  His reception took him aback. “Where in hell did you get that coat?” Max Arnow demanded. Reagan had had the white sport jacket specially tailored; he admired it very much. “You can’t wear that outfit,” Arnow snorted. “The shoulders are too big—they make your head look too small.” Arnow called in an aide. “Take him over to wardrobe and see what the tailor can do with this outfit. He looks like a Filipino.” The tailor sliced and reconfigured Reagan’s jacket, narrowing the shoulders and fitting it closer to his chest. He ordered special shirts with custom collars to make Reagan’s neck, judged too short, look longer.

  From wardrobe Reagan was sent to makeup, where his self-esteem suffered further blows. “That Arnow guy must think I’m Houdini,” the makeup director groused. “Some of the mugs he signs up!” In fact there was little to do, or perhaps just little that could be done. A new haircut erased the vestiges of Reagan’s college-boy look. His face had good color; he could keep that.

  His voice was fine, though he would need coaching for particular dialects or accents. But his name would have to be changed. No one outside Holland would pay to see an actor called Dutch. Reagan hesitantly suggested his given first name. Arnow and the Warner Brothers publicity team rolled the moniker around their tongues: “Ronald Reagan … Ronald Reagan.” It sounded okay. It would fit a marquee. They would give it a try.

  NEITHER THEY NOR he had any idea how much hinged on this snap decision. Reagan’s highest hope was to make his career in movies; he had no inkling he would carry his Hollywood name into another field, one that insisted on real names.

  Instead, he concentrated on getting his first role. Studios tested their new talent in B movies, the low-budget features that filled out the double bills that made moviegoers feel they were getting their money’s worth. The Bs were shot quickly and forgotten even faster. Reagan seemed a natural for one that was beginning production when he arrived; called Love Is on the Air, it had a part for a radio announcer of roughly Reagan’s description.

  Reagan confessed to unaccustomed stage fright as the hour of his first take approached. For years he had dreamed of this opportunity; he had no fallback if he botched it. Another member of the cast, a veteran character actor, noticed his nerves. “Kid, don’t worry,” he said. “Just take it easy and everything will be all right.” The makeup crew applied some final touch-ups. The lights came on. The director said, “Camera … Action!”

  Reagan remembered the moment decades later. “Suddenly, my jitters were gone,” he said. “The old character actor had been right. As soon as I heard the director’s words, I forgot all about the camera and the lights and the crew and concentrated on delivering my lines.”

  It was his second stroke of luck, or fate, in just a few days. The ability to act for a camera, as opposed to an audience, is a talent not given to every thespian. Nor is it a talent vouchsafed to every politician. From the beginning, Reagan loved the camera, and the camera loved him. The affair would last a lifetime.

  The early notices were favorable. Besides filling out theater bills, the B films served as the studios’ equivalent of baseball’s minor leagues; scouts and reviewers paid less attention to the movies themselves than to the new talent they introduced. The reviewers liked Reagan, and about the time he discovered that his seven-year contract actually guaranteed him only six months of work, Warner Brothers extended the option another six months and gave him a raise.

  ALREADY HE EYED his next step. Dreams of the A-list danced in his head. He made a triumphal return to Dixon, which proclaimed him its favorite son. He brought his parents west to California and set them up in the first house they had ever owned. He suggested roles for himself and even movies to his bosses at Warner.

  One suggestion resulted in a picture about Knute Rockne, a Norwegian immigrant who became the football coach at Notre Dame. Rockne was respected but not revered until his 1931 death in an airplane crash, which made him an irresistible subject for mythmakers in multiple genres. Reagan talked up a Rockne movie around the Warner lot and subsequently took offense when Warner bought the rights to Rockne’s life without crediting or paying him. Perhaps he was correct to conclude he had been poached, but the idea was obvious enough to occur to any number of people in Hollywood.

  He took further offense when he learned that Warner was testing other actors for the role he envisioned for himself: George Gipp, a halfback who, like Rockne but before him, died young and touched similar heartstrings. Reagan demanded an opportunity to test for the role. The producer rebuffed him
, saying he didn’t look like a football player. Reagan dug out a yearbook photograph of himself in a Eureka College uniform and returned with it to the producer’s office. The next day he got his test, and he won the role.

  He loved playing a football hero, someone far better at the game than he had ever been. And though the Gipp part was modest in scope, it gave Reagan a line that would be associated with him for decades. Gipp has been diagnosed with an incurable illness; on his deathbed he tells Rockne, “Some day when the team’s up against it and the breaks are beating the boys, ask them to go in there with all they’ve got and win just one for the Gipper.”

  REAGAN WAS PROUD of his Gipp role, though not as proud as his father was. Sons eventually outstrip their fathers, but in Reagan’s case the eclipse came swiftly and dramatically. The family’s move to California showed how well Reagan was doing; it simultaneously confirmed what a failure Jack was. On his own or at his mother’s suggestion, Reagan softened the blow of his generosity to the older man. He asked Jack if he would mind taking charge of the fan mail that was beginning to arrive for him at the Warner studio. “Look,” he remembered explaining, “you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to, but you could really help me. I’ve got a heck of a problem with this fan mail, mailing out autographed pictures and so forth. What would you say if I got you a secretary’s pass and a regular salary at the studio and you came in every day to pick up the mail, look it over, order the pictures, and so forth.”

  His father liked the idea. “Jack jumped at it,” Reagan said. “It was a real job, it gave him self-respect, and he did a great job at it.” Whether Jack understood that his son was paying his salary, Reagan didn’t say. He did say that Jack handled the work better than he himself could have. “One day he showed me a letter from a young woman who had written that she was dying and wanted a photo of me before she did. I thought it was a story invented by someone who believed that’s what it took to get an autographed picture. Jack urged me to sign the picture anyhow and I did. About ten days later I got a letter from a nurse who told me that the woman, who was named Mary, had died with my picture in her hands and that it had made her very happy to have it.” Reagan added, “Jack never said, ‘I told you so.’ ”

  Jack lived only a few years in California. He died in 1941 at the age of fifty-seven. Reagan was pleased to relate his father’s last days as a tale of redemption, with himself in a supporting role. “When he died so young, I blamed it at first on his problem with alcohol,” Reagan wrote decades afterward. “Now I think his heart may have finally failed because of smoking. I’d always thought of Jack as a three-pack, one-match-a-day man: In the morning he’d use one match to light his first cigarette of the day, and from then on, he’d light the next one from the old one.” Reagan claimed partial credit for saving Jack from booze, if not tobacco. “The home he loved in California and his job at the studio may have helped him finally lick the curse that had hounded him so long. I was in the East on an errand for the motion picture industry when my mother called and told me that he had died,” he said. “During the call, she told of finding Jack one night standing in the house, looking out the window, and he began talking about his drinking and wondering how their lives might have been different if he hadn’t been a drinker. Then he told my mother that he had decided he was never going to take another drink, and she said, ‘Jack, how many times have I heard you say that?’ ‘Yes,’ Jack said, ‘but you’ve never seen me do this before,’ and he disappeared and came back with a big jug of wine he’d hidden from my mother. Then he dumped the wine into the sink and smashed the jug.”

  His mother went on to say that Jack had started going to church, and that he was proud of his son’s success. Jack had closely followed the filming of the Knute Rockne movie, and when it was ready for its premiere at Notre Dame, the emotional alma mater of every Irishman in America, he wanted to attend. But he didn’t want to ask his son. Nelle quietly passed the word along, and Reagan made the arrangements. “I invited him to join us on the Warner Brothers train that took us to South Bend for the ceremonies and premiere,” Reagan recalled. “Before he died, Nelle told me, Jack told her what the trip had meant to him: ‘I was there,’ he said, ‘when our son became a star.’ ”

  HE BECAME A husband about the same time. The end of college had ended Reagan’s romance with Margaret Cleaver, in the manner often effected by such life transitions. Physically separated by their need to find jobs, they drifted apart emotionally. Margaret went off to France, where she met a young man in the American consular service whom she eventually married. Reagan went to Iowa and then Hollywood, where he met young women as suddenly detached from their roots as he was.

  The studios understandably emphasized the romantic appeal of their actors, and the movie press sold papers relating which actor was dating which actress, where they dined, and what clubs they haunted. Reagan received his share of coverage, much of it courtesy of Louella Parsons, the doyenne of the gossip columnists, who happened to be from Dixon, Illinois. She took a liking to Reagan, with whom she had a minor role in one of his first films, Hollywood Hotel.

  Parsons considered matchmaking part of the mythmaking of Hollywood, and when Reagan and a young actress named Jane Wyman appeared together in the 1938 B comedy Brother Rat, about three cadets at the Virginia Military Institute, Parsons publicized a budding romance. Wyman’s childhood and youth had been even more challenging than Reagan’s. She had been born Sarah Jane Mayfield in St. Joseph, Missouri, in 1917. Her father left the family when she was five, and her overwhelmed, or distracted, mother farmed her out to some neighbors. Her foster mother lost her husband when Jane was eleven, and the two relocated to Los Angeles, where Jane found independence of a sort in marriage, at sixteen, to a salesman named Wyman. The marriage didn’t last, but the name did, and as Jane Wyman she made her way to Hollywood, where she signed a contract with Warner Brothers a year before Reagan arrived. She married again, but this marriage failed even more quickly than the first, and by the time she and Reagan encountered each other on the set of Brother Rat, she was again in the mood for romance.

  Or perhaps for security. Wyman guarded her innermost feelings, but a few years later she told an interviewer that until she met Reagan, she had never been able to entrust her feelings to anyone. She had hardly known her father and had scant experience of a stable home. Reagan, tall and strong, six years her elder, offered emotional assurance that warmed her from within. “He was such a sunny person … genuinely and spontaneously nice,” she said. He seemed a rock of stability. She couldn’t overstate what his love did for her. “Marrying Ronnie worked a miracle for me.”

  As for what Reagan saw in Wyman, it doubtless started with her physical attractiveness. She was young and vulnerable looking, in a way that men, including her two husbands and then Reagan, found irresistible. Her mercurial personality added to the appeal; at one moment she could coo, at the next hiss and spit. Had Wyman not expressed interest in Reagan, he might have paid her little mind. He had formed no serious attachments since parting with Margaret Cleaver. In his own way he was as cautious and distrustful of love as Jane. No more in his background than in hers did childhood afford a model for happy marriage. His parents, unlike hers, had stayed together, but he certainly did not intend to become a husband like his father had been to his mother.

  Nor did he possess, or was he possessed by, an ungovernable libido. A Hollywood veteran of that era, a woman, later distinguished Reagan from the lions of the boudoir. “When Clark Gable or Errol”—Flynn—“or Ty Power came into the room, you could just feel the heat waves shimmering,” she told an interviewer. But not Reagan? the interviewer asked. “Oh no, never Ronnie.” Why not? the interviewer asked. Wasn’t he as handsome as the others? “Yes,” she responded. “But female desire is attuned to male desire. Clark, Errol, obviously were crazy about women. Ronnie just wasn’t. I don’t think he ever looked at Ann Sheridan”—with whom Reagan starred in Kings Row—“and she was luscious.”

 
In any event, Wyman seems to have initiated the romance, and Reagan offered little resistance. She might have been more eager to secure a commitment than he: Hollywood gossip and bits of circumstantial evidence suggest that she staged a suicide attempt to dramatize that she couldn’t live without him. On the other hand, her hospital stay might have been caused by a nasty stomach bug. Yet the story went around that he held her hand at her bedside and said that of course he would marry her.

  The wedding took place in a chapel in Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, north of Los Angeles, in January 1940. The bride had just turned twenty-three; the groom was almost twenty-nine.

  4

  WHILE REAGAN’S CAREER and personal life were blossoming, Franklin Roosevelt’s fortunes appeared to be fading. The New Deal had stalled in the spring of 1935 when the Supreme Court toppled a central pillar of government planning of the economy, the National Recovery Administration. Roosevelt riposted with the Social Security Act, which expanded the welfare state into individual lives as nothing in American history before it had. The federal government assumed responsibility for the well-being of the elderly, for those unable to work, and for their dependents. Social Security meant what the name implied: individuals would be secured from the great vicissitudes of life in an industrial society. Roosevelt originally intended to wrap medical insurance into the package, but he decided not to press his luck and left health care to future generations.