Reagan: The Life

by H. W. Brands

  But he mounted others, slightly chastened and somewhat more skeptical of the company he was keeping. Dozens of committees and leagues had formed among the sixteen million veterans of the war; some were straightforwardly self-interested and lobbied Congress for such measures as extensions to the GI Bill, which already provided mortgage assistance, college grants, and unemployment pay to veterans. Reagan, among the top earners in the country, didn’t require government help and consequently chose his affiliation on other grounds. The American Veterans Committee had a slogan that appealed to him: “Citizens First, Veterans Second.” So he joined. “I expected great things of the AVC,” he recalled.

  He threw himself into its work. He helped arrange venues for fund-raisers, and he gave speeches to Rotary Clubs and other civic organizations. His famous name and familiar face ensured large crowds, and most of the audiences responded favorably when he lauded America’s victory over fascism and spoke of the need to be vigilant against any sort of neo-fascism. One listener, however, approached him after an address to the men’s club of the Hollywood Beverly Christian Church, where Reagan regularly worshipped. This man, the congregation’s pastor, remarked that he liked everything Reagan had said but thought he should say more. “I think your speech would be even better if you mentioned that if communism looked like a threat, you’d be just as opposed to it as you are to fascism.”

  Reagan confessed that he had never thought of this. But it seemed so obvious that he said of course he would. A short while later he gave a speech to another local group, a citizens’ organization that supported various political and social causes. He repeated his praise of the late war effort and his defiance of fascism should it again appear. The audience loved him, until the closing paragraph. “I’ve talked about the continuing threat of fascism in the postwar world,” he said, “but there’s another ‘ism,’ communism, and if I ever find evidence that communism represents a threat to all that we believe in and stand for, I’ll speak out just as harshly against communism as I have fascism.”

  A heavy silence fell upon the room.

  A few days later he heard from a woman who had been there. “I have been disturbed for quite some time, suspecting there is something sinister happening in that organization that I don’t like,” she wrote. “I’m sure you noticed the reaction to your last paragraph when you mentioned communism. I hope you recognize what that means. I think the group is becoming a front for communists. I just wanted you to know that that settled it for me. I resigned from the organization the next day.”

  Looking back, Reagan considered this period a turning point in his political education. “Thanks to my minister and that lady,” he said, “I began to wake up to the real world.”

  ANOTHER LESSON OCCURRED a few months later. In the summer of 1946, Reagan was asked to join the executive council of HICCASP. He was pleased by the recognition and eager to participate. But his first council meeting proved disillusioning. Held at the home of a prominent council member, it brought out some sixty people, including James Roosevelt, the eldest son of Franklin Roosevelt. Like Reagan, James Roosevelt thought it proper to strike what he considered a balance between the threats to America from the right and from the left. Roosevelt told the group that HICCASP was being assailed by outsiders as a communist front; it would behoove the executive council to go on record as opposing communism as well as fascism.

  “It sounded good to me,” Reagan remarked later, “sort of like that last paragraph I had inserted in my speech.” But it didn’t sound good to many of the people at the meeting. “I was amazed at the reaction. A well-known musician sprang to his feet. He offered to recite the U.S.S.R. constitution from memory, yelling that it was a lot more democratic than that of the United States. A prominent movie writer leaped upward. He said that if there was ever a war between the United States and Russia, he would volunteer for Russia.”

  Reagan took Roosevelt’s side, thereby attracting the leftists’ ire. “I found myself waist-high in epithets such as ‘Fascist’ and ‘capitalist scum’ and ‘enemy of the proletariat’ and ‘witch-hunter’ and ‘Red-baiter’ before I could say boo,” he recalled. One man, screenwriter John Howard Lawson, grew especially incensed. “He persisted in waving a long finger under my nose and telling me off.”

  The meeting dissolved in disorder. As Reagan left, he was approached by Dore Schary, an executive with MGM. “Come up to Olivia de Havilland’s apartment,” Schary said quietly.

  Reagan did so. “I found a solid group of about a dozen gathering in glee,” he recounted. His puzzlement at their high spirits showed, and the group explained that the blowup at the HICCASP meeting hadn’t been accidental. De Havilland said she had grown suspicious of HICCASP when she had been given a speech written by author and screenwriter Dalton Trumbo to deliver to a gathering in Seattle. She had decided it was too communist tinged. She had suggested to James Roosevelt that they put the HICCASP council on the spot; Roosevelt’s proposal did just that, with the results Reagan had witnessed.

  Reagan laughed as he heard the story. De Havilland thought unmasking the communists more serious than amusing, and she asked Reagan what he found so funny. “Nothing,” he replied, “except that I thought you were one.”

  “I thought you were one,” she rejoined.

  7

  MEANWHILE, HE STILL got no good movie roles. He blamed his unlucky timing. If not for the war, which pulled him from the screen at the moment of his dramatic breakthrough in Kings Row, he might have become the next Jimmy Stewart or Henry Fonda. The war had set him on a side track. Now, in the wake of conflict, Warner Brothers gave the best parts to actors the younger postwar audiences found more appealing.

  His complaint had merit; great success on the screen, like great success in any number of endeavors, requires the complicity of fate. The stars must align in the heavens for stars to shine in Hollywood. Yet there was more to the faltering of Reagan’s career. If he was being brutally honest, he had to acknowledge his own narrow acting range and limited sex appeal. During his life many acquaintances would comment on Reagan’s unwillingness to share his deepest feelings. He could know people for years but never let them close. His reserve might have been partly innate, but it doubtless reflected the need for the son of an alcoholic father to shield himself from the disappointments that come from seeing the one who should be your emotional pillar lying drunk in the snow.

  Reagan could play light roles, the ones that let him skate on the fragile surface of human existence. But the dark parts, those that required digging deep and conveying essential inner conflict, were too risky. He liked to think his Drake McHugh role showed what he could do. And in that role he did indeed display terror at a profound personal loss. Yet this was just a moment in a career, a moment he wasn’t able to reproduce. He blamed the war. But other actors’ careers survived the war. The simple fact was that Reagan wasn’t temperamentally suited to serious acting. The same defenses that kept acquaintances at a distance personally kept audiences at a distance dramatically.

  As for the limited sex appeal, it might have had similar roots. Love is the riskiest of all endeavors. Or it might have been something different. But in any event, Reagan didn’t exude the sexual desire and desirability that made contemporaries like Errol Flynn irresistible to female audiences and instructive to their male escorts.

  HOLLYWOOD’S LOSS WOULD be America’s gain. But not yet. For now, Reagan simply knew, or rather felt, that he had to find a new stage. Most of the youthful insecurity was gone. And why not? He was rich, famous, and married to a beautiful woman. What more could a man of thirty-five want? But he still looked outward to quiet the inner voices, to prove he wasn’t like his father. He still craved the applause of an audience. If Warner wouldn’t give him one, he would find his own.

  He had joined the Screen Actors Guild in 1937, at the start of his Hollywood career. In 1941 he attended a meeting of the SAG board, in the place of a temporarily indisposed member. His connection to the board continued, ind
irectly, during the war years, through Jane Wyman, who became a board member in 1942. He returned to the board in early 1946, as a replacement for a departing member, and he won sufficient notice among the other members that he was chosen third vice president that autumn.

  He discovered he liked the politics of the film industry. He came to relish the give-and-take of SAG affairs. And he gradually realized he possessed a gift for writing his own lines, lines that reflected the opinions he was developing about the film industry and the broader world.

  Reagan’s return to the SAG board coincided with a labor battle that split Hollywood and inflicted scars on the movie industry that would last for decades. The American labor movement had long been riven by disagreements over workers’ relationship to the capitalist system. Unions that represented skilled workers typically accepted the permanence of capitalism and simply sought better pay and conditions for their members within the existing system. Unions that represented unskilled workers, by contrast, often adopted the more radical position of challenging the existence or structure of capitalism and calling for workers’ governance or outright socialism. The American Federation of Labor, or AFL, was the prime exponent of the former, more conservative view; the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) was its radical counterpart. Since the mid-1930s the two organizations had been locked in a bitter, sometimes violent dispute for control of organized labor in particular industries and for primacy in the labor movement as a whole.

  The struggle of labor ideologies spilled into Hollywood. The Screen Actors Guild represented actors, the elite of the Hollywood workforce. A new organization, the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), attempted to gain a foothold in the movie industry by organizing the behind-the-camera workforce. In doing so, it took on an existing union, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE). The CSU called a series of strikes designed to win attention for the union and demonstrate the muscle it could deliver on its members’ behalf. The strikes attracted attention, but it wasn’t all positive, for the IATSE matched the CSU muscle with muscle of its own. IATSE members challenged the CSU picket lines, leading to riots in which dozens were injured by rocks, knives, clubs, and fists.

  Reagan and the SAG board initially tried to avoid choosing sides between the CSU and the IATSE. Those comparatively few guild members with strong labor affinities were reluctant to cross any picket line, almost regardless of its origin. A somewhat larger group, uniformly liberal in political views, accepted the claims of the CSU and its leader, Herbert Sorrell, that the new union represented a democratic alternative to the corrupt, autocratic IATSE. But the largest contingent of actors saw little to choose between the rival backstage unions and were willing to be guided by their own self-interest, which was, chiefly, to keep working. Like Reagan, many of them had been in the military during the war and were eager to be back to their old jobs and their old pay scale.

  The fact that the IATSE disputed the authority of the CSU made crossing the picket lines easier than it might have been. Union practice mandated solidarity when workers were clearly arrayed against owners, but when workers were pitted against workers, in jurisdictional disputes such as the present case, other unions could exercise their discretion. The Screen Actors did just that, and they chose to cross the CSU picket lines.

  Yet crossing entailed risks. While Warner Brothers let the IATSE line crossers fend for themselves, it took greater care of the actors, in whom it had more invested. The studio would call the actors each morning and name an obscure off-studio site where they should meet. The sites changed daily to foil CSU spies. Buses would roll up to the site, and the actors would board; the buses, with guards, would then drive to Warner and enter the lots. Reagan, who had finally found a part in a project called Night unto Night, recalled being advised to lie down on the floor as his bus crossed the picket line, lest he attract rocks or more lethal projectiles. “I couldn’t do that,” he explained. “So instead they made me sit by myself. They figured that if I was going to get it, nobody else would be hurt.” On one occasion he got to the rendezvous point just as his bus was going up in flames.

  Reagan at times found himself targeted more specifically. His anticommunist position in HICCASP hadn’t gone unnoticed by the leaders of the CSU, who considered him a knee-jerk defender of the status quo and therefore a threat to their union. His decision to cross the picket line appeared to confirm the judgment. Reagan rejected the legitimacy of the union’s action. “The CSU strike was a phony,” he asserted afterward. “It wasn’t meant to improve the wages and working conditions of its members, but to grab something from another union that was rightfully theirs.” He said much the same thing at the time, in a meeting in early October 1946. The session had been called by some SAG members who were dissatisfied with the direction provided by the board, and it was held at the home of actress Ida Lupino. Reagan learned of the meeting from fellow actor and SAG member William Holden, who suggested they attend. Sterling Hayden, a leftist among the actors, explained the strike in terms favorable to the CSU and, in Reagan’s judgment, inaccurate. Reagan wanted to rebut each point, but Holden held him back until Hayden finished. “Now!” Holden said.

  Reagan stood up and began speaking. “I confronted one of the most hostile audiences I ever hope to address,” he remembered. He had been studying the strike at the behest of the SAG board and was preparing a report for a meeting of the full membership. He had concluded that the dispute was jurisdictional and told the group so at Lupino’s. “I launched into a dress rehearsal of the same report I was to give to the mass SAG meeting two nights later. It was giving the opposition ammunition but it was also a chance to spike their guns.”

  The next morning Reagan went back to work on Night unto Night. The filming that day took place on a beach. Amid the session he was summoned to a telephone. The caller refused to identify himself. “There’s a group being formed to deal with you,” he said, according to Reagan’s recollection. “They’re going to fix you so you won’t ever act again.”

  Reagan didn’t treat the threat seriously until other actors and the executives at Warner told him he should. The studio called the police, who licensed him to carry a gun and placed a security detail at his house. He was informed what the man on the phone might have had in mind: throwing acid into his face. “Thereafter I mounted the holstered gun religiously every morning and took it off the last thing at night,” he recalled.

  BUT THIS WAS no way to live. While the strike lasted, Reagan and other opponents of the CSU would be in danger. So would their livelihoods. The violence at Warner Brothers cast the entire film industry in a bad light, and the dream machine, like many of its individual stars, had long depended on good lighting to work the magic that kept the money rolling in.

  There was a related issue for the studios. Critics of the movie industry complained that the studios monopolized business by operating their own theaters and giving those theaters exclusive rights to show their films. Potential competitors were effectively barred from entry. Congress and the courts had allowed the current system to develop and persist, but they might not always be so supportive. Whatever brought the industry into the public eye in a negative way—a protracted strike, for example—threatened to raise the monopoly question anew and perhaps prompt a change in government policy. The studios, and the actors, preferred the security and profitability of the status quo.

  A convention of the AFL was about to begin in Chicago; because the CSU, the IATSE, and SAG were all associated with the AFL, it made sense for the SAG leadership to appeal to the federation to arbitrate the Hollywood dispute. The AFL had dipped its toe into the fray already; a panel of three AFL vice presidents, sardonically but universally called the Three Wise Men, had laid down guidelines for a division of labor between the CSU and the IATSE. The guidelines bought a truce, but it didn’t hold for long. A subsequent clarification by the Wise Men had only muddied the waters. Yet the precedent, that the AFL would employ its prestige and influence to try to re
solve the Hollywood strike, encouraged the SAG board sufficiently that it dispatched a delegation to Chicago.

  Reagan was one of the delegates. He hated to fly and had a clause in his Warner Brothers contract that he would travel only by rail or car. Yet the importance of the issue and the shortness of time outweighed his aviation aversion, and he joined the others on a flight from Los Angeles. Their mission was to ask the Wise Men in person what they had meant in their original decision and the clarification. “We wangled a meeting with them—three distinguished, sincere, and, I am positive, thoroughly honest men,” Reagan recalled. By Reagan’s account, the three said their authority as arbitrators had ceased, but they were willing as private individuals to explain the principles behind their decision. Their explanation was simple, if unsatisfactory. They had been unable to apply jurisdictional rules from the rest of the AFL to the Hollywood case, given the peculiar craft-crossing history of the IATSE. They had rejected suggestions to dissolve the disputing unions and create a new, comprehensive body, because that would violate the AFL’s own history and traditions. So the best they could do was go forward with the current structure, resolving jurisdictional disputes in Hollywood on a case-by-case basis.

  Reagan and the others tried to get the three to elaborate on this decision as it applied to the issue that was currently the crux of the dispute: whether stage sets should be built by carpenters represented by the CSU or by the stagehands of the IATSE. The Wise Men at first declined, saying they had said enough on the matter. Yet they eventually allowed that set construction ought to go to the stagehands. But they noted that this part of the decision had been unacceptable to William Hutcheson, head of the brotherhood of carpenters that served as the CSU’s link to the AFL. They added, according to Reagan’s version of the meeting, that Hutcheson had applied great pressure to have the decision overturned or suspended.