An American Life

by Ronald Reagan

  I had experienced a shock at seeing myself with only about two feet of body and I just stayed there looking at where my body ended. The horror didn’t ease up. When the camera crew announced they were ready, I whispered to Sam Wood, the director, “No rehearsal—just shoot it.” I guess he understood. When he said, “Action,” I screamed, “Randy, where is the rest of me?” while I reached with my hands, feeling the covers where my legs should have been.

  There was no retake. Sam quietly said: “Print it.” I realized I had passed one of the biggest milestones in my career. I still believe Kings Row is the finest picture I ever appeared in and it elevated me to the degree of stardom I had dreamed of when I had arrived in Hollywood four years earlier.

  Bob Cummings, my costar, must have wondered in later years whether he might be a psychic of some sort: Clear back then on the set of that movie, Bob had a line that he would always use on me: “Someday,” he said, “I’m going to vote for this fellow for president.”

  Kings Row was the only picture I was in for which there was ever any talk of my getting an Academy Award. But that year, Warner Brothers also made Yankee Doodle Dandy, with Jimmy Cagney playing George M. Cohan. In those days the studios usually got behind only one picture in the Oscar race, and it picked Yankee Doodle Dandy. I’ve certainly never begrudged Jimmy Cagney for that: It was not only a great picture, but he was great in it. This actor, so much identified in people’s minds as a tough guy, had originally begun his career as a dancer and in that picture he was brilliant.

  I didn’t get an Oscar, but even before Kings Row was released, Warners offered me a seven-year contract at a considerable increase in salary over my existing contract, which only had a couple of years to go. It was an indication big things were expected of Kings Row and that after its release I might be in a position to ask for more than they were offering me or sit out the old contract and become a free agent.

  Negotiations for my new contract were going on when I received a telephone call from my brother on a Sunday morning telling me that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. Very shortly I started another picture costarring with Errol Flynn. It was called Desperate Journey and we played RAF pilots shot down behind the German lines.

  My agent at the time was Lew Wasserman, now head of MCA Inc. He persuaded me to accept the studio’s offer, pointing out that I was a reserve officer and soon could be called to active duty, so why not get the added money for whatever time was left? I have to confess I hadn’t given a thought to possible active duty, probably because the army had designated me for “Limited Service” because of my poor eyesight.

  Thank heaven for Lew. He was a great agent and friend and I was lucky to have him in both capacities. Three months after Pearl Harbor, I received a letter from the War Department. I didn’t have to open it to know what it was. Written on the envelope in red ink were the words “Immediate Action,” which meant active duty. I was ordered to report in fourteen days to Fort Mason, the port of embarkation in San Francisco.

  There were more than fourteen days of filming left on Desperate Journey. A lot of rescheduling took place to get my final scenes on film. Long shots and shots of my back were saved for a double after I was gone.

  On the morning of the fourteenth day, I reported to Colonel Philip T. Booker—thirty-four years, regular army, a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute. Along with some ROTC cadets from the University of Arizona, I was to serve as liaison officer loading convoys with troops bound for Australia. Our strategy was to build up a force there to prevent Japan from pinning down its flank on Australia and then being able to turn and attack the west coast of the United States.

  When my turn came for a physical exam, everything was fine except my vision without glasses. One of the doctors who was administering the test told me after checking my eyes that if they sent me overseas, I’d shoot a general. The other doctor said, “Yes, and you’d miss him.” My report read: “Confined to the continental limits, eligible for corps area service command or War Department overhead only.” So I was a liaison officer. All of us newcomers were cavalry. Then we discovered the commanding general of Fort Mason was a cavalry officer.

  My career in loading ships only lasted a few months, then Colonel Booker called me in and showed me an order transferring me to Army Air Force Intelligence, Los Angeles, California.

  At the time, General Hap Arnold was moving toward achieving his dream of creating an independent air force. He’d established the intelligence unit to make air force training films and documentaries, train camera crews, and accompany our planes on combat missions. I was sent to the unit because of my experience in motion pictures.

  My first assignment was to recruit technicians and artists from the movie business for the new unit who were ineligible for the draft, and pretty soon, even though I was wearing the bars of a second lieutenant, I was offering majors’ insignias to half-million-dollar-a-year movie directors. We also had first call on draftees from the industry.

  Our unit took over the Hal Roach film studio in Culver City and a nearby, recently closed school that became our training center for combat camera crews. Before long, the post was being called “Fort Roach”—a completely unofficial title and one, I think, that was not intended to be complimentary.

  I wound up as adjutant and personnel officer for the unit. Our combat camera crews went to every war zone in the world and our training films were used throughout the army air corps. In a way, we’d become the Signal Corps for Hap Arnold’s new air force.

  Our greatest and most unusual achievement was developing a new method for briefing pilots and bombardiers before their bombing missions.

  Under the old method, a briefing officer stood in front of a map with a pointer, describing to the crew the route of their mission and the targets of the attack.

  Our uniformed special effects magicians took over almost the entire floor of a sound stage and, working from prewar photographs and intelligence reports, created an amazing replica of Tokyo complete with thousands of buildings and its nearby coastline; then they mounted a camera on a movable overhead derrick from which they took motion pictures simulating what flight crews could expect to see as they approached and passed over Tokyo; after each bombing raid, new aerial photos were taken and our replica was updated to show the latest damage inflicted by our planes.

  No more map and pointer. The films were airlifted to our bomber bases in the Pacific and replaced the old-fashioned briefings. My job was to narrate the films, identify features by which the pilots could reach their targets, then say “Bombs away” at the appropriate time.

  At Fort Roach, I became one of the first Americans to discover the full truth about the horrors of Nazism. One of our jobs was to prepare classified films about the progress of the war to be shown to members of the general staff in Washington. As a result, we handled a lot of classified footage taken by combat cameramen around the world that was never seen by the public.

  During the final months of the war, we began receiving secret Signal Corps films showing the liberation of Hitler’s death camps and they engraved images on my mind that will be there forever.

  I’ll never forget one especially. It showed the interior of a huge building. Our troops had just taken over a camp and had entered the building. It was cavernous, like a warehouse. And the floor was covered with bodies. Then, as we watched in horror, one of the bodies rose up on an elbow and a hand reached up—a hand rising out of a sea of bodies, as if it were pleading for help.

  There were many other ghastly images: Camp inmates so gaunt and emaciated you wondered how they could possibly still be alive; ditches filled with bodies being bulldozed into the earth; footage of German families brought from nearby villages to see for themselves the unspeakable inhumanity of their countrymen.

  One of these films was amazing. The trip to a camp had been ordered by the commander of our troops and as the people left their village, some of them were almost in a festive mood, laughing and enjoying themselves, as
if they were on an outing to someplace pleasant they’d never seen before.

  Then, you followed the villagers through the camp and the cameramen switched between them and the horrors they were witnessing. Soon their reactions had changed completely: The men began to grow stooped and their faces turned ashen, many of the women began crying, some fainted and others turned away from the camera and began vomiting. They had learned something about their country they had never known before.

  When the war ended and Fort Roach closed, I decided to keep a print of one of the films because I remembered that after World War I, there’d been a lot of talk about how Americans had been duped by false propaganda about the enemy, and I thought it might come in handy.

  Some years later, a producer and his wife came over for dinner and we started talking about the war and he said, “I really wonder if all that stuff we’re hearing about the Germans is true. I don’t know if I believe it or not.”

  “Well, I have a little movie I’d like to show you,” I said.

  I set up my 16-millimeter projector, put up the screen, and let the story tell itself.

  There was one scene in this film that showed a barbed-wire fence. A group of Jews had been trying to escape from a concentration camp and were running toward the fence when they were mowed down by German machine guns. Their bodies were stacked deep along the fence and the hands of some who had almost made it to freedom were still clinging to the fence.

  It was a terrible and poignant scene of small, thin fingers desperately gripping rusted strands of barbed wire, in death.

  When the film ended, the producer and his wife just sat there in silence with tears in their eyes.

  13

  AT FORT ROACH I had my first exposure to the peculiar ways of the federal bureaucracy since those days during the Depression when Jack worked on Dixon’s relief program. About midway through the war, Congress challenged the military’s widespread use of civilian workers, saying it was a drain on the defense industry and the nation’s pool of draft-age men. An order went out setting a goal for reducing civilian employees at every post where they were used. It didn’t affect us. Although we’d asked for civilian typists to help our writers with their scripts, we were refused because our work was regarded as too secret to employ civilians; often, we learned the identity of the targets planned for future bombing missions long before they occurred, so enormous security precautions had to be imposed at the post. But one day I was visited by two men from Washington. They told me they were checking out our need for civilians. I told them we couldn’t have any. They smiled at each other and said, “You’ll have ‘em.”

  Sure enough, one day a contingent of fifty civilians arrived and announced they were going to establish a personnel office for the two hundred or so civilian employees that were going to be sent to us.

  At the time, we had about twelve hundred military men at the base, and our whole personnel section consisted of eighteen people.

  When the new civilian employees began arriving, every one of them was a transfer from another military installation; there’d been a program to reduce the number of civilians assigned to the military; instead, the military ended up with more civilian employees than they’d had before the program started—the bureaucracy had just transferred them from one place to another.

  My assignment as the post’s adjutant and personnel officer (I ended the war a captain) put me in close contact with the civilian bureaucrats and it didn’t take long for me to decide I didn’t think much of the inefficiency, empire building, and business-as-usual attitude that existed in wartime under the civil service system. If I suggested that an employee might be expendable, his supervisor would look at me as if I were crazy. He didn’t want to reduce the size of his department; his salary was based to a large extent on the number of people he supervised. He wanted to increase it, not decrease it.

  I discovered it was almost impossible to remove an incompetent or lazy worker and that one of the most popular methods supervisors used in dealing with an incompetent was to transfer him or her out of his department to a higher-paying job in another department.

  We had a warehouse filled with cabinets containing old records that had no use or historic value. They were totally obsolete. Well, with a war on, there was a need for the warehouse and the filing cabinets, so a request was sent up through channels requesting permission to destroy the obsolete papers. Back came a reply—permission granted provided copies are made of each paper destroyed.

  One assignment took me away from Fort Roach for a time. During World War I, Irving Berlin had put on a great Broadway show, Yip, Yip Yaphank, in which most of the performers were military personnel and the proceeds went to Army Emergency Relief.

  Irving did a reprise during World War II with This Is the Army. Warner Brothers offered to film it and give all the proceeds to the same cause. Again, the cast was mainly military and I found myself in a starring role. I’m told the picture earned more than $10 million for Army Relief.

  In Hollywood, if a contract player was suspended or absent for other reasons, including military service, a studio added the lost time to the end of his or her contract. The rule meant that when I returned to Hollywood after the war, I would have as much time left on my Warner Brothers contract as I’d had when the war began.

  But Olivia de Havilland challenged this procedure in court and won. Her legal victory set a precedent for all of us, and for me it meant that the four years I’d spent in the service would reduce by four years the amount of time left on my Warner Brothers contract; soon I’d be on the open market.

  Stallion Road, my first picture after the war, costarred Zachary Scott and Alexis Smith, and it was like a welcome-home gift: The story involved horses, with riding in fox hunts and jumping events in horse shows. I played a veterinarian, Larry Hanrahan, the owner of a black thoroughbred hunter named Tar Baby.

  Because of the war, my riding had gotten a little rusty. A few weeks before the filming was to begin, I called Dan Dailey, who was also a reserve officer in the cavalry, and said, “Dan, it’s been four years since I’ve done much riding. Do you happen to know somebody I could get to help me get back in the saddle?” He told me about an Italian count, Nino Pepitone, a former captain in the Italian cavalry, which had been considered the fountainhead of high-quality riding since the turn of the century. I went to see him and discovered that he owned a black thoroughbred mare named Baby. Well, Nino taught me things I’d never known before about jumping and riding, and I fell in love with the horse. Nino had done some bit parts before, and so I persuaded the studio to hire him for a minor role in the picture and also talked it into renting Baby for me to ride in the picture; she was a super horse, and I did my own jumping in the picture, without a double.

  Before we’d finished the picture I bought Baby, and not long after that I was able to buy my own ranch—eight acres in the San Fernando Valley—that fulfilled the dream I’d first had back in Des Moines. With Nino’s help, I went into business, breeding thoroughbreds and selling them at the yearling sale.

  During these early postwar years I found myself becoming increasingly involved with contract negotiations and other activities for the Screen Actors Guild.

  As I look back now, I guess I was also beginning a political transformation that was born in an off-screen cauldron of deceit and subversion and a personal journey of discovery that would leave me with a growing distaste for big government.

  I didn’t realize it, but I’d started on a path that was going to lead me a long way from Hollywood. But that was a long way off and I sure never suspected it at the time.

  I was back in pictures and loving it. After Warners brought several successful Broadway plays to the screen and cast me in starring roles, I didn’t have much to complain about. But I did wish Jack Warner would think of me on the back of a horse wearing a cowboy hat.

  He always wanted to cast me in drawing-room comedies in the kind of parts that might have gone to Cary Grant. I was hungry to
do action pictures. I believed the war had given audiences a taste for action—not necessarily more war movies, because they’d had four years of those, but adventure and outdoor pictures, especially westerns. But when I’d ask Jack to put me in a western, he’d cast me in another movie in which I’d wear a gray-flannel suit.

  In his defense, it wasn’t only Jack Warner who acted like that. That was the way Hollywood operated: If I’d played a sailor in a picture that made a lot of money, I’m sure I would have had to buy a ton of seasick pills because I wouldn’t be seeing land for years.

  “If you ever do let me be in a western,” I once told Jack, “you’ll probably make me the lawyer from the East.”

  14

  AT THE END OF WORLD WAR II, I was a New Dealer to the core. I thought government could solve all our postwar problems just as it had ended the Depression and won the war. I didn’t trust big business. I thought government, not private companies, should own our big public utilities; if there wasn’t enough housing to shelter the American people, I thought government should build it; if we needed better medical care, the answer was socialized medicine.

  My brother, meanwhile, had decided to become a Republican. We spent hours arguing—sometimes with pretty strong language—over the future of the country. He complained about the growth of government, claimed Washington was trying to take over everything in the American economy from the railroads to the corner store, and said we couldn’t trust our wartime ally, Russia, any longer. I claimed he was just spouting Republican propaganda.

  Like a lot of people in my generation, I’d come out of the Depression and a war expecting a better and more equitable world. I really thought we had fought a war to end all wars.

  But I didn’t like some of the things I saw after VJ Day.

  If you wanted to buy a new car, a salesman told you it was available only if you paid a sizable fee under the table. This didn’t sit well with those of us who had been in uniform for four or five years. Meanwhile, old patterns of racism were reappearing after four years in which blacks and whites had fought side by side. My own industry, motion pictures, was being ripped apart by a bitter labor dispute. What troubled me most was what I saw as the rise of fascism in our country, the very thing we had fought to obliterate.