Movie Nights with the Reagans

by Mark Weinberg

  Despite threatening on-screen to “tan his hide,” Reagan had remained a good sport about Bonzo and the film they shared throughout his political career. He was once asked to sign a picture of himself with the chimp, and he did so, adding: “I’m the one wearing the watch.” On another occasion, he told a group of business leaders, “I have to confess that I am amazed that a Hollywood actor who costarred with a monkey could ever make it in politics.” From time to time, he also would mention the movie in speeches. At a campaign rally in Atlanta in 1984, he said to the applauding and enthusiastic crowd, “If you had done this a few years ago when I was making Bedtime for Bonzo, I’d still be there”—meaning Hollywood. And at another political rally in 1986 in North Carolina, he told the crowd to vote for the GOP opponent of Democrat Terry Sanford, quipping, “Believe me, when it comes to reruns, Bedtime for Bonzo is better than tax time with Terry.” When President Reagan heard that a senior Soviet official had dismissed him as a “reckless cowboy” actor, he pointed out that he played in only a couple of Westerns and that maybe he should send the official a print of Bedtime for Bonzo—presumably to show the range of his acting skills!

  Reagan would often say that while Bedtime for Bonzo was perhaps the most fun movie he ever made, he did sometimes wonder if he should have heeded the advice of a director who once warned him never to share the stage with animals or children. Also, though he did make self-deprecating remarks about his involvement in the film, it annoyed him when critics pointed to it as an example of silliness; specifically, his starring opposite a chimpanzee. He did not see it that way. In Where’s the Rest of Me?, Reagan recalled the movie:

  Universal [Pictures Company], where I was supposed to realize my action ambitions, came up with another comedy. Diana Lynn, Walter Slezak, and I fought a losing battle against a scene-stealer with a built-in edge: he was a chimpanzee, and he even had us rooting for him. The picture was called Bedtime for Bonzo, and he was Bonzo . . . On the set, he learned our business so well that going to work was a fascinating experience. Naturally, his trainer was on the set, and the normal procedure called for the director, Fred De Cordova, to tell the trainer what he wanted from Bonzo. But time after time, Freddie, like the rest of us, was so captivated that he’d forget and start to direct Bonzo as he did the human cast members. He’d say, “No, Bonzo, in this scene you should—” Then he’d hit his head and cry, “What the hell am I doing?” [Interestingly enough, while Bonzo was portrayed as a male in the film, the chimpanzee that played him was a female named Peggy.]

  Despite attempts to belittle Reagan because of the movie, he was not embarrassed by it. In August 1982 his costar in the film, Walter Slezak sent him a letter. Chatty and respectful, the Austrian-born actor recalled their work together on the movie; told the president that he collected literary, musical, and political manuscripts; and asked for a signed photo. In a reply hand signed “Ron,” the president volunteered to Slezak that “when I see some of what is coming out of the industry today, Bonzo is looking better and better!” and inscribed a photo referring to the memories of their work together as “fresh and warm.”

  That was not the only time Ronald Reagan wrote in support of Bedtime for Bonzo. In a letter to my mother, he again made the case for watching it. I had been home to suburban Cleveland in January 1985. My parents and I had hoped to see a movie while I was there, but everything they suggested I had already seen at Camp David with the Reagans. That prompted my mother to write a note to the president in which she complained good-naturedly, “When Mark was recently home, we tried to find a movie to take him to, but no luck; he had seen them all with you!” The president felt bad and wrote back to her, “I’m sorry about the movies; we’ll try to run some ‘Golden Oldies’ instead of the current crop so Mark can see one now and then with you. To tell you the truth, I’d like an excuse to do that because I’m partial to the ones we used to make. I got carried away one weekend and made them look at Bedtime for Bonzo.”

  Though not originally Republicans, my parents adored Ronald Reagan. My working for him was what drew them to him, but that was by no means the only reason. They supported and respected what he accomplished as president, and were struck by how kind and gracious he was to them every time they saw him. I remember that one time my mother thanked him for “taking care” of me, and he looked at her, smiled, winked, and said, “I think Mark thinks he is taking care of me!”

  My mom and dad seemed amazed that their son had a relationship with a president of the United States and that the president was so unpretentious and welcoming. It was particularly exciting for my father, a World War II veteran, who could not quite believe he had talked with a commander in chief. My parents were also quite fond of Mrs. Reagan. My mother was bothered by news reports that were critical of the First Lady, and frequently reminded me to be kind to her. “It’s not easy being a mother,” she would say.

  My parents and siblings came to Washington several times during the years I was in the White House. Each time, the president received them. If she was in town, Mrs. Reagan did too. And my parents saw the president whenever we traveled to Cleveland. On his final trip there as president, he gave them a shout-out from the presidential podium at the beginning of his speech before the prestigious City Club, saying, “A special hello to Clevelanders Herb and Judy Weinberg, who are the parents of my assistant press secretary, Mark Weinberg.” They beamed for weeks.

  My parents visited me several times during the two years I lived in Los Angeles and served as director of public affairs in former President Reagan’s office there. On one trip, I arranged for them to come to the office and visit with him. He greeted them warmly and, after we took some pictures, invited them to sit on the couch for a chat. I hovered nearby. The conversation was pleasant, touching on a range of topics: raising kids, World War II, life in Southern California, movies, favorite desserts.

  The next day, Mrs. Reagan called me about something and began the conversation by saying “When Ronnie came home yesterday, all he could talk about was how nice your parents were.” I said, “Thanks, but it sounds like he was surprised.” Mrs. Reagan laughed but did not dispute my point.

  Not everyone in the president’s inner circle was a fan of Bedtime for Bonzo. Stu Spencer, the legendary and blunt Republican strategist who’d managed Reagan’s 1966 campaign for governor of California and the 1980 presidential campaign, was one of the few people who would tell his boss that he did not like one of his movies. Spencer told the president he did not think Bonzo was a very good movie.

  The president launched into a lengthy defense of Bedtime for Bonzo, but Spencer would not be swayed, telling him, “Ever since I have known you, you’ve been bitching about playing second fiddle to Errol Flynn, and in this movie, you play second fiddle to a chimpanzee. How in the world can that be a good movie?”

  At the end of the movie, the small group applauded and the president bowed. There was then a long talk about virtually every aspect of the movie. Reagan’s memory of script issues, special effects, stunts, makeup, and even bloopers, was amazing.

  According to the president, Bonzo could be a pain. Sometimes the chimp would disrupt the action by deciding to climb to the top of the studio. No amount of calling or cajoling could get the chimp to come down. Out of options, the president said, all of the lights were turned off, leaving the studio pitch black. Then someone would make a surprised grunt or yell as Bonzo, who was afraid of the dark, would follow the voice and land on the human he knew.

  What an evening! Perhaps Terry Dake, the pilot of the presidential helicopter, Marine One (who would go on to become a four-star General and Assistant Commandant of the US Marine Corps), said it best: “It was a study in contrasts to see a youthful Ronald Reagan on the screen going through antics with a chimpanzee and a dignified President Reagan sitting on the couch, watching and laughing.”IV

  * * *

  I. Email to author from Marine One pilot Terrence R. Dake, June 5, 2015.

  II. Ronald Reagan, “Remarks
at River Dell High School in Oradell, New Jersey, June 20, 1984,” American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=40073.

  III. Amanda Deaver email to author, May 31, 2016.

  IV. Terry Dake email to author, June 5, 2015.

  10

  GHOSTBUSTERS

  Starring:

  Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, Sigourney Weaver

  Directed by:

  Ivan Reitman

  Viewed by the Reagans:

  July 14, 1984

  The Film That Energized the 1984 Campaign

  On Tuesday, October 2, 1984, just over a month before the election in which the nation would decide whether to reelect Ronald Reagan to a second term, his supporters on the campus of Texas Tech University in Lubbock gathered for a rally. The guest of honor was Vice President George H. W. Bush, who had lived in Texas for many years and had represented a Houston-area district in the House of Representatives.

  Before Bush spoke, the crowd in Lubbock was treated to a warm-up act: the “Fritzbusters.” These were members of the campus College Republicans chapter who performed a short song-and-dance routine mocking Reagan’s Democratic opponent, Walter Mondale, who was also known by his longtime nickname “Fritz.” Their song included lines such as:

  If there’s something strange in America,

  Who you gonna call? Fritzbusters!

  If your tax rates are high, way up in the sky,

  Who you gonna call? Fritzbusters!I

  The song, of course, was a parody of the theme from Ghostbusters, recorded by the R&B artist Ray Parker Jr., which had spent three weeks at the top of the Billboard charts in August.II The movie itself was even hotter. The top movie of the summer, it was breaking studio earnings records on a pace to eventually be the second-highest-grossing movie of the year.

  It was no wonder the folks in Lubbock loved the Fritzbusters routine. A College Republican member at Texas Tech told the New York Times, “I thought they were too laid back for this kind of thing on this campus. I was surprised that they really got worked up.”III Even the Fritzbusters logo, a cartoon worried-looking Mondale in a red circle with a line through it, brought the movie to mind. The Fritzbusters act popped up on college campuses throughout the fall campaign.

  That Ghostbusters permeated the ongoing national political debate in 1984 is just one measure of how popular the movie was. And it wasn’t just Republicans. Vendors at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco that year sold “Reaganbuster” T-shirts with a similar logo featuring the president.IV

  Released nationwide on June 8, 1984, Ghostbusters starred eighties comedy icons Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Harold Ramis as Drs. Venkman, Stantz, and Spengler, respectively, three paranormal researchers who get booted from their university gig and go into business for themselves, snatching up and locking away troublesome spirits. The ghosts they encounter include a demonic librarian at the famous New York Public Library that will scare anyone into silence, and a chubby floating green blob with arms, known affectionately as “Slimer,” who causes havoc at a luxury hotel.

  Sigourney Weaver plays Dana Barrett, a concert musician with a haunted apartment. Something is growing in her refrigerator more dangerous than any mold. Rick Moranis plays Louis Tully, her hapless accountant neighbor. Their fashionable apartment building on Central Park West just might end up being center stage for a global apocalypse brought about by an ancient vengeful spirit—unless, of course, the Ghostbusters manage to save the day.

  But the four heroes—Ernie Hudson rounds out the group as Winston Zeddemore, hired by the original three when the ghostbusting business booms—have to contend with another villain as they seek to rid the city of spectral pests. This monster, however, is not supernatural. He’s about as monotonously down-to-earth as one can get. He’s a government bureaucrat, Walter Peck of the Environmental Protection Agency, played straight by William Atherton.

  Peck is a humorless parody of a federal functionary, stuffed into a three-piece suit and speaking bureaucratese. He first shows up at the Ghostbusters’ headquarters (a dilapidated former firehouse) demanding to “assess any possible environmental impact from your operation—for instance, the presence of noxious, possibly hazardous, waste chemicals in your basement.” After Venkman throws him out, he comes back bearing an arsenal of regulatory cudgels, including a “cease-and-desist-all-commerce order, seizure of premises and chattels, ban on the use of public utilities for nonlicensed waste handlers, and a federal entry and inspection order.”

  This walking copy of federal regulations was a perfect foil for the freewheeling Ghostbusters. When Dr. Spengler protests that Peck has barged into “private property,” Peck threatens him with “federal prosecution for at least a half a dozen environmental violations.” He even tries to push around an accompanying NYPD officer, who responds with one of the movie’s many quotable one-liners: “You do your job, pencil neck! Don’t tell me how to do mine!” Peck’s adherence to the rule book leads to an even bigger environmental hazard than he could have imagined: the possible end of the world.

  Atherton was so good at playing the stiff that his Walter Peck character caused him trouble for years. People would try to fight him in bars or yell insults from the movie out the windows of passing busses.V And it has not been lost on the movie’s more politically aware viewers that the stifling hand of federal regulation was one of its main antagonistic forces—aside from the ghosts themselves, of course. As National Review summed it up in 2009 when it included Ghostbusters on its list of “The Best Conservative Movies of the Last 25 Years”: “[Y]ou have to like a movie in which the bad guy . . . is a regulation-happy buffoon from the EPA, and the solution to a public menace comes from the private sector.”VI Not everyone thought that was a good thing. Thomas Frank wrote in Salon that the “Reaganism” in Ghostbusters was “fully developed”—and that wasn’t a compliment.VII The journalist David Sirota observed sarcastically that the Ghostbusters get “rich and famous,” but “real problems only arise when the big bad government tries to put them out of business.”VIII The movie’s tone was probably not accidental, either. Director Ivan Reitman later told Entertainment Weekly, “I’ve always been something of a conservative-slash-libertarian. The first [Ghostbusters] movie deals with going into business for yourself, and it’s anti-EPA—too much government regulation. It does have a very interesting point of view that really resonates.”IX

  President Reagan watched Ghostbusters at Camp David on July 14, 1984, as his campaign for reelection was revving up for the fall. Despite being out for more than a month, it was still the number one movie in America. While I do not recall the film making a major impression on the president, or any of us gathered in his cabin that evening, at least one person remembered it differently.

  In an article about the campaign published in the New Republic in September 1984, the journalist Sidney Blumenthal (who later gained notoriety in the Clintons’ service) includes this anecdote:

  “About a month before the convention, according to a top political aide, Reagan screened the movie Ghostbusters at Camp David. ‘That was great!’ the president said. ‘It was better than movies when I was making them. You know why? If they had made Ghostbusters back then, the whole thing would’ve been a dream, and the guy would’ve woken up at the end.’ ”X

  I don’t recall this and I doubt it ever happened. For one, it isn’t something Ronald Reagan would say. It sounds odd to hear him say any movie from the eighties was “better than movies when I was making them.” I often heard him state the exact opposite! It wasn’t his own movies that he liked better, he just liked the movies from that era more than those that came later. He thought those movies were cleaner, more wholesome, and thus more entertaining. While the president enjoyed many of the modern movies we watched, in his mind it was hard to top the classics from his own time in Hollywood.

  In addition, as I envision the small crowd of regulars who gathered in Aspen for movie screenings, I simply do not believe a
nyone would leak anything to Sidney Blumenthal. I can’t imagine who the “top political aide” he mentioned might be. Blumenthal might have heard the story secondhand (or third- or even further back). It may be that the president did like Ghostbusters, but the details of his reaction got distorted by the time they found their way to the pages of the New Republic.

  This July weekend at Camp David was a welcome occasion for the Reagans to rest and gather steam before the general election campaign kicked off at the GOP convention in Dallas that August. But plenty was going on even at this stage. The Friday before he left for the presidential retreat, he met with the speechwriter Ken Khachigian, who was helping draft Reagan’s acceptance speech for the convention. “I remember when I did all such things myself,” the president noted wistfully. “No way now—no time.”XI That was unfortunate because he was viewed by all the speechwriters and many others on the staff as “the best writer in the house.” He devoted what time he could, but the sheer volume of speeches required of a president made it impossible for him to do them all himself. I think he missed that.

  Even though it has been reported that there was some uncertainty on the part of the president and Mrs. Reagan about whether he would seek a second term, there was zero uncertainty on the part of the staff. None of us thought he would be a one-term president voluntarily. We knew he had the energy, drive, and desire to “finish the job,” as he referred to it, and no one could imagine him walking away after only one term. We always believed the president would win reelection. But the first debate with former vice president Mondale, when Reagan seemed overprogrammed and uncertain in his answers, gave us a momentary scare. Mrs. Reagan was known to be upset about the prep for the first debate, and rightfully so. Rumor had it that she had made her displeasure known to either Mike Deaver or Dick Darman (White House Staff Secretary and deputy to chief of staff James A. Baker III), saying in a firm tone, “What are you doing to him?”