Movie Nights with the Reagans

by Mark Weinberg

  We waited it out, mostly confident, especially since the earlier exams had gone well. But there was always an undercurrent of nervousness when the boss was out of commission, however temporarily. If everything went according to plan, we would take the helicopter from Bethesda to Camp David.

  More than five hours later, the Reagans were given the all clear to leave, all tests having been passed without incident (aside from the pesky polyps). Once again, the president and Mrs. Reagan passed the gauntlet of reporters, and once again they fielded shouted questions about how the president felt. “Fine,” Mrs. Reagan said, and the president responded, “A-OK.”

  That was all they were going to get from the Reagans. Specific questions about what the doctors had found went unanswered. A short time later, the White House physician, Dr. T. Burton Smith, issued a short statement announcing the polyps removal, detailing the tests performed, and pronouncing the president “in good health.”III The press would have to be satisfied with that. My boss, Larry Speakes, wasn’t giving them anything else. We released the necessary information about the state of the president’s health to keep the country informed, but beyond that, we wanted to respect the doctor-patient confidentiality to which Ronald Reagan, like anyone else, was entitled.

  A thunderstorm was raging as all of us, including Rex the dog, piled back into Marine One. As we powered north through the rain toward Camp David, I could feel a sense of relief among the group. The colon cancer had not returned, just as the doctors had predicted after the surgery. Reagan would note in his diary that the doctor administering the CAT scan had especially encouraging words for him: “My insides were twenty-five [years] younger than my age,” the president was told.IV Nobody had expected any bad news from the morning’s examinations, but after spending five hours at a hospital, everyone was ready for a quiet weekend at the presidential retreat.

  As it turned out, movie night the next night would deliver just the boost we needed. That Saturday we watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, a gleeful, madcap teen comedy that was released on June 11 and has been lifting the spirits of viewers ever since.

  Ferris Bueller was the latest offering from the director John Hughes, who by 1986 had already become famous for popular coming-of-age films such as Sixteen Candles (1984) and The Breakfast Club (1985), which focused on average American kids—from the jocks, to the nerds, to the unclassifiable eccentrics—managing the awkward ups and downs of high school life. An alumnus of the National Lampoon humor magazine, he had also written the script for the more “adult” comedy National Lampoon’s Vacation in 1983 (if Chevy Chase’s antics in that film can indeed be called “adult”).

  Hughes was also a ringmaster of the Brat Pack stable of young actors in the 1980s, casting actors including Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall in multiple movies and assembling many of the core Brat Packers for the ensemble cast of The Breakfast Club.

  Ferris Bueller was not a Brat Pack film. Instead, it starred Matthew Broderick, then best known for 1983’s WarGames, which the Reagans had also viewed, as the title character, a high school student determined to have one more day of extracurricular fun before his parents and teachers wise up to his habit of cutting class. The movie opens by making clear he’s going for his ninth day of skipping school this semester, and his realization that making it an even ten would require him to “barf up a lung.”

  Ferris enlists the help of his best friend Cameron Frye (Alan Ruck), who is also staying home that day, apparently genuinely sick—even dying, in his own hypochondriacal estimation. Not only does Ferris convince the morose Cameron to get out of bed (his reasoning: “You’re not dying, you just can’t think of anything good to do”), but also he finagles him into taking out his father’s red 1961 Ferrari 250GT California, one of only a hundred in existence, for their excursion.

  The reason they need the fancy sports car? They need to spring Ferris’s girlfriend, Sloane Peterson (Mia Sara), from school. Using an elaborate ruse, Cameron poses as Sloane’s father on the phone, and Ferris plays the role in person, faking a death in the family to get Sloane out of class. As the three of them peel away from the school in the Ferrari, exulting in their freedom, they leave in their dust the dean of students, Edward Rooney (Jeffrey Jones), who escorted Sloane to the door. Rooney has had it out for Ferris for a long time. He resolves to catch him in the act of cutting class once and for all.

  Ferris, Cameron, and Sloane leave their suburb—the fictional Shermer, Illinois, where Hughes set most of his movies—for a series of adventures in the “big city” of Chicago. Hughes, who grew up in the real-life suburb of Northbrook, thought of this movie as “my love letter to the city.” He said later, “I really wanted to capture as much of Chicago as I could, not just the architecture and the landscape, but the spirit.”V Tak Fujimoto’s loving cinematography does just that, embracing the city with the camera lens.

  The audience is treated to a rollicking good time as Ferris and friends take in a Cubs game, impersonate the “Sausage King of Chicago” to get seated at a fancy restaurant where they try the pancreas, and immerse themselves in the treasures of the Art Institute of Chicago. They are dogged all along the way by Ed Rooney, and Ferris’s equally vindictive and jealous sister, Jeanie (Jennifer Grey). Ferris’s well-meaning but bumbling parents threaten to spoil the fun at times, but he has a knack for finding his way out of even the stickiest situations.

  Ferris Bueller found two immediate fans in the Reagans. Both the president and Mrs. Reagan enjoyed the movie from beginning to end and laughed at the antics of Broderick and company throughout. The group that had gathered in Aspen Lodge for the screening laughed heartily too. Afterward, we all agreed that it was nice to see a movie that didn’t take itself seriously at all and just offered pure entertainment and unabashed fun. The president pointed out that in his view, that was the type of film Hollywood should be putting out, instead of movies filled with gratuitous violence and sex.

  It was clear that one of the president’s favorite scenes involved Ferris crashing the annual General Von Steuben German-American Appreciation Day Parade in downtown Chicago, which was filmed at the actual parade, with some ten thousand extras, according to Hughes.VI Ferris winds up atop a float and entertains the assembled crowds with a lip-synched version of the Wayne Newton standard “Danke Schoen” (“Thank You” in German). Reagan and Newton were longtime friends, and the president was amused to see his pal’s signature song from 1963 used as the centerpiece of a scene in a teen comedy in 1986.

  Newton, also known as “Mr. Las Vegas,” had known Reagan for years. “I met him about seven years ago in California,” Newton told the Washington Post while in town for Reagan’s first inauguration in January 1981.VII That would have been about 1974, when Reagan was finishing up his tenure as California governor, and Newton was the highest-paid live act in the country. The connection was immediate. “I was very impressed with him,” the performer remembered. “Something just clicked.”

  When Reagan ran for president in 1980, Newton jumped into action on his behalf, performing at seven fund-raisers that brought in millions in donations.VIII Newton was not just a celebrity attaching himself to a popular candidate for his own gain. He was a true believer.

  “My motive with Reagan was altruistic,” he told the paper. “I wanted to see him president. If I had a little bit to do with that, well, it makes me feel good.” It went beyond that. “If Reagan had lost, I would have left the country,” Newton remarked in the same interview. “I probably would have moved to Australia.” Reagan’s chief asset, according to Newton? His strength. “I’m one of those people who believe that strength will make this country what it once was,” he said.IX

  Newton headlined the festivities at both of President Reagan’s inaugurations, in 1981 and 1985. At the first, when the Reagans stopped by the ball that the singer was hosting at the Sheraton-Washington Hotel during their rounds of the celebrations, the new president made sure to thank Newton. “I’m so grateful to him,” he told the cr
owd, “because Wayne, throughout the whole campaign, was just constantly working in our behalf.”X

  The friendship went both ways. The day after he had been sworn in as president, Reagan sat down and handwrote a note to Wayne Newton. The entertainer kept it framed in the study of his Las Vegas home.XI Reagan even visited Newton at home over the objections of some staff at the Republican National Committee.

  Newton recounted to Larry King in 2005 that he had planned to have the president stay at his house during a visit to Las Vegas, but “the Republican Committee called and said, ‘You know, he was going to come to your house, Mr. Newton, but we think that maybe it would probably be better for him to go somewhere else.’ ” Newton understood, but his feelings were hurt, until the same staffer called again a few days later. This time he told Newton, “We told the president what we had said to you, and I don’t think I’ve ever been chewed out quite as nicely.” Reagan’s final word on the subject was: “I’m going to Wayne Newton’s house, and get used to it, because he’s my friend.”

  “And so that’s the kind of guy he was,” Newton told King.XII

  Newton was friends with the Reagans to the end. He was invited to both of their funerals.

  President Reagan was thrilled to hear his old friend singing (even if Matthew Broderick was acting it out) in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. For his own part, Wayne Newton felt the same. Years later, he reflected that by the time Ferris Bueller came out, he “thought ‘Danke Schoen’ had run its gamut.” Here was a chance to bring the song back into the public eye. “When I saw [Broderick] doing an impression and lip-synching to my version of the song, I just thought that was the coolest thing I’d ever seen.”XIII

  Another Reagan ally, one of his few in the media, responded favorably to Ferris Bueller as well. The conservative columnist George Will, perhaps not best known for embracing popular culture, called it “the greatest movie of all time” when it came out. He explained: “By ‘greatest movie,’ I mean the moviest movie, the one most true to the general spirit of movies, the spirit of effortless escapism.” Will devoted an entire column to praising the film, which despite being very much aimed at the teenagers of the day, also carried, in his view, an element of nostalgia. “Oh, carry me back to the olden days,” he remarked, “when almost all movies were like ‘Ferris Bueller’—no nonsense about seriousness.”XIV I can imagine Ronald Reagan, himself a veteran of those “olden days” of movies, thinking much the same thing.

  I think that a big part of what entertained the Reagans was that Ferris Bueller was trying to get away with something. Hoping he would not get caught. And I could relate to that—especially at Camp David.

  On one of my early visits to Camp David, I woke up to my phone ringing. It was well before nine in the morning on a Sunday, so something had to be up. I rolled over, picked it up, and heard the Camp David operator announce, “Mr. Weinberg, I have the First Lady calling for you, sir.” I had a nervous feeling.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Reagan, how are you?” I said in a hoarse, sleepy voice.

  “Mark, what do you think about it?” she asked.

  “It, ma’am?” I replied in panic.

  “The article,” she said. I was the press aide in attendance, so naturally she’d expected I’d know about whatever she was referring to. I would routinely get three newspapers delivered to my cabin on Sundays, but they were still on the porch, covered in snow. So I took the phone—which fortunately had an extralong cord—to the porch and, in my T-shirt and briefs, scooped up the papers, brushed them off, and said to Mrs. Reagan: “It was interesting. What did you think?”

  I hoped that would give me some indication of what she was talking about and buy a little time to find the piece. It did, and as she spoke, I tore through the papers and was able to locate and skim the article and offer an opinion, which I am sure was devoid of any intelligent analysis whatsoever.

  From then on, I set my alarm to six o’clock on Sunday mornings and made sure to have read every paper by eight. She never called me for such a purpose again.

  Of course, not all of the critics were buying into what the movie was all about, and some even managed to connect the movie to Reagan in a negative way. In New York magazine, David Denby sneeringly dismissed it as “John Hughes’s nauseating distillation of the slack, greedy side of Reaganism.”XV Denby seems to take awfully seriously a movie whose clear, obvious guiding principle is frivolity, but he was not the only one conscious of some higher themes mixed in with Ferris Bueller’s high spirits. Ben Stein, the former Republican White House staffer and actor (not a combination one often encounters), felt the same way.

  Stein, who had served as a speechwriter in the Nixon and Ford administrations, appears in the movie as an economics teacher at Ferris Bueller’s school, a small but memorable role that launched Stein’s second career as an actor. First, we see him calling roll, and uttering in an unforgettable monotone, “Bueller . . . Bueller . . .” to no response. Later we listen in on a lecture he is giving to the class on, of all things, supply-side economics, or “Reaganomics.” He covers the “Laffer Curve,” named for the Reagan administration economist Arthur Laffer, and even mentions the phrase George H. W. Bush used to attack Reagan’s economic policies during the 1980 Republican primaries: “voodoo economics.”

  The role came to Stein in a roundabout way, as he explained in a 2006 interview with CNN:

  “Richard Nixon introduced me to a man named Bill Safire, who’s a New York Times columnist [and former Nixon speechwriter]. He introduced me to a guy who’s an executive at Warner Bros. He introduced me to a guy who`s a casting director. He introduced me to John Hughes. John Hughes and I are among the only Republicans in the picture business, and John Hughes put me in the movie.”XVI

  During the filming, Stein happened to be talking off camera to some of the extras playing his students about economics. The kids were delighted by his distinctive monotone style, and on hearing their laughter, the crew worked a lecture scene into the film. At the end, everyone applauded. “I thought they were applauding because they had learned something about supply-side economics,” Stein said. “But they were applauding because they thought I was boring.”XVII

  As Stein noted, John Hughes was conservative in his own politics. In another interview, thirty years after the Reagans watched the movie at Camp David, he reflected on how Ferris Bueller, in his own goofy way, helped encapsulate the Reagan era:

  America at that time was in the midst of the Reagan boom, so we were all in a pretty good mood. The end of the seventies were really bad economic times, and after the dark times of Watergate, I think Ferris was to some extent reacting to the fact that things were better. What was his mother’s occupation? Luxury real estate broker. Those were happier days, a much more optimistic age—even though we were running large deficits. Ferris Bueller’s optimism was very representative of the era, and it was very representative of who John Hughes was. He was an ardent Republican and extreme conservative. He believed Reagan could transform all of us into Ferris Buellers. Ferris was an artifact of a free era. Ronald Reagan was all about freedom. Ferris was an unregulated high school kid in an unregulated world. It was “morning in America,” and it was morning for Ferris.XVIII

  Ronald Reagan may not have turned us into a nation of Ferris Buellers, but he and Ferris did share a common belief in freedom. And that included Reagan’s own, personal freedom.

  One of Ferris Bueller’s most quoted lines, which I’m sure still appears in millions of high school yearbooks all across America, is this simple injunction: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

  Reagan’s weekends at Camp David were his chance to “stop and look around once in a while.” And this weekend, after spending all of Friday morning in a hospital, that was especially important. He needed the swim and the walks he took that Saturday, and he needed the relaxation and laughter of a movie night with Ferris Bueller. We all did.

  17

>   HELLCATS OF THE NAVY

  Starring:

  Ronald Reagan, Nancy Davis

  Directed by:

  Nathan Juran

  Viewed by the Reagans:

  September 7, 1985

  The Film They Starred In Together

  When we first walked into Aspen, the president, wearing a mischievous look, greeted us with one of his trademark phrases, telling us we were in for a treat, or at least he hoped so. We knew what that meant. Reagan had used that line before to let us know we were about to watch one of his own movies. And as he made sure to remind us, we were the ones who had asked to see it.

  It was true, of course. Reagan was always bashful about showing his own movies. But he had shown Bedtime for Bonzo the year before, and several of us managed to cajole him into showing the Oscar-nominated Kings Row a year later.

  We all quickly took our seats and settled down for a time-travel journey unlike any other. This evening, the feature was a special one: Hellcats of the Navy, starring Ronald Reagan and Nancy Davis. We would be watching both Reagans watching themselves on the screen.

  Hellcats, as the Reagans called it, was the only movie in which the two of them acted together, but it also happened to be the last picture that either made. Sharing the top billing was certainly a nice way to exit the business, but I have wondered whether they were happy about the way their Hollywood careers ended. I have a feeling that Ronald Reagan, at least, was not. In his first autobiography, Where’s the Rest of Me?, published in 1965, he seemed a bit resentful, writing of his Hellcats experience: