According to SAG board member George Chandler, “MCA asked [the] Screen Actors Guild for assurances that if it signed and continued in television film production, it would not have to cease such production when [the] Screen Actors Guild should later regulate agents in the television film field. The Screen Actors Guild Board of Directors, after consideration, granted this request, agreeing that if in the future it should adopt agency regulations in the television film field which prohibited agents from engaging in television film production, it would grant MCA a waiver of such prohibition for the term of the regulations. The agreement was made by Screen Actors Guild to stimulate employment of actors in television films at a time when motion picture employment was generally at a low ebb.”5
Walter Pidgeon made the following motion, seconded by Leon Ames: “RESOLVED, that the special letter agreement with Revue Productions, Inc., and MCA Artists, Ltd., copy of which is attached hereto, be and it is hereby approved and ratified.”
According to the minutes of the meeting, the motion carried unanimously.
John Dales, an attorney who had been SAG’s executive secretary since 1943, recalled that the SAG board felt that the studios were threatened by television, so the board decided, “‘Here’s a chance for these guys [MCA] to really go and bring this business to Hollywood and keep it there.’ We were concerned about potential conflict. So we went back to them [MCA] and said, ‘If we franchise agents—and we think we will—we will give you a waiver to produce, but with all kinds of restrictions: you can’t take any commissions from any of your actors that you put in those pictures. Secondly, you must give them not less than the amount they customarily receive—in fact, not less than their highest salary for comparable work. And there was to be a fiduciary relationship [between agent and actor], which ‘we will be the judge of as to whether or not you’re carrying [it] out.’ In other words, everything the agent does with respect to the actor must be in the best interest of the actor.”6
In his July 23, 1952, letter to MCA, Reagan wrote, “At the present time you are engaged in the motion picture and television film agency business and in the television film production business; you expect to continue in both. You have explained to us your reasons for so doing.
“We agree that for a period commencing with the date hereof and expiring October 31, 1959, if any contract rule or regulation made by us prevents your engaging in both businesses we hereby give you waiver thereof for such period.…”
Revue Productions, after receiving the SAG waiver, immediately “began to sell reruns of Stars Over Hollywood directly to local stations and advertisers, and soon after produced its first syndicated show, an anthology called Chevron Theatre.”7
MCA had simply employed the same tactic it used with James Petrillo and the AFM to begin its fast rise in the band-booking business and in radio production—with the same result. And like the MCA-AFM blanket waiver, the MCA-SAG blanket waiver was exclusive; other agencies could not get it. Among those who complained the loudest was the William Morris Agency, which represented Sophia Loren, Deborah Kerr, Kim Novak, Natalie Wood, Jack Lemmon, and Steve McQueen. Herbert Siegel, chairman of the General Artists Corporation, screamed, “I’ve never run across anything like this in all my years in the business. MCA and we are playing in the same ball game, but there is one set of rules for them and quite a different set of rules for everyone else.”
The Justice Department’s Antitrust Division later reported, “The MCA-SAG arrangements, in effect, have placed MCA in a highly favorable competitive position over other talent agencies and television producers. It alone has been in a position to use its unique dual position as a lever to induce talent to be represented by it and to use such talent in its own television productions. This has served to restrain the competitive efforts of other talent agencies and television film producers.”
An FBI report also charged that “any blanket waiver granted to MCA would give MCA a competitive advantage in that they have available to them increased job opportunities and, therefore, have more to offer in this respect to their prospective clients.” The FBI also insisted that the waiver would “have the effect of deterring any MCA client from discharging MCA.”8
The Justice Department later received information that “until the granting of the blanket waiver, MCA … was merely another competitor. But with the granting of the waiver, the battle took on a one-sided aspect. Since MCA had the right to make as many television shows as it wanted, it could always guarantee talent work in television. Therefore, the talent left the other talent agencies in droves. Moreover, MCA got not only a huge new pool of talent but the right to use it in television shows. This increased the salability of the television shows, and more and more production resulted. The central fact of MCA’s whole rise to power was undoubtedly the blanket waiver. This gave it the real jet-speed boost.”9
But, as with the AFM waiver and the relationship between Petrillo and Jules Stein, rumors circulated around Hollywood about the SAG waiver and a possible deal between Reagan and Wasserman. Actor Dana Andrews, who later became president of SAG, said, “Ronald Reagan’s a very affable fellow. Of course, it’s a lot of bullshit, but it works. I don’t think he’s a vicious man, but I think if it would get him a job, he would kiss ass anytime. But he’d do it pleasantly. He’s always looking out for himself.…
“Being president of SAG doesn’t mean you can make deals, but you do have more influence. I was in the Guild in 1952, but I wasn’t on the board when SAG gave MCA the waiver to produce for television.… I remember that the government man was looking into that, and he wanted to know if I knew if a secret deal had been made.… He said that he was going to continue to look into it. Later, he told me that there had been no proof that there had been such an arrangement. And if there was such a thing, I didn’t know about it.…
“But I’ll tell you one thing, Lew Wasserman … gets what he wants, one way or the other. He had enemies all over town, and he still does. But people respect him because he has power.”10
When Wasserman was asked whether a secret deal had been made with Reagan, the MCA president replied, “That’s outrageous. It’s absolutely untrue.… Did we bribe anyone? My answer is no!”11
A federal law-enforcement officer, who was well-acquainted with Hollywood during the early 1950s, said, “If there was a secret deal between a major production company and a labor union, there was one man they’d go to to cut it: Sidney Korshak.” Although he admitted that he had only heard rumors about Korshak’s possible role in the MCA-SAG blanket waiver, he insisted that “Korshak was all over the place back then, doing his work for the Chicago mob.”
Korshak’s name did crop up in a Hollywood investigation at about the same time as the MCA-SAG arrangement and the 1952 purchase of Universal Pictures by Decca Records. A group of investors had made a $7 million-plus bid to purchase the RKO Pictures Corporation from Howard Hughes. Hughes had earlier owned a movie company, the Caddo Corporation, which was responsible for such films as The Racket, Hell’s Angels, and Scarface. Hughes had developed a fascination for gangsters and their life styles.
Among the new RKO investors were Ralph E. Stolkin, a thirty-four-year-old Chicago millionaire; his father-in-law and partner in his mail-order business, Abraham Leonard Koolish; and Ray Ryan, a wealthy oilman.
A key player in the negotiations was Korshak, who initially introduced Stolkin to Arnold Grant, a young attorney who—if the deal went through—was to succeed Hughes’s business associate, Noah Dietrich, as RKO’s chairman of the board. Korshak was slated to handle RKO’s labor problems.
On October 16, 1952, soon after the RKO purchase was announced, The Wall Street Journal carried a detailed story about it, as well as its new owners, charging that Stolkin, Koolish, and Ryan had all been involved with “organized crime, fraudulent mail-order schemes, and big-time gambling.” Stolkin had been connected to the distribution of punchboards, “a yokel gambling device”; Koolish was linked to “an Illinois insurance fraud scheme”
; and Ryan, it was discovered, was a heavy gambler and a business partner of New York Mafia boss Frank Costello. The report also described Korshak as the “catalytic agent” for the deal.
Within days after the Journal’s series, the RKO purchase deal collapsed, and Korshak resigned as the studio’s labor lawyer. “Temporary” control of RKO was later given back to Hughes,* who kept the Stolkin group’s $1.5 million down payment.
A former Hughes employee said, “Howard Hughes knew the kind of people he was dealing with; he always did. He knew their backgrounds, and he knew their associations. That was the way he operated. In the case of the Stolkin group, he took their down payment and then waited. At the right time, he leaked the story to the press.”
*Aside from the president, Reagan, present for all or part of the July meeting were SAG board members Leon Ames, Edward Arnold, Gertrude Astor, Richard Carlson, George Chandler, Nancy Davis, Rosemary de Camp, Frank Faylen, Wallace Ford, Paul Harvey, Robert Keith, Grafton Linn, Philo McCollough, Walter Pidgeon, George Sowards, Kent Taylor, Regis Toomey, Audrey Totter, and Rhys Williams.
Only a handful of these actors were actually represented by MCA.
*On July 18, 1955, Hughes—the first person to be the sole owner of a major motion picture company—sold RKO and all of its remaining properties for $25 million to Thomas F. O’Neil, the heir to the General Tire and Rubber Company in Akron, Ohio. Hughes had made a final profit of $6.5 million.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
At the Justice Department, there was deep and open suspicion that there had been some sort of illegal tie-in—or even a payoff—between MCA and Reagan in return for the MCA-SAG blanket waiver. As Justice Department records noted, “It was thought … that SAG might have purposely favored MCA for some illegal consideration.” Although it may never be proven that Reagan or any other SAG official pushed through the SAG special arrangement with MCA and then received a suitcase filled with cash, it is clear that, within months of the deal, Reagan benefited personally, financially, professionally, and politically from his relationship with MCA.
Ronald Reagan had been faced with mounting debts, including a large back-tax assessment from the Internal Revenue Service. On March 4, 1952, Reagan married Nancy Davis. Her career was quickly put on hold when she became pregnant. Reagan was worried about mortgage payments on the 290 acres of rocky but scenic property in Malibu Canyon that he had purchased in 1951, using Yearling Row as a down payment. Reagan had paid $85,000, or about $293 per acre, for property that was situated on the corner of Mulholland Drive and Cornell Road in Agoura, California, outside of Los Angeles. Furthermore, the Reagans had purchased a three-bedroom, ranch-style home—where they spent most of their time—in Pacific Palisades, a beautiful area near the ocean between Santa Monica and Malibu.
In 1953, the forty-three-year-old Reagan turned for help to MCA president Lew Wasserman and Arthur Park, whom Wasserman had hand-picked as Reagan’s new day-to-day agent. A one-time musician and tennis pro, Park had been hired for seventy-five dollars a week by Taft Schreiber in 1936 and became an MCA vice-president eleven years later. Among his other clients at MCA was Reagan’s ex-wife, Jane Wyman.
Speaking of the differences between Reagan’s two wives, Park said, “The styles of Jane and Nancy are totally different. I had to continue handling Jane and Ronnie when they were divorced, and I must say one thing for Jane Wyman—I never heard her criticize Ronald Reagan ever. And I don’t remember Ronald Reagan saying anything downgrading Jane, either.
“But Nancy’s a very ambitious woman—just take it from there. Ambitious women do anything to meet their ends. It’s obvious. She’s been promoting Ronald Reagan’s activities politically from the time she married him.… Jane and Ronnie were really two separate entities. Nancy, as an actress, really didn’t get anyplace, let’s face it. She had ambitions, but when she married Ronnie, she backed off. So she was never in competition with him. She always played her part, happily and well, as his wife.”1
Reagan refused to perform on television, fearing overexposure, or in a risky stage production on Broadway, so he, along with Wasserman and Park, decided to give Las Vegas a try. If nothing else, Reagan would be sure to make some big money. For two weeks’ work in Vegas, he could make as much as he had for his last movie.
Through MCA, he signed a contract with Beldon Katleman, the owner of the El Rancho Vegas hotel/casino in Las Vegas. Reagan had known Katleman—a Los Angeles-based parking-lot mogul who was the nephew-in-law of Columbia’s Harry Cohn and a close, personal friend of Sidney Korshak—from the Friars Club, which had held a testimonial dinner in Reagan’s honor in 1950. Reagan was assigned to emcee a low-budget nightclub act that would be featured in Katleman’s showroom. As the master of ceremonies, Reagan was to tell jokes, dance, and sing, as well as introduce the other performers.
“Art Park phoned to say Beldon wanted to move our date up to Christmas,” Reagan said. “I needed the booking and certainly the money, but something inside me rebelled at the idea of hearing ‘Silent Night’ in Las Vegas—and we said no. [Katleman’s] next call was a demand that I appear as master of ceremonies at one of his regularly scheduled shows, and the show he had picked headlined a stripper. I’m sure the stripper* was a nice girl—the kind you might even take home to Mama—but try as I would, I couldn’t come up with an idea of how we could work together, in front of people.… The El Rancho [deal] ended up a mutual cancellation.”2
Twenty minutes after the El Rancho deal fell through, Reagan was booked into the Last Frontier hotel/casino for two weeks, February 14–28, 1954—where Johnny Roselli was on the payroll as a “public relations consultant.” Reagan served as emcee for a show featuring several comedy, song, and dance teams, including the Continentals, the Honey Brothers, the Blackburn Twins, and the Adorabelles.
After the engagement, Reagan recalled, “We had a wonderfully successful two weeks, with a sellout every night and offers from the Waldorf in New York and top clubs from Miami to Chicago. It was a great experience to have and remember, but two weeks were enough. Nancy was with me and sat through every show, and when it was over we couldn’t wait to get back to the Palisades.… When we were back home, we thought of it as just so many more weeks we’d bought that we could hold out in our waiting game.”3
Returning to Hollywood, the unemployed Reagan was saved once again by his friends at MCA. The vehicle, this time, would be network television.
In one of MCA’s first deals to produce television programs, Wasserman had obtained an agreement with the General Electric Company to sponsor an anthology series of weekly, half-hour dramas, General Electric Theater. The show was the “flagship” program of MCA’s new entry into the production business, made possible by the 1952 SAG waiver. GE Theater premiered on February 1, 1953, alternating on a week-to-week basis with The Fred Waring Show, a musical variety show. After five years on the air, the Waring program broadcast its last show on May 30, 1954.
Consequently, General Electric made plans to buy a weekly show, and Wasserman offered to give the company an established star to be the host and to represent GE’s corporate image.
The actual pitch to GE had come from Ben Duffy, an executive at the Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn advertising agency and a close friend of Taft Schreiber’s. BBD&O had done extensive business with MCA for years and had been the Republican National Committee’s advertising firm since 1952. BBD&O also represented United States Steel, DuPont, Revlon, and the American Tobacco Company, and later became responsible for finding sponsors for The $64,000 Question.
Schreiber went right to Reagan—who no longer feared television overexposure as much as unemployment. “When Schreiber wanted to give Ronnie a proper test for the new GE Theater,” according to one report, “he simply gave him the lead in an episode of another MCA-produced television series, Medallion Theater. After the live program was finished, Henry Denker, the co-producer, remembered that ‘the cameras were kept running while two MCA guys got Reagan up against a gray background.
They filmed an opening, middle break and closing as if he were host on a series.’”4
Wasserman offered Reagan the job as host, program supervisor, and occasional star of MCA’s GE Theater. The deal called for Reagan to receive a large salary from GE of $125,000 a year, or $2,500 per show, plus a generous expense account. Art Park later said that MCA’s Revue Productions, the show’s producer, had also paid Reagan “a very fancy sum,” but this amount was never disclosed. Over the next five years, Reagan’s salary graduated to $169,000 a year, and GE also later installed a $5,000 all-electric kitchen in Reagan’s home.
Arthur Park recalled, “I was sitting on pins and needles because this was a hell of a contract. Not only did MCA have Reagan on GE Theater as a performer, but we also produced the show. So it was a very, very large commission for our company.”5
Reagan did not need long to decide whether to take the job. “The real extra, however, and the one that had drawn me into the picture,” Reagan said, “was MCA’s idea to hang the package on some personal appearance tours, in which for a number of weeks each year I’d visit GE plants, meeting employees and taking part in their extensive Employee and Community Relations Program. I had been tagged because of my experience in the Guild and the speaking I’d done in the industry’s behalf along the ‘mashed potato’ circuit.”6
Appearing in the prime-time, 9:00–9:30 P.M. Sunday slot on CBS, immediately after the MCA-represented Ed Sullivan Show, Reagan finally became an established star.*
Even though he was no longer the president of the Screen Actors Guild, Reagan continued to serve on its board while his wife, Nancy, also remained an active board member. During the spring of 1954, SAG completed negotiations amending a 1949 agreement with the Artists’ Managers Guild, which represented SAG members’ talent agents, including MCA, in both motion pictures and television. Prior to the original agreement and as a result of a 1937 law passed by the California State Legislature, the permissible duration of an agent/actor contract was seven years, with no escape clause as long as the actor received one day of work every four months. Under the 1949 agreement, the agent/actor contract lasted one year if it was a first contract and three years if the contract was being renewed. An actor could fire an agent if he did not receive a minimum of fifteen days of work every ninety days or if the agent had a conflict of interest in representing the actor. The SAG-AMG contract stated that agencies representing SAG members would have to apply and pay one hundred dollars or more simply for an agency “franchise” from the SAG board, as well as a permit from the state.
Dark Victory Page 13
