Reagan Read online

  No one regarded himself as more of an outsider or underdog than Ronald Reagan—and he was probably right. Every weekend, people in places like Dixon and Davenport and Des Moines flocked to theaters, where for ten cents they could lose themselves in the deeds of the scoundrels, heroes, and lovers that flickered across the screen. That someone from Dutch’s background could envision himself up there took an incredible leap of imagination and invention, or at least the ability to ignore the improbability of it and plow ahead. He had only his natural poise to see him through, his gift for concealing any insecurities.

  He was out of his element—that he knew for sure. As he drove onto the Warner Bros. lot the morning of June 1, he worried that he’d made a colossal mistake. He’d been hired to act, something he hadn’t done since college, five years earlier, and to act opposite giants such as James Cagney, Errol Flynn, Bette Davis, and Paul Muni. One scene and they’d realize what an impostor he was. This became clearer while watching his screen test with Max Arnow soon after he arrived. Everything was wrong with it: the way he looked on film, the way he sounded, his delivery, his awkward gestures. By the time the test had run through the projector, he was already planning his escape back to Iowa.

  Arnow tried to ease his mind, but not before raking over his appearance. Actors were required to wear their own clothes, but Dutch’s newly purchased white sport coat would have to go. “The shoulders are too big—they make your head look too small,” Arnow told him. He had the wardrobe department recut the jacket, altering the shoulder lines to make Dutch more proportional. And Perc Westmore, the studio’s legendary makeup artist, performed a subtle makeover on his face.

  His name also became an issue. Dutch Reagan sounded too pedestrian to the studio press agents. It didn’t roll off the tongue. They needed a name that would look good on a marquee. There were plenty of examples: Archibald Leach read better as Cary Grant, and Lucille LeSueur as Joan Crawford. Even June Travis was a name that had been chosen out of the telephone directory. “Dutch Reagan” was a nonstarter. It had to be changed, no doubt about it. But—to what? After much back and forth, Dutch proposed a radical solution: his actual name. “How about Ronald . . . Ronald Reagan?”

  From that day on, “Dutch” was officially retired. Everyone in Hollywood would know him as Ronnie.

  Fortunately, he had someone by his side for moral support—George Ward, an associate at the Meiklejohn Agency, was designated as his agent and knew the ropes. Warner Bros., Ward explained, was basically a sweatshop. Contract players, who were required to punch a clock, reported at five-thirty in the morning and were expected to work from nine until six, but often much later—six days a week, no exceptions. “The pace was incredible,” James Cagney wrote in his autobiography. “At times we started at nine in the morning and worked straight through to the next morning.” Competition for roles was fierce due to the large number of actors on the roster, so Ronnie was advised not to get impatient; it would take time, perhaps several weeks, even as many as six months, until they found something suitable to cast him in.

  No sooner were the words out of Ward’s mouth than Ronnie was thrust into his first assignment, in the ill-fated movie The Inside Story, which had been slated to roll with Ross Alexander. He would be taking over the role, and it was tailor-made—a muckraking radio announcer at a small-town station. Warner had actually made this picture three years earlier as Hi, Nellie, with Paul Muni. This was more than a common occurrence. About half of these low-budget features were retreads. To save the cost of underwriting an original screenplay, the studio put new wheels on it, gave it a fresh coat of paint, and changed the name. They sometimes recycled the same picture four or five times. No one minded as long as it had fresh faces and a new title. The result wasn’t an important feature; it was known around the industry affectionately as a B.

  In the 1930s, as talking pictures exploded, a trip to the local movie house constituted a full night’s entertainment. Theater owners ran an entire program, with a cartoon, a short, a newsreel, a serial, and two feature films. The B was the bottom half of a double bill, averaging a little over an hour in length, as opposed to the A, which ran about an hour and a half and top-lined the studio’s box-office stars. With a Warner Bros. movie, that meant you saw the likes of Jimmy Cagney and Edward G. Robinson in an A. The B’s had smaller budgets and shorter shooting schedules—about three weeks, tops—allowing studios to introduce and test out a fledgling actor like Ronald Reagan to determine whether there was enough raw talent there to bump him up to the A’s as a leading man.

  The Inside Story was a B, no doubt about it. The cast was filled with new or run-of-the-mill contract players and was produced by Bryan Foy, who headed the Warner Bros. B unit. Foy started out as a director on the lot and had already made forty-five films by the time Ronald Reagan came aboard. His job was to produce twenty-six features a year at a total cost of $5 million. He was a taskmaster, not only because he had to rush dozens of movies through production, but also because he had production boss Jack Warner breathing down his neck. And Warner was a notorious fire-breather. It would be an understatement to say they had a rocky relationship. Warner fired Foy dozens of times, initially in 1928 for taking a short subject called The Lights of New York and extending it into the first all-talking feature, against the Warner brothers’ strict orders at a time when they happened to be out of town. When the movie, a $100,000 investment, brought in $2 million, Foy was retained and given a raise and the reins of the B unit.

  Now he was charged with steering Ronald Reagan through the process. This wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Ronnie had no filmmaking experience whatsoever. Because working on a soundstage was completely different from acting in front of an audience, his first few efforts on the set unmasked him as stiff and awkward. And the camera was unforgiving. He had to learn to move properly and to deliver his lines while conveying personality. It helped that the studio had a dialogue coach on the payroll, but a profusion of little miscues are evident in his first movie.

  The Inside Story, eventually retitled Love Is on the Air, was not exactly a work of art, but not embarrassing, either. It was, as one critic assessed it, “an undemanding broth of light comedy and even lighter romance,” exactly what was required of a B picture. The Hollywood Reporter singled out Ronnie as “a natural, giving one of the best first performances Hollywood has offered in many a day,” but the New York Times ignored him completely in its review of the movie, saying it “makes no pretensions to class and even less to credibility.” There weren’t a lot of expectations riding on it. No careers were going to be launched—or destroyed—as a result. Ronnie simply blended into the picture without making waves. In any case, Jack Warner, the production chief, was satisfied with the work. He watched the film’s dailies each night after it had wrapped and decided there was something interesting in his new talent acquisition—at least interesting enough to give him another shot.

  Ronnie immediately segued into Sergeant Murphy, opposite a horse, in a soapy B picture that cast him as a cavalryman. Coincidentally, the role was another instance of typecasting. During his spare time in Des Moines, he’d enrolled in the Citizens’ Military Training Program, which was more or less a reserve candidacy in the Fourteenth Cavalry Regiment based at the local fort. It was less a desire to enlist than an opportunity to ride the Army horses for free, but it contributed familiarity and know-how to his second movie.

  Before shooting began, as a favor to Jack Warner, he reported to Stage 6 to put in an uncredited appearance in the finale of Hollywood Hotel, a low-key Busby Berkeley musical based on the Louella Parsons radio series of the same name, playing a broadcaster. Ronnie’s performance in it was inconsequential, but it lifted him into the orbit of the mighty gossip columnist, who had a role as a talent impresario.

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  Louella Parsons stood practically alone as the missionary who introduced the gossip column to American readers. Her earliest
years were spent barnstorming the Midwest, writing chatty news articles, movie reviews, and screenplays. Two short-lived marriages interrupted her career. By 1918, at the relatively late age of thirty-seven, she had moved to Manhattan, bringing her new form of whisper journalism to the New York Morning Telegraph, where she was noticed and snatched away by William Randolph Hearst. It was Hearst, the father of tabloid journalism, who turned Parsons’s gimlet eye toward Hollywood and groomed her as a syndicated columnist for his Universal News Service.

  Once installed in L.A., she began churning out daily columns for Hearst’s Los Angeles Examiner, which were syndicated to six hundred newspapers with a readership of over twenty million, and soon added a Campbell’s Soup–sponsored daily radio show, which shamelessly promoted stars and their latest releases. She cultivated contacts and amassed the kind of power—and fear—in the film industry otherwise possessed only by the mightiest of moguls. Parsons, it was said, could make or break a career with one swipe of her acid-tipped pen. She did it unmercifully and with impunity, mixing bedroom chatter and innuendo, even smear tactics when it suited her purposes, to elevate movie stars to a new level of public fascination.

  Hollywood gossip might have helped promote films, but in the process it created a whole new set of problems. Divorces and scandals once confined to studio lots were now ripe for picking. If Parsons decided to break a story counter to a company’s best interests, there was nothing much that could be done about it. So the studios, which saw her as both benefactor and threat, courted her, kowtowed to her, offered her exclusives, put her in films, anything she wanted in exchange for favorable press.

  Louella Parsons immediately took a shine to Ronald Reagan. It would have pleased his new boss to think she saw promise in the young actor’s ability. Warner understood the impact someone such as Parsons could have on Reagan’s career. But, in fact, her interest in him was personal. As luck would have it, Louella Parsons was from Dixon, Illinois. She’d graduated from the old South Side High School, where Ronnie—Dutch—had begun his education, and she, too, had escaped the confines of Dixon through books borrowed from its public library.

  Ronnie left the Hollywood Hotel set in a swoon. Out of water, but a fish swimming in the right direction, upstream. He’d encountered a galaxy of stars: Dick Powell, Ted Healy, Frances Langford, Benny Goodman, Fred Waring, Louella Parsons. He spotted the Lane sisters, Rosemary and Priscilla, in the cast and waved hello. They’d made their singing debut on his show at WHO, and he felt comforted by their presence. Afterward, he had lunch in the studio commissary in the company of more stars: Joan Blondell, Sterling Holloway, Errol Flynn, Anita Louise, and Edward Everett Horton, who grabbed his hand and welcomed him aboard. “Dick Powell . . . wished me luck,” he recalled. Dick Powell! He’d come a long way in just a few short weeks.

  Buoyed by the prospect of steady employment, he moved into the Hollywood Plaza Hotel, a ten-story “skyscraper” surrounded by a dense grove of date palms at the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street. It was “a hotel for film people,” not four-star or grand like the Hollywood Hotel at the west end of the block, “but comfortable, utilitarian, with a small lobby.” The Plaza’s greatest advantage was its prime location. It was the crossroads of Hollywood. He could walk to the Egyptian Theater, “an architectural crazy house of Chinese, Greek and Egyptian design,” a few steps away, or shop at the Broadway, with its fabulous Tea Room. The Brown Derby, where Louella Parsons held court, was situated in the middle of the block, next to a miniature golf course, and Simon’s, the iconic drive-in restaurant with carhops on roller skates, was on the corner. Across the street stood the Hollywood Recreation Center, a sprawling entertainment complex, which later functioned as the home of ABC Radio, and just down the street was Wallichs Music City, whose upstairs space became the birthplace of Capitol Records.

  A sea of humanity flowed just outside his door. The once-sleepy boulevard was full of car traffic at all hours, and a trolley barreled down the middle of the street. And electricity of all kinds, the bright lights were literally dazzling. “Lights, millions of them,” Reagan wrote to an audience back in Iowa, “their variegated colors giving out a brilliance of myriad Christmas trees.” An infestation of sightseers never seemed to sleep. Prostitutes worked the shadows. “I was in a new world,” Reagan acknowledged.

  Thankfully, he had company. Hours after he moved into the Plaza, a whole Des Moines crew turned up on his doorstep—Pee Wee Johnson, Will Scott, Tommy Thompson, and a WHO vocalist, Ed Morely, all of whom had followed him west. They had dinner at the Brown Derby, then went to the Palomar, a glitzy dance hall, where, as Reagan recalled, “the manager introduced us to some girls” and they took over the microphone on the bandstand, singing “several Iowa songs.”

  He reveled in being Dutch again for a while. Being greeted as Ron or Ronnie at the studio sounded foreign to him. No one, not even his parents, had ever used that name, and it took some getting used to, letting Dutch go. He struggled to maintain an ordinary existence by going horseback riding in Griffith Park with Joy Hodges and bodysurfing off the Santa Monica pier. A date with June Travis sidestepped the café-society scene in favor of a county fair. Friends and he congregated at Barney’s Beanery, a West Hollywood diner, instead of the high-toned haunts frequented by stars. But it wasn’t easy to shake off the demands of his new job. The studio publicity machinery set to work to promote its young star, sending him to red-carpet premieres, having him emcee events, and staging photo shoots with his glamorous co-stars.

  These activities were no guarantee of job security. Warner had signed Ronald Reagan to a seven-year contract, which seemed like an eternity on the surface of it. Most employees could relax with such a long-term deal. In the movie business, however, the salient details were buried in fine print. “When the newspapers announce that ‘So-and-so has been signed to a long-term contract,’” Reagan explained, “it means that they are tied up for from three to six months definitely and up to seven years on a ‘maybe’ basis.” Contract players signed an agreement that amounted to little more than servitude. “The studio had the option to abandon the contract at the end of each six-month period,” says Olivia de Havilland, “whereas the actor had no such exit clause. The studio also had the right to lay an actor off without pay for three months each year.” What’s more, if an actor refused to play a role he or she had been assigned, the studio could suspend the actor’s contract or add to the end of it the period of time it took another performer to complete the role. In essence, a seven-year contract could expire in six months or run . . . forever.

  “It was like a fiefdom,” says film professor Alan Spiegel. “If you obeyed the kings, you would reap financial glory. The studio would protect you. If you had eccentricities in drinking or drugs or sex or women, they would cover all that up and take care of you. But they owned you.”

  Ronnie had sweated out his first option period. Warner Bros. was notorious for chewing up and spitting out young actors after the initial six-month stretch. Many just didn’t measure up, while others either proved difficult to work with or couldn’t handle the pressure.

  After making three movies, Ronald Reagan had no idea where he stood. He’d had two choice roles in B’s to make his bones, and another, in an A picture called Submarine D-1, with Pat O’Brien, where his performance wound up on the cutting-room floor. The New York Daily News reported that he “has poise, a voice, and a face that the camera loves,” but that might not be enough star power to convince the higher-ups.

  His fate rested entirely with Jack Warner. The youngest of the four brothers, he was the studio’s production chief, responsible for all filming, an enigmatic tyrant. He was “crude, vulgar, shallow, flaky, contrary and galling . . . loud and self-conscious,” a tough and unpredictable autocrat when it came to contracts and performers. “He disliked actors and showed it,” recalls de Havilland, who described Warner Bros. as “a prison” and Jack Warner as “the warden of the priso
n.”

  Reagan had seen Warner only from afar; he hadn’t yet met him personally and therefore had no idea of the man’s opinion of him or if his contract would be extended. Even though he was penciled in for two more features, there was no indication from the executive suite whether he would stick around to make them. On October 2, 1937, the day after Love Is on the Air was finally released nationally, Bill Meiklejohn called with the verdict. “MY OPTION’S BEEN TAKEN UP,” Ronnie exulted. “While I haven’t been in Hollywood six months yet, they’ve already notified me that they intend to keep me for the next six months period.”

  He was also getting a raise to $250 a week, with a guarantee of sixteen weeks’ work. It was enough, at last, to make good on a promise. When he’d called home in May to say he was moving out to Los Angeles, he vowed to bring his parents west as soon as his finances permitted. He wanted to have Jack and Nelle close by to keep an eye on them. Jack’s health had deteriorated, and they were barely getting by. A change of scenery would do them a world of good. With some creative budgeting, Ronnie sent them money for a train ticket and rented them a small ground-floor apartment in West Hollywood, convenient to shopping, that looked out on a flower garden.

  It was time for Ronnie to balance work and family. He dug in assiduously at the studio, but the dutiful son made time to go to a Disciples church with his mother and to take walks with Jack, who shuffled wearily around the new neighborhood. The gang of Iowa friends that he saw regularly folded seamlessly into the new family structure, meeting for dinners that Nelle would prepare and following the meal with a trip to the movies. Hollywood was starting to feel like home.

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