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REAGAN
Also by Marc Eliot
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Sex, Money, Culture, and Politics at the Crossroads of the World
REAGAN
The Hollywood Years
M A R C
E L I O T
Harmony Books
N e w Yo r k
Copyright © 2008 by Rebel Road, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Harmony Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Harmony Books is a registered trademark and the Harmony Books colophon is a
trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Eliot, Marc.
Reagan: the Hollywood years / Marc Eliot.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Reagan, Ronald. 2. Actors—United States—Biography. I. Title.
PN2287.R25E45 2008
973.927092—dc22
[B]
2008014974
eISBN: 978-0-307-44996-2
Design by Lauren Dong
v1.0
Previous page: Early publicity photo.
Rebel Road Archives
Fo r b a b y c o c o a b e a r
CONTENTS
Introduction
1
Chapter One
THE NEX T VOICE YOU HEAR
Chapter Two
FROM MUGS TO THE MOVIES
Chapter Three
THE IRISH MAFIA
Chapter Four
DUTCH AND BUT TON-NOSE
79
Chapter Five
THE GAMUT FROM A TO B
103
Chapter Six
KINGS ROW
11
37
55
125
Chapter Seven T H I S I S T H E A R M Y
159
Photo Insert
Chapter Eight
MR. REAGAN GOES TO
WA S H I N G T O N
197
Chapter Nine
LOVE IS LOVELIER
225
Chapter Ten
F A L L I N G U P WA R D
251
Chapter Eleven T H E F O R G E T T I N G O F T H I N G S
PA ST
279
Chapter Twelve R E N D E Z V O U S W I T H D E S T I N Y
Sources
337
Notes
340
Filmography and TV Appearances
Author’s Note and Acknowledgments
Index
368
353
364
323
Reagan had built up a strong following over the years at
Warner Bros. playing mainly the companions of the leading
stars, or loyal confidants of the rich and powerful. He hardly
ever “got the girl.” So when Jack Warner heard that Reagan was
running for governor of California, he shook his head dubiously. “Governor, no. Bad casting. The friend of the governor.”
—Jesse Lasky, Jr.
W
Comedian Bob Hope once asked President Reagan how it felt to
actually be the U.S. president—to sit in the very Oval Office
where Abraham Lincoln paced during the Civil War. “Well,”
said Reagan, with his characteristic smile, “it’s not a lot different
than being an actor, except I get to write the script.”
—Douglas Brinkley,
quoting Ronald Reagan in the published version of
The Reagan Diaries
INTRODUCTION
Previous page: Early Warner Bros.–First National publicity photo.
Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
onald Reagan holds two unique places in American
history, one as a minor cultural figure, the other as a major
political one. In that sense, he was a serial populist. In his second incarnation, politics became the driving force of his life, and in
1967 he became the governor of California, an office he used as a
springboard to win the presidency thirteen years later. In 1980, he
became the nation’s oldest elected chief executive and for the next
eight years ruled with flash and stature as the most powerful politician
in the world and, arguably, the most popular. Future historians will no
doubt reevaluate President Reagan’s contributions to such remarkable
achievements as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the second Russian Revolution of the twentieth century, the arrival of relative peace in his
time, and the long-term effects of the policies of “Reaganomics.” Yet to
understand fully the later political Ronald Reagan, whose personable
manner and understated expression of authority allowed him to enjoy
the respect of virtually everyone on all sides of the international political spectrum, it is necessary to examine the earlier Ronald Reagan,
the Hollywood actor who continually struggled for recognition, success,
and, ultimately, relevance. Hollywood helped create the public persona of the man who would eventually lead the free world, and therefore holds the key to understanding Reagan—who he was before who
he eventually became. Indeed, if it may be said that as president
Ronald Reagan played one character—“President Reagan,” the smiling, affable, head-shaking, soft-spoken figure whose frequent utterance of the word “well” became prime turf for comedians the world
over—it may also be said that as president the same carefully crafted,
head-shaking, soft-spoken character, with all “wells” intact, made him
one of the most beloved leaders the nation he led had ever seen.
Any mention of Ronald Reagan the actor usually brings snickers of
ridicule, primarily because of the one film everybody remembers more
R
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Marc Eliot
than any of the fifty-three others that he made (only a handful of
which are easily seen anymore): Frederick de Cordova’s 1951 Bedtime
for Bonzo. Its comic plot revolves around a man and his relationship to
a laboratory chimpanzee. Had Reagan remained in pictures, Bonzo,
too, would surely have slipped into the obscurity it deserved.
In truth, many of Reagan’s films have been largely forgotten, overshadowed by the extensive examination of his accomplishments during his later political era. The reason may be simply one of time
pushing his Hollywood years ever deeper into the recesses of the
American cultural psyche. Ronald Reagan’s career as an actor ended
nearly a half a century ago, eons in a culture where lasting relevance
is, with rare exception, usually measured in months.
However, Reagan’s own reluctance to reflect on this period suggests there may have been some measure of unwillingness on his part
to examine too closely just how all the monkey business of his first
and mostly unremarkable career could possibly have led to the profoundly successful second one, which saw him heroically guide a
nation out of the darkness of its own social, political, cultural, and
moral post-Vietnam malaise back into the glorious sunshine of a powerfully chauvinistic national pride.
Like the early studio publicity 8 × 10s of his face, he may have preferred to airbrush the wrinkles of imperfection that marred the myths
of his prepresidential Hollywood years. His two official “memoirs,”
both ghostwritten (the first by Richard Hubler, the second by Robert
Lindsey), are, essentially, the same book, save for the expanded time
frame of the second, written some twenty-five years after the first,
when Reagan’s two terms of president had ended. They both share
similarly self-aggrandizing distortions and significant lapses of fact—
not all that unusual in memoirs when the subject chooses to recollect
his own achievements for posterity, something politicians (and actors)
often do.
The first, Where’s the Rest of Me?, originally published in 1965, a
year before Reagan made his successful run for governor, takes for its
title his character’s most famous line from Sam Wood’s 1942 Kings
Row. In it, Reagan, as Drake McHugh, asks the unforgettable question when he realizes his legs have been amputated during emergency
R E A G A N
5
surgery following an accident, and that the operation has left him
“incomplete” as a man. Unfortunately, the memoir, whose main focus
is the political battles Reagan fought before, during, and after his rise
to the presidency of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), a kind of primer
for his future political style, is woefully incomplete. Reagan’s title references not just his own appointment with destiny in the great American body politic but the political identity that would come with it (he
had changed his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican only
three years earlier). In the book, he glides through his Hollywood
career rather lightly, as if impatient to get to the part of his life’s journey that first made him feel truly “whole.”
The second, An American Life, first published in 1990, runs over
725 pages, of which less than 20 percent, about a fifth, deals with Reagan’s Hollywood years, despite the fact that his film and TV career
lasted nearly three decades and did not end until 1965, when he was
already fifty-four years old—almost thirty years, a full third of his life.*
Considering Reagan died almost thirty years later—in June 2004,
at the age of ninety-three, after several years of suffering from Alzheimer’s disease—the span of his active full-time political career (not
counting his work as the head of SAG while he was still a working
actor), from his election as governor of California in 1966 to his second presidential term ending in 1988, amounts to about twenty-two
years, or a little less than a quarter of his life.† Granted, serving as the
ultimate leading man, the president of the United States, was more
important to him (and the rest of the world) than playing second fiddle to Warner’s extraordinary stable of über–leading men (Humphrey
Bogart, Dick Powell, Errol Flynn, and Pat O’Brien, among others).
There is, nonetheless, in both memoirs, especially the second, a lot
“left out,” a palpable disconnect, the absence of what actors often
refer to as “the motivational through-line,” between Reagan’s two
*Reagan appeared in fifty-four feature films between 1937 and 1964, and between 1952
and 1965 appeared in dozens of episodics and hosted two series, G.E. Theater and Death
Valley Days. After 1966, he continued to appear on TV variety shows, including The
Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, right up until his presidency.
†
Reagan’s term actually ended with George H. W. Bush’s inauguration on January 20,
1989.
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lives. The biographical, emotional, and psychological connective tissue from one to the other is utterly missing.*
Reading Reagan’s memoirs, one senses a long-standing dissatisfaction with his on-screen career that falls somewhere between anger
and disappointment, with the roles he had (or more accurately, the
ones he was denied), his relegation to the B unit for much of his
decade-plus exclusive deal with Warner Bros., his inability to make
the breakthrough to top-of-the line star. And that once he became
president of the United States, perhaps the ultimate comeback, his
rage and frustration toward Hollywood and the somewhat emasculating effect it had on his self-image—always the loyal pal, rarely the
romantic lead—turned softer. If all was not totally forgiven, Reagan
often chose to cover his first-career bitterness in a layer of selfdeprecating (and self-defensive) humor. Hence, both memoirs, like
his performance in Bedtime for Bonzo, are too self-consciously stiff
and overly literal (but not very literary) to be truly revelatory.
However, away from the strictures of the written word or the movie
moment, Reagan’s self-deprecating humor always left teeth marks,
with its punch lines often telling more about how he saw himself than
any of his official chronicles. Rich Little, one of the most dead-on of
(President) Reagan impersonators, became friends with his subject
during the White House years and often informally chatted with him
about the “good old days,” something Little quickly discovered was
still a sensitive issue for the president. One time, when he asked Reagan if it was true that he had, for a time, been up for the lead in
Michael Curtiz’s 1942 classic Casablanca, Reagan responded with
that familiar head shake, automatic smile, quick turn-away of his
eyes, and just a hint of a quivering hesitation in his voice: “Well, yes,
it’s true, but Ingrid Bergman eventually got the part.”
During Cabinet meetings or at the many social events and state
dinners, which Nancy Reagan produced Hollywood-style, as if they
were glittering opening-night premieres of a major motion picture, he
*It was still missing years later, in 1999’s Dutch, the authorized overstylized and underinformed biography by Edmund Morris. And in Nancy Reagan’s 1989 memoir, My Turn,
Hollywood plays even less of a role. Warner Bros., Reagan’s home studio for much of his
career, receives two scant mentions. MGM, her home studio, got five, and her entire film
career is summed up in a total of twelve pages in her four-hundred-page memoir.
R E A G A N
7
liked nothing more than to chuckle and gossip with friends about “the
old days,” not so much the pictures he made but, and at times quite
graphically, the most beautiful women in the world whom he had had
the privilege to work with—Joy, Susan, Ila, Bette, Viveca, Olivia, Ann.
Women, and how he related to them (and them to him), was another
complex affair for Reagan largely absent from his memoirs, perhaps
another subject too much for him to deal with in autobiographical
hindsight.
While his official “best friend” during his presidency was Jimmy
Stewart—an actor whom he genuinely admired and knew well from
the old days but never acted with, and who, accompanied by his wife and
occasionally his children, was among the most frequent guests at the
Reagan White House—the actor Reagan talked about the least was one
of his closest on-screen “pals,” Errol Flynn, with whom he had appeared
in two of Reagan’s better movies.* Flynn, arguably the most notorious
ladies’ man in the Tinseltown of his time, was the star Reagan had most
envied but could not get along with during the Hollywood years. Reagan
admired the courtly heroism of Flynn’s on-screen persona but strongly
disapproved of the brutish way Flynn treated women in real life.
As for Reagan’s first wife, the actress Jane Wyman—to whom he
was married for eight years (they were married January 26, 1940, and
divorced June 28, 1948) and who broke his heart when she had a
highly publicized affair with actor Lew Ayres before leaving Reagan for
good—in both memoirs he devotes very little space to her, about three
paragraphs in his first, and one sentence in his second. Only with his
second marriage, to Nancy Davis, when he was forty-one years old
and she four months shy of thirty-one, does Reagan insist that he
finally found emotional closure and completeness.† Despite their age
difference, Davis provided to Reagan what the far more ambitious and
calculating Wyman never could: the proper maternal acoustics for the
*Michael Curtiz’s 1939 Santa Fe Trail and Raoul Walsh’s 1942 Desperate Journey.
†
Reagan was ten or twelve years older than Davis, depending upon which source you consult for the actual year of her birth; it appears she may have shaved two years off in order to
extend her youthful appeal to the studio heads of her day. In her unauthorized biography of
Nancy Reagan, Kitty Kelley offers convincing evidence that Davis was actually born in
1921. Shaving years for the purposes of extending one’s film career was not an uncommon
practice in those years. Like today, youth then was everything in Hollywood.
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Marc Eliot
psychologically packed echo left behind by Reagan’s cries of longing
for his first love, high-school sweetheart Margaret Cleaver. “Mugs,” as
he called her, had committed the cardinal sin of disloyalty when she
left him for another boy, whom she eventually married and stayed with
for the rest of her life. This was a deep wound that never completely
healed, inflicted by the “gal” who was supposed to be “just like the one
who married dear old Dad.” From the day he married Nancy Davis
until the last days of his life, Ronald Reagan always called his second
wife “Mommy.”
Politics, Hollywood-style, also played a role in Reagan’s conflicted
feelings about those years, especially when combined with his complex feelings about women. Reagan originally became involved with
the issues of the day at the urging of his first wife, Wyman, who pushed
him to secure a position on the board of the Screen Actors Guild,
which would eventually lead to his becoming its president (interestingly,
it was his second wife, Nancy, who masterminded his elevation in California society that served as entrée for him to national politics). Reagan, while still a Roosevelt liberal, became a strong and outspoken
leader of SAG, considered at the time to be one of the most leftleaning unions in forties Hollywood. In that position, he performed
the nearly impossible task of keeping the membership working without
making them appear to be scabs or strike-breakers during what was
perhaps the most volatile strike in Hollywood’s history, while at the
same time managing to keep the doors of the studios open for business. And he did it with passion, strength, and determination. Even so,
despite all that he had done for his studio (one could make a reasonable
if not definitive argument that Reagan helped save Warners from
going under during these troubling times), once Jack Warner felt he
could no longer justify keeping him under his exclusive, high-paying
contract, he quickly and coldly cut Reagan loose. Reagan also used his
position at SAG to gain advantageous “waivers” for MCA, the talent
agency that represented him, owned by the imperious Jules Stein and
led by the shadowy Lew Wasserman, and continued to do so even
after Wasserman sent him to a humiliating engagement in Las Vegas at
the lowest point in Reagan’s career.
Upon his arrival in Hollywood as a complete unknown in a
crowded field of unknowns, it was his extraordinarily good fortune to
R E A G A N
9
land Wasserman as his first agent. Wasserman took an immediate liking to the new young actor and set him on the road to stardom. It was
Wasserman, more than any acting teacher ever did or could, who recognized young Reagan’s natural talent and then helped to develop it
into a commercially viable movie-star persona, the likable fellow, one
of the boys, the hero’s best friend, the all-around good guy.
It was Wasserman who made him a player in Hollywood; it was
Wasserman who stood by him when Reagan fell from cinematic grace;
it was Wasserman who orchestrated Reagan’s amazing career resurrection, via television, that made possible his remarkable political
transformation and eventual leap into history.
And Reagan never forgot it. That was why he could never say no to
Wasserman, even when payback came in the form of that humiliating
gig in Las Vegas, or the back-door Guild deals SAG president Reagan
helped enforce that heavily favored MCA, over not only other talent
agencies but also the very performers it and he, Reagan, represented.
The last person Reagan had lunch with before heading for Washington,
D.C., and the presidency, and the first person he had lunch with after
his eight-year two-term tour of duty was over, was Lew Wasserman.
Ronald Reagan managed not merely to survive his Hollywood
years, at the end of them he managed to perform an astonishing metamorphosis, from leading man to statesman, from an actor who played
minor roles on the soundstages of Hollywood to a man whose greatest
role was played out on the center stage of the world. Proving F. Scott
Fitzgerald utterly wrong, Ronald Reagan had one of the most spectacular second acts of any American life.
What follows is the story of the first.
Chapter One
THE NEX T VOICE
YO U H E A R
At Eureka, I’d pick up a broomstick, pretend it was a microphone, and do a locker-room interview with some of my fraternity brothers to get some laughs.
—Ronald Reagan
Previous page: Ronald Reagan was a lifeguard at Lowell Park Beach in Illinois
during the summers he attended high school and college.
Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
t was 1911 and Howard Taft was in the third year of his
one-term presidency, a tenure of office so uneventful that on his
deathbed he insisted he couldn’t remember a single thing about it.
In China and Mexico, revolution was in the air. In New York City, a
fire in the Triangle shirtwaist factory killed nearly 150 workers and
sparked nationwide labor reform. In Los Angeles, the immensely popular novelty of moving pictures was about to be transformed into a
full-service industry by the merger of two independent film companies, which became Paramount Pictures, Hollywood’s first “major”
studio. And on February 6, in Tampico, Illinois, the heart of Chicago
farm country, John Edward “Jack” Reagan (pronounced RAY-gun),
first-generation Black Irish, and his wife, Nelle, became the proud
parents of their second child, a baby boy they named Ronald Wilson.
Like his two-year-old brother, Neil (nicknamed “Moon” for his
round face), baby Ronald was born in the cold-water flat the family
lived in over a shallow bank on Main Street. There was no doctor
available to make house calls for such poor folk as these, but Jack had
managed to secure the services of a midwife, who brought the chubby
infant into the world with a good old-fashioned smack on the bottom,
which set baby Ronnie onto a crying jag that seemed to Jack would
never end. Exasperated (and filled with too much booze), Jack
declared later that night to the whole world but to no one in particular, “For such a little bit of a fat Dutchman, he makes a hell of a lot of
noise!”
The crying eventually stopped, but the nickname stuck. From as
early as he could remember, Ronald, whose given name was
changed shortly after his birth (no one quite remembers why, but
the certificate says Donald) was called Dutch. Jack, like his son,
always preferred the nickname because, the father insisted, it made
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him sound more rugged than did the girlish “Ronnie” that Nelle had
chosen.*
At the time, the tallest building in Tampico was the grain elevator
dominating the single commercial main street between the depots of
two railroad lines. Jack worked in the general store across from the
elevator. His knowledge covered all the departments, not unusual in
these Midwest one-outpost towns, but he was especially adept at selling shoes, and his interest in them bordered on the obsessive; he
spent his free nights analyzing the bones of feet and filling out forms
requesting correspondence courses on how to sell the right shoes to
fit them.
Unfortunately, his interest in and devotion to his work not only
didn’t help him get ahead, but after more than two years it also wasn’t
enough to keep him from losing his job. The problem wasn’t ability; he
had a lot of that, along with a good personality, a natural glibness, and
an appreciation of when to tell a timely joke to move along a sale. It
was, rather, what Ronald Reagan would later describe as the demon in
the bottle that brought Jack down. Jack was a fall-down drunk who
worshipped at the feet of Irish whiskey.
His wife, Nelle, on the other hand, was a straight-back Protestant,
a member in good standing of the Tampico Church of Christ. Born in
Illinois from a Scots-English ancestry, she’d met Jack in Fulton and fell
fast and hard for the tall Irishman, accepting his proposal of marriage
without hesitation despite the fact that he was Catholic. At least, she
told herself, he wasn’t a “serious” Catholic. He hardly attended Mass
and although they were married in the Catholic church in Fulton, she
had made it clear to him that their children would be raised Protestant.
Jack had no objections.
Now, with two small children to raise—Neil, five years old, and
Ronald, three—in the light of his latest firing, Jack, with his family, had
to move far enough away to escape the stigma of what Nelle described
as their disgraceful circumstances so that Jack could start over again.
They moved first, in 1913, to the South Side of Chicago, where Jack
*Accounts vary. According to the official Ronald Reagan website, Reagan’s name was
changed from Donald to Ronald while his mother was still pregnant, after her sister had a
son and named him Donald, beating her to the punch.