The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan

by Rick Perlstein

  It was absurd, but so were the antics on the other side—for instance when Lawson brought a statement to read calling his accusers “stool pigeons, neurotics, publicity-seeking clowns, Gestapo agents, paid informers, and a few ignorant and frightened Hollywood artists.”

  On October 23, witness Reagan trod a middle ground. He had recently adopted a new technology, contact lenses, but he put them away for the occasion; his horn-rims imparted a more serious air. In his statement he repeated what he had said to Hedda Hopper: he didn’t wish “to see any party outlawed on the basis of its political ideology. We have spent a hundred and seventy years in this country on the basis that democracy is strong enough to stand up and fight against the inroads of any ideology.” He closed, “I hope we never are prompted by either fear or resentment of Communism into compromising any of our democratic principles in order to fight it.” Having delivered a thoughtful, judicious presentation, he was just about the only person to emerge from the sordid proceedings enhanced.

  On the other hand, late in July, SAG executive director Jack Dales, almost certainly with Reagan’s cooperation, had helped the FBI confirm the identities of fifty-four people whose names it had obtained in an illegal break-in of a Communist Party office. Indeed, Reagan had already dropped the dime on eight suspects himself.

  UPON HIS RETURN FROM WASHINGTON, his wife greeted him at the door: “You bore me! Get out!” It was her first categorical insistence upon a divorce. The next week That Hagen Girl came out to ghastly notices—one of which regretted Shirley Temple’s suicide attempt failed. “Thanks for being frank regarding That Hagen Girl, I know the reviews couldn’t say much for it, and only did it to accommodate Warner Bros.,” he wrote Lorraine Wagner. “They tried others who refused, so they asked me and I said I knew it wouldn’t do anything for me, but they were desperate, so you know ‘old easy goin’ Reagan.’ ”

  Two weeks later, on November 17, a SAG membership meeting passed a resolution decreeing officers had to sign affidavits stipulating that they were not members of the Communist Party—probably in coordination with the studio executives who, six days later, emerged from the Waldorf hotel in Manhattan to announce that “we will not knowingly employ a Communist,” and inviting “the Hollywood talent guilds to work with us to eliminate subversives, to protect the innocent, and to safeguard free speech and a free screen wherever they are threatened.”

  In December, Johnny Belinda completed, Wyman traveled to New York City, where she was quoted in a Hollywood column as saying, “There is no use in lying. I am not the happiest girl in the world. It’s an accumulation of things that have been coming a long time,” though she hoped that when she saw her husband “we can solve our problem.” Reagan learned of the quote upon his return from a shopping trip to buy his wife a fabulous Christmas gift. He promptly ran to Hedda Hopper—whose column the next morning reported, “Ronald Reagan declares he merely had tiff with Jane Wyman in answering queries about reports that they are on verge of separation.” And what, she’d asked, was he buying his girl for Christmas? “I’m not going to tell you. If I told you, you’d print it and then it wouldn’t be a surprise for her. . . . I’m looking forward to a happy life with Jane for as long as we live.”

  Two weeks later, Old Easy Goin’ Reagan earned a new nickname. According to a report by the FBI. “Confidential Informant T-10” told agents of his “firm conviction” that Congress should outlaw the Communist Party and formally designate groups that were Communist fronts, so that members’ disloyalty could be legally established. It was the opposite of what he had told HUAC forty days earlier—but consistent with the studio chiefs’ request that Congress “enact legislation to assist American industry to rid itself of subversives.” One day around that time, he took a long car trip with his former religion professor at Eureka. “He told me of his marriage troubles and of his troubles with Communists at the Guild,” the teacher remembered in 1966, when Reagan the gubernatorial candidate was making his bones by fulminating against the wickedness and moral dissolution of the Berkeley student left. But back in 1947 “he told me that there was a group of women at the University of California who were getting men tied into Communism by charm and sex—virtually prostitutes. He told me that like Lincoln if he ever got a chance to crack that, he’d crack it harder than what he’s doing now.”

  DUTCH’S 1948 WAS RUNG IN with a two-page spread in Photoplay, “Those Fightin’ Reagans”: “ ‘It’s a strange character I’m married to,’ Ronnie announced with a wry but unmistakably tender smile, ‘But—I love her. . . . Please remember,’ he told us, ‘that Jane went through a very bad time when, after the strain of waiting for another baby, she lost it. Then, perhaps before she was strong enough, she went into Johnny Belinda. . . . Perhaps, too, my seriousness about public affairs has bored Jane,’ he added slowly. ‘But you must believe me when I say that, less than six weeks before Jane left for New York, we were happy enough for her to tell me, ‘I hope it can always be like this between us.’ ‘I hope so,’ Ronnie said, with an earnestness you could reach out and touch. ‘Because I believe we belong together.’ ” In May, Jane filed for divorce on grounds of “extreme mental cruelty.” Her husband didn’t attend the June dissolution hearing. Readers of the Los Angeles Times, however, did. “Despite her lack of interest in his political activities,” the paper said, reporting her argument before the bench, “Reagan insisted that she attend meetings with him and that she be present during discussions among his friends. But her own ideas, she complained, ‘were never considered important.’ ”

  The following February, Jane Wyman was nominated for the Best Actress Oscar. When she won, her self-possessed and witty speech, the shortest in history, became a Hollywood legend: “I accept this very gratefully for keeping my mouth shut once. I think I’ll do it again.” It sounded like a dig at her “diarrhea-mouth” ex. Reagan, bitter, cracked, “Maybe I should name Johnny Belinda as co-respondent.” Decades later, in a rare personal revelation, he recalled to a reporter during a stormy airplane flight (he was afraid of flying), “I tried to go to bed with every starlet in Hollywood and damn near succeeded.” One of those starlets later accused him of what would come to be called “date rape”; another, an eighteen-year-old virgin, said he told her she should see a doctor because she couldn’t have an orgasm. Sometimes he woke up in one of the bungalows at the legendary Garden of Allah hotel complex on the Sunset Strip not knowing the name of the woman beside him in bed.

  No movie roles, let alone in the Westerns he craved. “I was almost on my way to Colorado on location when the studio changed its mind about casting,” he wrote in his column in his fan club newsletter of one cowboy role. He did, however, buy a little eight-acre “ranch.” “I grab a post hole digger and put up more paddock fences,” he wrote, referencing his favorite horse: “It’s a job to keep ahead of Tar Baby, who likes to lean on them until something gives.” Forlornly, he named the place “Yearling Row”—after the breakthrough movie of his former wife.

  At least he had his political obsession to ground him. Most Hollywood liberals had lost interest in politics after the death of FDR; among the stars, Lucille Ball, Robert Ryan, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Ronald Reagan were almost alone in plumping for the 1948 Democratic ticket. Reagan, on election eve, introduced a new liberal hero, Hubert Humphrey, on a national radio broadcast:

  “This is Ronald Reagan speaking to you from Hollywood. You know me as a motion picture actor. But tonight I’m just a citizen, pretty concerned about the election next month, and more than a little impatient about those promises the Republicans made before they got control of Congress a couple of years ago.”

  He went on to flog the Standard Oil Company for reporting a “net profit of $210 million, after taxes, for the first half of ’48—an increase in seventy percent in one year”: proof, he said, that Republicans were lying in their central election claim: the claim that the postwar epidemic of inflation had been caused by higher wages—not “bigger and bigger profit
s.”

  This was boilerplate liberalism, circa 1948. What was extraordinary was the way he found to illustrate the argument. Noting “an Associated Press dispatch I read the other day,” he introduced America to one Smith L. Carpenter, who “retired some years ago thinking he had enough money saved so that he could live out his last years without having to worry. But he didn’t figure on this Republican inflation which ate up all his savings. So he’s gone back to work.” He paused for ironic effect: “The reason this is news is Mr. Carpenter is 91 years old.”

  Here was that soon-to-become trademark skill: illustrating abstract questions of public policy with true heart-tugging stories from genuine folks. Or rather, apparently true. Generations later, when a wondrous technology would let the complete contents of dozens of newspapers be searched in less than a second, the fact could be told. And that fact is that none of these dozens of newspapers ran any Associated Press dispatch about someone named “Smith L. Carpenter,” nor anyone else who went to work when he was ninety-one years old because inflation ate up his savings.

  One year earlier, Hedda Hopper had written how Reagan “had struck me as being quiet [and] unassuming.” Now a profile called him “the spokesman for all movie actors,” who “walks around the studio with a portable radio,” “reads every book he believes he should read” and “most of the political columns,” and habitually shocks tourists “when he walks over and starts chatting.” It concluded, in dog-bites-man style, “He is not only an actor, but a politician.”

  But he still wasn’t a movie star. As the emcee who had introduced him on that election eve Democratic radio broadcast said: “Now to Ronald REE-gan in Hollywood.” People still didn’t know how to pronounce his name.

  SOON A SLOW, SUBTLE IDEOLOGICAL shift began stirring in Ronald Reagan’s breast. By 1952, he was campaigning for Dwight Eisenhower—but also for a liberal senatorial candidate. By eight years later, however, he was about as far right as a public figure could be—writing a personal letter to the Republican presidential nominee: “Shouldn’t someone tag Mr. Kennedy’s ‘bold new imaginative program’ with its proper age? Under the tousled boyish hair cut it is still old Karl Marx—first launched a century ago. There is nothing new in the idea of a Gov’t being Big Brother to us all. Hitler called his ‘State Socialism’ and way before him it was ‘benevolent monarchy.’ ” Delighted at the spectacle of this Hollywood star calling a centrist Democrat a Commie, Nazi, and monarchist all at once, Richard Nixon issued a command to his staff: “Use him as a speaker wherever possible. He used to be liberal.”

  The underlying moral logic was the same. He saw good guys. He saw bad guys. Only the identity of the two precisely changed places. How? It was a shift the complexity of which he himself was constitutionally unable to convincingly explain: he said that he hadn’t changed—that the Democratic Party had. That made no sense; if anything, the Democratic Party by the time he became a Republican was more conservative than it had been in 1948, when Harry Truman campaigned on a sweeping program of national health insurance. So what had changed? One crucial factor was his views on the subject of taxation—with which the president of the Screen Actors Guild had already begun a lifelong obsession.

  His industry became tax-obsessed first. The new Hollywood, like the old one, was built on the manufacture of stars. But now stars manufactured themselves. Once upon a time, in 1932, Clark Gable told Photoplay—“smilingly,” the picture magazine claimed—“I am paid not to think.” Sometime later, when Gable asked for a percentage of the profits of the films in which he starred, a top executive exploded: “He’s nobody. We took him from nobody. . . . Who taught him how to walk? We straightened his teeth and capped them into that smile. . . . We taught this dumb cluck how to depict great emotions. And now he wants a piece of the action? Never!” Then came the 1943 California Supreme Court decision in Olivia de Havilland’s case, which called traditional studio contracts “indentured servitude”; then, postwar, aggressive Justice Department enforcement against the monopoly practices forbidden by the 1940 Paramount decree; then the labor troubles of 1945–47, eating away at studios’ bottom lines. There was, too, the rising medium competing for Americans’ entertainment dollars: television. The studios’ hand thus weakened, stars making Gable’s old demand had considerably more power. This was, ironically, the reason Reagan became SAG president in the first place: Robert Montgomery was one of the first to get a newfangled “profit-sharing deal.” That, officially, made Montgomery “management”—and thus disqualified him for union office. This was something his replacement, with far less box-office pull, wouldn’t have to worry about.

  The new deals made Hollywood stars entrepreneurial, at a time when the Revenue Act of 1941 set the top income tax bracket at 90 percent for every dollar earned above $200,000. So stars started thinking like Republicans: They became tax-obsessed. Indeed, the story Reagan would tell about why he became interested in taxes revolved around that 90 percent top marginal tax rate: he claimed it kept him from adding a new picture to his schedule if it meant getting paid only a dime on the dollar. The story, however, doesn’t wash. Reagan was still a contract player, not a freelancer—and still a rather meager contract player at that. In April 1949, when a melodrama of his he thought splendid, called Night Unto Night, came out after being held for two years, he confidently refused a loan-out to Columbia for a silly comedy. But Night Unto Night got bad reviews. Next Variety gave him a good notice (“Reagan is a fellow who has a cheerful way of looking at dames”) in The Girl from Jones Beach—but the picture was just the sort of fluff he was desperate to avoid. He had done Warners a favor the previous year by filming the war picture The Hasty Heart in cold and damp England (the cash-strapped British government had frozen American corporate assets, forcing studios to film more pictures there)—but Warners repaid him by scheduling him in only one picture for the next year.

  Early in 1950 a black-tie dinner for his thirty-ninth birthday drew six hundred attendees, including Cecil B. DeMille. Al Jolson sang “Sonny Boy” to the guest of honor. Perhaps buoyed by that, Reagan wrote Jack Warner a letter—addressing him as “Dear Jack” and calling in what he thought was a chit. “You agreed that the script and role were very weak but asked me to do the picture as a personal favor which I gladly did,” he wrote of That Hagen Girl. “At that time,” he pushed, “you encouraged me to bring in a suitable outdoor”—Hollywood jargon for “adventure”—“script which you agreed to buy as a starring vehicle for me.” He then noted a rumor that the Western script the studio had purchased on that recommendation had been reassigned to Errol Flynn. He concluded, “I know you too well to ever think you’d break your word. However I am anxious to know something of production plans—starting date etc. in order to better schedule my own plans. Frankly I hope it is soon as I have every confidence in this story.”

  “Jack” responded through the studio’s chief legal counsel: “Maybe it would be a good idea to effect a mutual cancellation of your contract.”

  Lew Wasserman was able to cobble him a five-picture-a-year-deal at Universal—a second-tier studio that cast him in his most infamous humiliation. Of Bedtime for Bonzo, Newsweek opined, “The chimp behaves more credibly than Ronald Reagan.” His name was even mispronounced in the trailer. He turned down the sequel, not because of any worries about tax liability, but because he thought the script unrealistic. (“Who could believe a chimp could go to college and play on the football team?” recollected the star of a picture in which the chimp wears glasses, learns table manners, and is adopted as a child by a professor and his wife.) No, this wasn’t an actor worried about the tax liability of winning too many roles. In any event, by then a business genius had figured a way out of the 90 percent tax bracket problem. When a studio really wanted a certain actor for a certain role, Lew Wasserman, Reagan’s own agent, invented profit-sharing deals that turned the actor into a “corporation,” whose stake in a picture could then be taxed at the capital gains rate, a mere 25 percent. But that was only
for stars. Wasserman wasn’t able to get Reagan any decent pictures at all, on any terms.

  The future champion of individualism and entrepreneurship despised the new, more individualistic, entrepreneurial Hollywood. As SAG president, he was obsessed with preserving the factory system: guaranteeing actors “a wage that’ll enable them to live during the lay-off periods”; begging the studios in 1950 to re-balloon the number of actors under contract back to more than seven hundred from the current number, 350; arguing in 1952, his last year as SAG president, that by “casting and concentrating on a small group of individuals, who happen to be temporarily ‘hot,’ ” the studios harmed only themselves. (Projecting blame onto the industry for problems he was suffering in his own career was a pattern of his in interviews.) He all but proposed featherbedding make-work for the 5,242 SAG members who made less than $300 a year. (He noted that only 139 members grossed more than $50,000 a year—a point inconsistent with his later argument that the exorbitant top marginal tax rate for those earning over $200,000 was devastating Hollywood.)

  The new Hollywood, in fact, was killing him. To keep him working, Wasserman had to search elsewhere within his burgeoning entertainment empire. “REAGAN IN NIGHT CLUB / BUT NOT FROM CHOICE / ACTOR CITES PROBLEMS” reported the newspaper Hollywood Citizen in 1954, announcing his debut as emcee at the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas, “despite the fact that he is no singer or dancer and could scarcely qualify as a comedian.” His costars were an act that specialized in the hardly cutting-edge arts of soft-shoe dancing and barbershop quartet singing. Rounding out this uninspiring evening of entertainment, the Citizen reported, was a “monologue such as he has delivered at countless benefits.” Reagan was just grateful for the opportunity—which came, he wrote to Lorraine Wagner on the Frontier’s Western-themed stationery, at “about the time when I thought I was going over ‘Niagara Falls’ in a tub.” He also told her the show was “going over real big and the whole thing is really a grand experience.” For Ronald Reagan everything always works out in the end, gloriously, even when it does not. His Las Vegas agent described the revue as an “omelet.” Having laid that egg, Reagan soon was out of work once again.