Early Reagan

by Anne Edwards

  “We have conquered fear,” a composed, smiling Roosevelt told the hundred thousand people who crowded Franklin Field in Philadelphia and the vaster numbers who listened on the radio as he accepted the Democratic presidential nomination. (“He arrived at the podium on the arm of his son James—after a frightful five minutes when in the crush his steel brace had buckled and out of sight of the crowd he had fallen.”) He recalled the problems that beset the nation in 1932 and outlined how his administration had overcome them. He did not shy away from the current problems. But freedom, he declared, was “no half-and-half affair.” The language was clear, the tone confident, the style intimate. And as he came to the end of his speech and in a rising cadence announced, “this generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny,”* the crowd rose to its feet as one and nearly drowned out his last words with cheers. Harold Ickes, the secretary of the interior, called it “the greatest political speech [he had] ever heard.”

  Dutch’s enthusiasm for the New Deal might have lost some of its fervor (although Jack’s had not), but his feelings toward Roosevelt were even more intensified. He put in a radio plug for his candidate whenever the chance presented itself. He also began to perform his first loving imitations of Roosevelt’s fireside chats to the amusement of WHO staffers, although not all were in the president’s corner. Roosevelt had numerous enemies and detractors. Indignantly the president told his radio audience, “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.” As the election drew closer, the Chicago Tribune reminded its readers daily, “Only 5 [4, 3, 2, etc.] days remain to save your country.” (The newspaper’s switchboard operators were even forced to repeat this message to all callers.) The Tribune was also responsible for a vicious story by Donald Day (who later was arrested for broadcasting for the Nazis) that claimed Roosevelt was supported by Moscow. The rival Chicago Times proved the story a complete hoax.

  Crushes of people cheered Roosevelt’s train and motorcade during his campaign journeys. He had the votes of workers he had put back to work and those who believed he would find them employment. He had the votes of farmers who looked forward to his program of rural electrification. He had the votes of northern blacks. The mood of the times is etched in this story of a New Deal official visiting his native Montana and having seen “men I had been to school with—digging ditches and laying sewer pipe. They were wearing their regular business suits because they couldn’t afford overalls… one man pulled some silver from his pocket and said, ‘Frank, this is the first money I’ve had in my pockets for a year and a half.’“ Hoover and the Republicans had cost him everything he had once had. Roosevelt and the Democrats had given him, if not a return to good times, at least money to feed his family. The November election was a landslide for Roosevelt, who carried every state but Maine and Vermont.

  The winter of 1936-37 was one of the coldest Iowa had experienced in more than a decade, which could have accounted for Dutch’s restlessness as spring approached without any evidence of bringing the smallest signs of fair weather with it. Des Moines had been his home for four years, a residency that had matured and educated him in ways that equal time at Eureka had not. His vision of himself and what he could accomplish had not only changed him, it had drastically altered his perception of the world. He still considered himself a Democrat and a liberal. He blamed Harding, Hoover and the Republicans for the problems the Midwest, and especially his family, had suffered during their administrations. Yet, curiously, despite all the young liberals who had been close to him in Des Moines, the two men who were to remain lifelong good friends and advisers were Hal Gross and Voith Pemberthy, both staunch conservatives and Republicans.

  The last two years in Des Moines had sharpened his political knowledge and his desire to learn more. Whenever Pemberthy or Gross made a point, he sought answers from books and articles—cramming up on the information for their next confrontation. He had gone about as far as possible at WHO and he knew it.

  Four years earlier he had been embarrassed to tell Sid Altschuler that he wanted to be an actor. But he still thought about the possibility. By now he had learned that power and money went hand in hand. Both appealed to him. Local fame had given him a taste of power. Somewhere up the line he suspected there could be a greater payoff in films than his current seventy-five-dollar weekly salary. At that moment he had no clear idea of how that could be achieved. Then Joy Hodges, a Des Moines girl who had become a successful band singer after years of appearing on Radio WHO (first at age twelve as Eloise Hodges, one half of the Blue Bird Twins, and then as part of the Singing Trio, a teenage group), returned home on a personal-appearance tour. Hodges had appeared in minor roles in several films for RKO, where she was under contract. The Des Moines press promoted her to star status and Dutch was asked to interview her for WHO.

  “He sat across the microphone from me in riding breeches, which I found amusing. But he was very good-looking even with his glasses,” she said. Slim and willowy with wide-set hazel eyes and bouncy light-brown hair, Hodges was a bundle of energy, as vivacious as she was ambitious. During the interview, she said something to him about his own potential in Hollywood. “After our interview he asked me if I would go riding with him at Fort Des Moines. I said yes even though I knew I had nothing to wear… no slacks, jeans, et cetera.… When he arrived the next afternoon, I hid in the closet to block out his very determined doorbell-ringing. My folks were out and I just could not face him to tell him I had nothing to wear. He rang and rang, and finally, after about ten minutes, left. I agonized about that broken date… some day I think I will confess how vain I was and that I was just another girl who couldn’t say no to him and to such a kind invitation [to go horseback riding].”

  Being stood up did not seem to perturb him. The interview with Joy had stirred other than romantic emotions. He recalled that she had made a point of telling him that Hollywood was the only place to be if he wanted a film career. Being seen at the right places with the right people was all-important. Her advice rang in his ears for weeks after the interview and was underscored when a musical group called Al Clauser and His Oklahoma Outlaws were guests on WHO’s Barn Dance program. Also former regulars on WHO, they had just been signed by cowboy star Gene Autry to appear with him in a film (Rootin’, Tootin’ Rhythm), and they dropped a casual “come see us at the studio” when they left.

  Des Moines caught Hollywood fever when film promoters came through shooting screen tests for possible future stars. Dutch was approached but did not fall for what he suspected might have been a scam. Nonetheless, he remained optimistic that he could make it in Hollywood as an actor if he could just go out there and see a few “influential people.” (His opening remark in the Hodges interview had been, “Well, Miss Hodges, how does it feel to be a movie star?” Prophetically, she replied, “Well, Mr. Raygun, you may know one day.”)*

  With his conservative nature, he could not consider a trip to California just to bask in the sun on the slight chance that he might be “discovered.” Therefore, he came up with a scheme. The Chicago Cubs had their spring-training camp from February 12 to March 15 at Santa Catalina Island, twenty-seven miles southwest of Los Angeles Harbor. He had a month’s vacation time coming to him, so he went to see Maland and “talked [him] into the idea that if they [WHO] put up the money, I would put up the time—and my vacation could be spent accompanying the Chicago Cubs on their training trip to Catalina Island. I made quite a pitch about what this would do for me in filling me with color and atmosphere for the coming baseball season. It worked.”

  The westward journey that carried him away from his Midwest roots took two nights and a day. Because his departure was in the evening, the most depressed areas between Des Moines and Lincoln, Nebraska, were only a glimmer of lights that came and went as the train chortled through the darkness. By morning it was on its way through the open western plains and the great Rockie
s. By the second night it was crossing the Colorado plateau and the Mohave Desert. The last sand traces were lost about dawn when—like some biblical miracle—the citrus groves—green and abundant—mile upon mile—appeared, and with them, the shock of fender-to-fender, dented, worn-out, black jalopies—mattresses tied to roofs, gaunt faces staring through windows, figures standing on running boards. Children clambered as close to the tracks as possible, waving on the train’s occupants.

  Dutch wasted no time when he arrived at Union Station, downtown Los Angeles. By nine A.M. he had checked into the Hollywood Plaza Hotel near the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street and hired a taxi to take him to Republic Studios, where the Oklahoma Outlaws were filming with Autry. He had no idea that Republic was such a distance out in the Valley. The cab fare was a lot higher than he had anticipated, as was the thermometer. Los Angeles was experiencing an unusually hot February—with temperatures close to ninety, soaring to over one hundred in the Valley, which was always ten to twenty degrees hotter. The white linen suit Dutch had bought for his California journey was limp by the time he got permission to pass through the gates of Republic Studios. The Oklahoma Outlaws were on location, but he did connect with their representative, who, he later said, “gave sympathetic ear when I voiced my aspirations and introduced me to a casting director who was less than enthusiastic.” The man handed him some old scripts to take with him and told him to come back in a week or two and to “pick out a scene that you think fits you, and I’ll listen to you read.”

  As he looked around the Republic lot, which made low-budget quickie programmers—mostly Westerns—an inner instinct warned him that this studio would never offer him the kind of career he hoped for in films. At twenty-six, he was young but not a kid, and he had made a name for himself in radio. The next morning he took the boat from the pier at Wilmington (three dollars round trip) to Avalon, the main center of resort and sports activities on Santa Catalina Island, an hour’s boat ride away.

  William Wrigley, Jr., the chewing-gum millionaire (who had also built Wrigley Field), had bought the entire island from its previous, unsuccessful promoters in 1919.* Wrigley had the formula and the millions needed to turn the island into a commercial success. The settlement of Avalon, which rested at the mouth of a large canyon along the crescent-shaped shore of the spectacularly beautiful Avalon Bay, was swiftly transformed into a romantic palm-studded haven for tourists, supplying them with a casino, Moorish in design, which had cost two million dollars to build, a boardwalk to equal Atlantic City’s, and a vast motion-picture theater occupying the ground floor of the white circular building that housed the casino. Five ramps gave access to the second-story ballroom. A cocktail lounge with a one-hundred-foot-long bar whose walls were covered with fantastic fish murals adjoined it.

  Catalina was a year-round resort, but the great crowds came during the summer months. In February, the waters of the many bays and coves were calm and clear, but they were also cold. The tourists of this time of year fished for barracuda, giant tuna and swordfish, and attended the exhibition games of the Wrigley-owned National League Chicago Cubs, held daily at noon at the Catalina Baseball Park at Freemont Street and Avalon Boulevard. This is where Dutch was expected to spend his days. But he did not show up on a regular basis at the practice field. Charlie Grimm, the manager of the Cubs, took him to task for this. “How could I tell him that somewhere within myself was the knowledge I would no longer be a sports announcer?” Reagan said. So sure was he that he’d make it through the golden gates of some major studio that he granted himself a true vacation—horseback riding, boating, “and seeing Catalina scenery.”

  Catalina indeed possessed some beautiful terrain. The foliage was luxuriant in its numerous valleys, and the rugged higher slopes of its mountains were covered in chaparral. Many film stars (Ronald Colman and Douglas Fairbanks among them) had yachts berthed in the coves and glamorous beach houses on the hillsides, where they entertained lavishly. There were also abandoned movie sets from films that had sought the South Sea island effect, including both the thatched round house used in the silent picture Rain (with Gloria Swanson) and the Continental Hotel set from the sound remake of it (starring Joan Crawford). Dutch was not to meet any film luminaries on Catalina. Evenings he hung around with the ballplayers. Reagan claimed that the sportswrit-ers who were covering the Cubs spring training gave him “some hazing… some of it was unkind.… Veteran sportswriters are really a breed apart in their ability to coin pungent phrases… they were resentful of radio men.”

  The second week in California he called Joy Hodges, who was singing with the Jimmy Grier Band at the Biltmore Bowl. After the show he sent a note backstage asking her to join him. “I did,” she recalled, “and he confessed he wanted to visit a studio. I said that could be arranged. Then he admitted he wanted a movie test.… I asked him to stand up and remove his glasses, he did, and it was clear that he was VERY HANDSOME. I told him never to put those glasses on again. The next morning I called my agent [George Ward, of the Meiklejohn Agency] and Dutch went to see him.”

  In actual fact, “without the glasses I couldn’t see him at all!” he quipped. But the major point was that Ward had known instinctively that the young man facing him was a “type” that could easily be sold. He categorized him as “the likeable, clean-cut American,” with the kind of sex appeal that emanated from natural charm and a solid maleness. His were the kind of good looks that appealed mostly to young girls and older women. As George Ward sat listening to Dutch exaggerate his acting experience (the Eureka Dramatic Club had suddenly become “The Johnson Professional Players”*) and double the salary Radio WHO was paying him, an idea came to him.

  This “big overgrown kid” looked and sounded like another young man, Ross Alexander, whom Warners had been grooming for stardom. Tragically, on January 3, 1937, at age twenty-nine, Alexander had shot himself shortly after finishing Ready, Willing and Able for the studio, his suicide paralleling to an amazing degree that of his first wife, Altea, who took her own life a year earlier with the same weapon, a .22 caliber rifle. Warners had covered up the tragedy as best they could. Alexander had recently married actress Anne Nagel† (also under contract to Warner Brothers), and the two were to leave on a honeymoon the next morning. Echoes of the suicide of Jean Harlow’s husband, Paul Bern, allegedly motivated by his impotency, hung over the Alexander tragedy. Replacing him as soon as possible with a similar type would be a smart move for Warners. Ward rang Max Ar-now, the studio’s casting director, while Dutch was still seated in his office. Arnow agreed to see him that day, and when he had, to shoot a test the following Tuesday (Dutch was scheduled to return to Des Moines by train on Wednesday, March 16). Outside Ar-now’s bungalow office at Warners, Ward, who now was convinced he had a hot property, said, “Two tests are better than one—let’s go to Paramount.” Ward’s hunch seemed solid when that studio offered Dutch a small spot in a short subject being shot that coming Sunday. (Paramount often cast hopefuls or their contract players in these eight- to ten-minute films that were used as fillers between halves of a double bill. In this way, tests and camera experience for future players were paid for by the exhibitors.)

  Early Sunday morning, Dutch appeared at Paramount, submitted to makeup, was given his few lines and then was told to wait. The Cubs were playing an exhibition game at Wrigley Field at noon, which he was to cover. By one o’clock he approached the casting director and asked him when he could be expected to be finished.

  “I might not get to you until eleven o’clock tonight,” the man replied.

  “You mean that you got me here early this morning and you might not use me until tonight?”

  “Son, this is Hollywood.”

  “Well, this is Des Moines,” he claimed he said, “and you can shove Hollywood.” He left and took a boat to the island. “I could afford to be brave,” he admitted. “I had Tuesday coming up, and somehow I hadn’t taken this Paramount thing seriously.” Sunday evening, Joy Hodges rehearsed wi
th him the scene he was to use as his test. He learned his lines quickly. (“I couldn’t believe his ability to read a page and practically recite it back,” Joy Hodges said.) He had a good feeling about the test and talked about his return to Hollywood.

  His instinct proved reliable. Everything about the test was approached seriously by Warners. His was the only one being shot that morning. Great care was taken in his makeup. June Travis, a promising young starlet, was on hand to do a scene with him from the delightful Philip Barry play Holiday (he was playing Johnny Case, the Cary Grant role in the film version made later that year). Both the director (Nick Grinde) and the cameraman (Joseph Patrick MacDonald) were experienced and talented professionals,* and Dutch’s choice of Holiday to showcase his potential as a youthful, affable and charming leading-man type was a wise one. His performance would not have given Gary Grant any sleepless nights, but Barry’s character was interesting and the scene shot for the test, where he explains to his fiancee’s sister (eventually played by Katharine Hepburn) his plan to retire young after “making a bundle” (and working again when he gets older), contains some of the playwright’s smartest and most literate dialogue. (Coincidentally, Hepburn had won her contract in Hollywood with a scene from the same play.)

  This time, he was finished by noon. Ward tried to convince him to remain in California for several days until “Mr. Warner [can] see this film.”

  “No,” he replied adamantly. “I will be on the train tomorrow—me and the Cubs are going home.” And home to Des Moines he went, concerned during the entire train journey that he had “blown it” by leaving town. “Actually, I had done, through ignorance, the smartest thing it was possible to do,” he said with hindsight. “Hollywood just loves people who don’t need Hollywood.”