by Anne Edwards
Monday morning, March 22, Dutch returned to work at WHO with stories about his Hollywood screen test, but laughed it off. As he and Myrtle and another member of the staff started out to lunch, a telegram was delivered:
WARNERS OFFER CONTRACT SEVEN YEARS, ONE YEAR’S OPTION, STARTING AT $200 A WEEK. WHAT SHALL I DO? GEORGE WARD MEIKLEJOHN AGENCY.
Dutch wired back:
HAVE JUST DONE A CHILDISH TRICK [leaving Hollywood so soon]. SIGN BEFORE THEY CHANGE THEIR MINDS. DUTCH REAGAN.
He admitted, “Then I yelled.”
The same day George Ward called Joy Hodges to tell her of the Warners offer. Hodges swiftly dispatched a telegram to the Des Moines Register:
MAY BE SCOOP. YOU DO HAVE POTENTIAL STAR IN YOUR MIDST. DUTCH REAGAN LOCAL SPORTS ANNOUNCER SIGNED LONG TERM WARNER BROTHERS CONTRACT FRIDAY [March 18]. THEY CONSIDER HIM GREATEST BET SINCE [Robert] TAYLOR WITHOUT GLASSES, JOY HODGES.
“The day Dutch got the telegram advising him he had passed the screen test was a day to remember,” Herb Plambeck recalled. “Dutch held court for several hours, sitting on his desk, jubilant, excited, euphoric, accepting everyone’s congratulations, mesmerizing all of us with the tales of his Hollywood adventure then, and those yet to be.”
That night he called Nelle and Jack, promising that he would send for them to join him in California as soon as he was settled. That was not to be for several months. The Warners contract was to start Tuesday, June 1, and he remained at WHO until Friday, the twenty-first of May. That night the staff gave him a farewell bash at Cy’s Moonlight Inn. Early the next morning, his convertible piled high with all his gear, he headed west to a new life.
Dutch Reagan had been left behind in Des Moines. From June 1, 1937, Ronald Reagan would be known by his generally mispronounced proper name.
* Myrtle Williams was the maiden name of Myrtle Williams Moon.
* Mary Frances’s surname has been deleted at the request of her family.
* Margaret Cleaver was married to James Waddell Gordon, Jr., of Richmond, Virginia, on June 18, 1935, by the Reverend Cleaver in the Christian Church, Eureka. Her sister, Helen (who had accompanied her to France), was her maid of honor. The reception was held at Lidas Wood Hall, Eureka College, where Margaret had once lived and where she and Dutch had spent many romantic evenings dreaming of their futures. On June 22, the Gordons sailed from New York for Glasgow, Scotland, where Gordon was to be an assistant U.S. consul. They later made their home in Richmond.
“Jeanne Tesdell Burington.
* Reagan used the phrase “a rendezvous with destiny” in his own campaign speeches.
* Reagan had been sensitive about the mispronunciation of his name and had been correcting his guests before airtime.
* Wrigley’s son was Phillip Wrigley, Charles Walgreen’s friend and frequent houseguest.
* Reagan used the name of his drama teacher at Eureka, Miss Johnson. This bogus group was to be listed thereafter in his studio biography and reprinted in most publicity releases.
† Also known as Ann Donal, and not to be confused with British actress Anna Nagel.
* Joseph P. MacDonald (1906-68) became one of Hollywood’s top cinematographers. His credits were to include Pinky (1949), Viva Zapata (1952), How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), The Young Lions (1958) and Walk on the Wild Side (1962).
HOLLYWOOD
Heart of a continent, the nearts converge on open boulevards where palms are nursed with flare-pots like a grove, on villa roads where castles cultivated like a style breed fabulous metaphors in foreign stone, and on enormous movie lots where history repeats its vivid blunders.”—KARL SHAPIRO, Hollywood
8
LATE MONDAY EVENING, MAY 31, DUTCH PULLED UP TO the front door of the Hollywood Plaza Hotel, the shiny brown of his convertible obscured by dust and sand. He had driven almost nonstop the last twenty-four hours of the trip, foolishly making the trek across “the burning desert” during the day. Despite the sunglasses he wore, his eyes were red-rimmed from the glare of the sun.
Thousands of neon lights up and down Hollywood Boulevard outlined names and slogans (one read I’D WALK A MILE FOR A CAMEL and showed a cigarette with a red neon tip superimposed over a camel whose hump appeared to move). Searchlight beams pierced the sky, but they were too far up the street to ascertain whether they announced a movie premiere or the opening of a new hamburger stand. A message waited for him at the desk inside. George Ward would meet him at the hotel at nine A.M. the next morning and take him out to Warners.
He woke early and walked up and down the Boulevard. Hollywood looked like any other part of its mother city, Los Angeles. You did not know when you came to it, or when you left it, except for the signs and Hollywood Boulevard, the main street (called in the thirties either the Boulevard or Hollywood Bull), a broad thoroughfare with streetcar tracks up its middle. Both sides of the Boulevard, which runs due east and west, were lined with bizarre, claptrap buildings in pinks, greens and eye-blinding, sunstruck white. White was worn from spring to fall by the suntanned men in polo shirts and sports jackets and by the women in brief informal dresses who, masked by sunglasses, paused at window displays in the colorful storefronts.
South of the Boulevard, ice-cream-colored, one-story stucco bungalows roofed in red tile—thorny branches of scarlet bougainvillaea spreading across the sides of their one-car garages, a single palm growing on the lawn, a pepper tree planted between the sidewalk and curb—lined the side streets that led to Sunset Boulevard and some of the small independent studios. In this area of Hollywood, fake cowboys in chaps and sombreros and extras and featured players in makeup, bright kerchiefs tied around freshly waved hair, dark glasses a must, lunched at corner hot-dog stands and talked shop.
The northern half of Hollywood rose upward from the Boulevard in a network of twisted, sharp roads into the tawny foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains (known as the Hollywood Hills), where larger homes clung tenaciously to the rocky hillsides providing spectacular views for their occupants while daring the fury of the frequent California earthquakes. No greater contrast could exist between the Main Street commonplaceness of Dixon and the midwestern simplicity of Des Moines than the environs of Vine Street and the Boulevard, the location of Reagan’s hotel. The unreality of it was awesome. On a warm June day even the air seemed rarefied, as if all of this garish section had been sealed in vaporproof glass.
When George Ward met Reagan, he was struck once more by his clean-cut good looks, his vitality and total naturalness. In the film industry’s short career, deception and illusion had developed to extraordinary lengths. For the movies, windows were made of rock candy; stones of tar paper, balsa wood and cork; snow of gypsum and bleached corn flakes; icicles of fiber hair dipped in plaster of Paris. Strawberry gelatin substituted for blood. Warners’ prop shop stocked enough artificial apple blossoms for twenty-eight trees and enough fake daisies to cover an acre of field. Studios created new names for players along with totally fictitious biographies. Image was of optimum importance. Therefore, at Warners, Emmanuel Goldenberg had become Edward G. [for Goldenberg] Robinson; Ruby Stevens, Barbara Stanwyck; George Nolan, George Brent; Clara Lou Sheridan, Ann Sheridan; and Dorothy, Rosemary and Priscilla Mullican—Lola, Rosemary and Priscilla Lane. The name Ronald Reagan had been duly considered by the “front office” and the publicity department, and since they thought it had a good ring to it as well as marquee appeal, it had been retained.
Warner Brothers was a family business run by three brothers. Harry and Albert (Abe) were based in New York, Harry as president of the company and Abe as treasurer. Jack, the only brother in California, was vice-president in charge of production, ran the studio and was responsible for all filming. Harry was the patriarch of his family, and his influence on the taste and goals of his younger brother, Jack, had been enormous. Messianic in his attitudes, Harry believed all films carrying the Warner name should contain a moral lesson. “The motion picture,” he was quoted as saying, “presents right and wrong as t
he Bible does. By showing both right and wrong we teach the right.” He possessed “a violent hatred of all forms of human prejudice” and was obsessively anti-Nazi. His proselytizing hand could be seen behind all the films his brother Jack produced.
At Warner Brothers, Jack Warner operated as a “totalitarian godhead.” One observer called him “a bargain-counter dictator.” Even his brightest stars were made to punch a timecard. Warner, a rabid right-winger, employed a full-time investigator to check on the patriotism of his employees. No one worked for him without a private security clearance. The commissaries at most of the other studios featured three meals a day; Warners served only one. No socializing on company time was his policy. The studio police at Warners, headed by F. Blayney Mathews, a former investigator for the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office, was operated along the lines of the FBI. Warner himself devised a personnel record which all his employees had to fill out and sign. Questions asked were about religion, lodge or club affiliation, insurance carried, assets, debts, and there was one yes or no question: “Are you a member of any organization, society, group or sect owing allegiance to a foreign government or rule?” Warner was also obsessed with the fear that another studio might get its “spies” on his sound stages and preempt one of his films. “Clearance” was not an easy matter, and visitors were few. This gave the Warner lot an insular quality not found at other studios. But, though he did not permit much liberty of temperament or freedom of action among his executives and players, he encouraged liberty of imagination among his producers (often called supervisors) and directors.
Under Jack Warner, the studio had pioneered in sound. Its current success had been built on its achievement to produce films that kept abreast with the headlines. It also sought and developed new stars, directors and production techniques. Jack Warner was never as involved in the private lives of his employees as was Louis B. Mayer at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, seldom interesting himself in their affairs, marriages and divorces. At Christmas, which he and his wife traditionally spent in France, he telegraphed greetings to his closer employees, signing them “Jack and Ann Warner, Cannes, France,” although they were dispatched by his secretary in Hollywood to save expense. Yet, he did take a personal interest in Reagan at the beginning of his contract—one, because he was part of the sports world, which Warner admired; and two, because he had liked his test and thought him promising. But this was done from the distance of his grand suite on the lot. Warner and Reagan did not actually meet until many months after Reagan was hired.
Little that transpired at his studio escaped Jack Warner’s attention. Blue memos cascaded from his desk like the waters over Niagara (all other executives communicated on pink stock). At the bottom of each sheet of interoffice correspondence was written: “Verbal messages cause misunderstanding and delays (please put them in writing).” Since copies of all memos were kept on file, Warner had a complete written account of studio activities available at all times. Two men, Roy J. Obringer (Warners’ general counsel) and Steve Trilling* (casting director), “equally short [as Warner], equally stocky, equally bald,” functioned as his liaisons, relaying his edicts, opinions and praise wherever they were to be directed. When Warner wanted personally to contact one of his employees (often even when he or she was on the lot), he was known to do so by telegram, frequently several pages in length.
Reagan started at the studio when Hal Wallis was at the height of his reign as executive producer (1933-42). Wallis was largely responsible for Warners’ A films, and dealt more on the day-to-day details of production than did his boss. Bryan Foy was Wallis’s alter ego for Warners’ B pictures. Foy’s unit produced twenty-six features a year on a five-million-dollar budget, which included his salary and those of his staff. Occasionally, one of Foy’s movies received A promotion, but this seldom raised the figure of his budget. B features were the bread and butter of the studio and Foy was well qualified to play Scrooge on their behalf. Raised in vaudeville, he later became “a shoestring independent producer of the most opportunistic stripe.” In 1928 he had made the first all-talking feature, The Lights of New York, for a total cost of twenty-one thousand dollars. Films like Sterilization, What Price Innocence and Elysia (filmed in a nudist camp) were made on similar “corner-cutting” budgets and returned their expenses the first week in release. Story costs for his films were virtually nil. He took old Warner scripts and gave them new treatments merely by changing locales or genres (transforming a Western melodrama into a contemporary gangster picture). His films were also strong on the use of inserts such as newspaper clips or newsreel snips (to save the expense of producing the action otherwise required) and close-ups (to minimize the number of actors needed in a scene). Neither Foy nor Wallis permitted their directors to improvise on the script or to make retakes (unless a preview had gone so awry that reshooting was demanded to save the film from being scuttled). Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer worked in reverse. After previews, films were reedited and whole scenes often reshot.
Until Reagan arrived at the studio, he did not know that he had been cast as the lead in Love Is on the Air, a programmer to be made by the Foy unit. The feature was scheduled to begin shooting the following Monday morning, June 7, with June Travis, the young woman who had helped him in his screen test, as his leading lady. Only four days remained for the studio to prepare a lead who not only had no camera exposure but no professional acting experience. No matter how low the budget {Love Is on the Air was to be made for $119,000), the prudence of such a gamble was questionable. But the decision reflects most pointedly the purpose of the film studios in the thirties: to create their own stable of personalities, hoping that out of every ten contract players one might prove to have star quality.
Warner Brothers had the largest list of stock contract players, of which Reagan was now a member. And, as one observer said, “The studio that had you under contract had to give you consideration, had to try to build you for its own sake.… If you didn’t make it you were out, and you were a freelance player.” Studios also employed freelance performers, of course; Warners hired fewer than others. A freelance player could negotiate each new film, but the competition was fierce and one’s livelihood insecure. Nonetheless, many of Warners’ contract players griped about the unfairness of the system. “What you, the actor, would have would be a guarantee of six months’ [employment], what the producer, of course, would have would be options for seven years…” The studio also had the right to place a contract player on suspension if he or she refused a role, the suspended performer receiving no pay for the number of weeks specified by the studio. Like snow days in eastern schools, these suspended periods could then be tacked on to the end of a player’s contract. This could mean that the player, now a star, had to make a film on the pay scale of a stock contract player. None of these eventualities troubled Reagan when he started at Warners, nor did the authoritarian attitude that prevailed. Making a movie was the overriding thing. And even there, he gave no thought to its quality or budget.
On April 20, 1937, Reagan had signed a seven-year contract with six-month options to begin June 1, at two hundred dollars a week. This did not mean consecutive weeks. Contract players were only guaranteed nineteen weeks’ work in twenty-six. In addition, any revenues they made in radio, personal-appearance tours or commercial advertising went directly to the studio. Reagan had only the right to renegotiate his salary after four years (by that time he would be earning six hundred dollars a week), and he could not quit to go elsewhere. Warners could also loan him out to another studio for whatever fee they could get, while continuing to pay him his contracted weekly stipend, a standard arrangement for contract players at that time.* If the performance was well received in his first outing, he would be put in a supporting role in an A film (which usually ran over ninety minutes, whereas a programmer ran approximately sixty minutes) soon afterward. What happened from there depended upon audience reaction. Character actors were not handled in the same way, but Warners had signed Reagan with an eye to groo
ming him as a leading man.
Almost immediately upon his arrival at the studio, he was taken over by the men and women who created a distinctive look for each player—the makeup artists, hairdressers and wardrobe personnel. The quintessential re-creation of this process occurs in the Judy Garland-James Mason version of A Star Is Born, where Garland’s natural beauty is masked by a similar team of experts in an attempt to turn her into a glamour girl. (Reagan was to say, “Apparently I was too big a problem for Perc [Westmore, top Warner makeup artist] to handle at the studio. So he sent me to the House of Westmore [commercial salon for makeup and hair, operated by the six Westmore brothers] on a Saturday for what turned out to be a joint consultation with his brothers. I still remember how they circled around me as if I were a racehorse. They spoke only to each other, not to me. I recall their saying such clinical things as ‘What are we going to do with him? With his hair parted in the middle like that, he looks like Joe E. Brown with a small mouth!’“)
Happily for Reagan, he had been signed for his own best qualities, the boyish charm, the all-American look. The West-mores were most concerned with the deep crevice across the bridge of his nose put there by so many years of wearing heavy glasses. Darker makeup was used on this area, and deeper laugh lines and the intimation of dimples were created to distract the viewer’s eye. The pouf he had worn for years was flattened and a suggestion of sideburns penciled in. Without his glasses, one eye had the tendency to turn slightly when tired. Instructions were sent to the camera department that he was not to be photographed fullface in close-up where this would be most evident.