Early Reagan

by Anne Edwards

  Willkie’s speeches were actually an endorsement of Roosevelt’s foreign policy. During the campaign, Willkie’s voice gave out and Roosevelt was quoted as saying he hoped the doctors “kept him talking.” But he did fight vituperatively against the president’s New Deal at home. Roscoe Drummond, then chief of the Washington news bureau for the Christian Science Monitor, quoted Willkie as saying to him: “If I could write my own epitaph, and if I had to choose between saying, ‘Here lies an unimportant President,’ or ‘Here lies one who contributed at a moment of great peril to saving freedom,’ I would prefer the latter.”

  At the time, America was experiencing one of its most uncertain, divisive periods. The Nazis were devouring Europe and Roosevelt was doing a juggling act—keeping the Axis as far as possible from the United States while attempting to strengthen the arm of every resisting country. Hollywood became polarized. It had the same proportion of isolationists and of those who felt the United States had to aid Britain as the rest of the country. There were Democrats who believed it dangerous for a president to run for a third term, and Republicans who did not trust a nominee who had so recently switched parties. Seldom had two men of such tremendous charisma and speech-giving talent opposed each other, facts that elicited a higher than usual election fever among the citizens of the film colony. As a result, the town remained politically segregated during the campaign, fearing a confrontation on an issue or candidate with one of the Front Office power men, which could have been a serious misstep. Still, there was a lot of action at Hollywood Democratic Headquarters, and Jack joined Pat O’Brien in doing what he could.

  Billboards were pasted across the nation with signs that read *HOLLYWOOD FOR ROOSEVELT*, beneath which were the enlarged personal signatures of Pat O’Brien, Rosalind Russell, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Melvyn Douglas, Sylvia Sydney, Alice Faye, James Cagney, Dorothy Lamour, George Raft, Miriam Hopkins, Hugh Herbert, Edward G. Robinson, Andy Devine, Thomas Mitchell, Betty Grable, Henry Fonda, Robert Benchley, Sally Eilers, Humphrey Bogart, Claude Rains, Ritz Brothers, Virginia Bruce, Joan Bennett, James Gleason, Jane Wyman “… and hundreds of others.” Reagan does not appear to have been active in this campaign, though he was still registered as a Democrat.

  Reagan and Wyman spent the evening of Election Day with Nelle and Jack (who paced the floor as he listened to the state-bystate returns on the radio). The election was closer than anyone had predicted, and Willkie was to win more votes than any previous candidate running against an incumbent president. “Jack, please sit down,” Nelle kept saying. But Jack was too agitated to do so.

  The president, waiting in the dining room of Hyde Park, “news tickers clattering nearby,” apparently shared this apprehension. James MacGregor Burns, a member of his staff, recalled of the scene: “The President was calm and business-like. The early returns were mixed. Morgenthau, nervous and fussy, bustled in and out of the room. Suddenly Mike Reilly, the President’s bodyguard, noticed that Roosevelt had broken into a heavy sweat. Something in the returns had upset him. It was the first time Reilly had ever seen him lose his nerve.

  “‘Mike,’ Roosevelt said suddenly. ‘I don’t want to see anybody in here.’

  “‘Including your family, Mr. President?’

  “I said anybody,’ Roosevelt answered in a grim tone.”

  The room was cleared. Reilly stolidly guarded the closed door as Roosevelt sat alone awaiting the nation’s final decision. A short time later the votes began to swing in his direction. He ordered the door open. “Roosevelt was smiling again… and in came family and friends…”

  Roosevelt’s reelection was gaily celebrated by Jack Reagan, Pat O’Brien and the workers at the Hollywood Democratic Headquarters. Early in the morning on May 18, 1941, one month after Roosevelt was sworn in for his third term, Jack Reagan died. Reagan wrote: “I’m sure he knows that Pat and his new friends were there in the little church off Sunset Boulevard to say goodbye.”

  The monkey on Reagan’s back—the fear that his father would be overtaken by the “black curse” to his and his family’s humiliation—was now also dead.

  * Later changed to Knute Rockne—All American.

  † Warners had originally wanted to cast James Cagney as Knute Rockne. His popularity was at a high (number four in the box office for male stars in 1938) while O’Brien had not even surfaced in the top fifty. “It is a simple matter of arithmetic,” Robert Buckner, the script writer, wrote Father O’Donnell (business manager of Notre Dame). “Cagney would insure the picture’s success. O’Brien would not.” Mrs. Rockne, who had final approval of casting, wanted O’Brien, however, and he was cast.

  * Howard never made a major film again, although he did direct a few low-budget productions before he was forced into “retiring” in 1946 at the age of forty-seven. He died seven years later.

  * In 1945, a union official and witness in a Justice Department investigation into the MCA/AFM connection was to claim that there had never been a union member who won a case before the AFM board against MCA. Stein also obtained from Petrillo a “blanket waiver” giving MCA the right to counteract AFM’s bylaws and operate “as both agent and production company,” a violation of union bylaws he repeated with SAG.

  * Montgomery served a second term as SAG president in 1946-47.

  * By 1945, they represented an estimated one third of all Hollywood stars and major directors and producers, and earned their nickname—”the Octopus.” The expansion did not stop there. MCA “gobbled up” an estimated one half of Hollywood’s major talent by 1950.

  * Although Buckner was given sole credit for the script of Knute Rockne—All American, the studio had purchased some additional material from a December 1938 Cavalcade of America radio script about Rockne. Included in this purchase was the famous “Win one for the Gipper” scene. Upon the 1940 release of the film, the writer of the radio drama threatened to sue. Warners made a settlement granting the studio all film rights but overlooking television provisions. Thus, in 1956, when the film was sold to television, the famous scene had to be deleted.

  * Ironically, Reagan had already made his last film, The Killers, at the time of this statement.

  † In the final version, Reagan’s line was cut.

  * Reagan claimed “he broke a leg.”

  * Willkie had practiced law until 1933, when he became president of the Commonwealth and Southern Corporation, a giant utility holding company.

  11

  BEHIND JANE WYMAN’S EASYGOING, WISECRACKING exterior lurked little Sarah Jane Fulks, always seeking approval and love. Her insecurity drove her to set near-impossible goals for herself, which kept her on edge but also propelled her forward. Reagan’s self-assurance gave him an authority and implacability that were difficult for a less secure person to oppose. In the Rea-gan-Wyman household, his word was pretty much law regarding what he considered the more masculine considerations: family economics and planning for the future. He left household matters to Jane—not costs, just the “feminine-frivolous”—decoration, entertainment, and orders to the maid who came in five days a week.

  Firmly convinced that to want was to have before this marriage, Wyman had lived up to every penny of her modest salary and more. “I don’t know how I ever did it, but I was up to my neck in debt,” Wyman once admitted of this period. “I knew the way Ronnie [felt] about debts, and decided the best thing to do was to pay every last living bill before the big event. After it was all over, I had $500 to my name. ‘That’s swell,’ Ronnie assured me. ‘That’s the beginning of our savings account.’“

  While still on their honeymoon, Reagan sat her down and worked out what he called “a viable budget. This meant that we saved half of everything we made. That first month was tough sledding. We literally didn’t spend a dime. Every one of our checks was banked away, half in a savings account and half in a checking account… charge accounts took care of our living expenses—food, gas, oil, dining out—so we had no bills to pay until the first of the following month.… Ronnie has
a phobia about bills. If a bill is ten days old, he starts having a fit. As a result every bill is paid and out of the way by the 10th of every month… and he made sure we never charged more than what we had set aside for living expenses.”

  Even with their combined incomes, they lived modestly for Hollywood, where spending habits are often a gauge to success. Because Wyman wanted a baby and a house, the percentage of their earnings going toward savings increased. (Wyman refers in one early article to the day when she would have their “savings account baby.”) Outsiders found them curiously mismatched. “Janie always seemed about ten years younger,” one friend says. “She could be the life of the party.… [Ronnie] was a good storyteller, but he often used Jane as the butt of his story—you know, how she had been duped, or a silly thing she had done. She’d get flustered but she never said anything. I had the feeling that they weren’t really communicating. In 1940 and 1941 all he talked about was world conditions. He was very serious—even during football season. Only it was the game that he was serious about then.”

  Another friend adds: “I’d say Janie was a lot quicker than Ron. She had a sort of streetwise intelligence. She did everything fast, made up her mind on the spot. Ron always thought things out. I think she admired him greatly and considered him a hell of a lot smarter than she was. Their friends were more the Old Guard in Hollywood, not their contemporaries or the in-groups and swingers.”

  (Wyman said of the first few months of their marriage, “Neither Ronnie nor I were stars, we were both featured players making $500 a week. I wasn’t a glamour girl and he wasn’t a matinee idol. We were just two kids trying to get the breaks in pictures.”)

  Reagan took a scholarly interest in wine and liked to play host at small dinner parties. They bought two Scotties (the same breed of dog as Roosevelt’s beloved Fala), and named one Scotch and the other Soda. Wyman claimed Soda took after Reagan and Scotch after her. “One day Scotch got mad and started snapping at Soda,” she told an interviewer. “For a moment, Soda watched him tolerantly—’Pipe down, brother, pipe down.’ When that didn’t work, he lifted his paw and laid it quietly on his brother’s nose. It worked like a charm. Scotch subsided. Soda removed the paw and they trotted off together in brotherly love. And if those aren’t my husband’s tactics, I’ll eat my hat.”

  “There was a snobbism in Hollywood,” Joan Fontaine recalled, “the second leads didn’t get invited.” The snub did not affect the Reagans much. Late nights were out completely when they were filming, and they worked steadily throughout 1940-41. “When employed there are the long hours of activity, which meet personality needs,” Hortense Powdermaker explained in her anthropological study, Hollywood, the Dream Factory, written in the 1940s. “Then the picture is finished and a period of inactivity follows. Even if the actor is under contract and there is no financial worry, the situation is not an easy one. There is the well-known lost feeling when not acting.” This was true of Wyman, who tried to cram her free time with other activities. Compulsive by nature, she polished silver and brass and constantly rearranged furniture. She went house hunting and priced antiques for the home they could not quite yet afford. She played golf and kept up with current novels, hoping always to find in one a meaty role that she could convince the studio was right for her. Her ambition had grown, her dedication to acting, her sense that she could make it big. Her interest in SAG activities continued. She could always be depended on to pinch-hit on a committee when needed.

  Reagan has been quoted as saying, “I think Jane started talking about a baby the day after we were married. I wanted one too, but I used all my male logic to persuade her that every young couple ought to wait a year. She agreed I was right as usual and she was wrong. So we had a baby.” The portrait painted of the Reagans in the hundreds of magazine articles published during their marriage point up Reagan’s practical nature and Wyman’s emotional sensitivity, her need for self-expression and for roots.

  Just five months after they married—in June 1940—Wyman became pregnant, and the impending event threw her into more intense activity. She differed from stars of the past who feared children might reduce their popularity. To the contrary, in her case it could reverse her screen image, add maturity and depth of character. She did not, however, tell the studio about her condition until after the tour to South Bend in early October, when she was already four months’ pregnant.

  Reagan, at thirty, was to become a father, but his concerns were more political than personal. Anticipating the approach of war, he argued at social gatherings or on the set for American involvement, solid in his belief that only with our help could the Axis be defeated. Holland had fallen, France was on her knees. Only Britain stood strong, but how long could it hold out?

  Roosevelt was alert to the danger signs. “Each night as he relaxed over his stamp collection, the President would confide to his personal physician, Admiral Ross T. Mclntire, ‘England has to be saved…’“ The problem remained that if Germany should triumph over Britain, how could the United States face the resultant threat to its safety? Roosevelt successfully demanded from the Senate that the country aim for a production of fifty thousand planes within the year, and requested a budget increase of $500 million plus an additional $70,000 per plane for annual maintenance. “Even the Republicans,” noted Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, “will have to go along with this program because the country is for it and they dare not do otherwise.”

  Reagan’s co-workers found him more talkative than ever. Defense figures were rattled off at a dizzying pace. “No one was quite sure he was accurate, but he sure as hell sounded accurate,” one former colleague commented. As Republicans pushed for the same goals as the administration—a solid American defense—war clouds drifted close. (The New York Herald Tribune bluntly suggested, “The least costly solution in both life and welfare would be to declare war on Germany itself.”) The passion and fears of the time found listeners and new friends for Reagan. No longer a “repository of fact,” he was an articulate man with political knowledge that was of pertinent interest. His friendship with Justin Dart grew. Dart was becoming one of the top fund-raisers in the Republican party and through him Reagan was meeting many influential men, among them Goodwin Knight (future Republican governor of California) and banker Charles Cook. He socialized often with actors George Murphy and Dick Powell, both Republicans. The war in Europe brought his thinking closer to the Republican view, although he remained a loyal Roosevelt admirer. He did not think his opinion on joining the fight against Germany was hawkish. Rather, he spoke of American involvement as a pledge to help the underdog and defend the weak. But he remained adamant in his belief that Roosevelt would not enter a war until America was ready. What Reagan and his friends debated was the manner in which that readiness was—and was not—being achieved.

  “They had made many films together, but arguing politics drew them together,” explained Powell’s widow, actress June Al-lyson. “It was a riot to listen to Ronnie, a staunch Democrat, trying to convert Richard [Powell] while Richard argued just as hard to turn Ronnie Republican. I figured the only way to get into this conversation was to pop some basic questions at Ronnie.

  “He answered me carefully, methodically. When Ronnie got through explaining something to me, Jane Wyman leaned over and said, ‘Don’t ask Ronnie what time it is because he will tell you how a watch is made.’“

  Wyman had been in Gold Diggers of1937 and The Singing Marine with Powell when he was a musical-comedy leading man. In the early forties, about the time he met and married Allyson, Powell made a sudden transition to straight dramatic roles. This change coincided with an increasingly serious interest in business and politics and brought him into an active alliance with the Republican party. As early as 1941, he saw Reagan’s potential as a political figure. His opinion of him as an actor was less favorable. He not only tried to convert Reagan to Republicanism, he kept insisting that if Reagan became a Republican he might have a future somewhere other than films. Allyson
and Wyman, on the other hand, shared a distaste for politics. “He’ll outgrow it [Reagan’s obsession with politics],” Allyson told Wyman. “To [Jane] it wasn’t funny,” she later commented. “But even more annoying to her was the fact that it took Ronnie so long to make up his mind about anything she asked him.… I thought it was wonderful that Ronnie was so vitally interested in everything and was always studying a new subject… he showed the same thoroughness in matters other than politics and he was… always studying. He was a wine connoisseur and once after I asked some questions about wines, he sent me a book on the subject.” Allyson recalled that during their meetings, “a certain sad sweetness radiated from [Wyman’s] large soulful eyes.”

  Whenever Reagan got together with his men friends, the talk would shift to politics. Wyman’s aversion to such evenings was not so much that the subject was boring but that a social occasion would either turn argumentative or place Reagan on a soap box. She was not as apolitical as her distress might indicate. She stood up to be counted whenever an issue seemed important to her, and she had exceptionally sound reasoning ability—which was why SAG called upon her services so often. But Reagan’s living-room polemics had more to do with an attempt to convert than to reason. And they echoed something unsettling in Wyman’s past.

  Many parallels existed between Wyman’s father, Richard Fulks, and Reagan. Both were Democrats with strong, conservative attitudes (seemingly a contradiction); both were men who believed in the work ethic, in law and order, in America and American ideals; and both were obsessed with politics and power. Fulks never became a successful politician, not from his lack of trying but because of his austere personality and his mediocre ability. Wyman’s reaction to those qualities Reagan shared with her father was to withdraw, to become even more of a private person than ever. Reagan’s attention was so diverted by his involvements that he could not recognize the danger this could pose to their marriage. He called her “button nose” and every year sent red and white roses for Valentine’s Day. To the world they lived in, he projected a grand-fellow, good-husband image.