Early Reagan

by Anne Edwards

  Wyman had always wanted another child. Maureen claims that as a youngster she “wanted two things in this world—a baby brother and a red scooter. And they [her parents] kept telling me that if I wanted a baby brother, I would have to save up. And one day they said I was going to get what I wanted that night [March 18, 1945]. I was sort of looking for a red scooter. But sure enough, it was a four-day-old baby brother. And my father [who was still in uniform and recently promoted to captain] said, ‘Where is it?’ And I went up the stairs. I had ninety-seven cents. So I gave the lady from the adoption agency my piggy bank.”

  Three days earlier, the Reagans had disappeared for the day. Wyman says, “Michael [the baby] was only twelve hours old when Ronnie and I got him.… As far as we’re concerned, we’re blood. What else can I say? He’s my baby boy.” They sent out the following announcement:

  Heavenly H.Q.

  Special Order #2

  Par. 2. Michael Edward Reagan is relieved from assignment and duty with present station and is assigned to the Reagan Base Unit, 9137 Cordell Drive, Hollywood, California. Duty assignment, “Son and Brother.” Rations and quarters will be provided. Travel by stork authorized. Effective date of change on the Morning Report, 18 March, 1945.

  The Reagans issued a statement that they had “decided to adopt because so many children in the world are in need of care and love, and a real home life. Therefore, we felt it was important for people who want more children and can provide for them to add from the outside to their family as we have.…” Certainly, Michael’s adoption must have been the result of a combination of motives rather than of a single social issue. Wyman might well have felt she could not take time from her career to carry a child. And both could well have believed that an infant would help draw them closer as a family.

  While Wyman was still working on Night and Day, Lost Weekend (having won its battle over the liquor lobby) was released. Hollywood took a second look at her. Wilder had photographed her with her natural, darker brown hair. Makeup had been minimal, playing up to the depth and size of her eyes, and her wardrobe had been attractive but simple and in good taste. True, her role was small, but when she was onscreen her performance was telling, and Wilder kept coming in for close-ups on the emotion held in her eyes. The delay in the film’s release, although a disappointment to Wyman initially, now worked in her favor.

  The Yearling, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s moving story of a young boy’s attachment to a fawn, had been a best-selling book in 1940-41. Metro had bought the rights, and in the summer of 1941 production had begun in Florida with Spencer Tracy as the boy’s father. Within a week, filming had been suspended because of the miscasting of the youth and the project was temporarily shelved. But in the past year Metro had seen the phenomenal rise of one of their new young players, Gregory Peck (barred from military service because of a serious back injury incurred in his youth). In the space of that year Peck had starred in Keys of the Kingdom (receiving an Academy nomination for his work), The Valley of Decision and Spellbound. Peck had many of Tracy’s qualities—the projection of moral and physical strength, intelligence, sincerity. Metro had also recently signed eleven-year-old Claude Jarman, Jr., who was perfect for the role of Jody Baxter. The project was taken down off the shelf. Playwright Paul Osborne rewrote the screenplay, tailoring the man’s role more to Peck’s style than to Tracy’s, and a search was begun for an actress to play the difficult part of Ma Baxter, the young, backward, inarticulate mother. Clarence Brown, the director, needed an actress who could eloquently express her emotions with her eyes. One look at the close-ups in The Lost Weekend and he felt certain he had found his Ma Baxter. Warners agreed to loan her out if her test with Peck proved successful. It did, and Wyman’s improbable dream of being accepted as a serious actress became reality.

  Brown’s reputation had been built on his talent in bringing a stirring beauty to his leading ladies—Greta Garbo (Flesh and the Devil, A Woman of Affairs, Anna Christie, Romance, Inspiration, Anna Karenina), Norma Shearer (.4 Free Soul, Idiot’s Delight), Joan Crawford (Possessed, Chained, The Gorgeous Hussy), Irene Dunne (The White Cliffs of Dover) and young Elizabeth Taylor (National Velvet). Wyman began the film in the heat of mid-July, thrilled to be working with such a prodigious director. As shooting of The Yearling progressed and she saw the early rushes, her hopes rose even higher. Because she had so little written dialogue, her eyes (almost in silent-screen fashion) caught all the poignant longing and caring of Ma Baxter’s character. Jane Wyman was on her way to becoming a major star.

  Roosevelt had run for a fourth term in the fall of 1944 against Thomas Dewey. The great pressures of the war had taken their toll on him. He was withdrawn and indifferent to the prodding of his party that he must campaign. Even Eleanor felt he was remiss in this, for “only through the actual sight and feel of the crowds [does] the man in public life really get to know what the people who back him believe in,” she wrote him. But Roosevelt refused to get “into… the dusty political arena.” “I don’t think Pa [Roosevelt] would really mind defeat,” Eleanor wrote her son James. “If elected he’ll do his job well. I feel sure and I think he can be kept well to do it but he does get tired so I think if defeated he’ll be content.… I am only concerned because Dewey seems to me more and more to show no understanding of the job at home or abroad.”

  Eleanor’s proddings were finally effective, and on September 23, Roosevelt surprised the press by making a political speech to the Teamsters Union. The speech became a classic:

  “These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, on my wife, or my sons. No, not content with that. They now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don’t resent attacks, and my family doesn’t resent attacks, but Fala does resent them.… He has not been the same dog since.”

  All of Roosevelt’s four sons were overseas the night of the election, but Eleanor and their daughter Anna and her son Johnny were with him at Hyde Park when “at 9 p.m. the dining room table was cleared and the real business,” as Eleanor put it, of tabulating the votes began. At 11:40 the traditional torchlight parade from the village arrived, and this time Roosevelt permitted himself to be wheeled out to address them from a wheelchair, instead of putting on his heavy braces and standing up. At 3:15 in the morning, Dewey conceded.

  The Yalta Conference took place just two days after the inauguration; his daughter, Anna, accompanied him. The results of the conference were announced on February 11,1945, in a joint statement by Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin. The Allies were planning Germany’s unconditional surrender. Germany’s defeat was near at hand.

  Roosevelt returned from Yalta a weary traveler. He addressed Congress to tell them of the conference sitting down “because of the weight of his steel braces.” Eleanor was alarmed, fearful he was accepting “a certain degree of invalidism.” She convinced him he should rest for a few weeks at Warm Springs, where he often went for the waters. He departed without her. She was to join him on April 12 but was delayed. Late that afternoon, Franklin D. Roosevelt died. When Eleanor was told, her first words were, “I am more sorry for the people of this country and of the world than I am for ourselves [the family].” Harry Truman, vice-president, was immediately summoned to the White House and ushered into Eleanor’s sitting room. The widow stepped forward and placed her arm gently on his shoulder. “Harry,” she said quietly, “the President is dead.”

  Roosevelt’s death hit Reagan hard. The president had been a fixture and a hero in his life—as he had for most Americans—for thirteen years. What did he know about Harry Truman? What did anyone really know about the feisty little haberdasher from Independence, Missouri? If Roosevelt had survived eighteen days longer, he would have learned that Adolf Hitler had died; eight days after that (May 8, “V.E. Day”), Germany surrendered. One political commentator wrote that “Hitler’s fate—or the world’s—was that he met Roosevelt, who understood better than Hitler did the calculated risks which must be taken in the politics of the world.” O
n August 6, the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and on August 9, on Nagasaki. On August 14, Japan surrendered, ending World War II. Reagan had been discharged a month earlier on July 11, 1945. “All I wanted,” he wrote, “was to rest up a while, make love to my wife, and come up refreshed to a better job in an ideal world. (As it came out, I was disappointed in all these post war ambitions.)”

  Jane was hard at work on The Yearling. She rose at five A.M. to be on location at six, and she came home at night tired and totally absorbed in her scenes for the next day. Reagan rented a cabin at Lake Arrowhead, about two hours from Hollywood, and drove there alone. Then he rented a speedboat for twenty-four hours each day. He claimed the boat owner thought he was crazy. “ ‘It’s all right,’ I assured him, ‘I just want to know that the boat is there at the dock any time I want to take a drive on the water. I can’t walk on it anymore.’“

  * Newly designated by Franklin D. Roosevelt and the 76th Congress to be observed on the third Sunday of May, annually. The 82nd Congress, by Joint Resolution, February 29, 1952, designated September 17 of each year “Citizenship Day” and repealed the resolution authorizing “I Am an American Day.”

  * Why, in that case, the army accepted financing of the short by Warner Brothers, agreeing to “loan out” Reagan’s services and allowing the film to be shot on army ground with other army personnel, is not explained.

  * Burdick, with Horace Sutton, while stationed at Fort Slocum in New York, had written the book, music and lyrics for the first World War II full-length soldier show, Spring Fever.

  * Jack Warner offered President Roosevelt a print to be shown at the White House before the premiere. On July 9, 1943, Edwin M. Watson, major general secretary to the president, replied: “Quite frankly, the demands of his [the president’s] time during these critical days seem to grow heavier as the War progresses and he has practically no time in which to see movies.”

  * Tickets in Hollywood were scaled from $75 to $2.20 (earning for Army Emergency Relief $62,500) and from $55 to $2.20 in New York (earning an additional $28,340 for AER).

  † Hal Wallis claimed he had first seen the show in a pre-New York engagement. He then wired Jack Warner and together they decided to film it. He later said, “Irving came West for preliminary work with Casey [Robinson], Mike Curtiz… and me, and then we accompanied him back to New York by train [the Silver Chief. Berlin returned to Hollywood for the filming]. We worked on the script from the time we left Union Station. Somewhere in the Middle West, we got stuck in a snowdrift overnight, and had to be dug out with snowplows. We were hardly aware of it. As the snow piled up around the train, we outlined the whole production. Irving disappeared from time to time into the adjoining bedroom to compose new songs.… He sang lustily as he worked, quite oblivious to the fact that we were snowbound.

  “We continued working in my suite at the Waldorf Towers in New York and at [his] house on Seventh Street in Greenwich Village.… He was never satisfied, and Casey… was miserable. Finally, Irving took over entirely, and Casey went on to another project.”

  * Wallis’s and Warner’s animosity flared again at the Academy Awards in March 1944. Casablanca was named Best Picture of the Year. Wallis stood up, intending to go to the stage to receive the Oscar, but Warner leaped to his feet and rushed to the stage, beating Wallis there. With “a flashing smile and a look of great self-satisfaction” he accepted the award. “I tried to get out of the row of seats and into the aisle but the Warner family sat blocking me,” Wallis claimed. “I had no alternative but to sit down again, humiliated and furious.” The Academy apologetically sent Wallis another Oscar, but Warner did not apologize.

  * In early 1943, Reagan bet Captain Edwin Gilbert (the writer of Rear Gunner) that “the war would be over by Labor Day. When it didn’t end, Reagan paid ofT the bet—twenty-five dollars.”

  † Short sections of the sound track of Air Force, which starred John Garfield, Gig Young and Arthur Kennedy, were used in this NBC radio show. Reagan held the excerpts together with a running narration.

  * A barfly played by Doris Dowling in the film.

  THE

  SAG

  YEARS

  “Let me say here that I believe in the SAG with all my heart. It is a damned noble organization…”

  —RONALD REAGAN in

  Where’s the Rest of Me?

  14

  THEIR CAREERS WERE GOING IN DIFFERENT DIRECtions—”hers up, his down,” June Allyson says, adding that it caused a serious problem in the Reagan marriage. But that is far too simplistic an appraisal. Wyman’s career was ascending, and would continue to do so with breathtaking swiftness. Reagan, however, had already begun to place his increasing interest in politics above his own film career. Had Wyman encouraged him at this point, he might have overcome his growing dilemma over party affiliation (increased since Roosevelt’s death) and Nelle’s reaction to a switch and moved earlier into the political arena.

  For six years, while other Warner actresses—Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Lauren Bacall—were being suspended for refusing roles, Wyman remained docile. Even when Warners began their wartime buildup of female players, she accepted fifth billing and superficial parts in support of less-experienced performers. Had she not gone to Paramount to make The Lost Weekend and then to Metro for The Yearling, the kind of incendiary fame she had in 1945-47 might never have been lighted.

  “We speak of her as ‘Wyman’ because she is now important,” commented one columnist during that time. “You don’t refer to Oscar P. Socrates and John N. Cicero, do you?” In the same vein that the press used only the last (or first) names for certain stars—Dietrich, Garbo, Bacall, Cagney, Davis, Olivier—Jane now frequently became “Wyman” in print, while Reagan was written about as “Ronald Reagan”—as though the inclusion of the first name was to avoid confusion with another Reagan.

  The Lost Weekend, as grim as any war film could have been, won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1945. Ray Milland’s stunning performance as the drink-driven protagonist brought him his first Oscar.* Until the making of this film, Milland had been thought of as a romantic comedian, just as Wyman was associated with the kind of roles she had played. Hollywood did not suspect that either could ever rise to dramatic heights and power. In The Lost Weekend, Wyman gave a solid performance but left the histrionics to Milland. Then came The Yearling, and all through 1946, while Reagan was either at leisure or working with inferior material in second-rate films, Hollywood talked about the possibility of Wyman winning the Academy Award for her performance as Ma Baxter.

  When Reagan returned from Arrowhead, Wasserman was in final negotiation for Reagan’s famous million-dollar contract. During a two-week break in the shooting of The Yearling, he and Wyman went to New York for a vacation, and while there, at the Waldorf-Astoria Towers, he signed (on August 21) the contract that would pay him thirty-five hundred dollars a week for seven years, with only nine weeks’ layoff each year,† That same day, he wired Warner:

  DEAR JACK VERY HAPPY MYSELF. NOTHING WRONG AN ARMISTICE WON’T CURE, LOVE TO YOU AND ANN [Mrs. Warner]. JANE AND RONNIE.

  He appears to be referring to the peace armistice which came a short time later, but the telegram could well have had a double meaning.

  Warners obviously believed in his ability to regain the momentum that had built up with Kings Row and Desperate Journey just before his induction into the service, or they would not have agreed to Wasserman’s high terms. Yet several months passed with Reagan drawing a check but with no film in the offing. During the war a number of new male stars had burst forth: Van Johnson, Peter Lawford, Robert Walker, Tom Drake, Cornel Wilde, Gregory Peck and many more. All-time favorites like Jimmy Stewart, Tyrone Power, Robert Montgomery, Henry Fonda, Clark Gable, Gene Kelly and numerous others had been released from service at the same time as Reagan. And Old Guard stars such as Bogart and Cagney had become further entrenched. Most stars had contracted to return to their studios after their wartime service, a
nd film vehicles had to be found for all of them.

  About this time, Warners bought Stephen Longstreet’s best seller Stallion Road for Errol Flynn, but Flynn’s popularity was on the wane and his drinking problem had become so acute that often shooting was held up on his films.* A decision was made to star Bogart and Bacall. (Reagan later said, “I felt a great tragedy surrounded [Flynn]. Physically he was a magnificent piece of machinery. He could have been a fantastic athlete in any sport.”) William Faulkner, who had been under contract to Warners for three years, was assigned to write the screenplay.†

  In Hollywood because he was in dire need of money, Faulkner, like his literary colleague F. Scott Fitzgerald before him, felt deeply compromised by his association with films. Stallion Road, a melodrama that verged on soap opera, was about a dedicated veterinarian who fights an outbreak of anthrax on his breeding farm and wins the love of a young attractive neighbor from a rather jaded writer. Faulkner obviously took the position that the only way to write such a pedestrian story was to pretend someone else had the assignment. When producer Alex Gottlieb finally got the script, he knew Bogart and Bacall would never agree to appear in it.

  “Faulkner, as you probably know, was a drunk,” Gottlieb confided. “All the time he’d sit on the couch in his office with a pipe in his mouth. People would pass by and say, ‘Now there’s a writer who’s really thinking.’ He had a bottle of liquor by his side and he was dead drunk. If you went over and touched him, he’d fall down. I waited for ten days—didn’t hear a word from him. Called his secretary and asked how he was doing. She said, ‘Fine. We’ll have pages for you any day now.’ Three weeks go by. Finally, she called and said, ‘Mr. Faulkner is sending over ten pages.’ I get the ten pages and I read them. I call up and said, ‘Bill, have you got a few minutes to stop by my office?’ He came in, sees what’s on the desk and asks if I had read the ten pages. I said, ‘I certainly have. They don’t have anything to do with the novel. Different characters. Different background.’ He said, ‘I know, but aren’t they great!’“