Early Reagan

by Anne Edwards

  Faulkner went back to work and finally completed a draft. Reading Faulkner’s screenplay for Stallion Road, one would have no indication that he had written any part of it. The characters have no insight or depth, the story lumbers along and the dialogue is stiff.

  Stephen Longstreet was called in to adapt his book and the Faulkner script was tossed on the scrap heap. Bogart and Bacall were now involved in The Big Sleep and would not be available. Reagan was cast in the role of Larry Hanrahan, the veterinarian, but shooting would not begin until late spring, 1946.

  Hollywood was taken aback by Reagan, the World War II veteran. “During the War Ronald changed considerably. Or at least so it seemed to me,” W. H. Mooring, who had served with Reagan at Fort Roach, recalled in 1947. “He would attend some of the press showings of United States Army Air Force propaganda films. Wearing heavy, horn-rimmed glasses and with a wider chin than I had ever seen him wear before, he would get up before the film started and deliver some kind of official talk to the Press.

  “He did so well I began to see him in the role of politician. He put on weight, his shoulders broadened out and the boyish air gave way to a stronger, more manly presence.

  “By this time he was Captain Ronald Reagan. Quite clearly his command of the situation as a sort of Press relations man was bringing back to him the public slant he had on life before he ever became an actor at all [a reference to his WHO days]…

  “Get the subject [acting] around to him and he’ll shuffle in embarrassment.… It may be due to the fact that in his heart he has never really felt like an actor at all. His real interest might be in public service. Maybe politics.”

  On December 12, 1945, Reagan took his first step into politics when he gave a speech at a mass meeting at Hollywood Legion Stadium, sponsored by the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of Arts, Sciences and Professions (HICCASP).* The committee had originally been formed by a large segment of the film community who admired Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal policies and saw the organization as an instrument to further their support of the Roosevelt program. Norman Corwin’s controversial radio play Set Your Clock at 9-235, which dealt with the dangers of world extinction by the atomic bomb, was read.

  Reagan referred to himself as a “hemophiliac liberal” in the early forties. But by the end of World War II, “wartime contacts with self-serving Government bureaucrats” had led him to agree with Hal Gross about waste and greed in federal spending. Since these wartime contacts were at Fort Roach, the government bureaucrats he refers to would necessarily have had to be connected with the War Department public-relations division. Even so, he still considered himself a liberal (and would for several more years) because of his early education and his interpretation of the word. He believed deeply and sincerely in equality of race, religion and sex. His Jeffersonian view of the Constitution was accomplished by a faith in his country’s Tightness. And he felt that fortunate men must contribute to the care and support of the more unfortunate. It obviously never occurred to him in the forties that a conservative Republican might share his convictions.

  “They wanted him to run for Congress,” Jane Wyman told the Los Angeles Daily News on June 18, 1946. “He’s very politically minded. I’m not.” A few days later, Reagan was quoted as saying, “Politicians have asked me to run for Congress. Heck, I couldn’t do that. If I did, I’d be the subject of criticism as a politician. I couldn’t go around making speeches without feeling I was doing it for self-glorification. No, I don’t want to have any ax to grind.” Neither of them state who had asked Reagan to run for Congress or on what ticket. Five years earlier, Dick Powell and Justin Dart had suggested he should consider a congressional race—as a Republican. But Jack Dales states that Reagan told him that he had now been approached by the Democrats. His continuing friendship with George Murphy, president of the SAG, had greatly influenced his thinking; the Democrats were good children being tempted and seduced by evil powers, while the Republicans, although too authoritative, had the moral strength to overcome the intruders. Apparently the power brokers of the California Republican party had come to believe they needed a film personality to win the Republican vote in the southern half of the state, which had always been polarized by San Francisco in the north and Los Angeles in the south.*

  Despite the “Heck,” the humble pie and the Jimmy Stewart shuffle, Reagan was beginning to feel the excitement of near power. The young man who dreamed of being a hero and became a lifeguard began to evolve into the man who believed he had the ability to save his country from sliding on a treacherous downward path. First, though, he had to make those notches in a new log.

  As a Broadway star in the twenties and early thirties, Helen Gahagan Douglas had been considered one of the world’s most beautiful women. She had married actor Melvyn Douglas in 1931. Drawn to social work and politics, she had organized relief campaigns for migrant workers during the Depression, and then, in 1939, presented seminars throughout California to alert women in the Democratic party to the Nazi threat. (“If Hitler couldn’t be stopped in Europe, it wasn’t likely that America would escape attack…”) Within a few years she had become a strong voice and state vice-chairman in the California Democratic party, and in 1944 she ran a successful campaign for the Fourteenth Congressional District. When the war ended, the country was bombarded with nightmarish photographs of the devastating deaths and horrifying injuries caused by the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Americans suffered guilt and fear. Gahagan addressed Congress in October 1945, touching on her concern and stressing: “The first order of business of this Congress and the people of the world is the question of the survival of mankind.”

  The HICCASP meeting on atomic power was already set when Congress broke for Christmas and Gahagan returned home to California. For the first time, Reagan was heard speaking publicly on a serious issue. Gahagan had not been too enthusiastic about his inclusion on the program, but had been swayed by the organizers. She was impressed and surprised by his eloquence and charismatic presence and Hollywood took note with her.

  One of Reagan’s first acts after being discharged from the army was to narrate a film for the American Veterans Committee on providing housing for the returning servicemen. Then he was voted back on the board at the SAG while an industry-wide strike catapulted him into the eye of the storm.

  The Screen Actors Guild’s official birthday is June 30, 1933, the date of the organization’s incorporation.* Actually, it came into being in March of that year, when the industry’s producers decided to beat the Depression by halving the salaries of all actors under contract. Because the actors had nowhere to turn, they took the cut, but six of them—Ralph Morgan, Grant Mitchell, Berton Churchill, Charles Miller, Kenneth Thomson and Alden Gay Thomson (Kenneth’s wife)—met in the Thomson home to discuss forming a self-governing union of film actors. By the end of the evening, the Screen Actors Guild was conceived and the six set out to sell it to their co-actors. For the next few weeks, huddled whispering groups formed on studio sets and clandestine meetings were held in actors’ homes. A few years earlier, the theater union, Actors Equity Association, had unsuccessfully attempted to organize Hollywood, resulting in the motion-picture blacklisting of those involved. This time the actors succeeded, but they had a four-year struggle ahead until they had a contract with the producers, and it had taken a threat of a strike by actors to achieve it.

  Several thousand motion-picture actors had filled Hollywood Legion Stadium on the hot, sticky Sunday evening of May 9, 1937—”all of them ready to strike for recognition of their union,” a member of the SAG staff recalled. “For weeks small, private meetings had been held in the homes of various stars, for the stars added immeasurably to the economic bargaining power of the Guild. Every star had been asked: ‘Will you support a strike by the Screen Actors Guild if it is necessary to win a contract with the motion picture producers?’ More than 98 percent had answered ‘Yes!’… Heated meetings of the SAG president, Robert Montgomery,
a negotiating committee and the producers, led by studio heads, had continued up to the last few hours before the mass membership meeting.* Everyone in the stadium nervously waited to hear if there would be a strike as Montgomery waved a paper in his hand and then read the contents:

  “ ‘We wish to express ourselves as being in favor of the Guild [union] shop.… We expect to have contracts drawn between the Screen Actors Guild and the studios before expiration of this week. [Signed] Louis B. Mayer and Joseph M. Schenck.’“

  The actors went wild. An hour later, newsboys stood on the busiest Hollywood intersections shouting the page-one headline: ACTORS WIN! AFL GUILD WINS. The SAG had affiliated with the American Federation of Labor in 1935, which had a membership by 1937 of well over four million. The AFL was conservative, apolitical (cautiously so), avoided all affiliations with extremists or left-wing groups, and found it a point of pride that in the 1932 election they had refused to support either socialist or communist candidates. The original board and officers of the SAG were to a great extent conservative Republicans and would remain so for several decades, whereas the Screen Writers Guild had a more balanced board.

  Until 1937, there was little left-wing activity in Hollywood. The political climate in Hollywood began to change during the Spanish Civil War. Nancy Lynn Schwartz, author of The Hollywood Screen Writers Wars, wrote, “… the Thirties was the era when Hollywood, especially Warner Bros., was turning out a batch of ‘socially conscious’ pictures that dealt with issues like crime and unemployment. However… the movie companies would have willingly followed Stalin in those days had that made for commercially successful entertainment.” Screenwriter Paul Jarrico added, “Warner Brothers had made a reputation as good, patriotic Americans, and they made some of the best anti-Nazi films and more political films than were made anyplace else. But they also, when they decided to be anti-Communist (1945 on), were more anti-Communist than anybody else and made more anti-Communist films.… The Warner brothers and L. B. Mayer thought politically. They had political motivations, intent and drive. They cared. Harry Cohn at Columbia and Darryl Zanuck at Fox were more open to progressive content if it could be sold to them in terms of its commercial attractiveness. They didn’t care what the picture said. They just wanted to know whether it would make money.”

  The presence of “Communists” or “fellow travelers” in the membership of the film unions became a weapon in the hands of the union leaders. Nothing had to be proved to place the accused under suspicion. Theoretically, a union’s fight for better wages or working conditions for their members should have nothing at all to do with the politics of those members, any more than with their race or religion. But by threatening a studio with disclosure (names of “Communists” or “fellow travelers” revealed to them through “private, secret” sources), a union could endanger a box-office star. It took no time at all before the studios began developing their own weapon—they would expose the “Reds” or “pinkos” themselves. The coalition between Right and Left in Hollywood bound together because of the war began to unravel in 1944 with the formation of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, which announced in a full-page two-color ad in The Hollywood Reporter, “we find ourselves in sharp revolt against a rising tide of Communism, Fascism, and kindred beliefs.… We resent the growing impression that this industry is made up of, and dominated by, Communists, Radicals, and crackpots.… We want only to defend against its enemies that which is our priceless heritage.…” The ad was signed by its president, Sam Wood (Reagan’s champion in Kings Row), Walt Disney (who in 1941 had successfully squashed a strike by his underpaid cartoonists, claiming that he would “close down the studio and sell toys” rather than meet the cartoonists’ union’s demands), James Kevin McGuinness, Rupert Hughes and Howard Emmett Rogers. (The last three with Disney had been known as “the Four Horsemen” when they attempted in 1936 to break up the formation of the Screen Writers Guild. In a hearing before the National Labor Relations Board, Rogers was asked, “Ever hear of Benedict Arnold? You know what they call him, don’t you?” Rogers replied, “I think they called him a traitor… I might add that he was also a very good soldier.”)

  “The Alliance’s strength was concentrated mainly at MGM,” Nancy Lynn Schwartz said. “The most celebrated film star among the group’s supporters was Gary Cooper, who was known as being one of the most politically naive reactionaries in Hollywood. During the late Thirties, he had gotten caught up with Arthur Guy Empey’s Hollywood Hussars, a reactionary vigilante army that was preparing, with the help of gun-toters like McGuinness, Victor McLaglen, and Ward Bond, to do a little housecleaning in their community—their targets, preferably, anyone slightly pink.”

  As a graphic illustration of the political polarization of Hollywood at this time, screenwriter William Ludwig remembered: “One really startling day which began when two writers—and I will not mention their names—came into my office. As they came in, one of them locked the door, and I asked them what it was about. They said that they had been observing me and watching me carefully and they felt I was very good material, and they gave me an invitation to join the Communist Party. I said that I didn’t think it was for me, I wasn’t the kind of fellow who liked to be told what to think before I had a chance to figure out what I wanted to think. And then I went to lunch.

  “After lunch, King Vidor [the director], for whom I’d written An American Romance, came in, and he wanted to talk to me, and he wanted me to join the American [sic] Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. I said, ‘What are they for, King?’ And he said, ‘We’re against this and against this, and against this, and especially against the Communists.’ I said, I know what the Alliance is against, but what are they for?’ And he said, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘King, I have made up my mind that I’m not going to join things just because they are against something. I want to find, if there is such a thing, something that’s for what I’m for. What is your organization for, King?’ There was a long pause, and King said, ‘I’ll have to talk to Sam Wood about that,’ and he got up and left the office.”

  In response to the Alliance’s cries to rout from the motion-picture industry the “totalitarian-minded groups” working in the industry for “the dissemination of un-American ideas and beliefs,” Martin Dies and his committee of “sleuths” arrived in Hollywood on April 21, 1944. The industry began to take militant sides. Sidney Buchman, a top producer-writer at Columbia, issued the statement that “The Alliance’s unsupported charges of ‘subversive activities’ in films are a threat to Hollywood management and labor alike.” Screen Writers Guild president Mary Mc-Call, Jr., accused the Alliance of union-busting intentions. “We don’t believe union busting is an American ideal.”

  Dies was not the only “right-wing, publicity-seeking Communis t-hounder” who saw the Red menace as the answer to his own need for power. California State Senator John (“Jack”) Tenney had also grabbed hold of the Red bait to catch himself a power fish. In the autumn of 1944, he set up the Tenney Committee and began his own hearings into the color of Hollywood’s politics. “Years later,” recalled Pauline Lauber Finn, “after having testified before Tenney, I watched McCarthy, and it was incredible—the same verbiage, attacks, chanting. They were cut from the same mold. Tenney was physically similar to McCarthy too—beefy without being fat.”

  The SAG kept an extremely low profile during this period. Nonetheless, celebrity actors’ names were being used in support and in defiance of the Alliance and of Tenney’s committee. With more naivete than seems possible, the American motion-picture industry, containing the most international celebrities in the world, had allowed itself to be conned into a publicity tool for Leftist and reactionary demagogues.

  Reagan states, “Like most of the soldiers who came back, I expected a world suddenly reformed. I hoped and believed that the blood and death and confusion of World War II would result in a regeneration of mankind.… If men could cooperate in war, how much better
they could work together in peace.

  “I was wrong. I learned that a thousand bucks under the table was the formula for buying a new car. I learned that the real-estate squeeze was on for the serviceman. I discovered that the rich had got just a little richer and a lot of the poor had done a pretty good job of grabbing a quick buck. I discovered the world was almost the same and perhaps a little worse.”

  He also discovered that his wife had gone on merrily with her career while his had been put in cold storage, that Jack Warner was in no hurry to see to it that this particular returning serviceman be given his place in the sun. With nothing to do and his wife hard at work, he filled his days with constructing two model boats, each about two feet long—the USS America and a freighter. If he had any concerns that the industry was being pulled apart by a strike and by polarizing political ideologies, he managed to scuttle them temporarily.

  By Christmas, 1945, he got bored with his models, encased them in glass and “blindly” and “busily” joined “every organization I could find that would guarantee to save the world.” He adds that he was “hell-bent on saving the world from Neo-Fas-cism,” and claims he was not “sharp about Communism” and “by reason of deception” considered the American Communists in Hollywood liberals like himself. He became a member of the American Veterans Committee after he “observed that more than forty [other] veterans’ organizations… seemed to be highly intolerant of color, creed and common sense.” According to him, he “became a large wheel” in AVC* He did, indeed, take up the battle of the studio employees who were returning veterans, and the SAG was a natural place for him to seek action. The SAG president, George Murphy, suggested the board ask him to return as a permanent member, and it was agreed.