Early Reagan

by Anne Edwards

  KEEP AFTER DE LIAGRE AND VAN DRUTEN… CAMPAIGN ON RONALD REAGAN WILL EMPHASIZE HIS QUICK RETURN TO FAME SINCE HIS RETURN FROM THE ARMY AND HIS QUALITY OF EVOKING WARM RESPONSE FROM ALL TYPES AND AGES OF MOVIE FANS AND WITH HIS PART AS BILL PAGE HE GAINS NEW STATURE…

  Irving Rapper had directed a number of successful dramas for Warners. The Voice of the Turtle was his first comedy. “John Van Druten… was to have made his debut directing the film version [of his play]. But he despaired when he realized the studio preferred to cast its own actors under contract. He therefore quit and asked Warners to let me direct it.… I reluctantly accepted Ronald Reagan, whom no one took too seriously [as an actor]…” Rapper recalled.

  By the first week in May, filming was completed and Reagan was able to devote almost full time (for a month) to the SAG. He took over an office in their building on Sunset Boulevard. Despite Jack Warner’s plans to give him a new image as a romantic comedian of Cary Grant’s stature, interviews and articles began appearing in which he was referred to as a “stout citizen representative of the Hollywood folk who think and vote and are the back bone of America.” Accompanying photographs of him wearing his glasses and speaking from a podium bore such captions as “Ronald Reagan refuses to be a glamour boy.”

  A lengthy interview titled “Mr. Reagan Airs His Views” appeared in the Chicago Tribune and was syndicated to numerous other newspapers. (The Mr. Reagan was a new form of public address, one seldom applied in print to other actors.) “Our [America’s] highest aim should be the cultivation of freedom of the individual for therein lies the highest dignity of man. Tyranny is tyranny, and whether it comes from right, left, or center, it’s evil.

  “I believe the only logical way to save our country from all extremists is to remove conditions that supply fuel for the totalitarian fire. I’m not, however, in favor of outlawing any political party. [The Communist party was legal in the United States and on the presidential ballot.] If we ban the Communists from the polls we set a precedent. Tomorrow it may be the Democratic or the Republican Party that gets the ax.… The Reds know that if we can make America a decent living place for all our people, their cause is lost here. So they seek to infiltrate liberal organizations just to smear and discredit them. If you don’t believe this, name me one conservative organization that is Communist-infiltrated. I’ve already pulled out of one organization that I joined in good faith. One day I woke up, looked about, and found it was Commie-dominated [HICCASP] and did I pull out of it—but quick!

  “You can’t blame a man for aligning himself with an institution he thinks is humanitarian; but you can blame him if he deliberately remains with it after he knows it’s fallen into the hands of the Reds.” To the accusations that he “had sold out to the producers,” he replied that he was “not particularly disturbed” because he was “passionately interested in the working man” and recognized faults in labor as well as management. His answer to the slowdown in production posed by the strike was, “The film industry is suffering from prosperity as far as the actor is concerned.… Usually if a man sees customers lined up in front of a store, his impulse is to build another store in the neighborhood to take care of the surplus.” The studios were not keeping up with the demand, he said [ignoring the strike issue]. His answer: “Build more theaters and make more pictures. In a period of prosperity [postwar] people are ready to spend money at the box office.”

  Jack Warner asked him to do That Hagen Girl opposite Shirley Temple. The script raised the same question of poor judgment as had Night Unto Night. Charles Hoffman—the writer who had contributed the “additional dialogue” on The Voice of the Turtle— adapted Edith Roberts’s turgid story of an adopted illegitimate child (Temple) taunted all her life (she is now seventeen) by the residents of the small town in which she lives. She ends up in the somewhat surprised arms of a man (Reagan) old enough to be her father—and, indeed, long suspected as such. To Reagan’s everlasting credit, he did try to get out of doing this film. But Warner insisted, and with a baby due in four months, Reagan chose not to go out on suspension. Production was started on June 4 with a seven-week shooting schedule.

  Temple (actually nineteen at the time) had recently married actor John Agar and wanted an opportunity to play a mature role. That Hagen Girl probably destroyed any chance she might have had to move from child to adult performer. To add to the awfulness of the film, Reagan and Temple had no chemistry together and ended up looking ridiculous. (Reagan tells the story of an incident at the sneak preview. At the point in the film when he denies to Mary Hagen that he is her father, “There was a loud chorus from the audience [when he ends the scene with “I love you”], ‘Oh, No!’ I shrank down in my seat and wouldn’t leave until the audience had filed out.” The scene was cut.) About a week into the production, Reagan and Temple had to shoot the sequence where she jumps into a lake to drown herself and he dives in to save her. To add to the bleakness, Peter Godfrey, the director, ordered rain. Reagan refused a^double, and the scene of him jumping off the pier into the cold water of the river location had to be reshot a number of times. The following day, June 19, he awoke with a fever. Wyman called in to tell the studio they would have to shoot around him. Five days later (June 24), his condition grew worse and he was taken to the nospital with pneumonia.

  Wyman went into labor and was also rushed to the hospital (Queen of Angels; Reagan was at Cedars of Lebanon). A premature girl (six months) was born, survived in an incubator for twenty-four hours and then died. Wyman had to go through the ordeal alone and return to the house alone, while Reagan remained hospitalized. He resumed work on the set of That Hagen Girl on July 14. At home, his wife was withdrawn, relations were strained. At the studio, he was making a bad film that he knew was no good and that had fallen behind schedule. The Guild afforded him his best escape, although he did spend time at Nino Pepitone’s (where he now boarded three horses). He spoke to Nelle almost every day and on Sunday the family gathered at his place. But Jane kept more and more to herself. Everyone attributed it to postpartum depression.

  * * *

  Jane Wyman had seen Johnny Belinda on Broadway in January 1940, when she and Reagan had been on the Louella Parsons tour.* From that moment, she later confessed to a reporter, she had wanted to play the part of the deaf mute, Belinda, onscreen. At the time, because of the subject matter, no studio had bid for the rights despite the play’s great critical and commercial success. Not until June 1946 did a film company express interest. The fact that the studio was Warners was a stroke of tremendous luck for Wyman. Still, selling the idea of making Johnny Belinda to Steve Trilling and Jack Warner had not been an easy task for producer Jerry Wald, even though he was thought of as the “bright-eyed genius” on the lot. On June 15, 1946, Wald wrote Trilling:

  I can’t stress to you enough the great box-office picture there is in this material… the basic story of “Johnny Belinda” is a thousand times more commercial than “To Each His Own.” Why nobody has purchased this property before is somewhat beyond my comprehension. In a very slick fashion you are dealing with the most primitive emotional subject in the world—an unwed mother who is having her child taken away. The mother, in order to defend the child, kills the man who is attempting to do this.…

  Don’t you think it’s high time that you guys [Trilling and Warner] acknowledged that I do have a good mind for stories?… Consistently, Steve, I’ve had to sell you and Warner on properties [that have become big grossers like Mildred Pierce].… When are you going to get wise to the fact that you can tell a corny story with basic human values, in a very slick, dressed-up fashion?… Okay, Doctor—I’ll go quietly.

  Wald finally got the go-ahead from Warner, who had originally memoed him: “Who the hell wants to see a movie where the leading lady doesn’t say a word?” By summer 1947, Wald had an acceptable screenplay and was looking for a director. He turned to Jean Negulesco, who had done a good job for him on the Joan Crawford film Humoresque. Negulesco wrote Steve Trilling on July 2, 1947:
“Jerry Wald gave me a copy of’Johnny Belinda’ to read this morning.… I must say it’s one of the most exciting, human and colorful scripts I have read in a long time. I am terribly enthusiastic about the possibility of doing it, because I know I could make a good job of it.…”

  When Wyman heard that the studio had purchased the play, she went to Wald (a personal friend) and asked to be considered. Having just seen Wyman in The Yearling (also an unglamorous role), he had no difficulty in visualizing her as the drab, tortured Belinda. The casting sheets begun in July show he had not considered anyone else for the role, although Trilling had suggested Teresa Wright. Almost immediately after the death of her baby, Wyman began preproduction work on Johnny Belinda. She had to master sign language and lipreading by the time the film was to go before the cameras in September. She worked with Elizabeth Gessner, a woman who taught both and then befriended a teenage Mexican girl who had been born unhearing. The young woman and Wyman spent several days a week together at the Reagan house communicating in sign language. Evenings, Wyman ran the sixteen-and thirty-five-millimeter films that the studio had made of the girl so that she could study her eyes, trying to capture “a certain quality,” an “anticipation light,” the look of one who wants “to eagerly share in things.” Something kept eluding her. And then she realized it was that she could hear. She spoke to Wald and Negulesco and they agreed that she might do better if she blocked out sound by putting wax in her ears, both for rehearsals and for the film.

  Johnny Belinda was now as great an obsession with Wyman as the Guild was with Reagan. Both had withdrawn into their own worlds.

  The role of the doctor who befriends Belinda was to be played by Lew Ayres, but the two were not to meet until they had arrived at Mendocino, California, two hundred miles north of San Francisco, where the location shots would be filmed. Reagan drove up with Wyman and remained for a day before returning to Los Angeles. A jumble of weathered, gabled wooden buildings fronting dirt streets, edged by the ominous pine woods of encircling hills and perched on the northern shore of a half-moon-shaped bay at the mouth of the Big River, Mendocino—with a population under one thousand, almost all greatly dependent on intermittent lumbering—could easily have been Belinda’s real village. Seldom had a film company seemed more at odds with its location and a town’s inhabitants, most of whose ancestors had traveled in covered wagons across the country from New England. People in Mendocino had retained their forefathers’ reserve. They left the movie folk pretty much alone and expected the same in return. For this reason, the cast and crew became a tightly knit, insular group. They moved to the site of a former logging camp. Housing was fairly primitive. Evenings they sang around an open campfire. “We felt so isolated, yet oddly at peace,” Wyman recalled, “that no one wanted to play cards or dance. It was as though the spirit of the simple people of Belinda’s remote world hung over and around us.”

  Negulesco was a fine painter and, under his tutelage, Wyman found she had some artistic talent. During her free time in the first six weeks in Mendocino, canvas and paints under her arm, she would get into the company pickup truck and drive to Russian Gulch, where the fern-banked canyon cut deep among the redwoods; or to the wild, rocky coastline of Fort Bragg; or to Noyo by the winding Noyo River, crowded with small fishing craft tied up alongside tumble-down warehouses. Sometimes Agnes Moorehead (who was also in the cast) joined her, sometimes Negulesco. More often, it was Lew Ayres. “Just sitting there painting away with… Lew gave me a warm feeling,” she later said.

  In March 1942, less than four months after Pearl Harbor and with America seething with war preparations, Lew Ayres had announced to the world that he would not bear arms.

  “Now let us consider war,” he had said in a prepared statement which he read to reporters. “It is not strange that no one really wants war, yet few think that life can be successfully or even respectfully lived without it. We all shake our heads sadly over our predicament and then wait for the other fellow to stop it first, each side perhaps eager to be the benevolent victor.

  “In confusion we stumble blindly along with prayers for peace on our lips and bloodstains on our hands, afraid to go forward, afraid to stop, and troubled by strangely perplexed hearts, wherein savagery and virtue reside intertwined.

  “So in my opinion we will never stop wars until we individually cease fighting them and that’s what I propose to do. I propose we proclaim a moratorium on all presumed debts of evil done us, to start afresh by wiping the slate clean and continuing to wipe it clean… my views have been on file [with the army] for over a year… and have long been taken for granted by my personal friends.

  “Furthermore I am, and have been, fully aware of the possible consequences arising from such an action as mine in these emotional times, but against all eventualities I am fortified with an inner conviction that seems to increase proportionately with every obstacle I face… this decision is… the mature result of hours, days, and years of research and reflection.”

  Ayres was sent to a conscientious objectors’ camp at Cascade Locks, Oregon. The story pushed the war news off the front pages of newspapers across the nation and created an incredible furor in Hollywood. Theaters banned his pictures. A front-page editorial in The Hollywood Reporter asked the public not to blame the motion-picture industry for Ayres’s stand. Whole pages of advertisements were taken in newspapers from Los Angeles to St. Louis vilifying him for his action—and Ayres had been a particularly loved performer, especially since his recent Dr. Kildare films. At twenty, he had burst into stardom in All Quiet on the Western Front with his never-to-be-forgotten portrayal of the young German soldier who is unable to kill the enemy but gets killed himself finally by a sniper on the edge of a World War I shell hole as he reaches out to hold a butterfly in his hand. Ayres had been married twice—to actresses Lola Lane and Ginger Rogers—but he had always been a bit of a recluse, an intellectual given to independent ideas. He had a quiet, almost diffident manner, a warm natural voice, all-American good looks and eyes that contained a surprising element of sadness. For many years he had been a vegetarian espousing the creed of passive resistance to evil. Nonetheless, what was a socially acceptable philosophy before Pearl Harbor branded him a coward after America entered the war.

  He had been born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where his father played the cello with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra. His paternal grandmother had been a well-trained pianist and teacher. He took up the jazz banjo and at nineteen landed a berth with Hank Halstead’s Orchestra and made some of the first Vi-taphone jazz recordings. An agent in Hollywood saw him and got him a film contract with Metro. A year later, he was cast as the bewildered soldier in All Quiet on the Western Front.

  “I have a very simple philosophy,” he told one reporter. “I believe that each man is born with certain limitations and capacities. And it’s up to him to find them. A tree bears in its seed the possibility of growing to a maximum height, of spreading to a maximum width, of putting forth a maximum number of leaves. Now, if that tree grows as high, spreads as far and produces as many leaves as it is capable of, it has performed its function as fittingly as it can in the eternal scheme of things. We call that tree beautiful. Then, why not the same thing for the lives of men?”

  Not long after Ayres had arrived at the “conshi camp,” as detractors called it, he asked to be put in the Army Medical Corps and sent to the front lines. After a short training period, he was shipped to the South Pacific as a medical corpsman. Six months before the war’s end, he was made a chaplain’s assistant and promoted to sergeant. The men who served with him found him brave beyond the normal interpretation of the word. He displayed no personal fear as unarmed and under fire he administered medical assistance and prayers to men injured and dying on battlefields. He also turned over his entire army pay to the Red Cross.

  “War was more horrible than I had ever imagined it,” he said later. “Maybe you don’t know what a bombed city looks like; or what it feels like to hold a child
in your arms while it bleeds to death, or to stand by while kids watch their parents being dumped into mass graves. It got me, and for the first time in my life I understood the callousness of medics around suffering people. They have to be that way. When I felt myself cracking I went aside and had a talk with myself. I knew if I didn’t get hold of my nerves and emotions I would be no good to anyone. So I did.”

  After the storm created by his declaring himself a conscientious objector had passed, some of the most conservative industry figures came to his defense. The violently right-wing Hedda Hopper took space to say: “Lew Ayres [is a] man who had the courage to stand up for his convictions in the face of public criticism and at the sacrifice of his career. That’s all that a man’s God asks of him. It took courage—far greater courage—to do what he did than to wheedle and pull strings to get an officer’s uniform, as many, without the courage and ability to measure up to it, have done. Lew could have landed a cushy job. It’s unfortunate that he had to go against the prevailing sentiments, but to crucify a man for standing up to his own convictions, even if it meant national ridicule and professional suicide, is un-Christian and un-American.”

  He had come out of the service several months after the war’s end, having been transferred from battlefield to hospital work. He had first considered becoming a minister and then decided he might do more good if he could make films that had “some kind of universal message of faith and understanding.” He expected Hollywood to bar its doors to him. But people had come to respect his strength of character. Louella was one of the first to interview him upon his return. “He’s one of the finest characters in Hollywood,” she concluded. He made one film, The Dark Mirror (playing a psychologist), opposite Olivia de Havilland for Universal. It did well. Now Warners had cast him as the doctor who saves Belinda and her child and stands up against a bigoted, self-righteous town. He was thirty-eight, only two years older than Reagan, but his exposure to the horrors of war had aged his appearance. The youthful good looks had given way to “a spiritually remote look in the eyes… greying hair… and an older, surer, more solid appearance.”