by Anne Edwards
The Screen Actors Guild had been one of Beilenson’s clients from its inception to his resignation as general counsel in 1949. He had, however, been in the United States Army from early 1942 to 1946. During his absence, his law firm, Beilenson & Berger, represented the SAG.
* Reagan was present at these private meetings with Beilenson. William Holden was in Europe filming. Walter Pidgeon met with Reagan, Dales and Beilenson in his absence. Beilenson wrote the author: “At the time of the waiver to MCA, about which you inquire, I had long since ceased to represent the Guild. When MCA asked me to represent it, I accepted on condition that I would not represent MCA in any negotiation with Screen Actors Guild or with any other labor union. Hence, I took no part in the waiver.” His name does appear, however, in the minutes of the July 14, 1952, meeting as having met with the SAG’s negotiating team on behalf of MCA.
* Reagan is referring to Cattle Queen of Montana, produced by Benedict Bogeaus and starring Barbara Stanwyck and him. He is faulty in his memory (the statement was made in the summer of 1962). The film was shot in early summer 1954, not 1952, and released in January 1955.
* Walter Pidgeon was nominated to succeed him.
* Truman acceded to this request with the proviso that all Eisenhower’s army rights be restored on the day following the election should he run and lose.
* Reagan claimed he refused to consider television in 1953, but he had made appearances with Burns and Allen and on selected anthology series.
THE
CORPORATE
YEARS
“At one point he was being interviewed on radio at the Stork Club and the host showed him a picture of William Holden and some nubile young thing obviously not his wife.
“ ‘What would you say if I told you that your best friend, William Holden, was in here with this girl?’ he asked.
“Ron replied, ‘1 would say that that was a composite picture.’“
—EARL B. DUNCKEL
22
REAGAN’S MEMORY WAS WORKING IN PROPER SEquence by the time he published his autobiography in 1965. In it, he places the filming of Cattle Queen of Montana correctly between his nightclub debut, February 1954, and his contract with General Electric Theater, September 1954. The film featured Barbara Stanwyck as a crusty cattlewoman who inherits her father’s rangelands and battles Indians and rustlers to protect her livestock. Reagan’s character was that of an undercover army officer sent to track the Indian disturbances. Reagan once claimed the making of the film was “like playing cowboy and Indian.”
Made for RKO, the picture was shot in Glacier National Park, Montana. Reagan and the cameraman, John Alton, took the train to the location. Reagan was stunned by the beauty of the “great northwest” and talked about one day maybe owning a ranch there. Local ranchers were hired as the film posse and supplied the horses in the production. Reagan toured the area on horseback and proved to be the top equine expert on the film. He viewed Stanwyck with reverence, “a great actress and a real pro,” and returned to Hollywood in high spirits as he entered into negotiations to host a half-hour television anthology series for General Electric.*
The idea for the show—a continuing star host and a guest star performer each episode—was sold to G.E. by its advertising company, Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborne (BBD&O), who packaged shows through MCA. MCA suggested the format, which, considering the fierce war then raging between Hollywood and television, was astounding since the top stars refused to appear on television. “MCA promised us [G.E.] that we would be able to break that barrier if we could go along with the plan they had,” Earl B. Dunckel later explained. Dunckel had been a newspaper-man in Schenectady, New York, home of G.E.’s headquarters, when he was asked to join G.E. Theater as a “communicator.” Within a short time, he was put in charge of “audience participation.” Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians, who had been with G.E. for years, had just been canceled. G.E. was looking for a new format and MCA had found it.
“They were really very smart people,” Dunckel continued. “The plan was essentially to have this half-hour anthology [with a top star every week]. How they baited the stars in was, one, you could choose the kind of vehicle you would be in. For example, Bob Hope could be a Sam Spade-type detective if he wanted to. (Actually, Jack Benny wanted to do that and did.) The other bait was that we kept the program for three or five showings, and after that it’s yours.”
This meant that the stars would then own the show in which they had appeared and thus be likely to draw a steady income from reshowings for many years.†
“MCA was fantastically powerful,” one observer commented, “mainly—oddly enough, because they were great tax people.” And Dunckel added “… they would show a star how to save more of what he earned than anybody else in the world could, which was the reason, I think that so many flocked to MCA rather than some of their competitors.”
G.E. had been looking for a host for several weeks when MCA submitted Reagan’s name. Reagan claimed the series had been created with him in mind, along with a plan for him to go on the road speaking at the various G.E. plants and taking part in their “extensive ‘Employee and Community Relations Program.’“ But Dunckel has stated:
“We had been very, very definite as to the kind of person we wanted. Good moral character, intelligent. Not the kind with the reputation for the social ramble. A good upright kind of person. We looked at several people. I won’t mention who they were.* You don’t construct a top-ten program overnight. You don’t start right away knowing what the public wants.… In a large corporation, if you try something new, your biggest obstacle is your own people. [I then came up with a plan] to have Ron meet and charm these G.E. vice-presidents all over the country so that they would stay off our back long enough for us to get the program moving.”
The device of Reagan visiting G.E.’s 135 plants across the country would also be a unique marketing device. G.E. had a staff of more than 700,000 men and women who with their families made up a considerable audience. Dunckel and Reagan met for the first time in New York in August 1954. “There was nothing of the posturing, nothing of the ‘I am a star’—he was a regular guy… whom I liked instantly… Nancy was there with him.
“Ron was going to star in a certain number of vehicles, ones that would be hand-tailored for him or that, reading the scripts, he particularly liked. He was the continuity, the host, the element that tied the whole thing together. We needed that, because [each episode was] so disparate… and we needed a focal force in there to hang them all together, to keep them in line.”
Reagan’s sudden and unexpected good fortune was hard for even him to grasp immediately. The first contract guaranteed him $125,000 a year as host. He was to receive an additional fee for any show in which he took a role, compensation for his company tours and profit participation on episodes in which he appeared after the show was in its fifth replay. Nancy was also to have a part (as supporting performer) in scripts that were suited to her.†
Reagan became host of General Electric Theater on Sunday evening, September 26, 1954. The show, emanating from the CBS studios in Los Angeles, was broadcast live from nine to nine-thirty P.M. EST. Not long after, G.E. Theater alternated between live and film. Reagan memorized his part as host (about two minutes on the opening show). Regular commercials were interspersed. “We very carefully wouldn’t let him do that [the commercials] because it would cheapen his role overall for him to get right down to the nitty-gritty,” Dunckel recalled. Nancy appeared opposite Reagan on October 10, when he stepped into his first acting role for General Electric Theater as a man on the brink of a nervous breakdown. On December 12, he portrayed a doctor threatened by hoodlums. On January 23, 1955, he turned up (surprisingly) as an officer in the Irish Civil War of 1922 who turns informer to save his life, and on March 13 in a comedy about a motion-picture producer filming a Western version of War and Peace. His roles were varied if nothing else.
The initial G.E. tour in August 1954 (before the filming of
the first episode) began at the giant turbine plant at Schenectady, New York.* Nothing had prepared him for the vastness of thirty-one acres of factory under one roof. He stood stunned on the balcony above at his first sight of it. The noise of the machines was deafening. Dunckel and another executive led him carefully down the three flights of open iron stairs to the factory floor.
“He couldn’t see his hand in front of his face,” Dunckel explained. “He couldn’t wear [his contact lenses] anyplace where people were smoking or there were any fumes. The irritation was so great that he had to take them out, so he never wore them [on the tours].”
Suddenly a group of workers recognized Reagan. Word spread and the machines ground to a halt. Reagan walked the thirty-one cement acres back and forth for four hours stopping at each machine, talking to almost every one of the plant’s factory employees, signing autographs and “generally having a hell of a good time getting acquainted.
“The people were most amusing,” according to Dunckel. “The women would come running up—mash notes, autographs and all that kind of thing. The men would all stand… looking at him, obviously saying something very derogatory—I bet he’s a fag,’ or something like that. He would carry on a conversation with the girls just so long… then he would leave them and walk over to these fellows and start talking to them. When he left them ten minutes later, they were all slappin’ him on the back saying, ‘That’s the way, Ron.’
“We were going to stay over [in Schenectady] Saturday [for Reagan to rest before going on]. Coincident with this, there was a huge meeting of teachers… high school teachers. Meeting at the armory. There were three or four thousand of them. At the last minute their speaker came down ill, and they came to me and said, ‘Can Mr. Reagan speak to us Saturday night’… I said, in effect, thanks a lot but no thanks. I was thinking, ‘My God, this is an area outside of my expertise. I would have to do a lot of research [to write a speech for Reagan].’ What did I know about education?
“[Ron] said, ‘Dunk, let’s give it a try.’
“I said, ‘Ron, I haven’t got time to [write a speech].’
“He said, ‘Don’t worry. Don’t worry.’
“This was four o’clock on Friday afternoon and he wasn’t to speak till Saturday night, but we had all these things going on Saturday morning and through two o’clock Saturday afternoon. He got up there and gave a speech on education that just dropped them in the aisles. He got a good ten-minute standing applause afterward. This is when I finally began to realize the breadth and depth of his knowledgeability… everything that went into that mind stayed there. He could quote it out like a computer any time you wanted. He did read widely, and he remembered what he read. He tended to mesh everything in together to get a pattern out of things. It was an amazing tour de force. It really was.”
Reagan still would not fly unless forced to do so, and so he and Dunckel usually took the train from town to town, a red-eye special that brought them to their destination at dawn, when they would be met at the station and put in one car, their bags in another. They never saw the hotel they were going to until after midnight. All that time, Reagan would be walking plant floors, talking to employees. “In Erie [Pennsylvania], that first trip… we got back to the hotel after midnight. The desk clerk said, ‘Mr. Reagan, there is a young lady who has been waiting here for you for two and a half hours now.’
“I said, ‘Ron, you can’t afford it. You’re dead now…’
“Ron said, ‘Dunk, I’d better find out what it’s all about.’
“So we went over to her. This was the typical stage-struck small-town girl. She was all set, had it in her mind, tickets and everything, she was going to Hollywood. Ron spent an hour and a half convincing her that, if she was really serious about acting, what she should do is hit the little theater, the local radio and TV stations, the local floor show, whatever. I remember, he kept drumming it into her, ‘Always remember, if you can command an audience in Erie, Pennsylvania, you can command an audience anywhere. You don’t have to go to Hollywood to prove it.’… He saw her to the door. ‘Dunk,’ he said, ‘I’d do almost anything to keep another one of these little girls from going out there and adding to the list of whores out in Hollywood.’“
At another plant, “a bull of the woods showed up. Big woman. She looked Ron up and down and put her face about that far from him and said, ‘Buster, I’d love to back you up in a corner sometime.’
“‘Well,’ he said, ‘it would have to be a pretty big corner.’
“The security wasn’t a problem in those days.… An occasional shop [factory] girl would bare her left breast and want him to sign it.”
The tours gave Reagan a new irn^ge of himself, as traveling ambassador. By the time of his second tour (the following spring), he was beginning to speak more often in open factory areas or auditoriums or before local groups—the Kiwanis, the Lions, the Rotary, the Elks, the American Legion. He talked about America the beautiful, and the need to retain wholesome values, the family, the country’s economic problems, taxes, juvenile delinquency—all the subjects close to the hearts of everyday people. He communicated on their level, never used “highfalutin” language, had a good store of well-told humorous anecdotes. He’d stand for an hour after a speech answering questions and then devote extra time to exchange a few personal words with the people who gathered around him when he was ready to leave.
Whether he wanted to accept the fact or not, he was perceived as a spokesman for management. He never went into details such as employees benefits, and he tried to speak in generalities, translating the employees’ questions into his own experience, but he was looked upon as management nonetheless.
“They might ask, ‘What do you think of this business of General Electric telling our union to take it or leave it?’
“He would say, ‘When I was heading up a union, I recognized that there always came a time when you were at the make/break point and where it had to be one way or the other. All the arguing, all the discussion had taken place. We had passed that stage. Now it was, “Am I going to accept your plan? Are you going to accept my plan? Are we going to go on from here, or is this going to remain a deadlock?” That’s essentially what take it or leave it amounts to.’
“[It’s] bull, total bull [that he] was reading from three-by-five cards when he was up there giving his talk, ‘the talk.’* There wasn’t any ‘the talk’ at all. This is a crock… he would occasionally write himself notes. He is a very good writer.… He’s got this little crabbed handwriting which is hard to read. I can just see him changing a speech to something he is comfortable with.… I don’t care how many speech writers they have over there at the White House, the end product is his. I’ll bet any amount of money on that,” Dunckel insisted.
Within a year, Reagan had become “a walking symbol of the company’s interest in and responsiveness to its customers and employees.” Reagan once asked G.E. head Ralph Cordiner, “Is what I’m saying doing G.E. damage?” Cordiner replied, “I am not ever going to have G.E. censor anything you say. You’re not our spokesman. Even though you’re going out under our aegis. You’re speaking for yourself. You say what you believe.”
A few years later he had moved sharply away from talks about Hollywood and America the beautiful and into talks about what was wrong with the country and what could be done (in his opinion) to correct it. At this point, “some people at G.E. said, ‘Don’t make waves.’“
Dunckel was an archconservative, and as they traveled in trains and cars and stood about waiting for transportation in the nether hours of the day, he would drumbeat conservative politics at him. Reagan still tried to defend New Dealism, and the men had spirited arguments. Finally they agreed that the Democratic party “had turned the corner and gone a different direction. He had not deserted it—it deserted him.” The “growing liberal influence in the business world” was also a topic the two men discussed.
Dunckel has said that G.E. had a “left-wing liberal element fairly high u
p in the organization… most of them I don’t think were liberals by nature. They were liberals out of fear, particularly those people who read The New York Times. It was the first thing they did every morning. All you read in the papers then was the liberal message. The liberals were very, very effective. Reagan was being portrayed in the liberal press as a combination of Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan.… Editorially the press commented, ‘Here’s somebody who hates the little man, who would turn us back to the Dark Ages’—all that nonsense.”
Reagan had fallen into a way of life that had marked similarities to his years as president of the SAG. On one hand he was the speaker (less negotiator now) dealing in important issues, and on the other, performing in scripts that did not require great acting on his part. In early 1955, he even managed time to make another Western, Tennessee’s Partner, for RKO. Reagan was in the saddle again, this time in the thankless role of John Payne’s sidekick, Cowpoke, who gets gunned down trying (and succeeding) to save his friend’s life when Payne is framed for murder. Payne gave the film whatever few good acting moments it contained. Rhonda Fleming and Coleen Gray looked beautiful, but the “raucous mining town” of Sandy Bar was as phony as Cowpoke’s drawl.
Despite her sporadic appearances as an actress, Nancy was often referred to in the press as “the former Nancy Davis of Chicago.” This wording implied that she was a society girl whose film career had been a lark, an impression that could well have been circulated by Nancy herself, who never missed an opportunity when being interviewed to mention her father, “the eminent neurosurgeon, Dr. Loyal Davis of Chicago.” Edith, however privately revered, was never publicly discussed.
Once Reagan signed with General Electric Theater, he and Nancy saw the Davises more often. The doctor and his son-in-law had a growing rapport. Reagan found it easy to stop in Arizona on his way home from a tour. He met and liked Davis’s neighbor and good friend Senator Barry Goldwater. And the Davises traveled to the Coast to see the Reagans whenever they could. (Edith recalled that on one trip, the Davises had gone to a church wedding of a friend’s daughter in Beverly Hills and Jane Wyman was there. “I went over to her and I said, ‘I’m glad to see you, I’m Nancy’s mother.’ And she said, ‘Oh, I’m so glad to meet you. Thank you for being so nice and coming over.’ And I said, ‘Oh, no, honey. Anybody who wouldn’t be nice to you is a fool.’“)