Early Reagan

by Anne Edwards

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  NOBODY OUTSIDE HIS FAMILY COULD REALLY claim to know Ronald Reagan. He could “charm the hell” out of you, but he was an aloof, intensely private man who did not trade stories about his personal life. He now believed that he was a spokesman for the conservative viewpoint and that his voice was important. “An air of dignity” had wafted into his attitude. Helene Von Damm, his secretary during the 1960s, claimed he was “never one of the boys. A Ronald Reagan in a smoke-filled rap session after hours with his staff, or political friends, sitting behind the desk with rolled up shirt sleeves, open collar, feet on his desk, is… inconceivable to me.… Of course, he inherited an Irish temper and I must admit to having caught him using four-letter words… he will blush and utter an embarrassed apology on catching himself.”

  In speaking to factory workers on his tours, he never dressed down to his audience. He always wore a shirt and tie, the dark hair smoothed immaculately into the modified pompadour (which he retained, although the style was becoming passe). “Funny thing about Reagan,” one of his co-workers commented, “he never seemed to sweat.” He appeared at the SAG executive and emergency meetings impeccably dressed, although his choice of clothes always looked faintly outdated. This could have been because his frugal nature disallowed casting off anything in good condition or because he felt more comfortable in styles that reflected the Arrow shirt advertisements he had modeled for in the forties.

  He returned to the SAG presidency reluctantly. “He felt that, you know, you’ve done it once, you’ve done it and it might even be construed as a sign of weakness,” Jack Dales says. With Wasserman’s nod of approval and the board’s coaxing, his name was placed on the ballot without opposition, and he was elected. Almost instantaneously he was catapulted into a series of explosive negotiations with the producers to ward off a strike.

  Two main issues were at stake in the SAG’s contract demands: one, compensation for films from 1948 onward reissued to television; and two, the establishment of a welfare and pension fund. The issue of past films being sold to television had remained dormant for twelve years (since the last strike) because they were not, at that time, part of the networks’ prevalent programming. But in 1959-60, several of the studios were in deep financial trouble; while none of the major studios had put their old films onto television, accusations rose that they were planning to do exactly that.*

  Some of the SAG members felt the producers had a point in refusing back pay. “Who the hell ever went back twelve years retroactively? Who the hell ever went back anything retroactively? Maybe back two months. But twelve years. There was a strong feeling that we were out of our minds…” The board and a larger group of members did not agree. In addition to the desire for a share of the purchase price, “We [the actors] felt it’s going to hurt the actor; his face is on the screen, and the more he’s seen, the less he’s going to be employable.”

  A crucial negotiating meeting was held between the Association of Motion Picture Producers and representatives of the Screen Actors Guild on January 18, 1960. For the first time in Hollywood labor history, the presidents of the five major studios participated in the discussions. By the end of the evening there had been no change in the position of either side.

  The meeting was held at the offices of the Association of Motion Picture Producers. Reagan, Dales, the entire board of the SAG, the producers’ negotiating committee and the five company presidents—Ben Kahane (Columbia), Barney Balaban (Paramount), Spyros Skouras (Twentieth Century-Fox), Joe Vogel (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) and Jack Warner sat around the massive thirty-by-fifteen-foot table. Reagan and Warner were seated facing each other. Skouras acted as general chairman and spokesman for the studios, which he said were not free agents. They had stockholders and boards of directors who claimed the films being discussed were company assets which they owned and no officer of the company was free to give away those rights.

  Skouras was standing at the head of the oval table, Reagan was seated just off the curve to his left. It became clear that Skouras was directing his pitch to Reagan. He continued to mount the reasons why they really had nothing to discuss. The studios were in a state of emergency. Whatever the revenues might be from old films, the stockholders would demand that they be held against their losses.

  Reagan told the Guild membership at the next general meeting that he had replied: “Mr. Skouras, do you mean to tell us now that if we, the whole [acting community], would settle for one percent [of profits from reuse] that you couldn’t stay in business with ninety-nine percent? But you could stay in business if you got the other percent?”

  “We won’t discuss it,” Skouras had replied. “It’s a non-negotiable subject.”

  “Well, we withdrew,” Reagan told the thousands of Guild members packed into the vast Hollywood Palladium where Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra concerts had drawn smaller audiences. “We didn’t stop negotiations. We tried it on an off-the-record basis. Everybody knows that a negotiating committee has to make speeches.… So every once in a while, when you feel there might be a point to be made, you sort of find yourself out in the hall, and you say, ‘What is really your problem?’ And he says, ‘What’s yours?’ And you trade notes and go back inside and wind up a deal.

  “Somebody once said that in negotiations, you start out asking for the moon, and the other side offers green cheese. When you both get real tired of looking at each other, you settle in the middle of the table for a fair deal for both sides, where you should have settled in the first place.

  “Well, we feel that we have proven that we are not asking for the moon any longer.” He then told the audience of the board’s decision to ask them for authority to call a strike in the hope that would break the deadlock. The strike was called, but not unanimously by any means, and the actors went out. “There was a lot of ferment,” Kim Felner of the executive staff admits, “especially among the celebrities. After three or four weeks the regularly working actors, the studio actors, wanted to go back to work. There were a lot of private meetings in stars’ homes, and he or she would say, ‘Listen, we’ve got to mediate—maybe if we [the stars] take this position, the rest of the rank and file will come along.’“

  “Hedda Hopper led a very conservative force. She wanted to appease the producers,” Chet Migden, who was then the SAG’s assistant executive secretary, says. “After a month when the actors were out of work and they began to be hit hard in the pocket-book, and they had gotten some points, they felt they should quit while they were still ahead. Reagan came to agree with them.”

  “Once we were in the strike period,” Dales added, “the deal began to sweeten itself. The producers had offered four million dollars to start a pension and welfare plan right [then]. This [plan] started the day that the contract was signed. During six or seven weeks of the strike… there were actors who used to come to the office and say, ‘This is wrong. We ought to be going back to work. We’ll never make up what we’re losing. And if you can get television residuals for us in the future, that’s enough.’ There were other actors who said, ‘Don’t sell us out. To the death, by God!’

  “So it was tough… [the producers] said, in effect, you are getting retroactive pay. We’re putting in four million dollars. That’s retroactive pay. We’re putting in the pension plan.”

  Fears of an approaching capitulation spread. Bitterness that was to last more than twenty-five years took hold. A paper was circulated with a picture of Reagan “decked out in a Hitler moustache and hairdo over the caption, ‘Heil!’“

  Then Richard Walsh, head of IATSE (International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees) met with Reagan and Dales. Walsh had made statements that he thought SAG was “wrecking the business,” and he refused to give them his support. Not only that, but a statement by Walsh appeared in Variety and Hollywood Reporter that he would get his union triple whatever SAG got in terms of payment for the reuse of theatrical pictures in television.

  “Walsh came in with his coterie of [union] leaders and Ro
nnie just really let him have it,” said Dales. “I thought we were going to be in one of those good, old-fashioned fistfights. He said, ‘It’s the lousiest bit of strike breaking I’ve ever seen in my life.’ That’s all it was, was plain strike breaking.

  “Walsh was red-faced, and the guys were on their feet. And Walsh—he was no fool—he said, ‘Sit down, fellows.’ So he said, I don’t look at it that way. It just was a statement of fact. If it’s good enough for you, it’s good enough for us. I don’t buy your use up of your face. If the pictures are going to be shown there, then they’re not making pictures for television; our men are losing work.’“ Walsh finally backed down, but Reagan now had problems with his own Guild.

  Enter the mystery of the missing minutes. Reagan chaired a general membership meeting on April 18, 1960, to report the progress of the strike negotiations. About three hundred members attended. A transcript of all meetings was required, and one of that meeting was made and eventually “misplaced,” and believed lost. Through the years a controversy raged as to what actually happened at that meeting. Some recall it as “a stormy session marked by calls for Reagan’s resignation, denunciation of his ties with General Electric and an attack on the agreement [the plan for a pension fund in exchange for any residuals for 1948-59 films reused for television] as a sweetheart contract selling out to management.” SAG member Madelaine Lee recalled Leon Ames as “a heavy,” and that members found printed sheets on their chairs with a pressured sales pitch to give in to the producers. Someone else claimed Reagan got so angry he surrendered the chair to Leon Ames, unable to continue. Another SAG member, Frank Maxwell, remembered “vividly” that “the people who had anything to say much against the contract were called out of order… and finally the meeting was adjourned at the height of all the debate… [it was] a very heated meeting, and I remember being very hot under the collar.” Chet Migden, who was also present at the meeting, did not recall any clamor for Reagan to resign or that he turned the chair over to Ames.

  The minutes, finally found in October 1980, told a different story. Leon Ames is not listed as having been present and no protest from the membership is recorded. Only a few dissenting votes are noted when a resolution was offered to allow eight feature films [halted in midproduction by the strike] to resume production [pending the final contract ratification]. But these “found” minutes have a traveling history. They were subpoenaed on Reagan’s behalf by the Republican party when he announced his intention to campaign for the governorship. Ordinarily, the original typed transcript would have been held in the file and a copy delivered. When the minutes, years later, turned out to be missing, it was assumed that the original transcript had been sent by mistake and never returned. Then, in 1980, a SAG secretary, Joan Hausen, found a concurring typed transcript of the meeting in the 1960 strike-negotiations file. SAG now believed the minutes had been misfiled (all SAG minutes are in large black-leather binders marked by years). The mystery seemed a simple case of careless misfiling. However, on close examination, a further mystery presents itself. The April 18, 1960, minutes appear to have been typed on a different typewriter than that of the other minutes of the same year.

  Chet Migden insists, “There are no ‘missing minutes.’ The minutes were misfiled. They are the official reporter’s minutes taken by a court reporter [which might explain the difference in type from the general minutes], probably Noon and Pratt whom we customarily used back then. In any event that’s what happened at the meeting.

  “People confuse this with another meeting during the strike which was hot. The actors who wanted it over versus those who wanted to stay out. The Guild stayed out… Reagan felt it was necessary to establish the actors’ right to additional payment for theatrical films on TV.… He fought a good fight in negotiations.… The issue was emotional and still is. The possibility of getting producers to give up a share of what they already owned was the impossible mountain to climb.…”

  Reagan claimed that the strike ended in June between “soup and salad” at one of those large Hollywood dinner parties “where some two hundred guests prowl around tables for ten minutes looking for their own names on place cards.” Reagan found himself seated next to Anna Rosenberg, employed by the studios as a public-relations adviser in the strike. Whether by coincidence or not, whoever put those two place cards next to each other enabled Reagan to lay out to Rosenberg “exactly what the Guild would settle for” on an easy, social level.

  Two days later, MGM’s Joe Vogel called Reagan at the Guild asking for a private meeting. Vogel had flown out from New York and Dales and Reagan met him in his room at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “Vogel fancied himself a peace maker,” Migden recalled. “He failed.” But negotiations were going on at the Producers Association, and four days after the Vogel meeting a deal was struck. After six months and a loss of many millions of dollars, the actors went back to work. They had sold all TV rights in films they had made from 1948 to 1959 to the producers for two million dollars to establish an improved pension and welfare plan, one half of the producers’ original offer.* Somehow, during the long months of negotiation, the SAG had lessened, not strengthened, its bargaining power.

  A large faction in the Guild screamed “sellout,” feeling the advantage gained by the pension did not balance the loss of wages while they had been on strike and the loss of income they would have received from residuals. Those whose careers were ended by 1959 because of age, changing fashions and the blacklist now had no future income from old films to look forward to, although they were to show up regularly on the late show. Films made after 1959 were not generally shown until two decades later, with good economic reason, since film companies did not have to pay out any fees for reuse on pre-1959 films. Despite this, Reagan has always insisted he won a good deal for the SAG.

  “It was about June [I960],” Dales remembered, “that he said to me, I know I came back for a purpose, and it’s been accomplished. I just don’t think I should stay. And besides which (and I think this was an excuse) I have a chance to get into producing.”‘†

  Reagan not only stepped down from the presidency, ‡ but he and Nancy went off the board. When he left the Guild offices for the last time as president or board member on July 9, 1960, he said he had “something of the same feeling” he had had the day he walked out of Fort MacArthur, his war service having ended. However, repercussions he had not anticipated were to follow.

  Reagan’s switch to the Republican party did not happen all at once. But he had crossed the track to the other side in 1950, when he supported Nixon (no matter how surreptitiously) against Helen Gahagan Douglas, and in 1952 he boarded the Republican train during the Eisenhower-Nixon campaign. His vote for Eisenhower had been a comfortable crossover. The last two years of Truman’s presidency had been tainted by a scandal of payoffs within the administration, disenchanting many Democrats. And not only was the general a great American hero, he had never previously been associated with any political party. Even Jack and Nelle might have understood their son’s switch. Now Jack was dead and Nelle was in a nursing home in Santa Monica, no longer interested in her son’s politics. Reagan had no one to answer to except his own conscience. In truth, he thought like a Republican, adhered almost wholly to that party’s philosophies and principles and no longer believed in many of the things that had once made him a Democrat.

  With the passage of the Twenty-second Amendment, limiting the president to two terms of office, Eisenhower could not run for a third term. Had there been no constitutional bar, his closest advisers believed, he would have run again and his popularity would have ensured a victory over any of the likely Democratic candidates. Eisenhower was not overly enthusiastic about Vice-President Nixon as the Republican candidate. He even suggested that Nixon might be better as a secretary of defense. Despite eight years in the White House, the Republicans were still the minority party. Their leaders shared Eisenhower’s grave doubts about Nixon’s ability to win an election and cited the storm of local protest that
had beaten back an attempt to name a street in his hometown of Whittier, California, in his honor. On a visit to Whittier College, his alma mater, only two students would shake his hand.

  Nevertheless, enough people believed that he would make an effective president to enable him to win the Republican nomination. Reagan, as a registered Democrat, could not vote in a Republican primary. But as soon as Nixon became the candidate, he joined in his campaign.

  The Democratic candidate was John F. Kennedy, and this election was not the first time that he had crossed swords with Richard Nixon. When both sat on the House Labor Committee as freshmen congressmen, they had disagreed so vehemently over the Taft-Hartley Act that they carried their fight outside Congress to a public debate.* Though a Democrat, Kennedy had been considered “a fighting conservative.”† He had been running for the presidency since he lost the Democratic vice-presidential vote to Estes Kefauver in 1956. His book Profiles in Courage had been a best seller. He had barnstormed the country back and forth, north and south, for three and a half years, speaking at Democratic rallies and dinners, raising money for Democratic candidates in almost every state, and by January 2, 1960, when he declared his intention to run, he was already a national figure.

  Kennedy was a well-educated, urbane man, witty, good-looking, brave (a war hero) and so rich no one could ever suspect him of any financial infraction. Young people identified with his youth (forty-three), and his charm, intelligence and energy were indisputable. But in the early stages of the campaign, he was regarded by the liberals with suspicion because of his and his family’s close ties to McCarthy (who had died in 1957 in disgrace).* The more conservative Democrats thought him “too young, too rich, too independent, and in too much of a hurry.” He was also a Catholic, a “daunting obstacle” to be faced. No wonder Nixon was so confident at the start of their campaign.