Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Dame coach, pushed hard for him. Reagan’s parting words in his deathbed scene, “Win one for the Gipper,” would become a battle cry for his supporters in his political campaigns. His most memorable line in Kings Row was also delivered from bed, and would become the title of his autobiography: Where’s the Rest of Me?

  Everyone involved in Kings Row was first-rate: the producer Hal Wallis, the director Sam Wood, the screenwriter Casey Robinson, the cinematographer James Wong Howe, the composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and a cast that included Robert Cummings, Claude Rains, Charles Coburn, and Judith Anderson. Its budget exceeded $1 million, an exceptional amount for frugal Warner Bros., and larger than that for any previous Reagan film.92 It was based on a controversial best-seller by Henry Bellamann, which involved incest, insanity, euthanasia, and homosexuality in a small Midwestern town, and which had to be severely diluted to get the script approved by the Hays Office censors. Reagan gave what he and most critics considered the best performance of his career as the thoughtless young rake who loses his inheritance to a crooked banker and his legs to a sadistic doctor, but finds a uniquely American kind of redemption in the love of a girl from the wrong side of the tracks, played by the stunning Ann Sheridan, who marries him and helps him become a successful real estate developer. (Interestingly, Sheridan’s character is wiser than Reagan’s, she consults with a psychiatrist about how to handle her husband’s depression without telling him, and his first real estate project is her idea, though she pretends it was his.) Reagan took his father to the premiere of Knute Rockne at Notre Dame in October 1940. Warners invited two train cars full of stars and press from Los Angeles, and an estimated 250,000 fans crowded into South Bend, Indiana, for the three-day publicity event, which included a football game between Notre Dame and the College of the Pacific. Franklin Roosevelt Jr. read a letter from his father at the banquet following the opening. As Reagan later told the story, he had been eagerly anticipating the trip for weeks:

  Nelle cornered me one day and told me that someone else was excited. Jack would never let me see it, but the dream of his life was to make this trip. Here was an Irishman who had really worshipped from afar: he’d never seen a Notre Dame team play; he’d never even been to South Bend. He thought Pat O’Brien was the greatest man since Al Smith. And he sensed somehow his youngest son would pass a kind of milestone before the trip was over.

  Warner Bros.: 1937–1941

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  What a simple thing this would be for me to fix—still, I felt a chilling fear that made me hesitate. We had all lived too long in fear of the black curse. Nelle’s optimism was in full tide—she’d tell Jack how important it was that he vote dry on the trip and she knew he could be trusted. Whatever happened, I’m glad that she was so persuasive. It only took a phone call and the studio said yes before I got the question out of my mouth. . . . Saturday was the big day with lunch in the dining hall of St. Mary’s followed by the game and at night the premiere.

  First thing in the morning I called Jack’s room, but there was no answer. All unsuspecting, I called the desk to ask if he had gone out.

  I was informed he and Pat had just come in. His weakness was prosperity, and this was prosperity in capital letters. The evening before at the university banquet he had sat with an old Dixon friend, and heard students, faculty, and distinguished alumni greet us with a thunderous ovation. Then while I peacefully slept, he had been taken into the inner circle, so to speak, by Pat who had adopted him in his warmhearted way. Some time later I was told of their early morning return to the hotel—it must have been quite a scene. Jack was sure the empty streets were a trap and that the quarter-million fans were lurking in an alley, just waiting to swoop down on Pat for autographs. At each intersection he would halt Pat while he tiptoed up to the corner, and peered cautiously around; then he would signal Pat to join him and they would scamper across the street to the shelter of the buildings. Pat loved every minute of it.93

  If any movie star was the perfect friend for Jack Reagan it was Pat O’Brien—the grandson of four Irish immigrants, a devout Catholic, a faithful family man, a hard drinker, and a fervent FDR supporter. Famous for playing Irish cops and priests, he was also a Milwaukee schoolmate and Navy buddy of Spencer Tracy’s (and, like Tracy, a friend of Edith Davis’s from their theater days). Ronald Reagan and O’Brien, who was eleven years his senior, had hit if off on the first film they made together at Warners, Submarine D-1, three years earlier; Reagan’s part ended up on the cutting room floor, but it was the beginning of a friendship that, as he later wrote, “would play an important part in all that has happened to me.”94

  O’Brien kept up with Jack Reagan after their South Bend bender, taking him to the Hollywood Democratic Party headquarters to help out with the Roosevelt campaign. Barely six months after they celebrated FDR’s November 1940 victory over Wendell Willkie together, Jack dropped dead of 1 1 4

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House a heart attack on May 18, 1941, at age fifty-seven. According to family lore, he died while waiting for an ambulance that never came; Nelle had called the nearest ambulance service, not knowing that, because of a jurisdictional dispute, Beverly Hills ambulances were not permitted to cross the bound-ary into West Hollywood.95 Ronnie was in Atlantic City, on a Warners promotional tour. When Nelle reached him by telephone, she urged him not to fly, saying she would delay the funeral until he and Jane could return home by train.96

  Pat O’Brien was among the small group of mourners at St. Victor’s Catholic Church in West Hollywood. Ronnie, as he told Maureen years later, was “beyond crying. My soul was just desolate, that’s the only word I can use. Desolate. And empty. And then all of a sudden I heard somebody talking to me, and I knew that it was Jack, and he was saying, ‘I’m OK, and where I am it’s very nice. Please don’t be unhappy.’ And I turned to [Nelle], who was sitting with me, and I said, ‘Jack is OK, and where he is he’s very happy.’ And it was just like it went away. The desolation wasn’t there anymore, the emptiness was all gone.”97

  Four months later, in September 1941, it was Nelle’s turn to share in her son’s stardom. This time the junket was to Dixon, Illinois, for Louella Parsons Day and the premiere of International Squadron, starring Ronald Reagan—the man who hated to fly—as a daredevil American pilot fighting with the British Royal Air Force against the Nazis. This double home-coming started with the biggest parade in Dixon’s history, with five bands and fifteen floats, followed by the dedication of the Louella Parsons Wing at the Dixon Hospital, a banquet at the Masonic temple, the premiere at the Dixon Theater, and a Hollywood Ball at the town armory.98 Ronnie invited Nelle’s old friends from her True Blue Bible class to the premiere, which was a benefit for the hospital, and mother and son were put up at Hazelwood, the Walgreen estate on the Rock River, along with the rest of Louella’s entourage, including Bob Hope, Ann Rutherford, George Montgomery, and Joe E. Brown.99 Charles Walgreen’s widow, Myrtle, gave a lunch for two hundred on the lawn where a decade earlier young Reagan, then a caddie for Mr. Walgreen, had lolled in a hammock.100

  “I want all of you to know that I did not sleep last night, thinking of my trip back to Dixon, where I could meet my old friends,” Reagan said in his speech at the kickoff of the parade. “I counted the 77 persons whom I have been credited with pulling out of the Rock River at Lowell Park many times during the night.”101 As Louella rose to cut him off, Bob Warner Bros.: 1937–1941

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  Hope’s sidekick, Jerry Colonna, whispered, “This fellow must be running for Congress!”102

  “During the couple of days it took to reach Dixon, I got to know Ronnie quite well,” recalled Ann Rutherford, then an MGM starlet, who was also traveling with her mother. “You know, who else are you going to talk to? Picture people stuck with picture people when you went into the dining car, and over a couple of dinners my mother and I were so impressed with him. He had an idea about everything, especially poli
tical things. My mother shook her head and said to me, ‘He is not going to stay in the picture business. He has far more important fish to fry, and he’ll do it.’ He really had suggestions on everything. For instance, he said to me, ‘You do have a three-check bankbook, don’t you?’ And I said, ‘Yes, why?’ He said,

  ‘Well, what do you do with your canceled checks?’ I said, ‘I put a rubber band around them and throw them in a shoe box.’ And he said, ‘Well, what you should do is, when you get them back, take a little Scotch tape and tape them to the stubs. That way you know where everything is.’ ”103

  Clouding the festivities in Dixon was the inevitability of America’s involvement in World War II. The war had started two years earlier with Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, and as country after country fell to the Nazis, including France in the summer of 1940, an increasingly bitter and urgent debate divided America. On one side were the isolationists, who were opposed to America’s entanglement in any foreign wars; on the other the interventionists, who believed it was America’s duty to fight beside Britain, the only Western European democracy still resisting Hitler.

  Although Roosevelt had been reelected in November 1940 promising to keep the country out of war, he was secretly plotting with Winston Churchill to do just the opposite while publicly promoting preparedness, rearmament, and aid to Britain. For most of 1940 and 1941, the isolationists, led by the influential America First Committee, were ascendant. By May 1941, eight months after it had been founded, the AFC had almost 850,000 dues-paying members,104 and among its most prominent supporters were Charles Lindbergh, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alice Longworth Roosevelt, and former ambassador Joseph Kennedy, who had been recalled from London by FDR for being too eager to appease the Germans.

  The AFC was headquartered in Chicago, where its principal backers were General Robert E. Wood, the chairman of Sears Roebuck, and Chicago 1 1 6

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Tribune publisher Colonel Robert McCormick. The only movie star on its national board was Lillian Gish, who during 1940 and 1941 was starring in the Chicago production of Life with Father 105 and, through her good friend Colleen Moore, seeing a lot of Loyal and Edith Davis. Although the AFC

  would later come to be seen as a reactionary and even anti-Semitic group, its membership included such leading liberals as future ambassador Chester Bowles, and it began as a student antiwar group at Yale that included Gerald Ford, Sargent Shriver, and future Yale president Kingman Brewster.106 It should also be remembered that between August 1939, when Hitler and Stalin signed a nonaggression pact, and June 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the American Communist Party and its left-wing sympathizers were also vociferously isolationist.

  Indeed, the American political scene during the prewar period was so complicated that the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which had been started in 1938 by Congressman Samuel Dickstein, a far-left Democrat from Manhattan’s Lower East Side, to investigate pro-Fascist and pro-Nazi organizations such as the German-American Bund, was soon taken over by Congressman Martin Dies, a far-right Democrat from Texas, who promptly launched an investigation of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, claiming it was “under the control of Communists.”107 As the Brown Scare turned into the Red Scare, and Hitler and Stalin carved up Eastern Europe, the Anti-Nazi League—which had been formed in 1936

  and had in its vanguard everyone from Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Ham-mett, and Dorothy Parker to Lucille Ball, Henry Fonda, and Groucho Marx108—changed its name to the Hollywood League for Democratic Action and lost many of its movie star members.109

  Nonetheless, Congressman Dies spent the month of August 1940 in Hollywood personally interviewing many of the stars associated with the Anti-Nazi League and like-minded groups. “One by one, the accused came to his hotel to seek absolution,” Neal Gabler writes in An Empire of Their Own, “Humphrey Bogart, Fredric March, Luise Rainer, Franchot Tone, even Jimmy Cagney, who left telling reporters that the charges claiming Hollywood was permeated by Communism were ‘so exaggerated that they are ridiculous.’”110

  Cagney was papering over the fact that the Communist Party in Hollywood had been steadily growing since the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, and had a strong appeal for the socially conscious intellectuals in the community. As Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner write in Radical Hollywood, Warner Bros.: 1937–1941

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  “In this world where networking meant everything, the Communist Party’s Popular Front was, from the middle thirties until the late forties, the network for the cerebral progressive, the inveterate activist, and the determined labor unionist.”111 Ring Lardner Jr., for example, was drawn into the Party by his co-writer on A Star Is Born, Budd Schulberg, in 1937. In his memoir, I’d Hate Myself in the Morning, he says, “I thus became one of about two dozen party members in Hollywood. (Five years later, the count was well over two hundred.)”112

  In Dutch, Edmund Morris repeats a startling claim by the screenwriter Howard Fast, that Ronald Reagan tried to join the Party in 1938. “Reagan got carried away by stories of the Communist Party helping the dispossessed, the unemployed, and the homeless,” Fast told Morris. “Some of his friends, people he respected, were Party members. So he turned to them.

  Said he wanted to become a Communist.” According to Fast, who was in the Party at the time, Reagan’s Brother Rat costar Eddie Albert and his far-left Mexican wife, Margo, talked him out of it, at the behest of the local Party hierarchy, who thought Reagan was a “flake.”113 Leonora Hornblow told me she was “shocked” by Morris’s story, and said Ronnie “never gave any indication” of Communist leanings in their political discussions on the Brother Rat set.114

  The first HUAC investigation of Hollywood fizzled out, but a year later the movie industry was under attack again. “[The movies have]

  ceased to be an instrument of entertainment,” declared the isolationist Senator Gerald B. Nye of North Dakota in an inflammatory speech he gave at an America First rally in St. Louis on August 1, 1941. “They have become the most gigantic engines of propaganda in existence to rouse . . .

  war fever in America and plunge this nation to destruction.” The studios had the power to “address 80 million people a week,” he pointed out, and were run by executives who came from “Russia, Hungary, Germany, and the Balkan countries.” As he shouted out their names—Mayer, Warner, Goldwyn, Cohn—the crowd booed.115 “Are you ready to send your boys to bleed and die in Europe, to make the world safe for Barney Balaban and Adolph Zukor and Joseph Schenck?” he railed, naming the president and chairman of Paramount and the president of Fox.116

  One month later, on September 11—just four days before Louella Parsons Day in Dixon—Lindbergh, the AFC’s most popular spokesman, weighed in with a speech in Des Moines that created a national uproar and would tarnish his reputation forever. “The three most important 1 1 8

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House groups,” he said, “who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt administration.” He went on to say that the Jews’ “greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.”117

  On September 25, 1941—ten days after the Dixon festivities—Harry Warner was called before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Moving Picture Propaganda. The subcommittee, chaired by Senator D. Worth Clark of Idaho, a leading isolationist, had compiled a list of fifty films it said contained pro-war propaganda, including eight made by Warner Bros. Harry Warner didn’t flinch. “You may correctly charge me with being anti-Nazi.

  But no one can charge me with being anti-American,” he told the committee.118 “Shortly after Hitler came to power in Germany I became convinced that Hitlerism was an evil force designed to destroy free people, whether they were Catholics, Protestants, or Jews.” He added that he had

  “always been in accord with President Roosevelt’s foreign
policy.”119

  Warner Bros. wasn’t making propaganda movies so much as historical movies, Harry Warner calmly claimed. But as both proud Jews and the most conspicuous Roosevelt supporters among the Hollywood hierarchy, the Warners had taken the lead in opposing the Nazis and preparing the American public for eventual intervention in Europe. In April 1938, to give one example of their high-profile efforts, Jack and Ann Warner had hosted a $100-a-plate dinner at their Beverly Hills estate to raise money for refugees from Germany, with the exiled Nobel Prize writer Thomas Mann as guest of honor.120 In a 1939 article Harry Warner wrote for the Christian Science Monitor, he stated that the film industry had “implied duties to ethics, patriotism, and the fundamental rights of individuals.”121 Despite his demurrals to the Clark subcommittee, Warners was definitely making propaganda movies, including at least two starring Ronald Reagan.

  Murder in the Air, which Reagan began shooting a few days after the war started in Europe in September 1939, was originally titled The Enemy Within and briefly retitled Uncle Sam Awakens before its release in early 1940. It was the fourth and last in a series in which he played Brass Bancroft, a nonchalantly heroic Secret Service agent who defends America from smugglers of illegal aliens, international counterfeiters, foreign sabo-teurs, and home-grown subversives.122 These were the films in which he earned his self-described reputation as the “Errol Flynn of the Bs,”123 with

  “one fight per every 1000 feet of film.”124 To promote the third in the series, Warner Bros.: 1937–1941

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  Smashing the Money Ring, Warners filled theater lobbies with fingerprint booths, wanted posters, and “crime clue boxes,” in which patrons were encouraged to drop the names of suspicious neighbors.125 Murder in the Air introduced a futuristic weapon that could shoot enemy aircraft out of the sky, and the trailer beckoned: “Join Ronald Reagan battling 20,000 unseen enemies to protect . . . the most deadly weapon ever known to man . . . a death ray projector . . . the greatest force for peace ever discovered.”126