Their week of dates won her more press coverage than any of her stage appearances had. All the leading New York columnists—Walter Winchell, Ed Sullivan, Earl Wilson, Dorothy Kilgallen—ran items, as did Louella Parsons in Hollywood. “Has something at last happened to Clark Gable,”
asked Modern Screen magazine, “something, to be exact, in the form of a slim, brown-eyed brown-haired beauty named Nancy Davis—that is changing the fitful pattern of his romantic life? Has he, in other words, finally found the Gable woman, for whom he is more than willing to give up the Gable women? The answer seems to be yes—even though, if it is love at all, it is so far a love in hiding.”57
A year later, Gable married Sylvia, Lady Ashley, in Santa Barbara. It was a fourth marriage for both of them, and it lasted a little more than a year.
In My Turn, written a year after she left the White House, Nancy relived her dates with the King:
Perhaps I missed some of the signals he was sending out. He lived in Encino, and he referred to his house as a ranch. One night, at dinner, he asked me, “How would you feel about living on a ranch?”
I mumbled something foolish like, “Gee, I don’t know, I never have.” But I have often looked back at that moment and wondered: Was Clark Gable sounding me out about a possible future together?
And if so, how should I have responded? I wasn’t in love with him, but if we had seen more of each other, I might have been. I was certainly taken by his attentiveness and his kindness, and by his mod-esty. It just wasn’t what you would have expected from such a star.58
Aside from her dates with Gable, the only bright spot during her last year in New York was a modicum of success in the emerging new medium 1 9 4
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House of television. Nancy had appeared on television for the first time while she was in Chicago the previous fall, most likely in a celebrity show for the Community Fund organized by Edith, who was chairman of the charity’s women’s division. Television was just beginning to take hold of the American living room—there were only 136,000 sets in the whole country in 1947—and the technology was not yet perfected. “I had to wear green makeup and black lipstick,” Nancy recalled, “to look good on those early, primitive black-and-white sets.”59
In 1948, according to Mademoiselle, she “had feature roles on the Kraft Television Theater and the Lucky Strike dramatic series.”60 The fashion magazine noted her progress in its November issue with a small photograph and a paragraph of text, concluding with: “Enthusiastic about television, Nancy looks forward to the day when video will have its own stars,
[and] would like a dramatic show of her own.” At the end of the year, ZaSu Pitts arranged for Nancy to reprise her three-line part in Ramshackle Inn on NBC’s Philco Television Playhouse, another one of the live dramatic anthology series that dominated the small screen’s early years.
“I wasn’t setting show business on fire,” she later wrote, trying to put a realistic but cheerful face on this period of her life. “However, I honestly don’t think I even thought of that. I was doing something I wanted to do and having a good time.”61
Nancy Davis at twenty-seven, it would seem, was not that much closer to a successful acting career than she had been when she left Chicago four years earlier. Nor had she found Mr. Right.
C H A P T E R N I N E
DIVORCE
1947–1948
I have turned down quite a few scripts because I thought they were tinged with Communistic ideas. . . . I could never take any of this pinko mouthing very seriously, because I didn’t feel it was on the level.
Gary Cooper, testifying before HUAC,
October 1947
THE YEAR 1947 BEGAN ON A HIGH NOTE FOR RONNIE AND JANE, WITH HER
Oscar nomination for The Yearling and his being cast in The Voice of the Turtle, a romantic comedy based on John Van Druten’s long-running Broadway play, which Warners saw as one of its top films of the year.1 On January 26, shortly after their seventh anniversary, Jane learned that she was pregnant. If they had a girl, the movie magazines confided, Ronnie wanted to name her Veronica. Jane reportedly had her heart set on a boy, who would be named Ronald Reagan Jr.2
On March 10, Robert Montgomery stepped down as SAG president, citing a conflict of interest, as he had recently begun to co-produce his own movies. In a secret vote by board members, Reagan was chosen to serve out Montgomery’s term, winning over the more liberal Gene Kelly and the more conservative George Murphy, who were then elected first and third vice presidents, respectively. William Holden—nominated by Jane Wyman—was made second vice president.3
Four nights later, Jane and Ronnie attended the Academy Awards with Mary Benny—Jack Benny was emcee—and watched Olivia de Havilland win over Jane to take the Best Actress award for To Each His Own. As they left the Shrine Auditorium, Reagan tried to make light of his wife’s loss, 1 9 5
1 9 6
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House telling reporters that maybe they’d name their expected child Oscar—
“Jane deserves one around the house.”4
On April 10, sitting in their living room with an FBI agent, the couple named at least six SAG members as suspected Communists.5 According to Anne Edwards, who interviewed a close friend of theirs, “Wyman . . . was in an emotional state, torn, not knowing what to do but not agreeing with his decision.”6 According to the agent’s report, “Reagan and his wife advised that for the past several months they had observed during the Guild meetings there were two ‘cliques’ of members, one headed by Anne Revere and the other by Karen Morley, which on all questions of policy confronting the Guild followed the Communist Party line.”7 Both Revere and Morley were Party members; the latter had recruited Sterling Hayden, whom Reagan apparently also named because of his leadership of the pro-CSU faction in SAG.8
By then the strike that had violently disrupted the industry for a large part of the previous year was sputtering to an end, and Herbert Sorrell was a desperate figure, the victim of his own demagogic excesses and the relentless right-wing campaign to hang the Communist noose around his neck. After SAG led twenty-four other Hollywood unions in declaring the CSU “a rump organization, conflicting with our duly constituted A.F.L. central labor council of Los Angeles,” workers deserted the picket lines in droves. “The CSU dissolved like sugar in hot water” is the way Reagan put it.9 “Crushed to powder” was more like it, said liberal screenwriter Philip Dunne, adding that Reagan was “always careful to hide his own aggression.”10
Larger forces were at work, too, creating a climate in which left-wing union activism was increasingly untenable. In the November 1946 elections, Republican majorities took control of both houses of Congress for the first time since 1928; among the newcomers were Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin and Representative Richard M. Nixon of Southern California.
On March 12, 1947, the White House announced the Truman Doctrine to defend Greece and Turkey from Soviet aggression. That same month Harry Truman signed an executive order requiring loyalty oaths of all federal employees.11 In June the new Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act over Truman’s veto; it outlawed the closed shop, prohibited jurisdictional strikes, forbade unions to contribute to political campaigns, and required elected union officials to take an oath that they were not Communists.
Divorce: 1947–1948
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Across the nation, the right was resurgent, and the left was divided and on the defensive. In the last week of 1946, ICCASP merged with the National Citizens Political Action Committee, another left-wing group, to form Progressive Citizens of America (PCA), laying the groundwork for a third-party challenge to Truman in the 1948 election by Henry Wallace.
In Hollywood, the remains of HICCASP—including Gene Kelly, Lillian Hellman, John Howard Lawson, and Dalton Trumbo—voted to go along with the merger.12
One week later, in January 1947, a group of nationally prominent liberals met in Washington to launch Americans for Democra
tic Action. The organization had “two objectives,” wrote Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “to infuse the Truman administration with the spirit of the New Deal, and to liberate the democratic left from Communist manipulation.”13 Schlesinger was an ADA founder, along with Eleanor Roosevelt; Harold Ickes, the former executive director of ICCASP; Hubert Humphrey, then Mayor of Minneapolis; economist John Kenneth Galbraith; columnists Stewart and Joseph Alsop; labor leaders Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers and David Dubinsky of the Ladies’ Garment Workers; and AVC national head Charles Bolté.14
“The liberal split was crystallizing,” Schlesinger explained. The two new organizations “were in substantial agreement on domestic issues, but they disagreed on qualifications for membership. A.D.A. rejected ‘any association with Communism or sympathizers with Communism as completely as we rejected any association with fascists or their sympathizers. Both are hostile to the principles of freedom and democracy on which this Republic has grown great.’ P.C.A., on the other hand, welcomed ‘all progressive men and women in our nation, regardless of . . . political affiliation.’ . . . And the admission of Communists moved P.C.A. toward the Soviet side in the Cold War.”15 Mrs. Roosevelt agreed: “The American Communists seemed to have succeeded very well in jeopardizing whatever the liberals work for. Therefore, to keep them out of policy-making and staff positions seems to be very essential even at the price of being called red-baiters.”16
Actor Melyvn Douglas became ADA’s California chairman in early 1947, and Reagan joined fellow liberal anti-Communists Walter Wanger and Philip Dunne on its organizing committee.17 Olivia de Havilland, Bette Davis, and Will Rogers Jr. also signed on.18 At the same time, Reagan was working closely with Jimmy Roosevelt and Douglas trying to save the AVC’s Hollywood chapter from a total Communist takeover. By that 1 9 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House spring they gave up, and started the separate, anti-Communist Hollywood Chapter No. 2.19
“Our highest aim should be the cultivation of freedom of the individual for therein lies the highest dignity of man,” Reagan told Hedda Hopper in an interview published in May. “Tyranny is tyranny, and whether it comes from right, left, or center, it’s evil. Right now the liberal movement in this country is taking the brunt of the Communist attack. The Reds know that if we can make America a decent living place for all of our people their cause is lost here. So they seek to infiltrate liberal organizations just to smear and discredit them.”20 Hopper, the avenging angel of the Hollywood right, was obviously taken by Reagan, despite his defense of liberalism, and told her readers that he “commanded the respect of his most bitter opponents.”21
That same month, HUAC came to town. The committee was now chaired by New Jersey Republican J. Parnell Thomas, a former insurance salesman whose office featured a picture of the American flag with the slogan “These colors do not run.”22 But the committee’s driving force was a reactionary Mississippi Democrat named John Rankin, who terrified the larger part of Hollywood because of his tendency to conflate Communism and Judaism.
On May 8 and 9, Thomas and two other committee members held closed hearings at the Biltmore Hotel on Communist influence in the movie industry, and then Thomas announced to the press that “hundreds of very prominent film capital people have been named as Communists to us.”23
Nearly all of the fourteen “frank and cooperative” witnesses—including screenwriters James Kevin McGuinness, Howard Emmett Rogers, and Rupert Hughes, an uncle of Howard Hughes’s—were from the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, which itself had an anti-Semitic taint. Alliance stalwart Robert Taylor told the congressmen that the Roosevelt administration had delayed his entry into the Navy in 1943 so that he could finish shooting Song of Russia, a film he considered pro-Soviet propaganda. Ginger Rogers’s mother, Lela, testified that her daughter had insisted on cutting the Marxist line “Share and share alike—that’s democracy” from Dalton Trumbo’s screenplay for Tender Comrade.24 Veteran character actor Adolphe Menjou swore that if the Communists took over Hollywood, which he thought was close to happening, “I would move to the state of Texas . . . because I think that Texans would kill them on sight.”25
Divorce: 1947–1948
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Jack Warner was the only studio chief to testify, and he did so secretly, one week later. Some said that he was still fuming over the CSU siege of Warner Bros. during the 1945 strike, others that he was eager to clear his name as the head of the studio that had invented the liberal-message movie. The other moguls, led by Mayer, hoped that if they ignored the committee it would go away. But Warner told the inquisitors what they wanted to hear, and in doing so assured that they would be back. There was, he testified, a conspiracy to slip anti-capitalist, un-American propaganda into Hollywood films, and it was led by the screenwriters. “They en-deavor to inject it,” he said. “Whatever I could do about it—I took out.”
Stretching the truth, he added, “Anyone I thought was a Communist or read in the papers that he was, I dismissed at the expiration of his contract.”
He then listed sixteen suspect writers, including Lawson, Trumbo, Ring Lardner Jr., Irwin Shaw, and Clifford Odets, many of whom were still typing away in studio bungalows in Burbank.26
Like the moguls, the anti-Communist liberals of ADA, including Reagan, didn’t pay too much mind to HUAC’s Hollywood foray. But four nights after Jack Warner testified, PCA held a rally for Henry Wallace at which J. Parnell Thomas and “all their ilk” were denounced by the star speaker, Katharine Hepburn. Her fiery speech had been written partly by one of Warner’s listees, Dalton Trumbo; another, Ring Lardner Jr., had scripted the movie that launched her on-screen partnership—and off-screen romance—with Spencer Tracy. A Bryn Mawr graduate, Hepburn inherited her progressivism from old-money East Coast parents who prided themselves on their unconventionality: her father, a prominent Hartford surgeon, was a longtime Henry Wallace admirer; her mother, born a Houghton in Boston, was a suffragette and early birth control militant. By 1947 the thirty-eight-year-old actress had already won her first Oscar and been nominated for three more, but she was more respected than beloved in Hollywood, where she was perceived as a lock-jawed snob and an eccentric radical. Yet she managed to get along with Loyal and Edith Davis when she and Tracy were their houseguests in Chicago.
The playwright Arthur Laurents, then a young screenwriter at MGM, accompanied Hepburn, Tracy, and Irene Selznick (the more unconventional of Louis B. Mayer’s two daughters) to the PCA rally that night. In his memoir, Original Story By, Laurents captures the drama and glamour, the sheer 2 0 0
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House spectacle, of Hollywood politics at the time—and also reveals its precious-ness:
The Progressive Citizens of America held a big rally at Gilmore Stadium for Henry Wallace as part of a drive to stem right-wing attacks on unions and the arts. . . . At the most dramatic moment, at the peak of excitement, a very high platform was hit with blazing spotlights and there was Katharine Hepburn in a red Valentina gown.
The stadium roared. Hepburn’s grin carried to the top of the bleach-ers and she delivered magnificently a speech fighting the destruction of culture. The crowd wouldn’t stop cheering. Henry Wallace could have been elected president if Katharine Hepburn, in that red dress, on that blazing tower, could have been transported from city to city all over the land.
Afterward, she, Tracy, Irene, and I went back to her house on Tower Drive, high in the Beverly hills. She was euphoric, proud of her speech. I had been one of the writers of that speech. . . .
Tracy was bothered by the speech, more that she had made any speech at all. Actors had no place in politics, period, according to Spencer Tracy. I’d heard that before, I was sure I’d hear it again, but I never once heard it from a liberal. Only from the most conservative—and Spencer Tracy, congenial and pleasant as he was, was a right-winger. So was Louis B. Mayer. So were Cecil B. DeMille and Sam Wood. So were Barbara Stanwyck and R
onald Reagan and George Murphy, John Wayne, Ginger Rogers—stars born on the wrong side of the tracks who thought playing footsie with conservatives would allow them to cross over.27
Ronald Reagan was not yet a full-fledged right-winger in mid-1947—
and George Murphy was born on the Yale campus, where his father was a famous track coach—but the point Laurents makes is a valid one. Consciously or not, social motives often color political views. So does the company one keeps. Reagan’s postwar friends—the guys he went out for a drink with after SAG meetings, the couples he and Jane saw at Saturday night dinner parties and Sunday afternoon barbecues—were mostly self-made and mostly Republican. Even those who generally avoided party politics—the Bennys, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Claudette Colbert—
were intrinsically conservative, patriotic, entrepreneurial, and obsessively concerned with the high taxes they were paying on their six-figure incomes.
Divorce: 1947–1948
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Reagan considered Bill Holden, who was seven years younger, his best friend. A moderate Republican, the handsome actor was known as Golden Holden, partly because his first hit film, released in 1939, was Golden Boy; partly because he had grown up in monied South Pasadena and his mother was descended from George Washington.28 Ronnie and Jane were also close to Dick Powell and June Allyson, the vivacious young blonde Powell had wed in August 1945, a month after divorcing Joan Blondell. Powell had been in films with both Ronnie and Jane: The Cowboy from Brooklyn, among others, with him, and two musicals, Gold Diggers of 1937 and The Singing Marine, with her. June Allyson recalled in her 1982 memoir, “Ronnie and Richard were close buddies—a love of arguing politics drew them together just as a distaste for the same subject brought me and Jane Wyman together in a fortuitous blending of couples.”29
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