Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked

by Chris Matthews

  Yet in life, just as in the movies, the illusion is everything. When you’re seeing the finished, glossy production, as Tip was, you’re not rooting around for the discarded scenes. As any student of Ronald Wilson Reagan’s origins knows, the script for the future president’s story threw plenty of obstacles in his way early on.

  He’d come into the world in Tampico, Illinois, a hamlet around one hundred miles west of Chicago. Over the next seven years the Reagans moved five times in Illinois, including a stint in Chicago itself, but eventually returned to Tampico, where they lived above the local variety store until young Ron—nicknamed “Dutch” (“he looks like a fat Little Dutchman,” his father said of the newborn)—was nine. Now they moved again, to the much larger town of Dixon. His father, Jack, a salesman, proved a not so able provider, and keeping two growing boys fed was often a struggle for Nelle, his mother. Neil Reagan, Reagan’s older brother and only sibling, remembered being sent out for a ten-cent soup bone; it would have to stretch through an entire week of dinners. In ways like this Nelle Reagan continually put her natural optimism to work for her, a trait she’d pass on to her second son.

  The family situation wasn’t helped by the fact that Jack Reagan drank too much, suffering—and forcing his wife and children to suffer—from what his younger son would term “the Irish curse.” Reagan would write, painfully, of having returned home one afternoon to the sight of his father sprawled out on the front porch, a spectacle for the neighbors to see, judge, and share. And yet the difficulties of his home life didn’t prevent Dutch Reagan from playing varsity football his last two years—though passionately determined, he’d been too small until then—and being popular enough to be elected Dixon High student body president when he was a senior. He was also president of the Dramatic Club.

  As he entered his late teens, Reagan looked past his family and its difficulties to begin taking charge of the future he wanted for himself, a path that would test both his ambition and his ingenuity. Setting out to convince Eureka College to help with the costs of his education—it was 1928, the year before the Great Depression began—he did the job so well they wound up offering a scholarship fully covering his tuition as well as half his board. To pay for the difference he worked as a “hasher,” serving meals, first for a fraternity, later at a girls’ dorm.

  When he first headed west after graduating from college—his majors had been economics and sociology—he made it only as far as another midwestern hub, Davenport, Iowa, just across the Illinois border. There he landed a slot as a sportscaster in a budding medium open to newcomers: radio. After Davenport, once he’d gained experience behind the microphone, he struck out and headed due west again, making it this time just a bit farther into Iowa, to a station in Des Moines.

  Then, finally, he was ready for the biggest western leap of all: California. In 1937, five years after saying good-bye to Illinois, it was now “goodbye sports . . . hello Hollywood!” for the twenty-six-year-old Reagan. It made perfect sense.

  Nancy Reagan, who knew her husband better than anyone, later succinctly explained to me: he couldn’t get stuck out there in middle America. She understood her future husband’s youthful yearnings to escape because she’d once experienced them herself. A native New Yorker, she’d moved to Chicago at the age of eight when her divorced mother remarried. Returning after her four years at Smith College, she, too, managed to escape and never come back. They were two of a kind—the kind that didn’t stay put until they got where they were meant to be.

  It was a moment of manifest destiny: Ronald Reagan proceeding all the way west for the first time. He’d gone as a radio sportscaster, sent to Los Angeles to report on spring training. But the chance to take a Warner Bros. screen test trumped his original purpose, to keep an eye on the Chicago Cubs, warming up for the season on Catalina Island.

  As they say in politics, you make your breaks. In Los Angeles, he spotted a poster advertising the evening’s entertainment in the Biltmore Hotel’s ballroom. One performer was a singer he knew from Des Moines. He sent a note inviting her to dinner between shows. This led to her offering to introduce him to her agent, who in turn proved able to arrange a screen test for the young radio announcer. It was a break that led to a two-hundred-dollar-a-week, seven-year Warner Bros. contract that Reagan quickly signed, agreeing with the stipulation that he be billed as Ronald, not “Dutch,” Reagan, the name he’d been going by. He was on his way.

  Reagan’s first film saw him playing a radio reporter, the very job he’d just left behind. Love Is on the Air was a B picture shot and released quickly as the second half of a double feature. The reviews in the trades were approving, “likeable” being the basic verdict—and, of course, they weren’t wrong. It would prove to be his lifelong signature quality. Over the next few years, Ronald Reagan, working regularly, turned up—more than once, as I’ve said—as Brass Bancroft the Secret Service agent. He appeared as a military cadet in the 1938 comedy Brother Rat with Jane Wyman, whom he’d soon make his first wife, and as an army private in Sergeant Murphy (1938), the title character of which was a horse. In a change of pace, he was a pleasure-loving playboy in the Bette Davis picture Dark Victory (1939). His big break arrived in 1940, the year Knute Rockne—All American was released.

  On the Warner lot, Reagan had become pals with Pat O’Brien, one of the most prolific stars of the era and the leader of Hollywood’s “Irish mafia,” a group that included James Cagney, Spencer Tracy, and others. Each day at lunch in the Warner Bros. commissary O’Brien would hold court, surrounded by his buddies, and before long he invited Reagan to join the gang.

  When O’Brien won the part of famed Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne in a highly anticipated upcoming biopic, he soon learned from Reagan how eager he was to be in it, and that he’d grown up worshipping both Rockne and George Gipp, the young football player who’d died in 1920 just days after leading his team to victory. The young Reagan had been so taken with the Gipp story that he’d once even started writing a screenplay of his own. To press his case at Warner Bros., he brought in his college yearbook, which showed him on the playing field. In an effort to help, O’Brien made sure the studio bosses knew the young contract actor was the real deal. “This is a helluva important role. A lot of the people you have under contract don’t know a football from a cantaloupe. This guy does,” O’Brien told Jack Warner.

  In a further effort to help, O’Brien interceded with producer Hal Wallis on behalf of his younger friend. Finding Wallis initially reluctant, he then extended himself in an even larger gesture, offering to read Rockne’s lines for the screen test Reagan needed to ace in order to win the part. It all helped. When Knute Rockne—All American premiered in South Bend, Indiana, home of the University of Notre Dame, a quarter million fans greeted the cast. The Gipper role would prove a turning point in Ronald Reagan’s career.

  Reagan’s next career peak—the role he himself considered his best—was Kings Row, in which he played, as he often did in those years, the hero’s best friend. Opening in early 1942, just months after Pearl Harbor, Kings Row established its claim on filmic immortality by virtue of a simple five-word question: “Where’s the rest of me?” It’s what Reagan’s character, Drake McHugh, demands to know after waking from surgery to discover both his legs amputated by a sadistic doctor. Reagan would go on to make the famous line the title of his 1965 autobiography.

  Measured by box office, though, the most important movie for the future president was a film released in 1942, Desperate Journey. It reteamed him with Errol Flynn. Two years earlier they’d appeared together in Santa Fe Trail, in a thrilling wartime tale directed by Michael Curtiz, best known today for Casablanca. Desperate Journey follows the perilous path through Nazi Germany of an RAF bomber crew shot down and trying, against enormous odds, to escape. It was the number-two-grossing film of the year, second only to the enormously loved Mrs. Miniver.

  Yet by the time Kings Row and Desperate Journey opened, they were showing to a country that was not
the same as when the movies were filmed. On December 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor was attacked, Franklin D. Roosevelt went before Congress to ask it to declare the United States officially at war. If America was at war, so was Hollywood. The movie industry, an important one for national morale, became a critical part of the war effort.

  The month before he’d moved to Los Angeles from Des Moines, Reagan had joined the Army Enlisted Reserve. Arriving in Hollywood, he was appointed second lieutenant in the cavalry. With the United States now in the war, he was ordered to active duty—it was April 1942, two months after Kings Row had opened in theaters. His eyesight—he suffered from astigmatism—kept him from assignment to a combat unit.

  Transferring from the cavalry to the Army Air Corps, the actor was sent first to a public relations unit and then to the just-created First Motion Picture Unit. Never before had a military unit been made up completely of movie professionals dedicated to putting all their skills, talent, and imagination into training and propaganda films. It was this unit, based in Culver City in the former Hal Roach Studios (once home to Laurel and Hardy, among other comedy greats, and now dubbed Fort Roach), to which Ronald Reagan would be attached for most of the rest of the war. In 1943, a twenty-two-minute film he’d narrated, Beyond the Line of Duty, won the Oscar for “Best Short Subject.” Though he both appeared in and voiced-over numerous movies, he was also the unit’s personnel officer, and at the end of his active duty in 1945, when he returned to civilian life, he held the rank of captain.

  Wars leave no one they’ve touched the same. Though he’d spent the years of World War II far from the front, making films in Culver City and Burbank, Ronald Reagan had served honorably. He’d contributed exactly as the U.S. government had called upon him to do. Yet not only did the postwar landscape he confronted now look and seem different; so did he.

  One of those who apparently saw him in a new—and unflattering—light was his wife of eight years, Jane Wyman. They’d married in 1940, two years after shooting Brother Rat together. She’d become a Warner contract player in 1936 at nineteen, having appeared, though often as an uncredited chorus girl, in thirty or so pictures by the time they started dating. A native Missourian, she, too, had gotten her showbiz start in radio, as a singer. She’d also been twice married by the time she walked down the aisle with Reagan.

  But by 1948, when they divorced, she was the bigger star of the two. She’d been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1946, for The Yearling, and in 1948 won it for Johnny Belinda. Given the couple’s high profile, the Hollywood gossip mills went to town avidly recycling all the cruel remarks she’d allegedly made about her spouse and the father of her two children. For his part, Reagan seemed to be in denial and still deeply devoted to his marriage.

  Wyman was said to have confided in a friend one night at a cocktail party: “Don’t ask Ronnie what time it is because he will tell you how a watch is made.” As far as she was concerned, her soon-to-be ex-husband number three was “America’s number one goody two shoes.” She on the other hand had recently taken a lover—Lew Ayres, her Johnny Belinda costar. Her cruelest line may well have been delivered to Reagan face-to-face when he returned home one day from work: “You bore me,” she said. “Leave!”

  • • •

  Long before his divorce from Wyman, and even their marriage itself, Reagan had developed an obsessive passion of his own: politics. By his own account, it had begun back in 1928, the year he entered Eureka College. There, he and his fellow students, angered by the administration’s decision to eliminate a number of courses—which also meant laying off the professors who taught them—decided to call a strike. Such a protest would shut down the campus. But the stand was worth making, the student leaders felt, and, despite his freshman status, Dutch Reagan was the one picked, at the meeting of the entire student body, to make the motion to strike.

  Here’s how he recalled the impact the speech had on the audience, but most of all on him: “When I came to actually presenting the motion . . . they came to their feet with a roar—even the faculty members present voted by acclamation. It was heady wine. Hell, with two more lines, I could have had them riding through ‘every Middlesex village and farm’—without horses yet.”

  When it came to Hollywood actors, the truth was there was something about Ronald Reagan that set him apart. Soon after he’d arrived on the Warner lot a decade earlier, colleagues noticed he paid as much attention to actual news headlines as the ones in Daily Variety. Robert Cummings, his Kings Row costar, recalled Reagan holding forth frequently on the set. “All the cast used to sit around waiting for the cameramen to light the scene—sometimes it was long, tedious hours, because almost all of the entire outdoor scenes were shot indoors. So we’d listen to Ronnie talk about foreign affairs and the economy and things like that. . . . Whether he knew what he was doing at the time or not, I don’t know—it wasn’t a lecture—but he took the center of the stage.”

  Ron Reagan, the president’s son—by his second wife, Nancy, whom Ronald married in 1952—later would describe his father as having had two selves. One, he wrote, was the “public” Reagan who “wanted and needed acclaim and recognition” but would “disavow ambition.” Alongside this visible Reagan, he believed, existed another “private” one, within whom the drive to get ahead “burned with a cold but steady flame.” According to the younger Reagan, the Ronald Reagan whom the world assumed it knew “could not have existed without the Ronald Reagan he rarely let anyone see.” In the years following World War II, as Reagan faced setbacks, that hidden, private self seems to have been the main engine of the changes and choices he faced and made. It was also the part of Ronald Reagan that was deeply driven by his political thinking.

  In the late 1940s, he realized he wasn’t being considered for parts that would have been offered to him after Kings Row and Desperate Journey— that is, if he hadn’t spent those World War II years in uniform. The world had moved on, other handsome newcomers were arriving, and audience tastes were changing.

  It’s not that he had no work in front of the cameras during this period. He shot a few B pictures every year, including the much-remembered Bedtime for Bonzo (1951). It’s that the gleam of Ronald Reagan, movie star, had lost much of its previous luster. The charmed existence that Tip O’Neill imagined was his rival’s lifelong birthright was nowhere to be seen. Though Reagan had gotten out of Illinois just as he’d always meant to, had gone on to appear on movie posters and had his name lit brightly on marquees, his career now looked to be headed downward. What remained to him were the grit and resilience—an integral part of his secret self—that adversaries would continue to underestimate at their peril.

  Offscreen, Reagan’s marriage in 1952 to Nancy Davis—a young actress ten years his junior—was the best evidence that fortune could still favor him. Their union was the stuff of fan magazines: she’d dated Clark Gable, and William Holden was best man at their wedding. But it was Nancy’s rock-solid devotion to her husband and belief in him that made her exactly the soul mate he needed. “My life really began when I married my husband,” she often said. The same, most certainly, could be said for Ronald Reagan.

  Politically, Reagan was evolving. While Nancy’s own loyalties were influenced by her stepfather Loyal Davis’s staunch Republicanism, his new son-in-law—who’d voted for FDR, supported the New Deal, campaigned for Harry Truman, and, more than that, had backed Helen Gahagan Douglas in her California Senate race against Richard Nixon—would remain a registered Democrat for another decade.

  In 1937 Reagan had joined the Screen Actors Guild shortly after arriving in Hollywood. He’d gone onto its board as an alternate in 1941. Then, after the war, he resumed his involvement (serving at one point as an alternate for Boris Karloff). In 1946 he became vice president, and the next year, the guild’s president. SAG was then involved in a bitter dispute with a craft union coalition, the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), whose hard-left leadership wanted its support. Ugly violence ha
d broken out at the Warner Bros. gates between strikers and those wanting to cross the CSU picket lines. In the weeks that followed, Reagan became a persuasive SAG voice against continuing to honor those picket lines, and many fellow union members began falling in step behind him. Threatened by anonymous phone calls, he began carrying a .32 pistol. His rousing speech to the SAG membership now produced a stunning return-to-work vote: 2,748 to 509. The studio bosses also applauded his position. “Ronnie Reagan has turned out to be a tower of strength,” declared Jack Warner, “not only for the actors but for the whole industry.”

  Reagan would go on to serve as SAG president for a total of seven terms. Despite his long-held ambition to act and to be thought well of as an actor, he was proving a natural at this real-life role he liked to call the “citizen-politician.” Those who want to dismiss Ronald Reagan merely as a good-looking guy inspired to enter politics as his screen career started fading should take a moment to consider the heartfelt eloquence of testimony he gave in the fall of 1947, seven months after being elected president of the Screen Actors Guild. His audience: the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). The issue: communist influence in the movie industry.

  Like many other Hollywood liberals of his era, Reagan walked a middle line between the arch anticommunists and those more tolerantly inclined. While acknowledging that the Communist Party undoubtedly wished to exploit Hollywood as a propaganda tool in any way it could, he vehemently objected to the idea that they were getting away with it. When asked by Robert Stripling, HUAC’s chief investigator, “What steps should be taken to rid the motion picture industry of any communist influences?” here was Reagan’s reply:

  • • •

  Well, sir, ninety-nine percent of us are pretty well aware of what is going on, and I think, within the bounds of our democratic rights and never once stepping over the rights given us by democracy, we have done a pretty good job in our business of keeping those people’s activities curtailed. After all, we must recognize them at present as a political party. On that basis we have exposed their lies when we came across them, we have opposed their propaganda, and I can certainly testify that in the case of the Screen Actors Guild we have been eminently successful in preventing them from, with their usual tactics, trying to run a majority of an organization with a well-organized minority.