by Bob Spitz
ALSO BY BOB SPITZ
Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child
The Saucier’s Apprentice
Yeah, Yeah, Yeah (Young Adult)
The Beatles: The Biography
Shoot Out the Lights
Barefoot in Babylon
Dylan: A Biography
The Making of Superstars
PENGUIN PRESS
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Copyright © 2018 by Bob Spitz
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Spitz, Bob, author.
Title: Reagan : an American journey / Bob Spitz.
Description: New York, New York : Penguin Press, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018019603 (print) | LCCN 2018025882 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525560272 (ebook) | ISBN 9781594205316 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Reagan, Ronald. | Presidents—United States—Biography. | Governors—California—Biography. | Motion picture actors and actresses—United States—Biography. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Presidents & Heads of State. | POLITICAL SCIENCE / Government / Executive Branch. | HISTORY / United States / 20th Century.
Classification: LCC E877 (ebook) | LCC E877 .S75 2018 (print) | DDC 973.927092 [B] —dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018019603
Version_1
To
Barbara Aikman
for her wisdom and generosity
and
Becky Aikman
for the same—and everything else
If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON
If you have a bat in your hand, you have a chance to change the story line.
—REGGIE JACKSON
CONTENTS
Also by Bob Spitz
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
PROLOGUE
PART 1
DUTCH
CHAPTER 1 || An Ideal Place
CHAPTER 2 || “A Little Bit of a Dutchman”
CHAPTER 3 || “The Happiest Times of My Life”
CHAPTER 4 || Ready to Shine
CHAPTER 5 || “Everyone’s Hero”
CHAPTER 6 || “Living the Gospel”
CHAPTER 7 || “The Disappearance of Margaret”
CHAPTER 8 || “A People-Pleaser”
CHAPTER 9 || “Another Robert Taylor”
PART 2
RONNIE
CHAPTER 10 || Letting Dutch Go
CHAPTER 11 || “Button Nose”
CHAPTER 12 || “Where’s . . . Where’s the Rest of Me?”
CHAPTER 13 || In the Army Now
CHAPTER 14 || “A Dangerous Man”
CHAPTER 15 || Trouble in Paradise
CHAPTER 16 || The Blue Period
CHAPTER 17 || “Nancy (with the Laughing Face)”
CHAPTER 18 || “Ronnie’s Finest Hour”
CHAPTER 19 || Moving from Left to Right
CHAPTER 20 || An “Apprenticeship for Public Life”
CHAPTER 21 || The Friends of Ronald Reagan
CHAPTER 22 || The Citizen Politician
PART 3
GOVERNOR
CHAPTER 23 || “Prairie Fire”
CHAPTER 24 || The Non-Candidate
CHAPTER 25 || The Conservation Governor
CHAPTER 26 || “A Horse of a Different Color”
CHAPTER 27 || “Momentum”
CHAPTER 28 || The Front-runner
CHAPTER 29 || “Big Mo”
CHAPTER 30 || “A Referendum on Unhappiness”
PART 4
MR. PRESIDENT
CHAPTER 31 || “The O and W”
CHAPTER 32 || Survival of the Fittest
CHAPTER 33 || Cracks in the Foundation
CHAPTER 34 || War and Peace
CHAPTER 35 || Urgent Fury
CHAPTER 36 || “Teflon Man”
CHAPTER 37 || “Let Reagan Be Reagan”
CHAPTER 38 || Into the Abyss
CHAPTER 39 || “A Fresh Start”
CHAPTER 40 || “So Far Down the Road”
CHAPTER 41 || “Back on the Roller Coaster”
CHAPTER 42 || Snakebit
CHAPTER 43 || Reclaiming the Spotlight
CHAPTER 44 || The Long Goodbye
CHAPTER 45 || An Ordinary Citizen
CHAPTER 46 || “The Sunset”
Photographs
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Image Credits
Index
About the Author
PROLOGUE
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA—FEBRUARY 15, 1954
Ronald Reagan had lost his way.
Identical corridors splayed through the Hotel Last Frontier like spokes on a wheel, and none of them seemed to lead to the Ramona Room. One spoke led off to the Gay ’90s Bar, where the Kirby Stone Four were setting up for their midnight-to-dawn gig. Another cut through the 21 Club Casino, whose rows of ravenous slot machines were clacking away like castanets. The hall to the left emptied into the Carillo Room, a tony watering hole for the after-show crowds, and past that to the Chuck Wagon, its wood-paneled pub. A fifth spoke descended to a subterranean passage known to hotel guests as the Marine Room, offering underwater glimpses into the deep end of the pool. The Ramona Room, for all Ronald Reagan knew, might have been located on Mars.
He stood at the hub, deciding which way to turn, like a piece on a game board. The wrong move would make him late for his own opening night.
The Last Frontier had pulled out all the stops for its Ronald Reagan showcase. The hotel’s nightclub was known for its top-flight entertainers, but rarely attracted Hollywood stars. Most actors steered clear of Las Vegas engagements, fearing its seamy aura would tarnish their fame. But Reagan, whose own aura of late had dimmed, had little choice.
He was forty-three and experiencing what he referred to as “some rough sledding,” a Hollywood euphemism for a career on the skids. His contract at Warner Bros., where he’d been a studio stalwart since 1936, had ended in a whimper of lowly scripts and lower box-office receipts. Freed to work for any studio, he hadn’t fared much better. He made, in his words, “a couple of turkeys”—Tropic Zone, an unimaginative action yarn, at Paramount, even though he “knew the script was hopeless,” followed by Law and Order at Universal, based on a stale, B-western formula. Since then, he’d rejected every dismal script, setting off a six-month drought. It was the longest layoff of his professional career.
Throughout that career, Ronald Reagan had been a reliable if unspectacular movie star, with a body of solid roles to his credit. Pictures like Knute Rockne, All-American and Kings Row had elevated him from feature player to marquee prominence. His agent, Lew Wasserman, was a powerhouse, the capo di tutti capi, with the clout to keep Reagan gainfully employed. In 1947, Reagan had been elected president of the Screen Actors Guild, a position that best
owed prestige even as the parts failed to measure up. And his new wife, Nancy Davis, ten years his junior, attractive and smart, was what Hollywood called a comer. Together, they spent nights dancing at the Mocambo and Ciro’s or in their booth at Chasen’s, breaking bread with the Dick Powells or the Jack Bennys or the Bill Holdens—Hollywood royalty. On the surface, Ronald Reagan was similarly enthroned.
But in the film business, the surface was usually make-believe. Reagan was still handsome, still virile, still radiantly charming, but he was too old now to play the lead in a romance or action flick, he didn’t sing or dance well enough to do musicals, and he wasn’t the subtle kind of actor who might get parts in more nuanced fare. So at the moment, the Reagans were in a real crunch.
Money was tight. Having gone for a while without getting his standard $75,000-per-movie fee, Reagan had been dipping into savings to cover his myriad necessities. There was child support to his ex-wife, Jane Wyman, and a new, unexpected baby, Patti, his first with Nancy. He was paying off two homes—a new hideaway in Pacific Palisades and a 350-acre ranch, Yearling Row, in the Malibu Hills—that together required three mortgages. The ranch, in particular, was a financial black hole: $15,000 in new pumps to make the water potable, veterinary care for fifty steer that had contracted pink eye, unanticipated fees to ranch hands. And taxes. Taxes! They were enough to send Ronald Reagan’s blood pressure soaring. The federal government had him in a chokehold. He had made a serious tax miscalculation that plunged him into debt to Uncle Sam. During World War II, when Reagan served in an Army Air Force stateside unit, he took advantage of a serviceman’s right to defer taxes until after the war. Reagan had heard that servicemen after World War I had been forgiven their tax debts, and he gambled on a similar gift the second time around. Gambled—and lost, bumping him into a predatory tax bracket that left him $18,000 in the hole. To make matters worse, in addition to his screen layoff, there had been a freak accident—a broken leg sustained in a charity softball game—that sidelined him for another long stretch, as hospital fees in the five figures piled up.
“I’m living from guest shot to guest shot on television, and an occasional personal appearance,” he complained to a friend who had recently thrown him a bone of a role: to narrate a public service film for North American Rockwell, the military manufacturing behemoth, that would pay him scale, around $240.
Money was so tight that he shopped a radio series based on the hijinks “of a Hollywood couple, an Actor and Actress who go into ranching,” but no one bit. Then came the biggest blow. Just before Christmas, Reagan accepted a part in a picture called Prisoner of War to begin filming at MGM in the spring. But the script, about American captives during the Korean War, was a feeble piece of work designed to take advantage of recent headlines. When Reagan accepted it without so much as a hiccup, Lew Wasserman palmed his client off on a second-string colleague, more or less scuttling their longtime relationship.
Reagan’s new agent, Art Park, scrambled to come up with something lucrative. Broadway beckoned, but Reagan was adamantly opposed to moving to New York. Television, still in its infancy, had become a viable option, where an actor of Reagan’s particular stature would feel right at home. He had nothing against TV; some of his best friends wound up there. But a series . . . just didn’t feel right. He was convinced that after two or three years playing the same one-dimensional role—say, a masked man with an Indian sidekick or a father who knew best—it would be difficult for producers to see him as anything else.
When Art Park proposed doing a Vegas nightclub act, Reagan didn’t immediately reject it. Yes, it was preposterous, well beneath his standards, but the money Park mentioned was too good to dismiss. Reagan could make as much in two weeks as he could over several months on a picture. And it was easy work. Over the years, as a popular emcee on the mashed-potato circuit—a backdrop that included meetings, rallies, and charitable benefits—he’d introduced hundreds of acts with humorous patter. He was a natural at it. That was all that would be expected of him in Las Vegas. Billed as “Ronald Reagan Presents,” he’d introduce four or five acts each night—a couple of singing groups, a comic, a dancer, whomever the hotel had booked—tell a few jokes, maybe join in a skit with the featured act, nothing he’d be uncomfortable with.
Reagan thought it over. It didn’t demean his dignity, it wasn’t humiliating work. In essence, he saw himself “as sort of an impresario,” like Ted Mack or his old friend Louella Parsons, in whose traveling review he once appeared. That experience, in 1939, had been pretty much of a hoot. “Louella Parsons and Her Stars” crisscrossed the country, playing to packed houses everywhere they landed. He loved cavorting in the skits with Joy Hodges and Susan Hayward; it’s where he fell in love with Jane Wyman, another member of the Parsons cast. With the right material, he’d feel at ease.
Reagan’s agency, MCA, had deep roots in Las Vegas. Its beginnings in show business, booking talent into nightclubs and ballrooms, gave the agency the kind of primacy that packed Vegas showrooms with its clients. MCA had relationships with every hotel in town. All it took was a phone call to book the Ronald Reagan Show.
The El Rancho was the obvious choice. It was the first resort on the Strip and boasted the largest casino in Nevada, where no less than Howard Hughes was a regular at the blackjack tables. Its lounge, the Round-Up Room, was a Vegas institution, whose recent lineup of headliners included Buddy Hackett, Vic Damone, Nat King Cole, Hoagy Carmichael, and Joe E. Lewis. If one’s reputation was determined by the company one kept, Ronald Reagan had nothing to fear.
The deal was negotiated in a matter of minutes, and fell apart in almost as little time. The El Rancho’s owner, Beldon Katleman, insisted the show run over the Christmas holiday, which was a deal breaker as far as Reagan was concerned. Christmas with the family was sacrosanct and unfit for Las Vegas. The coup de grâce, however, was the headliner, Lili St. Cyr, one of America’s premier strippers, “who left almost nothing to the imagination when she stepped dripping wet out of her onstage bubble bath.” Reagan was having none of it, and directed his agent to cancel the deal.
Within minutes, another offer materialized at the Last Frontier, just down the Strip. The Last Frontier held more promise than its name. The hotel was part of a vast resort complex just off US-91, the Last Frontier Village, one of those kitschy tourist attractions designed to resemble an abandoned ghost town from the Gold Rush days. Guests could visit the Old Trading Post or head over to the stables, with its collection of antique stagecoaches, or ride the bumper cars. The Shooting Gallery boasted a $100,000 collection of guns and pistols. There was a museum of mechanical pianos, and a miniature train traveled around the entire grounds. After a day’s sightseeing and with the kids tucked in bed, adults gathered in the hotel’s casino and showroom, where a who’s who of entertainers played to sellout crowds—Xavier Cugat & His Latin-American Orchestra, Dorothy Lamour, Señor Wences, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Howard Keel, Abbe Lane, and the Liberace/Phil Foster Show. In August, the legendary Dorsey brothers, Tommy and Jimmy, were reunited onstage after twenty years of leading competing bands. The only hitch came when Dorothy Dandridge, the first black actress nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress, performed. As a condition of her residency, she was warned not to go anywhere near the swimming pool, which was still strictly segregated. When she hinted she might “stick her toe in the water,” the pool was suddenly “under construction” and closed to everyone for the duration. Had Ronald Reagan known about the treatment of Dandridge, he might have balked, but that little tidbit had been carefully concealed.
MCA wanted him focused on the showcase, certain he would be scrutinized by tastemakers for future work. It was a demanding routine—two shows a night, three on Saturday, each running a little over an hour and a half—showbiz lite, placing it somewhere just north of vaudeville. He would top-line a bill featuring four frothy acts: the Continentals, a veteran male quartet that mixed barber-shop songs, soft-shoe, and knockabout schtic
k; the Blackburn Twins, with Evelyn Ward, a glamorous Broadway showgirl and mother of future pop star David Cassidy; the Honey Brothers, a trio of dancing acrobats; and the Last Frontier Dancers, nicknamed the Adorabelles, who high-kicked their way through a chorus line, dressed in skimpy peekaboo costumes.
It was a fast-moving show, with a number of tricky entrances and well-timed choreography, all the more difficult for a nightclub novice who, according to critics, was “no singer or dancer and could scarcely qualify as a comedian.”
Ronald Reagan had worked hard to nail down his part. In January, he and the Continentals had set up shop on a Hollywood soundstage, rehearsing bits in sessions that often lasted four hours or more. Nancy sat quietly in a corner of the room, sipping ice water and scribbling notes on a legal pad. “She was a great audience for him,” said comedy writer John Bradford, “because she laughed at every one of his jokes.” At the outset, Reagan “was rough as a cob,” but he “was a fast study [who] must have worked hard at home in the evenings,” honing his part after those grueling workouts. “By the end of the first week, he was moving like the rest of us,” recalled Ben Cruz, a member of the group. In early February, they tried out the act at the Statler Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, spending a week polishing the routines in front of an audience, at the end of which they were good to go.
Las Vegas, however, presented a different set of circumstances. The audiences were larger—the Ramona Room was a hearty 600-seat theater—and more discerning; they could just as easily wander up the Strip to the Thunderbird, where the Four Aces were appearing, or over to the Sahara for Kathryn Grayson and the Sonja Henie ice show; the Desert Inn’s marquee advertised Jackie Miles, billed somewhat extravagantly as “America’s Leading Night Club Entertainer and Comedian,” while Tallulah Bankhead cavorted at the Sands “in a flimsy, see-through dress that shocked even Las Vegas.” The competition was fierce. Ronald Reagan had to be on top of his game.
Not wanting to cut things close, he and Nancy had arrived in Vegas a few days early. The surroundings were still pretty foreign to him. Reagan wasn’t a gambler or much of a drinker. He and Nancy kept to themselves and spent their days lounging by the pool with their noses in books. Still, he managed to make a few waves.