by Bob Spitz
Reagan was still smarting from his Hollywood woes and had expressed as much in an interview with Bob Thomas, who covered the movie business for the Associated Press. In particular, he resented the decline of the studio system, forcing bona fide stars—like himself—to freelance in other media. “This business was built on the basis of offering the public stars they could see nowhere else,” he argued. If John Q. Public can encounter you in places like the legitimate stage or on TV or in Las Vegas, he “will certainly think twice before paying to see a movie with a star he has seen so often” elsewhere.
Reagan also lit into what he called the “benefit bureaucrats,” who put the squeeze on actors to appear for free at charity functions, especially telethons, where “the net return comes to something like a nickel a head.” He’d done a slew of them himself to no real effect, and it disturbed him to see screen idols like Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart herded across a stage, while only the producers of the events profited from their appearance.
But Reagan knew the score. Only a year earlier, he’d told a group of Kiwanis, “If you didn’t sing or dance in the Hollywood of my day, you wound up as an after-dinner speaker.”
Bob Thomas knew he could count on Ronald Reagan to provide some juice for his column, comments that strayed beyond simply promoting the Vegas opening. In Hollywood, Reagan had always been a columnist’s dream source. He was eminently approachable, an actor who didn’t shy from the press or buckle to the dictates of studio publicists. Thomas had often relied on him for quotes that were thoughtful, even somewhat flammable, as did those irrepressible yentas Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper. This issue of actors working for free was a case in point. It was a persistent plaint in Reagan’s repertoire of workforce grievances. Publicity for the Vegas debut offered another forum in which to air his opinion.
* * *
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Ronald Reagan had never shrunk from expressing himself about the kinds of contentious issues that other actors went out of their way to avoid. He’d never been shy about speaking out, taking a stand. As a freshman in college, he happily allowed himself to be recruited to lead a student strike by upperclassmen. After school, his honeyed Midwestern voice drew listeners from five states to his nightly radio broadcasts of Cubs games and variety shows. And in Hollywood, he was elected by a broad consensus of his peers to head the preeminent Screen Actors Guild in a highly unusual perch for such a relatively modest screen star. He won the gratitude of his fellow actors for his efforts to wrest professional respect from tyrannical studio bosses and ease labor unrest and, more controversially, to fight against communist influence infiltrating the ranks. It was this latter concern—the spread of communism, of “Russian aggression aimed at world conquest”—that impelled Ronald Reagan to engage in public dialogue that extended well beyond standard union issues and to speak before Congress in an effort to root out radicals and extremists.
Along the way, he’d formed strong opinions he felt necessary to convey—about government, the economy, a moral malaise, taxes. Above all he could communicate. He was eloquent, plainspoken, convincing. President of the Screen Actors Guild was arguably Ronald Reagan’s star turn.
But now Reagan was no longer SAG head, and his acting career seemed to be slipping away. Reagan knew the movie business was changing, the spotlight moving to younger stars like James Dean, Paul Newman, and Marlon Brando. Television was siphoning audiences away. Roles for plain-vanilla actors like Reagan were drying up; there were fewer opportunities, no guarantees for continual work. It was high time to rethink his career.
What he felt most passionate about was speaking out on issues that he believed in. He’d formed strong opinions he felt obliged to share. Politics? Friends teased him incessantly about a future on the political stage. He had a knack for politics, qualities that were perfectly suited to it, but he seemed to be getting further and further away from them. Here he was in Las Vegas of all places, introducing the Honey Brothers and the Adorabelles and giving an interview about a fairly minor issue concerning actors and freelancing. Was this all there was for him? He had a facility for something so much more than what he was doing right now. He wanted—needed—to be on a bigger stage.
Interestingly, another MCA agent, Taft Schreiber, had just floated the framework of a new kind of project. There was interest from BBD&O, the New York advertising giant, for an actor such as Ronald Reagan to serve as program supervisor for a new TV series—a dramatic anthology—that already had a sponsor in place: General Electric. There would be limited acting involved. Reagan would introduce each show as its host and occasionally function as a producer, and he could have first dibs on choice parts if he wanted.
At first, it didn’t resonate. Ronald Reagan was a hardcore skeptic where television was concerned. Even though this new medium was taking America by storm, “everyone of stature in Hollywood,” he maintained, “was delicately holding their noses about it.” His “personal interest in television was nil.”
Still, there were incentives. Reagan would get equity, a small percentage of royalties that could add, over time, to a generous salary. He’d have creative input, help select scripts—and court his Hollywood friends. The show was already attracting major stars; Cary Grant, Bill Holden, even Jane Wyman had already performed, and Reagan’s old pals Bob Hope and Jack Benny were slated for the new season. Plus, it was a family affair—produced by none other than Revue Studios, a wholly owned subsidiary of MCA, two entities Reagan was familiar with. Taft Schreiber dangled an even more delectable carrot: GE wanted its new host to spend a quarter of his time offscreen, touring the plants in its corporate empire, speaking to assembly-line employees. He’d be a traveling ambassador, exchanging ideas with regular folks.
He’d been thinking it over, weighing the pros and cons. The new places it might take him. The things he’d learn. It was an odd way to jump into public life, backed by corporate money to express a point of view, certainly not a traditional route, but it intrigued him. Instead of, say, running for the city council or state legislature, and instead of getting bogged down in the nuts and bolts of minor political issues, this might be a way to gain prominence and hone his political views. All of this was on his mind when he finally found his way to the Ramona Room and took the stage.
* * *
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Ronald Reagan was a pro, a natural the moment the spotlights hit him. He clicked right into his onstage role, the affable, aw-shucks charmer who drew audiences in by his presence alone. People liked the Ronald Reagan they encountered, the all-American image he presented. They felt they could relate to him as someone like themselves—not flashy, not glib, not in a Fred Astaire kind of way—just a man of the people, which is what he gave them that night in spades.
Reagan’s only nod to fashion was the streamlined, pocketless, black gabardine tuxedo he’d designed himself for the occasion. When the Continentals introduced him twenty minutes into their spot, the Ramona Room buzzed. He looked stunning as he ambled into view. He was tan, trim, suave, glowing: a movie star. He commanded the stage. The Continentals had lukewarmed up the crowd, singing corny old chestnuts like “Donkey Serenade” and “Flight of the Bumble Bee” accompanied by sound effects, but Reagan turned up the heat with a rat-a-tat attack of self-deprecating jokes. He opened with one of those a-funny-thing-happened-on-my-way-to-Las-Vegas bits, claiming that he was magically transformed from Hollywood typecasting as a briefcase-wielding house-husband into “a joy-boy.” In fact, his stodgy screen image was so ingrained, he said, that his last leading lady, a woman older than he, called him “father.” Seamlessly, he lapsed into a joke-filled routine that required a playful Irish brogue.
Later in the show, after dispatching the Blackburn Twins and the Adorabelles, he returned for another workout with the Continentals, this time sporting a straw hat and cane. Reagan sat on a makeshift chair formed by the legs of two group members pretending to shave his cheeks while singing the barber-shop quart
et mainstay “Sweet Adeline.” This was followed by a beer-garden skit in which he wore a Pabst Blue Ribbon apron with the legend “Vos vils du haben?” scrawled across it, danced and sang, and murdered the German language to howls of laughter. The evening ended with the star standing solo, center stage, sans props, delivering a meditation called “The Definition of an Actor,” by Irvin S. Cobb, noting how actors weren’t quite like doctors or lawyers, they didn’t do regular work, but they still left the world a better place.
Leaving the world a better place. Was he doing enough to leave the world a better place? He’d been mulling that over for the past couple of years, how he could do something about all the issues—the everyday battles confronting hardworking Americans—that had been gnawing at him. It wasn’t too late to start doing something about it. He’d made a name for himself in a superficial business, but it gave him the kind of visibility that could wield influence beyond stage and screen. His mother always told him how important it was to help others, to put the needs of those who were disadvantaged ahead of one’s own. Once, when he was in high school, she hosted a Women’s Missionary Society meeting whose topic was “The Large World—My Neighborhood.” Didn’t that just about say it all?
Las Vegas, he knew, wasn’t the answer. The nightclub act did relatively decent business—good enough to prompt an offer for a return engagement—and was well received by the critics, for the most part. But the experience left Ronald Reagan unfulfilled. He made only $5,500 a week, not the windfall he expected. And the city itself was a strange place to work, even more of a fantasyland than Hollywood, if that was possible. After the shows, when most performers hit the casino or checked out an act at a neighboring hotel, Ron and Nancy went back to their room, where they spent the time reading, talking, and thinking about the future. “The nightclub life was not for us,” she recalled.
This gave him time to think about broader issues. Reagan had become disillusioned with the direction the country was taking. The newspapers he combed through each morning were full of stories that disturbed his sense of right and wrong: the federal budget was seriously out of balance, forcing postponement of the tax reductions President Dwight D. Eisenhower had promised; Nikita Khrushchev was saber rattling; the Supreme Court had heard a case, Brown v. Board of Education, that threatened to upend how Americans sent their children to school; the Communists had stepped up their aggression in Southeast Asia; and taxes were keeping Reagan himself trapped in an 87 percent bracket.
Where did he figure into “The Large World—My Neighborhood”? Not too long ago, he’d been clearer about it. As a lifetime Roosevelt Democrat, he’d embraced the New Deal coalition, especially FDR’s efforts to encourage labor union growth and his promise to reduce the size of the federal government and cut the budget. He loved Roosevelt’s view that common people can have a vision that included all social classes for the good of the country. All of that had made perfect sense. Reagan had even supported the election of Harry Truman, whom he admired. But, lately, he’d become disillusioned with the Democratic Party and its penchant toward “encroaching government control.” Reagan deplored “the problems of centralizing power in Washington,” which he felt took inalienable rights and freedoms away from citizens such as himself. To him, it seemed the party’s liberal faction also went to great lengths to defend the shady Hollywood clique that had romanticized and dabbled in communism.
All this served to redirect Ronald Reagan’s political antennae. He’d become more agitated in the past few years, more impatient with the country’s direction, more clear-cut in his feelings about right and wrong. When it came right down to it, he’d been gravitating toward a conservative philosophy, siding with Republicans on issues concerning the economy and the spread of Soviet influence, military strength and smaller government, law enforcement and tax reform. His closest friends—Dick Powell, Bill Holden, and Bob Cummings—were steadfast Republicans who had tirelessly drawn him to their side. And he’d gone for Ike in 1952, the first time he’d ever voted for a Republican candidate.
Ronald Reagan spent the rest of his Las Vegas engagement turning everything over in his mind—how a nightclub career didn’t suit him and his movie career was very possibly over, how his new wife and new daughter gave him the kind of emotional anchor he’d never had before, how he might transition to a smaller screen where his ideas and opinions would have more of an impact (and help dig him out of debt), how his convictions and talent for airing them gave him entrée onto an entirely different stage.
These things were all starting to coalesce as Reagan returned each night to his hotel room, making his way through the mazy corridor of the Last Frontier.
Yes, Ronald Reagan had lost his way—but he thought he had found the path back.
PART 1
DUTCH
CHAPTER ONE
AN IDEAL PLACE
“It is worthwhile for anyone to have behind him a few generations of honest hardworking ancestry.”
—JOHN P. MARQUAND
More than any one person or principle, it was a place, or at least the idea of a place, that formed the bedrock of Ronald Reagan’s character. Even well into his eighties, he could still summon up a movie’s worth of memories that cast a resonant glow on his Midwest upbringing: the seemingly boundless cornfields studded with grain elevators jutting into the stratosphere; the daily caravan of boxcars rumbling over miles of newly laid track, carrying staples through the heartland; the seductive and moody Rock River, whose treacherous crosscurrents challenged him as a teenage lifeguard; the modest wood-framed family homes surrounded by white picket fences; the scenic prairie roads he hitchhiked, from Dixon to Kewanee, Danville, Rock Island, and Davenport. “My hometown was a small town, and everybody knew everyone else,” he recalled near the end of his life. In his case “hometown” was a composite of his best recollections of the whistle-stops the Reagan family made as they migrated fitfully across Illinois and Iowa, from Tampico to Galesburg to Monmouth to Dixon.
Ronald Reagan clung to a story of his Midwestern childhood that he described as “one of those rare Huck Finn-Tom Sawyer idylls.” In fact, Ronald Reagan’s upbringing owed more to the moodier, crisis-filled sagas of, say, Willa Cather or Upton Sinclair than to Mark Twain. Granted, there are many heartwarming chapters to his family history, but they are interrupted by long passages of strife and great hardship.
Ronald Reagan had little to go on when it came to his ancestry, the sketchy Reagan lineage that stretched back to nineteenth-century Ireland and Scotland. In a 1987 letter to Hollywood friends, he said, “I’ve never known anything about my father’s family,” lamenting the gaps in his family history.
His great-grandfather, Michael Reagan, with his wife, Catherine, and their three children—Thomas, John, and Margaret—stepped off the cargo ship Joseph Gilchrist in lower Manhattan in 1857. Others in the sickly, penniless O’Regan* family held on in Doolis, a mud-gash of an Irish village—just twelve sod-and-stone huts—west of Ballyporeen below the Galtee Mountains. But Doolis held no future for Michael, the “bright and ambitious” potato farmer’s son, one of the few local men able to read and write. London was his first gateway to opportunity. When he turned twenty-two, Michael made a beeline for the British capital, where he landed in an Irish ghetto in the Peckham district.
He wasn’t alone in his quest. Throughout the 1850s and 1860s, thousands of refugees from the widening Irish potato famine squeezed into Victorian London, relegated to a warren of overrun slums. North Peckham was particularly squalid, marked by high unemployment, rampant crime, raw sewage, and the inevitable cholera outbreaks that swept through the neighborhood, ravaging the population. Michael O’Regan, who took shelter in a boardinghouse with twelve fellow Irishmen at 24 Benley Street, proved luckier than many of his mates. He found steady work in a soap factory, earning enough to save a few shillings each payday.
A year after Michael settled in London, he met Catherine Mulcahy, a “gardener’s
laborer” six years his senior, who lived in a boardinghouse directly across the street. Catherine was an iron-willed woman, escaping her own sorry circumstances. Her three uncles were notorious scoundrels, overly familiar with the inside of Irish jails. Two brothers had earned their stripes by teaming up in a pub brawl that ended with a death, while the third brother, James, a notorious game poacher, was arrested for an act of “barbarity and atrocity” in which he ripped the wool off the backs of living sheep. Leaving home—an extraordinary step for a young Irish woman—gave Catherine a new purchase on life. On May 15, 1852, she gave birth to her first son, Thomas, and five months later, on October 31, Michael O’Regan and Catherine Mulcahy made it official, marrying at St. George the Martyr, a Catholic church in Southwark. Michael signed the marriage certificate “Reagan” instead of O’Regan, an act that forever altered the family name; Catherine merely scrawled an X on the space provided.
Despite gainful employment and a roof over their heads, the Reagans were eager for a change. Soapmaking was a hard business with long hours and repulsive conditions. In filthy, unventilated sheds, chandlers (as they were called) rendered chunks of slaughtered pigs for fat, then cooked the lard with lye in cauldrons over a sweltering fire before pouring the slime into trays to harden.
From the moment they touched land in New York City—“the Golden Doorway”—the new world’s promise was evident. Waves of new arrivals, mostly from Europe—the displaced, the desperate, the hopeful—swept through the portals at Castle Garden, a sandstone fort in what is now Battery Park, America’s first immigrant-processing depot. A registration office, a medical examination facility, a currency exchange, guidance counselors, all synced to manage the human flow. Somehow, the Reagan family avoided the scam artists that prowled the docks, selling phony railroad and boat tickets to unsuspecting aliens. They ignored the “runners” speaking in Gaelic who conned Irish immigrants into renting Manhattan’s vermin-infested hellholes at egregious rates. City living wasn’t for them; they’d had their fill of it in London. The Reagans came from country stock and decided to push their way inland, where cheap land awaited those who understood its soil.