Reagan

by Bob Spitz

  In its way, Hollywood had already been at war for several years. Jewish studio chiefs and writers had mobilized in early 1936 to assess how best to respond to Nazi Germany’s mounting anti-Semitism. The consensus among executives was to keep their heads down. “I don’t think Hollywood should deal with anything but entertainment,” declared Paramount Pictures founder Adolph Zukor. “To make films of political significance is a mistake.” The writers, on the other hand, were ready to roll out the heavy artillery: scripts laced with snarling Nazi villains. It was a standoff.

  No one side could make a move without the approval of a man named Joseph Breen, who reigned over the Production Code Administration—the form of moralistic self-censorship that the studios had adopted in 1934. Breen read every script before it went into production and adjudicated what would and would not be tolerated on the screen; anything he personally found unsuitable or intolerable could close down a picture. Unfortunately, Breen often deemed a misdirected wink to be salacious—and he was a raging anti-Semite. In a letter to a friend, he wrote that he worked with “people whose daily morals would not be tolerated in the toilet of a pest house. . . . Ninety-five percent of these folks are Jews of Eastern European lineage. They are, probably, the scum of the scum of the earth.” Breen saw nothing objectionable in Adolf Hitler’s mistreatment of Jews, and he warned the studios not to overtly criticize Nazi Germany.

  By 1939, Warner Bros. had had enough. The studio’s Berlin rep, Joe Kauffman, had been beaten to death by Nazi thugs. According to Jack Warner, “There are high school kids with swastikas on their sleeves a few crummy blocks from our studio.” He had already caved in to Breen’s demand that The Life of Emile Zola not mention that Captain Dreyfus was a Jew. No more. In 1939, Warner Bros. defied the Production Code and released Confessions of a Nazi Spy. It opened the floodgates, and pictures like The Great Dictator, Night Train to Munich, Sergeant York, and Foreign Correspondent followed in its wake.

  Actors were eager to do their parts. In late 1938, fifty-six stars, along with the Warners, formed the Committee of 56, calling for a boycott of all German products until that country stopped persecuting Jews and minorities. Fredric March pleaded for ambulances for Spain; Joan Crawford denounced the invasion of Ethiopia. Some of the biggest names in Hollywood committed to movies that enabled them “to combine entertainment and larger implications that ‘point up’ social aspects and encourage awareness.”

  As immersed as he was in current events, the closest Ronald Reagan came to supporting the cause directly was his role as a brash American fighter pilot who joins the RAF in International Squadron. His wake-up call came on February 9, 1941, when an envelope arrived with his induction notice. As an officer in the cavalry reserves, which he’d joined back in Iowa, Ronnie’s name was on the draft board’s radar. He was thirty years old, in great physical shape. Of course, he was severely nearsighted and he had dependents; in the event of war, there was no chance he’d see action. Still, Jack Warner wasn’t taking any chances with his prize asset. A rough cut of International Squadron reinforced Warner’s notion that Ronnie might have real star appeal. Warner petitioned the Army for a deferment, which gave the studio time to develop his career.

  Warner Bros. owned a property that might well be a suitable star vehicle for Reagan. In 1940, it had acquired the rights to Kings Row, a florid bestseller by Henry Bellamann, for $35,000, seven times what it had offered for Gone with the Wind. The book had all the components for a ripsnorter—a dark and complex coming-of-age story that explored love, friendship, treachery, sadism, homosexuality, and scandal in a rural Midwestern town. Those same elements posed a number of problems. “As far as the plot is concerned, the material in Kings Row is for the most part either censurable or too gruesome and depressing to be used,” Wolfgang Reinhardt, the film’s associate producer, wrote in a memo to Hal Wallis. “The hero finding out that his girl has been carrying on incestuous relations with her father, a sadistic doctor who amputates legs and disfigures people willfully, a host of moronic or otherwise mentally diseased characters, the background of a lunatic asylum, people dying from cancer, suicides . . .” He went on, raising a litany of objections.

  They’d surely give Good Joe Breen a stroke. Even before a script was finalized, Breen notified Warner Bros. that his Production Code office would ban any attempt to make a film of Kings Row. “Any suggestion of sex, madness, syphilis, illegal operations, incest, sadism, all must go,” Breen insisted. “If this picture is made . . . decent people everywhere will condemn you and Hollywood.” Conditions he set for reversing his decision—slicing out every aspect of the book’s central core—would have turned it into an Andy Hardy movie. Over time, Breen used the Production Code to reject four drafts of the script. Warner Bros. persisted, hiring director Sam Wood, who had recently scored a hit with Kitty Foyle at RKO, then whittled down a wish list of male and female megastars to four or five viable contract players. After Hal Wallis viewed the dailies for International Squadron, he cast Ronnie as Drake McHugh, the gadabout sidekick—and unrequited love interest—to both male and female protagonists. Billed as the studio’s lead picture for 1941, Kings Row promised to be the opportunity Reagan had yearned for.

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  Before production got the go-ahead from Jack Warner, the studio sent Ronnie and Jane to several cities along the East Coast as part of a promotional “Bad Men” tour—he for The Bad Man in general release, she for the upcoming Bad Men of Missouri. While they were away, on May 18, Jack Reagan suffered another heart attack in the early hours of the morning. Nelle called for an ambulance, then dialed Neil, who rushed over with his wife, Bess, from a few blocks away. Jack was unconscious when they arrived; they could tell his condition was critical. Over the next half hour, Jack’s breathing began to labor. The wait for the ambulance was agonizing.

  Little did they realize that Los Angeles ambulances were in the midst of a nasty turf battle that divvied up the city into exclusive districts. The ambulance Nelle called was dispatched from a nearby Beverly Hills hospital. “It got to the end of the district and realized the address was further on and turned around and went back, but didn’t notify anyone,” Ronald Reagan recalled. “So my mother, my brother and his wife waited there while my father died for an ambulance that was never coming.” He had lived a hearty life, not an easy one, cursed by a condition beyond his control. Jack Reagan was fifty-seven years old.

  At the funeral service, on May 21, 1941, Ronnie was surprised by the way he processed his grief. Thoughts of the past, of his father, loving but unreliable, mingled with thoughts of the present, of Jack’s last days, seeking to compensate for his persistent misconduct. At the end, all the reckless spunk had gone out of him, replaced by something softer, sober, more spiritual. Ronnie felt it intensely as he stood in the chapel during the funeral of the loving but unsteady man who had turned his childhood into an odyssey of disorder and insecurity. “All of a sudden a wave of warmth came over me and it was almost as if he was telling me he was just fine,” he recalled. “It was just so pronounced that I just had to believe something approaching the psychic had happened to me.”

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  Ronnie took comfort that summer in his work on Kings Row. The picture finally went into production in mid-July 1941, with high expectations. Yes, the story was a loopy hodgepodge, especially after the script was disemboweled by the censors, but there was plenty that worked to Ronnie’s advantage.

  Jack Warner spared no expense to ensure the success of his pet project. The cast he’d assembled was first-rate. For the male lead, Parris Mitchell, they’d signed Robert Cummings, star of the 1939 hit Three Smart Girls Grow Up and already in rehearsal for two pictures at Universal: It Started with Eve opposite Deanna Durbin and Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur. The love interest would be played by salty “Oomph Girl” Ann Sheridan, an audience favorite with whom Ronnie had co-starred in Angels Wash Their Faces and who was announced
for the eagerly awaited release The Man Who Came to Dinner. The supporting cast was packed with some of Hollywood’s finest actors: Judith Anderson, Maria Ouspenskaya, Charles Coburn, Broadway stage trouper Betty Field, and the incomparable character actor Claude Rains.

  Ronnie remembered the production for its “long, hard schedule” and a demanding role that “kind of wrung me out.” An unforeseen treat was his opportunity to talk politics between takes with director Sam Wood and Bob Cummings. They would sit for hours, earnestly discussing the European war and the country’s responsibility to the beleaguered Allies. Wood was a Republican and devoted isolationist. In the years that followed, he’d emerge as president of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, an organization of high-profile Hollywood conservatives whose manifesto declared: “In our special field of motion pictures, we resent the growing impression that this industry is made up of, and dominated by, Communists, radicals, and crackpots.” Much of that feeling was expressed on the set of Kings Row. Provoked by Ronnie’s liberal views, Wood more than held his own in their often fiery exchanges, while Cummings fanned the flames with his conservative asides.

  Ronnie struggled to put that same heat into his performance. The movie’s characters brimmed with Freudian tics and neuroses. As Daily Variety noted, “Most of the leading characters are mad.” Drake McHugh, Reagan’s character, was a deeply conflicted man. Unfortunately, Ronnie didn’t have the technique to do the part justice; it was beyond him as an actor. He grappled awkwardly with sustained emotions. But he had enough intelligence and common sense to relate well to the camera, to play the affable best friend to a more competent actor. And he had the right mentor in Sam Wood, who was an actor’s director.

  Despite the insuperable demands of the role, Ronnie found his footing, so to speak, in a pivotal scene near the end of the movie in which Drake, having lost his inheritance and the chance to marry a doctor’s daughter, endures an accident that crushes the lower part of his body. In an act of rank sadism, the spiteful, perverse doctor amputates both of his legs, a deed the book intends as symbolic castration. Ronnie’s character awakes from the operation to utter perhaps the most memorable line of his movie career—“Where’s . . . where’s the rest of me?”

  The scene unnerved Reagan. It was so extreme, so remote from any real experience he knew or could imagine, and yet he had to dig deeper and summon real emotion. “I felt I had neither the experience nor the talent to fake it,” he recalled. “I simply had to find out how it really felt.”

  Where’s the rest of me? Those five words weighed on him. He rehearsed them repeatedly, turned them inside out, discussed them with friends, consulted disabled patients. “At night I would wake up staring at the ceiling and automatically mutter the line before I went back to sleep,” he said. As the day approached to shoot the scene, he was no closer to understanding it and recalled being panicked. It was too far out of his comfort zone.

  His ordeal deepened when he arrived on the set. To present as a credible amputee, he had to lower his torso from the waist down through a hole that had been cut into a mattress, then lie back in bed, immobile. Nothing happens quickly on a movie set. Once they got him positioned, lights had to be moved, the camera angled properly, cables taped down, chalk marks scratched out for the actors, a sound check run. It took about an hour, while Ronnie lay there, sinking—and sinking—into the part. “Gradually, the affair began to terrify me,” he said. His latent claustrophobia kicked in. “In some weird way, I felt something horrible had happened to my body.” He broke into a sweat. Beneath the boyish good looks and L.A. tan, real fear appeared in creases around his mouth.

  When they were ready to shoot the scene, Sam Wood positioned himself close by the bed. Ronald Reagan has given conflicting accounts of the action in two memoirs. In the earlier version, he begged for a rehearsal, which Wood ignored and just shot the scene cold. Later, in a postpresidential autobiography, Ronnie took it upon himself to whisper to the director, “No rehearsal—just shoot it.” Whatever the case, what mattered was on the screen. When the impact of the accident finally sank in, a sick horror gripped him. His eyes rolled in their sockets, and his face froze in a rictus of despair.

  “Where’s . . . where’s the rest of me?”

  The line sent a charge through the Warner Bros. executive suite. When Jack Warner saw the dailies, he felt their impact was strong enough to deliver the breakthrough he’d envisioned for Ronald Reagan. Within hours, he called Lew Wasserman and opened negotiations for a new seven-year contract that would practically double the actor’s salary. Warner also decided to get his money’s worth while he could, ordering Ronnie to report to the set of a new film, Juke Girl, only three days after he’d wrapped Kings Row.

  It was a grind making back-to-back features. He became a fixture on the lot for months on end, six days a week, often fourteen hours a day. “I began to feel like a shut-in invalid,” he grumbled, “nursed by publicity.” He spent the rest of the summer on the studio treadmill: filming and giving interviews. But rumblings about his performance cast a giddy effect on the workload. He could tell himself it was in the service of his career, or because he was irreplaceable, or because the older stars like Cagney and Muni were making way for contemporary, more embraceable faces. Whatever the reason, he accepted each new assignment confident the effort would put him over the top.

  In fact, he’d gone as far as it would take him.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  IN THE ARMY NOW

  “I have done the state some service, and they know ’t.”

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  No one ever mistook the Dixon Theater for Grauman’s Egyptian. The solid, unprepossessing building just a block or two south of the Rock River was wedged between retail establishments near the foot of Galena Avenue. Except on weekends, when kids flocked to matinees and parents took a well-earned evening out, the sidewalk outside the doors was mostly deserted. But early on a Monday evening in September 1941 it pulsed with all the pomp and excitement of a red-carpet extravaganza. Feverish crowds swarmed the street adjacent to the box office and klieg lights sent crisscrossed beams high into the dusky sky. Police struggled to surround the limos that pulled up to the curb, escorting the occupants inside. It seemed like the whole city was aware of the occasion, but if anyone still needed an explanation, they could find it splashed across the neon marquee.

  WORLD PREMIERE TONIGHT —International Squadron—

  STARRING DIXON’S OWN RONALD “DUTCH” REAGAN

  The screening put the finishing touch on a two-day homecoming he shared with Louella Parsons, the highlights of which included the dedication of a new children’s hospital ward, a parade through town, several receptions, and a rally near the lifeguard’s chair at Lowell Park. They’d brought along a celebrated entourage from Hollywood—Bob Hope, George Montgomery, comedian Joe E. Brown, Jerry Colonna, and Ann Rutherford, familiar to all as Andy Hardy’s girlfriend in the beloved MGM series. But Ronald Reagan—Dutch—was the main attraction. It had been only a few years since he’d left Dixon, and plenty of locals had personal connections to him as a rambunctious neighborhood boy, an enterprising schoolmate, or the heroic lad who’d pulled seventy-seven people from the merciless Rock. Now he was back, a bona fide movie star, but as the marquee stated: one of their own.

  As the lights went down inside the theater, Ronnie had to swallow a few emotional gulps. It wasn’t all that long ago he’d watched countless movies from a seat in the balcony, fantasizing about being up on that very same screen. He was more than lucky—he was blessed. The stark reality of it hit him hard that evening, sitting among his Dixon and Hollywood peers.

  He wished Jane could have been there to share it with him. A minor medical issue had forced her to remain behind in Los Angeles, so he’d taken Nelle along in her place. It was his mother’s first real outing since Jack’s death and an opportunity for her to reconnect with old friends. She’d
hardly left her son’s side since The City of Los Angeles chugged into the Chicago & Northwestern depot two days earlier. When they each stepped out onto a makeshift platform to address the welcoming crowd, Nelle received an equally genuine cheer.

  But the trip was only a respite from Ronnie’s creeping discontent. The feedback from International Squadron and Kings Row had been so promising, but the films that followed were dreadful, prompting anxiety and not a little resentment. An item Warner Bros. spun off to the trades announced his casting in a starring role in Casablanca, with Ann Sheridan. Only a rumor, as it turned out. What had he and Ann Sheridan done to deserve Juke Girl? It was a dark, tortured little melodrama—a poor man’s The Grapes of Wrath—but without that movie’s gorgeous script or performances. It wasn’t a terrible picture, but it was forgettable. And the working conditions had bordered on punishment. “We shot night exteriors [from six p.m.] until sunup for thirty-eight nights,” Ronnie remembered, most of them on location in central California farmland, where the night air felt more like Finland than Fresno.

  Afterward, he was slotted into Desperate Journey, an overheated Errol Flynn vehicle, classic B-movie hokum that might have been an installment in the Brass Bancroft series. It was “an action melodrama of the wildest stripe,” one critic noted, full of slangy one-liners and wild-goose chases. It was impossible to take seriously. Ronnie drew passable notices for his performance as Johnny Hammond, a brash, irreverent, implausibly brave fighter pilot, but he was again playing second fiddle to a brasher, more irreverent, braver Errol Flynn.