by Bob Spitz
Forty-five years later, Howard Fast, the noted writer and avowed Communist, told Edmund Morris that Ronald Reagan made serious inquiries about joining the party early in his career, and he might have, too, had Eddie Albert, his Brother Rat co-star, not succeeded in talking him out of it. Party leaders, according to Fast, didn’t trust Ronnie’s political philosophy—probably recognizing him more as an idealist disposed to “helping the dispossessed, the unemployed, and the homeless” than as a disciple of Lenin or Marx. In any case, it appears that he flirted with the party’s issue-oriented politics and progressive causes that were treated with indifference by a majority of Americans.
That all began to change when the CSU strike began in early 1946. Across America labor had set off an explosion of work stoppages seen as crippling essential industries. Since the end of the war, an astounding 4,600 strikes had occurred, with hundreds more threatened. Hollywood was no stranger to this phenomenon. Unable to achieve fair terms suitable to its rank and file, the CSU expanded its action on behalf of the decorators and launched an industry-wide action aimed at all major movie companies. It was a long, drawn-out, ugly affair, with studios and their IATSE allies employing scabs, thugs, a private police force, and fire departments to thwart picket lines and break the strike.
IATSE launched an all-out publicity assault demonizing the CSU union as a Communist tool. Roy Brewer sent letters to prominent actors and producers intimating that if they didn’t declare themselves loyal to IATSE and against the CSU, “then that person was ipso facto an agent of un-Americanism, an enemy of IATSE, and a likely candidate for boycott by the film projectionist members.”
The war had touched off a wave of patriotism across the country that cast suspicion and slapped a badge of un-Americanism on anyone who thought differently or dared to buck the status quo. Progressives, antifascists, and liberal activists found themselves at risk of being called communists, the bogeymen du jour. As conservative national interest groups would have it, communists were out to infiltrate all phases of democratic society in an effort to subvert the government. Alleged communists became a lightning rod for the anger and resentment of anyone who had lost family in the war, suffered economic setbacks, or felt differently about freedoms and religion. Tarnishing the reputation of adversaries by merely insinuating they were communist was a tactic that touched raw nerves. When Roy Brewer circulated a document that celebrated “the sturdy Americanism of IATSE in contrast to the alien nature and beliefs of its opponents,” the battle lines were drawn.
Two of the CSU’s leading proponents had been the Screen Actors Guild and an organization called the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions (HICCASP). Founded in early 1946 as an offshoot of the Hollywood Democratic Committee, HICCASP counted among its 3,300 members—“3,300 professional exhibitionists,” as Time labeled them—the cream of Hollywood liberal society, not just its top-tier actors like Humphrey Bogart, Gregory Peck, Orson Welles, and Olivia de Havilland, but “everybody who was anybody”: writers, directors, and serious-minded luminaries who lent their names, such as Linus Pauling, Albert Einstein, Harold Ickes, and Max Weber. James Roosevelt, FDR’s son, served as the group’s national director.
Ronald Reagan became a member in 1944, lured by the group’s hard work in promoting President Roosevelt’s reelection. At the time, he seemed unaware of the strong voice that radicals, communists, and fellow travelers exercised on the committee’s executive council, a fact not lost on a contingent of genteel country-club liberals who resigned in protest. Like many who remained, he was attracted to the group’s strong political and social agendas—supporting the United Nations and universal disarmament, denouncing colonialism, and advocating stronger price controls, unemployment compensation, a minimum wage, federal aid for education, and improved housing and health care. “Many actors were caught up in HICCASP’s policies,” recalls Olivia de Havilland, who acted as the board’s vice chairman and helped generate widespread industry support. “Actors empathize—that’s their talent, empathizing with the role they play, which they couldn’t do without that gift. And they have a tendency to empathize with the maltreated, the underdogs, and different types of people.”
Such empathy for “an institution he [thought] was humanitarian” was Ronald Reagan’s motivating force. In the summer of 1946, when asked to fill a vacancy on HICCASP’s executive council, he jumped at the chance, saying he “felt honored” to serve in a more prominent capacity.
His enthusiasm was short-lived. At his first council meeting, on July 2, 1946, a brouhaha erupted over whether HICCASP was “controlled by the left” that further separated the remaining moderates from the radicals. Life had recently published an excerpt of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s The Vital Center, in which he singled out HICCASP as a Communist front. When George Pepper, the executive director of HICCASP, asked the council to respond, Jimmy Roosevelt suggested they compose a statement repudiating communism. A flurry of epithets were directed at him: “fascist” . . . “capitalist scum” . . . “witch-hunter” . . . “Red-baiter.” Several dissidents staged a stormy walkout.
Olivia de Havilland announced that she wouldn’t remain a member of the group without a suitable declaration. She was “sick and tired,” she said, of the way the communist sympathizers “manipulated” the meetings. “Whenever a motion was proposed that their opponents objected to, somebody rose and said, ‘Why not table this so we can get on with other business. It can be introduced later.’ If it was brought up again, Dalton Trumbo, a brilliant man, got up and spoke absolute nonsense to delay the vote, like Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” Similar motions were tabled repeatedly, prolonging meetings well past eleven o’clock, when members on early call the next morning got up, one by one, and left. “At which point, the radicals untabled the motion and passed it, one-two-three.” As far as de Havilland was concerned, the tactic outed them as “a bunch of communists.” She’d be damned if they were going to get away with that type of stonewalling any longer, which is why she backed Jimmy Roosevelt’s suggestion. Over loud, angry protests, he appointed a committee to draw up a statement they could present to the membership for debate. Reagan thought it was a reasonable idea. He believed it was worth distinguishing liberalism from communism. De Havilland recalls that “Ronnie got up and volunteered to write it,” a deed that touched off a vicious reaction from screenwriter John Howard Lawson, “who accused him of being a stooge of the Hollywood aristocracy.”
Afterward, Dore Schary, who ran RKO’s motion-picture production arm, invited Ronnie to join a renegade faction of HICCASP for a strategy session at Olivia de Havilland’s apartment on Shoreham Drive. De Havilland appreciated Ronnie’s willingness to stick his neck out for the group. “He was very effective with people—very effective,” she recalls. “And he was willing to take the responsibility, which put him in a precarious position.” It also pleased her that he had separated himself from the radical element. “We were all so suspicious of each other,” she says. “At the time, in that atmosphere, you never really knew who was or wasn’t a communist, and I just thought he might be one.” When he walked into her place with the anticommunist bloc, she broke into a grin and admitted as much to him. “That’s funny,” he shot back, “because I thought you might be one.”
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The Screen Actors Guild was enmeshed in talks to help resolve the various labor strikes, which forced the actor’s union to take a stand. In February 1946, Ronnie was chosen as a temporary SAG board member, replacing actor Rex Ingram (and in March again for Boris Karloff), spinning him center stage in these messy affairs.
It was a tense, difficult period. SAG worried that a strike would force actors to choose sides: either to walk out in sympathy or cross the picket lines. The IATSE–CSU fracas was especially thorny. “It’s a war to the finish,” Roy Brewer declared, ruling out any possibility of labor peace in Hollywood. A wider strike was onl
y a matter of time—SAG, under its contract with producers, had a legal obligation to order its members to work. On the other hand, all unions were in effect a brotherhood and bound to support one another. When the CSU had threatened a strike in early 1946, the guild sided with the producers, who promised to keep the studios “open at all costs.” But an all-out showdown was another story.
Ronnie was full of misgivings about the situation. He had his hands full with Stallion Road, which was about to start production by the beginning of April. The movie, in essence his long-awaited comeback, had become an afterthought for Warner Bros. A week before the cameras were scheduled to roll, Bogart and Bacall dropped out over Jack Warner’s refusal to assign Mike Curtiz to direct. “We’ll have to use a B team,” he told producer Alex Gottlieb. In the ensuing scramble to launch on time, Gottlieb swapped in Zachary Scott and Alexis Smith, both capable actors but without the starpower of their predecessors. He wasn’t any happier about Ronald Reagan, whose presence he considered comparable to “a mannequin in a store window with a built-in smile.” And the Faulkner script was gone, too—too literary. The studio downgraded the movie to reflect the changes. The budget was slashed and Technicolor was scrapped in favor of black-and-white photography, the kiss of death in postwar Hollywood.
This turn of events was “a blow” to Ronnie, who admitted he’d been “looking for a free ride” on the Bogart-Bacall locomotive. Now he was part of a slow-moving boxcar. Still, it was a horse story, which meant plenty of outdoor work and riding, which he especially looked forward to. The movie filmed on location in Hidden Valley, an equestrian ranch community in the Santa Monica Mountains, about forty miles northwest of Los Angeles. Jane had just returned from Florida, where retakes for The Yearling were shot, and was spun right into Cheyenne, a Warner Bros. western, without a day off to catch her breath. By the time they got home at night, husband and wife had barely time enough to eat a light supper and kiss the kids before collapsing into bed.
Whatever little downtime there was, Ronnie devoted it to union affairs. He was having second thoughts about his relationship with HICCASP. Neil Reagan badgered him ceaselessly about its communist leanings. He was like a broken record: “Get out of that thing,” he implored his brother. “There are people in [HICCASP] who can cause you real trouble.” Moon claimed he was “doing little things for the FBI” that included hiding in the bushes outside HICCASP meetings and taking down the license plate numbers of people who attended, certain the members were “more than suspect . . . not exactly American.”
But the drumbeat of accusations about communism in HICCASP and CSU began to harden Ronnie’s views against them—and against communism in general. All the vitriol from friends like Robert Montgomery, his brother, and the Red-baiting press was having an effect. Reagan concluded that “this little rump group of unions . . . had been infiltrated and taken over by the communists.” It was easy to believe the CSU strike “was a plot to get economic control of the picture business,” that the AFL-CIO was the root cause of all labor unrest, and that Communists were subverting Hollywood to spur revolution.
Later that summer he proposed a written doctrine that HICCASP could use to separate itself from the Popular Front, more or less sidestepping the issue. The statement, as he composed it, said that HICCASP “has no affiliation with any political party or organization, Republican, Democratic, Communist, Socialist or other. Its policies are determined solely by the majority will of its membership.” Olivia de Havilland, for one, “thought it didn’t go far enough.” She pushed for a total renunciation of communism, without much support. The council finally approved another version, but neither faction, the liberals nor the radical left, was satisfied, and ultimately the resolution was rejected. A few days later Jimmy Roosevelt and de Havilland resigned in disgust. “Ronnie hung in for another couple months,” de Havilland recalls, but his good-faith efforts went for naught. There was nothing left to hang in for. The organization had lost its way. “Very shortly,” as he recalled, “HICCASP gave its last groan and expired.”
It was a sorry affair—but a learning experience. Prior to this, he “shared the orthodox liberal view that communists—if there really were any—were liberals who were temporarily off track” and posed no threat to the greater good. Now he was convinced otherwise. The episode, he said, made him consider the possibility of not only a communist infiltration but an “attempted takeover of Hollywood.”
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In late September 1946, Ronnie started filming Night Unto Night, a gloomy melodrama that Warner Bros. developed as a showcase to debut the darkly exquisite Swedish actress Viveca Lindfors. Just four days into production the CSU strike erupted, and actors had to cross picket lines to get to work. This presented a real problem for Ronald Reagan. A week earlier, he’d been elected vice president of the Screen Actors Guild, whose sympathies should have obliged it to support the protesters. But a secret deal had been struck between IATSE’s Roy Brewer and high-level industry leaders to force the CSU out of the studios. Ronnie persuaded SAG’s board to throw in with management as well. He had bought into the argument that CSU was too compromised and not representing the best interests of guild membership.
By September 24, twelve hundred of the CSU’s carpenters and painters had been summarily fired. Outside the gates of Warner Bros. which had dismissed more craftsmen than any other studio, the CSU’s Herb Sorrell addressed the pickets. “There may be men hurt, there may be men killed before this is over,” he screamed through a megaphone, “but we’re in no mood to be pushed around any more!”
It was the spark that ignited the firestorm. Sorrell’s remarks touched off a wave of violence that was as ferocious as depicted in any Hollywood gangster film. Both sides contributed to the mayhem. On October 5, according to a CSU account, “Warner Bros. turned high-pressure fire hoses on peaceful pickets in front of the studio gate . . . [and] continued the assault with tear gas.” Five days later, known as Bloody Monday, “certain IATSE heads recruited non-Warner workers to smash a picket line . . . armed with chains, clubs, battery cables and other weapons.” As Time reported, the CSU’s demonstrators “scattered tacks in the path of movie stars’ automobiles, threw coffee in the faces of picket-line crossers, [and] stoned busloads of rival AF of L workers convoyed through their jeering, milling ranks.” Windshields were smashed, cars overturned. Ronnie later claimed that “a bus used to take extras through the picket lines was bombed and burned out just a few minutes before [he] was scheduled to board it.” In any case, each day he rode a bus driven by Teamsters through the barriers, ignoring the advice of Warner Bros. security guards that he should lie down in order to avoid the rocks and Coke bottles launched toward the windows.
Those missiles turned out to be the least of his worries. On September 24, while shooting a scene on location at Point Mugu beach, Reagan was summoned to the phone at a nearby gas station. A voice on the other end of the line delivered an unmistakable threat. “A squad was ready to take care of me and fix my face,” Reagan recalled, “so that I would never be in pictures again.”
Fix his face. That could only mean one thing: acid. There were rumors that goons had a batch of it ready. Warner Bros. wasn’t going to take any chances. A studio cop was instructed to “take Reagan home and stay on patrol all night.” The studio also issued him a Smith & Wesson revolver and ammunition.
The craziness was taking its toll. There was turmoil in the streets, on the set, at union meetings, in Hollywood hangouts—and inevitably at home. Jane wasn’t thrilled with having a gun in the house. She was naturally “high-strung,” as Hedda Hopper pointed out. Now threats of violence and . . . a gun, which lay prominently on their bedside table. It unnerved her, especially when she woke up in the middle of the night to find Ronnie sitting up, holding the weapon, having imagined a noise somewhere in the vicinity. To say nothing of his ranting and raving about unions and communists. They seemed to imperil, for Reagan, everything he
cherished: the movies, American values, his personal safety. Jane thought he was home in body but not spirit, consumed by the guild’s affairs, with a phone glued to his ear or his nose in the pages of ongoing negotiations. It was all starting to get to her.
Bob Cummings sensed something was amiss. During the shooting of Princess O’Rourke, he’d mentioned Ronnie’s impressive “grasp of politics” and drew a blustery stare from Jane. “Politics!” she hissed. “He gives me a pain in the ass. That’s all he talks about. If you had to sit and listen to him like I do . . .” She shook her head, unable to finish. Jane was rarely that candid. Despite the frustration with Ronnie, public criticism was off-limits. But occasionally a potshot slipped out. One of their friends recalled a party that fall when “Ronnie lectured everybody in the room about Communism, and Jane whispered to a friend, ‘I’m so bored with him, I’ll either kill him or kill myself.’”
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As the strike wore on, Ronnie became convinced that Herb Sorrell and the CSU were controlled by Communists. On October 18, Reagan repeated that opinion in a speech to the film technicians of Local 683, who were supporting the CSU pickets, ultimately changing their minds. His next target was the Screen Actors Guild. Any official policy, however, had to be voted on by referendum, which meant putting it before the entire guild.