by H. W. Brands
Reagan spoke of what he would tell his daughter when she came of age, but he spoke as well of what he had discovered for himself. “I want her to know that nothing between her and the man she loves can be wrong or obscene, that desire in itself is normal and right. There is one other thing I think she should know. If some man she finds attractive or likable feels desire for her, like any parent I hope she’ll have the common sense and good taste not to be promiscuous or involve herself in casual affairs but (and this is equally important) I don’t want her to be disgusted and convinced that his desire is an indication of moral decay and vulgarity. Of course a man feels desire for an attractive woman—nature intended that he should and something would be amiss if he didn’t. A girl’s judgment of this man should be based only on his respect for her wishes but don’t ask him not to feel an instinct as much a part of him as hunger and thirst.”
Second loves were perfectly possible and entirely respectable, he said. “The world is full of lonely people, people capable of happiness and of giving happiness, and love is not a magic touch of cosmic dust that preordains two people and two people only for each other. Love can grow slowly out of warmth and companionship and none of us should be afraid to seek it.” He concluded, “Now I am going to seal this letter very quickly and mail it because if I read it over I won’t have the nerve to send it.”
HE DID SEND it, and he likewise summoned the nerve to ask Nancy to marry him. His timing might have been influenced by the fact that Nancy evidently was pregnant (“Go ahead and count,” she wrote in her memoir, referring to the birth of their first child, Patti, seven and a half months after the wedding). Reagan was quite satisfied with a small ceremony for his second try. But Nancy would surely have insisted on something larger had decorum not caused her to want to tie the knot as quickly as possible.
And so the hastily arranged service, held on March 4, 1952, at the Little Brown Church in the San Fernando Valley, included only the bride and groom, the minister, and William Holden and his wife, Ardis, who served as best man and matron of honor. Nancy didn’t notice that the Holdens, who were having marital troubles, sat on opposite sides of the small church. “I spent the entire day in a happy daze,” she recalled.
14
NANCY’S ACTING CAREER essentially ceased upon her marriage to Reagan. Having landed her man, she focused her ambitions on his career, which continued to evolve. Warner Brothers had basically written him off as an actor. Jack Warner remained friendly, but this only complicated Reagan’s position. Reagan’s agent, Lew Wasserman, headed the Music Corporation of America, which was tussling with Warner Brothers. Wasserman told Reagan he could employ the William Morris Agency in dealing with Warner, to avoid a potential conflict of interest. Reagan declined. “I don’t feel that strangers can suddenly take over and represent my best interests,” he explained to Warner. He said he wanted to deal with Warner on a more personal basis. And he had a bone to pick. “I know you will recall our discussion some time ago with regard to That Hagen Girl”—in which Reagan played the much older suitor of Shirley Temple. “You agreed that the script and role were very weak but asked me to do the picture as a personal favor which I gladly did. At that time you encouraged me to bring in a suitable outdoor script which you agreed to buy as a starring vehicle for me. I found such a property in Ghost Mountain and the studio purchased it.” Reagan had heard nothing more about the studio’s plans for the film until recently, and what he was now hearing wasn’t promising. “There have been ‘gossip items’ indicating you intend to star someone else in this story. Naturally I put no stock in these rumors—I know you too well to ever think you’d break your word. However, I am anxious to know something of production plans—starting date, etc., in order to better schedule my own plans. Frankly I hope it is soon, as I have every confidence in this story.”
In fact it was soon, but it wasn’t with Reagan. Warner Brothers cast Errol Flynn in the part Reagan wanted, leaving Reagan to mutter against Jack Warner and the ingratitude of the studio system.
The fault wasn’t entirely with the studios, for the film industry was laboring under unprecedented burdens. Despite the producers’ best efforts to curry popular and political favor, the Supreme Court in 1948 ruled against the major studios on the control of theaters. The studios were compelled to sell their outlets, a development that eroded the rationale for the B movies that had been pushed upon the public by the captive theaters, whose revenue supported the studios’ oligopoly. Forced for the first time to compete, the studios slashed costs wherever they could. The stars survived, but marginal actors like Reagan found less and less work.
A second blow to old Hollywood was the advent of television. Experimental broadcasts of live moving images began in the 1920s, but not until the late 1930s did regular programming commence. World War II diverted the talent and resources of the infant industry, but soon after the war the small screen of television revealed itself to be a worthy and disruptive competitor to the big screen of movies. In 1945 television receivers were almost unheard of in American homes; by 1950 nearly four million homes boasted the new devices. By 1955 thirty million homes, or more than half the residences in America, had sets; by 1960 the number of sets approached sixty million and the proportion nine out of ten.
The challenge to movies was obvious and immense. The millions of television owners and their families could now experience the emotional escape movies had provided, but without leaving their homes. Their individual decisions summed to a disaster for Hollywood: movie attendance plunged by three-quarters between 1945 and 1960.
Reagan first encountered television professionally in his role as SAG president. The new medium posed novel challenges to the existing structure of labor relations. The most important questions for Reagan were whether television actors were screen actors and whether screen actors became television actors when their films were shown on television. Reagan and SAG had no pressing desire to extend the guild’s jurisdiction to actors in live television shows, as they seemed more like stage actors (who had their own union, Actors’ Equity) or radio performers (who belonged to the American Federation of Radio Artists). But some on the radio side sought to recruit not only television actors but all actors and performers and amalgamate them into a single comprehensive union. They linked arms in a committee called the Television Authority, or TVA.
Reagan resisted. The screen actors were the moneyed elite of the act ing and performing corps, and they would lose ground by joining with the others. Moreover, screen actors typically lived and worked in Hollywood, whereas most stage actors and television performers were in New York. But the critical element, in Reagan’s view, was political. The big union the radio men advocated struck him as a stalking horse for the radical politics he had been battling in SAG and before Congress. “Let me make one thing plain,” he wrote afterward. “I am not suggesting the TVA movement was a Communist plot, but just that a controversy of this kind was catnip to a kitten where the little Red brothers were concerned. They had to latch on and do what they could to cause trouble—particularly for SAG and also because ‘one big union’ is right down their alley. The party line will always back anything that simplifies and centralizes. It’s easier to subvert one organization where policy decisions are far removed from the rank and file than it is to take over a dozen groups.”
Reagan spent much of two years fighting the single-unionists. The work required endless meetings at which the amalgamationists would raise point of order after point of privilege after point of information, only to be voted down overwhelmingly by the general membership of SAG, who knew they had a good deal as things stood. Ultimately, Reagan and the other SAG leaders preserved the independence of the screen actors, leaving the television actors to join the radio folks in the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.
AMERICAN POLITICIANS HAVE always been early adopters of new communication technologies; they have seized with alacrity on whatever enables them to reach voters. Theodore Roosevelt exploit
ed the mass-circulation newspaper press to make himself the center of America’s attention and the first president to be a national celebrity. Franklin Roosevelt turned radio to his New Deal purposes, conducting intimate seminars in democratic philosophy and Democratic policies with audiences of fifty million in his Fireside Chats.
Ronald Reagan would become to television what Franklin Roosevelt was to radio, but he and the rest of his generation took first political lessons in the new medium from Joseph McCarthy. The Wisconsin Republican had ridden into the Senate on the anti–New Deal wave of 1946 but for three years had done little to distinguish himself. At the beginning of 1950 he hit upon the theme of communist infiltration of the federal government. It was hardly original, as anyone from Harry Truman, who had launched his own loyalty probe in 1947, to Ronald Reagan and the other witnesses at the Hollywood Ten hearings could have told him. But his timing turned out to be inspired. The Soviet Union had just shocked Americans and much of the world by detonating an atomic bomb; given that credible experts had predicted a much later date for Moscow’s acquisition of the ultimate weapon, the conclusion that spies must have revealed the atomic secret was nearly unavoidable. In truth spies had been at work, as the world discovered when Klaus Fuchs was convicted in a British court for passing information about the British and American atomic programs to the Soviets. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were subsequently convicted in an American court on similar charges and executed. Three months before McCarthy’s epiphany China’s communist People’s Liberation Army had completed its conquest of the world’s most populous nation. No one accused the Chinese communists of infiltrating the American government, but the mere fact of their victory seemed to raise the stakes in the struggle between democracy and communism. And not long after McCarthy asserted the presence of communists in the federal government, the communists of North Korea attacked South Korea, triggering the first armed conflict of the escalating Cold War.
McCarthy’s discovery of communism, and the popular reaction to it, gave the Republican Party a powerful weapon to use against Truman and the Democrats. The Republicans had soft-pedaled their criticism of Truman’s containment policy in the 1948 election, not wishing to appear unpatriotic or spoil their own chances of directing that policy, with which most of them agreed. Truman’s surprise victory over Dewey stunned and angered them, and they abandoned all respect for his office and all concern for appearances and declared political war on everything he did. McCarthy struck some of the Republican leadership as uncouth and perhaps unprincipled, but he appeared just the kind of bashi-bazouk to lead the charge.
McCarthy assailed the State Department, which he described as infested with communists. He blasted Truman for harboring said communists, and after Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur for insubordination amid the Korean War, he declared that the president should be impeached. He castigated George Marshall—George Marshall!—for being at the center of a “conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man.”
McCarthy’s attacks sealed the fate of the Truman administration. Truman was eligible to run again in 1952 but became patently unelectable and didn’t even seek the Democratic nomination. Dwight Eisenhower, the commander of Allied forces in Europe in World War II and a strong advocate of Truman’s containment policy despite being a Republican, handily defeated Democrat Adlai Stevenson, giving the Republicans the White House for the first time since Herbert Hoover.
McCarthy briefly reconsidered his tactics, now that his party held the high ground of policy. But only briefly: he soon slammed Eisenhower for insufficient alarm at the insidiousness of the communist threat. Eisenhower despised McCarthy, but the senator’s Republican colleagues in the Senate still considered him useful and gave him control of the Committee on Government Operations.
McCarthy employed the committee as a platform for his signal contribution to the history of congressional investigations: the use of live television in national coverage of committee hearings. The U.S. Army had bristled at the allegations by McCarthy against Marshall, Eisenhower, and other members of the service, and it looked for means to retaliate. When a McCarthy aide sought favored treatment for an assistant who had been drafted, the army detected an opening and denounced the senator. McCarthy convened hearings, which two television networks—ABC and DuMont—aired from start to finish and two others—NBC and CBS—covered in part. The hearings attracted twenty million viewers, lasted thirty-six days, and filled 188 hours of broadcast time.
They did nothing good for McCarthy, who turned out to lack the persona for television and who appeared nonplussed when questioned by the counsel for the army. “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” Joseph Welch demanded. “Have you left no sense of decency?” McCarthy lacked a rejoinder, let alone decency. His approval rating plunged, and his hold on the public imagination vanished.
Yet his defeat demonstrated the power of television to shape political perceptions. Should someone else emerge, someone with an attractive camera presence and a message of hope rather than fear, television would deliver the audience.
15
THE PUBLICISTS AT General Electric weren’t thinking of politics when they proposed that Ronald Reagan switch from film to television. They saw in Reagan something movie audiences didn’t see. Television’s small screen portrays actors differently than film’s big screen, and a persona that doesn’t fill the big screen can serve quite well in television’s miniature.
Reagan definitely wasn’t filling the big screen. His film career had fizzled almost completely. He blamed not himself but the industry. “A star doesn’t slip,” he told movie columnist Hedda Hopper. “He’s ruined by bad stories and worse casting.” Reagan was speaking of a generation of actors, but his own experience clearly colored his remarks. “The present system of casting is bad for pictures and death on actors. A man, for instance, may do an outstanding bit as a cop. A producer, seeing the picture, says, ‘That guy certainly knows how to play a cop.’ So he casts him as a cop in his next picture. The fellow plays a cop in fifteen films, and then he’s through.” Reagan further faulted the producers for believing audiences constantly demanded fresh faces on the screen. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m thoroughly in favor of new faces. They’re the lifeblood of this business, as most of us know. I think you’ll find that actors, more than any other class in our profession, discover and push new talent.” And the eight thousand members of the Screen Actors Guild, he said, constituted the greatest pool of talent anywhere. “But the present custom in Hollywood seems to be not to use talent, but to exploit it.” This was woefully shortsighted. “Did you know there are 65 million people who don’t go to the movies with any degree of regularity?” Reagan asked Hopper. “Most of them are over thirty years of age. That’s the group we need to bring back into the theaters.”
Warner Brothers wasn’t listening, and when the studio made plain it wasn’t going to promote his work, Reagan negotiated the right to accept work from other studios. Yet little materialized. He portrayed an alcoholic baseball pitcher in The Winning Team and was cast opposite a chimpanzee in Bedtime for Bonzo. And these were his best roles. The harsh fact was that audiences didn’t want to watch him and so producers didn’t want to work with him.
His immersion in the politics of the actors’ guild gave him something else to do, but even that option ran out when he relinquished the SAG presidency to Walter Pidgeon at the end of 1952. He had already served longer than any president in the guild’s history, and more than a few in the guild sought a change at the top. Besides, Nancy was pregnant, and he didn’t wish to travel as much as the office required.
“I sat down and looked myself in the career,” he said afterward. “One of the first signs of Hollywood chill is not only who doesn’t call—it’s who does. Producers complete with shoestring have a great script you ought to read. A short time before they wouldn’t have called you because you were out of their reach. Now, having them on the line gives you the
same feeling a fellow lost in the desert must have when he looks up and sees the buzzards starting to gather.”
But he needed to work. He had a house in Hollywood and the Malibu ranch to pay for; he had a wife and a child on the way, not to mention the two children he shared with Jane Wyman. He had been making a handsome salary since the war, but the marginal tax rate on high earners was over 90 percent, and he hadn’t managed to shelter much of his income.
Television beckoned, but Reagan, like most film actors, considered it déclassé. It didn’t pay nearly as well as movies, and it marked actors as has-beens or never-weres. He rejected the offers. He tried his hand at emceeing in Las Vegas, the gambling town that was rising from the rock and sand of the Nevada desert just beyond the reach of California’s less lenient laws. He couldn’t get comfortable in the role, and his discomfort showed. He liked the pay but couldn’t see himself as a floor-show fixture.
At this point his agent approached him with a novel idea. General Electric wanted to sponsor a television show, a weekly series of short dramas. These would be quality productions, with top actors in guest appearances. The series needed a host, an introducer who would become the face of the program. And there was something else. The host would double as a spokesman for General Electric, traveling the country and speaking on behalf of the company’s management to its far-flung workforce and to other groups in the cities and towns where GE had plants. The company’s thinking was that the two functions, television host and company spokesman, would reinforce each other. The hundreds of thousands of employees would furnish the core of a television audience that would multiply into the millions when family members and friends also watched.