After Nancy and I talked it over, I decided to begin turning down roles in bad pictures and holding out until something really good came along.
I went for more than a year without making a movie. Although lots of scripts were sent to me, there were not many I liked and I turned down roles that would have earned me more than $500,000. I filled the money gap by doing guest shots on television.
Our first child, Patricia Ann, had been born, and she had added lots of joy to the Reagan household. But financially, they were pretty lean and sometimes difficult times. Before I’d made the decision to say no to film offers I didn’t like, we’d bought a home in the Pacific Palisades. I already owned the ranch in the San Fernando Valley where I was breeding thoroughbreds. But there was a hefty mortgage on the house and that ninety-four percent tax rate hadn’t left us with a lot of savings.
While turning down bad roles in pictures, I had several options to support the family.
I still couldn’t sing or dance, but, with Nancy in the audience every night, I did a nightclub floor show at the Last Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas for two weeks, in which I was an emcee for a group called the Continentals. The audience’s reaction was good, the reviews were good, the pay was terrific, and they invited me to come back. But Nancy and I missed our life in California and neither of us thought much of smoke-filled nightclubs, so when the two weeks ended we were glad to go home.
I could have gotten a job on Broadway, which was always looking for Hollywood actors, but Nancy and I were devoted Californians and not interested in a long-term relationship with New York.
There were many offers to star in a television series, but I was firmly against it.
I was sure a television series could be a professional kiss of death to a movie actor: The people who owned movie theaters thought nobody would buy a ticket to see someone they could see at home in their living room for nothing. Besides, most television series expired after two or three years, and from then on, audiences—and producers—tended to think of you only as the character you’d played in the TV series.
In the end, television guest spots not only tided us over financially but led me to one of those unexpected and unplanned turns in the road—the kind that can take you a long way from where you thought you were going.
18
TAFT SCHREIBER, WHO HEADED television activities for MCA, knew I was adamant against doing a TV series. But in 1954, he came to me with a proposal: The General Electric Company was in the market for a new television program, and he wanted to propose a weekly dramatic anthology in which I would only act several times a season but serve as the host every week.
I knew that having my face beamed into homes across the country every week risked the kind of overexposure that could be fatal to a movie actor’s career. But I liked the idea because it offered me a chance to share in the growing financial prosperity of television while avoiding the kind of typecasting that acting in the same role week after week in a regular series brought with it.
I agreed to do it and thus was born the General Electric Theater, which for eight years at nine o’clock on Sunday nights produced what I think were some of the finest programs to emerge from the period that show business historians now refer to nostalgically as the “Golden Age of Television.” Each Sunday, the GE Theater offered a different story with a different cast, and virtually every Oscar winner in Hollywood showed up in one of our plays.
My new job called upon me to play a supporting role in an extraordinary experiment by American industry. Until then, most of America’s industrial giants had tended to function under a strong central management within a single geographic region—United States Steel in Pittsburgh and General Motors in Detroit, for instance. But Ralph Cordiner, General Electric’s chairman, a remarkable and foresighted businessman, believed GE would grow more dynamically if he dispersed its manufacturing operations around the country. Smaller divisions headed by strong local managers who had considerable autonomy over their products and manufacturing operations, he thought, ought to be more competitive and more responsive to the marketplace than a large, unwieldy organization dominated by a powerful head office, and I think he was right.
Cordiner implemented his vision on a grand scale, establishing 139 GE plants in thirty-nine states.
In doing so, he recognized that such a sweeping decentralization might cause some morale problems. Managers of GE plants far from the company’s New York headquarters, for example, might consider themselves as second-class citizens, forgotten by the home office.
As an adjunct to my job on the television show, he asked me to travel to GE plants around the country as a kind of goodwill ambassador from the home office. Sending the host of the GE Theater to the far-flung plants, he thought, would demonstrate that the New York office cared about company employees no matter where they were and would also help forge a closer link between the plants and the communities where they were located. Local managers were instructed to take me to local events.
At first, all I did was walk the assembly lines at GE plants, or if it didn’t interrupt production, I’d speak to them in small groups from a platform set up on the floor of the factories; I’d tell them a little about Hollywood and our show, throw it open to questions, then move on to another plant.
About a year or two after the tours began, the GE representative who always accompanied me told me I was scheduled to speak to a group of company employees who had been working on a local charity fund-raising project. I think everybody expected me to get up and tell a few Hollywood stories as usual and then sit down. But instead, I decided to give a speech about the pride of giving and the importance of doing things without waiting for the government to do it for you. I pointed out that when individuals or private groups were involved in helping the needy, none of the contributions were spent on overhead or administrative costs, unlike government relief programs where $2 was often spent on overhead for every $1 that went to needy people.
When I sat down, my remarks got a huge ovation. As we were driving away from the plant, the man from GE said, “I didn’t know you could give speeches.” I said, “I have been doing that for quite a while.”
Well, that changed everything. From then on, whenever I went to a GE plant, in addition to meeting workers, they’d schedule a speech or two for me to a local organization like the United Fund or Chamber of Commerce; before long, the company began to get requests for me to speak before larger audiences—state conventions of service organizations and groups like the Executives Club in Chicago and the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.
For eight years I hopscotched around the country by train and automobile for GE and visited every one of its 139 plants, some of them several times. Along the way, I met more than 250,000 employees of GE—not just shaking their hands, but talking to them and listening to what was on their minds.
Looking back now, I realize it wasn’t a bad apprenticeship for someone who’d someday enter public life—although, believe me, that was the farthest thing from my mind in those days.
As a radio sports announcer, I had sometimes flown to ball games or other events I was covering in an open-cockpit biplane wearing a leather helmet and goggles, and I’d loved it. But during the early fifties, there was an epidemic of plane crashes that caused something inside me to say it wasn’t a safe time for me to go flying. Call it a hunch if you will, but I felt that if I agreed to fly, I’d get in the wrong plane someday. So, I had it written in my contract that GE couldn’t ask me to fly.
I knew that someday I’d fly again but I’d know when the time was right. In the meantime, I got to see a lot of the country through the windows of a moving train; I still can’t think of a more comfortable way of travel than taking the Super Chief from Los Angeles to Chicago.
Initially, my speeches were only about the picture business, but after a while I began trying to make them a kind of warning to others. This is what had happened in Hollywood; if they weren’t careful, people in other occupations might
soon find themselves in the same fix as those of us in Hollywood and be denied fair treatment by the government: If it could happen to people in the picture business, I said, it could happen to people in any business.
Well, after I began including these remarks in the speeches, an interesting thing happened: No matter where I was, I’d find people from the audience waiting to talk to me after a speech and they’d all say, “Hey, if you think things are bad in your business, let me tell you what is happening in my business. . . .”
I’d listen and they’d cite examples of government interference and snafus and complain how bureaucrats, through overregulation, were telling them how to run their businesses.
Those GE tours became almost a postgraduate course in political science for me. I was seeing how government really operated and affected people in America, not how it was taught in school.
From hundreds of people in every part of the country, I heard complaints about how the ever-expanding federal government was encroaching on liberties we’d always taken for granted. I heard it so often that after a while I became convinced that some of our fundamental freedoms were in jeopardy because of the emergence of a permanent government never envisioned by the framers of the Constitution: a federal bureaucracy that was becoming so powerful it was able to set policy and thwart the desires not only of ordinary citizens, but their elected representatives in Congress.
I’d make a note of what people told me, do some research when I got home, and then include some of the examples in my next speech. Pretty soon I had quite a few. For example, I learned the government had six programs to help poultry growers increase egg production. It also had a seventh program costing almost as much as all the six others to buy up surplus eggs.
As time went on, the portion of my speech about government began to grow longer and I began to shorten the Hollywood part. Pretty soon, it became basically a warning to people about the threat of government. Finally, the Hollywood part just got lost and I was out there beating the bushes for private enterprise.
No government has ever voluntarily reduced itself in size—and that, in a way, became my theme.
I’d emphasize that we as Americans should get together and take back the liberties we were losing; with fewer than sixty percent of the voters turning out at many national elections, it was like handing ourselves over to the enemy. Our whole system of government is based on “We the people,” but if we the people don’t pay attention to what’s going on, we have no right to bellyache or squawk when things go wrong. So I would tell them that, and the place to start was to begin paying more attention to what was going on in their government.
I’ve always believed that you can’t hold an audience by reading a speech, but when you’re giving three or four or more talks a day, as I was, it’s difficult to memorize every word you wanted to say; so, refining a technique I first tried out during my early speech-making days in Hollywood, I developed a shorthand I’ve used ever since.
I began listing the main points I wanted to make in a speech on four-by-six-inch cards with abbreviations for some words: “That,” for example, became “tht,” “barren desert” would be “barrn dsrt.” Just the letters told me what the word was, and usually other words in a sentence would be so obvious to me when I looked down at the card, I’d remember the rest. I might include three or four words to remind me of a story or joke that I wanted to tell, then I’d ad lib the rest. (Of course, this hasn’t done much for my spelling now when I write a note to someone.) Let me take that sentence and show how I’d compress it: “. . . cours ths hsnt don much . . . my splng now whn . . . write . . . note . . . sm one.”
Although GE gave me a platform, it left it up to me to decide what to say. As a liberal in my younger days I’d had an inherent suspicion of big business and couldn’t believe there wouldn’t come a day when the company would begin trying to write my speeches for me. Never once did that happen.
In 1958, our second child, Ron, was born, bringing more joy into our lives. In 1960, after leading the Screen Actors Guild in its first major strike in history in my fifth term as president, I resigned after becoming a partner in a production company, and therefore, from the union’s point of view, I was no longer a working stiff but a producer.
Some authors have suggested my work in the Screen Actors Guild fighting the studios hurt my film career, as it had hurt some of the early pioneers in the union, but I’ve never felt any sour grapes about it. To a newspaper columnist who asked, after the 1960 strike, if I thought the union work had hurt my career, I said, “I think it has hurt some, although certainly not in the way that someone says, ‘I’m mad at this guy so I won’t use him in my pictures.’ In all my years with the union, I’ve never seen any grudges carried deliberately out of the conference room. Any suffering careerwise definitely isn’t retaliatory, although there are a lot of people involved in making a motion picture, and you become typecast in their minds on the basis of what they know about you off the screen. They stop thinking of you as an actor. The image they have of you isn’t associated with your last role, but with the guy who sat across the conference table, beefing. And that’s death! You develop a sort of aura. People even forget in time how you came to have it. Your name just doesn’t come up when parts are being discussed.”
I wasn’t unhappy, though. In Hollywood, I’d found more than I’d ever expected life to give me. For many, many reasons, these were very happy years for Nancy and me. My income from General Electric had enabled us to build a dream home overlooking the Pacific Ocean that GE stuffed with every imaginable electric gadget. We also bought a 350-acre ranch in the Santa Monica Mountains north of Los Angeles that we loved. And, although GE kept me on the road a lot, there were long stretches of my life during that period when my daily routine focused entirely on my family, our ranch, and a horse.
To my mind, nothing compares with the kinship between man and animal you find on the back of a horse. I’m not sure what it is, but there you are, in charge of an animal with more muscle in its neck than you have in your whole body. From the minute the horse takes its first step, every muscle in your own body begins to respond to it; how much of the experience is physical and how much is mental, I don’t know, but there’s no better place for me to think than on the top of a horse.
As you rock along a trail to the sound of the hooves and the squeak of leather, with the sun on your head and the smell of the horse and your saddle and the trees around you, things just begin to straighten themselves out. Somehow, it just seems a lot easier to sort out a problem when I’m on a horse.
I did a lot of thinking atop Baby during those pleasant years, and I made some important decisions about my life.
19
I GUESS IT WAS IN 1960, the year Richard Nixon ran against John F. Kennedy for the presidency, that I completed my political journey from liberal Democrat to dedicated Republican.
One day I came home and said to Nancy, “You know, something just dawned on me: All these things I’ve been saying about government in my speeches (I wasn’t just making speeches—I was preaching a sermon), all these things I’ve been criticizing about government getting too big, well, it just dawned on me that every four years when an election comes along, I go out and support the people who are responsible for the things I’m criticizing.”
As a liberal Democrat, I was naturally opposed to Richard Nixon. In 1950, he ran for a seat in the U.S. Senate from California against Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, the wife of an actor-friend of mine, Melvyn Douglas, and I campaigned against him. Nixon won after a bitter battle that focused on allegations Helen Douglas was a Communist sympathizer. In those days I worked on the campaigns of just about any Democrat who was willing to accept my help. In 1948, I campaigned for Hubert Humphrey and for Harry Truman, and to this day, I think Truman was an outstanding president, with one exception. He had a common sense that helped him get to the root of problems; he stood up to the bureaucrats, and when he had a tough decision to make, he made it. A
nd he wasn’t a tax-and-spend Democrat; during the past sixty years, there have been only eight scattered years when the federal budget was in balance and four of those years were under Truman. Looking back, I think he and I were in tune on a lot of things about government and I think if he had lived longer he might have come over to the other side like I did. In my view, the only thing that kept Harry Truman from real greatness was his decision not to completely back General Douglas MacArthur and win the Korean War.
I think, as MacArthur did, that if we as a nation send our soldiers abroad to get shot at, we have a moral responsibility to do everything we can to win the war we put them in. I’ll never forget one prophetic remark by MacArthur: “If we don’t win this war in Korea, we’ll have to fight another war—this time in a place called Vietnam.” Until then, I had never heard of Vietnam. I only knew about a place called French Indochina. How right he was.
I also greatly admired the man who followed Truman into the White House, Dwight Eisenhower. In 1952, I joined several other Democrats in sending a telegram to Ike urging him to run for president as a Democrat. At the time, he was very reluctant to run at all. But I always suspected he’d have to run; it’s always seemed to me that when it comes to the presidency, it’s not candidates who make the decision whether to run, it’s public opinion—the people make the decision.
When Ike decided to run on the Republican ticket, I decided: If I considered him the best man for the job as a Democrat, he still ought to be my choice. So I campaigned and voted for Ike—my first for a Republican. In 1960, when Nixon was preparing to run against Kennedy for the presidency, I still carried around some bitter feelings from the 1950 Senate campaign. After I mentioned this to Ralph Cordiner, he said, “I think you might be wrong about Nixon.”
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