Supermob

by Gus Russo

  When World War II broke out, Wasserman and Jack Warner persuaded the War Department to delay Reagan's draft induction in order to let him star in what would arguably be his best movie, Kings Row.1 After the war, Lieutenant Reagan picked up where he'd left off in Hollywood, joined Hill­crest Country Club, divorced Jane Wyman, and was forced to reassess his acting vocation, which was descending faster than a two-thousand-pound bunker buster.

  In October of 1946, Reagan visualized his next career move when he spoke in Chicago at an American Federation of Labor (AFL) convention. Rousing the union members with anticommunist bombast, Reagan would learn, like other would-be pols such as Richard Nixon, that he could use red-baiting to craft a career in politics. Robert K. Dornan, nephew of comedian Jack Haley, recalled seeing Reagan venting at "Colonel" Jack Warner's house. "Ronald Reagan would be in a room talking a lot, even at parties, about how to keep the Communists out of Hollywood."2 His obsession with Communism led him to barnstorm in an effort to destroy the liberal Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), a federation of Hollywood craft unions; that quest sided him with the corrupt IATSE and MCA in order to combat fictitious "commies" in Hollywood. This clash in the labor-intensive movie industry is widely perceived as one of the pivotal labor struggles of the postwar era. Reagan's demonization of the CSU was not new; labeling the leftist unionizers "parlor pinks," George Browne had employed the tactic a decade earlier when he fronted for the Outfit's takeover of IATSE.3 Of course, the lefties were not aligned against the United States, but were merely a reaction to World War II fascism, and Reagan and cohorts surely knew it. Nonetheless, once the opportunistic Reagan picked up the anticommunist theme, he never let it go—it would be his ticket to success.

  Reagan's stance was not without its drawbacks, however, as verbal jousts often threatened to turn physical. One former CSU operative, George Ku-vakis, remembered how Reagan "had a limousine pick him up at his house, take him to work, and they were all armed . . . and they brought him home at night undercover."4

  But Reagan's jingoism was even more ugly than people knew: in an attempt to curry favor with the FBI, Reagan undertook an insidious and secret anticommunist mission. According to a massive FBI file released in 1998, Reagan began meeting with FBI agents at his home in 1946, whereupon he gave the Bureau the names of actors Howard da Silva (The Tost Weekend), Larry Parks (The Jolson Story), and Alexander Knox (Wilson) as supposed Communists. Those and other names (deleted from the FBI documents) given by Reagan to the Bureau were eventually blacklisted in Hollywood. For the icing on the cake, Reagan publicly claimed that Hollywood liberals caused his lackluster film career to stall out as punishment for his hysterical anticommunist crusade.5

  Ironically, Reagan's hand-wringing may have been a classic example of the maxim "He doth protest too much." According to the recent file release, the Los Angeles FBI Field Office reported that Reagan may have had his own "commie" connections: in 1946, Reagan was a sponsor and director of the Committee for a Democratic Far East Policy, which had been designated as subversive by the attorney general; he was also a member of the American Veterans Committee, cited as "communist dominated." Those were just the sorts of associations Reagan reported to Hoover that resulted in ruined careers for his fellow actors. Fellow actor Karen Morley, who knew Reagan at the time, opined, "It isn't that he's a really bad guy. What's so terrible about Ronnie is his ambition to go where the power is. I don't think anything he does is original, he doesn't think it up. I never saw him have an idea in his life. I really don't think he realizes how dangerous the things he really does are."6

  Reagan's drive to free the acting community from the clutches of the Red Menace (coupled with a nudge from Lew Wasserman) motivated him to run for the presidency of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), where he could become the endangered actors' father-protector. Years later, he verified the rationale in his autobiography, writing, "More than anything else, it was the Communists' attempted takeover of Hollywood and its worldwide weekly audience of five hundred million people that led me to accept a nomination as president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG)."7

  Although Reagan attained the post, not all in the acting community were convinced by his zealous rhetoric. Actor Alexander Knox commented, "Reagan spoke very fast . . . so that he could talk out of both sides of his mouth at once."8 Another SAG member said, "Reagan was a conservative, management-sweetheart union president and ran SAG like a country club instead of a militant labor union."9 And in a style that would presage his presidency, Reagan often seemed confused when tough questions were posed. But he was actually dumb like a fox, for as Hollywood labor expert and Fulbright Scholar Gerald Home wrote, "[He] almost seemed to use this confusion as a tactic: he had converted bafflement into an art form . . . he misstated dates and events at meetings. At one point he said jokingly, 'Pat [Somerset, another SAG official] says I am mixed up.' "10 Reagan would use the "kindly idiot" strategy not only in the presidency, but in future federal testimony when he was repeatedly quizzed about his furtive dealings with Wasserman. (It would also come in handy during the arms-for-hostages and Iran-contra gun-smuggling scandals of the eighties.)

  Ronald Reagan's career in politics might have ended before it began were celebrities not virtually immune from prosecution in their Hollywood sanctuary. In February 1952, the actor with whom Sid Korshak occasionally went on the prowl set his sights on MCA starlet and single mother Selene Walters. According to Walters, a twenty-one-year-old combination of Kim Novak and Carole Lombard, it all started when Reagan introduced himself to her in the wee hours at Slapsy Maxie's nightclub. Walters recently re­called:

  I was very impressed because he was such a big star. He asked for my address and phone number and I gave it to him. After my date took me home to my apartment, I got undressed, put on a housecoat. Then there was a bang on my door—it was about three A.M. I was afraid to open it at that hour.

  "Who is it?" I asked.

  "It's Ron—I just met you an hour ago. Let me in."

  So I let him in. "I want to talk about my career," I told him. But he didn't want to talk about my career at all. So there was a lot of shuffling around on the sofa. I was struggling and kept saying, "Stop!" but he wouldn't. He forced himself on me and did what he wanted to do—in like a half a second, staining my nice housecoat in the process.

  He said, "Listen, kid, I'll be in touch. We'll talk about your career later."

  He never called me because he married Nancy Davis two weeks later. I didn't want any scandal so I never reported it. Besides, you couldn't sue a big star in those days. You still can't.11

  Indeed, on March 4, 1952, Reagan married divorcee and actress Nancy Luckett Davis, and although his career was in the dumps, he refused to allow his new bride to live in anything but grand style. Living well beyond his means, Reagan purchased not only a home in Pacific Palisades, but also a 290-acre Malibu parcel for the amazing price of $65,000. Reagan was now under great pressure to afford his lifestyle, as well as pay a large tax bill that accompanied the land purchases. That pressure was soon to be relieved in the aftermath of one of Hollywood's greatest controversies, an episode that smacked of a Wasserman-Reagan-Korshak power play.

  At the time, MCA and all other talent agencies were forbidden by SAG from becoming producers, for obvious conflict-of-interest reasons—a talent agent is at natural odds with a producer over the fees obtained by the talent. * With the recent arrival of the medium of television, which was centered in New York, all Hollywood-based businesses, including MCA, were feeling the pinch. Stein, Wasserman, and MCA decided that they had to get into television production if MCA was to continue expanding, and to do that, the long-standing SAG rule had to go. Although MCA had been granted an occasional waiver from the rule, they now coveted a "blanket waiver" for all productions. They had the admittedly brilliant foresight that MCA could pioneer the filming of television programs that could be resold, as opposed to the live variety emanating from New York.

  With Reagan's divorce lawyer Laurence Be
ilenson representing MCA, SAG began considering the unprecedented blanket waiver. MCA frightened the union's membership by warning that all TV production would stay in New York unless MCA was granted the exemption. Rumors were rife that Sid Korshak was also involved in the dealings on behalf of his friends Lew Wasserman and Reagan. Thus, in his fifth and lame-duck term as SAG president, Ronald Reagan, with his new wife, Nancy, on SAG's board, granted a blanket waiver to MCA on July 14, 1952, allowing Stein's exploding MCA juggernaut a unique immunity from the SAG rules.

  Much as James Petrillo's Chicago music-union waivers for MCA had given Stein the advantage in that city, the latest favor gave MCA an insurmountable edge over competing agencies in Hollywood. In the aftermath, MCA, now the only entity capable of "packaging" the product from top to bottom, began to exponentially increase its hold over the entertainment industry. (The company's production income would skyrocket from $8.7 million in 1954 to almost $50 million in 1957, some of which was used to purchase the 327-acre Universal Pictures backlot for $11 million in 1958.) MCA could now demand that outside producers package more MCA talent into a production or take none at all. According to a source for the Justice Department, which began still another investigation of MCA, the mega-agency "has a representative stationed at every studio" who tipped the agency for future negotiations. The result of the spycraft was that if a studio wanted any MCA client (writer, actor, director, singer, comic,.etc.), it had to fill all the positions with MCA clients.12 This dictum extended to nightclubs as well, and businessmen who refused to succumb to the strong-arm tactics were often forced to hire grade B talent. When the Department of Justice investigated MCA for antitrust violations in 1962, it concluded that the 1952 waiver became "the central fact of MCA's whole rise to power."13

  Both Hollywood professionals and law enforcement officials were certain that the deal involved collusion between Reagan and MCA. Former MCA executive Berle Adams euphemistically noted, "Lew got close to Reagan on that SAG deal."14 But law enforcement was somewhat less discreet. One Department of Justice source later remarked, "Ronald Reagan is a complete slave of MCA who would do their bidding on anything."15 And although no one in government formally charged that Reagan and MCA had conspired beforehand, many observers assumed that it had happened, especially given what happened next.

  The P a y b a ck

  What added fuel to the Reagan-Wasserman charges was the sudden and dramatic upturn in Reagan's fortunes at MCA. On a small scale, the agency cut a deal for Reagan to work at the Outfit-owned Last Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas to cover, as Reagan himself admitted, his back tax debt. Of considerably more importance was MCA's transfiguring of the washed-up actor into a national television star, a nod that would make Reagan not only a millionaire, but give him an audience that would later be receptive to his increasingly right-wing political aspirations.

  A firsthand witness to the accommodation was Henry Denker, a pioneering New York-based television producer for CBS who helmed the weekly dramatic anthology show Medallion Theater, which premiered in 1953. Denker recently spoke of how the shows were put together: "Our advertising agency, BBD&O, asked us to work closely with MCA, because they had the biggest reservoir of stars. 'Work with Taft [Schreiber] and Lew [Wasser­man] and Freddie [Fields],' we were told." And MCA delivered, producing such stars as Charlton Heston, Henry Fonda, and Jack Lemmon for Denker.

  Occasionally MCA came to Denker asking for a favor in return, usually in the form of adding a new talent they were representing to the cast of the show. Denker had no problem with the quid pro quo, but was quizzical when one MCA request seemed odd: "One day I got a call from Freddie Fields. 'We might get you Ronald Reagan,' he said. Well, I knew by that time Ronald Reagan was over the hill. It was no secret in show business. They said, 'Find something for Reagan to do.' So, I wanted something that was surefire that nobody's ever missed with. I found something that had been produced three or four times—never failed. It was called Alias, JimmyValentine, about a safecracker who gets out of jail and decides to go straight. "*

  Denker remembered Reagan arriving prepared in New York, adding, "You couldn't have met a nicer guy in your life." At the end of Reagan's yeo­manlike performance, a series of events occurred that clarified Freddie Fields's pitch for Reagan. According to Denker, at the end of the live broadcast, the director didn't call for the hot lights to be turned off. Denker thought, "There's something very strange going on here." In a couple of minutes, the situation became odder still when the director had Reagan, who had changed into a suit, stand in front of a gray velour drape and perform the introduction to Alias, JimmyValentine—but by now the show was off the air.

  "What this really was about came out after the show aired," said Denker, who realized that MCA was using his show and soundstage to film a pilot for a new weekly series that they eventually sold to General Electric. That audition evolved into General Electric Theater, a weekly series for which MCA hired Ronald Reagan at $125,000 per year as host, program supervisor, occasional star, and producer of the show. GE Theater was a top hit, running for nine years.

  "I thought about bringing a lawsuit," Denker said years later. "They stole the show. What was going on was they needed a spot for Reagan because it was a payoff for something. They owed him something. This was the payoff for the waiver that he gave to MCA—an incredible conflict of interest. Every favor MCA did, like getting Reagan the GE job, was in exchange for something they got in return. Take my word for it. I know those guys. They were the shrewdest bunch of guys that have ever been in show business, and Lew Wasserman was the top of them all."

  Denker later spent a year in Hollywood working at MCA's Universal Pictures production wing, where he saw firsthand why SAG had outlawed the agent-producer role for so long, the rule that was overturned during Reagan's tenure at SAG. "I found out—and here is the real evil in this thing," Denker recalled, "that the Universal writers represented by MCA were being paid less than the writers who are represented by outside agents. They sold their writers down the river."16

  In 1972, Denker published one of his thirty-four novels, The Kingmaker, a thinly veiled roman a clef about a superagency that maneuvered one of its actors into the California governor's mansion. In the book, Dr. Isadore Cohen of Chicago creates the Talent Corporation of America (TCA), relocates to Los Angeles, where he lunches at Hillcrest, and promotes a washed-up actor and SAG president, Jeff Jefferson. After passing a SAG waiver for TCA, Jefferson performs in Alias, Jimmy Valentine, and TCA rewards him with the job of hosting the TV show CM Theater. At the end of the book, when a television commentator mused that Jefferson could actually become president of the United States, Cohen recoiled in fear that he might have created a monster. In just eight years, Cohen's fictitious nightmare would become a reality.

  "My book is the true story," Denker has said. "I lived through it." True or not, when a prominent Hollywood producer wanted to adapt the book to film, Wasserman put his foot down. "Lew told him, 'Absolutely not!' " remembered Denker.* It would not be the last time that a Supermob boss would interfere with a writer that dared expose their story. MCA's control over so many A-list talents allowed the firm to play hardball over the years with clients whose politics ran counter to Wasserman's and Stein's. In 1954, when SAG again threatened to retract the waiver, Reagan and SAG negotiator John Dales went into closed session and extended MCA's waiver to 1960. "Ronnie Reagan had done Lew another good turn," said Denker.

  With Reagan's career back on track, MCA spent the remainder of the fifties building an entertainment monolith. In 1958, the company bought television distribution rights to over 750 pre-1948 films from Paramount Pictures for $35 million. Now MCA could add "distributor" to its list of services. The company also entered into an exclusive relationship with underdog network NBC. Robert Kitner, NBC's vice president, devised the arrangement with his MCA counterpart, Sonny Werblin. "Sonny," Kitner told him, "look at the [NBC] schedule for next season; here are the empty spots, you fill them in."17 By 1959, MCA was prod
ucing fourteen NBC shows, for a total of eight and a half hours in prime time.

  A potential problem arose in 1959 when SAG's seventeen thousand members threatened their first strike in sixty years, over televised-movie residuals—$60 million of which had already gone to MCA as a result of the Paramount film acquisitions. With their contract with producers scheduled to expire on January 31, 1960, the beleaguered actors prevailed upon SAG board member Reagan to take the SAG presidency again in the mistaken hope that he would provide a strong voice for them in negotiations with MCA. "That's why Reagan was elected president of SAG again in 1959," said a SAG board member. "We knew how close he was to MCA and thought he could get us our best deal."18 (Of particular note was that Reagan was on the board illegally, since he was also a producer of GE Theater. Three years later, Reagan lied to the 1962 grand jury when he said he had not been a producer. Not only have writers for the show recalled his producer role, but Reagan himself admitted it to the Hollywood Reporter for its November 14, 1955, issue.)

  SAG rules notwithstanding, Reagan decided to retake the presidency, especially after his Svengali weighed in. "I called my agent, Lew Wasserman," Reagan said. "Lew said he thought I should take the job."19 It is widely believed that Sidney Korshak entered the picture at this point, helping to steer MCA through the shoals of the potentially disastrous SAG negotiations. Then IATSE president Richard Walsh told author Dan Moldea, "Korshak's involved in that whole proposition you're talking about there, and it would tie back into Reagan . . . Reagan was a friend of, talked to, Sidney Korshak, and it would all tie back together . . . I know Sidney Korshak. I know where he comes from, what he is, and what he's done. He's a labor lawyer, as the term goes."20