Movie Nights with the Reagans

by Mark Weinberg

  In the film, which had just been released three weeks earlier, Michael J. Fox plays Marty McFly, a high school student from a loving but struggling family. Through his friendship with a local scientist, inventor, and all-around eccentric, Christopher Lloyd’s Doc Brown, Marty is transported from the present year of 1985 back to 1955 in a time machine made from a converted DMC DeLorean sports car. As he adjusts to the shock of living in his hometown of Hill Valley, California, thirty years in the past—and falls in with a younger but no less wacky Doc Brown—Marty’s unexpected mission is to help the teenage incarnations of his parents meet each other and fall in love before Marty and his siblings vanish from the face of the earth.

  Both Reagans appeared engrossed in Back to the Future, often laughing heartily. The president got a kick out of the fact that when Marty first goes back to 1955 and walks past Hill Valley’s movie theater, the marquee shows Cattle Queen of Montana, the 1954 film starring Barbara Stanwyck and Ronald Reagan.

  At the time, Roger Ebert compared Back to the Future to Frank Capra’s 1946 classic It’s a Wonderful Life and speculated that executive producer Steven Spielberg was “emulating the great studio chiefs of the past.” The timeless quality of the storytelling was not lost on the two veterans of old Hollywood sitting with us in the darkened living room.

  But beyond that, I could not help but wonder if the president may have seen parts of himself in certain aspects of the film. Marty journeys back to a simpler time—when patriotism mattered, when the town square was kept a little cleaner, when everyone seemed to smile a little easier, and the music the kids listened to was just a little softer. Reagan often implored us to embrace the simple values that informed this earlier era, to recapture the grit and spirit of togetherness that helped win World War II and usher in the prosperity of the 1950s. Indeed, America’s booming economy at home and unrivaled standing abroad, which characterized Ronald Reagan’s 1980s, in some ways mirrored the country’s similarly strong footing in the 1950s.

  Of course, the 1950s were far from perfect—in reality or in the movie. Marty’s goal is always to get “back to the future,” back to 1985. It would have been far more difficult to make a movie chronicling a character’s struggles to get back to the eve of Reagan’s election in 1980, with its gas lines, stagflation, and the Iranian hostage crisis in full swing. Or even worse, back to the mid-1970s, when the Watergate scandal had ratcheted up national tension to nerve-wracking levels.

  Marty knows he must get back to 1985 because his future is there, and while he can’t see what it holds, he knows he must return to experience it. But to do that, he has to make sure his future parents get together so that Marty himself can be born in the first place. Marty’s future father, George McFly, is a loner and a bit lost, but he is madly in love with Marty’s future mother, Lorraine. When Marty encourages George to tell Lorraine that “destiny”—or as George famously flubs the line, “density”—has brought them together, he is speaking literally as a part of that destiny himself.

  Ronald Reagan believed in the concept of destiny and the guiding hand of providence. It was plain to see in their everyday interactions that he and Nancy believed they were destined for each other. But he also had a long-standing vision of destiny for America and its people. As early as 1952, Reagan said to a graduating class at William Woods College that he “always thought of America as a place in the divine scheme of things that was set aside as a promised land.”I

  It was this unshakeable belief in the boundless future of that promised land that drove Ronald Reagan throughout his presidency. In his disdain for limits and his endless capacity to look ahead, he resembled the movie’s Doc Brown. Like Brown, Reagan was a visionary, a dreamer, a man whose imagination was among his greatest assets—yet always a realist. As it turned out, both Brown and Reagan were right: there is such a thing as destiny, though sometimes it needs a little push.

  In only one brief instance did the mood in the room darken. It was during a scene after Marty McFly arrives in 1955 and meets the younger Doc Brown:

  DOC:

  Tell me, Future Boy, who’s president of the United States in 1985?

  MARTY:

  Ronald Reagan.

  DOC:

  Ronald Reagan? The actor? [Rolls his eyes.] Ha! Then who’s vice president, Jerry Lewis? I suppose Jane Wyman is the First Lady?

  MARTY:

  Whoa, wait. Doc!

  DOC:

  And Jack Benny is secretary of the Treasury!

  The movie continued, but for me—and, I suspected, those around me—it felt as if the air had gone out of the Aspen Lodge. Something lingered in the room. A discomfort. That evening was only the second time in all eight years of my service in the White House that I ever heard Jane Wyman’s name mentioned or her referred to by anyone other than reporters. Mrs. Reagan rarely mentioned her husband’s first wife, to whom he was married from 1940 to 1949, though she did once recall going with the president to Jane’s house to visit their children, Michael and Maureen. “Jane was perfectly nice to me,” Mrs. Reagan said, “but those visits were awkward. Not only had she been married to Ronnie, but she was the star, and it was her house and her children. I felt out of place, and I was a little in awe of her.” She also noted that Jane “knew how to play on Ronnie’s good nature” and had somehow managed to convince him not to remarry until she did. (Nancy convinced him otherwise: the couple wed on March 4, 1952, eight months before Wyman tied the knot for the fourth time.)II

  Still, the unspoken “taboo” about mentioning her was pretty clear. In 1983 a staffer was riding in the limo with the president after some routine event. For reasons that I will never understand, my colleague happened to ask the president if he had ever seen Falcon Crest, the popular 1980s prime-time soap opera that starred Wyman as the conniving wine baron Angela Channing. Falcon Crest, which began airing on CBS in 1981, the same year Reagan took office, was routinely a top-ten show in the Nielsen ratings. It was hard to imagine that it escaped either of the Reagans’ attention.

  The president did not get easily riled. But when he did, we knew to watch out.

  He stared at his aide with an intensity the man had never seen before and said, in the iciest tone imaginable, “No. Why do you ask?”

  There was no good answer to that question. The aide attempted none. The staffer told me later that he wanted to jump out of the moving car but instead resigned himself to shrugging his shoulders and looking out the window for the rest of what seemed like an interminable ride back to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

  That was the weird thing about Jane Wyman, at least to the Reagan staff: it was as if she didn’t exist to the president anymore. He seemed as though he had willed himself to forget about that period of his life, and was startled and resentful when asked to return to it. Throughout his administration, he never mentioned her name publicly, and she never mentioned his, even though Ms. Wyman was given ample opportunities to do so over the years. Nonetheless, she let it be known that she voted for him both in 1980 and 1984.

  Only once in all the years that I knew Ronald Reagan did he mention Jane Wyman to me. Shortly after he left the White House, we were in the back of a car in Los Angeles, on our way to some event. He was reminiscing about Hollywood, and particularly about the disparity between actors’ salaries in his day and now. At one point, he said, “That’s back when I was married to Wyman.” Wyman. I was struck that he mentioned her at all and by the fact that he said just her last name. Never did I hear even that from him again.

  Fortunately, at the Back to the Future screening, Doc Brown’s reference to the president’s first wife passed without comment, and our breathing returned to normal. The discussion after the movie was pleasant, and the Reagans seemed particularly impressed by Michael J. Fox’s performance. The president commented on how clever the movie was and how this was the type of movie that Hollywood should be making, as opposed to some of the more controversial, violent, or adult-themed films that seemed all too common at the time.


  Mrs. Reagan brought up Jack Benny, who had been a friend of hers. As Jane Wyman had been mentioned in the movie in almost the same breath as Benny, some of us were a bit perplexed. But Mrs. Reagan did not say anything about Ms. Wyman. Instead, she recalled a conversation she and Jack Benny once had about worrying.

  “Jack told me,” she said, “ ‘I don’t understand when people say “Don’t worry.” If you’re a worrier, you’re a worrier, and it’s okay.’ ”

  “Well, Mrs. Reagan, you are a worrier,” her husband said with a smile.

  Perhaps with the president’s recent surgery lingering in her mind, Mrs. Reagan replied, “Yes, honey, I am.”

  We filed out into the still-warm July air and went our separate ways. Jim Kuhn and I hung back and talked in front of the now-closed Aspen front door.

  “He seems great,” Jim said. “Back to normal.”

  “I know. It’s amazing. The guy is seventy-four. I hope I’m like that at sixty-four,” I replied.

  Six months later, on February 4, 1986, President Reagan channeled Doc Brown in his State of the Union address, as he exhorted Americans to remember that the sky—not the street—was the limit.

  “Never has there been a more exciting time to be alive,” the president said, “a time of rousing wonder and heroic achievement. As they said in the film Back to the Future, ‘Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.’ ” That was how Ronald Reagan saw America. It is how those of us who knew him and loved him see it still.

  It turned out, however, that we weren’t quite finished with Back to the Future. In 1989 I was working for the former president at his office in Los Angeles when the movie mogul Lew Wasserman, Reagan’s agent many years earlier, contacted him. Wasserman told the president that the director Robert Zemeckis was working on the second sequel to the film, Back to the Future III, and apparently was considering Reagan to play the 1885 mayor of Hill Valley. Would he be interested in the part?

  It would have been his first role since the historical TV Western Death Valley Days and part of me hoped my boss would take it. How fun it would be to see him on a movie theater screen once more, doing a job he had loved. And how much fun he would have, hitting his mark and delivering his lines, one last time. But part of me worried that it would be beneath the dignity of the Office of President of the United States. My opinion was neither sought nor offered.

  The president, flattered, thought about Zemeckis’s offer for a while. I suspect that a part of him wanted to do it. Perhaps he, too, worried about the optics. Or, just maybe, he figured that returning to his Hollywood past carried more risk than reward. After all, time travel hadn’t worked out all that well for Marty McFly.

  In the end, he declined. Ronald Reagan loved the past. But he never needed to live in it.

  * * *

  I. David Brooks, “Reagan’s Promised Land,” New York Times online, June 8, 2004, www.nytimes.com/2004/06/08/opinion/reagan-s-promised-land.html?mcubz=3.

  II. Nancy Reagan with Novak, My Turn, 100.

  12

  ANTI-COMMUNIST FILMS—ROCKY IV

  Starring:

  Sylvester Stallone, Dolph Lundgren, Talia Shire

  Directed by:

  Sylvester Stallone

  Viewed by the Reagans:

  January 31, 1986

  REDS

  Starring:

  Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Jack Nicholson

  Directed by:

  Warren Beatty

  Viewed by the Reagans:

  December 8, 1981

  RED DAWN

  Starring:

  Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, C. Thomas Howell

  Directed by:

  John Milius

  Viewed by the Reagans:

  September 7, 1984

  The Films That Set the Tone for an Era

  In May 1983 a filmmaker named Timothy Anderson met with the Reagan image guru Michael Deaver to discuss a project he claimed to have conceived, a sequel to the popular Rocky movies, in which the actor Sylvester Stallone, as world champion Rocky Balboa, takes on a Soviet boxer in what Anderson called “a very great motion picture with a wide range of positive results.” Also in attendance at that meeting was Stallone himself.I

  That Stallone was one of the most prominent Hollywood supporters of Ronald Reagan (Charlton Heston and Tom Selleck were others) was not a secret. He and his then girlfriend Brigitte Nielsen would later receive a coveted invitation to an October 1985 White House state dinner honoring Singapore’s president, Lee Kuan Yew. That occasion would lead to an interesting interaction with Stallone: he called the White House to ensure that he and Nielsen would be seated together. (Apparently, she felt uncomfortable with strangers.) As it happened, I fielded the call. I told the actor I’d see what I could do, but made no promises. I called the social secretary, who conveyed the request to Mrs. Reagan. To encourage conversations with others around the table, Mrs. Reagan had a long-standing policy of separating guests from their spouses or dates at such dinners. But above all else, Mrs. Reagan wanted guests to be comfortable and enjoy the evening. In Stallone and Nielsen’s case, she made an exception, and they sat together.

  At the event, which the actors Raquel Welch and Michael J. Fox also attended, Stallone told reporters, “It’s always flattering to have the highest person in the land admire your work.”II He promised Reagan a Rambo poster if the president would give him a poster of himself in return.III The president had quipped after dealing with a hostage crisis, “I saw Rambo last night, and now I know what to do the next time this happens.”IV

  The Washington Post reported about another guest at that state dinner, in a note that can now be read only with tragic poignancy: “[Christa] McAuliffe, the teacher who is training for the Shuttle Challenger mission, sat next to the president last night. She said he had talked about his Hollywood career. ‘He told us a lot of stories about when he was in films,’ she said. ‘He also said maybe I could take some papers to grade with me in space.’ ”

  Later in 1985, Stallone invited the Reagans to attend his wedding and reception in Beverly Hills. The president, who liked Stallone but was not particularly close to him, was unable to attend, though he did send a telegram expressing his wish that “the joy of your wedding day always be yours to share and may God bless and watch over you.”V

  Popular culture linked the president and Stallone’s work. A bumper sticker showed up in the eighties that said, “Rocky was a Republican.” The Rocky series did have more than a tinge of the conservative ethos. It emphasized hard work, personal responsibility and determination, and celebrated the hardworking American who dreams of one day doing something great. Which, of course, is why it made perfect sense to send the legendary “Italian Stallion,” Rocky Balboa’s nickname in the films, to battle Communism in Russia. This was the plot of the fourth movie in the series.

  In 1983, early in the development of Rocky IV, Timothy Anderson was concerned about the production schedule for the film. “I assume that you realize the positive impact that my version of Rocky IV could have upon the electorate should it be released in midsummer 1984,” he wrote Deaver. “The story has a strong message of courage and confrontation of evil, in spite of the fact that the hero has periodic cause to question his own strength and durability. This runs very specific parallels to the basic tenets of the president’s foreign policy as well as the manner in which he handles certain difficult domestic problems.” Anderson urged Deaver to impress upon Stallone an “expedited schedule” to ensure that the movie premiered before the president’s reelection.

  I learned a lot from Mike, an unassuming man in horn-rimmed glasses whose official title was deputy chief of staff. He was an indispensable member of the Reagan team but never sought credit or attention. He also protected both Reagans. Once on the 1980 campaign plane, at the end of a long day, candidate Reagan wandered back to the press section and engaged in banter with reporters. Deaver raced to his side, looking nervous, but Bill Plante of CBS News whispered to him, �
��Relax, Mike. He’s okay.” At an off-the-record meeting with reporters shortly after the 1981 assassination attempt, Deaver beseeched the press not to report on Reagan’s wearing a bulletproof vest. Reporters wanted to know why, and Mike said, with genuine worry, “Because it tells a person to shoot for his head.” Silence followed. Though Deaver knew both Reagans far better than Jim Baker, the chief of staff, Deaver let Baker run the show. He and the Reagans knew Baker would be better at operating the levers of government.

  Deaver concentrated instead on the Reagan image. He had an ability to read the president’s moods, knew what settings would work for him, and how he would react. He understood “stagecraft” and how to convey messages through symbols and events. He was always on the lookout for “moments” that would help cement Reagan’s history, but he also knew when to say no. During a 1984 event with Michael Jackson, a staff member suggested to Deaver that the president shake the singer’s hand while wearing a white “glitter glove” to match Jackson’s trademark accouterment. That was going too far. The idea was nixed.VI

  I’m sure that Deaver, with his keen, searching eye for moments advantageous to the Reagan image, saw the potential of the fourth installment of the Rocky franchise to help the 1984 reelection campaign. Not that the president needed much help. And the White House wasn’t above using Hollywood films, and celebrities, to support the administration’s message. Such interplay between DC and Tinseltown was in its infancy, compared with today. For example, during the Reagan years, the White House Correspondents Association’s annual dinner was so boring it was referred to as a “nerd prom.” In recent years, it has become a Hollywood star-studded event, including press coverage of arrivals on a red carpet.