“[T]he important thing is that you should not argue with them. Communism has become an intensely dogmatic and almost mystical religion, and whatever you say, they have ways of twisting it into shapes which put you in some lower category of mankind,” wrote novelist and screenwriter F. Scott Fitzgerald, describing the ideological tension in Hollywood.
The illusion that communism is a harmless ideology is shattered on September 27, 1946, when the Confederation of Studio Unions goes on strike. The head of the union is Herb Sorrell, a rough-and-tumble former boxer who is also a longtime member of the Communist Party. The strike is funded by the National Executive Council of the Communist Party. “When it ends up,” Sorrell predicted, “there’ll be only one man running labor in Hollywood—and that man will be me.”
This is not a peaceful protest but a violent and militant attempt by the Communists to begin taking control of every major union in Hollywood—and, by proxy, the motion picture industry itself. In addition to the striking union members, Sorrell has enlisted hired thugs from the San Francisco area to provide menace. Cars are overturned in the streets. Police fire tear gas at the picket lines blocking the entrance to the Warner Bros. studio. Great mobs of strikers attack those attempting to cross the picket lines. Actor Kirk Douglas describes a scene of men armed with “knives, clubs, battery cables, brass knuckles, and chains.”
Despite the violence, studio head Jack Warner refuses to buckle. He continues making movies. Actors and employees do not cross picket lines to get to work. Instead, they are smuggled into the studio through a Los Angeles River storm drain. For those preferring not to endure the smells and slime of the subterranean entrance, the other option is riding a bus driven straight through the picket lines at Warner’s front gate. Scores of police officers are called in to line the route but cannot prevent the strikers from pelting the vehicles with rocks and bricks. Everyone on board the bus is instructed to lie down on the floor to avoid being hit in the head by broken glass and projectiles.
Ronald Reagan, as vice president of the Screen Actors Guild, considers the storm drain a coward’s entrance and refuses to lie down on the floor of the bus. No matter that he has two young children and a pregnant wife at home, Reagan puts himself at risk in order to make a statement: he is not afraid.
Each day, arriving for work on a new film called Night unto Night, Reagan is the lone person on the studio bus sitting upright, for all to see. When the strikers later escalate their campaign by forcing the Screen Actors Guild to support the strike, an anonymous caller to Reagan’s home threatens that he will be attacked and his face burned with acid if he tries to block SAG’s pro-strike involvement.
Furious, Reagan refuses to back down. Instead, he buys a pistol and carries it in a shoulder holster wherever he goes. For the rest of his life, Ronald Reagan will be vehemently anticommunist. For him, it is very personal: he will never forget the threats.
Four weeks into the confrontation, on October 24, 1946, Reagan and strike organizer Herb Sorrell sit down at Hollywood’s Knickerbocker Hotel. Sorrell is a powerfully built man, fond of using physical intimidation to achieve his goals. But Reagan is no less strong and is uncowed by Sorrell. He angrily accuses the union boss of being responsible for the threats.
“I have to have guards for my kids because I got telephone calls warning what would happen to me,” he seethes, before adding, “You do not want peace in the motion picture industry.”
Actor Gene Kelly is also at the meeting as a member of SAG’s board of directors. He quickly steps in with a joke to keep the peace: “If Mr. Reagan hits Mr. Sorrell I want it understood that this is not the official feeling of this body.”2
Kelly’s words have their desired effect. The meeting calms until it ends at one thirty the following morning, but nothing is resolved.
By December, with the strike in its third month, Reagan is calling a special meeting of SAG’s 350 most elite members. Among them is actor Edward G. Robinson, a man known for playing gangsters on-screen. Robinson is also one of Hollywood’s most ardent Communists. In a speech that those in attendance will remember for years to come, Reagan assures the membership of his solid standing as a New Deal Democrat and argues that the Guild should maintain a united stand against the strike. Even Robinson marvels “at Reagan’s clear and sequential presentation.”
Still, the strike drags on.
The duration of the strike angers Reagan. He is appalled by the Communist union leader’s zealous desire to take control of Hollywood. What began as a battle of ideologies has now become Reagan’s personal mission. He vows to fight communism, wherever it may be.
* * *
With Ronald Reagan gaining political confidence, Gene Kelly nominates him for president of the Screen Actors Guild. Veteran actors James Cagney, Robert Montgomery, Harpo Marx, and John Garfield have just stepped down from SAG leadership. Reagan is not present at the time of his nomination, arriving halfway through the meeting to find out that he has won. He is stunned.
The term of office is one year, beginning in 1947. Almost immediately, Reagan is tested by Communist sympathizers attempting to undermine his leadership. “At a mass meeting,” Reagan will later write, “I watched rather helplessly as they filibustered, waiting for our majority to leave so they could take control.”
A voice in the crowd cries out that the meeting should be adjourned. “I seized on this as a means of ending the attempted takeover. But the other side demanded I identify the one who moved for adjournment.”
Reagan is in a bind. While many in the Screen Actors Guild are against the Communists, it is also a career liability to speak out publicly against them. The momentum of the Communist movement is too great, and the possibility of being personally and professionally ostracized from the Hollywood community is very real. Reagan scans the crowd, searching for at least one individual with the backbone to be his ally in this heated moment.
He sees his man. “Why, I believe John Wayne made the motion,” Reagan tells the crowd. Wayne is one of Hollywood’s best-known tough guys, a former college football player whose starring roles in Westerns and war movies have made him one of the most bankable box office stars in the world. And unlike many Hollywood heroes, who look tall on the screen but are actually diminutive in real life, the gruff Wayne stands at a rugged six foot four.
“I sure as hell did,” Wayne roars from the crowd.
The meeting is adjourned.
* * *
Finally, after thirteen long months, the strike ends. Yet even as the studios emerge victorious, Hollywood’s growing embrace of communism continues unabated, drawing the attention of the feared FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover.
In the waning days of their marriage, Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman are approached by FBI agents Richard Auerbach and Fred Dupuis, who come to their home uninvited on April 10, 1947. The agents ask the couple to “report secretly to the FBI about people suspected of Communist activity.”
Wyman and Reagan quickly offer up six names. This will be the end of Wyman’s involvement with the FBI, but Ronald Reagan begins meeting frequently with the bureau to provide more names and information. He is given a code name: T-10. Two of the people he names, actresses Karen Morley and Anne Revere, will not work in Hollywood for the next twenty years.3
Ronald Reagan believes this banishment is just, for he knows the women to be Communists—and thinks the Communist Party is an agent of a foreign power.
Reagan will be damned if he will allow the motion picture industry to undermine the moral fabric of the United States of America.
Reagan testifies before the House Un-American Activities Committee, 1947.
Ronald Reagan will never waver from the belief that informing for the FBI was the right thing to do; nor will he suffer any repercussions for it. “I talked to Ronnie since,” Jack Dales, executive secretary of SAG at that time, will comment years from now. “And he has no doubts about the propriety of what we did.”
* * *
On October 23, 1947, Re
agan travels to Washington to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, a congressional group trying to root our subversive individuals and practices.4 “I believe that, as Thomas Jefferson put it, if all the American people know all of the facts they will never make a mistake,” said Reagan, responding to questions from HUAC chief investigator Robert Stripling. “Whether the [Communist] party should be outlawed, that is a matter for the government to decide. As a citizen, I would hesitate to see any political party outlawed on the basis of its political ideology. However, if it is proven that an organization is an agent of a foreign power, or in any way not a legitimate political party—and I think the government is capable of proving that—then that is another matter.”
Reagan’s appearance before the committee is his first visit to Capitol Hill.
It makes a lasting impression on him.
* * *
Nearly four years after testifying before Congress, Ronald Reagan guides Tar Baby back to the barn. He hopes soon to add “thoroughbred horse breeder” to the many job titles that currently keep him busy and plans to expand the simple barn into something more elaborate for that purpose.
Reagan leads the mare into her stall and removes her bridle and saddle. Whistling softly to himself, he brushes her torso and flanks. The repetitive movement allows Reagan a contemplative moment.
It is clear that Ronald Reagan needs to make some hard decisions about his future. He gets little respect for his roles as an actor, but he is held in such high esteem for his political activism that when the Friars Club recently honored him they refrained from derogatory jokes and putdowns. Instead, the six hundred members in attendance spent the evening lauding him with sincere speeches about his “stature and dignity,” with the legendary singer Al Jolson even going so far as to say that he wished his son would “grow up to be the kind of man Ronnie is.”
But with his Guild presidency coming to an end, it seems that Reagan’s political days will also cease. All the respect in the world from his Hollywood peers won’t pay the bills. He must find a way to revive his career. The mortgage on his ranch alone is eighty-five thousand dollars. Politics doesn’t offer that kind of money.
As Reagan steps out of the barn, walking to where Nancy Davis and his children wait inside the small ranch house, he faces a midlife crisis. Reagan well knows the truth: he is a forty-year-old Hollywood has-been on the verge of losing everything. As he enjoys a brief time of quiet and solitude on this cool December morning, he is unsure of what 1952 has in store for him—hardly aware that it is the year in which he will remarry, father a new child, and vote Republican for the first time in his life.5
4
STUDIO CITY, CALIFORNIA
MARCH 4, 1952
5:00 P.M.
“I do,” says Ronald Reagan, looking into the large brown eyes of a pregnant Nancy Davis. He is dressed in a black wedding suit with narrow matching tie. Davis, who clutches a fragrant bouquet of orange blossoms and white tulips, does not wear a wedding gown. Instead, she has chosen to wear a gray woolen suit bought off the rack at the I. Magnin department store in Beverly Hills. A single strand of pearls is draped around her neck.
The Rev. John Wells, a Disciples of Christ minister, stands before the small, bare table that represents the altar here at the Little Brown Church. He asks Davis if she, too, agrees to be wed “till death do you part.”
“I do,” she replies. Nancy Davis has campaigned hard for this moment since setting her sights on Ronald Reagan three years ago. She is undaunted by his flings with other women, accepting his indiscretions while enjoying a few brief affairs of her own.1 Davis knows that there are two keys to Reagan’s heart: politics and horses. So she has spent hours whitewashing fences at the actor’s Malibu ranch and attending the Monday night SAG board meetings to watch him lead the proceedings. “I loved to listen to him talk,” Davis will write of their courtship, “and I let him know it.”
Standing in the chapel to Reagan’s right is his best man, the hard-drinking actor William Holden. The thirty-three-year-old Academy Award nominee for Sunset Boulevard has taken a break from filming the World War II drama Stalag 17 to be at the ceremony. His wife, Ardis, is serving as Davis’s matron of honor. The Holdens have been fighting today and are not on speaking terms. That is not an unusual situation in their eleven-year marriage. The main issue between them is infidelity. Holden underwent a vasectomy after the birth of their second son and is fond of bedding his costars without fear of getting them pregnant, thus leaving his wife in a constant state of jealousy and torment.2
Even as Ronald Reagan and Nancy Davis recite their vows, awash in apparent marital bliss, the Holdens sit on opposite sides of the tiny church.
Other than these four, and the gray-haired Reverend Wells, who presides wearing a flowing black robe, there is no one else in attendance for the Reagan-Davis wedding, which makes the Holdens’ feud glaringly obvious. The Reagan children, Maureen and Michael, are away at school.
Even though a formal wedding announcement was made on February 21, and gossip writer Louella Parsons spread the word to twenty million people worldwide through her syndicated newspaper column, the ceremony is stunningly casual. There was no limousine to ferry the couple to the church. Instead, Reagan picked Nancy up at her apartment in the Cadillac convertible purchased for him by Jane Wyman.
In addition, there is no formal reception. The group will adjourn to the Holdens’ ranch-style home3 in nearby Toluca Lake for a quick bite of cake and a splash of champagne before Reagan and Davis drive two hours to Riverside’s Mission Inn for their wedding night.
Reagan’s initial wedding proposal fell far short of romance. Davis had longed “that Ronnie would take me out in a canoe as the sun was setting and would strum a ukulele as I lay back, trailing my fingers in the water, the way they used to do in the old movies I saw as a little girl.”
Instead, Reagan simply pronounced, “Let’s get married,” over dinner at a Hollywood nightclub shortly after Davis told him she was pregnant. To which she replied, after gazing into his eyes and placing her small hands atop his: “Let’s.”
Nancy Davis was so eager to marry Ronald Reagan that she willingly accommodated his every wish. If that meant a small ceremony, lacking fanfare or even a hint of the media flashbulbs that might provide a modicum of grandeur—then so be it. Nancy was released from her Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio contract just two weeks prior. “I don’t want to do anything else except be married. I just want to be Ronnie’s wife,” she says later.
To Reagan, this anonymous wedding is perfect. His life seems to become more complicated by the day, and he hardly needs a horde of press to remind him that his career is in peril. In addition to dealing with Davis’s pregnancy, Reagan was released from his contract with Warner Bros. just five weeks ago. He claims that he wants a small ceremony because the memory of his lavish first wedding to Jane Wyman is still painful. But the truth is that “to even contemplate facing reporters and flashbulbs made me break out in a cold sweat,” as Reagan will one day write.
The wedding is so discreet that Reagan has not even invited his mother, Nelle. His father, Jack, died more than a decade ago, but Nelle Reagan now lives nearby, in Southern California. But even though Reagan has a close relationship with his mother, who is a member of the Disciples of Christ denomination, she is not in attendance.
Nancy, on the other hand, has no living relations in Hollywood. Her godmother was Alla Nazimova, the late owner of the legendary Garden of Allah Hotel. Coincidentally, that same den of iniquity was the place where Reagan promised himself that he would stop sleeping around. Thanks to that moment, and to his relationship with Nancy, he is now seen less and less in the nightclubs of Hollywood, preferring to spend weekends at the Malibu ranch.
“It’s not that I hunger for somebody to love me,” Reagan has confided to Nancy, finally putting the memory of his divorce in the rearview mirror, “as much as I miss having somebody to love.”
* * *
�
�I pronounce you man and wife,” says Reverend Wells, adjusting his thin wire-frame glasses. Davis is so swept away by the moment that she will not remember saying “I do” or even Ronald Reagan’s kiss as their marriage is sealed. Instead, she will recall only the booming voice of Bill Holden as he comes to her side. “Can I kiss the bride?” he asks.
“Not yet,” Davis protests. “It’s too soon.”
But as the svelte Ardis looks on, Holden wraps his arms around Nancy’s waist and kisses her passionately on the lips.
* * *
Ardis Ankerson has arranged for a photographer to be present at her house as a beaming Nancy Reagan slices wedding cake with her new husband. The three tiers of white frosting, with the small plastic statue of bride and groom perched on top, rests on the Holdens’ dining room table. Reagan blinks as the shutter clicks, while Nancy leans in toward the camera with eyes wide open. It is a moment both iconic and timeless, re-created at countless weddings before and since. If not for Ardis possessing the forethought to hire a photographer, there would have been no pictures of this moment.
The resulting images are unassuming. Yet one day they will be considered remarkable, for this evening begins a marriage that will change the world.
It is midnight as the newly married Reagans arrive at the Mission Inn, an elaborate structure built to look like an old Spanish mission, with great stucco walls, exposed beams, and a garden courtyard.4 A bouquet of red roses waits in their room, compliments of the house.
In Ronald Reagan, Nancy sees a greatness that thus far has eluded him. She will dedicate her life to bringing it forth. Soon, her supplication will vanish and dominance will emerge. Reagan will reluctantly cease his womanizing, although continuing his affair with Christine Larson well past the day his baby daughter, Patti, is born on October 21, 1952.5 And while there will be the occasional discreet liaison in the future, Reagan’s days as a playboy are in the past. In time, these affairs will come to haunt him. Not a man normally given to regrets, Reagan will rue his behavior as his love for Nancy grows deeper. “If you want to be a happy man,” he will counsel a friend years from now, “just don’t ever cheat on your wife.”
Killing Reagan Page 4