by Gore Vidal
But war clouds were now gathering over the Hollywood Hills. Five months after Pearl Harbor was attacked, Ronnie, though extremely nearsighted, was available for “limited service.” To much weeping and gorge-rising, Ronnie went not overseas but over to Culver City where he made training films for the rest of the war. Modern Screen headline: BUT WHEN RONNIE WENT RIDING OFF TO BATTLE, HE LEFT HIS HEART BEHIND HIM! Photoplay: I WON’T BE DOING THESE PICTURES. UNCLE SAM HAS CALLED ME…AND I’M OFF TO THE WAR.
Ronnie was now known for two important roles, one as the doomed “Gipper” in Knute Rockne, All American and the other as the playboy whose legs are sawed off (“Where’s the rest of me?”) in King’s Row. As Ronnie’s films moved once again B-ward, he moved toward politics. Originally, he had been a New Deal liberal, or something. Actually his real political activity was with the Screen Actors Guild where, by and large, in those days at least, first-rate working actors were seldom to be found giving much time to meetings, much less to becoming its president, as Reagan did.
When the McCarthy era broke upon America, Ronnie took a stern anticommie line within his own union. In 1951 in Fortnight, he wrote that “several members of Congress are known Communists” and as one whose reviews had not been so good lately, he went on to add that though good American newspapers were attacking “dirty Reds” their publishers didn’t know that they were employing “drama and book critics who…were praising the creative efforts of their little ‘Red Brothers’ while panning the work of all non-Communists.”
Ronnie then went to work vetting (or, as it was called then, “clearing”) people in the movies who might be tainted with communism. This was done through the Motion Picture Industry Council. The witch hunt was on, and many careers were duly ruined. Ronnie believed that no commie should be allowed to work in the movies and that anyone who did not cooperate with his council or the House Committee on Un-American Activities (in other words, refused to allow the committee to ask impertinent questions about political beliefs) should walk the plank. To this day, he takes the line that there was never a blacklist in Hollywood except for the one that commies within the industry drew up in order to exclude good Americans from jobs. Ronnie has always been a very sincere sort of liar.
* * *
As luck would have it, Nancy Davis cropped up on one of the nonexistent blacklists. Apparently there were other possibly pinker actresses named Nancy Davis in lotusland. She asked a producer what to do; he said that Reagan could clear her. Thus, they met…not so cute, as the Wise Hack would say. It was the end of 1949. They “dated” for two years. Plainly, she loved this bona fide movie star who never stopped talking just as she could never stop appearing to listen (what her stepfather Dr. Davis must have been like at the breakfast table can only be imagined). But the woman who had launched the marriage of Ronnie and Janie, Louella Parsons, the Saint Simon of San Simeon as well as of all movieland, could not understand why that idyllic couple had split up. She described in her column how “one of the lovely girls Ronnie seemed interested in for a while told me he recently said to her, ‘Sure, I like you. I like you fine. But I think I’ve forgotten how to fall in love.’ I wonder—do those embers of the once perfect love they shared still burn deep with haunting memories that won’t let them forget?” If the popcorn isn’t too old, we can pop it. But no salt and use oleomargarine.
Apparently, the embers had turned to ash. After two years, thirty-year-old Nancy married the forty-one-year-old Ronnie in the company of glamorous Mr. and Mrs. William Holden who posed, beaming, beside their new best friends at a time when they were their own new worst friends for, according to Mr. Leamer, as they posed side by side with the Reagans, “The Holdens weren’t even talking to one another.”
Nancy’s career is now one of wifedom and motherhood and, of course, listening. Also, in due course, social climbing. She was born with a silver ladder in her hand, just like the rest of us who went to Sidwell Friends School. Naturally, there were problems with Ronnie’s first set of children. Ronnie seems not to have been a particularly attentive father, while Nancy was an overattentive mother to her own two children. But she took a dim view of Ronnie’s first litter. The Reagans settled on Pacific Palisades. Ronnie’s movie career was grinding to an end; he was obliged to go to Las Vegas to be a gambling casino “emcee.” As there were no commies working for the trade papers by then, the reviews were good.
2
The year 1952 is crucial in Reagan’s life. The Hollywood unions had always taken the position that no talent agency could go into production on a regular basis since the resulting conflict of interest would screw agency clients. Eventually, federal law forbade this anomaly. But thirty years ago there was a tacit agreement between agencies and unions that, on a case-by-case basis, an occasional movie might be produced by an agency. The Music Corporation of America represented actor Ronald Reagan. Within that vast agency, one Taft Schreiber looked after Ronald Reagan’s declining career. At the end of Reagan’s term as president of the Screen Actors Guild, he did something unprecedented.
On July 3, 1952, after a series of meetings, Ronnie sent a letter to MCA granting the agency the blanket right to produce films.
Within a few years, MCA was a dominant force in show business. In television, the forty or so shows that Revue Productions produced each week far surpassed the output of other programming suppliers.
Now for the payoff:
Later that year [1954], Taft Schreiber…told Ronnie about a possible role introducing a new weekly television anthology series, “The GE Theater”…Schreiber owed his position as head of MCA’s new Revue Productions to a SAG decision in which Ronnie played an instrumental role,
and so on.
* * *
For eight years, Ronnie was GE’s host and occasional actor; he also became the corporate voice for General Electric’s conservative viewpoint. During Reagan’s tours of the country, he gave The Speech in the name of General Electric in particular and free enterprise in general. Gradually, Reagan became more and more right wing. But then if his principal reading matter told him that the Russians were not only coming but that their little Red brothers were entrenched in Congress and the school libraries and the reservoirs (fluoride at the ready), he must speak out. Finally, all this nonsense began to alarm even GE. When he started to attack socialism’s masterpiece, the TVA (a GE client worth 50 million a year to the firm), he was told to start cooling it, which he did. Then, “In 1962, pleading bad ratings, GE canceled the program.”
During this period, Reagan was not only getting deeper and deeper into the politics of the far right, but he and Nancy were getting to know some of the new-rich Hollywood folk outside show biz. Car dealers such as Holmes Tuttle and other wheeler-dealers became friends. The wives were into conspicuous consumption while the husbands were into money and, marginally, conservative politics which would enable them to make more money, pay less tax, and punish the poor. Thanks to Ronnie’s brother Neil, then with an advertising agency that peddled Borax, the future leader of Righteous Christendom became host to Borax’s television series, “Death Valley Days.” That same year Ronnie attended the Cow Palace investiture of Barry Goldwater.
“In late October, Goldwater was unable to speak at the big $1,000-a-plate fund raiser at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles….Holmes Tuttle asked Ronnie to pinch-hit.” Tuttle sat next to wealthy Henry Salvatori, Goldwater’s finance chairman. Tuttle suggested that they run Ronnie for governor of California in 1966. Salvatori didn’t think you could run an actor against an old political pro like the Democratic incumbent Pat Brown. But when Ronnie went national with The Speech on television, Ronnie was in business as a politician, and his friends decided to finance a Reagan race. To these new-rich Sunbelters, “Politicians and candidates, even Ronnie, were an inferior breed. ‘Reagan doesn’t have great depth,’ Salvatori admits, ‘but I don’t know any politician who does. He’s not the most intelligent man who ever was, but I’ve n
ever met a politician with great depth. I don’t know of any politician who would be smart enough to run my business, but Reagan just might.’ ” There it all is in one nut’s shell.
* * *
The rest is beginning now to be history. “In the spring of 1965, forty-one rich businessmen formed ‘The Friends of Ronald Reagan.’ ” For fifty thousand dollars a year, they hired a public-relations firm that specialized in political campaigns to groom Ronnie. California politics were carefully explained to him and he was given a crash course in the state’s geography, which he may have flunked. He often had no idea where he was, or, as a supporter remarked to Leamer, “once, he didn’t know a goddamn canal and where it went. Another time, he was standing in the Eagle River and didn’t know where the hell he was,” etc. But he had his dream of the city on the hill and he had The Speech and he had such insights as: the graduated income tax was “spawned by Marx as the prime essential of the socialistic state.”
Alas, Mr. Leamer is not interested in Reagan’s two terms as governor. He is more interested in Nancy’s good grooming and circle of “best dressed” friends; also, in the way her past was falsified: “Nancy Davis Reagan was born in Chicago, the only daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Loyal Davis,” said a campaign biography. Although Nancy had denied seeing her “natural” father after her adoption, she had indeed kept in touch for a time; but when he was dying in 1972 and her natural cousin tried to get through to her, there was no response. Mr. Leamer goes on rather too much about Nancy’s wealthy girlfriends and their clothes as well as her wealthy cavaliere servente Jerome Zipkin who has known everyone from my mother to W. Somerset Maugham. “Maugham’s biographer, Ted Morgan, thinks the British author may have patterned Elliot Templeton, a snobbish character in The Razor’s Edge, on his American friend.” Since The Razor’s Edge was published in 1944, when Mr. Zipkin was still under thirty, it is most unlikely that that exquisite Anglophile American snob (and anti-Semite) could have been based on the charming Mr. Zipkin. Actually, for those interested in such trivia, the character was based on Henry de Courcey May, a monocled figure of my youth, much visible at Bailey’s Beach in Newport, Rhode Island; although this exquisite was adored by our mothers, we little lads were under orders never to be alone with nice Mr. May—or not-so-nice Mr. Maugham for that matter. But once, on the train from Providence, Mr. May…But that is for Mr. Leamer’s next book.
In a bored way, Mr. Leamer rushes through the governorship, using familiar Reagan boiler plate: the highest taxes in the state’s history, and so on. He skirts around the most interesting caper of all, the ranch that Reagan was able to acquire through the good offices of MCA. When some details of this transaction were reported in the press, I was at a health spa near San Diego where Jules Stein and his wife (lifelong friends, as Mr. Leamer would say) were also taking the waters. When I asked Jules about the ranch caper, he got very nervous indeed. “What exactly did they print?” he asked. I told him. “Well,” he said, “I didn’t know anything about that. It was Schreiber who looked after Ronnie.” By then Schreiber was dead.
Mr. Leamer tells us more than we want to know about the Reagan children. There seems to be a good deal of bitterness in a family that is closer to that of the Louds than to Judge Hardy’s. But this is par for the course in the families of celebrities in general, and of politicians in particular. A ballet-dancer son with his mother’s nose did not go down well. A daughter who decided to run for the Senate (and support the ERA) did not go down well either. So in 1982 Ronnie and his brother, Neil, helped to defeat Maureen, which was a pity since she would have been a more honorable public servant than her father. Apparently he has now had second thoughts or something; he has appointed her consultant “to improve his image among women.” The family seems a lot creepier than it probably is simply because Reagan, a divorced man, has always put himself forward as the champion of prayer in the schools, and monogamy, and God, and a foe of abortion and smut and pot and the poor.
Mr. Leamer races through the political life: Ronnie sets out to replace Ford as president but instead is defeated in the primaries of 1976. Mr. Leamer finds Ronnie a pretty cold fish despite the professional appearance of warmth. When one of Ronnie’s aides, Mike Deaver, lost out in a power struggle within the Reagan campaign, he was banished; and Ronnie never even telephoned him to say, “How are tricks?”
As he did in his own family, Ronnie stood above the squabble. Indeed four years before, when Ronnie had been choking on a peanut, Deaver had saved his life.
For God’s sake, Leamer, dramatize! as Henry James always told us to do. When and how did that peanut get into his windpipe? Where were they? Was it the Heimlich maneuver Deaver used?
In 1980 Reagan took the nomination from Bush, whom he genuinely dislikes, if Mr. Leamer is correct. Reagan then wins the presidency though it might be more accurate to say that Carter lost it. Nancy woos Washington’s old guard, the Bright Old Things as they are dubbed, who were at first mildly charmed and then more and more bemused by this curious couple who have no interest at all in talking about what Washington’s BOT have always talked about: power and politics and history and even, shades of Henry Adams and John Hay, literature and art. Henry James was not entirely ironic when he called Washington “the city of conversation.” Ronnie simply bends their ears with stories about Jack Warner while Nancy discusses pretty things.
Mr. Leamer gets quickly through the politics to the drama: the shooting of Ronnie, who was more gravely injured than anyone admitted at the time. By now, Mr. Leamer is racing along: “Unknown to [Nancy’s] staff…she was accepting dresses and gowns from major designers as well as jewels from Bulgari and Harry Winston.” Seven pages later: “Unknown to Nancy’s staff, much of this jewelry didn’t belong to her; it had been ‘borrowed’ for an unspecified period from the exclusive jeweler to be part of a White House collection.” Nancy wriggled out of all this as best she could, proposing to give her dresses to a museum while suggesting a permanent White House collection of crown jewels for future first ladies. Conspicuous consumption at the White House has not been so visible since Mrs. Lincoln’s day. But at least old Abe paid out of his own pocket for his wife’s “flub dubs.”
* * *
The most disturbing aspect of Make-Believe is that Ronnie not only is still the president but could probably be reelected. Almost as an afterthought, Mr. Leamer suddenly reveals, in the last pages of his book, the true Reagan problem, which is now a world problem:
What was so extraordinary was Ronnie’s apparent psychic distance from the burden of the presidency. He sat in cabinet meetings doodling. Unless held to a rigid agenda, he would start telling Hollywood stories or talk about football in Dixon. Often in one-on-one conversations Ronnie seemed distracted or withdrawn. “He has a habit now,” his brother, Neil, said. “You might be talking to him, and it’s like he’s picking his fingernails, but he’s not. And you know then he’s talking to himself.”
“If people knew about him living in his own reality, they wouldn’t believe it,” said one White House aide. “There are only ten to fifteen people who know the extent, and until they leave and begin talking, no one will believe it.”
Of all our presidents, Reagan most resembles Warren Harding. He is handsome, amiable, ignorant; he has an ambitious wife (Mrs. Harding was known as the Duchess). But in the year 1983 who keeps what brooch from Bulgari is supremely unimportant. What is important is that in a dangerous world, the United States, thanks to a worn-out political system, has not a president but an indolent cue-card reader, whose writers seem eager for us to be, as soon as possible, at war. To the extent that Reagan is aware of what is happening, he probably concurs. But then what actor, no matter how old, could resist playing the part of a wartime president? even though war is now the last worst hope of earth; and hardly make-believe.
Mr. Leamer’s Make-Believe will be criticized because it is largely a compendium of trivia about personalities. Unfortunately, there is n
o other book for him to write—unless it be an updated version of Who Owns America?
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
September 29, 1983
CHAPTER 8
ARMAGEDDON?
1
As the curtain falls on the ancient Acting President and his “Administration,” it is time to analyze just what this bizarre episode in American history was all about. When Ronald Reagan’s career in show business came to an end, he was hired to impersonate, first, a California governor and then an American president who would reduce taxes for his employers, the southern and western New Rich, much of whose money came from the defense industries. There is nothing unusual in this arrangement. All recent presidents have had their price tags, and the shelf life of each was short. What was unusual was his employers’ cynical recognition that in an age of television one must steer clear of politicians who may not know how to act president and go instead for the best actor available for the job, the one who can read with warm plausibility the commercials that they have written for him.
Now it is quite possible to find an actor who does understand politics. Orson Welles and Gregory Peck come to mind; but would they have been sufficiently malleable? The producers were not about to experiment. They selected an actor who has never shown the slightest interest in actual politics as opposed to the mechanics of political elections in the age of television. That is why Reagan’s economic and foreign policies have never made the slightest sense to anyone who knows anything about either. On the other hand, there is evidence that, unlike his wealthy sponsors, he has a sense of mission that, like Jesus’, is not of this world.