Dark Victory

by Moldea, Dan E. ; Miller, Mark Crispin;

  *Foy’s younger brother, Eddie Foy, Jr., was featured in three of Reagan’s movies: Going Places, Code of the Secret Service, and Murder in the Air.

  †Dark Victory—a drama about a wealthy young woman who develops a brain tumor, goes blind, and then dies—was based on an unsuccessful Broadway play starring Tallulah Bankhead. Using her influence with Jack Warner, Bette Davis convinced him to allow her to star in the movie. The movie was beaten out for Best Picture by Gone With the Wind. Vivien Leigh won over Davis for Best Actress. In Dark Victory, Reagan plays Davis’s young and charming but rarely sober friend.

  *During the war, the 3,503 members of the Screen Actors Guild made 25,925 free appearances in support of the Allied war effort; 150 SAG members participated in front-line USO camp shows; and 1,574 Armed Forces Radio broadcasts were made by members. Aside from the work done by Reagan and his colleagues at Fort Roach, thirty-seven short films were distributed to 16,000 theatres.7

  *Wilkerson later apologized to Reagan.

  †Reagan and the twenty-four-year-old Wyman had met in 1938 after being cast as sweethearts in the film Brother Rat. They were married two years later, on January 26, 1940. It was Reagan’s first marriage and Wyman’s second; she had earlier been married less than a year to a Los Angeles businessman. Hollywood gossip columnists—particularly Louella Parsons, who was from Reagan’s hometown, and who had announced their engagement and held their wedding reception at her home—called their relationship “one of the great romances of the century.” Hollywood hype aside, Reagan and Wyman starred together in three undistinguished movies in 1940: Brother Rat and a Baby, An Angel from Texas, and Tugboat Annie Sails Again, as Warner Brothers and Bryan Foy tried to cash in on their all-American couple.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The highlight of Reagan’s early years on the SAG board was his role in the power struggle between the 16,000-member International Alliance of State and Theatrical Employees (IATSE) and the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU).

  Despite IATSE’s claims that it had reformed itself from the days the union was controlled by the Mafia, the same seven members who had sat on its executive board during the Bioff-Browne reign remained in place—including its new New York–based international president, a forty-five-year-old Irish-American, Richard Walsh, who had been a vice-president under Browne. Consequently, there were numerous charges that the gangsterism within IATSE had not been removed, only replaced. The new IATSE response to such attacks was identical to Bioff and Browne’s: that their critics were obviously communists. Asked about the situation in his union, Walsh replied, “That’s a problem I don’t talk about at all.… A good president never takes responsibility for anything.”1

  A big, tough Nebraskan, Roy Brewer was appointed as the union’s international representative in March 1945 and sent to Hollywood. Born in 1909 in Nebraska’s Cairo Hall County, Brewer had attended Baptist College in Grand Island for one semester and studied law through LaSalle Extension University. In 1926, he started working as a projectionist in a local theatre, and, the following year, was elected secretary of the Grand Island Central Labor Union, as well as vice-president of the Nebraska State Federation of Labor. In 1933, at twenty-three, he was elected president of the federation, a post he held until 1944. Briefly, in 1935, he worked with Tom C. Clark as a compliance officer under the National Recovery Administration—which worked in cooperation with the Justice Department when NRA codes were violated. While working in the Office of Labor Production of the War Production Board, he received his Hollywood assignment from IATSE.

  Instead of trying to rid the union of its gangster image and all remnants of mob control, Brewer was obsessed with eliminating “the communist influence” within the union and the movie industry in general. “When Browne [and Bioff] went to jail,” Brewer insisted, “that ended any connection with the mob in the IATSE.” When pressed on his claim that the Mafia no longer existed in Hollywood, Brewer replied, “When Walsh was beginning to deal with these problems—he had an awful fight to save Hollywood and to convince the government, too, that he was not tainted with this, really—he went along with them [the Mafia], he did some things.” Without elaborating, Brewer said, “Walsh had done a good job of cleaning up the mob.…”

  Shifting his attention away from the problem of the Mafia’s infiltration of his union, Brewer continued, “The truth is, [the communists] had this town in the palm of their hands; they were calling the shots.… They had 360-some people who have been clearly and positively identified as dues-paying members of the Communist Party. We had other [information] that top stars, top directors, and top producers [were involved], and they were kicking in five percent of their salaries to the Communist Party’s coffers. And they were making salaries of up to $5,000 a week.”2

  Along with several members of Hollywood’s ultraconservative community—such as producer Walt Disney; actors Robert Taylor, Gary Cooper, and John Wayne; columnist Hedda Hopper; and Hollywood Teamsters leader Joe Tuohy—Roy Brewer was an officer of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, which was allied with the studios and heavily supported by newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst. According to the group’s “Statement of Principles,” the Alliance was created because “in our special field of motion pictures, we resent the growing impression that this industry is made up of, and dominated by, communists, radicals and crackpots.… We pledge to fight, with every means at our organized command, any effort of any group or individual to divert the loyalty of the screen from the free America that gave it birth.”

  Jeff Kibre, the leader of the IATSE progressives, had proven to be instrumental in the final downfall of Bioff, Browne, and Joe Schenck. However, after the Schenck confession and the Bioff-Browne convictions, Kibre, who had performed so heroically against the mob but was an admitted communist, was immediately blackballed by, among others, the studios, the Alliance, and IATSE. Unwelcome in the Hollywood community, Kibre eventually became an organizer for the United Auto Workers and later helped organize the fishermen’s union.

  Jeff Kibre’s legacy of pro-union, anti-corruption militancy fell upon Herb Sorrell, a stocky former boxer with a flat nose. A former business agent with the Hollywood painters’ union, Motion Picture Painters Local 644, Sorrell, in 1942, created the Conference of Studio Unions, “a coalition of five dissatisfied AFL locals (the Screen Cartoonists Guild, the Screen Office Employees Guild, Film Technicians Local 683, Machinists Local 1185, and Motion Picture Painters Local 644).” By 1945, CSU had added the carpenters’ union and three other locals to the fold.3

  Sorrell continued to denounce the ongoing corruption and Mafia influence within IATSE. As CSU became bigger and more popular, Brewer and the Alliance began to view him as a serious threat. Brewer attacked the CSU as “communist-dominated” and claimed Sorrell “followed the Communist Party line.”

  “We were fighting for our lives,” said Brewer. “It’s either the communists or us.”

  Using the red-baiting line, Brewer, IATSE, and the Motion Picture Alliance began waging a public relations war against CSU.

  Although Sorrell had supported a variety of left-wing causes and received support from Harry Bridges, the militant president of the International Longshoremens and Warehousemens Union, he always denied throughout his career that he was or ever had been a communist. Unsophisticated in many ways, Sorrell was still viewed by most of the Hollywood community as being a dedicated and honest union man who operated a clean, honest, and democratic labor organization.

  In March 1945, Sorrell called a CSU strike in Hollywood as a result of a jurisdictional dispute between CSU and IATSE over the representation of Hollywood’s skilled, behind-the-camera workers. A three-member arbitration committee from the AFL had supported the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, a member of the CSU coalition of trade unions, over IATSE’s newly formed “set-erectors union.” However, both IATSE and the motion picture studios had ignored this and other pro-CSU judgments by the AFL, even when its president, Wi
lliam Green, personally intervened.

  “The relationship with the employers and [IATSE] has always been a close one,” Brewer said. “We fought each other, but the point is that we lived in an industry, and we had the industry and its welfare in common. Our leaders have always understood that if they [the studios] didn’t make money, we wouldn’t get it. So you had to help them make money to get it.”4

  On October 5, 1945, hundreds of CSU members picketing outside the gates of Warner Brothers were pelted by tear gas thrown by pro-IATSE goons and strikebreakers—who then used chains, rubber hoses, and blackjacks to attack the CSU partisans. While the fire department turned their hoses on them, knocking them off their feet, police officers moved in and beat the protesters with their clubs.5

  In other incidents, Brewer and Hollywood Teamsters leader Joe Tuohy packed buses with union goons and sent them crashing through the CSU picket lines. Those strikers who interfered were pummeled by the legbreakers or arrested by the police, who clearly supported IATSE, the Teamsters, and the studios. Later, Tuohy—who had defied a membership vote not to cross the CSU picket lines—was hired by Joe Schenck as an “industrial relations director” for Schenck’s National Theaters. In his new position, Tuohy made a four-hundred-dollar-a-week salary, a raise of $275 a week over what he made as a union official.

  Brewer admitted soliciting the Teamsters to break the CSU picket line. “Well, there was some Teamsters thing that was questionable,” Brewer said, “but they were on our side and, as far as I was concerned, I was with fellows who were trade unionists. They were our allies.”6

  Brewer continued, “We took the people through. I was there. We got the buses, we made the arrangements. The studios were reluctant, but they cooperated. We ordered our men to go in and make the sets.… We had a riotous condition.” But, Brewer insisted, “We never engaged in any violence … the police were cooperating with us.”7

  Reagan agreed with Brewer—that CSU was behind the violence. “[A] thousand strikers had massed at Warners,” Reagan said. “Three autos had been overturned, clubs, chains, bottles, bricks, and two-by-fours were used freely. Now various homes of the IATSE members were bombed by night; other workers were ambushed and slugged.”8

  Father George H. Dunne, a Roman Catholic priest, had been commissioned by Commonweal, a liberal Catholic weekly, to make an investigation of the labor dispute in Hollywood. Dunne’s report suggested a different story:

  “The producers and the IATSE leadership have always reacted very sensitively when the Browne-Bioff era has been introduced into the discussion of Hollywood’s labor disputes. They pretend it has nothing to do with the present. They would like the public to think that there has been a complete change since those days.… Actually little has changed.

  “The men who made the deals with Browne and Bioff, and through them with the notorious Chicago gang, still run the industry. The same men who sat in council with Browne and Bioff as heads of the IATSE still run the union.…

  “Browne and Bioff, thanks to the government, have gone. The other people are the same. Their methods are the same.

  “The record is clear. It is a shameful record of collaboration between the producers and the leadership of IATSE, first to betray the interests of the IATSE members themselves and, in the later period, to destroy the opposition of democratic trade unionism represented by the Conference of Studio Organizations.”9

  Reagan brushed Dunne and his report off, saying, “George Murphy [SAG president from 1944 to 1946] and I decided he must be the victim of a snow job.”10

  Referring to his close ties to IATSE and the Teamsters during the strike, Dunne had also been critical in his report of Ronald Reagan, “whose Rover Boy activities helped mightily to confuse the issues.”11

  In 1946, the National Labor Relations Board—which Brewer claimed “was completely under the control of the communists”—again ruled in favor of CSU over IATSE in another jurisdictional dispute over Hollywood decorators. IATSE and the studios ignored that decision as well. Again, CSU struck in July 1946 for three days in protest. The strike was effective—as SAG helped to negotiate a short-lived peace agreement called “The Treaty of Beverly Hills,” which provided for a twenty-five-percent wage increase. But CSU’s success was to be short-lived.

  By September 1946, during the third and final CSU strike—which began after Walt Disney red-baited his cartoonists, who were also CSU members—the studios turned the work stoppage into a lock-out of nearly all of the CSU membership, especially the carpenters and the painters, most of whom would later be blacklisted. After initially remaining neutral in the CSU strike, the SAG membership, persuaded by Montgomery, Murphy, and Reagan, voted to cross the CSU picket lines.

  In his condemnation of CSU, Reagan said, “What the communists wanted to do in terms of the CSU strike was to shut down the industry, and when everybody was angry and dissatisfied with their unions for their failures, the communists would propose one big union for Hollywood.…”

  Reagan said that in the midst of the final CSU strike, the SAG leadership was, on occasion, protected by IATSE members. Reagan even hired his own armed bodyguard and carried a .32-caliber Smith & Wesson pistol as he crossed the CSU picket line on his way to work at Warner Brothers. He claimed that he had received an anonymous telephone call threatening that “a squad was ready to take care of me and fix my face so that I’d never work in pictures again.”12

  He has since said and resaid that “a handful of Teamsters” protected him from bodily harm when SAG and IATSE were engaged in pitched combat with the “communists.” He never has given any further details about the incident.

  Recalling the violence in the IATSE-CSU dispute, Reagan said, “None of us yet believed that what a few anonymous people wanted was exactly what was happening in Hollywood—a state of chaos.… Pat Casey, the producers’ labor negotiator, said the situation was ‘explosive.’”13

  Casey, who had been working to settle labor disputes with the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association, had been directly involved in the IATSE-CSU dispute, protecting the interests of the studios. Supporting the IATSE-SAG faction because of its long-term ties with MPPDA, Casey remained in the background of the dispute. Among Casey’s employees had been Johnny Roselli, who previously served as an “undercover agent” with the firm.

  Was the Mafia in any way involved in the Hollywood violence? Academy Award–winning producer Irving Allen, who had no sympathy for the communists, said, “When there was a labor problem in the studios—and they were always coming up then—the studios would go to Sidney Korshak [a long-time Roselli associate] and hire him as their lawyer. And he was always able to solve them. He was very good. He was able to solve … most of the problems in this town.* And, from my point of view, he earned his fee.”15

  When asked whether Korshak was involved in the studios’ and IATSE’s war with CSU, Brewer was less than direct: “He didn’t have much to do with it.… I don’t know what he did, if he did anything. He may have appeared, but he wasn’t a major factor. Maybe I did know him, but I can’t remember everybody. I don’t want to take anything from him or give him anything. He may be very well informed … but I don’t know him.”16

  On March 10, 1947, the Screen Actors Guild selected Ronald Reagan to complete the unfinished term of Robert Montgomery, who, among other board members, had to resign as president because he was also a film producer and, thus, according to SAG’s by-laws, not permitted to hold office in the Guild.

  According to the SAG board minutes of that March 10 meeting: “Four resignations from members of the board of directors were presented: Robert Montgomery, president; Franchot Tone, 1st vice-president; Dick Powell, 2nd vice-president; and James Cagney. These letters of resignation explained that each of the actors now has a financial interest in the production of the pictures in which they appear, and that while their primary interest will always be that of actors, they do not feel that they should hold office in the Guild while their present status in
the industry continues, particularly in view of the fact that the Guild will soon be going into negotiations for its new contract.

  “At this point, John Garfield, Harpo Marx, and Dennis O’Keefe stated that they were in approximately the same position as the above-named officers, and, therefore, each of them offered his resignation as of this date and left the meeting.”

  That same month, a U.S. House Special Subcommittee on Labor began to investigate the IATSE-CSU situation. However, Pennsylvania Republican Carroll D. Kearns,* who chaired the subcommittee, made a deal with IATSE and the studios before the hearings began in which no testimony would be heard about charges of the Mafia’s influence on IATSE. According to Father Dunne’s report in Commonweal, “He [Kearns] was visibly pained by any remark, however indirect, that called into question their [IATSE’s and the studios’] sincerity, integrity, and good faith. He seemed to regard these men who for years connived with the filthiest elements of the underworld as paragons of virtue.”17

  Just before Kearns arrived in Hollywood, Sorrell was kidnapped and beaten by three men—one of whom was wearing a police officer’s uniform. The battered Sorrell was then dropped in the desert.

  At the same time, Brewer and an array of politicians and studio executives prompted the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings investigating the film industry. The first round of HUAC hearings began that October, and the Brewer partisans hoped to destroy the CSU and the left-wing artists who supported it once and for all. Chaired by J. Parnell Thomas, a New Jersey Republican—and with Representative Richard M. Nixon of California on the panel—HUAC subpoenaed forty-one witnesses, nineteen of whom were considered “unfriendly” and unwilling to testify. Thirteen of “The Nineteen” were Jewish, prompting charges that the investigation had anti-Semitic overtones.