Reagan: The Life (18 page)

Reagan afterward acknowledged that he wasn’t the model suitor. “
The truth is, I did everything wrong, dating her off and on, continuing to volunteer for every Guild trip to New York—in short, doing everything which could have lost her if Someone up there hadn’t been looking out for me. In spite of my determination to remain foot-loose, in spite of my belief that the pattern of my life was all set and would continue without change, nature was trying to tell me something very important.”

Maybe it was nature, or maybe it was Nancy. His determination to be footloose was no greater than her determination not to let him get away. She abided his travels and his seeing other women, although not without jealousy. She overheard another actress tell of a gift he had given her. “
That hurt,” she remembered decades later. He invited her to a ranch he had purchased in the Santa Monica Mountains above Malibu, after owning a smaller ranch near Northridge; she gamely helped paint fences
and do other chores around the place. One day he said, “You know, you really should buy a house. It would be a terrific investment.” She had been thinking about living in
his
house as his wife, and she was stunned by the comment. “I just about died!” she said.

She hung on, though, and he decided he liked having her around. “
Gradually I came out of a deep-freeze and discovered a wonderful world of warmth and deep contentment,” he remembered. He invited her to spend time with Maureen and Michael on the weekends they were with him. Her goal eventually seemed within sight. “
I began to believe that we really would get married,” she said.

At this point the previous Mrs. Reagan became a problem. “Jane was perfectly nice to me,” Nancy recalled of occasions when he would visit the children at their mother’s house and take her along. “But these visits were awkward. Not only had she been married to Ronnie, but she was very much 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 was also miffed. “I could see that Jane knew how to play on Ronnie’s good nature. She had convinced him that he shouldn’t get married again until she did.”

Yet Nancy knew what she wanted, and she wouldn’t let a mere star stand in her way. “It took me a little time, but I managed to unconvince him.”

R
EAGAN
’
S NEW ROMANCE
caused him to reconsider other things he thought he knew. An old friend from Dixon had written saying she had lost her husband and was reconciled to never finding another love; Reagan responded with uncharacteristic reflectiveness. “
Your letter led me to believe you are embarked on a course which can only lead to unhappiness and a barren future,” he wrote. “This is all wrong. You are young and very attractive and have a great deal to offer some worthwhile man and both you and your son need a man in your life or lives. You spoke of your aunt and the ‘ideals’ she gave you. It is high time you reviewed those teachings in the light not of modern living but of
modern knowledge
. I too was raised in a home where ‘ideals’ similar I’m sure to yours were taught, by my Mother. Now I have the highest regard for her and for her teachings but I have had to go on from there and find a ‘code for living’ in keeping with my conscience and knowledge of right and wrong. This does not mean casting her principles aside but rather it is building to meet my present needs on a foundation I learned from her. At the same time I have learned
painfully that some ‘idealism’ is in effect a flight from reality. You say you believe there is
one
love in life for each of us—this is just
not
true. Can you believe that God means for millions of really young people to go on through life alone because a war robbed them of their first loves? Maybe you’ll resent this, Florence, but I must say it—you have to look into your own heart and ask yourself if you really believe in
one love
now lost to you or if this is a shield behind which you hide because your past experience did not measure up to your girlhood dreams and now you
fear
men.”

Reagan shared his own experience of love and sex and marriage. “I will grant you that all of us grow up with a ‘moonlight and roses’ outlook on romantic relationships and sometimes it comes hard to reconcile this dream with the actualities of
physical
contact. To show you how ‘over idealistic’ my training was—I awoke to the realization (almost too late) that even in marriage I had a little guilty feeling about sex, as though the whole thing was tinged with evil. A very fine old gentleman started me out on the right track by interesting me in the practices of, or I should say moral standards of, the primitive peoples never exposed to our civilization—such as the Polynesians. These people who are truly children of nature and thus of God, accept physical desire as a natural, normal appetite to be satisfied honestly and fearlessly with no surrounding aura of sin and sly whispers in the dark. By our standards they are heathens but they are heathens without degeneracy, sex crimes, psycho-neurosis and divorce. I guess what I am trying to say is that I oppose the dogmas of some organized religions who accept marital relationship only as a ‘tolerated’ sin for the purpose of conceiving children and who believe all children to be born in sin. My personal belief is that God couldn’t create evil so the desires he planted in us are good and the physical relationship between a man and woman is the
highest form of companionship
.”

Reagan spoke of what he would tell his daughter when she came of age, but he spoke as well of what he had discovered for himself. “I want her to know that nothing between her and the man she loves can be wrong or obscene, that
desire
in itself is normal and right. There is one other thing I think she should know. If some man she finds attractive or likable feels desire for her, like any parent I hope she’ll have the common sense and good taste not to be promiscuous or involve herself in casual affairs but (and this is equally important) I don’t want her to be disgusted and convinced that his desire is an indication of moral decay and vulgarity. Of course a man feels desire for an attractive woman—nature intended that he should and something would be amiss if he didn’t. A girl’s judgment
of this man should be based
only
on
his
respect for
her wishes
but don’t ask him not to feel an instinct as much a part of him as hunger and thirst.”

Second loves were perfectly possible and entirely respectable, he said. “The world is full of lonely people, people capable of happiness and of giving happiness, and love is
not
a magic touch of cosmic dust that preordains two people and two people
only
for each other. Love can grow
slowly
out of warmth and companionship and none of us should be afraid to seek it.” He concluded, “Now I am going to seal this letter very quickly and mail it because if I read it over I won’t have the nerve to send it.”

H
E DID SEND
it, and he likewise summoned the nerve to ask Nancy to marry him. His timing might have been influenced by the fact that Nancy evidently was pregnant (“
Go ahead and count,” she wrote in her memoir, referring to the birth of their first child, Patti, seven and a half months after the wedding). Reagan was quite satisfied with a small ceremony for his second try. But Nancy would surely have insisted on something larger had decorum not caused her to want to tie the knot as quickly as possible.

And so the hastily arranged service, held on March 4, 1952, at the Little Brown Church in the San Fernando Valley, included only the bride and groom, the minister, and
William Holden and his wife, Ardis, who served as best man and matron of honor. Nancy didn’t notice that the Holdens, who were having marital troubles, sat on opposite sides of the small church. “
I spent the entire day in a happy daze,” she recalled.

N
ANCY
’
S ACTING CAREER
essentially ceased upon her marriage to Reagan. Having landed her man, she focused her ambitions on
his
career, which continued to evolve. Warner Brothers had basically written him off as an actor. Jack Warner remained friendly, but this only complicated Reagan’s position. Reagan’s agent,
Lew Wasserman, headed the
Music Corporation of America, which was tussling with Warner Brothers. Wasserman told Reagan he could employ the
William Morris Agency in dealing with Warner, to avoid a potential conflict of interest. Reagan declined. “
I don’t feel that strangers can suddenly take over and represent my best interests,” he explained to Warner. He said he wanted to deal with Warner on a more personal basis. And he had a bone to pick. “I know you will recall our discussion some time ago with regard to
That Hagen Girl
”—in which Reagan played the much older suitor of
Shirley Temple. “You agreed that the script and role were very weak but asked me to do the picture as a personal favor which I gladly did. At that time you encouraged me to bring in a suitable outdoor script which you agreed to buy as a starring vehicle for me. I found such a property in
Ghost Mountain
and the studio purchased it.” Reagan had heard nothing more about the studio’s plans for the film until recently, and what he was now hearing wasn’t promising. “There have been ‘gossip items’ indicating you intend to star someone else in this story. Naturally I put no stock in these rumors—I know you too well to ever think you’d break your word. However, I am anxious to know something of production plans—starting date, etc., in order to better schedule my own plans. Frankly I hope it is soon, as I have every confidence in this story.”

In fact it
was
soon, but it wasn’t with Reagan. Warner Brothers cast
Errol Flynn in the part Reagan wanted, leaving Reagan to mutter against Jack Warner and the ingratitude of the studio system.

The fault wasn’t entirely with the studios, for the film industry was laboring under unprecedented burdens. Despite the producers’ best efforts to curry popular and political favor, the Supreme Court in 1948 ruled against the major studios on the control of theaters. The studios were compelled to sell their outlets, a development that eroded the rationale for the B movies that had been pushed upon the public by the captive theaters, whose revenue supported the studios’ oligopoly. Forced for the first time to compete, the studios slashed costs wherever they could. The stars survived, but marginal actors like Reagan found less and less work.

A second blow to old Hollywood was the advent of
television. Experimental broadcasts of live moving images began in the 1920s, but not until the late 1930s did regular programming commence.
World War II diverted the talent and resources of the infant industry, but soon after the war the small screen of television revealed itself to be a worthy and disruptive competitor to the big screen of movies. In 1945 television receivers were almost unheard of in American homes; by 1950 nearly four million homes boasted the new devices. By 1955 thirty million homes, or more than half the residences in America, had sets; by 1960 the number of sets approached sixty million and the proportion nine out of ten.

The challenge to movies was obvious and immense. The millions of television owners and their families could now experience the emotional escape movies had provided, but without leaving their homes. Their individual decisions summed to a disaster for Hollywood: movie attendance plunged by three-quarters between 1945 and 1960.

Reagan first encountered television professionally in his role
as SAG president. The new medium posed novel challenges to the existing structure of labor relations. The most important questions for Reagan were whether television actors were screen actors and whether screen actors became television actors when their films were shown on television. Reagan and SAG had no pressing desire to extend the guild’s jurisdiction to actors in live television shows, as they seemed more like stage actors (who had their own union,
Actors’ Equity) or radio performers (who belonged to the
American Federation of Radio Artists). But some on the radio side sought to recruit not only television actors but all actors and performers and amalgamate them into a single comprehensive union. They linked arms in a committee called the Television Authority, or TVA.

Reagan resisted. The screen actors were the moneyed elite of the act
ing and performing corps, and they would lose ground by joining with the others. Moreover, screen actors typically lived and worked in Hollywood, whereas most stage actors and television performers were in New York. But the critical element, in Reagan’s view, was political. The big union the radio men advocated struck him as a stalking horse for the radical politics he had been battling in SAG and before Congress. “
Let me make one thing plain,” he wrote afterward. “I am not suggesting the TVA movement was a Communist plot, but just that a controversy of this kind was catnip to a kitten where the little Red brothers were concerned. They had to latch on and do what they could to cause trouble—particularly for SAG and also because ‘one big union’ is right down their alley. The party line will always back anything that simplifies and centralizes. It’s easier to subvert one organization where policy decisions are far removed from the rank and file than it is to take over a dozen groups.”

Reagan spent much of two years fighting the single-unionists. The work required endless meetings at which the amalgamationists would raise point of order after point of privilege after point of information, only to be voted down overwhelmingly by the general membership of SAG, who knew they had a good deal as things stood. Ultimately, Reagan and the other SAG leaders preserved the independence of the screen actors, leaving the television actors to join the radio folks in the
American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.

A
MERICAN POLITICIANS HAVE
always been early adopters of new communication technologies; they have seized with alacrity on whatever enables them to reach voters.
Theodore Roosevelt exploited the mass-circulation newspaper press to make himself the center of America’s attention and the first president to be a national celebrity. Franklin Roosevelt turned radio to his
New Deal purposes, conducting intimate seminars in democratic philosophy and Democratic policies with audiences of fifty million in his
Fireside Chats.