Reagan: The Life (19 page)

Ronald Reagan would become to television what Franklin Roosevelt was to radio, but he and the rest of his generation took first political lessons in the new medium from Joseph McCarthy. The Wisconsin Republican had ridden into the Senate on the anti–New Deal wave of 1946 but for three years had done little to distinguish himself. At the beginning of 1950 he hit upon the theme of communist infiltration of the federal government. It was hardly original, as anyone from Harry Truman, who
had launched his own loyalty probe in 1947, to Ronald Reagan and the other witnesses at the
Hollywood Ten hearings could have told him. But his timing turned out to be inspired. The Soviet Union had just shocked Americans and much of the world by detonating an atomic bomb; given that credible experts had predicted a much later date for Moscow’s acquisition of the ultimate weapon, the conclusion that spies must have revealed the atomic secret was nearly unavoidable. In truth spies
had
been at work, as the world discovered when
Klaus Fuchs was convicted in a British court for passing information about the British and American atomic programs to the Soviets. Julius and
Ethel Rosenberg were subsequently convicted in an American court on similar charges and executed. Three months before McCarthy’s epiphany China’s communist People’s Liberation Army had completed its conquest of the world’s most populous nation. No one accused the Chinese communists of infiltrating the American government, but the mere fact of their victory seemed to raise the stakes in the struggle between democracy and communism. And not long after McCarthy asserted the presence of communists in the federal government, the communists of
North Korea attacked
South Korea, triggering the first armed conflict of the escalating
Cold War.

McCarthy’s discovery of communism, and the popular reaction to it, gave the Republican Party a powerful weapon to use against Truman and the Democrats. The Republicans had soft-pedaled their criticism of Truman’s
containment policy in the 1948 election, not wishing to appear unpatriotic or spoil their own chances of directing that policy, with which most of them agreed. Truman’s surprise victory over Dewey stunned and angered them, and they abandoned all respect for his office and all concern for appearances and declared political war on everything he did. McCarthy struck some of the Republican leadership as uncouth and perhaps unprincipled, but he appeared just the kind of bashi-bazouk to lead the charge.

McCarthy assailed the State Department, which he described as infested with communists. He blasted Truman for harboring said communists, and after Truman fired General
Douglas MacArthur for insubordination amid the
Korean War, he declared that the president should be impeached. He castigated George Marshall—George Marshall!—for being at the center of a “
conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man.”

McCarthy’s attacks sealed the fate of the Truman administration. Truman was eligible to run again in 1952 but became patently unelectable
and didn’t even seek the Democratic nomination. Dwight Eisenhower, the commander of Allied forces in Europe in World War II and a strong advocate of Truman’s containment policy despite being a Republican, handily defeated Democrat
Adlai Stevenson, giving the Republicans the White House for the first time since
Herbert Hoover.

McCarthy briefly reconsidered his tactics, now that his party held the high ground of policy. But only briefly: he soon slammed Eisenhower for insufficient alarm at the insidiousness of the communist threat. Eisenhower despised McCarthy, but the senator’s Republican colleagues in the Senate still considered him useful and gave him control of the Committee on Government Operations.

McCarthy employed the committee as a platform for his signal contribution to the history of congressional investigations: the use of live
television in national coverage of committee hearings. The U.S. Army had bristled at the allegations by McCarthy against Marshall, Eisenhower, and other members of the service, and it looked for means to retaliate. When a McCarthy aide sought favored treatment for an assistant who had been drafted, the army detected an opening and denounced the senator. McCarthy convened hearings, which two television networks—ABC and DuMont—aired from start to finish and two others—
NBC and CBS—covered in part. The hearings attracted
twenty million viewers, lasted thirty-six days, and filled 188 hours of broadcast time.

They did nothing good for McCarthy, who turned out to lack the persona for television and who appeared nonplussed when questioned by the counsel for the army. “
Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”
Joseph Welch demanded. “Have you left no sense of decency?” McCarthy lacked a rejoinder, let alone decency. His approval rating plunged, and his hold on the public imagination vanished.

Yet his defeat demonstrated the power of television to shape political perceptions. Should someone else emerge, someone with an attractive camera presence and a message of hope rather than fear, television would deliver the audience.

T
HE PUBLICISTS AT
General Electric weren’t thinking of politics when they proposed that Ronald Reagan switch from film to television. They saw in Reagan something movie audiences didn’t see. Television’s small screen portrays actors differently than film’s big screen, and a persona that doesn’t fill the big screen can serve quite well in television’s miniature.

Reagan definitely wasn’t filling the big screen. His film career had fizzled almost completely. He blamed not himself but the industry. “
A star doesn’t slip,” he told movie columnist
Hedda Hopper. “He’s ruined by bad stories and worse casting.” Reagan was speaking of a generation of actors, but his own experience clearly colored his remarks. “The present system of casting is bad for pictures and death on actors. A man, for instance, may do an outstanding bit as a cop. A producer, seeing the picture, says, ‘That guy certainly knows how to play a cop.’ So he casts him as a cop in his next picture. The fellow plays a cop in fifteen films, and then he’s through.” Reagan further faulted the producers for believing audiences constantly demanded fresh faces on the screen. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m thoroughly in favor of new faces. They’re the lifeblood of this business, as most of us know. I think you’ll find that actors, more than any other class in our profession, discover and push new talent.” And the eight thousand members of the Screen Actors Guild, he said, constituted the greatest pool of talent anywhere. “But the present custom in Hollywood seems to be not to use talent, but to exploit it.” This was woefully shortsighted. “Did you know there are 65 million people who don’t go to the movies with any degree of regularity?” Reagan asked Hopper. “Most of them are over thirty years of age. That’s the group we need to bring back into the theaters.”

Warner Brothers wasn’t listening, and when the studio made plain it wasn’t going to promote his work, Reagan negotiated the right to accept work from other studios. Yet little materialized. He portrayed an alcoholic baseball pitcher in
The Winning Team
and was cast opposite a chimpanzee in
Bedtime for Bonzo
. And these were his best roles. The harsh fact was that audiences didn’t want to watch him and so producers didn’t want to work with him.

His immersion in the politics of the actors’ guild gave him something else to do, but even that option ran out when he relinquished the SAG presidency to
Walter Pidgeon at the end of 1952. He had already served longer than any president in the guild’s history, and more than a few in the guild sought a change at the top. Besides, Nancy was pregnant, and he didn’t wish to travel as much as the office required.

“
I sat down and looked myself in the career,” he said afterward. “One of the first signs of Hollywood chill is not only who doesn’t call—it’s who does. Producers complete with shoestring have a great script you ought to read. A short time before they wouldn’t have called you because you were out of their reach. Now, having them on the line gives you the same feeling a fellow lost in the desert must have when he looks up and sees the buzzards starting to gather.”

But he needed to work. He had a house in Hollywood and the Malibu ranch to pay for; he had a wife and a child on the way, not to mention the two children he shared with
Jane Wyman. He had been making a handsome salary since the war, but the marginal tax rate on high earners was over 90 percent, and he hadn’t managed to shelter much of his income.

Television beckoned, but Reagan, like most film actors, considered it déclassé. It didn’t pay nearly as well as movies, and it marked actors as has-beens or never-weres. He rejected the offers. He tried his hand at emceeing in Las Vegas, the gambling town that was rising from the rock and sand of the Nevada desert just beyond the reach of California’s less lenient laws. He couldn’t get comfortable in the role, and his discomfort showed. He liked the pay but couldn’t see himself as a floor-show fixture.

At this point his agent approached him with a novel idea. General Electric wanted to sponsor a television show, a weekly series of short dramas. These would be quality productions, with top actors in guest appearances. The series needed a host, an introducer who would become the face of the program. And there was something else. The host would double as a spokesman for General Electric, traveling the country and speaking on behalf of the company’s management to its far-flung workforce and to
other groups in the cities and towns where GE had plants. The company’s thinking was that the two functions, television host and company spokesman, would reinforce each other. The hundreds of thousands of employees would furnish the core of a television audience that would multiply into the millions when family members and friends also watched.

The offer appealed to Reagan. It entailed a regular paycheck and would keep his face in front of the public. The traveling was a drawback, but a person in his position couldn’t have everything he wanted. Reagan had always liked the personal appearance tours he had done to promote his films; he enjoyed the crowds and the celebrity treatment. He wasn’t the celebrity he had been or had hoped to become, but he would be a star to the GE workforce. He would have to preach the virtues of GE and capitalism, but this was no problem as he believed in capitalism and presumed he could come to believe in GE.

And so
The General Electric Theater
was launched, with Ronald Reagan as host. His contract was “
the fattest TV deal ever signed,”
Hedda Hopper reported. This wasn’t saying much, given television’s youth. But Reagan could portray it as a forward step. “Best part of the deal: I can have my cake and eat it too,” he told Hopper. “My contract allows me to make motion pictures—all of them I want. So I can be a week-end TV actor and carry on my screen work too.”

H
E WAS TALKING
fantasy about screen work. He made one film in 1955 and another in 1957. The latter,
Hellcats of the Navy
, included Nancy Reagan in her sole screen appearance after her marriage to Reagan. But beyond these, a couple of voice roles, and a small part in one last hurrah in 1964, Reagan’s film career ended when he signed with General Electric.

He put the best face on his premature retirement from films. “
In the old days I used to feel that Ronald Reagan was constantly on the soapbox, trying to change the world and doing his best to solve the problems of this complex motion picture industry,”
Louella Parsons wrote in the spring of 1955. “Today, he is more fun and less serious about the world in general.” Reagan had sought out columnist Parsons, his old friend from Dixon, to tout the GE series. She inquired as to the source of his easier mien. “I suppose TV has done this for me,” he replied. “You know, I used to be president of the Screen Actors Guild, not only off the screen but on. I was never cast in a picture in which this position didn’t influence the producers. I was always given the role of a sedate, solid citizen, and if I was put
in a Western I was sure to play an Eastern lawyer!” He hadn’t closed the door forever to movie roles. “If a good part comes along in either medium I’m going to grab it if I can,” he said. “But the beautiful thing about television is that you can pick and choose your stories, because you’re in a financial position to wait for what you want.” He granted that things weren’t what they once had been, and not for him alone. “Do you realize how this industry is changing? There are very few stars under contract these days. Many of the big ones free lance and are on television, too.”

Several of those big ones landed on Reagan’s show. “
We have
Fred Astaire,
Jimmy Stewart, Tony Curtis,
Alan Ladd,
Charles Laughton,
Audie Murphy,
Art Linkletter,
Jeannie Carson and many others already on film or committed to do at least a half-hour episode for our series this season,” Reagan told journalist
Walter Ames in 1957. Ames inquired how Reagan did it: How did he and General Electric entice such talent to television’s small screen? “Good stories, top direction, production quality,” Reagan answered. “An actor’s primary desire, and a necessary requisite in our industry, is to entertain to the best of his ability.
General Electric Theater
gives him, or her, that opportunity.” Reagan added that the program often cast actors against type, and that this appealed to them. Fred Astaire would perform in a nondancing role. Heartthrob Tony Curtis would battle bulls. Jimmy Stewart was going to star in Dickens’s
Christmas Carol
reimagined as a Western. Charles Laughton would become the coach of a Little League team.

The General Electric Theater
was more than an innovation in the new medium of television; it was also an experiment in the developing art of public relations. Since the dawn of American industrialism in the nineteenth century,
corporations had pondered how to portray themselves to the individuals and groups who shaped their world. Customers and clients formed one important constituency, employees another, government officials and the voters who chose them still others. Customers were typically wooed, by advertising and commercial promotions. Employees might be coddled and patronized in company towns, or threatened and intimidated by wage cuts and private security forces when the employees went on strike. Government officials could be bribed, as in several scandals of the Gilded Age, or funded in election campaigns, until Congress outlawed most corporate contributions in the early twentieth century.