Ronnie and Nancy (17 page)

In Chicago there were balls every night during the holiday season, and all kinds of lunches, cocktail parties, and dinners in honor of that season’s debs. Edith had arranged for one of the city’s grande dames, Mrs. Patrick A. Valentine, an Armour heiress, to give a dinner for Nancy at her Gold Coast mansion. The biggest bash of the week, at the Blackstone Hotel with the Glenn Miller Orchestra, was for Priscilla Blackett, the daughter of an advertising tycoon. The night before Nancy’s debut, Jean Wescott’s parents gave their daughter a ball at the Casino.93

Nancy’s late-afternoon tea dance was a simpler affair, though the attendance of thirty Princeton boys assured its social success. (One of those young men, Frank Birney Jr., the son of a Chicago banker, would soon become Nancy’s first college beau.) To mark the occasion of their daughter’s introduction to society, Edith and Loyal gave Nancy a single strand of pearls, which she wore with her silver-trimmed white gown.94 The trunk baby had become a debutante, the near orphan a near princess.

C H A P T E R F I V E

WARNER BROS.

1937–1941

In those days at the studios, which governed everything we did, we generally saw the people who were at the same studio. Joe Mankiewicz, the screenwriter, said it was like living in a duchy, in a moated castle. From 1938 to 1941, I was in the Warner Bros. duchy, because my first husband, Wayne Morris, was an actor at Warners. He and Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman acted in the same movies, so we saw them all the time. They were not married when I first met them. Jane, as a matter of fact, was married to a man called Myron Futterman, and it used to send me into fits of laughter. He was a perfectly nice man. I don’t know why, the name tickled me. What were Jane and Ronnie like then? They were adorable. But what did I know? I was eighteen years old. They were young and beautiful. But everybody was beautiful.

Leonora Hornblow to author,

February 10, 2000

LOS ANGELES IN 1937—THE YEAR RONALD REAGAN ARRIVED—WAS A PLACE

apart, a paradise some would say, far away from the rest of the world and its problems. Its leading industry—moviemaking—employed nearly forty thousand people in the manufacture of fantasies, illusions, and myths for a nation still struggling with the grim reality of the ongoing Depression.

The hard times had only increased the public’s appetite for Busby Berkeley musicals, high-society comedies starring Carole Lombard and Myrna Loy, and Saturday-matinee Westerns with Gene Autry and William Boyd as Hopalong Cassidy. The Spanish Civil War, with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy backing one side and the Soviet Union the other, had started the year before, Japan invaded China in July 1937, and a nervous Franklin Roosevelt was beginning to rearm America. But that meant stepped-up orders for Southern California’s burgeoning oil, rubber, and 9 3

9 4

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House aircraft industries. Bad news was good news, it seemed, in this upside-down Shangri-la.

The landscape itself was a mirage come true, semidesert transformed into semitropics by sheer human willpower and the massive importation of water from the Owens Valley in Central California, carried over the world’s longest aqueduct, a 233-mile marvel of engineering built between 1906 and 1913 by an itinerant knife sharpener turned municipal water czar named William Mulholland.1 Where there was once sagebrush and mesquite, there was now jasmine and oleander, hibiscus and bougainvillea, and acre upon acre of perfectly manicured and constantly watered lawns surrounding mile upon mile of mock Spanish, Tudor, Italian, and New England mansions, from Pasadena to Palos Verdes, from Hancock Park to Beverly Hills. Even the palms that lined the boulevards to the beaches were imported, and every two-bedroom bungalow in the most modest neighborhoods seemed to come with a flowering orange or lemon tree in its tiny front yard. If New York was the ultimate vertical metropolis, Los Angeles was the ultimate hor-izontal one, sprawling, spacious, languid, preternaturally pretty. The newest city in the world, they called it, the city without a past.

This was the city of upward mobility and self-invention, hedonism and fundamentalism; the mecca of beauty queens and musclemen, swamis, psychics, evangelists, and astrologers, asthmatics and arthritics, rich retirees fleeing the boredom of Peoria and Omaha, poor Okies fleeing the desperation of the Dust Bowl, Jewish intellectuals and artists fleeing Hitler; the land of the white picket fence and the kidney-shaped swimming pool, of the open shop and the gated community, where the myth of the American Dream was invented by the Eastern European moguls who ran Hollywood.

Between 1900 and 1940 the population of Los Angeles grew from barely 100,000 to almost 1.5 million,2 making it the fifth-biggest city in the country, after New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.3 A relentless campaign of annexation—the only way for neighboring towns to tap into the city’s water supply was to be annexed—had made it the largest city in area in the country, encompassing 442 square miles from the San Fernando Valley in the north to Venice, San Pedro, and the man-made Port of Los Angeles in the south. This was also the city of the car (one for every 1.6 residents by 1926, a ratio the rest of the country would not match until 1950),4

the single-family home (a remarkable 94 percent of all dwellings in 1930),5

and the feverishly promoted residential subdivision (at the height of the 1920s boom, there were 43,000 real estate agents).6

Warner Bros.: 1937–1941

9 5

Unlike the older, industrialized cities of the East and Midwest, whose growth was fueled by European immigration, Los Angeles was the result of a great internal migration from the heartland of America. As Mike Davis noted in
City of Quartz
, the railroad magnates, real estate developers, bankers, and boosters who took over the seedy cattle town in the 1880s “set out to sell Los Angeles—as no city had ever been sold—to the restless but affluent babbitry of the Middle West.”7 The newcomers, in John Gregory Dunne’s words, were “already thoroughly Americanized, with roots going back several generations—hardworking, white, English-speaking Midwestern smalltowners seeking a Protestant Eldorado with a temperate climate and no foreigners fresh from the boat.”8 Until well after World War II, Los Angeles was the most homogeneous large city in America—90 percent white and two-thirds Protestant9—and had been kept that way by the Chinese exclusion acts of the 1890s, the periodic repatriation of Mexican nationals, and the widespread deed covenants and block restrictions excluding blacks and Asians that took hold in the 1920s.10

Yet set within this WASP utopia was the most ostentatiously powerful Jewish community in the nation, led by the self-made moguls who founded and ran the Hollywood studios. The two most important men in prewar Los Angeles were probably Harry Chandler, the publisher of the
Los Angeles
Times
, the city’s dominant newspaper, and Louis B. Mayer, vice president and head of production of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the largest and grandest of the five major and three minor studios. Chandler, the de facto dictator of the downtown oligarchy that ran Los Angeles, used his newspaper as a promotional vehicle for his vast real estate ventures, and was by far the city’s richest citizen, leaving an estimated $500 million fortune at his death in 1944. Mayer, the undisputed king of the movie industry, owned stock in 20th Century Fox and Columbia Pictures as well as MGM;11 he was the highest-paid individual in the country in 1937, earning $1.3 million in salary and bonuses, and would remain so until 1946. Though they were hardly friends, both men were union-hating, moralistic, conservative Republicans—Mayer was actually chairman of the California Republican Party’s central committee in the 1930s.12

On matters of politics and industry standards the other studio heads kowtowed to Mayer—except for his great rival, Jack Warner, vice president and head of production at Warner Bros., the second-largest studio. If Mayer and his family were Herbert Hoover’s first dinner guests at the White House in 1929, Jack Warner would brag in his autobiography that he “virtually 9 6

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House commuted” to the Roosevelt White House—“court jester, I was, and proud of it.”13 If Metro was the Tiffany’s of the studios, Warners was the Ford, an efficient assembly line known for its low budgets and long hours. The Warners—Jack’s older brother Harry was the studio’s New York–based president—saw themselves as upstarts, outsiders, innovators, whose movies made up in realism and relevance what they lacked in gloss and sophistication. They had made the first talkie,
The Jazz Singer
with Al Jolson, in 1927, and pioneered the gangster movie, the headline movie based on news stories, and movies about such controversial subjects as labor disputes and race relations. The studio motto was “Combining good citizenship with good movie-making.” “The motion picture,” Harry Warner told
Fortune
magazine in December 1937, “presents right and wrong, as the Bible says. By showing both right and wrong we teach the right.”14

Although Harry and Jack Warner were not really liberals—they counted FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and the jingoistic newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst among their closest friends—many of the studio’s producers, directors, and writers definitely leaned to the left, including Hal Wallis, the executive producer responsible for most of the studio’s A movies, and Jerry Wald, its most important writer (and later producer). With the exception of Dick Powell, a dedicated Republican, most of the studio’s major stars—Edward G. Robinson, Paul Muni, James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis—were also prominent liberal Democrats.

One can see why an idealistic FDR fan from a working-class background like Ronald Reagan would fit in at Warner Bros. One can also see why an optimistic Disciple of Christ from Illinois by way of Iowa would feel at home in Los Angeles.

On May 24, 1937, as night fell over the glittering coastal metropolis, twenty-six-year-old Dutch Reagan drove into town in his open-topped Nash. The first thing he did, after checking into the Biltmore, was to thank Joy Hodges, who had made the introduction that led to his contract and who was still working in the hotel’s nightclub. The next day, wearing a new white sports coat and blue trousers, he presented himself at Warner Bros. in Burbank—a week early. “Where in hell did you get that coat?” was the way Max Arnow greeted him. Summoning a young assistant, the casting director ordered, “Take him over to Wardrobe and see what the tailor can do with this outfit. He looks like a Filipino.”15

Over the next few days he was put through the studio makeover mill.

Warner Bros.: 1937–1941

9 7

The makeup department told him his head was too small and gave him a new hairstyle. The wardrobe department said his shoulders were too wide and his neck too short and sent him to Jimmy Cagney’s shirtmaker for custom-made shirts with trick collars (which he would continue having made for the rest of his life). The publicity department hated the name Dutch Reagan, even though he insisted it was known throughout the Midwest. When he told them his real name was Ronald, they said they loved it—Ronald Reagan!—and acted as if they had thought it up themselves. In an industry where most of the stars had their names changed, the name Ronald Reagan had the alliterative symmetry the studios considered classy and commercial. And so he came to be called by his proper name for the first time in his twenty-six years.16

In his first six months at Warners, he had the lead in two B movies and supporting roles in two A movies, a pattern that would prevail over the next four years. He played a radio announcer in
Love Is on the Air
, a sports reporter in
Swing Your Lady
, a cavalryman in
Sergeant Murphy
, and an assistant to Louella Parsons in
Hollywood Hotel
, which was based on the gossip queen’s CBS radio show of the same name. Meeting Parsons, one of the two dominant columnists in Hollywood—the other being her bitter rival, Hedda Hopper—would prove to be a boon to Reagan’s career. She took an immediate liking to him when she learned that he was from Dixon, Illinois, her beloved hometown, and from then on seized every opportunity to promote him in her daily column in the Hearst-owned
Los Angeles Examiner
, which was syndicated in six hundred newspapers worldwide.

Among the Warners stars he worked with in these early movies were Humphrey Bogart and Dick Powell, who would become a close friend.

During the three weeks it took to complete
Love Is on the Air,
he started dating his co-star, the beautiful June Travis. The daughter of a vice president of the Chicago White Sox, she had another suitor at the time, a rich playboy from Philadelphia named Walter Annenberg.

Annenberg was only three years older than Reagan but had already been romantically involved with Lillian Vernon, a Ziegfeld Follies girl (and later a mail-order entrepreneur), and Ethel Merman, then the hottest new star on Broadway, among others. He had been coming out to California since 1932, when his father, Moses Annenberg, the multimillionaire owner of the
Daily Racing Form
, started a Hollywood-based fan magazine called
Screen
Guide
. (Walter always took the train, because Moses, who had seven daughters but only one son and heir, wouldn’t let him fly.) He was introduced 9 8

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House around town by Louis B. Mayer, and he knew everyone there was to know from William Randolph Hearst and his movie star mistress, Marion Davies, to Jack Warner and his glamorous second wife, Ann. The press scion cruised around town in a custom-made Lincoln convertible, stayed in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and spent weekends partying and gambling in Palm Springs, then the Hollywood elite’s favorite hideaway.17

Nonetheless, June Travis preferred her co-star from Iowa, and Annenberg graciously withdrew. But he kept up a passing friendship with Reagan all through the late 1930s and 1940s, though the Republican Annenberg, whose father had bought the
Philadelphia Inquirer
in 1936 and made it a rabidly anti-FDR organ, often disagreed with Reagan’s liberal views. Eventually, however, they would come to see eye-to-eye, and Walter Annenberg would be one of the most important backers of Ronald Reagan’s political rise.