Ronnie and Nancy (31 page)

On July 1—the day before the showdown at HICCASP—Herbert Sorrell, the head of the Conference of Studio Unions, called a strike. It was the latest skirmish in the sometimes violent struggle for control of Hollywood’s thirty thousand studio workers between the upstart CSU and the en-trenched International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) that had been raging on and off since early 1945. The July strike was settled in two days by an agreement known as the Treaty of Beverly Hills because it was negotiated in a bungalow at the hotel of the same name by union and studio representatives brought together by an emergency committee of SAG’s board.119 Reagan was one of the committee’s six members,120 and from that moment on he would play a central role as SAG’s point man in the increasingly byzantine—and ideologically charged—conflict.

Hollywood’s labor war had begun almost absurdly—with a decision by
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the seventy-seven member Society for Motion Picture Interior Decorators to switch its affiliation from IATSE to the CSU—and quickly engulfed the entire movie industry. Despite rulings by the National Labor Relations Board and the War Labor Board, IATSE refused to recognize the switch.

The battle was engaged in earnest on March 12, 1945, when the CSU’s ten thousand members went on strike in support of the decorators and began picketing the studios. The studio bosses backed IATSE, the older and less militant of the labor coalitions, partly because it included the projectionists union, which could close down their theaters, and partly because of rightwing accusations that the CSU was Communist-controlled—accusations that had some basis in fact. The Hollywood left, including HICCASP and the AVC, backed the CSU, claiming that IATSE was run by racketeers, which until 1941 it had been. While Dalton Trumbo wrote speeches for CSU leader Herbert Sorrell, a hotheaded former boxer from Oakland, the rabid anti-Communists of the Motion Picture Alliance rallied around IATSE head Roy Brewer, a onetime projectionist from Nebraska whose de-ceptively mild manner cloaked an obsessive hatred of Communists.121

Both sides vied for SAG’s support, because if the stars honored the CSU’s picket lines, the studios—which were being kept running by IATSE’s seventeen thousand members—would be forced to shut down. From the start Murphy and Montgomery took the position that the strike was jurisdictional—a dispute between unions, rather than labor and management—

which meant that under American Federation of Labor (AFL) rules SAG

members were not obligated to honor the picket lines. The CSU called for a national boycott of stars who crossed the lines, but it didn’t stop most marquee names—including liberals such as Bogart, Judy Garland, and Lucille Ball—from continuing to report for work.122 (Edith Davis’s Republican friend Lillian Gish waved demurely at the strikers on her way into the Selznick studio, where she was filming
Duel in the Sun.
)123

The 1945 strike dragged on inconclusively for seven months before reaching a violent climax outside Warner Bros. On the morning of October 5, some one thousand CSU strikers massed at the studio’s front gate and began overturning cars to block the entrance to IATSE workers. Warners’ security force, backed by local police, responded with fire hoses and tear gas.

In the ensuing riot, each side accused the other of using chains, pipes, clubs, and knives. Black Friday was followed by Bloody Monday, and the fighting went on for two more weeks, spreading to MGM, Paramount, and Republic. Earl Warren, California’s moderate Republican governor, refused 1 7 4

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House demands to send in the National Guard. The so-called Battle of Burbank was finally brought to an end on October 25, when the AFL’s national executive council issued the Cincinnati Directive, ordering the strikers back to work and both sides to the negotiating table. Three AFL vice presidents—

W. C. Doherty, head of the mail carriers, Felix Knight, head of the railway car-men, and W. C. Birthright, head of the barbers—were chosen to arbi-trate outstanding disputes. The day after Christmas, the Three Wise Men, as they were called, handed down a ruling that gave the CSU jurisdiction over the set decorators. But it also allowed the studios to transfer 350 set-construction jobs from CSU carpenters to IATSE stagehands. The carpenters protested to the AFL, and Sorrell threatened to shut the studios down with another strike. Jack Warner declared that the studios were victims of

“a gigantic Communist conspiracy” and swore he would never make another “liberal” movie, because “liberalism was just a disguise for Communist propaganda.” He also swore that he would never vote for a Democrat again.124

That is where matters stood when Reagan entered the picture with SAG’s emergency committee in July 1946 and helped settle the two-day strike.

Six weeks later, however, the Three Wise Men delivered their August Clarification, which appeared to favor the carpenters. In response, IATSE leaders threatened to shut down not only production but also distribution if the studios complied. In secret meetings held in August and September, the Producers Labor Committee plotted with IATSE representatives to break the CSU once and for all. Their plan was for the studios to demand that CSU carpenters and painters work on sets started by IATSE stagehands. If they refused, as expected, they would be fired for violating a moratorium on work stoppages agreed to in the Treaty of Beverly Hills, and be replaced by IATSE workers.125

SAG’s emergency committee, including Reagan, who had been nominated third vice president of the Guild, met with IATSE chief Roy Brewer and suggested that he abide by the August Clarification until the matter could be taken up at the AFL’s national convention in October, but Brewer argued that Sorrell wouldn’t be satisfied until the CSU controlled every union worker in Hollywood. Reagan attended at least one of the Producers Labor Committee’s secret meetings with IATSE leaders, on September 11, so there is some basis for believing he knew of their plans.126 That same day he called Sorrell on behalf of SAG and urged him
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not to call another strike.127 According to Reagan, Sorrell rebuffed him, probably because he had already ordered CSU painters and carpenters not to work on IATSE-built sets, thus making a confrontation inevitable.

Both sides were clearly spoiling for a fight, and had already lined up muscle: the longshoremen’s union for the CSU; the Teamsters for IATSE.

SAG’s leaders tried to cast themselves as innocent bystanders. “The Guild is not interested in the merits of the case,” Montgomery proclaimed at the board’s September 17 meeting, “but feels that all possible steps should be taken to prevent a strike which would throw 30,000 people out of work because of 300 jobs.”128 Reagan spoke out strongly for a motion stating that “members of the Guild be instructed to go through picket lines and live up to their contracts . . . and that the Guild make every effort to see that the studios provide adequate physical protection for its members when crossing picket lines.” The motion passed with only two dissenting votes, from Boris Karloff and Anne Revere.129 The board also called an emergency meeting of the entire membership for October 2 and asked Reagan to prepare a speech explaining SAG’s strike policy.

A few nights later, Reagan and Bill Holden, his closest friend on the SAG board, “crashed” a meeting of SAG’s leftist contingent at Ida Lupino’s house. According to Reagan, the seventy-five actors gathered on Lupino’s patio were “astonished and miffed” by their arrival. The meeting was chaired by Sterling Hayden, who would later testify to HUAC that he had been assigned by his Communist Party cell to line up SAG support for Sorrell. “The whole thing was a brainwash job,” Reagan recalled. “The C.S.U.

was lauded to the skies, the I.A.T.S.E. was damned, and the SAG drew faint praise indeed for trying to be blessed with the peacemakers.” When he defended SAG’s policy, he was booed and heckled. John Garfield, who also sat on SAG’s board, tried to quiet the group, but was pulled aside by Howard Da Silva—both Garfield and Da Silva were secret Party members at the time.130

The next day Reagan was filming a beach scene at Point Mugu for
Night
Unto Night
—he had started shooting his second postwar movie on September 20—when he was called to the phone. “There’s a group being formed to deal with you,” an anonymous caller said. “They’re going to fix you so you won’t ever act again.” He was escorted back to the studio, where the security office issued him a .32 Smith & Wesson pistol and a shoulder holster. The fear was that CSU hotheads were planning to throw acid in Reagan’s face; he claimed not to take the threat seriously until he saw a police car guarding his 1 7 6

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House house that night. “Thereafter, I mounted the holstered gun religiously every morning and took it off the last thing at night. I learned how much a person gets to lean on hardware like that. After months of wearing it took a real effort of will to discard it. I kept thinking: ‘The very night you take it off may be the night when you need it most.’”131

Meanwhile, between September 12 and September 24, 1,200 carpenters and painters had been fired, and they started picketing the studios. On September 26, the CSU called a strike to halt work on the fifty films then in production at the eight largest studios. In a repeat of the previous fall’s Battle of Burbank, CSU and IATSE workers clashed outside Warners’ gate, and Burbank policemen fired shots into the air.132 The following morning the
Los Angeles Times
quoted Sorrell as saying, “There may be men hurt, there may be men killed before this is over. But we are in no mood to be pushed around any more.”133 For his part, Brewer declared, “I.A.T.S.E. and the [CSU] cannot exist together in Hollywood. It is war to the finish.”134

Over the next several days ugly battles erupted outside MGM, Universal, Columbia, and Paramount. The AVC’s Hollywood chapter voted to support the CSU and ordered its members to join the picket lines in full military uniform, a move an outraged Reagan saw as proof that it had become “a hotbed of Communists.” By October 1 more than two dozen veterans had been hospitalized for injuries suffered in clashes with police.135

On October 2, Reagan gave his speech urging SAG’s membership to support the board’s policy of neutrality and to honor their contracts by crossing the picket lines. Three thousand actors had gathered for the mass meeting at the Hollywood Legion Stadium, an old boxing arena, where a podium was set up in the ring. Outside, some two thousand pro-CSU

demonstrators were handing out leaflets and shouting taunts demanding that SAG support the strike. Reagan’s friend Robert Stack recalled the tense scene: “There was a group outside and inside that was trying, supposedly, to take the Guild away from us. I don’t know if they were Communists, but when we arrived at the stadium they were about ten deep, and we had to walk in single file. There was a guy standing on the marquee taking pictures as we walked in, saying, ‘You better know how to vote, because we’ll know how you vote.’ Inside people were yelling. Bob Mitchum got up and said, ‘Look, as an American you can ask me what to do, but damn it, don’t
tell
me what to do.’ There was a racket going on; they were marching in cadence on the roof. Ronald Reagan stood up in the middle
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of the boxing ring and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I implore you, stay to the bitter end tonight. Because if you don’t, you’re going to lose your union. I don’t care how early your call is, but please stay tonight.’ And he went on and on. He’d had death threats. In fact, Chuck Heston told me that they were flattening Ron’s tires and stuff.”136

After the meeting, a half-dozen Teamsters led Reagan and Wyman through a gauntlet of hecklers to their car. “A group of us went to Trader Vic’s,” Stack remembered. “And I said, ‘You know something, Ron, I was very impressed by you. I can’t think of anyone else who could have gotten up there and done what you did. And I feel strongly that if you’re as gifted as you are and if you believe in democracy, as an American, you have an obligation to do something for your country. You really should do something with that leadership quality.’ He looked at me kind of funny, gave me a quizzical smile, and said, ‘You mean if I run for president, you’ll vote for me?’ I said, ‘Yeah, you bet your ass.’ And everybody laughed.”137

SAG members voted 2,748 to 509 in favor of the board’s—and Reagan’s—position.138 Thus empowered, Reagan stepped up his efforts to keep the studios open and end the strike. He persuaded SAG’s board to let him lead a delegation to the AFL’s Chicago convention, and Warners suspended production on
Night Unto Night
so that he could go. The star-studded group—Wyman, Murphy, Edward Arnold, Robert Taylor, Gene Kelly, Walter Pidgeon, Alexis Smith, Dick Powell and June Allyson—

threatened to tour the country condemning the AFL’s leaders if they didn’t do more to mediate the dispute. Back in Los Angeles, Reagan met with the technicians at Technicolor who had voted to switch sides from IATSE

to the CSU, but they walked out anyway, a major setback for the studios because they had no other way to process color film. In late October, Reagan organized a SAG-sponsored roundtable of forty-three local unions at the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel, which ended badly, with Sorrell screaming at his friend Gene Kelly and Reagan telling Sorrell, “Herb, as far as I’m concerned . . . you do not want peace in the motion picture industry.”139

According to Reagan, “Now various homes of the I.A.T.S.E. members were bombed at night; other workers were ambushed and slugged.”140 Warners employees were being brought to the studio each morning on buses driven by Teamsters; CSU picketers threw rocks and bottles as the buses whizzed through the gate.141 On November 13, Reagan watched as the Warners bus on which he usually commuted went up in flames on Beverly 1 7 8

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Boulevard, not far from his house.142 Two days later, in violation of a court injunction prohibiting more than eight pickets at any studio gate, 1,500