Ronnie and Nancy (49 page)

In addition, MCA quietly agreed to pay actors residuals when Revue shows they appeared in were rerun, a concept the Association of Television Producers had rejected out of hand in negotiations with SAG earlier that year. The hush-hush deal was worked out by MCA’s freshly hired lawyer, Laurence Beilenson, who had been SAG’s lawyer for years, and who had represented Reagan in his divorce proceedings. (Ten years later, when Reagan was subpoenaed in a Justice Department investigation of alleged an-titrust activities by MCA, he would claim that he had no memory of this backroom pact. And although the feeling that he gave special treatment to his own agents would persist, he was never formally charged with wrongdoing of any kind.)33

The blanket waiver proved to be a bonanza for MCA. “The Octopus of Show Biz,” as it came to be known, would dominate television throughout the 1950s—producing shows for its own talent, including Jack Benny, Edgar Bergen, George Burns and Gracie Allen—and with its huge TV

profits go on to acquire Universal Studios in 1958. Actors also benefited tremendously from Reagan’s decision, because once MCA agreed to pay

“reuse fees,” other producers had no choice but to follow. As one MCA 2 6 8

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House agent later put it, “Every writer, actor and director in this town ought to get down and kiss Ronald Reagan’s feet.”34

If there was a payoff for Reagan personally, it would be some time in coming. His contract with Universal was closed out with
Law and Order
in the fall of 1952, and he would not make another movie for fourteen months. “Ronnie was upset with Lew for the way things worked out with Universal,” Nancy Reagan told me.35 The Wassermans had also pulled back from Reagan socially after his remarriage, probably because, as Nancy Reagan pointed out, “Edie and Jane were very close.”36 (In 1955, Revue Productions launched
Jane Wyman Presents the Fireside Theater
.) In fact, Wasserman no longer actually represented Reagan, having turned him over to Arthur Park, a vice president at the agency.

“The phone continued to ring for Ronnie,” Nancy later wrote, “but now he was being offered bad roles in bad films—pictures he described as ‘They don’t want them good, they want them Thursday.’”37 She supported her husband in his refusal to make any more “clunkers,” but the financial strain was considerable. Reagan was in debt to the IRS for income tax he had de-ferred during the war, the horse ranch was mortgaged and losing money, there were two mortgages on the Amalfi Drive house—and no furniture in the living room because they couldn’t afford any.38

So Nancy made a clunker instead: “Five months after Patti was born, and despite my decision not to be a working wife, I went back to work for one picture. Quite simply we needed the money. This was a blow to Ronnie, but we had to face facts, and face them together. I could get work, but his movie career was at a standstill.”39 She was paid $18,000 for
Donovan’s
Brain
, a low-budget sci-fi thriller about a mad scientist who preserves the brain of an evil tycoon. In a master stroke of irony, Lew Ayres played the scientist and Nancy his wife. (She claimed they did
not
talk about Jane.) Her best line: “Call me when the brain quiets down.” According to one critic, she “walked through the movie in a state of utter bafflement, giving a new dimension to the word
dumbfounded
.”40

Although he was almost as dismissive of television as the studio bosses, Reagan agreed to go on
The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show
in May 1953, and later that year he started going to New York to make guest appearances on such shows as
Revlon Mirror Theater, Lux Video Theater,
and
What’s My Line?
“Dear Nancy Pants,” he wrote from the Sherry-Netherland on one such trip. “Yesterday I went directly from the train to rehearsal—

only stopping to check in here. . . . Back at the hotel I put in a call to you
Pacific Palisades: 1952–1958

2 6 9

and then I tried for Lew Wasserman—not in town! [MCA agent] Sonny Werblin—away on vacation! Nancy Poo Pants Reagan—away out yonder!

Eight million people in this pigeon crap encrusted metropolis and suddenly I realized I was alone with my thoughts and they smelled sulphurous.”41

Ronnie may have been feeling sorry for himself, but he was only down and out by Hollywood standards, staying as he was at a luxurious Fifth Avenue hotel and, as he went on to tell Nancy, enjoying a half-bottle of Pi-chon Longueville with his dinner at “21.” Still, he couldn’t resist expressing resentment of those who had it easier in life, namely a fellow at an adjacent table, “a Brooks Brothers character who was evidently a Fond Fathers junior partner with plenty of loot he never could earn for himself.” Mainly, however, he missed Nancy: “Man can’t live without a heart and you are my heart, by far the nicest thing about me and so very necessary. There would be no life without you nor would I want any.” He signed off, “I Love You, the Eastern Half of Us.”42

That Christmas, Reagan recalled, was “the lowest point of all.” Then a script from MGM “came down the chimney to the sound of sleigh bells and tiny hoofs on the roof.” Reagan earned $30,000—less than half his fee just two years earlier—for
Prisoner of War
, in which he played an American intelligence officer captured and tortured by the North Koreans. The script was based on interviews with POWs released after the end of the Korean War in June of that year, and the role seemed custom-made for an anti-Communist crusader. But
Prisoner of War
was a critical and commercial disappointment. “Unfortunately, production and release were both rushed, with the idea the picture should come out while the headlines were hot,” Reagan rationalized. He also felt that the film was hurt by

“the reluctance of extreme liberals to enthuse about anything that upset their illusions.”43

Reagan was not in a position to say no when Art Park came up with another way to bring in some cash: doing a Las Vegas act. He found the idea “outlandish,” but when Park told him that he could make $15,000 a week, Reagan agreed to consider it. On the morning of his meeting with Park, he and Nancy checked the daily astrology column of “one of our good friends . . . Carroll Righter.” Reagan later wrote that he “almost suspected an MCA plot: my word for the day read, ‘This is the day to listen to the advice of experts.’ Cutting out the item, I walked into the meeting, and without even saying hello, asked, ‘Are you guys experts?’ ”44

After assuring Reagan that he would have to do little more than what 2 7 0

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House he had done at countless benefits over the years—tell a few jokes and introduce other acts—Park made a call to Beldon Katleman, the owner of the El Rancho Vegas Hotel Casino. Katleman was eager to book Reagan, whom he knew from the Friars Club, but when it turned out that he wanted him to emcee a show featuring a stripper, Reagan balked.45 Instead, he was booked into the Last Frontier for a two-week stint in mid-February 1954.

MCA hired comedy writer John Bradford to help prepare Reagan’s act.

“I was scared to death because I had never heard of a performer who couldn’t sing or dance doing a Vegas act before,” Bradford recalled. “So I met with Ron and Nancy—she was always with him, always—to see what he could do. I tried him out singing, and he was great; I gave him a sample monologue, and his timing was perfect. He loved telling jokes in an Irish brogue, and he was good at it, so I felt a little better. My wife and I then spent every day for the next three weeks with the Reagans working on the act, and Ron was terrific; he really knocked himself out because he was on his uppers and needed the dough. . . . [Nancy] attended every rehearsal and took notes like a secretary; she was that concerned.” Bradford added, “I remember he wanted me to put a lot of tax jokes in the monologue because he’d just been hit with a whopping bill for back taxes and he hated the IRS. He said the Internal Revenue Service should be abolished.

‘Everyone should pay ten percent of their income and that’s it,’ he said.”46

Reagan’s ninety-minute show featured the Continentals, a male quartet that had appeared in nightclubs and on the Ed Sullivan television show. It also included the Honey Brothers, slapstick comedians known for their blue humor (though most of that was cut for Reagan’s show), a musical duo called the Blackburn Twins, and a line of showgirls in feathered headdresses. Reagan wrote most of his self-deprecating monologue, and good-naturedly went along with skits that required him to crack lowbrow jokes in a German accent while wearing an apron advertising Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and get smacked on the head with rolled-up newspapers by his fellow performers. According to one of the Continentals, Nancy sat through two shows every night, “sipping nothing more than a glass of ice water.”47 “I never got bored,” she said, putting a good face on what must have been a somewhat painful experience.48

Ronnie and Nancy didn’t gamble in Las Vegas until their last night, and then bet only $20 at the blackjack table. At bedtime, they would read books side by side—history and politics for him, biographies and novels for her.

Pacific Palisades: 1952–1958

2 7 1

After two weeks in the capital of honky-tonk, the couple had had enough.49

“We couldn’t wait to get back to the Palisades and that tiny queen who had taken us over,” said Ronnie, referring to one-and-a-half-year-old Patti.50

“We had been very, very definite as to the kind of person we wanted. Good moral character, intelligent. Not the kind with the reputation for the social ramble. A good upright kind of person.” So said Earl B. Dunckel, a General Electric public relations executive, explaining why the giant industrial corporation agreed to have Reagan take over as host of the struggling weekly drama series it had been sponsoring since early 1953.
General Electric Theater
was originally conceived by MCA, in collaboration with G.E.’s advertising agency, Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborne (known as BBD&O), as a way to lure big-name movie stars—most of whom were still refusing to do TV—onto the small screen. Dunckel recalled meeting Reagan at an early planning session in New York in August 1954: “There was nothing of the posturing, nothing of the ‘I am a star’—he was a regular guy . . . whom I liked instantly. . . . Nancy was there with him.”51

Reagan had vowed he would never do a TV series, but the terms of the contract he was offered by Taft Schreiber, the MCA vice president who ran Revue Productions, which produced the show, were extremely attractive.

For an annual salary starting at $125,000, he would introduce each week’s half-hour episode, star in some, and tour the country for sixteen weeks visiting G.E. plants and making speeches as part of the company’s Employee and Community Relations Program. This last function, Reagan would later say, was the clincher for him. In addition, he was given the title of program supervisor as well as profit participation in episodes he starred in after they had run five times. The contract was for five years.52 As it worked out, the G.E. job not only rescued him professionally and financially but also laid the groundwork for his emergence as a national political figure.

The revised
General Electric Theater
, hosted by Ronald Reagan, was a hit from its first airing on CBS at nine o’clock on Sunday evening, September 26, 1954, and by its third year only
I Love Lucy
and
The Ed Sullivan Show
had higher ratings. Nancy co-starred with Ronnie in the first season’s third episode, “The Long Way Round,” which was billed as “the tense story of a wife’s attempts to help her husband recover from a breakdown,” and she would appear in a handful of others over the years. Some episodes were broadcast live from New York, and some were filmed on the old Republic Pictures lot, where Revue had set up shop. Reagan’s introduction of each 2 7 2

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House episode was less than two minutes long, and he signed off every show with the company motto: “Here at General Electric, progress is our most important product.”53

“Ronnie held it together. He was a wonderful host. We couldn’t have asked for anybody better,” said William Frye, who produced the filmed segments for Revue from 1955 to 1960. “There was a scriptwriter to write the intros, but Ronnie always contributed in his own way and always made them better. We had a TelePrompTer, but he very seldom used it—

Ronnie knew his lines. Our deal with Ronnie was that he would star in three out of every thirteen episodes. I usually had one being written, one being shot, and one being edited, to keep ahead. Once in a while Ronnie would come into the office and say, ‘Gee, I just read such and such a script.

Who’s going to do it?’ I’d say, ‘Well, I’m trying to get Charlton Heston,’

or, ‘I’m trying to get Fred MacMurray.’ Because those guys hadn’t done television at that point. And he would say, ‘Well, listen, I would like to do it.’ So it was kind of a touchy situation, because I wanted to keep Ronnie happy, but at the same time I was trying to build the show with important people who had never been on television. And within the first couple years we got Jimmy Stewart, Joan Crawford, Fred Astaire, Joan Fontaine—they all made their TV debuts on
G.E. Theater
.” Frye added, “Of course, with Stein and Wasserman and Schreiber controlling everything, it made my job very easy.”54

Reagan’s first tour for General Electric began at a turbine plant in Schenectady, New York, where the company had its headquarters. He spent four hours walking through the thirty-one-acre factory, stopping to chat with almost every worker, signing autographs, and “generally having a hell of a good time getting acquainted,” Dunckel recalled. It happened that several thousand high school teachers were holding a convention in Schenectady that weekend, and when their scheduled speaker fell ill, they asked Dunckel if he could get Reagan to give a speech on education.

Dunckel turned them down, fearing that he would have to write the speech, but Reagan volunteered to write it himself. “He got up there and gave a speech . . . that just dropped them in the aisles,” according to Dunckel. “He got a good ten minute standing applause afterward. This is when I finally began to realize the breadth and depth of his knowledge-ability . . . everything that went into that mind stayed there. He could quote it out like a computer any time you wanted.”55