Sign Before They Change Their Minds
After college, Reagan thought he’d give radio a shot. He hitchhiked to Chicago, where he was advised to try his luck back home. His chance came with an audition announcing University of Iowa football games for the radio station WOC in Davenport. The call letters stood for “World of Chiropractic”—the station was an adjunct to a local chiropractic school, whose eccentric owner had a “world famous collection of spines,” a stuffed St. Bernard under the piano, and a license acquired in the early days of radio. Reagan’s improvisational ability, wedded to a voice with strong presence, impressed Pete MacArthur, the station manager. In early 1933, MacArthur hired him as a staff announcer for a hundred dollars per month. After WOC merged with WHO, a more powerful station in Des Moines, Reagan was earning two hundred dollars a month as a sports announcer in a bigger city. His voice could now be heard throughout the Midwest.
The quality of that voice, warm and soothing, deep without huskiness, made Reagan a natural on the radio. Being from the middle of the country, he wasn’t burdened with any distinguishing regional accent. He learned that the way for him to sound spontaneous was to memorize the opening passage of a script. But it was the narrative quality of his thinking as much as his vocal timbre that drove his early success. Reagan was, like his father and brother, a natural yarn spinner who knew how to conjure a scene and characters. He could also do impressions. At WHO, he performed send-ups of President Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats for his colleagues.
His most important job at WHO was “re-creating” more than six hundred Chicago Cubs games over four seasons, based on the pitch-by-pitch account telegraphed from Wrigley Field or from wherever the Cubs were on the road. He described his job as “visualizer,” making vivid something he couldn’t see for an audience that couldn’t see it, either. He called what he did “painting a word picture.” He’d describe the weather, the expressions on the faces of the players, the reaction of the crowd—invented but not necessarily untrue. Jeanne Tesdell, his steady girlfriend for a year, later told her daughter about the way Reagan would gyrate in the recording booth, transported by his imagination as if he were present at the ballpark. His favorite story was about the time the wire went dead during a game between the Cubs and the St. Louis Cardinals, with Dizzy Dean on the mound. Reagan improvised an endless succession of pitches fouled off by the batter. After twenty minutes, when it seemed he could tap-dance no longer, the telegraph clicked back to life. The batter had fouled out on the first pitch.
Reagan’s fortunes were improving ahead of the country’s. He was a local celebrity and man-about-town, driving a brown Nash convertible and dating the prettiest women. Some he took swimming, or riding at Fort Des Moines, where he joined the U.S. Cavalry Reserve to have use of the stables. But Reagan was far from extravagant or a playboy. His lighthearted modesty made everyone like him. He was also a good son and brother, sending home a third of his paycheck and helping pay for Neil to finish college, then getting him a job with the station in Davenport.
His dream was the movies. The plan he hatched in 1936 was to get WHO to send him to cover the Cubs at their spring training camp on Catalina Island, near Los Angeles, and to use his spare time to knock on studio doors. Joy Hodges, a former WHO employee who had become a band singer, got Reagan a meeting with her agent, George Ward. Ward got him a screen test at Warner Bros., but couldn’t persuade him to wait around for Jack Warner to evaluate it. Reagan packed up and went back to Des Moines. Playing hard-to-get turned out to be an inspired strategy. Ward soon cabled him with an offer from Warner for a contract starting at two hundred dollars a week. SIGN BEFORE THEY CHANGE THEIR MINDS, Reagan wired back.
Warner Bros., where Reagan would remain for fifteen years and make forty-one films, relied on Reagan’s voice more than his body. In the first two pictures he made in 1937, Love Is on the Air and Hollywood Hotel, he was cast as a radio announcer. Hollywood Hotel, a Busby Berkeley film, was his big break. The movie was built around the popular radio show of Louella Parsons, a powerful figure in the entertainment industry, whose daily gossip column was published in the Hearst newspapers. On the set, Reagan discovered a private connection with Parsons: she, too, was from Dixon. From then on, she was a champion of his career.
After breaking off a second, brief engagement to an actress named Ila Rhodes, Reagan began dating Jane Wyman, who starred with him in the Brother Rat movies. Parsons became a cheerleader for their relationship. After breaking the news of their engagement, she invited Reagan and Wyman on a national promotional tour called Hollywood Stars of 1940 on Parade. The musical revue, ostensibly a showcase for Hollywood’s rising stars, was also a celebration of Parsons’s power. “Oh, Louella, won’t you mention me / For a movie star in Hollywood, that’s what I want to be,” the actors sang, to the tune of “Oh, Susanna.”
Where Reagan was steady and good-natured, Wyman was insecure and impulsive. Twenty-one when she met Reagan, she was already in the midst of a second divorce, with three more to come. There is no indication that she told her new husband about her unacknowledged first marriage to Eugene Wyman, at the age of sixteen, though it might have taken an effort even for the incurious Reagan not to wonder why she didn’t use Mayfield, her parents’ last name. Parsons and the Warner publicity department also airbrushed away her brief second marriage, to a middle-aged New Orleans businessman. The young stars were married in 1940 by a Disciples minister, with Parsons hosting the reception. Their daughter, Maureen, born the following year, called her Aunt Lolly.
Another advantage in Hollywood was the connection Reagan cultivated with Lew Wasserman, who was quickly becoming the most powerful agent in the movie business. As with Louella Parsons and Jack Warner, Reagan swiftly developed a personal friendship with Wasserman that went beyond their transactional relationship. The result was that within a year of his showing up from Iowa, Reagan, a likable actor of no great talent and limited sex appeal, had three of the most influential people in Hollywood backing his rise. As with his subsequent successes, he saw his relationship with this circle of patrons as good fortune that simply befell him, rather than as something he’d engineered. This ingenuousness was part of what endeared him to such powerful benefactors.
With Wasserman’s firm, MCA, promoting him, Reagan swiftly became a familiar face in B movies, the weaker film on a double bill. He played comic roles and the kinds of adventure heroes he’d imagined as a child, for an audience of children. These pictures, made by a separate Warner production unit, were turned out like assembly line products in a few weeks. “They didn’t want them good, they wanted them Thursday,” he liked to say. Reagan, “the Errol Flynn of the Bs,” was the ideal assembly-line actor, versatile and reliable. He appeared in ten films in 1938 and seven more in 1939. By 1941 he was getting more fan mail than any star in Hollywood other than Flynn himself.
In the four films in the Brass Bancroft series, Reagan played a dauntless federal agent doing battle with counterfeiters, spies, and saboteurs. Pictures such as Secret Service of the Air reflected Warner’s pro-interventionist stance, which became the subject of a Senate investigation into “warmongering” and “war propaganda” a few months before Pearl Harbor. One of the subjects of the investigation was the film International Squadron, in which Reagan’s character, a pilot for the Royal Air Force, sacrifices his life. Another, Murder in the Air, released in 1940, was the last of the Brass Bancroft movies. In it, Reagan goes undercover to stop German spies trying to sabotage a test of America’s secret weapon, an “inertia projector,” which can shoot planes out of the sky at a range of four miles. “It not only makes the United States invincible in war, but in so doing promises to become the greatest force for world peace ever discovered,” his character says.
Reagan believed in his ability as an actor. He didn’t like having his career denigrated, as it often was after he went into politics. At the same time, he had a realistic understanding of his limitations. He wanted more dramatic roles and parts in Westerns, but recognized that “averageness” was his key asset. “Mr. Norm is my alias,” he wrote in an as-told-to article for Photoplay, a fan magazine. He channeled everyman, which meant everyone could relate to him.
Playing George Gipp in Knute Rockne—All American (1940) was Reagan’s first role in an A film. The modest athletic hero, a self-reliant man of action expressing the American ideal of leadership, became an alter ego for Reagan. In the athlete’s dying speech, he tells his coach, Knute Rockne, that when the team is in a tough spot one day, he should rally the troops by telling them to “win one for the Gipper.” Reagan’s favorite catchphrase was a classic Hollywood fairy tale, since no one called the real Gipp the Gipper, and the football hero’s deathbed exhortation was likely a fabrication of Rockne’s. But to Reagan the myth expressed the deeper truth about uniting around a cause and persevering against the odds. Another line from the film rings even truer about the actor playing the role: “I don’t like people to get too close to me,” Gipp at one point informs the coach’s wife.
The peak period of Reagan’s acting career followed: Santa Fe Trail, in which he played opposite Errol Flynn, and Juke Girl, where he starred with Ann Sheridan. His best role was in Kings Row, the adaptation of a lurid best seller about life in a small town at the turn of the century. Though the story was massively reworked for the screen, filming a novel dealing with incest, homosexuality, and euthanasia was a challenge to the Motion Picture Production Code. Reagan played Drake McHugh, a young playboy whose legs are amputated by a sadistic doctor as punishment for a romance with the doctor’s daughter. As Reagan’s character comes to in a strange bed after his operation, sweating and disoriented, he shouts, “Where’s the rest of me?” In his 1965 memoir of the same title, Reagan remembers this as a rare moment of emotional fusion with the character he was playing. Kings Row was nominated for an Academy Award and helped turn Reagan into a legitimate star. In 1941, even before the film was released, the strength of his performance enabled Lew Wasserman to negotiate a seven-year, million-dollar contract for him that was the first in the industry.
Reagan’s 1942 Photoplay article provides a glimpse into how he saw himself as an actor at the height of his career.
And right from the start, down there in “B” pictures where I began, through four years of “bit” parts (the “Poor Man’s Errol Flynn,” they called me), I was sure that I was in the right business for me. I knew I’d get to the top, if I kept on working and learning.… Thanks to some good advice from a guy named Pat O’Brien, I played those “B’s” as if they were “A’s.” You see, the boss only goes by results. If I do a part carelessly because I doubt its importance, no one is going to write a subtitle explaining that Ronald Reagan didn’t feel the part was important, therefore he didn’t give it very much.
In the same article, Reagan lists politics alongside sports and dramatics as one of his major interests. Years later, he would describe himself as a “hemophiliac liberal” during those years, and “not sharp” about Communists.
As a reserve second lieutenant in the cavalry from his days in Des Moines, Reagan was subject to the draft well before Pearl Harbor. Jack Warner had gotten him a deferment in early 1941, saying Reagan was needed to finish Kings Row. Advice from Wasserman and lobbying by the Warner Bros. chief counsel helped produce two more deferments. But in March 1942 Reagan was finally drafted. Because of his poor eyesight, he was eligible for only “limited service.” With some further string pulling, he was soon serving under Jack Warner, who had become a lieutenant colonel in the newly created First Motion Picture Unit of the Army Air Forces. Reagan was stationed at Fort Roach, formerly the Hal Roach studios in Culver City, where he acted in and narrated films used for recruitment, training, and public relations. He never went overseas.
By the time Reagan was discharged in September 1945, his career had lost momentum. Among those who had overtaken him was his wife, whose first serious role was in The Lost Weekend, a drama about alcoholism directed by Billy Wilder. Part of Reagan’s problem was becoming choosier about his roles. He wanted to be cast in adventure dramas that played out the theme of rugged individualism—or, as he put it on Louella Parsons’s radio show, “the principles America lives by; the pioneer spirit, the sportsmanship, the health and courage.” Warner, however, didn’t see him as another John Wayne. The studio preferred Reagan as a romantic or comedic lead. Over his intermittent objections, it put him in a series of films that ranged from mediocre to awful. “With parts I’ve had, I could telephone in my lines, and it wouldn’t make any difference,” he groused in one interview. In another, he complained that if Warner “ever got around to putting me in a western, they’d cast me as a lawyer from the east.”