Starring: |
George Burns, Suzanne Pleshette, David Birney |
Directed by: |
Gilbert Cates |
Viewed by the Reagans: |
March 7, 1981 |
The Film That Starred One of the Reagans’ Dearest Hollywood Friends, Who Modeled How to Joke About Old Age
The first full weekend of March 1981 came on the heels of one of the biggest media events in years. On Friday, March 6, the iconic CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite, who for three decades had covered eight US presidents and delivered the news to Americans during times of war, crisis, and assassination, signed off the air for the last time. President Ronald Reagan was one of his final guests.
The Cronkite interview was a high point for any White House press aide. But for a midlevel press aide like me, I was finding that the White House wasn’t always glamorous.
Shortly after settling into my cabin one of the early weekends at Camp David, I received a call from the camp commander.
“Mark, I wanted you to be aware of a problem we had with one of your press photographers.”
I knew from his referring to the press photographer as mine, it would not be a great conversation.
I asked him what was up. One of the photographers had relieved himself on a rock, the commander reported.
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“He pissed on a rock near the duck blind,” he replied, indicating the area on the grounds of Camp David where wire service photographers could witness the arrival and departure of Marine One in case we crashed. The commander said this behavior could not be tolerated. I promised to admonish the offending photographer. I picked up the phone in my cabin and requested to be connected with the White House in Washington. I asked the operator there to track down the photographer.
The White House operators were the best in the world. They could find anyone anywhere anytime. But like many of the people who worked at the White House, they had a unique way of doing things, with a language all their own. Whenever I asked the White House operator to find a reporter, photographer, or anyone else, she would ask, “Sir, would you like to take the ring?” I had no idea what that meant. It turned out that “take the ring” means that when the White House operator places a call for a staff member, she dials the number and then allows the staff member to announce himself or herself, as opposed to having the White House operator announce the call. As time went on, I took advantage of the willingness of White House operators to announce calls to people I wanted to impress, mostly old friends from college.
Once the offending photographer was on the line, I told him that I had heard from the commander of Camp David that he had peed on a rock.
With no hesitation or tone of remorse, the man said, “Yes, that’s true, I did, and here’s why: I told the marine escort that I really had to go to the restroom, but he refused to take me to one. I had no choice. I’m sorry, but they sure weren’t very nice about it.”
It was not exactly the type of “media relations” I expected to handle when I joined the White House staff.
The Cronkite interview, of course, presented no such awkwardness and went off without a hitch. Cronkite himself was the consummate gentleman, and his sit-down with the president during his final week on the air showed that he was going to remain a model of journalistic professionalism until his last moment on America’s screens. Sitting in the Oval Office, the president and the veteran CBS anchor talked about Cold War issues such as the administration’s support for the nation of El Salvador against Marxist guerrillas, and what some viewed as its controversial policies and statements toward the Soviet Union.I President Reagan had caused a stir when he was asked about the USSR in a late-January press conference and said that “the only morality they recognize is what will further their cause, meaning they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat, in order to attain that, and that is moral, not immoral, and we operate on a different set of standards.”
Asked about that remark by Cronkite, the president pointed out that the Communist ideology did not profess belief in God. “Their statement about morality is that nothing is immoral if it furthers their cause, which means they can resort to lying or stealing or cheating or even murder if it furthers their cause, and that is not immoral.” It was an honest statement by Reagan but did little to appease the hand-wringing diplomatic corps.
No doubt it was a coincidence, but the themes of morality and faith fit nicely with Mrs. Reagan’s movie selection for that weekend: George Burns’s Oh, God! Book II, which had the beloved cigar-chomping eighty-five-year-old comedian taking on the title role.
The film was a sequel to the surprise hit Oh, God! This was a Warner Bros. production, and the minute its iconic blue-and-gold shield hit the screen, I suspect the president smiled and made a mental note of it. I soon came to notice that whenever he talked about Warner Bros. there was a twinkle in the president’s eye. After all, it was the film company that first signed Reagan to a picture deal when he was just a radio announcer from Des Moines with a crew cut and thick glasses. It was obvious that being at Warner Bros. had been a happy time for him. He would often talk about it being like a family and having a comforting feeling of belonging.
The president occasionally talked about that first film job, which he almost sabotaged before it began. In 1936, while on a trip to Hollywood to cover the Chicago Cubs, who at that time held their spring training in California, Reagan did a screen test for Warner Bros. Told that it might be several days before studio head Jack Warner could view his filmed audition, Reagan decided not to wait around. He headed back on the train to Iowa. Reagan later recounted, “I had done through ignorance the smartest thing it was possible to do. Hollywood just loves people who don’t need Hollywood.”II
The Warner Bros. logo on the George Burns film propelled the president to give it greater gravity. The first Oh, God! movie, which premiered in 1977, also starred the popular singer John Denver and was one of the year’s most successful films. (Denver did not take part in the sequel.) The poster for Book II showed the bespectacled Burns, as God, riding a motorcycle, and the tagline demonstrated the film’s gentle humor: “That’s right. I made another movie. You know me, I can’t stop creating.”
In the movie, the Almighty appears before a twelve-year-old girl named Tracy Richards. Burns puts forth his usual funny remarks and inside Hollywood jokes that had made him a popular stand-up comic. At one point, Tracy tells him that “somehow I thought you’d look holier and more fancy . . . I mean, like, with a crown and a long beard and a flowing white robe.” Burns responds, “You’re thinking of Charlton Heston.” (Heston had previously played Moses in The Ten Commandments [1956] and John the Baptist in The Greatest Story Ever Told [1965].) God then asks the little girl to think of a slogan that would encourage more people to believe in him again. “Sometimes,” Burns tells her, “you just have to believe in things you can’t see.”
The cutesy premise did have some dark moments. After Tracy does what God asks, her parents think she is delusional. A psychiatrist who administers a series of tests and a brain scan declares Tracy a psychotic who should be institutionalized. God comes to her defense, one-liners at the ready.
As you might guess, this was not an eighties movie that proved popular over the years. Roger Ebert, the film critic, called it a “third-rate situation comedy” and noted that “the movie’s screenplay was written by no fewer than five collaborators, but they were so bankrupt of ideas that some scenes have a quiet desperation to them.”III
Yet the Reagans were destined to like the film (they later screened the somewhat better 1984 follow-up, Oh, God! You Devil) for one reason only: it starred their longtime friend.
Born Nathan Birnbaum, George Burns was the ninth of twelve children of Jewish immigrants. Burns was just seven years old and working in a candy shop when he was “discovered” as a singer. From there he began a ninety-year entertainment career, first in vaudeville, and then radio, and then as an actor in films and television. His partner in this was his wife and costar, Gracie Allen. She and he were a duo, with Burns in the straight-man role, on radio, TV, the stage, and in film for more than forty years. (Gracie Allen retired in 1958, and died of heart disease in 1964. Her husband lived to be one hundred, dying in 1996.)
“He was really a simple man, not full of himself or of being in pictures,” Mrs. Reagan once told me. “And he was always happy.”
“Sounds like someone else we know,” I replied.
“Yes, yes it does,” she said, and smiled.
By the time Reagan sought the presidency, Burns, a once-fading actor, was undergoing a late, unexpected revival. Many viewed him this way after his acclaimed performance in the 1975 film The Sunshine Boys, in which he played an aging ex-vaudeville comedian, a role that earned him an Academy Award. As Burns put it, in a line Reagan might well have used himself, “If you stay in the business long enough and get to be old enough, you get to be new again.”IV
Reagan was very happy about his friend’s renaissance. Burns was among the few Hollywood stars with whom he carried on a semiregular correspondence throughout his presidency. One of his closest friends in the business, the leading man Robert Taylor, had died in 1969, long before the Reagans moved into the White House. The Reagans and the Taylors had been extremely close for many years, even serving as godparents to each other’s children. Tessa Taylor, Robert’s daughter and the Reagans’ goddaughter, told me that even after many decades, she could still remember what it sounded like when “Uncle Ronnie” would rub her earlobe as a little girl—a “rustling” sound with an echo, “like when you put a big seashell up to your ear”—and the kindness of “Aunt Nancy,” as Tessa’s own mother struggled with dementia. When Robert Taylor died, Reagan, then governor of California, delivered the eulogy and even included it in a collection of speeches he published later.
With Robert Taylor gone, their remaining friendships from the old days, like that with George Burns, became even more precious. I didn’t know at the time how much George had influenced Ronald Reagan’s post-movie-star life. I found out years later that, for one, he was a source of work. Nancy recalled that when it became clear that her husband’s film career was waning, by the early 1950s, he was able to “get by” by guest-starring on TV programs such as the popular Burns and Allen Show. (In the show’s third season, Reagan played himself.)V
Burns also advised Reagan about performing onstage, which he started to do in the 1950s as a master of ceremonies. Rather than just relying on his movie star pedigree, Reagan figured he needed to have something funny to say when he went before audiences. “George Burns once expounded on truth being the basis of all good comedy,” Reagan recalled, “and he was right.”VI
To the delight of his audience, Reagan decided to make fun of himself and his lack of experience as an MC onstage. Self-deprecation became a hallmark of his humor. His successful appearances led executives at sponsor General Electric to ask him to host a weekly television program, General Electric Theater, in the mid-1950s. Like most movie stars at the time, Reagan was wary of appearing on TV, thinking it would diminish his career. But he didn’t have many options. What intrigued him was the chance to go around the country and speak at GE plants about politics and events of the day—the “mashed potato circuit,” Reagan called it, because at many political dinners, the menu included mashed potatoes, regardless of the poorly prepared entrée. Sometimes he called it the “rubber chicken circuit,” because roast chicken was frequently served.VII
As a politician, Reagan, echoing Burns, proved a master at delivering jokes and telling humorous stories based on truth. Such as their advancing ages. “When I was a kid,” Burns once quipped, “the Dead Sea was only sick.” He could also be a bit more risqué: “Sex at ninety is like trying to shoot pool with a rope.”VIII
Reagan, too, poked fun at his age, which usually had the advantage of easing people’s own concerns about electing to office the oldest president in American history. “I never drink coffee at lunch,” the president said once. “I find it keeps me awake in the afternoon.” He also loved to use his friend George as a foil: “the only man in America older than I am.” At another point, Reagan once described Burns’s morning ritual: “He’d get up, go down to the porch, and get the paper. Then he’d look through the obituaries. And if he’s not in it, he goes back into the house to get a cup of coffee.” Reagan claimed Burns had complained about the Stars and Stripes to Betsy Ross, saying, “Personally, I think the pattern’s a little busy, but let’s run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes it.”IX But perhaps his best line ever about his age came in the 1984 debate against Walter Mondale. When asked if being the oldest president in history (he was seventy-three) might be a detriment, Reagan, with a totally serious expression, replied, “I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” Even Mondale laughed out loud, and it defused the age issue for the remainder of the campaign.
Reagan’s jokes and stories often had a purpose. They allowed him to make points in a subtle way or sometimes avoid making one at all. One time the president and the First Lady invited Mrs. Reagan’s stepbrother, Dr. Dick Davis, and his family to an event at the White House. A Russian pianist performed in the East Room, after which there would be a “surprise.” Following the performance, the guests made their way upstairs to the family quarters. The president and Dr. Davis waited at the elevator until everyone had gone up. As they did, Reagan made small talk with his brother-in-law by pointing out the presidential seal above the Blue Room and remarking how Harry Truman changed the eagle looking from spears of war to the olive branch of peace.
When they got to the family quarters, the president and Dr. Davis stood at the back, where the guests had gathered. In the front, an easel covered in velvet cloth had been set up. With great flourish, Dr. Davis remembers, his stepsister, Nancy Reagan, unveiled her official portrait. In it, she was dressed in a full-length bright-red gown, with a pearl necklace. President Reagan whispered to Dick, “Well, Dick, what do you think?” Clearly seeing the similarity to what a cardinal might wear, Dick replied, “Well, sir, it does look a bit ecumenical.” The president launched into a joke about a man who was drunk at a party, then approached a person, and asked for a dance, to which the person said, “No. First of all, you are slightly intoxicated, second, the orchestra is not playing, and third, I am a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church.” Dick interpreted that to mean that his brother-in-law shared his view about the painting and its resemblance to clerical garb.X But did he? Who knows?
For the most part, Reagan and Burns shared gentle humor—which is also what drew the Reagans to the Oh, God! films. What made the movies particularly appealing to some in the often cynical 1980s was their overt defense of spirituality and faith. But the films didn’t preach to audiences, and they weren’t divisive. Burns’s God, as the film critic Roger Ebert put it, was “a sort of ancient Will Rogers on a Christmas card by Norman Rockwell.”XI
That was just fine with the president. Although Reagan owed his victory in the 1980 election, in part, to the participation of the so-called religious right—large groups of evangelical voters who supported issues such as allowing prayer in school and prohibiting abortion—he was not one to Bible thump. In the ten years I worked with him, I never heard the president talk about his religion or try to impose his faith on others. He respected people of all faiths—as well as atheists, of which his son, Ron, is one—and did not presume any superiority.
Reagan received criticism in some quarters for not attending church during his time in the White House. The charge was that he mined the votes of the faithful for the election but didn’t share a deep, abiding belief in God. That was untrue. The president told me on a number of occasions that one of his biggest regrets about life in the White House was his inability to attend regular Sunday worship services, as he had before his election.
He made the decision for a variety of reasons. The Secret Service told the Reagans that the churchgoers would have to pass through metal detectors if he were there, something he thought was very intrusive, and he worried that his presence at a church might make it a target and thereby pose a risk to other worshippers. The president also didn’t want pastors to feel pressured to include political issues in their sermons. (However, on one occasion he did go—unannounced—to Easter services at a church near the ranch he owned in California, which the Secret Service thought was safe.)
Both Reagans missed their regular church attendance. When they returned to Los Angeles after the presidency, they attended worship services regularly again, starting with their first weekend, at which they received a standing ovation from the congregation at the Bel Air Presbyterian Church. “We probably won’t be doing that every Sunday you come,” said the pastor, the Reverend Donn Moomaw.
Religious though they were, like many in Hollywood, the Reagans could be a bit superstitious. I have always been a nervous flier, which Ronald Reagan didn’t know until many years into our time together. Once, after his presidency, we were on a small, private jet on the way back to Los Angeles after a speech somewhere. It was around six o’clock, and it had been arranged that dinner would be served in flight, even though it was a short hop. President Reagan sat in a captain’s chair at a table and faced the front of the airplane. I sat opposite him at the table and faced the rear. We took off from the runway but did not gain much altitude—or at least it seemed that way to me. The president looked at his watch, then peered into the cockpit, to which the door was open, then at his watch again and then back to the cockpit.
“They seem to be doing something with a flashing red light in there,” he announced to us in the passenger section. I about passed out. “Yep, they’re working on something up there that has their attention,” he explained. He looked at his watch again. Then back to the cockpit. “Good Lord, they’re still at it,” he said with a tone of exasperation.
At that point, I had heard enough. “Will you please stop it?” I said to him in a firm, loud voice. He looked surprised and bewildered. One of the Secret Service agents immediately explained, “Mark is a bit of a nervous flier, Mr. President.” He smiled, touched my hand, and said, “Me too. That’s why I always wear these lucky cuff links,” which he showed me. They were square gold replications of a calendar page of March 1952, with Tuesday the fourth being marked by a purple stone. That was the date of the Reagans’ wedding anniversary. “So don’t worry, we’ll be fine. I was just getting concerned that if they did not fix whatever that light was, we would run out of time for dinner.” Dinner? Seriously? That’s what he was worried about?! I was genuinely annoyed.
From then on, every time we flew somewhere, he made a point of showing me that he had on his “lucky cuff links.” Once, however, he forgot to wear them, and as soon as we boarded the plane and were seated, he turned toward me and said, “Say, I owe you an apology. I wore some other cuff links today. But don’t worry, it’s a nice day out.”
“Couldn’t you have told me after we safely returned home?” I asked. He laughed. We had a lot of turbulence on the flights that day.
My fear of flying was not restricted to small private planes. I could get nervous on the White House press charter and even on Air Force One. I used to imagine that if—God forbid—Air Force One went down while I was on board, the headline in my hometown paper, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, would read “Air Force One Crashes; Weinberg, All Others Killed.”
Superstitious or not, Reagan believed in heaven and in the afterlife. Mrs. Reagan did, too, especially after the president’s passing. As their daughter, Patti, recalled, during her eulogy for her mother in 2016: “In the weeks after he died, my mother thought she heard his footsteps coming down the hall late at night. She said he would appear to her long after midnight sitting on the edge of the bed. I don’t know anything about the possible passages between this world and the next, but I do know her faith in these visits eased some of her loneliness. They made her feel that he was close by.”XII
Quite unexpectedly, the president once told me his views about death and the afterlife in 1990, when I informed him that I was thinking about moving on to another job. It had been more than ten years. The time seemed right. He told me he had “been wondering” when I would want to move on because he understood that “people at your age need to do other things.
“Besides,” he told me, “I won’t be here forever.”
I knew what he meant, but decided not to play along.
“Well, I know that one day you may want to close this office and work from home.”
He shook his head and said, “No, Mark, I mean here.”
“Oh, Mr. President, please don’t say that,” I protested. I admired and liked him so much, I didn’t even want to think about him not being on Earth to share his point of view or tell a story.
“But, Mark,” the president said firmly, “I am not afraid of that.” He smiled. “In fact, I am looking forward to it.”
I may have turned green. I asked him not to tell anyone else that.
But on that evening in March 1981, the little group at Camp David was enjoying a much more lighthearted vision of the afterlife, courtesy of Reagan’s old friend George Burns. However, as Burns’s God helped young Tracy navigate her family’s problems, a very real family drama was unfolding halfway across the country, setting in motion a chain of events that would come to personally affect all of our lives.
That very evening, a troubled young man arrived in Denver to meet his mother and father. Upon the advice of a psychiatrist, the parents decided to give their son some money but refused to allow him to return home.XIII “You’re on your own,” his father told him. “Do whatever you want to do.”XIV This, as it turned out, was “the greatest mistake of my life,” the man’s father would reflect later.XV The young man’s name was John W. Hinckley Jr.