The Triumph of Nancy Reagan by Karen Tumulty (best books under 200 pages .txt) 📗

Their marriage started off as a picture of bliss. Jane, whom Ronnie called “Button Nose,” gave birth to their daughter Maureen Elizabeth on January 4, 1941. The Reagans had two terriers, adorably named Scotch and Soda. Thanks to the negotiating skills of their new agent, Lew Wasserman, there was enough money to start building a comfortable house on a plot of land they bought in the Hollywood Hills. It sat at the end of a long driveway, and had a breathtaking view of the city, the ocean, and the mountains.

But their careers were never in sync. Hers languished in the first few years of the 1940s, while Ronnie got his two most acclaimed parts, as doomed Notre Dame halfback George Gipp in Knute Rockne All American and as wealthy Drake McHugh, who loses his legs to a sadistic surgeon, in Kings Row. The first gave him a nickname, “the Gipper,” which stuck with him through his political career. In the latter, Ronnie’s character is most remembered for the passion with which he cried: “Where’s the rest of me?”

That one line—“Where’s the rest of me?”—would become a self-defining metaphor for Ronnie. It spoke to his awakening need to find a more authentic identity than the ones confected for him by screenwriters. They saw him as good-looking enough but short on star quality. He didn’t exude sex appeal or danger. Even as Ronnie watched himself on the screen in Kings Row, delivering his most acclaimed performance as an actor, he realized: “I had become a semi-automaton ‘creating’ a character another had written, doing what still another person told me to do on the set. Seeing the rushes, I could barely believe the colored shadow on the screen was myself. Possibly this was the reason I decided to find the rest of me.”

Events across the globe would soon disrupt his career and his life. Ronnie had been an army reservist since his days in Iowa. When World War II arrived, he was ordered to active duty. But his bad eyesight made him unfit for combat, so from the spring of 1942 through the end of the war, he served stateside in a military motion-picture unit, run by the predecessor to the US Air Force, that made training, morale-building, and propaganda films. “By the time I got out of the Army Air Corps, all I wanted to do—in common with several million other veterans—was to rest up awhile, make love to my wife, and come refreshed to a better job in an ideal world. (As it came out, I was disappointed in all of these postwar ambitions),” Ronnie recalled.

He still nurtured hopes of vaulting from B movies to top roles in main attractions. His agent Lew Wasserman told him to be patient. After all, he was still getting $3,500 a week under his contract. But as Ronnie whiled away his time building model ships at a rented house on Lake Arrowhead, he couldn’t help noticing that the better parts were starting to go to younger men. The only real demand for his talents was on the speaking circuit, which, as he put it, “fed my ego, since I had been so long away from the screen.”

Meanwhile, Jane’s star was ascending. She moved from playing ditzy blondes to challenging parts that brought critical acclaim. Her rise began with her role as the love interest of an alcoholic in 1945’s The Lost Weekend, costarring opposite Ray Milland and under the direction of Billy Wilder. It accelerated the following year, when she played emotionally stunted Ma Baxter in the drama The Yearling. She won the 1949 Best Actress Oscar for her starring role in Johnny Belinda, where she portrayed Belinda MacDonald, a deaf woman who had been raped. By dramatizing sexual violence and its consequences, the film pushed boundaries and required a relaxation of the Motion Picture Production Code.

Jane immersed herself for months at a time in these grim roles, not breaking character even when she was at home. During the filming of Johnny Belinda, six-year-old Maureen had to learn a few words in sign language to communicate with her mother. (When the divorce finally came, Ronnie joked darkly to a friend: “Maybe I should name Johnny Belinda as co-respondent.”)

But Jane’s new success was not the only reason the marriage hit the rocks. Ronnie was starting to talk incessantly about politics, though he had not yet begun his rightward drift from New Deal liberalism. His wife found the subject deadly. The trouble in their relationship became increasingly apparent to their friends. Jane once told actress and singer Joy Hodges: “Well, if he is going to be president, he is going to get there without me.” The gulf grew and deepened as Ronnie became preoccupied with his work with the Screen Actors Guild. Founded in the 1930s as a vehicle to give actors some leverage against being exploited by the producers who held their multiyear contracts, SAG was going through a turbulent and politically fraught period. Having joined the union’s board in 1941 and been elected its president in 1947, Ronnie was spending five nights a week at the headquarters, girding for marathon negotiations with producers. Seven months after becoming SAG president, Ronnie was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which had been established in 1938 as a special investigatory panel to investigate citizens and organizations suspected of having Communist ties. Its clout had increased dramatically in 1945, when it became a permanent committee of Congress.

As Ronnie entered the committee’s hearing room on Capitol Hill, “there was a long drawn-out ‘ooooh’ from the jam-packed, predominantly feminine audience [at] the tall Mr. Reagan, clad in a tan gabardine suit, a blue knitted tie, and a white shirt,” the New York Times reported. The movie actor also ditched his contact lenses for glasses that gave him more gravitas.

Ronnie was grilled about the possibility that a “clique of either Communists or Fascists” was trying to exert influence over the union.