Killing Reagan (3 page)

As the debate continues, Jimmy Carter is not doing himself any favors onstage. “I had a discussion with my daughter, Amy,” Carter says, referring to his thirteen-year-old, “to ask her what the most important issue was. She said she thought nuclear weaponry and the control of nuclear arms.”

In the greenroom, Carter's campaign staff is distraught. While prepping for the debate, Carter told them he planned to use his daughter to make a point. His staff strongly urged him not to.

“In the end,” Pat Caddell will later recall, “it came down to ‘I'm the president. Fuck you.'”

It is a huge mistake. That the president of the United States is allowing a teenager to decide what matters most to America in a time of such great crisis is laughable. One journalist will later write that the statement was “Carter at his worst: Weak and silly.”

But Jimmy Carter does not have that sense. “In the debate itself, it was hard to judge the general demeanor that was projected to the viewers,” Carter will write in his diary tonight. “He [Reagan] has his memorized tapes. He pushes a button, and they come out.”
11

Carter's statement is true. Like all veteran actors, Reagan has mastered the art of memorization. Also, while there are a great number of scripted lines that he has written himself or with his speechwriters to help him score points, Reagan has concocted a simple statement to deride Carter. After the president launches into a detailed and very dry explanation about Reagan's opposition to national health care, Reagan pauses at his lectern. It is obvious that Carter is showing off his intellect in a way that is meant to make Reagan look old, slow, and out of touch. The president's words were specifically chosen to ensure that Reagan's scripted lines could not rescue him and to make it obvious to one and all that Jimmy Carter is the more intelligent of the two.

What follows is Reagan at his best. In four simple words that will be remembered for decades, he succeeds in making President Carter look foolish. They are words that Reagan came up with during the long hours of practice debates but which he has kept to himself, knowing that for maximum effectiveness the line must sound completely spontaneous.

Slowly shaking his head, Reagan turns to Carter and says, “There you go again.”

The auditorium erupts in laughter. Reagan's tone is that of a disappointed parent, saddened by a child who has failed to live up to expectations. The words mean nothing and everything. One short sentence captures the mood of a nation that no longer wants detailed policy explanations as to why the economy has collapsed and Americans are being held hostage in a foreign country.

The time for words has passed. Now is the time for action.

The election may be seven days away, but for James Earl “Jimmy” Carter Jr. of Plains, Georgia, it is over. The only man who does not know that is Carter himself. “Both sides felt good about the debate. We'll see whose basic strategy is best when the returns come in next Tuesday,” he will write in his diary.

*   *   *

Reagan finishes the debate with a flourish. “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” he says earnestly into the television camera, wrapping up with an emotional appeal to the American people. “Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago? Is there more or less unemployment in the country than there was four years ago? Is America as respected throughout the world as it was? Do you feel that our security is as safe, that we're as strong as we were four years ago? And if you answer all of those questions yes, why then, I think your choice is very obvious as to who you'll vote for.”

So obvious, in fact, that the election is a landslide. Ronald Reagan receives 489 electoral votes; Jimmy Carter receives just 49.
12

On January 20, 1981, Ronald Reagan is sworn in as the fortieth president of the United States.

John Hinckley Jr. has a new target.

 

2

U
NIVERSAL
S
TUDIOS

H
OLLYWOOD
, C
ALIFORNIA

S
EPTEMBER
1950

D
AYTIME

The chimpanzee wears a white jumpsuit as she climbs high into the branches of a eucalyptus tree in the front yard of 712 Colonial Street.
1
“Peggy” is five years old. She was born in the jungles of Liberia and lured into captivity with a bundle of bananas. Since coming to Hollywood, Peggy has been taught to understand 502 voice commands, ride a tricycle, do backflips on cue, and put on a necktie. She has become one of the motion picture industry's top animal performers, commanding a thousand dollars per week in salary. Now, as the cameras roll, she is starring in her first title role. The film is a screwball comedy entitled
Bedtime for Bonzo
.

Ronald Reagan and Peggy the chimp on the set of
Bedtime for Bonzo
, 1950

“Action!” cries director Fred de Cordova.
2
Peggy instantly obeys trainer Henry Craig's instruction to do what comes naturally for her: climb a tree.

One would think the act will not be quite as easy for her costar. Thirty-nine-year-old Ronald Reagan balances precariously on the top step of an eight-foot ladder leaning against the tree trunk. In his slick-soled shoes, dress shirt, and tie, he is hardly dressed for climbing. His trademark pompadour, meantime, is carefully Brylcreem'd into place. There is no safety rope to halt his fall should Reagan lose his balance, but that is not a problem. Nearly twenty years after his college football career ended, the rugged actor is still lean and athletic. Reagan pulls himself up into the tree with ease, with not so much as a hair out of place.

Just a few years earlier, it would have been ludicrous to imagine Ronald Reagan acting opposite a chimpanzee. He was a star contract player for the Warner Bros. film studio, well on his way to becoming the sort of lead actor who could command any role he wished, like his friends Cary Grant and Errol Flynn.

In every way, Ronald Reagan's life in the early 1940s could not have been better.

But that was then.

*   *   *

Ronald Reagan is twenty-six when he steps off the electric trolley at the Republic Pictures stop in Hollywood. The year is 1937. A torrential April rain drenches the young baseball announcer as he strides quickly along Radford Avenue to the studio gate. If Reagan were to lift his head, he would see the legendary “HOLLYWOODLAND” sign just miles above him in the hills, but he keeps his head low, the collar of his raincoat cinched tightly around his throat.

Dutch, as Reagan is known to family and friends, works for radio station WHO in Des Moines, Iowa, covering sports. He has come west to visit the Chicago Cubs spring training camp on nearby Catalina Island, twenty miles off the California coast.
3
But the storm has shut down the ferries and seaplane service to Catalina, giving Reagan a free day in Los Angeles. Cowboy singing sensation Gene Autry is filming a new Western called
Rootin' Tootin' Rhythm
, and a few of Reagan's friends from back home are playing the roles of Singing Cowhands.
4
Reagan, who has long fantasized about being a movie star, has come to offer moral support to his pals.

Reagan will later write that “hundreds of young people—from Iowa, Illinois, and just about every other state”—shared his fantasy. They “stepped off a train at Union Station in Los Angeles … they got no closer to realizing it than a studio front gate.”

But thanks to his pals, Reagan makes it through the gate and hustles to Autry's soundstage. He enters the cavernous building with klieg lights hanging from high wooden beams. He is immediately intoxicated by the sight of the actors, cameras, lights, and everything else that goes into making a movie. All is quiet as filming begins. Gene Autry himself, dressed in the knee-high boots and gun belt of a cowboy, strums a guitar and sings a lament about life on the prairie. The set is made to look like the parlor of an ornate home. Autry is surrounded by musicians and actors clutching fiddles and guitars, all dressed as cowboys.

“Cut,” yells director Mack Wright as the song winds down. Autry stops. Everyone relaxes on the set. A few minutes later, as Wright calls for “action,” the scene is repeated.

“I was starry-eyed,” Reagan admits to a friend that night. His friend's name is Joy Hodges, and she and her band are performing at the stately Biltmore Hotel in downtown LA. Joy knew Reagan back in Des Moines, and they now enjoy a quiet dinner between sets. The walls are lined with oak, and a marble fountain gurgles in the background. Reagan tells her his dreams of becoming a movie star and how he wishes he could find a way to break into the business.

Joy Hodges, a pretty, raven-haired lady, finds Reagan intriguing.

“Take off your glasses,” she commands.

He removes them, and Joy instantly becomes a blur to Reagan.

Hodges, on the other hand, can see him quite clearly—and she likes what she sees. “Studios don't make passes at actors who wear glasses,” she warns him before going back onstage for her second set.

Thus, the fairy tale begins. By ten the next morning, Reagan is meeting with Joy's agent, who arranges a screen test for the handsome young man. The test eventually makes its way to Jack Warner, the powerful head of Warner Bros. Pictures. He also likes what he sees and offers Reagan a seven-year contract at two hundred dollars a week—almost three times what he makes at WHO. A hairstylist transforms Reagan's center-parted look into the trademark pompadour he will wear the rest of his life. A tailor ingeniously alters the taper of his collar to create the optical illusion that Reagan's neck is not so thick. Finally, after some deliberation, the publicity department declares that he can keep his real name on-screen.

Up-and-coming movie star Ronald Reagan, 1939

So it is that by June 1937, just two months after stepping out of the rain at Republic Pictures, Ronald Reagan is acting in his first motion picture. The movie is called
Love Is on the Air
. Appropriately enough, Reagan plays a radio announcer.

*   *   *

Sarah Jane Mayfield—or Jane Wyman, as she is known in Hollywood—knows a thing or two about love. It is early in 1938 as she arrives on the set of the film
Brother Rat
. At the age of twenty-one, she is already married. Her current husband is dress manufacturer Myron Futterman, whom she wed in New Orleans six months ago. Small, with bangs worn high on her forehead and a husky voice that will one day become her trademark, Wyman has struggled to break into Hollywood since coming west from Missouri. But now she finally has gotten her foot in the door through a series of small roles in B movies and is determined to become a star. Her weakness is being impulsive when it comes to love, and she separates from Futterman almost as quickly as she married him.

As Ronald Reagan begins his tenth film in less than a year,
5
there is no hiding the fact that his
Brother Rat
costar has quickly become infatuated with him. By December 1938, Jane Wyman officially divorces Myron Futterman and takes up with Reagan.

They soon become Hollywood's golden couple, “wholesome and happy and utterly completely American,” in the words of gossip columnist Louella Parsons, who, knowing that nothing in Hollywood lasts forever, nevertheless predicts that their union will last thirty years. Wyman and Reagan are married in January 1940, shortly before Reagan begins filming
Knute Rockne All American
with Pat O'Brien. He plays the role of legendary Notre Dame running back George Gipp, uttering the immortal line “Ask 'em to go in there with all they've got, win just one for the Gipper,” before dying on-screen. It is his first A film and is soon followed by a costarring role alongside the swashbuckling womanizer Errol Flynn in
Santa Fe Trail
. Just four short years after breaking into Hollywood, Ronald Reagan is now a major star. He and Wyman are soon building a massive new house and spending their evenings at the best Hollywood nightclubs.