Landslide (11 page)

“Oh,” said Nancy, not sure what to say. She smiled and laughed uncomfortably. “Well, I think probably rancher/actor.”

“Which do you think he likes better?” Miller pressed.

Nancy was still unsure of herself. She looked to her husband.

“Go ahead!” said Ronnie. “I won’t step on your foot right here.”

Nancy proceeded cautiously. “Well, he’s very fond of ranching …”

Miller didn’t wait for her to finish the thought. “Yeah, I think some day when you hang up the grease paint,” he said, turning back to Ronnie, “you probably want to come out here and settle down with the kids and lead the life of a country gentleman and a working rancher.”

“Yes,” said Reagan, broadening his grin to show his impeccably white teeth. “I’d like that very much.” His smile grew wider and his face tighter. Reagan was a better actor than he ever got credit for, but this particular performance was far from convincing. By the looks of him, settling down as a gentleman rancher was the last thing he wanted.

And that makes sense. The story of Reagan settling into life as the happy country squire has one big problem. It neglects the power of a central, shaping force in Reagan’s life: his remarkable ambition.

At its heart, the life story of Ronald Reagan is the story of an uncommon ambition pursued. It is a rare ambition that gets a teenage boy out of bed in the morning every day of his summer vacation so he can work twelve-hour shifts as a lifeguard. A rare ambition that convinces a boy from a forgettable Midwestern town that he can be a star, that propels him to talk his way into a career on the radio and then in the movies. A rare ambition that gets the GE spokesman onto a train into the hinterlands week after week, year after year, in search of crowds he hasn’t yet met. A rare ambition
that makes the second son of a failed dreamer into the most famous man of his age.

To Nancy, Reagan’s ambition was essential to understanding him—the key part that everyone always missed. “
Ronnie’s easygoing manner is deceiving,” she wrote after the Reagans left the White House. “Underneath that calm exterior is a tenacious, stubborn, and very competitive man. Just look at the record. Ronnie rarely loses.”

And yet, somehow, this man with the unceasing desire to win, this man whose life had been shaped by his need to be a star,
this
man was, at the age of fifty-one, perfectly happy to settle down into a quiet life on his ranch?

The people around Reagan when he parted company with GE would remember otherwise. By the time the Reagans wrote their postpresidential memoirs, in which they professed to have been happy to have the extra time with the family in the post-GE years, Ralph Cordiner, the chairman of GE who fired Reagan, had died, as had Charles Brower, the head of BBD&O, the advertising agency that produced the program. For his biography of Reagan,
Edmund Morris spoke to Brower’s widow. She recalled the fired Reagan as despondent: “What can I do, Charley? I can’t act anymore, I can’t do anything else. How can I support my family?”

Reagan denied Mrs. Brower’s account, but it’s clear that his prospects were indeed bleak. He went back to his old agent, Lew Wasserman, who by then had become one of the great men of Hollywood, having merged his talent agency MCA with Universal Studios. Wasserman reluctantly agreed to send around Reagan’s résumé but was not very encouraging, warning him, “You’ve been around this business long enough to know that I can’t force someone on a producer if he doesn’t want to use him.”

Out of work, out of the public eye, Reagan was at a crossroads once again. “
Like any actor,” he told a magazine interviewer in 1961, “I keep thinking that the big part is still ahead of me.” But he was
fifty-one years old when
GE Theater
was canceled. His father, Jack, had not lived to see sixty. He had been given a chance at fame not once but twice. There was little reason to believe that a chance would come a third time.

So it is no surprise that when at last Wasserman had a role to offer Reagan, in
Johnny North
, Reagan agreed to take it, bad guy or no.

And it is even less of a surprise that when Reagan saw the reality of the role he had accepted, he was not pleased.

For the rest of his life, Reagan would say that agreeing to appear in
Johnny North
, later renamed
The Killers
before its theatrical release in 1964, had been a mistake. Some of his admirers expunge the movie from the record entirely, claiming his movie career ended with
Hellcats of the Navy
, a 1957 tale of heroism in World War II. For his part, Reagan would acknowledge
The Killers
, but only to disparage it.

Officially, his objection was the casting—he was simply not meant to play a villain. “
A lot of people who went to see
The Killers
,” he wrote in his postpresidential memoirs, “kept waiting for me to turn out to be a good guy in the end and dispatch the villains in the last reel, because that’s how they had always seen me before.”

And it’s true that
The Killers
was not the sort of film for him. Reagan not only preferred to be the good guy, he preferred stories that affirmed the essential goodness of the rest of his country and humankind, too. That wasn’t
The Killers
, a film that depicts characters without conscience and a world without good. It delights in violence.
The theme of evil is there from the very beginning of the film, when viewers see Marvin’s and Gulager’s characters hunting down North at a school for the blind where he works as a teacher under an assumed name. Entering the school, they approach the receptionist, a blind middle-aged woman in pearls, and ask where they might find him. When she tells them that he is not available, they brutally assault her, pouncing on her in her chair and throwing her onto the floor. Even to audiences in later generations, the brutality
of the sequence is jarring. Later in the movie, viewers see a disturbing scene in which Dickinson’s Farr receives a forceful blow to the face from her boyfriend, not quite a punch but significantly more than a slap. The actor to deliver the blow was none other than Reagan himself. The film takes a casual attitude toward murder—by its conclusion, all of the leading players have been killed by someone else. After the movie’s release, Reagan’s daughter Patti was forbidden by her parents to see it. “
Everybody dies in it,” her mother explained.

“Mr. Norm,” in other words, was well outside his comfort zone on this particular movie set. Still, Reagan’s real problem with
The Killers
may have had as much to do with the parts of the film he found familiar as with the parts that were foreign and abhorrent. For in truth, Ronald Reagan and his character, Jack Browning, had more in common than the actor would care to admit. In the film, the relationship between Reagan’s Browning and Dickinson’s Sheila Farr is a complicated one. She is his girlfriend, he pays her bills and keeps her in fancy clothes. But she looks elsewhere for romance and doesn’t mind flaunting her liaisons with other men in front of the world, even in front of Browning himself. Browning endures these exhibitions in silence.

Browning was a cuckold. And playing him, Reagan might have been transported back to the lowest moment of his life:
Right now Jane needs very much to have a fling and I intend to let her have it
.

Earlier that fall, Reagan had filmed his entrance in the film in preproduction. No one would ever mistake it for a hero’s entry—for one thing, it comes thirty minutes into the film, in a scene at a racetrack, where Cassavetes’s Johnny North is about to take part in an auto race. With a large crowd seated in the stands, Farr joins North in the driver’s pit. She drapes her arms over his shoulder and flirts: “
Just kiss me, you fool!” He obliges, passionately.

The camera cuts to view the kiss from farther away, through two round holes surrounded by darkness. Someone is watching the lovers through a pair of binoculars. Then the camera cuts again, to reveal,
for the first time, the face of Ronald Reagan. He is in the stands with everyone else. And he is the one holding the binoculars, pulling them slowly down from his eyes.

That was the future that lay ahead of Reagan that weekend in November. Someone else would get the girl. He would be the one who watched.

T
HROUGH THAT AWFUL
weekend, people kept their televisions on. For most, the days blended together to make one long ghastly montage, the days distinguishable only by subtle shifts in color and motion.

Friday: Darkness and chaos at Andrews Air Force Base … the dead president coming down in his coffin … the shadows falling over the faces of the mourners … the widow in her pink suit with its awful stains.

Saturday: Gray everywhere. Gray skies over the White House where the president’s body lay in state in the East Room. The gray-faced president, hurrying out of the West Wing … a series of gray-haired men parading into the Executive Office Building to meet with him. In the afternoon, the new president makes a brief statement, declaring Monday a national day of mourning. When he finishes speaking, the NBC correspondent offers commentary:
President Johnson “has been, shall we say, a little bit in the background today …”

Sunday: A hint of light … a clearing in the skies above the Capitol dome … flags and crosses flicker across the television screen … a crowd of unfathomable magnitude gathers on the Mall, lining up to bid the fallen leader goodbye … the networks show Army cadets in the chapel at Valley Forge, singing aloud the Lord’s Prayer as they kneel row on row.

But then there was another, even darker turn. From nearly the moment of his arrest for the president’s murder, Lee Harvey Oswald had been a fixture on television sets. Mesmerized by the camera lights pointed at him, Dallas police chief Jesse Curry had given the
media the run of his police department.
An FBI agent, arriving to sit in on Oswald’s interrogation, had been amazed to find whole offices reordered to accommodate network cables creeping in through windows from the street. When, just before noon Eastern Time that Sunday, the press got word that Oswald was about to be transferred to the county jail, the assembled correspondents and photographers scrambled to get fresh pictures of the most hated man in the country.

And so NBC was broadcasting live when a man dressed in a dark suit and hat emerged from a crowd of reporters in the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters and walked right up to the assassin. Viewers at home saw this man shout at the assassin and then shoot him in the abdomen. “
He’s been shot!” NBC’s correspondent Tom Pettit narrated, just a few feet from Oswald’s crumpled body. “There is absolute panic.… Pandemonium has broken loose!” And the images on the screen showed this was in fact the case. As reporters rushed for the body, the police tried to push them back. But they seemed unsure of themselves.

News anchors did not yet have the ability to interview their correspondents by satellite link, so the only choice the networks had was to let the chaotic images from Dallas roll—the police seizing Oswald’s assailant, an ambulance arriving to take Oswald away, the ambulance pulling up the ramp out of the basement, headed to a hospital, probably Parkland, one of the bystanders observed. It all created the effect of watching a gruesome TV crime procedural as it played out in tight TV time. Within twenty minutes, the assailant had been identified as Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner with ties to the underworld.

By nightfall, Kennedy’s assassin had died and the networks had more sordid information about Oswald and Ruby than they knew what to do with. NBC aired a special broadcast on the two killers, retracing the steps of each over the previous three days. The program reached a climax with a scene from the Texas Theater, the movie house where Oswald had been arrested on Friday afternoon. The empty theater had been turned into a crime scene and was out of
reach of a cleaning crew. The camera turned askew as it surveyed the interior, revealing discarded popcorn and drink containers. It was the kind of place that nearly every American had visited but that most had never really seen, not under the glare of bright lights. The scene was horrible, the effect chilling. It made it seem as though guilt for the nation’s tragedy could not be confined to Oswald or Ruby or Dallas. It extended further, to any American who’d nibbled popcorn in a movie theater. Offscreen, a correspondent’s voice made the link more explicit:

So there was Ronald Reagan, who’d made his life in that place of cheap glamour and magnified unrealities.

Reagan, who’d just started filming his awful new movie, ninety minutes of shooting and dying paraded across the screen.

Reagan, whose passion was politics, but whose politics was suddenly taboo.

Reagan, who longed to be the hero but was stuck with the only part he could get: the sleazy gangster in the dark suit.