Ronnie and Nancy (20 page)

Bogart, Powell, and many other Warners stars were members of the Lakeside Country Club, in nearby Toluca Lake, as were Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, and Walt Disney. Reagan was accepted for membership, but he resigned when he realized the club did not allow Jewish members or guests.

“What happened was Ronnie took a Jewish friend to play golf,” Nancy Reagan told me. “And he was informed afterward that you couldn’t do that.

Ronnie said, ‘You mean Jewish people are not allowed?’ They said that was right. Ronnie was furious and resigned. They were mad at Ronnie and he was mad at them. It was a Mexican standoff. They put his membership card on the bulletin board and threw darts at it. And then Hillcrest made him an honorary member.”81

The Hillcrest Country Club, near Beverly Hills, was known as the Jewish club because it had been founded in 1920 by Jewish businessmen who could not get into the city’s oldest country club, the Los Angeles Country Club, which excluded not only nonwhites and Jews but also movie people. By 1940, Hillcrest was the bastion of the Jewish elite of Hollywood: studio chiefs Louis B. Mayer, Jack and Harry Warner, Adolph Zukor, and Harry Cohn were all members. At Hillcrest, Ronnie and Jane became part of the social set centered on the great husband-and-wife comedy teams Jack Benny and Mary Livingstone and George Burns and Gracie Allen.

“Popular legend had it that one could be a part of the Jack Benny–George Burns group just by being able to tell a good, funny joke,” notes Jill 1 1 0

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Robinson, the daughter of producer Dore Schary, in her memoir,
With a
Cast of Thousands.
82

Jack Benny’s annual salary for his Jell-O-sponsored radio show had just been raised to $350,000, and he was earning another $200,000 a year in movies for Paramount.83 Burns and Allen, who were also under contract to Paramount, were making $9,000 a week for their radio show on CBS. Although both Benny and Burns were a good decade older than Reagan, these friendships would last all their lives, and no doubt helped him hone his sense of humor. “I’ve taken up golf,” Jane Wyman told a reporter in 1941. “You just can’t keep me away from the club. I have a date with Mary (Livingstone) Benny this afternoon. Ronnie and I play together when we’re both not working.”84

“Jane was completely self-satisfied,” said Leonora Hornblow of the new bride. “And Jane was Mrs. Full Charge. I don’t think she ever asked Ronnie if he wanted a blue sofa—she just ordered what she wanted. The house was perfectly nice but very banal. And there were literally no books, just the news magazines for Ronnie and the ladies’ magazines for Jane.

Jane wasn’t a great reader either.”85 Reagan may not have been a book-worm, but he reportedly immersed himself in current events by reading both the
Christian Science Monitor
and the
Wall Street Journal
in addition to the local papers.86

Louella Parsons was a constant presence on Cordell Drive. Little Maureen called her “Aunt Lolly” and later wrote, “She was pretty much a fix-ture in our household during the early years of my childhood.” In fact, Parsons thought the child should have been named for her, and was not above trying to get usable information out of the toddler. As Maureen put it, “One of my most enduring memories about Louella Parsons is that she was someone I wasn’t supposed to talk to too much.”87

The Reagans also grew close to Lew Wasserman, who was not yet all-powerful but was working on it, and his equally ambitious wife, Edie.

Their daughter, Lynne, played with Maureen (and gave her the nickname that would stick for the rest of her life, Mermie). Jane Wyman told producer William Frye, a longtime friend of Reagan’s and Wasserman’s, “Ronnie and I started going to Chasen’s when it was just a stand. We’d go there with Lew and Edie almost every Saturday or Sunday night for a hamburger and chili.” Frye told me, “Lew and Edie were very, very close to Jane and Ronnie. Lew was behind both of them in a very big way in those days.”88

Evidently Jane wasn’t much of cook. “Ron and I practically lived at the
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1 1 1

Derby,” she later wrote in the introduction to a book about the Brown Derby at Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street, one of four restaurants in the chain. Their favorite dish was Catalina Sand Dabs Meunière, and they sometimes played gin at their table after dinner.89 Soon Ronnie became an enthusiastic wine connoisseur. “He got me started on a wine collection,”

recalled actor Robert Stack, who became friends with Reagan around 1940. “He got me a cellar, and, being a class act, he got me Romanee Contis and Pomerols and Montrachets.”90 Reagan may have been trying to impress Stack—who was from a socially prominent Los Angeles family and eight years younger than he—with his newfound sophistication.

On the other hand, Nelle’s son couldn’t help disapproving of Stack’s wild ways and friends, who included another future president of the United States. “Jack Kennedy was also a friend of mine,” Stack told me. “He was a just a young guy who happened to be the son of Joe Kennedy, who was then the ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Jack had a key to my apartment, which I could never get into because he was always there with a pretty girl.

We had a little room called the Flag Room. It had flags going up the walls and over the ceiling and one very large triple bed. The object of that room was that the girl had to match the flag to the country or otherwise pay a penalty. There were more penalties paid and more happy customers came out of that Flag Room.” According to Stack, “Ron kept trying to get me to settle down. ‘It’s high time you became a responsible citizen,’ he would say.

‘Okay, sure, Ron. Very good. Thank you. I think I’m busy now.’”91

Ronnie, who clearly loved being married, called his wife Button Nose, leading the movie magazines to dub Maureen “Button Nose the Second.”

Completing this picture of young marital bliss in Hollywood was a pair of Scottish terriers—the same breed as FDR’s famous Fala—named Scotch and Soda.

Warners put Ronnie and Jane in two more movies together after they married,
An Angel from Texas
and
Tugboat Annie Sails Again
, both in 1940. But her career stalled as his took off with the two A films that would make his name:
Knute Rockne, All-American,
in 1940, and
Kings Row
, filmed in 1941 and released in early 1942. In the first he played George Gipp, a famous halfback for Notre Dame known as the Gipper, who died of a strep infection at age twenty-five in 1920. Reagan took the idea to Warners, then had to fight to get the part, and probably succeeded only because his friend Pat O’Brien, who was cast in the title role of the famous Notre 1 1 2

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Dame coach, pushed hard for him. Reagan’s parting words in his deathbed scene, “Win one for the Gipper,” would become a battle cry for his supporters in his political campaigns. His most memorable line in
Kings Row
was also delivered from bed, and would become the title of his autobiography:
Where’s the Rest of Me?

Everyone involved in
Kings Row
was first-rate: the producer Hal Wallis, the director Sam Wood, the screenwriter Casey Robinson, the cinematographer James Wong Howe, the composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and a cast that included Robert Cummings, Claude Rains, Charles Coburn, and Judith Anderson. Its budget exceeded $1 million, an exceptional amount for frugal Warner Bros., and larger than that for any previous Reagan film.92 It was based on a controversial best-seller by Henry Bellamann, which involved incest, insanity, euthanasia, and homosexuality in a small Midwestern town, and which had to be severely diluted to get the script approved by the Hays Office censors. Reagan gave what he and most critics considered the best performance of his career as the thoughtless young rake who loses his inheritance to a crooked banker and his legs to a sadistic doctor, but finds a uniquely American kind of redemption in the love of a girl from the wrong side of the tracks, played by the stunning Ann Sheridan, who marries him and helps him become a successful real estate developer. (Interestingly, Sheridan’s character is wiser than Reagan’s, she consults with a psychiatrist about how to handle her husband’s depression without telling him, and his first real estate project is her idea, though she pretends it was his.) Reagan took his father to the premiere of
Knute Rockne
at Notre Dame in October 1940. Warners invited two train cars full of stars and press from Los Angeles, and an estimated 250,000 fans crowded into South Bend, Indiana, for the three-day publicity event, which included a football game between Notre Dame and the College of the Pacific. Franklin Roosevelt Jr. read a letter from his father at the banquet following the opening. As Reagan later told the story, he had been eagerly anticipating the trip for weeks:

Nelle cornered me one day and told me that someone else was excited. Jack would never let me see it, but the dream of his life was to make this trip. Here was an Irishman who had really worshipped from afar: he’d never seen a Notre Dame team play; he’d never even been to South Bend. He thought Pat O’Brien was the greatest man since Al Smith. And he sensed somehow his youngest son would pass a kind of milestone before the trip was over.

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What a simple thing this would be for me to fix—still, I felt a chilling fear that made me hesitate. We had all lived too long in fear of the black curse. Nelle’s optimism was in full tide—she’d tell Jack how important it was that he vote dry on the trip and she knew he could be trusted. Whatever happened, I’m glad that she was so persuasive. It only took a phone call and the studio said yes before I got the question out of my mouth. . . . Saturday was the big day with lunch in the dining hall of St. Mary’s followed by the game and at night the premiere.

First thing in the morning I called Jack’s room, but there was no answer. All unsuspecting, I called the desk to ask if he had gone out.

I was informed he and Pat had just come in. His weakness was prosperity, and this was prosperity in capital letters. The evening before at the university banquet he had sat with an old Dixon friend, and heard students, faculty, and distinguished alumni greet us with a thunderous ovation. Then while I peacefully slept, he had been taken into the inner circle, so to speak, by Pat who had adopted him in his warmhearted way. Some time later I was told of their early morning return to the hotel—it must have been quite a scene. Jack was sure the empty streets were a trap and that the quarter-million fans were lurking in an alley, just waiting to swoop down on Pat for autographs. At each intersection he would halt Pat while he tiptoed up to the corner, and peered cautiously around; then he would signal Pat to join him and they would scamper across the street to the shelter of the buildings. Pat loved every minute of it.93

If any movie star was the perfect friend for Jack Reagan it was Pat O’Brien—the grandson of four Irish immigrants, a devout Catholic, a faithful family man, a hard drinker, and a fervent FDR supporter. Famous for playing Irish cops and priests, he was also a Milwaukee schoolmate and Navy buddy of Spencer Tracy’s (and, like Tracy, a friend of Edith Davis’s from their theater days). Ronald Reagan and O’Brien, who was eleven years his senior, had hit if off on the first film they made together at Warners,
Submarine D-1
, three years earlier; Reagan’s part ended up on the cutting room floor, but it was the beginning of a friendship that, as he later wrote, “would play an important part in all that has happened to me.”94

O’Brien kept up with Jack Reagan after their South Bend bender, taking him to the Hollywood Democratic Party headquarters to help out with the Roosevelt campaign. Barely six months after they celebrated FDR’s November 1940 victory over Wendell Willkie together, Jack dropped dead of 1 1 4

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House a heart attack on May 18, 1941, at age fifty-seven. According to family lore, he died while waiting for an ambulance that never came; Nelle had called the nearest ambulance service, not knowing that, because of a jurisdictional dispute, Beverly Hills ambulances were not permitted to cross the bound-ary into West Hollywood.95 Ronnie was in Atlantic City, on a Warners promotional tour. When Nelle reached him by telephone, she urged him not to fly, saying she would delay the funeral until he and Jane could return home by train.96

Pat O’Brien was among the small group of mourners at St. Victor’s Catholic Church in West Hollywood. Ronnie, as he told Maureen years later, was “beyond crying. My soul was just desolate, that’s the only word I can use. Desolate. And empty. And then all of a sudden I heard somebody talking to me, and I knew that it was Jack, and he was saying, ‘I’m OK, and where I am it’s very nice. Please don’t be unhappy.’ And I turned to [Nelle], who was sitting with me, and I said, ‘Jack is OK, and where he is he’s very happy.’ And it was just like it went away. The desolation wasn’t there anymore, the emptiness was all gone.”97

Four months later, in September 1941, it was Nelle’s turn to share in her son’s stardom. This time the junket was to Dixon, Illinois, for Louella Parsons Day and the premiere of
International Squadron
, starring Ronald Reagan—the man who hated to fly—as a daredevil American pilot fighting with the British Royal Air Force against the Nazis. This double home-coming started with the biggest parade in Dixon’s history, with five bands and fifteen floats, followed by the dedication of the Louella Parsons Wing at the Dixon Hospital, a banquet at the Masonic temple, the premiere at the Dixon Theater, and a Hollywood Ball at the town armory.98 Ronnie invited Nelle’s old friends from her True Blue Bible class to the premiere, which was a benefit for the hospital, and mother and son were put up at Hazelwood, the Walgreen estate on the Rock River, along with the rest of Louella’s entourage, including Bob Hope, Ann Rutherford, George Montgomery, and Joe E. Brown.99 Charles Walgreen’s widow, Myrtle, gave a lunch for two hundred on the lawn where a decade earlier young Reagan, then a caddie for Mr. Walgreen, had lolled in a hammock.100