Killing Reagan Read online

  * * *

  At war’s end, Reagan makes a triumphant return to Hollywood. Warner Bros. gives him a new long-term contract worth a million dollars, with a guarantee of fifty-two thousand dollars per movie. Reagan and the petite Wyman live in a five-thousand-square-foot custom home on a knoll overlooking Los Angeles. He spends his off time playing golf with comedians Jack Benny and George Burns, and enjoys steak dinners with Wyman at the exclusive Beverly Club. Also in 1945, Reagan and Jane Wyman adopt a baby boy, whom they name Michael.

  Reagan’s first movie of the new contract is Stallion Road, in which he plays a horseback-riding veterinarian. Reagan’s on-screen mount is a midnight black thoroughbred mare named Tar Baby. Reagan likes “Baby” so much that he buys her before filming is completed. To give her a place to gallop, he fulfills a lifelong dream and buys a small ranch in the San Fernando Valley, which he will keep for a couple of years before buying a larger property in Malibu.

  Then tragedy strikes. In June 1947, Jane Wyman gives birth prematurely to a young daughter. Reagan is ill in the hospital with pneumonia at the time and cannot be at Wyman’s side when Christine Reagan comes into the world. She lives just nine hours. The loss deeply affects his marriage to Wyman.7

  Trying to put their lives back together, Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman pour themselves into their work. Yet, despite all the trappings of success, Ronald Reagan’s glory days in Hollywood are numbered. Warner Bros. soon casts him in a series of forgettable pictures that make little money and are scorned by critics. Reagan is perplexed. His Hollywood fairy tale is in danger of coming to an end—and he is powerless to do anything about it.

  Reagan is a hardworking, restless man who craves physical activity. He is the son of an all-too-often-drunk Irish shoe salesman and a Bible-thumping mother. Their parenting methods taught young Ron to avoid extremes in behavior, leading him, at times, to appear clueless and shut off. Also, it is true: Ronald Reagan is not a great intellect, having struggled to maintain a C average in college. Yet he can memorize paragraphs of script with ease and then recite them again and again on cue. Reagan also is a thinker, craving long periods of solitary meditation—preferably on horseback. He believes that “as you rock along a trail to the sound of the hooves and the squeak of the leather, with the sun on your head and the smell of the horse and the saddle and trees around you, things just begin to straighten themselves out.”

  Reagan first learned to ride while working as a teenage lifeguard back at Lowell Park in Dixon, Illinois, and lives by the saying “Nothing is so good for the inside of a man as the outside of a horse.”

  But no long gallop aboard Baby can hide the fact that Ronald Reagan’s personal and professional lives are now veering in new and disastrous directions.

  * * *

  Jane Wyman is growing bored with her husband, though he is oblivious to her dissatisfaction. Reagan can often be self-centered and callous. He has a habit of talking down to his wife because he possesses a college degree and she does not. He also likes to be the center of attention; sometimes screening his personal print of the 1942 movie Kings Row when guests come over for dinner.8

  Jane Wyman is not impressed when friends suggest that Reagan, who is developing a fondness for political activism, run for Congress. “He’s very politically minded. I’m not very bright,” she answers coolly, when asked if she supports the idea.

  Ronald Reagan has also become fond of lecturing. Any topic will do. “Don’t ask Ronnie what time it is,” Wyman warns fellow actress June Allyson, “because he will tell you how a watch is made.”

  Ann Sheridan and Ronald Reagan in Kings Row, Reagan’s personal favorite of all his performances

  When a baseball game comes on the radio, Reagan often ignores his wife and children, turning up the volume and drowning out their words by pretending to be the broadcaster and calling the game. In that way, he shuts out his family for hours.

  To make matters worse, Reagan resents Wyman’s growing level of celebrity. Her movies, such as The Yearling, are earning money, critical praise, and Academy Award nominations. No longer the star when the two go out, Reagan must hover at his wife’s elbow as she basks in the public’s applause.

  So it is that Ronald Reagan’s newfound political activism, his wife’s growing fame, and the death of their baby daughter combine to drive a wedge into their marriage. In 1947, Wyman cruelly mocks him during a lengthy speech he delivers before the Screen Actors Guild membership, foreshadowing the marital split that is soon to come. “Oh, for God’s sake, Ronnie,” she shouts to actress Rosemary DeCamp, “shut up and go shit in your hat.”

  The end comes while Wyman is filming Johnny Belinda on location in Pebble Beach, California. She begins an affair with costar Lew Ayres. In May 1948, Jane Wyman files for divorce from Ronald Reagan, citing mental cruelty.

  “I just couldn’t stand to watch that damn Kings Row one more time,” she explains when the marriage is finally over.

  * * *

  The divorce traumatizes Reagan. He is shattered and sometimes weeps openly, telling friends that the end of his marriage has left him “ashamed.” He clings to hope that the relationship can one day be salvaged and still drives the green Cadillac convertible Wyman gave him as a gift before the divorce. But when she publicly declares, “Lew Ayres is the love of my life,” it becomes clear that there will be no reconciliation.

  Embittered, Reagan begins to behave in a callow fashion. He spends lavishly at Hollywood nightclubs such as Ciro’s, the Coconut Grove, and Slapsy Maxie’s, drinking too much and conducting a series of sexual affairs with women decades younger than he. His actions do not go unnoticed by the press. Silver Screen magazine writes, “Never thought we’d come right out and call Ronnie Reagan a wolf, but leave us face it. Suddenly every glamour gal considers him a super-sexy escort for the evening. Even he admits he’s missed a lot of fun and frolic and is out to make up for it.”

  * * *

  One of Reagan’s liaisons is with actress Penny Edwards, who is just twenty, and another is with the twenty-two-year-old actress Patricia Neal. During a memorable one-night stand in his apartment, Reagan takes the virginity of eighteen-year-old Piper Laurie after first barbecuing her a hamburger. Ironically, at the time of their liaison, Reagan was playing the role of Laurie’s father in Louisa. The actress will later remember Reagan as a “show-off” in the bedroom, a self-absorbed lover who bragged about his sexual stamina during the act and became impatient when she did not climax. “You should have had many orgasms by now,” Reagan scolded Laurie after what she claims was about forty minutes of sex. “You’ve got to see a doctor about your abnormality.”9

  Reagan reaches bottom when he wakes up one morning at the Garden of Allah Hotel on Sunset Boulevard and does not know the name of the woman lying next to him. After that, he vows to rein in his behavior.

  But he does not. Three years after his divorce, when he proposes marriage to twenty-six-year-old actress Christine Larson by offering her a diamond wristwatch, Reagan is also having relationships with six other women. Larson turns him down.10

  * * *

  Now living on his own in an apartment above the Sunset Strip, Ronald Reagan soon grows apart from his young son and daughter. Three-year-old Michael and seven-year-old Maureen Reagan will long remember their father as loving but also absent from their lives for long periods of time—as was their mother. Both children are sent away to boarding schools by the time they enter the second grade. “There’s a distinct difference between the care provided by a parent and the care provided by a paid caretaker,” Maureen will say years later. “It was simply one of the prices all of us had to pay for their success.”

  During this playboy period, Reagan’s success has flatlined. He is no longer viewed as a bankable star by Hollywood standards. To add insult to injury, as his movie career is clearly in its death throes, Wyman wins her first Academy Award and arrives at the ceremony with Lew Ayres as her date, which only makes Reagan’s career seem more marginal.11 By 1949,
Warner Bros. terminates his long-term contract, leaving him without income to pay the bills for the high-flying Hollywood lifestyle to which he has grown accustomed.

  Desperate, Reagan accepts the offer to work on Bedtime for Bonzo. Animal movies are all the rage in Hollywood in 1950, thanks to the success of the February release Francis the Talking Mule. Jimmy Stewart has just finished Harvey, about a man and his invisible rabbit companion, on a set just one block down from where Reagan now films Bonzo. Harvey will open in October and earn Stewart his fourth Academy Award nomination.

  As Ronald Reagan now clambers up into the tree after the chimp Peggy (Bonzo), he still believes his career will rebound. The film’s other star, Diana Lynn, awaits him in the branches, adding to the comedy’s madcap narrative. Meanwhile, Bonzo has jumped off a branch and is now inside the house, somehow managing to call the police. Soon there will be cop cars and fire trucks screaming down Colonial Street, all in a scripted attempt to get everyone down from the tree. This is a far cry from Reagan’s days making movies such as Dark Victory with major stars such as Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis, or Sante Fe Trail with Errol Flynn. In that movie, Reagan played General George Armstrong Custer, whom he considers a great American hero.

  Still, Reagan is a professional. He shows up each morning on time, knows his lines, and is pleasant to his coworkers. There are times, however, when he seems distracted. For there are pressing concerns on his mind.

  Ronald Reagan is nearly forty years old. His profession is acting, but politics has set a new fire burning in his belly. The newspapers are full of the amazing events going on in the global fight against communism, as President Harry Truman sends U.S. troops into Korea to stop the Communist advance. Reagan is an ardent supporter of the Democratic president and campaigned for him in 1948. With Truman’s time in office due to end if he doesn’t run for reelection, Reagan is hoping former army general and World War II hero Dwight Eisenhower will run for president as a Democrat. Even as he deals with Peggy the chimp, Reagan is planning an article for Fortnight magazine in which he will explain how to fight communism worldwide. His determination to end the Communist threat is steadfast.

  “The real fight with this totalitarianism belongs properly to the forces of liberal democracy, just as did the battle with Hitler’s totalitarianism. There really is no difference except in the cast of characters,” Reagan will write.

  But that is a few months off. For now, Reagan is engaged in far less intellectual fare.

  “Cut,” director Fred de Cordova yells.

  Ronald Reagan climbs down from the tree.

  3

  YEARLING ROW RANCH

  SANTA MONICA MOUNTAINS, CALIFORNIA

  DECEMBER 22, 1951

  MORNING

  Forty-year-old Ronald Reagan gallops Tar Baby over the rolling countryside of his new 270-acre Malibu ranch. He rides English style, wearing skintight jodhpurs and knee-high Dehner riding boots. Christmas is just days away. The air is crisp on this winter morning, the skies clear and blue. Reagan’s two children, home on break from Chadwick boarding school, are spending the weekend in the small shingled ranch house back near the barn.

  But this weekend is not just a time for a father and his kids. Reagan’s latest girlfriend, a thirty-year-old actress named Nancy Davis, has joined them. Though she works very hard to endear herself to his son and daughter, and Maureen and Michael like her very much, Reagan is unsure about this blossoming relationship. He is not ready to be monogamous and is still seeing other women.

  Yet Davis is determined to win his heart—by any means necessary. Recently, Davis confessed to Reagan that she might be pregnant. Yet rather than encouraging Reagan to propose marriage, the announcement has the opposite effect. He flees to the home of Christine Larson, the starlet who spurned his offer of marriage earlier this year. Reagan complains to her that he feels trapped by Davis and wonders aloud if she is trying to trick him into marrying her.

  But on this day, Reagan does not feel confined. He rides tall and easy in the saddle, feeling the black mare moving beneath him. His connection with Baby is so strong that Reagan now insists upon riding her during on-screen horseback shots. This time last year they were in Tucson, Arizona, filming the Western The Last Outpost, which has become a minor success at the box office. The film’s horse wranglers warned Reagan that the desert location’s heat and dust might prove fatal to the mare. But the actor knows his horse well. Tar Baby survived the grueling shoot without a single problem.

  Now, riding on a dirt path lined with sycamores and scrub oak, past Malibou Lake, where he plans to swim in the summer, and the hayfield that parallels distant Mulholland Drive, Reagan finds himself at a curious career crossroads. Bedtime for Bonzo was such a box office success that a sequel is in the works. Reagan received mixed notices for his comedic performance, with most reviewers preferring to focus their praise on Peggy the chimp. The New York Times called Bonzo “a minor bit of fun yielding a respectable amount of laughs, but nothing, actually, over which to wax ecstatic.”

  Reagan was barely mentioned in the review.

  Despite Bonzo’s success, he is not offered a role in the sequel.1 On top of that, Reagan’s tenure as president of the Screen Actors Guild will soon come to an end. It is a time of upheaval and change in Hollywood, and Reagan has been in the thick of the pitched battle between the studios and an emerging Communist presence in the show business community.

  His “double life,” as he calls his now-intersecting twin passions of acting and politics, has consumed him. The ranch has been a tonic in these tough times, his Saturday getaway to clear his head from the strife.

  Reagan has been the head of SAG for five years. But no year has been more intense than 1951. In addition to acting in three films and attending the Monday night SAG board meetings, he has also traveled around the country speaking on behalf of an anticommunist group known as Crusade for Freedom. The purpose: to raise money for Radio Free Europe. And though Reagan is still very much a Hollywood actor, the words he scripts for himself are those of a seasoned international politician.

  Reagan with Tar Baby

  “The battleground of peace today is that strip of strategically located countries stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea,” Reagan says in a recorded speech that is replayed to small groups around America. “They are not big countries geographically, but they contain several million freedom-loving people, our kind of people, who share our culture and have sent millions of their sons and daughters to become part of these United States. Some call these countries the satellite nations. More accurately, they’re the captive nations of Europe.”

  Reagan is unaware that Crusade for Freedom is secretly backed by the Central Intelligence Agency, although he would likely be delighted if he knew.

  * * *

  Ronald Reagan actually considered joining the Communist Party back in 1938. Many in Hollywood were romanced by the Communists, as Adolf Hitler and his fascist ideology were becoming a threat not just to Europe but to the entire world. The Communists, with their avowed mission of helping the poor and disenfranchised, seemed poised to thwart Hitler’s ambitions. But there was more to Reagan’s attraction than mere ideology: as a newcomer to Hollywood, just one year into his studio contract, he saw becoming a Communist as a good way to expand his social circle.

  “Reagan got carried away by stories of the Communist Party helping the dispossessed, the unemployed and the homeless,” screenwriter Howard Fast will claim years later. “Some of his friends, people he respected, were party members, so he turned to them. Said he wanted to be a Communist … said he was determined to join.”

  But actor Eddie Albert, a costar in Brother Rat, was just as determined to talk Reagan out of turning red. Albert’s motives were deceptive. He leaned far to the left politically and secretly undertook the discussion at the behest of the American Communist Party leadership, who believed the talkative Reagan was a “flake” and did not want him joining their group.

  Albert wa
s successful. Reagan’s brief flirtation with communism came to an end.

  His interest in politics, however, did not cease.

  * * *

  It is August 11, 1941, when Ronald Reagan attends his first meeting of the Screen Actors Guild at the union’s headquarters on Hollywood Boulevard. He has been invited to serve as an alternate for actress Heather Angel. The Guild is just eight years old at the time, founded to improve working conditions for actors. Reagan’s first meeting is more of a social excursion, as he has little knowledge of the Guild’s inner workings. Even when Jane Wyman is elected to the board a year later, Reagan remains distant from SAG, involved as he is with the war effort. But he resumes attending meetings in February 1946 as an alternate for horror-movie actor Boris Karloff. In September of that year he is elected third vice president.

  By the end of World War II, with Hitler and the German Third Reich defeated, it is clear that Joseph Stalin and the Communists are just as ruthless and just as intent on global domination as the führer was. The Soviet Union, headquarters of global communism, displaces millions of people across Eastern Europe in order to build an empire even bigger than Hitler’s. It is also sending spies out around the world to infiltrate other nations and spread propaganda. Reagan soon sees this played out quite clearly in Hollywood. The actor’s union is slowly dividing itself into those, like Reagan, who now consider communism a scourge and those who believe that the political system embraced by the Soviet Union is intellectual and fashionable.