His Days in Hollywood

By RICHARD CORLISS

In 1966, Movie Mogul Jack Warner returned from a European trip to hear that an actor who used to work for him was running for Governor of California. "No, no," Warner famously said. "Jimmy Stewart for Governor. Ronald Reagan for Best Friend." Second lead. Second best. Best friend. Genial loser. That was Reagan throughout his 15-year tenure at Warner Bros. and in most of his films. In the 1939 Dark Victory he played the bon-vivant boozer who loses Bette Davis to George Brent and a brain tumor. As the young George Armstrong Custer in the 1940 Santa Fe Trail, he lost Olivia de Havilland to Errol Flynn's Jeb Stuart. In early 1942 Reagan was announced for a lead role, with his frequent co-star Ann Sheridan, in a film of the play Everyone Comes to Rick's. After a round of Hollywood-casting roulette, Warner made the film without Reagan or Sheridan. They called it Casablanca.

Even in his two best-known roles he played young men who lost life or limb. The 1940 Knute Rockne All American features Reagan as football hero George Gipp, who led Notre Dame to gridiron greatness. Gipp died young, of pneumonia, but not before whispering a deathbed plea to "win just one for the Gipper." This all-time movie catchphrase gave Reagan a nickname that stuck to him for life. And his role in the 1942 Kings Row, as a brash young man who has had his legs amputated, gave Reagan the line that became the title of his 1965 autobiography: Where's the Rest of Me.

In Hollywood movies, destiny decides every romantic plot twist. In real life, success is more a matter of luck and timing. Reagan had the luck to be signed to a film contract on his first try, at Warner in 1937, and to be cast as the lead in his debut effort, though his acting had been confined to school drama societies and his professional experience to announcing baseball games on the radio. But timing let him down. His breakthrough performance in Kings Row should have led to meatier roles, tailored to his personality; and it did win him a raise to $5,000 a week, negotiated by his agent, Lew Wasserman, later the head of the powerful media combine MCA. But this was 1942, America was at war, and Reagan's next costume was an officer's uniform in the U.S. Army Cavalry.

After the war, though he had graduated to leading roles, Reagan was an also-ran star. By the late '50s he had eased out of films and into TV hosting and a corporate pitchman's role for his new boss, General Electric. Testifying in 1962 before a grand-jury hearing on possible antitrust violations by MCA, he was asked his line of work and replied, with a joking modesty, "Actor, I think."

Like dozens of other middle-range film folk, Reagan made a good living but not an indelible impression. He didn't star in any great films, didn't pull jobs with many top directors, wasn't in movies so bad then they are guilty pleasures now. Reagan was never even a cult figure. His Hollywood career would be just one colorful chapter in the biography of the 40th President of the United States.

But he did devote two prime decades to movie acting. And film work offered some returns on his investment. It lent Reagan the status of a marketable commodity. It landed him two actress wives: the first, Oscar winner Jane Wyman; the second, Nancy Davis, who would be his and America's First Lady. Acting schooled Reagan in the hortatory oratory of movie dialogue--speeches crafted to sell an ideal or an emotion and still sound like plain-spoken common sense--a technique he used so persuasively in politics. And acting created the image of a pleasing persona: "Ronald Reagan," a collaboration of the man, the actor he became and the roles he was given to play. Where's the rest of President Reagan? A lot of it is in movies.

On June 1, 1937, the 26-year-old radio spieler strode into a $200-a-week contract at Warner Bros. His visible attributes: a golden smile; a long, lanky frame; a thick mane of dark hair, slicked back. But Reagan's most supple instrument was his voice. His Chicago Cubs play-by-play gig honed his ability to deliver dialogue with speed, assurance and conversational authority. Warner was a studio of fast-talking actors, but most of the men either sounded straight off the sidewalks of New York City (Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Pat O'Brien) or had acquired a well-bred British accent (the Australian Flynn, the Irish Brent). Reagan could pitch the sassy patter, but in heartland-America tones. Warner realized this and custom-made his first movie, Love Is on the Air. Playing a crusading radio host, he got to read much of his dialogue straight from the script.

As hero material, though, Reagan had limitations. His head was relatively small, his eyes were narrow, his lips thin. And he didn't know what to do with what he had. As critic Mitch Tuchman has noted: "Reagan's own repertoire of facial expressions was limited to an all-purpose, high-flung left eyebrow and tartly pursed lips. Later, when his attractive young face aged, these expressions were left behind, indelibly etched."

Reagan also lacked the true performer's love of being minutely scrutinized. Bluffly outgoing, infallibly at ease in large groups, he seemed inhibited by screen intimacy. He had trouble sustaining an emotion in close-up, as if he couldn't wait for someone, anyone, to yell, "Cut!" You can almost read the fear on Reagan's face. Only his eyebrow was cocky.

In his first Warner years, Reagan shuttled between supporting roles in A-level films and starring parts in B's. Brother Rat, set in the Virginia Military Institute, handed him the thankless role of the one sensible cadet in a bunch of college cutups. He was a radio announcer, again, in Boy Meets Girl--a good bit part, letting him display a frantic aplomb at a movie premiere as chaos erupts and he tries both to describe it and to rein it in.

Warner, a six-day-a-week studio, kept its actors busy. Reagan made 33 films in his first five years, averaging one every eight weeks. Some of his most confident work was in four B movies made in 1939, detailing the heroics of Secret Service Agent Brass Bancroft. In Secret Service of the Air, he foils an alien-smuggling racket and, during a fight, executes a smooth backflip over a cantina table. Murder in the Air earned some later camp luster with its secret weapon, the Inertia Protector, which is able to destroy hostile bombs aimed at the U.S.--a primitive forerunner of President Reagan's Star Wars plan.

These breezy B's, terrestrial siblings to the Buck Rogers serials, might not have been film literature, but they were the equivalent of expert speed typing. In them Reagan proved himself engaging, snappy, in command. When he figured no one was looking, he could be well worth watching.

Reagan still had to prove himself in A material, and just before the war he got a few chances. In the fluffy 1941 comedy Million Dollar Baby, he's Peter Rowan, a rebellious composer who's "got a sour disposition and a mouth to match." He calls himself "just a student of history. Civilization's rotting away." (Back then, he didn't mean the Soviet Union.) Reagan is pretty persuasive as a fellow spoiling for a fight with the world.

Million Dollar Baby displayed a tense defiance in Reagan, an untamed sexiness that he also used in Knute Rockne. His Gipp is famous for the deathbed peroration. But it's in his early scenes that he hints at the sort of screen personality he could have become, if Jack Warner hadn't insisted he keep playing the boy next door to the male lead.

Gipp has no interest in joining Rockne's rookies; baseball is his game. But when Rock sees him kick a football over the grandstand, he asks Gipp to try out for the team. "All right, if you insist," Reagan almost snarls. Throughout, teacher and student crack wise with each other like two newspapermen in a screwball comedy. Reagan's casual, almost flirtatious insolence is instantly attractive, and very modern for a 1940 rah-rah epic.

Reagan is just as brash, if more naive, in Kings Row. The film touches, daintily, on sexually possessive fathers, insane children, vindictive doctors, the hatred of the rich for the poor and, in the relationship of Reagan's character Drake McHugh and his friend Parris (Robert Cummings), a hint of homoeroticism. Reagan flawlessly navigates Drake's descent from rube bonhomie to maturing resolve to blackest despair, then up to a final splash of sunlight. Reagan considered the film his top accomplishment and never tired of screening it. In 1948 Wyman sued for divorce, charging extreme mental cruelty. But she had another complaint: "I just couldn't stand to watch that dismal Kings Row one more time."

Jack Warner had two more roles for his budding star--a migrant worker who becomes a kind of Anglo Cesar Chavez in the vigorous melodrama Juke Girl, and an R.A.F. pilot in Desperate Journey, again supporting Flynn--before Uncle Sam cast him as a stateside warrior. A natural leader, if not a natural actor, Reagan was often cast as a government enforcer and even more often as a soldier. As Stephen Vaughn observes in Ronald Reagan in Hollywood: Movies and Politics, "No 20th century President, with the exception of Dwight D. Eisenhower, had been seen in uniform by more people."

Captain Reagan, kept out of action because of poor vision, never saw hostile fire. Indeed, since he was assigned to the First Motion Picture Unit (jocularly given the acronym FUMPOO) at the old Hal Roach studios making propaganda films for the armed forces, he could usually bunk at home. They also serve who narrate documentaries.

Many stars, Clark Gable and Stewart among them, returned from war to reclaim their eminence. Reagan was not of their wattage, and again he had loser's luck. Bogart got the haunted-hero roles at Warner; Reagan got the scraps, like the part of a suicidal epileptic in the 1947 Night unto Night. After a decade, Warner still hadn't decided what genre best suited Reagan. Melodrama? Let him play a small-town D.A. in the 1951 anti--Ku Klux Klan Storm Warning, with another lynch-mob scene and heavy emoting from all the principals but Reagan. Comedy? Put him in The Girl from Jones Beach (1949), where he's an artist who has assembled the perfect pinup from the comeliest body parts of 12 models.

Virtually every male lead made westerns in the '50s, so Reagan was happily back on a horse in such ordinary oaters as Tennessee's Partner and Cattle Queen of Montana. His big hit of the decade was the silly Bedtime for Bonzo, a parable of cross-species adoption (Reagan and Diana Lynn try raising a chimp as a human child) in which the star spent much of his time with an animal perched in his lap or on his head. Though it gave his detractors much excuse for merriment, Reagan proclaimed himself proud of the film.

His other signal movie of the '50s was Hellcats of the Navy. It is famous as the one film to co-star Reagan and his second bride Nancy Davis. In fact, Davis' role is small and she doesn't distinguish herself in it. But Reagan is impressive as a World War II naval hero with a hint of Bogart's neurotic Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny. In the attempt to discover Japanese sea lanes, submarine commander Casey Abbott makes a decision that kills 60 of his men. He is both firm in his belief that he did the greatest good for the greatest number and flooded with remorse for sending sailors he knew to an early death. The movie is unusual and mature in dramatizing the burdens of power. Reagan's face seems graven, his body made ponderous by his executive authority--an impression he rarely gave as a seemingly jaunty President.

His last film (really a TV movie released in theaters because it was deemed too rough for the small screen) was The Killers in 1964. It's a bit of a cheap thrill to watch Reagan play a crime heavy and do his professional best in a scene where he has to slap Angie Dickinson. The Killers, violent and cynical, was a curious coda to Reagan's career. But, in a way, he had only been moonlighting as a movie actor ever since his Army days. He was moving into politics, graduating from Hollywood in the '40s to Sacramento in the '60s to Washington in the '80s.

Reagan served as president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) from 1947 to 1952. He negotiated the first contract that gave actors royalties for films but not for television work (a boon to his old friend Wasserman, who would run the largest TV production company). He also applied grease to the wheels of the anticommunist witch hunt. Reagan had been reflexively left-wing in the '30s and '40s. Edmund Morris, his authorized biographer, believes the story that Reagan had tried to join the Communist Party but was rejected on the grounds that he would be more valuable as a fellow traveler (a rumor Reagan blithely denied to Morris in 1987). By the early '50s, though, Reagan had turned firmly and forever to the right. His confidence as a speaker and SAG boss nudged him into pitchman and executive roles--first as the host of TV's General Electric Theatre and Death Valley Days, then as Governor and President.

Truth is, he was a TV actor before there was TV drama. A movie star typically projects danger and a TV star comfort and familiarity. Reagan had this domesticated appeal--bred in him, perhaps, but also hammered into him by all those roles in which he essentially played the sensible master of ceremonies to a cast of more gifted or committed actors. This steadiness, combined with a voice suggesting unforced manliness and homespun wisdom, made him a welcome, authoritative TV figure and a superb politician.

Reagan tipped Jack Warner's prophecy on its end, persuading most Americans that they were being governed by their best friend. So it is Jimmy Stewart who was the great actor. Was Ronald Reagan a great President? Well, he brilliantly played one on TV. And where's the best of him? In the easy authority he projected--the image of an American hero he rarely got to play in the movies.