An American Life Page 8

  Margaret said she’d gone on a European cruise with one of her sisters and met a foreign service officer with whom she had fallen in love.

  Then one day I got a call from my mother. She said there was an item in the Dixon paper announcing that Margaret Cleaver was engaged and planning to marry within a few weeks.

  Nelle, I’m sure, expected me to jump off a roof and she asked my old high school teacher, B. J. Frazer, to contact me and he sent me a wonderful, understanding letter. He said I had a whole life ahead of me and ought to look ahead, not behind me, and in the end things would work out all right.

  My mother, of course, repeated her old dictum that everything works out for the best and that every reverse in life carries the seeds of something better in the future.

  Margaret’s decision shattered me, not so much, I think, because she no longer loved me, but because I no longer had anyone to love.

  Still, I knew in my heart that we had grown apart during our long separation and something inside me suggested that things would work out all right; after a while, the pain eased and I began to admit Nelle and B. J. Frazer were right.

  9

  AS ANYONE WHO HAS EVER LIVED in central Iowa knows, winters there can last forever and slip into the heat of summer with barely a nod to spring. After I started broadcasting the Cubs’ games, I concocted a plan to escape part of the frigid Iowa winter by offering to accompany the team to its annual spring training camp in California. If you will pay my expenses, I told the people at WHO, I’ll go to California and donate my yearly vacation to the cause, and the trip will pay off in color and knowledge about the team I’ll be able to use all through the coming season.

  The proposal, which they accepted, wasn’t as charitable on my part as it seemed: A baseball announcer never gets to take a vacation during the summer, and my plan gave me an all-expense-paid holiday under the California sun, along with a chance to earn some extra money by writing articles for the newspapers back home. Since I also broadcast games of the Chicago White Sox, I could also look in on their spring practice in Pasadena, a few miles from Los Angeles.

  The Cubs, owned by the Wrigley chewing gum family, did their spring training on Catalina, a rocky island off the coast of Southern California that was also owned by the family.

  My annual trips to Southern California began in 1935. For someone who’d practically cut his teeth on celluloid shoot-’em-ups and carried around fantasies about becoming an actor for years, Catalina was tantalizingly close to Hollywood, but it was also pretty remote. Every week, there were hundreds of young people—from Iowa, Illinois, and just about every other state—who stepped off a train at Union Station in Los Angeles who had exactly the same dream that I did and they got no closer to realizing it than a studio front gate.

  A few weeks before my departure for California in 1937, however, something happened that made Hollywood seem a little less remote from Des Moines. Our station had a popular Saturday night barn dance program featuring a terrific group of musicians called the Oklahoma Outlaws. Gene Autry had heard about the group and signed them to appear in one of his singing cowboy movies. The studios in those days were constantly looking for ways to broaden their audience, and the Oklahoma Outlaws had a big following in the Midwest.

  That April when I arrived in Los Angeles for my annual ten-day reporting tour, a storm was socking Southern California with a ferocity that probably set back the Chamber of Commerce’s promotional efforts at least a year or two. The streets were flooded, high winds were felling the city’s towering palm trees like stalks of wheat, and the horizon was ugly and gray.

  I decided to play hooky from the Cubs and took a trolley to Republic Studios so I could watch my friends in the Oklahoma Outlaws act out their new, if temporary role as motion picture players. I’d planned to leave for Catalina that evening, but high seas along the twenty-one-mile Catalina channel were forcing boats to turn back, seaplanes were grounded, and the Cubs’ hotel on the island was cut off from the town of Avalon by mud slides.

  So I checked into the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, which is where the Cubs stayed when they were playing exhibition games with their farm club, the Los Angeles Angels, and that evening I walked downstairs to the Biltmore Bowl, a nightclub on the lower level, to look up a fellow Iowan, Joy Hodges.

  Joy, a singer who had once worked for WHO, had come to Los Angeles several years before with hopes of breaking into the movies and had won several small parts while singing at night with a band at the Biltmore. I sent a note to her backstage, and she joined me for dinner between her floor shows.

  Joy was a pretty, dark-haired woman with a sweet quality that hadn’t been spoiled by her brief exposure to show business. I was looking forward to a pleasant dinner with an attractive girl and I had planned on bringing her up to date on the latest gossip from Des Moines. But my head was still filled with the sights and sounds of my visit to the studio that day. Seeing the actors, the cameras, the lights, and the scenery had only whetted my appetite to be a member of the club. I was starry-eyed and confessed to Joy how much I’d always had a secret yearning to be an actor.

  “Take off your glasses,” she said.

  Studios, Joy added, as if to paraphrase Dorothy Parker, don’t make passes at actors who wear glasses. If I wanted to break into the movies, she said the first thing I had to do was “Get rid of those glasses.”

  Joy said she knew an agent who might be willing to tell me if I had any realistic chances of making it in Hollywood—and be truthful with me if he thought I was wasting my time.

  At promptly ten o’clock the next morning, I looked across a big desk at a skin-colored blur, agent Bill Meiklejohn, while trying to project “star quality” (whatever that was).

  I’d taken Joy’s advice and not worn my glasses to the interview with Meiklejohn; as a result, I could hardly see him during one of the most important interviews of my life.

  But, heart pounding and hopelessly nearsighted, I presented a somewhat exaggerated description of my qualifications for movie stardom.

  After finishing my pitch, I asked Meiklejohn gingerly if he thought it would be worth it for me to knock on a few doors in Hollywood.

  Without a word, he picked up his telephone and dialed Max Arnow, a casting director for Warner Brothers.

  “Max,” he said, “I have another Robert Taylor sitting in my office.”

  “God made only one Robert Taylor,” Arnow said of Hollywood’s reigning male star, loud enough for me to hear his friendly burst of sarcasm.

  Nevertheless, Arnow agreed to take a look at me.

  My subsequent interview with Arnow was brief and left me with the impression of being appraised like a slab of beef.

  I’ve often wondered what would have happened to me if Max Arnow hadn’t liked my voice.

  He and Meiklejohn circled me like a pair of hummingbirds, talking about my face, my shoulders, and my height as if I wasn’t even in the room.

  For some reason, Arnow said he was impressed by my voice. He said it reminded him of the voice of a young stock player Warners had put under contract but, for reasons I can’t remember, was giving the studio some kind of difficulty. I guess maybe Arnow thought of me as a kind of replacement for the guy with the voice like mine.

  Meiklejohn was apparently a good salesman because he persuaded Arnow to give me a screen test. Arnow handed me a few pages from the script of a Broadway play, The Philadelphia Story, told me to memorize them, and return in several days.

  At the end of the day, when I finally arrived on Catalina, Cubs Manager Charley Grimm chewed me out for being absent without leave.

  I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that my mind was somewhere else; it was exploding with visions of a future of which he wouldn’t be a part.

  I returned to Los Angeles by boat for the screen test and it lasted only a few minutes, just a Warners starlet and me exchanging a few lines from The Philadelphia Story.

  The next day, Arnow called Meiklejohn and told him h
e planned to show the test to Jack Warner, the mogul who ran Warner Brothers like a feudal monarchy, as soon as Warner could work it into his schedule.

  “They’ll call you in a few days at the Biltmore,” Meiklejohn said.

  “I’m sorry, but I won’t be there,” I said. “I’ve got to be on a train tomorrow—I’ve got to get back to my job in Des Moines; the season opener’s coming up in a few days and I’ve got to broadcast the Cubs’ games.”

  Arnow and Meiklejohn wouldn’t believe it when I refused to delay my trip back to Iowa. Although I didn’t do it consciously, I think it was probably a good strategic move: Hollywood was accustomed to people knocking down its doors for a job; it wasn’t used to somebody saying, “Sorry, I’ve got to go home now.”

  Still, as soon as I was on the train and America was rolling past me, I said to myself: What a damn fool you were.

  But less than forty-eight hours after the train pulled into Des Moines I got a telegram:

  WARNERS OFFERS CONTRACT SEVEN YEARS STOP ONE YEAR OPTION STOP STARTING $200 A WEEK STOP WHAT SHALL I DO MEIKLEJOHN

  I broke the speed records driving down to the Western Union office and wrote out a reply:

  SIGN BEFORE THEY CHANGE THEIR MINDS DUTCH REAGAN

  Although I broadcast Cubs games for another month, my heart wasn’t in it. After a lot of sad good-byes to my friends in Des Moines, I packed everything I owned into a Nash convertible that I’d bought recently for $600 and headed for California.

  If those months of rejection after my graduation from Eureka were the low point of my life, that trip across the country, with the top of my car open to the wind and the sun shining on my head, was one of the highest of the highs. I was on my way to Hollywood.

  After I checked into the Biltmore, George Ward, one of Bill Meiklejohn’s assistants, warned me that it might take weeks or months for Warner Brothers to cast me in a movie because it had a large stable of new stock players who’d be competing with me for roles.

  He was wrong. I was playing in my first movie within a few days, but not before I’d played a spectator’s role in an offscreen drama that might have been called The Remaking of Dutch Reagan.

  Thank goodness they liked my voice, for whatever reason, because for a while it seemed that was about all they liked about me.

  First stop: Makeup.

  “The hair has to be changed,” Max Arnow told a hairstylist.

  The hairstylist looked at me the way a paleontologist might examine a newly discovered but as yet unidentified fossil plucked from a prehistoric riverbed.

  “Where did you get that haircut?” she asked me.

  “It looks like somebody cut it with bowl number seven,” she added, before I could answer.

  I still had my Harold Teen haircut—short and parted down the middle.

  Then they announced I had another problem: My head was too small.

  “Where did you get that coat?” Arnow demanded, giving a fish-eye once-over to a new sport coat I’d purchased solely to impress him. “You can’t wear that outfit. The shoulders are too big. They make your head look too small.”

  Next stop: Wardrobe.

  “See what you can do about his head,” Arnow told a wardrobe designer.

  A tailor stripped off my coat and committed murder on it, slashing the shoulders and ruthlessly whacking away pleats and tucks.

  That helped, but it wasn’t enough. Arnow said that if I appeared on screen the way that God had made me, I would look out of proportion.

  “Your shoulders are too big and your neck is too short for your head,” he insisted, not very tactfully, I thought.

  There was a lot of foot shuffling and mumbling among the tailors, but no one, as I hoped, came forward and said: “His head looks okay to me.”

  Everyone looked troubled. Then somebody thought of Jimmy Cagney, one of Warner Brothers’ biggest stars. “He’s got the same problem, a short neck,” the voice said.

  Cagney, the wardrobe expert said, had solved his problem by going to a shirtmaker who had succeeded in creating the appearance of a longer neck and a bigger head by designing a special shirt collar for him.

  Behind his neck, Cagney’s shirts had a normal collar band, but as it encircled his neck it became smaller and narrower, so by the time it reached his chest, there wasn’t any collar band at all. The tips of the collar just lay flat on his chest, revealing a few more inches of skin than would have been exposed by an ordinary collar.

  “Get the name of Cagney’s shirtmaker,” someone said urgently.

  This was accomplished and I was sent to have some shirts made with a Cagney collar. But when I came back to the studio the experts said my shoulders and chest still appeared to be a little too wide for my head.

  Until then, I’d always worn narrow ties and shirts with small collars, whatever was in style at the time. To solve the problem, the wardrobe people instructed me to have all my shirts made with an extra-wide collar with near-horizontal lines and to use a wide Windsor knot when I tied my tie—anything, they said, to fill the gap between my lapels and reduce the appearance of the width of my shoulders.

  I have to admit they knew their business. To this day, I wear the kind of shirts they—and Jimmy Cagney’s shirtmaker—helped design.

  Next stop: Publicity.

  The first item on the agenda was a meeting to choose my name.

  Max Arnow and several Warner Brothers press agents sat around a table staring at me, making me feel like a mannequin who was supposed to be seen but not heard.

  Going through their minds was the question: What name does he look like?

  Ignoring me, they’d suggest a name, rule it out, then start over again, getting nowhere.

  Finally I interrupted and they looked at me as if I’d done something wrong. The mannequin could speak.

  I said, “May I point out that I have a lot of name recognition in a large part of the country, particularly in the Middle West, where I’ve been broadcasting sports. I think a lot of people would recognize my name on theater marquees.”

  One of them said “Dutch Reagan? You can’t put Dutch Reagan on a marquee.”

  I had never liked my first name and in school and on the radio, I’d always used my nickname. But I made a spot decision that I’d be happier using my real name rather than some moniker dreamed up by a press agent, and so I ventured inquiringly:

  “How about Ronald? . . . Ronald Reagan?”

  They looked at each other and began repeating it to one another, “Ronald Reagan . . . Ronald Reagan . . .”

  “Hey, that’s not bad,” one said.

  Pretty soon you would have thought they had thought it up. Everyone began chiming in their agreement.

  And so it was decided, then and there, that I could remain Ronald Reagan.

  10

  IT WAS A FANTASY COME TRUE. On a Monday morning in the first week of June in 1937, I drove my convertible through the gates of the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank, ready for work, and with a hole in my stomach as deep as an oil well. I asked myself, what am I doing here? Once again, I felt like the new kid in school.

  Here I was, a twenty-six-year-old radio announcer from Iowa suddenly rubbing shoulders with stars like Errol Flynn, Pat O’Brien, and Olivia de Havilland. They were professional actors. It had been five years since I had done any acting, and that was in a college play. I wasn’t quite an Iowa hayseed. But I’d never been east of Chicago, north of Minneapolis, south of the Ozarks.

  When I was introduced to Edward Everett Horton, he said kindly: “Glad to meet you, Reagan. We need some new faces around here. Hope you stick around.”

  So did I.

  I’d learned there was a clause in my contract that allowed Warner Brothers to fire me after six months if they were unhappy with me. So much for the publicity department’s announcement Warners had signed me to a “long-term contract.”

  In a studio screening room my first day, I was shown the test that had led Warners to offer me a contract and I wanted to bury
myself under my seat. I was terrible. I hated it. After that I figured I’d be on a train bound for Des Moines in time for Christmas.

  I was in the same boat as all the contract players. The studio liked to keep you a little off balance and uncertain how long you’d stay. George Ward tried to console me with an assurance that Warner Brothers usually took longer than six months to evaluate a new contract player, but he wasn’t very successful. That evening, he invited me to his home for dinner and afterward we went to the midget auto races at Gilmore Stadium where I glanced up at the lights of the press box and saw a group of reporters and broadcasters enjoying themselves. It hit me for the first time that I was now only a guy in the grandstand, not a member of the working press, and I wondered how long it would be before I was back in the press box.

  Hollywood studios in those days churned out two kinds of pictures—A movies, which led a double bill and featured major stars who could attract customers into a theater, and low-budget B movies, which featured newcomers and lesser-known character actors and filled out the second half of the bill. Like other newcomers, I was assigned to the Warner Brothers B Unit.

  Besides filling out their double bills, the studios used B pictures a lot like companies in some industries now use their research and development departments. After they’d put new actors or actresses under contract, they’d cast them in a B picture to test the audience reaction to them. If they seemed to click with the audience, based on the fan mail they received and the response to them at sneak previews, they were given more important parts and then slipped into an A movie in a minor role to further test whether they had the potential to be a star.