An American Life Read online

  Maybe it wasn’t intentional, but my first role at Warner Brothers sure seemed like typecasting: I was assigned to play a radio announcer in a movie initially called Inside Story, then renamed Love Is on the Air. It was a typical B movie—made in a hurry and forgettable.

  My preparations for the part consisted of a day with a dialogue coach; at least it was a day longer than the preparation I’d had for my radio announcer’s job in Davenport. The coach went over the script with me and told me to report for work the next day.

  When I woke up the following morning, I wanted to get out of town as quickly as I could. I thought about getting in my car and driving nonstop to Iowa.

  Nothing I’d ever experienced—no stage fright before a college show or steeplechase jump or dive from a high platform, nothing I’d been through, had ever produced in me the kind of jitters I felt when I stepped onto Stage Eight at Warner Brothers that morning.

  “Kid, don’t worry,” a veteran character actor who was in my first scene said. “Just take it easy and everything will be all right.”

  They sponged some makeup on my face, I took my place on the set, the lights went on, and the director, Nick Grinde, said: “Camera . . . Action!”

  Suddenly, my jitters were gone. The old character actor had been right. As soon as I heard the director’s words, I forgot all about the camera and the lights and the crew and concentrated on delivering my lines in a way that I hoped would make B. J. Frazer proud.

  A couple of minutes later, the director said “Cut.” To my amazement, he said he was satisfied with the first take. He started setting up to shoot the next scene and I sat down on one of those canvas chairs you see on movie sets (without my name on it) and said silently to myself: You know, maybe I can make it here.

  Although we finished Love Is on the Air in three weeks, it wouldn’t be released for four months so I had a long time to worry about whether Warner Brothers was going to renew my option. But they kept me busy. A few days after finishing this picture, I drew an assignment to play a cavalryman (more typecasting) in a picture based on a true story about a wonder horse named Sergeant Murphy that won Britain’s Grand National steeplechase race. The Des Moines Register had asked me to send reports home about my experiences in Hollywood. After we finished Sergeant Murphy, I wrote: “No matter what anyone says or what the future may bring, now I can always insist that I once was an actor.

  “If I’d only made one picture it might have been called a fluke. But I’ve made two now, and that makes me an actor—even if in name only.”

  Four months later, Love Is on the Air was released and I raced around town searching for reviews of my first movie. For the most part, they were kind. The Hollywood Reporter, one of the most important trade papers, said “Love Is on the Air presents a new leading man, Ronald Reagan, who is a natural, giving one of the best first picture performances Hollywood has offered in many a day.”

  A few days later, Warner Brothers picked up my option for another six months and gave me a raise.

  I called Nelle and Jack and asked them to come to California. Within a few weeks, they were on their way. And in a way, I suppose I was too, although now I faced the same kind of problem I faced during my first year at Eureka College when Mac McKinzie relegated me to the fifth string of the football squad: I had made the team; now I had to make the first string.

  11

  IN MY FIRST YEAR AND A HALF at Warner Brothers, I made thirteen pictures. Usually, I was in and out of a movie in three or four weeks. You worked from eight in the morning until seven at night.

  Between pictures, I went horseback riding in Griffith Park, learned how to body surf in the Pacific Ocean, and tried to keep up with the demands of the studio publicity machine. Press agents were constantly trying to pair me with my leading ladies and new starlets, a fringe benefit to which I usually didn’t object, and wherever I went, they assigned a photographer to follow and collect material for the fan magazines. The experience left me with a lifelong distaste for formalized picture-taking sessions.

  After we had filmed Love Is on the Air, one of our cameramen told me: “Kid, I don’t think you should wear makeup.

  “There are some people who have complexions that for some reason or other just can’t take makeup well and I think you’re one of ‘em. What I mean is that you can literally see the makeup on your skin.”

  Before long, he said it was likely I’d be asked to act out a few lines in a screen test for another new contract player and when that happened, he suggested, “Why don’t you try doing the scene without wearing makeup? Some people look better without it than with it.” We did the test and he was right. I never wore makeup again.

  I had always hated my glasses and after moving to Hollywood I enthusiastically became a guinea pig for some of the first pairs of contact lenses available in this country. They were big, rigid, and fit over the whites of your eyes like a pair of football helmets and weren’t much fun to wear. Each lens had a little bubble over your cornea that you had to keep filled with a saline solution, and every couple of hours, the solution would turn gray and you’d find yourself blinded until you replaced the fluid. They were difficult to wear but vanity prevailed, although I found out I couldn’t use them much in pictures because they had the effect of making me look a little pop-eyed on the screen. So unless I was doing a long shot or a stunt in which I felt I needed good vision more than a good appearance, I didn’t use them during filming.

  I was proud of some of the B pictures we made, but a lot of them were pretty poor. They were movies the studio didn’t want good, they wanted ’em Thursday.

  Until I got the part of George Gipp in Knute Rockne—All American, I was the Errol Flynn of the B pictures. I usually played a jet-propelled newspaperman who solved more crimes than a polygraph machine. My one unvarying line, which I always snapped into a telephone, was: “Give me the city desk. I’ve got a story that will crack this town wide open!”

  When the studio played you in an A picture, you always hoped it would generate the kind of reviews and fan mail and audience response at previews that would get you promoted out of the B Unit. But there were a lot of disappointments. You’d make an A picture and think you did okay and then find yourself back in the B’s, a little frustrated and saying unkind things about the studio’s judgment.

  When I arrived in Hollywood, actors and actresses had just won a tough five-year battle with studios for the union shop and recognition of the Screen Actors Guild as the exclusive bargaining agent for actors. Like all contract players, I’d had to join the union and wasn’t very happy about it. Making me join the union, whether I wanted to or not, I thought, was an infringement on my rights. I guess I also was a little uncertain as to why actors needed to have a union. But as I spoke to some of the older career actors I met at Warners and discovered how much they’d been exploited in the past, I began to change my mind. Major stars had no trouble negotiating good contracts and working conditions for themselves, but that wasn’t the case for the supporting players, many of whom had been blacklisted by the studios and deprived of work after they’d tried to form a union.

  As far as I was concerned, some of the studio bosses were abusing their power. Throughout my life, I guess there’s been one thing that’s troubled me more than any other: the abuse of people and the theft of their democratic rights, whether by a totalitarian government, an employer, or anyone else. I probably got it from my father; Jack never bristled more than when he thought working people were being exploited.

  Once I’d become a believer in the union, I was appointed to the Screen Actors Guild’s board of directors. I wasn’t asked; I was drafted to represent the industry’s younger contract players.

  My first directors’ meeting wasn’t at all what I expected. I thought the union would be run by the lesser actors who’d been exploited by the studios, but instead a lot of Hollywood’s top stars, like Cary Grant and Jimmy Cagney, were on the board. Most were big box-office draws who could easily command hu
ge salaries and didn’t need the Guild’s help to negotiate their wages. But they enthusiastically gave their time and prestige to assure that lesser players like me got a fair shake. That night I told myself that if I ever became a star, I’d do as much as I could to help the actors and actresses at the bottom of the ladder.

  The studios had a vested interest in helping contract players achieve stardom. But we were all captives of their decisions, right or wrong, and they weren’t always right. I decided I had to take my career into my own hands—and came up with a plan to marry my new job in Hollywood with my old love for football.

  I was fascinated with the life story of Knute Rockne, the legendary Norwegian-born coach at Notre Dame who died in a plane crash in 1931 after revolutionizing the game of football.

  Over lunch in the Warner Brothers commissary, I began talking up the idea of a movie based on his life and asked some of our writers for pointers on how to write a screenplay about him. I began working on a script and over lunch one day suggested to Pat O’Brien, a fellow Irishman who had become a good friend, that he’d make the perfect Rockne.

  Of course, I’d already cast my own part in the movie: George Gipp, who casually wandered onto Rockne’s practice field one day and as his greatest star became almost as legendary as the coach himself before dying two weeks after his final game.

  As I continued my work on a screenplay, I never thought about getting paid for it. My reward was the part of George Gipp—the immortal Gipper. Then one day I saw an article in Variety: Warner Brothers was going to make a movie based on the life of Knute Rockne starring Pat O’Brien.

  When I asked some friends how this had happened they told me I talked too much, that it was a good idea so Warners bought the rights to Rockne’s life story. But then they told me Warners had already tested ten actors for the part of Gipp. I ran all the way to the producer’s office and asked for a shot at the role. He turned me down because he said I didn’t look like the greatest football player of our time. “You mean Gipp has to weigh about two hundred pounds?” I asked. “Would it surprise you that I’m five pounds heavier than George Gipp was when he played at Notre Dame?”

  He held out for an actor who was a giant. A lot of players don’t look like players when they are out of uniform and, yes, some fellows who aren’t players look like they are when they put on a football uniform.

  I remembered a cameraman who had once told me that the people in the front office believed only what they saw on film. I got in my car and drove home as fast as I could and dug into the trunk I had brought from Dixon. I found a yearbook photo of myself in my college football uniform, raced back to the studio, and put it on the producer’s desk.

  He studied the picture, looked up at me, and said, “Can I keep this for a while?” I hadn’t been home more than an hour when the phone rang. It was a call telling me to be at the studio at eight in the morning to test for the role of George Gipp.

  Pat O’Brien volunteered to play Rockne in my test. The next day, the producer called and said: “Reagan, you’re playing the Gipper.”

  A few weeks after we finished filming Knute Rockne—All American, I sat in the back row of a small movie theater in Pasadena where Warner Brothers often sneak-previewed its new pictures. Pat was there too, along with a number of studio executives. We were waiting to sample an audience’s reaction to the movie for the first time.

  As the picture began to unreel in the dark theater, I sensed a glow radiating from the audience like a warm fire. I was in the picture only a few minutes, but it contained a very emotional scene. Just before Gipp died, I said to Rockne: “Some day when things are tough and the breaks are going against the boys, ask them to go in there and win one for the Gipper. I don’t know where I’ll be but I’ll know about it and I’ll be happy.”

  As I spoke these words, men and women in the audience started pulling out their handkerchiefs. Then, from the back to the front of the theater, I heard sniffles, making me wonder if this was the breakthrough I’d been waiting for.

  I drove home satisfied with the picture and had barely gotten into bed when the telephone rang. It was someone at the studio, telling me to report for wardrobe fittings early the next morning: “You’re playing Custer in Santa Fe Trail.”

  It was an Errol Flynn picture and I was cast in the second lead—not as costar, but one of the two leads in an A picture. At the studio the next day, I thought people were suddenly more friendly to me. Then I went to the wardrobe department and witnessed a scene I’ll never forget.

  Seamstresses had been working all night making uniforms for me. As I waited to be fitted, I looked over at a rack of uniforms tagged with the word “Custer” and the name of another actor. I watched a wardrobe man come in and gather up the uniforms, toss them like rags in a corner, and replace them on the rack with blue and gold-braided uniforms marked “Custer” with my name on them. I looked at those uniforms piled up on the floor and said to myself: “That can happen to me some day.”

  The same year I made the Knute Rockne movie, I married Jane Wyman, another contract player at Warners. Our marriage produced two wonderful children, Maureen and Michael, but it didn’t work out, and in 1948 we were divorced.

  After the Rockne movie, I began to be cast regularly in A pictures in leading roles. I was able to buy a home for my parents, the first anyone in our family had ever owned, and I think I helped Jack, who hadn’t been able to work much since the first of his heart attacks, get back some of his pride.

  Although I bought the house in their names I knew he would feel uncomfortable about that, so, after talking it over with my mother, I came up with a plan that worked like a charm. I told him I was starting to get more fan mail than I could handle and said: “Look, you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to, but you could really help me; I’ve got a heck of a problem with this fan mail, mailing out autographed pictures and so forth; what would you say if I got you a secretary’s pass and a regular salary at the studio and you came in every day to pick up the mail, look it over, order the pictures, and so forth.”

  Well, Jack jumped at it. It was a real job, it gave him self-respect, and he did a great job at it.

  One day he showed me a letter from a young woman who had written that she was dying and wanted a photo of me before she did.

  I thought it was a story invented by someone who believed that’s what it took to get an autographed picture. Jack urged me to sign the picture anyhow and I did. About ten days later, I got a letter from a nurse who told me that the woman, who was named Mary, had died with my picture in her hands and that it had made her very happy to have it.

  Jack never said “I told you so.”

  He kept on handling the fan mail for me until, at the age of fifty-eight, his heart finally gave out and he died in the home in California that he had come to love.

  When he died so young, I blamed it at first on his problem with alcohol. Now I think his heart may have finally failed because of smoking. I’d always thought of Jack as a three-pack, one-match-a-day man: In the morning he’d use one match to light his first cigarette of the day, and from then on, he’d light the next one from the old one.

  The home he loved in California and his job at the studio may have helped him finally lick the curse that had hounded him so long. I was in the East on an errand for the motion picture industry when my mother called and told me that he had died. During the call, she told of finding Jack one night standing in the house, looking out the window, and he began talking about his drinking and wondering how their lives might have been different if he hadn’t been a drinker. Then he told my mother that he had decided he was never going to take another drink, and she said, “Jack, how many times have I heard you say that?”

  “Yes,” Jack said, “but you’ve never seen me do this before,” and then he disappeared and came back with a big jug of wine he’d hidden from my mother. Then he dumped the wine into the sink and smashed the jug.

  She also told me Jack had started going to chu
rch again, a Catholic church near the house. As Jimmy Cagney described it once to me, “He’d heard the flutter of the wings.”

  After I rushed back to California, Nelle told me something else I’ll always treasure. Back when the Rockne film was being premiered at Notre Dame, she had told me Jack, as Irish as you could get, wanted to be there, and I invited him to join us on the Warner Brothers train that took us to South Bend for the ceremonies and premiere.

  Before he died, Nelle told me, Jack told her what the trip had meant to him: “I was there,” he said, “when our son became a star.”

  Although Jack may have never completely defeated the curse to which he had been a slave, he and my mother had many years of great love together.

  She rejoined him twenty-one years later, after years of torment by the illness we now call Alzheimer’s disease.

  12

  As AN ACTOR, I guess I spent some of my finest moments in bed—the Gipper’s death in Knute Rockne—All American, then a scene in Kings Row, in which I discovered my legs had been amputated by a sadistic and vindictive surgeon who was angry that I had romanced his daughter.

  I started preparing for this scene days before it was filmed. The scene called for me to be unconscious in bed, then awaken, discover my legs were gone, and scream, “Randy [my wife, played by Ann Sheridan], where is the rest of me?” Long before we filmed this scene it was very much on my mind. Would I be semiconscious in my condition and not be able to scream? I wanted to ask doctors what a man in that situation would be like but I never got the chance. Finally, it was the fatal day. When I arrived on the set I found they’d cut a hole in the mattress for my legs and they asked me to get in the bed to see how it felt and looked. When I got under the covers my legs went into the hollowed out section of the mattress. As I lay there looking down the length of the bed, it really looked like my body ended at my hips. From there on, the bed covers were smooth and flat. When they told me I could get up while they lighted the scene, I said, “No, I’ll just stay here until you’re ready to shoot.”