Ronnie and Nancy (29 page)

Japan surrendered on August 14, 1945, and Reagan was released from active duty later that month, although he was not officially discharged until December 9.57 “By the time I got out of the Army Air Corps,” he would later write, “all I wanted to do—in common with several million other veterans—was to rest up awhile, make love to my wife, and come up refreshed to a better job in an ideal world. (As it came out, I was disappointed in all these postwar ambitions.)”58

Reagan had every reason to be optimistic. The victorious Allied Powers were in the process of setting up the United Nations, Lew Wasserman had a seven-year, million-dollar contract from Warners ready for him to sign, and Jane and Maureen were waiting at home with an adopted baby boy named Michael Edward Reagan. What’s more, he was now looking at the world through contact lenses and, as cumbersome as they were, he found them preferable to the options he’d had since age thirteen—thick glasses or extreme myopia.59

With his uncommon ability to be sentimental and elegant at the same time, Reagan writes in his memoir: “Michael came to us in March of 1945—closer than a son; he wasn’t born unasked, we chose him.”60 The legal arrangements had been handled by Betty Kaplan, one of Jane’s bridesmaids, and her lawyer husband, Arthur; on March 18 they delivered the infant to the Reagan house, where Lew and Edie Wasserman were keeping the new parents company. Michael had been born three days earlier to a twenty-eight-year-old would-be actress from Kentucky who had had a wartime fling with a married Army Air Corps man. Jane had gone to meet her first in the hospital.61

Modern Screen
reported, “In a world where there are many children who never have proper care or love and who never know real home life, Jane thinks it is important for people like herself and Ronnie to add, from the outside, to their family—and then to regard the newcomer as flesh of their flesh, bone of their bone.”62 The family would later say that four-year-old Maureen had wanted a baby brother so badly that she tried to buy one on a shopping trip to the toy department of Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills with her father, and that when Michael was brought home, she ran to her 1 6 2

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House room to get her piggy bank and gave her entire savings, 97 cents, to a woman from the adoption agency who had presumably accompanied the Kaplans.63

In her 1989 memoir,
First Father, First Daughter
, the late Maureen Reagan wrote, “It’s always been my understanding that my parents didn’t think they could have any more children naturally. I’ve also sensed that my mother didn’t want to go through the pain and suffering of childbirth again, not after what I’d put her through. She can tell you the most adorned story of the day I was born—right down to what she was wearing when she went into labor and how much pain she endured throughout.

You can hear every minute of eight and a half hours of agonizing labor, and a minute and a half about me. That’s my mother.”64

Reagan’s new contract, guaranteeing him $3,500 a week whether he worked or not, went into effect on September 12, and Jack Warner told him, “Just relax until we find a good property for you.”65 He spent his first weeks out of uniform in a rented house at nearby Lake Arrowhead, where Jane, on loan to MGM, was filming
The Yearling.
Her career was about to ignite:
Lost
Weekend
opened that fall to rave reviews, and
The Yearling
, a big-budget Technicolor drama co-starring Gregory Peck, would win her an Oscar nomination the following year. While “Nanny” Banner, their Scottish governess, took care of the children, Ronnie spent his days speed-boating around the lake and building models of ships.66

Decades later, Neil Reagan would complain that he, and not his former lifeguard brother, had to teach little Maureen how to swim.67 Maureen, however, recalled her father as an attentive parent: telling her stories about growing up in Illinois and reading her fairy tales at bedtime; acting out her favorite poem, Robert Service’s “The Shooting of Dan McGrew”; doing vaudeville routines with her when they had company. Both parents, noted Maureen, “encouraged me to be independent. One of [my mother’s] favorite expressions was, ‘If I get hit by a Mack truck tomorrow, you’ll have to take care of yourself.’ At four I had the dubious distinction of being the only kid on the block who knew what a Mack truck was.” She also noticed that her mother tended to become more involved in her roles than her father did in his: “When she was doing Ma Baxter in
The Yearling
, we hardly saw her smile for six months. No exaggeration. She was this earth-mother-dirt-farmer-starving-to-death-type person every hour of the day.”68

Jane “would come through the door thinking about her part,” Reagan
Ronnie and Jane: 1941–1946

1 6 3

later said of his wife at this time, “and not even notice I was in the room.”69

Jane Wyman explained to a reporter in 1948, “It was my biggest chance yet, and I was determined to make the most of it. I determined to act from the inside out, to disregard all surface effects, and delve into the character of a sturdy woman who endured hardship stoically and who concealed a deeply emotional nature under a frosty, pragmatic exterior. I meditated on the role at great length; I wanted to get to the bottom of this woman’s psyche. And in doing so, I dredged up all the early hardship and disappointments in my own life, looking constantly for some points of reference that would link our respective inner schemes.”70

By the time Jane finished shooting
The Yearling
, in January 1946, Warner Bros. still hadn’t put her husband to work, and Ronnie could not have been happy to read in
Photoplay
: “Will there be room for both the male wartime and male peacetime stars in movies, Hollywood is asking? During the war an amazing number of men stars burst into being: Van Johnson, Peter Lawford, Robert Walker, Tom Drake, Cornel Wilde, Gregory Peck, John Hodiak, and many more. But already out of uniform or soon to don mufti again are such peacetime favorites as: Jimmy Stewart, Tyrone Power, Robert Montgomery, Henry Fonda, Clark Gable, Ronald Reagan, Lon McCallister, Donald O’Connor, Gene Kelly, Victor Mature, Wayne Morris, and many other golden boys.”71

Reagan’s first postwar picture,
Stallion Road
, did not begin shooting until April. A black-and-white melodrama co-starring Alexis Smith, this tale of a selfless veterinarian who gets the girl but contracts anthrax would prove noteworthy only for the fact that it led to the purchase of the first of four Reagan ranches. “I’d been a long time away from horses,” Reagan recalled, “and I desperately wanted to do my own riding and jumping.”72 An army friend, Oleg Cassini, the designer who would dress Jacqueline Kennedy in the White House, introduced Reagan to Count Nino Pepitone, who impressed him because he had been an officer in the famously stylish Italian cavalry. Reagan hired Pepitone as his riding coach, and when shooting was finished on
Stallion Road
that summer, they decided to go into racehorse breeding together. Reagan bought an eight-acre ranch at Northridge in the San Fernando Valley, then still largely agricultural, which Pepitone and his wife managed for him.

“Nino was amazed to discover that my idea of fun was to do what needed to be done, myself,” Reagan wrote. “This included building paddock 1 6 4

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House fences—even a quarter-mile track with the inner rail posts slanted at the proper angle and every post hole dug by hand, by me.”73 Ronnie named the Northridge ranch Yearling Row, for
The Yearling
, which won Jane raves when it opened at the end of the year, and
Kings Row
, his biggest screen success.

“Meanwhile I was blindly and busily joining every organization I could find that would guarantee to save the world,” he would write of this crucial transition period in both his personal and professional life, when his movie work “at times seemed to be a sideline, what with everything else that was happening.”74 Whether he realized it or not at the time, during these years Reagan was launching his third successful career—after radio announcer and movie star—as a political activist and industry spokesman. “I found him totally changed after the war,” recalled producer Frank McCarthy. “He had gotten so serious, to the point that he was talking about the world and politics all the time. People started listening to him at parties.”75

In June 1946 he was approached to run for Congress again—this time as a Democrat. “Heck, I couldn’t do that,” he told the
Los Angeles Times
.

“If I did, I’d be the subject of criticism as a politician. I couldn’t go around making speeches without feeling I was doing it for self-glorification. No, I don’t want to have any ax to grind.”76 Wyman was quoted in another paper: “They wanted him to run for Congress. He’s very politically minded.

I’m not.”77

Reagan’s postwar political activities began the day after he left Fort Roach in late August 1945, when he won a seat on the board of the Hollywood chapter of the American Veterans Committee. The newly formed AVC’s high-minded internationalism stood in contrast to the raw anti-Communism of such traditional organizations as the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and it enlisted such notables as Franklin D.

Roosevelt Jr., theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, cartoonist Bill Mauldin, and Audie Murphy, the most decorated American soldier of World War II.

Even General Eisenhower was an early supporter.78

“I myself observed more than forty veterans’ organizations arise,”

Reagan later wrote. “[M]ost of them seemed to be highly intolerant of color, creed and common sense. I joined the American Veterans Committee because of their feeling that the members should be citizens first and veterans afterward—and, as it worked out, I became a large wheel in their operations.”79 The Hollywood chapter was the second largest of
Ronnie and Jane: 1941–1946

1 6 5

some seven hundred chapters; as chairman of its membership committee, Reagan personally enrolled at least one tenth of its two thousand members.80

Reagan also stepped up his involvement in the Hollywood Democratic Committee, which continued to wield considerable clout in California politics after the impressive role it had played in Roosevelt’s 1944 reelection. In early 1946, the HDC merged with its New York counterpart, the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions (ICCASP), and became its Hollywood affiliate, known as HICCASP. Harold Ickes was named executive chairman of the combined organization, and FDR’s Hollywood-based son, James Roosevelt, became executive director of HICCASP. George Pepper, who had run the HDC, became the executive secretary of HICCASP. By mid-year, “3,300 professional exhibitionists,” as
Time
dubbed the Hollywood contingent, stood beside Albert Einstein and sociol-ogist Max Weber in support of both legitimate progressive issues, such as repeal of the poll tax, and hidden Communist party-line positions, such as transferring control of America’s atomic weapons to the United Nations.81

“In the old days,”
Time
noted, “a motion picture star had needed nothing but a white Duesenberg and 175 suits to round himself out socially. In the words of Dorothy Parker, there was no ‘ism’ in Hollywood but plagia-rism. But modern studio life has become much more complicated. Today few stars, male or female, would be caught dead at a commissary lunch table without a Cause. Most of them, horrified at the thought of being considered bloated capitalists, favor leftish causes of one kind or another.”

Edward G. Robinson told the magazine he belonged to HICCASP “because the atom bomb, when it exploded over Hiroshima, blew up every ivory tower in the world.” Humphrey Bogart signed up “because I believe in the principles promulgated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”82

Reagan became one of the most active stars working the “rubber-chicken and glass-tinkling circuits” on behalf of the AVC and HICCASP. “It fed my ego,” he said, “since I had been so long away from the screen. I loved it.”83

He started wearing his glasses again for these public speeches—an indication of how seriously he took his new role. His first speech, at Santa Ana on December 8, 1945, was to promote racial harmony by honoring Japanese-American veterans. In four brief lines, he displayed his innate idealism with eloquence: “The blood that has soaked into the sands of the beaches is all one color. America stands unique in the world—a country not founded on race, but on a way and an ideal. Not in spite of, but because of our polyglot 1 6 6

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House background, we have had all the strength in the world. That is the American way.”84

Two nights later, at an opening dinner for HICCASP’s conference on

“Atomic Power and Foreign Policy,” Reagan’s reading of “Set Your Clocks at U-235,” a Norman Corwin poem warning of the danger of nuclear annihi-lation and calling for world unity, was followed by speeches by Congress-woman Helen Gahagan Douglas, Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley, and novelist Thomas Mann.85 During the winter and spring of 1946, Reagan delivered speeches and wrote articles on the necessity of international cooperation, the promotion of racial and religious tolerance, and the threat of a neo-Fascist conspiracy to keep the world divided and unstable.

In an article for the
A.V.C. Bulletin
of February 15, 1946, he lambasted the American Order of Patriots, a whites-only veterans organization, and the anti-Semitic demagogue Gerald L. K. Smith as “home-grown fascists”

intent on installing “a strongman government in America” and starting World War III. He ended: “I think the A.V.C. can be a key organization in the preservation of democracy for which 300,000 Americans died, and because I have attacked the extreme right does not mean I am ignorant of the menace of the complete left. They, too, want to force something unwanted on the American people, and the fact that many of them go along with those of us who are liberal means nothing because they are only hitching a ride as far as we go, hoping they can use us as a vehicle for their own program.”86

Yet later that month, along with Gregory Peck, bandleader Artie Shaw, and director Edward Dmytryk, he lent his name to an anti-colonialist ad taken by the Los Angeles Committee for a Democratic Far Eastern Policy in the
People’s Daily World
, a local Communist Party newspaper.87 After giving a speech to the men’s club of the Hollywood-Beverly Christian Church, he was approached by the pastor, Reverend Cleveland Kleihauer.