Reagan: The Life (6 page)

And they broadcast ever more sports. The bigger stations reached larger audiences and commanded higher fees for advertisements; these fees supported bigger staffs that could cover events previously ignored. Reagan’s new employer sent him to football games, baseball games, automobile races, track meets, and swimming championships.

Yet the budget wasn’t boundless, and he sometimes announced games
from a distance. His station would arrange for telegraphic summaries to be wired to the station from the ballpark where the Chicago Cubs or White Sox were playing. A telegraph operator at the station would pass the summaries to Reagan, who would convert them into a narrative. The numbers “6-4-3” meant a double play from the shortstop to the second baseman to the first baseman. Reagan would relate how the batter Jones hit a sharp grounder or a high hopper to Smith at shortstop, who would field it cleanly or perhaps bobble it a moment before tossing it to Murphy at second, who would leap over the sliding runner from first, Young, while firing it to the first baseman, Greenberg, who would stretch to catch it just in time to nip Jones barreling down the first-base line.

The system left ample scope for Reagan’s imagination, especially when technical malfunctions occurred. “
One summer’s day—and this is a story that I’ve probably repeated more times in my life than any other—my imagination was tested to its maximum,” he remembered. “The Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals were locked in a scoreless ninth-inning tie with Dizzy Dean on the mound and the Cubs’ Billy Jurges at bat. I described Dean winding up and releasing his pitch. Then Curly, our telegraph operator, shook his head and passed me a slip of paper, and I looked for a description of the pitch. Instead his note read, ‘The wire’s gone dead.’ Well, since I had the ball on the way to the plate I had to get it there. Although I could have told our listeners that the wire had gone dead, it would have sent them rushing toward their dials and a competitor. So I decided to let Jurges foul off the pitch, figuring Western Union would soon fix the problem. To fill in some time, I described a couple of kids in the stands fighting over the foul ball. When Curly gestured that the wire was still dead, I had Jurges foul off another ball; I slowed Dean down, had him pick up the resin bag and take a sign, shake it off, get another sign, and let him pitch; I said he’d fouled off another one, but this time he’d just missed a home run by only a few inches.” Eventually, the wire came alive again, but not before Reagan’s Jurges had fouled off a record number of pitches. Then he popped out.

How many of Reagan’s listeners were actually fooled by his performances is impossible to say. His wasn’t the only radio station that made do with the telegraphic hookups, which were common across the country during the 1930s and for years after. Nor was Reagan the only announcer to fill dead time with faux fouls and spurious pitches. Other announcers added sound effects: toy bats hitting marbles to re-create the crack of bat against ball, recorded cheers for crowd noise, canned organ music for the
seventh-inning stretch, even sheets of metal to provide rumbles of thunder for rain delays. What captured and held listeners wasn’t so much the game at the actual ballpark as the story the announcer crafted around it. Reagan’s audience didn’t care that he couldn’t see the game as long as he spun a good yarn that let
them
see it, in their minds’ eyes. He did, and they kept tuned in.

Y
ET
R
EAGAN WANTED
more. He always wanted more. Even as it honed his skill at spinning stories, radio whetted Reagan’s appetite for the larger audiences of movies. He worked at the Des Moines station for four years, but as time passed, he plotted his escape to the silver screen. He talked his bosses into sending him to Southern California in 1935 to cover spring training of the Chicago Cubs; to offset the cost, he agreed to count the trip as his annual vacation. He hoped to visit Hollywood while in the area and discover what he could about the magical place where movies were made. Maybe the magic would touch him.

He told no one about this ulterior part of his plan. And during his first trip to California, little came of it. Catalina Island, where the Cubs held their training camp, was farther from Hollywood than he had thought, and the journey by ferry and streetcar wasn’t convenient. Nor did anything of substance emerge on his second trip, in the spring of 1936. But on his third visit, in April 1937, he got help from the weather. A storm system sat over Southern California, canceling baseball and giving the reporters covering the team time off. Reagan took the opportunity to go to Los Angeles and visit the Biltmore Hotel. He had the name of a woman
who had worked at WHO before he arrived and who had left the station to have a try at Hollywood. She hadn’t caught on in movies yet, beyond bit parts, but she had landed a gig singing with a band that played the Biltmore. Reagan took in one of the shows and sent her a message inviting her to meet him afterward.

Her name was
Joy Hodges and she was happy to see a fellow midwesterner. He brought greetings from mutual friends; they swapped reminis
cences of Iowa. Eventually, he screwed up his courage and admitted he had a secret wish to break into movies.

He was wearing the glasses he regularly wore to correct his nearsightedness. She told him to take them off. Movie actors didn’t wear glasses, at least not on-screen. She looked him over and decided he might do. She said she had an agent who was looking for clients. Reagan said he’d love to meet the man.

The next morning she called Reagan and said she had set up an appointment. Reagan arrived for the ten o’clock meeting without his glasses; he felt his way through the receptionist’s office to his meeting with
Bill Meiklejohn. He described his experience acting onstage and broadcasting on radio, exaggerating where he thought he could get away with it. Meiklejohn doubtless discounted the description but liked the new fellow’s appearance sufficiently to call
Warner Brothers. “
Max,” he told
Max Arnow, a casting director at the studio, “I have another Robert Taylor sitting in my office.”

Arnow heard such statements from agents every day. “God made only one Robert Taylor,” he replied, loud enough for Reagan to hear. But the studios were always looking for new talent and fresh faces, and he told Meiklejohn to bring Reagan over.

They took Meiklejohn’s car, and Reagan soon found himself sitting in front of Arnow. After they were introduced, Arnow asked, “Is that your real voice?” Reagan thought the question strange but replied that it was. Arnow didn’t elaborate, but Reagan learned afterward that he sounded like an actor who had worked for Warner Brothers and recently died.

Arnow sized Reagan up while Meiklejohn preached his virtues. Arnow agreed to give Reagan a screen test. He handed him a few pages from the script of
The Philadelphia Story
and told him to memorize them and wait for a call.

Reagan couldn’t believe his swift good fortune. He took the script to Catalina, where he found he couldn’t concentrate on his baseball reporting. He returned to the mainland by ferry several days later and reported to the studio. The screen test lasted but a few minutes. Reagan exchanged lines with a young actress brought in for the purpose and then was dismissed.

The next day Arnow called Meiklejohn and said the test had gone well enough that he wanted to show it to
Jack Warner, the head of the studio. But Warner was busy and might not be able to look at it for a couple of weeks. Reagan should sit tight.

Reagan was hopeful but not unrealistic. Amid the continuing depression, he couldn’t afford to jeopardize his radio job on the chance Warner might like him. He said the Cubs were breaking camp and heading to Chicago; he had to be on the eastbound train with them.

Reagan only later reflected that his apparent nonchalance about an acting career might have served him well. “I didn’t realize that Hollywood was a place where everyone knocked down the doors trying to get in, and they weren’t used to someone telling them that he had another job and couldn’t wait around. It must have intrigued them a little.” At the time he thought he might have ruined his one chance of fame. “I said to myself, ‘What a damn fool.’ ”

And so when, two days after arriving back in Des Moines, he received a telegram from Meiklejohn, he was stunned. “Warner offers contract seven years,” it said. “One year option. Starting $200 a week. What shall I do?”

Reagan replied at once: “Sign before they change their minds.”

J
ACK
W
ARNER DIDN
’
T
change his mind easily. He didn’t do much of anything easily, because nothing in life had come easily to him. A son of Polish Jews who had fled pogroms in the Russian Empire, Warner grew up hearing stories of Cossacks raiding the shtetlach and burning houses and raping women and girls. He spent his boyhood in Youngstown, Ohio, where Mafia mobsters and labor thugs broke heads and slit throats for profit and influence. He gravitated to vaudeville to escape the gang life of the steel town, performing onstage until his elder brother Sam persuaded him to move to the production side of the business, where the money was. He and Sam got into movies just after the turn of the twentieth century, showing early films in makeshift theaters around Ohio and Pennsylvania. In time they turned to film production. But this threw them athwart Thomas Edison’s movie trust, which controlled most production on the East Coast, and they decided to relocate west. Jack planted the family flag on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood as the Roaring Twenties were beginning, and the Warner Brothers studio—Sam and Jack were joined by Harry and Albert—rode the rising tide of consumer spending and technological improvement in the years that followed.

The studio’s first star was a dog, a German shepherd named
Rin Tin Tin who drew huge audiences into the theaters to watch his canine heroics.
Jack Warner dubbed Rin Tin Tin the “
mortgage lifter” for his ability to
erase debts the studio and its affiliates incurred. Warner liked the canine better than he liked most human actors. “He didn’t ask for a raise or a new press agent or an air-conditioned dressing room or more close-ups,” he said. In fact Rin Tin Tin got a raise, to $1,000 per week; he also acquired doubles to relieve him of the most onerous and dangerous stunts.

But he didn’t survive the shift from silent films to movies with sound tracks, not at Warner at any rate.
Sam Warner persuaded his brothers to purchase a technology that allowed the attachment of sound recordings to film. The initial appeal was that sound would permit theaters to dispense with the orchestras that played accompaniment to otherwise silent films. When Sam suggested that the technology could also record actors’ voices, Harry snorted, “
Who the hell wants to hear actors talk? The music—that’s the big plus about this.” The studio produced
The Jazz Singer
in 1927; the film contained orchestral music, singing, and only a few lines of spoken dialogue. But it was the talking that captivated audiences and shortly rendered silent films obsolete. Rin Tin Tin received his walking papers. “
The making of any animal pictures, such as we have in the past with Rin Tin Tin,” the studio informed its erstwhile star, through his master and agent, “is not in keeping with the policy that has been adopted by us for talking pictures, very obviously of course because dogs don’t talk.”

Rin Tin Tin caught on with a different studio, which was more than could be said for some other silent-film stars, who lacked voices for the talkies and couldn’t even bark. Jack Warner and the rest of the industry learned that voices counted a great deal in the new films, a fact that worked in Ronald Reagan’s favor when his radio-trained voice recorded well in his screen test. Meanwhile, the Warner brothers elbowed their way forward, until their firm became one of the five major Hollywood studios.

And the one that took the grittiest view of life. The leading brand in Hollywood belonged to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the movie conglomerate headed by
Louis B. Mayer, who consorted with the Southern California establishment and upheld the conservative business virtues personified by
Herbert Hoover, California’s gift to America, as it seemed in those pre-depression days. Mayer dined at the Hoover White House and benefited from the tax cuts implemented by the Republican administrations of the 1920s.

Jack Warner was, in many ways, the self-conscious opposite of Mayer. Warner applauded Franklin Roosevelt and the
New Deal, and his studio shot movies that showed the seamier side of American life. Gangster
films became a Warner Brothers staple;
James Cagney was Jack Warner’s personal discovery. Keepers of the American conscience chided Warner Brothers for touring the gutter;
Harry Warner defended their films by saying, “
The motion picture presents right and wrong, as the Bible does. By showing both right and wrong, we teach the right.”

R
EAGAN HELPED
. He headed for Hollywood in May 1937 in a used Nash convertible packed with nearly all his earthly possessions. His journey recapitulated the trek Americans had been making since the days of the California
gold rush; the West had long been the land of opportunity, the glittering destination of the American dream. Hollywood was simply its latest incarnation. Reagan stopped at the Biltmore to thank
Joy Hodges for her part in opening opportunity’s door, and he presented himself, a week early, at the Warner Brothers studio.

His reception took him aback. “
Where in hell did you get that coat?”
Max Arnow demanded. Reagan had had the white sport jacket specially tailored; he admired it very much. “You can’t wear that outfit,” Arnow snorted. “The shoulders are too big—they make your head look too small.” Arnow called in an aide. “Take him over to wardrobe and see what the tailor can do with this outfit. He looks like a Filipino.” The tailor sliced and reconfigured Reagan’s jacket, narrowing the shoulders and fitting it closer to his chest. He ordered special shirts with custom collars to make Reagan’s neck, judged too short, look longer.