REAGAN: THE HOLLYWOOD YEARS
Marc Eliot
Harmony Books
Biography
ISBN: 9780307405128
Ronald Reagan was a self-created man, a one-off legend of the 20th century. In this book we see that he was self-created many times and, true to his aw-shucks cowboy style, always attributed each re-creation to The Big Guy looking out for him. It was a style he learned in Hollywood where, after many Grade-B hero roles, he became the man in the white hat.
Reagan was born to a modest family in 1913 and early on received the nickname “Dutch,” which stuck with him ever after. He finished college with modest athletic accomplishments, had the usual disappointments and successes in love, and lucked into a job as a radio sportscaster. His mellifluous, calm vocal style became his saving grace. On a chance trip to California with the Chicago Cubs, he met a hopeful starlet who, for reasons known only to herself, tipped her agent that Ronnie would be a likely movie prospect. His first screen test confirmed that he was handsome enough to be a sidekick but not a leading man, and his bland acting style convinced Jack Warner that "the natural 'all American good guy' he projected on-screen could very well be worth his weight in box-office gold."
Reagan never appeared in the great films of his day. He was always consigned to pictures that just didn't quite come off. He enjoyed westerns and war movies, loved horses, and used his first big paycheck to move his parents to California. While he made movies, he made most of his leading ladies. He married Jane Wyman, convinced that her success and his were linked, but she kept on rising while his career remained in the doldrums. Then she strayed and he strayed, and he started his obsessive round of dating again, until he ran into the indomitable Nancy Davis, who had only one thing on her mind: to wed and mold the handsome, laid-back dreamy guy who once declared he was "too lazy" to get angry.
Initially their union was hardly a recipe for immediate worldly satisfactions; Reagan went just about broke and Nancy chafed at being a stepmother and mother instead of a career woman. However, Reagan still had backers, and his role as President of the Screen Actors Guild. It turned out that being cast in B-movies wasn't all that bad when those award-winning Hollywood greats found their own careers on the skids during the McCarthy era, while the soft-spoken, steely-eyed Ronnie Reagan stayed clean and clear. His SAG office gave him a bully pulpit from which to make highly memorable pronouncements about political issues, and from there, he began to get work as a speechmaker. Ultimately, he outshone the first candidate he chose to support, Barry Goldwater, by composing and delivering the most remembered speech of Goldwater's campaign, "A Time for Choosing." The rest, of course, is American political history.
In this well-paced, fully-packed bio, Marc Eliot, author of CARY GRANT and JIMMY STEWART, has pulled back the curtain on the young, restless Ronnie Reagan and his early shenanigans. To the frustration of his many detractors, Reagan is here revealed as someone who never did much bad stuff and actually took a few tough stands, but always with the solid backing of his buddies, film moguls Jack Warner and especially Lew Wasserman, who could be said to have pulled Reagan's strings throughout his years in Hollywood. Thanks to a deal struck through the machinations of Wasserman, Dutch came out looking like the man responsible for negotiating residual payments to movie actors for replays of their work in the new medium of television.
If the real facts were a little seedier and the deal a little more backroom, well, so be it. From situations like those, Ronald Reagan learned the hands-on work of politics --- lessons he would carry with him to the highest office in the land, along with his sincere gaze and that gentle yet fatherly voice.
--- Reviewed by Barbara Bamberger Scott
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