Such fears were nothing new for Reagan: in another instance during this period, the bus he was scheduled to ride through studio picket lines was bombed and burned just before he boarded. As a result of such episodes, police began guarding Reagan’s home and children, and he began packing a Smith & Wesson revolver, which he took to bed each night.4 For the first of innumerable times throughout his very public life, from Hollywood to Sacramento to Washington, Reagan started receiving death threats.5 Reagan would always remain a nice guy, but now he was chastened—a warrior, a Cold Warrior. From then on, he was in the ring.
THE SCREEN ACTORS GUILD
When Ronald Reagan arrived in Hollywood in 1937, Communism was not the first thing on his mind. After his success at the lifeguard stand, he embarked on an equally successful career in radio, becoming a broadcaster of Chicago Cubs games from the 50,000-watt WHO, the NBC affiliate in Des Moines, Iowa. Here he was no longer calling out to absent-minded swimmers; instead, his voice could be heard in kitchen after kitchen, barn after barn, and car after car throughout middle America during the Great Depression. As the Depression came to a close, Dutch began looking for a new challenge, seeking to change mediums and parlay his radio experience into something much grander—a career in the movies. While many people labored for years to make this transition, Reagan’s intrinsic confidence apparently told him that such a career shift would be neither impossible nor long in the making.
Indeed his instincts proved correct and between 1937 and 1964 he would take part in fifty-three films and work with some of the most legendary names in Hollywood—names like Barbara Stanwyck, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, John Wayne, Lionel Barrymore, Ginger Rogers, Doris Day, and Eddie Arnold, among many others. In Knute Rockne, All-American (1940), he beat out Wayne and William Holden for the part of Gipp.6 That same year, he made Santa Fe Trail with Errol Flynn, a picture now considered a classic, with a lineup that included Olivia de Havilland, a huge star coming off the previous year’s epic, Gone With the Wind, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award. Contrary to the modern image of him as a “B” movie actor, at one point Reagan was one of the top five box office draws in all of Hollywood, receiving more fan mail than any actor at Warner Brothers except Flynn.7 He became so successful that in October 1944 he made the cover of Modern Screen magazine.8
“I only recall respect for him as an actor,” remembered actress Judith Anderson, in a typical assessment.9 Film historian Robert Osborne, the face of Turner Classic Movies, says Reagan was “exceptionally likeable,” had all the ingredients required of a leading man in the 1930s and 1940s, and had won “worldwide recognition.”10 This had the important, wider effect of expanding Reagan’s self-confidence.
Although his star was eventually outshone by many of his industry counterparts, Reagan became revered throughout Hollywood more for his role in SAG than for any part that he played on camera. “Revered” is not a stretch: In one SAG event honoring him, a black-tie gathering at the Friars Club, a procession of dignitaries one by one praised Reagan for the “stature and dignity” he lent to the industry. Cecil B. DeMille reminded the group of the bad preReagan days of Hollywood. Pat O’Brien saluted him as no less than another George Gipp himself. Really piling it on, the great Al Jolson sang “Sonny Boy” and wished and gushed that his own sonny boy, Al Jolson, Jr., could one day ascend “to be the kind of man Ronnie is.”11
In the end, much of what Reagan eventually accomplished in Hollywood came from his organizing SAG, a natural extension of his deep interest in politics. Spurred in part by his role in short propaganda films that he made for the U.S. War Department during World War II, this interest grew into a passion during the years immediately following the war. By 1946 and 1947, Reagan began a career juggling act, bouncing back and forth between making pictures, political activism, and union work. His effectiveness as SAG president can be measured objectively: he was reelected to the post seven times beginning in March 1947, by huge margins. He was never rejected, and eventually granted a gold life membership card.12
While Reagan had many responsibilities as SAG president, movies and studio contracts were only half of the Hollywood coin for Reagan, as it was during this time that he was hammered into an iron-clad anti-Communist. Despite the guise of entertainment and glamour, these crucial years had an immeasurable impact on his view of international Communism and America’s responsibility to confront it. His presidency with SAG planted seeds that would come to fruition four decades later. “I know it sounds kind of foolish maybe to link Hollywood, an experience there, to the world situation,” he said from the White House in 1981, “and yet, the tactics seemed to be pretty much the same.”13 When aide Lyn Nofziger cautioned him about the Soviets at Reykjavik, he responded: “Don’t worry. I still have the scars on my back from fighting the Communists in Hollywood.”14 He judged his Hollywood experience “hand-to-hand combat.”15
One of his first scrapes came July 2, 1946, at his first council meeting of the Hollywood organization HICCASP, a group which had moved so far to the left, and included so many Communists, that it was frequently accused of being a Communist front. Though Reagan’s involvement with HICCASP started as early as 1944, he later admitted that he was very “naïve” regarding its true colors when he first began his association. Those true colors were made remarkably clear during that July day in 1946. It was then that group member James Roosevelt, FDR’s son and, like Reagan, a non-Communist liberal, suggested a group statement repudiating Communism. By Reagan’s description, “a Kilkenny brawl” erupted. Musician Artie Shaw sprang to his feet, offering to recite the Soviet constitution by memory, which he claimed was “a lot more democratic” than the U.S. Constitution. A writer yelled that if there were ever a war between the United States and USSR, he would volunteer for the Soviets. When Reagan endorsed Roosevelt’s proposal, he was showered with epithets, called a fascist, “capitalist scum,” “witch-hunter,” “red-baiter,” an “enemy of the proletariat.”16
This fracas was not unusual for Reagan, who found himself in a number of similar situations in 1946. Actor Sterling Hayden vividly remembered one such occasion, when he went head-to-head with Reagan. Hayden, who played the Air Force general who launched nuclear war in “Dr. Strangelove,” had been a marine in World War II, for which he was decorated for his actions parachuting behind enemy lines in Yugoslavia.
He was also a Communist.
One evening in 1946, Reagan, along with fellow actor and anti-Communist William Holden, decided to crash a meeting convened by Hollywood Communists who were making a final push to organize the film industry. The Reds were counting on new recruit Hayden to lead the discussion, and this was to be a big moment for the organization.
The crowd of about seventy-five was “astonished and miffed” when Reagan and Holden walked through the door. Reagan sat with the rest of the gathered, listened politely, and then waited for the right moment to ask for the floor. He managed to keep his temper during a forty-minute presentation in which he was repeatedly interrupted, booed, and cursed. He would not be bullied, and held forth.
As Hayden himself later put it, Reagan coolly “showed up and took over and ground [Hayden] into a pulp;…he dominated the whole thing.” As historians Ronald and Allis Radosh show, this seemingly somewhat minor incident was a seminal moment in helping to end the “golden era” of Hollywood Communists, who were unable to hijack the unions and were ultimately exposed as stooges to Moscow.17