Reagan: His Life and Legend (2024) by Max Boot

Heading out West, Ronald Reagan was joining one of the largest population migrations in American history. Between 1935 and 1938, roughly a quarter of a million people fleeing drought and dust would pack up all their belongings and relocate to California. But, unlike the destitute and desperate Okies, Reagan was joining one of the most influential, fabled industries in the entire country—and one of the few to stage an economic rebound by the late 1930s. The movie studios had been battered by the Great Depression but had recovered faster than most other sectors. By 1936, average weekly attendance was up to eighty-eight million people a week, a new high, as moviegoers flocked to these “dream palaces” to escape the misery of their lives. By 1939, the nation had more theaters (15,115) than banks (14,952), and Hollywood was producing 80 percent of all motion pictures in the world. Louis B. Mayer—head of the most successful studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)—was the highest-paid executive in the country, with an annual salary of $1.3 million. This era would later be acclaimed as the Golden Age of Hollywood, with 1939 dubbed the “Greatest Year in Motion Pictures.” Even movies that seemed to have nothing to do with the Depression offered much-needed psychological balm to audiences of the 1930s. As noted by cultural critic Morris Dickstein, The Wizard of Oz included “plaintive longing for something better, that place at the end of the Yellow Brick Road,” while Gone with the Wind reminded viewers that, however much adversity they faced, “tomorrow is another day.” Hollywood’s cultural cachet was immense: Tens of millions of Americans learned how they were supposed to look and behave while watching flickering images in the dark. 

Hortense Powdermaker, the first anthropologist to study the industry, wrote in 1950, “The star is not only an actor, but one of the gods or folk heroes in our society.” Yet the stars, while objects of veneration for the moviegoing masses, were, like millions of Americans in other fields, simply salaried employees. The studio bosses, who would do so much to shape American culture, were themselves outsiders who were looked down upon by the Los Angeles business elite. Because so many of them were either Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe or just one generation removed from the proverbial shtetl, they were denied entry to L.A.’s country clubs and so created their own in the Hillcrest Country Club. As Neal Gabler wrote in his magisterial history An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, the Hollywood Jews would help fabricate on the screen an imagined, idealized country “where fathers were strong, families stable, people attractive, resilient, resourceful, and decent.” The Warner brothers were unusual among the Hollywood moguls in backing Franklin D. Roosevelt early on, although they reverted to the Republican fold in 1936 when Alf Landon challenged FDR, and many of their pictures displayed a New Deal sensibility. Warner Brothers would be the first studio to produce an anti-Nazi picture: Confessions of a Nazi Spy in 1939. 

But they also made frothy Busby Berkeley musicals such as 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933, notable for their surrealism and sensuality, and exciting Errol Flynn swashbucklers, such as Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood. In 1940 another demanding star would join the Warner Brothers roster: Bugs Bunny. Overseeing this assembly line of dreams were Harry Warner, the company’s genteel president based in New York, and his younger, more vulgar brother Jack L. Warner, the vice president and production chief in Los Angeles. The two men loathed each other. Harry once chased Jack around the studio lot with a lead pipe, screaming “I’ll kill you, you son of a bitch,” and Harry’s widow later accused Jack of driving him to an early grave in 1958 by stealing the studio out from under him. They were, in fairness, very different personalities—Harry was kind and honest, a devout Jew, and a devoted family man. He stayed married to the mother of his three children, and there was never a hint of scandal around his life. Jack, by contrast, was irreligious, foul-mouthed, and hedonistic. He wagered large amounts of money in the casinos of the French Riviera and scandalized Harry by divorcing his first wife and marrying his pregnant mistress. Reagan expected a lot of ribbing because he was the new kid on the set, but he was pleasantly surprised to find what he imagined to be a supportive, small-town-like atmosphere. He wrote that “everyone has been helpful and friendly and I have yet to encounter the slightest trace of ill-will or jealousy among my fellow workers.” 

Dick Powell had wished luck to him on his first day on the Warners lot. Reagan was in awe not just of Hollywood but of the whole city of Los Angeles. It was already the nation’s fifth-largest metropolis, with more than 1.5 million residents, and growing fast. The architecture was a dizzying hodgepodge of styles very different from Dixon, Des Moines, or any other city. Middle-class residents lived in modest stucco bungalows or low-rise apartment houses, while movie stars, noted the journalist Margaret Talbot, built “imitation French chateaux, sprawling Spanish-style haciendas, columned replicas of stately plantation homes, Moorish castles with pointed arches.” Added to the air of unreality—many observers remarked that parts of Los Angeles looked like a movie set—some stores and restaurants were built to resemble the products they were selling. The original Brown Derby restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard, for example, was constructed in the shape of a big brown derby. The soundtrack to the city was provided, Talbot observed, by the nonstop “swish-swish of sprinklers” that kept lawns green in this desert-by-the-sea. William Demarest—a fatherly figure who was known for not putting the make on female clients—was just what Jayne Wyman was looking for in an agent. 

Ronald Reagan was just what she was looking for in a husband: a consummate gentleman who would treat her respectfully. As she later said, he was someone she could truly trust. Demarest said that, from Jane’s perspective, Ronnie was “the knight on the white charger. . . the dream of true, perfect manhood.” That Reagan and Wyman were spending time together was mainly her doing. “She did the chasing, and doesn’t give a hoot who knows it,” Modern Screen magazine reported. “She was the aggressor, the intent pursuer, from the start,” Demarest confirmed. Although younger than Reagan, “she was far more worldly and experienced than he was.” They first met when she asked him to sit at her table in the Warner Brothers commissary—reportedly giving him “the full benefit of her big brown eyes.” “I liked Ronnie the first time I ever saw him,” she recalled. “‘He is no fop,’ I thought.” She tried to convince the Warner publicity department to fix them up only to be told that each of them needed to date bigger names. The romance finally blossomed when they were on location in San Diego making their first movie together in July and August 1938. 

The noted film critic Richard Schickel, in an astute appraisal of Reagan’s acting, wrote that he did “his famous line in Kings Row unimprovably—anguish and panic in his voice, in his facial expression, in his thrashing movements under the covers. Hard to ask for anything more from any actor.” Schickel added that Reagan’s shortcomings as an actor were more evident earlier in the movie, before the amputation, when his character was still “a careless womanizer and ne’er-do-well heir to a small fortune.” “At this stage of the movie Drake McHugh is not a nice guy, and Reagan is visibly uncomfortable, straining, in these passages,” Schickel noted. “He does not exhibit the born actor’s relish at playing a heel. Instead, he exhibits the born public figure’s discomfort at being mistaken for one. He has no enough technique to help him get under the character’s skin or to distract us from his own discomfort.” Being a nice guy himself, Reagan was only comfortable playing nice guys on the screen. Reagan’s inability or unwillingness to play parts far removed from his own personality would eventually help bring his Hollywood career to a premature and inglorious end. 

But in 1942 Reagan was still on the ascent in Hollywood. He received the best reviews of his career for Kings Row, and it was nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Dark Victory also was nominated for three Oscars, including Best Picture, but, like Kings Row, did not win any. The New Yorker wrote that watching Kings Row “will give you that rare glow that comes from seeing a job done crisply, competently, and with confidence.” Reagan, the magazine added, “capably breezes through the part of the town sport who becomes a victim of Dr. Gordon.” The Des Moines Tribune was even more effusive, pronouncing that “Des Moines’ own Dutch Reagan is swell as the rich kid gone to pot.” Once it was released in 1942, Kings Row catapulted the boy from Dixon onto the Hollywood A list. By the middle of 1941, a Gallup survey ranked Reagan among the top one hundred stars in the movie industry. A 1942 survey found him tied for seventy-fourth place with Laurence Olivier, and he was receiving more fan mail than any Warner Brothers actor except Errol Flynn. Reagan, a Warner executive wrote in an internal evaluation, was “a very talented artist who had started at a meager salary of $200 per week and rapidly developed in artistic ability and box office value until he was assigned to top productions . . . and was undoubtedly a star in his own right.” Those who would in later life denigrate him as merely a B-movie actor—an accusation that would generally be accompanied by a chuckle and a mention of Bedtime for Bonzo (1951)—were not quite being fair. For one brief, shining moment, before America’s entry into the war, Reagan had become an A-list star. Then, on December 7, 1941, came the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The world would never be the same again—and neither would Ronald Reagan’s acting career. 

The Reagans had genuine financial concerns, but they were far removed from those of average Americans. They had just built a seven-room, so-called dream house in the Hollywood Hills modeled on one they had seen in This Thing Called Love, a 1940 romantic comedy with Rosalind Russell and Melvyn Douglas: truly a case of life imitating art. It had a magnificent view of the city and cost $15,000—not a lot by movie-industry standards but five times more than the median American home at the time. (In 2022, the extensively remodeled house at 9137 Cordell Drive would sell for $70 million.) Wyman, a free spender in her single days, had been deeply in debt. Now Ron, a stickler for paying bills before they were due, insisted on putting them on saving half of what they earned. Taxes took another big chunk of their income: The top marginal tax rate for couples filing jointly in 1941 with an income between $90,000 and $100,000 was 83 percent. So money was not flowing with typical film-colony abandon even before Ron’s military service would cut his monthly pay from $6,660 to $250. Reagan’s answer to the question of whether the Communist party should be legal was painstakingly noncommittal: "As a citizen I would hesitate, or not like, to see any political party outlawed on the basis of its political ideology. We have spent 170 years in this country on the basis that democracy is strong enough to stand up and fight against the inroads of any ideology. However, if it is proven that an organization is an agent of a foreign power, or in any way not a legitimate political party, and I think the Government is capable of proving that, if the proof is there, then that is another matter. I detest, I abhor the Communists’ philosophy, but I detest more than that their tactics, which are those of the fifth column, and are dishonest, but at the same time I never as a citizen want to see our country become urged, by either fear or resentment of this group, that we ever compromise with any of our democratic principles through that fear or resentment. I still think that democracy can do it." 

Reagan’s performance earned rave reviews. “Intelligent Ronald Reagan stole the show from his better known colleagues,” wrote a liberal columnist, Quentin Reynolds, adding, presciently, that the actor might “have a future beyond show business.” Ron was fascinated by politics, Jane bored by it. A glowing, but unintentionally revealing, profile in December 1946 reported Ron coming to the breakfast table eager to share the news of the world. “I’ve got news for you,” Jane pointedly replied. “I’m not interested.” The actress June Allyson, who was married to Reagan’s friend and fellow actor Dick Powell, later wrote that Jane “seemed upset with her husband’s obsession with politics”—and with his long-windedness. Don Siegel, who directed Reagan in Night unto Night, reported an even more scabrous put-down from Jane. One night, while they were all going to dinner together, Ron “spouted off endlessly” until Jane snapped at him: “Hey, ‘diarrhea-of-the-mouth,’ shut up! Maybe we can get in a word edgewise.” But, Siegel wrote, “Ron continued soliloquizing.” Shortly after the dour dinner with Ron on the Sunset Strip, Jane decided to head off for a vacation in New York—by herself. While there, she was tracked down by a gossip columnist. She told him that she was considering a separation from her husband: “There is no use in lying. I am not the happiest girl in the world.” At around the same time, she told a friend, “We’re through. We’re finished. And it’s all my fault.” 

And it was true that Jane Wyman had trouble staying married. Having been married twice before, after divorcing Reagan she twice married and twice divorced the same man: a handsome studio composer and bandleader named Frederick Karger. After her second divorce from Karger in 1965, Wyman stayed single for the final forty-two years of her life. “Some women just aren’t the marrying kind—or anyway, not the permanently marrying kind,” she later said, “and I’m one of them.” “What they do to food is what we did to the American Indian,” Reagan wrote in a jocular letter of complaint to Jack Warner during his stay in London filming The Hasty Heart with Patricia Neal. “The average meal should go from ‘kitchen to can’ thus avoiding the use of a middleman.” The actresses he was seen with included Betty Underwood (said by a magazine to have “one of the six best figures in America”), Doris Day, Ann Sothern, Monica Lewis, Adele Jergens, Rhonda Fleming, and Ruth Roman. Edmund Morris later counted “at least sixteen different young and beautiful actresses” that he dated during this period. One of the few non-actresses he went out with was the witty gossip columnist Doris Lilly, who in 1951 published How to Marry a Millionaire, which became a hit movie starring Marilyn Monroe, and who would be cited as the model for Holly Golightly in Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Many years later Lilly described Reagan as “truly the all-American boy, never a lothario,” and not a “come-on-strong type of man.” “He behaved himself beautifully,” she said. 

Piper Laurie: As filming progressed, Ronnie Reagan took an increasing interest in me. He began calling me into his dressing room when I passed the door. I was quite flattered by his attention. He’d invite me to sit down and ask how I was feeling about everything. Was I comfortable? Could he help me with anything? He was the president of the Screen Actors Guild at the time, and sometimes he asked me to just sit there while he did guild work and I studied my script. Occasionally he would step into my dressing room, sit down, and chat. I was very shy at first but gradually our relationship seemed more like one I’d have with someone in my acting class. He was becoming quite a friend and was sympathetic about my frustrations with the script. He drove up the hill on one of the small streets off the Sunset Strip and parked in the carport behind the apartment he’d been living in since his divorce. We went up the back way very discreetly and into his apartment. I made a decision, when I said, “Yes, I’d like that very much,” that this would be my first love affair. When I thought about it later, I knew the reality was, I had picked him. And he gave me a beautiful pearl necklace which looked to have cost a pretty penny. At this moment the fact of my virginity seemed irrelevant, and I didn’t want to be coy. 

I knew I wanted to make love with him. I wanted to be completed by this wonderful man who clearly desired me. He would know what to do. The evening up to that point had been quite romantic. Ronnie was more than competent sexually. He was also a bit of a show-off. He made sure I was aware of the length of time he had been “ardent.” It was forty minutes. And he told me how much the condom pack cost. In all fairness, I suppose that just was to reassure me. The experience was a stunning revelation for me, to be so physically close to someone. So amazing to look up and see the familiar face and that naked expanse of chest above me. But more than a few times during intercourse, he said, “There’s something wrong with you? You should have had many orgasms by now—after all this time. You’ve got to see a doctor about your abnormality.” He used that word. “Maybe a doctor can find out which is your problem. There’s something wrong with you that you should fix.” I was no stranger to orgasms, having discovered this miracle of our bodies when I was a young girl. But it had been a secret activity, and I know now that the uninitiated need a trusting environment to blossom. I suppose I should have spelled out the mortifying fact of my virginity, but even now I still expect people I admire to know more than they really do. 

Ronnie took my hand as we walked through the beautiful tree-lined side streets of Chicago around the Ambassador East Hotel. Our conversation covered a lot of territory, including what I thought about our age difference. Apparently it troubled him that I was only about nine years older than his daughter Maureen. But he said not a word about the evening we had had together. We stopped under a streetlamp. He looked at me with that nice face and those warm flirty eyes, and I let him kiss me. Then he steered the conversation to the possibility of our being together. I told him I couldn’t possibly because I was dating someone else. I had been going to the Chez Paree where I was serenaded by the handsome, glorious-voiced Vic Damone. It was an awkward moment, he looked so disappointed and hurt. I was embarrassed to be turning him down and wanted to say something kind, so when we started walking again, I said truthfully, “I’m very honored that such a respected and admired person was my first lover.” He stopped quite suddenly when I said that, almost did a double take. There was a quizzical look on his face. Was it possible he still didn’t know? Even with the colorful evidence I had left behind? Perhaps at that moment he got it—perhaps. He was very quiet as we walked back to the hotel. I wondered what he was he thinking. Whatever it was seemed impenetrable, and I didn’t try to break through. He saw me to my door and looked at me so strangely as we said goodnight.

Reagan gave amnesty to over 3 million illegal immigrants. He paid reparations to Japanese Americans wrongly interned by FDR. He pulled the US out of a long recession. He laid the groundwork for strategic missile defense. He assisted in driving the Soviet Union to collapse. He publicly called out Gorbachev leading to civil rights reforms in Russia and the Baltics. He reassured our allies and NATO that the US could and would counter the Soviet Threat. He led the charge for nuclear arms control as part of his “nuclear free world” vision. He worked well with democrats in the Congress with most of his actions receiving bipartisan support. If you looked at the data, the number of patients in state mental hospitals had dropped by 90% by 1980, the year Reagan was elected. So that was out of Reagan's responsability. Another false myth is that some historians have attributed the collapse of union jobs to Reagan, but there were 16.45 million union workers in 1995, while it was 19.8 million in 1980. So it had fallen by 220,000 a year since 1980. But it had peaked at 20.2 million in 1978 and fallen to 19.8 million in just two years, meaning it was already falling by 200,000 a year before the 1980 election. In other words, labor unions were already shrinking (and at basically the same rate) before Reagan as after. In 1981, the average mortgage interest rate was 16.63%, and the average home cost $69k. In 1989, the average mortgage interest rate was 10.32% and the median home cost 119k. If you borrowed 60k in 1981, your mortgage payment was $837. If you borrowed 105k in 1989, your mortgage payment was $946. So mortgage payments went up 13%. But the average wage in 1980 was $12,500, while in 1989 it was $20,100. So while mortgages went up 13%, wages went up 60% in the same period. People do like their myths, though, and the data won't change anyone's minds. Back in 1980 there were only 13 billionaires in the USA. As of 1987, that number was 44. In 2024, it exceeds 700 billionaires. 

Reagan had a keen eye on who our actual enemy was and still is. He is probably spinning in his grave learning about how the GOP has turned into a party of Putin's appeasers. Reagan’s policies were right for the time, the problem was subsequent politicians not adjusting it with the times. No economic policy is meant to be kept in place forever. Monroe had an excellent tariff policy for his time; it was changed a few decades later because what worked in the 1820s didn’t make sense in the 1850s, yet that didn’t make Monroe’s tariff policy bad. When Reagan took office the national GDP was under 1 Trillion dollars. When he left, the national GDP was over 8 Trillion dollars. Democracy and capitalism swept the world. Third-world poverty began to disappear. The poverty that existed world-wide at that time no longer exists. The Soviet Union fell as a direct result of his presidency and the United States emerged soon after his time in office as the sole super-power in the world. 

Reagan rejected the notion that AIDS was a gay disease. “I don’t want Americans to think AIDS simply affects only certain groups. AIDS affects all of us. What our citizens must know is this: America faces a disease that is fatal and spreading. And this calls for urgency, not panic. It calls for compassion, not blame. And it calls for understanding, not ignorance.” He similarly rejected the moralistic finger-pointing that had characterized too much of the discussion of the disease. “Final judgment is up to God; our part is to ease the suffering and to find a cure. This is a battle against disease, not against our fellow Americans. We mustn’t allow those with the AIDS virus to suffer discrimination. It’s been one of the top priorities with us, and over the last four years, and including what we have in the budget for ’86, it will amount to over a half a billion dollars that we have provided for research on AIDS. So, this is a top priority with us.” Reagan defended his policy and sent his budget to Congress, including AIDS research as a “high priority” program. In the spring of 1987 Reagan announced the creation of a special commission to study AIDS and seek a cure. “AIDS is clearly one of the most serious health problems facing the world community, and our health care establishment is working overtime to find a cure,” he said. “To think we didn’t even know we had a disease until June of 1981, when five cases appeared in California. The AIDS virus itself was discovered in 1984. The blood test became available in 1985. A treatment drug, AZT, has been brought to market in record time, and others are coming. Work on a vaccine is now underway in many laboratories.” He explained that the federal government continued to expand its budget for AIDS research. “Spending on AIDS has been one of the fastest growing parts of the budget, and, ladies and gentlemen, it deserves to be.” Washington was also removing regulatory barriers to bringing new drugs to the market. 

As both California governor and president, Reagan's overall record was not particularly conservative. California’s state budgets grew as much under Gov. Reagan as they had under his Democratic predecessor, while he also liberalized abortion and no-fault divorce, strengthened gun controls, pursued conservationist environmental measures, and increased funding for state universities by 136 percent even while attacking them as hotbeds of radicalism. Federal spending rose nearly as fast during his presidency as it had under his governorship. Boot concludes that Reagan “practiced Keynesian, not supply-side, economics by financing an economic expansion with government borrowing.” Yet right-wingers “sensed that he was on their wavelength, and they took comfort from his words while ignoring many of his deeds.” In point of fact, Reagan was a pragmatist far more than an ideologue. He understood “the difference between campaigning and governing,” as well as the importance of appealing to voters who didn’t share his conservatism. His greatest successes came when he listened to the counsels of moderate advisers, including Nancy who had the insight into people’s characters that her husband lacked. 

One of Reagan’s senior aides believed that without Nancy, “Ronald Reagan never would have been elected to anything.” It's necessary to credit Reagan for being unlike most ideologues of the left or right in his readiness to “abandon the dogmas of a lifetime when it became evident they no longer applied to a changing world.” What most Americans remember about Reagan today, however, are his geniality, cheerfulness, optimism, humor and ability to speak to the public’s hopes as well as fears. Perhaps his ongoing high approval ratings among Democrats as well as Republicans also stem from the fact that, “his support for immigration, free trade, and alliances are as much a quaint relic of the past as his gentlemanly demeanor, willingness to compromise, and reluctance to attack opponents by name.” Nostalgia for Reagan underscores his irrelevance to today’s brutal politics. Ronald Reagan was the leader many Americans felt they needed at a time when they were looking for national restoration, and they may seek his like again. —Reagan: His Life and Legend (2024) by Max Boot