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. 

Ronald Reagan wrote a letter to his son Michael on the eve of his wedding, saying: “Some men feel their masculinity can only be proven if they play out in their own life all the locker-room stories, smugly confident that what a wife doesn’t know won’t hurt her. The truth is, somehow, way down inside, without her ever finding lipstick on the collar or catching a man in the flimsy excuse of where he was till 3 A.M., the wife does know, and with that knowing some of the magic of this relationship disappears. Any man can find a twerp here and there who will go along with cheating... But if you truly love a woman, you shouldn’t ever want her to feel, when she sees you greet a secretary, or a girl you both know, that humiliation of wondering if she was someone who caused you to be late coming home, nor should you want any other woman to be able to meet your wife and know she was smiling behind her eyes as she looked at her, the woman you love, remembering this was the woman you rejected even momentarily for her favors."

Max Boot: I think he was a better actor than some people give him credit for, and it's kind of interesting because Reagan, in some ways, had very little ego. I mean, you criticize his policies all day long, and he wouldn't really care one way or the other, but if you criticized his acting, then he became sensitive. He was actually very proud of his role as an actor. And the skills that he learned as an actor, he began to translate into politics in the 1950s, working for General Electric. That was really the job that saved his career after his movie days were over. He became the host of General Electric Theater on CBS, and he began touring the country and began speaking to all sorts of audiences. And that's really where he learned to do a stump speech, and he was writing his own speeches. His shooting was probably the most traumatic event of his presidency, but it was also, in some ways, the most uplifting. Reagan was undoubtedly courageous and heroic in the face of this terrible adversity where he almost died, and yet he was telling Nancy, "Honey, I forgot to duck." And when the public heard about that, that really cemented Reagan's bond with the public, a bond that would never really be broken. Today's Republican Party has moved very far to Reagan's right. Reagan certainly would not recognize Donald Trump, because Trump is, in many ways, the anti-Reagan. So, you can't imagine two presidents more different from each other than Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, even though they were the only two U.S. presidents who ever hosted a national TV show before assuming office.

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

Ronald Reagan: His Life and Legend

Son of the Midwest, movie star, and mesmerizing politician―America’s fortieth president comes to three-dimensional life in this gripping and profoundly revisionist biography. In this “monumental and impressive” biography, Max Boot, the distinguished political columnist, illuminates the untold story of Ronald Reagan, revealing the man behind the mythology. Drawing on interviews with over one hundred of the fortieth president’s aides, friends, and family members, as well as thousands of newly available documents, Boot provides “the best biography of Ronald Reagan to date”. The story begins not in star-studded Hollywood but in the cradle of the Midwest, small-town Illinois, where Reagan was born in 1911 to Nelle Clyde Wilson, a devoted Disciples of Christ believer, and Jack Reagan, a struggling, alcoholic salesman. Max Boot vividly creates a portrait of a handsome young man, indeed a much-vaunted lifeguard, whose early successes mirrored those of Horatio Alger. Reagan’s 1980 presidential election augured a shift that continues into this century. Boot writes not as a partisan but as a historian seeking to set the story straight. He explains how Reagan was an ideologue but also a supreme pragmatist who signed pro-abortion and gun control bills as governor, cut deals with Democrats in both Sacramento and Washington, and befriended Mikhail Gorbachev to end the Cold War. A master communicator, Reagan revived America’s spirits after the traumas of Vietnam and Watergate. With its revelatory insights, Reagan: His Life and Legend is no apologia, depicting a man with a good-versus-evil worldview derived from his moralistic upbringing and Hollywood westerns. Source: amazon.com

From dusty small-town roots, to the glitter of Hollywood, and then on to commanding the world stage, REAGAN (2024) is a cinematic journey of a great man overcoming the odds. Told through the voice of Viktor Petrovich, a former KGB agent who followed Reagan's ascent, REAGAN captures the indomitable spirit of the American dream. Starring Dennis Quaid, Penelope Ann Miller and Jon Voight.

Some big names on the entertainment circuit regularly dropped by Nancy Davis’s East Lake Shore Drive apartment. Spencer Tracy, chaperoned by Katharine Hepburn, came to visit “so often,” Nancy recalled, “that he practically became a member of the family”—and often to dry out; Walter Huston and his wife, Nan, moved in while they were starring in Dodsworth; Helen Hayes was a regular, as was Colleen Moore, Mary Martin, and Lillian Gish; Carol Channing brought Eartha Kitt. “Jimmy Cagney was always there,” Nancy recalled. Mary Martin, a longtime patient of Nancy's step-father Dr. Loyal Davis’s, was rehearsing Lute Song, a Broadway musical with Yul Brynner. There was a small part—a Chinese handmaiden—that suited Nancy’s nascent talents. Three weeks into rehearsal, however, the director disagreed. John Houseman found Nancy’s acting skills “awkward and amateurish” for a top-drawer Broadway production. “I suggested to the producer that she was not physically convincing,” recalled Houseman, who had been hired after Nancy joined the cast. He was told to take it up with Mary Martin. Fire Nancy Davis?—not a chance, Martin argued. Her bad back took precedence, and she wasn’t about to alienate her precious doctor by sacking his step-daughter. 

On January 2, 1949, Nancy Davis got a call from her agent, informing her that “someone from Metro” had seen one of her TV appearances and suggested she fly out to Los Angeles for a screen test. Who that “someone” might be wasn’t a mystery. On and off, she had dated Benny Thau, MGM’s collegial vice president, who was said to have employed the practice of the casting couch. Though he was short, balding, and, at fifty-one, old enough to be her father, Nancy found in Thau an enthusiastic and supportive companion. No doubt his influence in Hollywood lent her countenance an attractive glow. However, despite an embarrassment of riches invested in her test, there was no heat on the screen. George Cukor was one of Hollywood’s A-list directors—MGM’s top director—who drew remarkable performances from his female stars. The scene Cukor chose for Nancy was from East Side, West Side, a high-priority studio project. He recruited hunky Howard Keel to read opposite her. It still didn’t add up to much. Cukor knew what a star looked like when he saw one. After watching a print of the finished test, “he told the studio Nancy had no talent.” In most cases, if a tastemaker of George Cukor’s esteem delivered such a verdict, the star-making machinery would have ground to a halt. But Thau had the power to veto the director’s opinion. 

On March 2, 1949, MGM announced that the studio had given a seven-year contract to Nancy Davis at a starting salary of $300 a week. She was twenty-eight years old (dropped down to a more marketable twenty-six on the official document). One of her professional goals was snagging an eligible bachelor from among Hollywood’s leading men. Six months later, Ronald Reagan separated himself from the pack. During her Hollywood career, Nancy Davis dated many actors, including Clark Gable, Robert Stack, and Peter Lawford; she later called Gable the nicest of the stars she had met after Reagan. Dick Powell had been instrumental in securing Ronald Reagan a seat on the board of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG). Reagan later wote in his memoirs about Dick Powell, “I was one of the thousands who were drawn to this very kind man, and who would think of him as a best friend. Sometimes, our paths took us in different directions, and months would pass without either of us seeing the other. When we did meet again, it would be as if no interruption had occurred. I cannot recall Dick Powell ever saying an unkind word about anyone.” 

When Nancy Davis met Ronald Reagan on November 15, 1949, he had risen to president of the SAG. She had noticed that her name had appeared on the Hollywood blacklist. Davis sought Reagan's help to maintain her employment in Hollywood and for having her name removed from the list. Reagan informed her that she had been confused with another actress. The two began dating and their relationship was the subject of many gossip columns; one Hollywood press account described their nightclub-free times together as "the romance of a couple who have no vices."

On March 10, 1947, three days before the Academy Awards ceremony, the board of the Screen Actors Guild met in a hastily called session to resolve a thorny jurisdictional problem. Because of a newly enacted resolution that prohibited members with production interests from serving on the board, Robert Montgomery, its president, announced his resignation, along with Jimmy Cagney, Dick Powell, Franchot Tone, and John Garfield. Replacement officers were pressed into immediate service, along with a vote to name Montgomery’s successor. George Murphy and Gene Kelly were nominated from the floor. Gene Kelly rose and placed Ronnie’s name in contention. Ronnie, as it happened, was conspicuously absent. He was attending a gathering of the American Veterans Committee, a group that linked veterans to potential employers, unaware that a consequential summit was taking place. When the vote was tabulated, the outcome was decisive. William Holden called later that night with the results. Ronald Reagan had been elected president of the Screen Actors Guild. The news delighted Ronnie. Whatever burden SAG had caused him, whatever turmoil in its ranks, deep down he loved the politics. He was as proud of the role he had played in the guild’s evolution as of any movie he had ever made. 

The presidency of the Screen Actors Guild gave him the soapbox from which to launch an anticommunism campaign, and a faction of his membership was ready to ride sidekick. There had always been a predominantly conservative element at the top of the guild. Robert Montgomery, Dick Powell, Robert Taylor, Ronald Colman, George Murphy and Adolphe Menjou, among others, were determined to oust the leftist influence that they said corrupted Hollywood and was a threat to American ideals. They belonged as well to the Motion Picture Alliance, whose members included Gary Cooper, Ginger Rogers, John Wayne, Ward Bond, Charles Coburn, and ZaSu Pitts. The MPA’s charter made no bones about its ultimate goal. “In our special field of motion pictures, we resent the growing impression that this industry is made up of, and dominated by, Communists, radicals and crackpots,” it stated. “We pledge to fight any effort of any group or individual, to divert the loyalty of the screen from the free America that gave it birth.” The MPA set its sights on suspected sympathizers—“subversives,” as it labeled them. The Screen Actors Guild became a hotbed of infighting. On September 12, 1947, at a routine SAG board meeting, a proposal was raised that would require all SAG members to sign a loyalty oath. Ronnie felt it was self-defeating, and instead he proposed making the oath voluntary. It was passed after little debate. About the HUAC hearings, Reagan said: “It’s so simple. All you’ve got to do is just name a couple of names that have already been named.”

His divorce from Jane Wyman took Hollywood by surprise. “Such a thing was so far from even being imagined by me,” Ronnie later admitted. He had a more conventional outlook, the product of Midwestern expectations. In a town where marriage was the shakiest of propositions, the Reagan-Wyman union had seemed like a solid bet. It was almost as though the film community had a stake in its success. Friends like the Powells and the Hustons were disheartened by the news, but no one took it as badly as Ronnie. He was back in Eureka, Illinois, back as Dutch, for the weekend, visiting his old coach Ralph McKinzie and anointing the Pumpkin Festival queen, when the story broke in the local Illinois papers. It hit him, people said, “like a ton of bricks.” When he returned home, Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons circled like a pair of vultures. Louella, his longtime advocate, picked at him first. No match for her meddling, Ronnie poured out his heart, unmindful that the seal of the confessional didn’t apply. Indiscreetly, he admitted that Jane had told him she still loved him but was no longer in love with him. That distinction seemed beyond his grasp. Even so, he was willing to give her plenty of space, hoping it would reignite a flame. “Right now, Jane needs very much to have a fling,” he said. “And I intend to let her have it. She is sick and nervous and not herself.” Hedda Hopper piled on in a subsequent Modern Screen column that aired all the couple’s private affairs.

As early as 1940, with the world on the brink of war, Dick Powell had tried persuading Ronald Reagan to run for Congress on the Republican ticket. The likelihood of that happening, at the time, was low. Reagan's flag was still firmly planted in Democratic soil, and switching parties was unthinkable. It was a nonstarter in 1950 when someone put his name up as a candidate for mayor of Hollywood, an honorary position. That left a cheesy, tinsel aftertaste. Local Democrats had asked him to run for Congress in 1952. Not to be outdone, that same year, Holmes Tuttle, an influential Republican contributor and prominent L.A. businessman, proposed that Reagan seek a Senate seat. Reagan loved Roosevelt’s view that common people can have a vision that included all social classes for the good of the country. Reagan had even supported the election of Harry Truman, whom he admired. But, lately, he’d become disillusioned with the Democratic Party and its penchant toward “encroaching government control.” 

Reagan deplored “the problems of centralizing power in Washington,” which he felt took inalienable rights and freedoms away from citizens. To him, it seemed the party’s liberal faction also went to great lengths to defend the shady Hollywood clique that had romanticized and dabbled in communism. All this served to redirect Reagan’s political antennae. His closest friends—Dick Powell, Bill Holden, Robert Taylor and Bob Cummings—were steadfast Republicans who had tirelessly drawn him to their side. And he’d gone for Ike in 1952, the first time Reagan had ever voted for a Republican candidate. From the 1970s on, the movies had turned away from the old studio era. By the time he took office as President of the USA, the Hollywood dream factory had turned its gaze to stories of anti-heroes, moral ambiguity, cruelty, and violence. Ronald Reagan never liked those movies. The sex scenes embarrassed him, too. On the national stage, he tried to project the old-style moral certainty of the classics he loved. 

The key to Reagan’s success, like that to Roosevelt’s, was his ability to restore Americans’ faith in their country. Reagan was called the “great communicator” with reason. He was the most persuasive political speaker since Roosevelt and Kennedy, combining conviction, focus, and humor in a manner none of his contemporaries could approach. Reagan’s critics often dismissed the role of conviction in his persuasiveness; they attributed his speaking skill to his training as an actor. But this was exactly wrong. Reagan wasn’t acting when he spoke; his rhetorical power rested on his wholehearted belief in all the wonderful things he said about the United States and the American people, about their brave past and their brilliant future. He believed what Americans have always wanted to believe about their country, and he made them believe it too. Reagan told stories and jokes better than any president since Lincoln. He understood the disarming power of humor: that getting an audience to laugh with you is halfway to getting them to agree with you. He was not a warm person, but he seemed to be, which in politics is more important. Many people loathed his policies, but almost no one disliked him personally. 

Democratic elections are, at their most basic level, popularity contests, and Reagan knew how to be popular. Like Roosevelt and other successful presidents, he realized that progress comes in pieces. If he got four-fifths of his ask in a negotiation, he took it and ran. He knew he could return for the rest. Reagan’s timing—some called it his luck—was no less essential to his success than his ability. “I know in my heart that man is good,” Reagan had said at the dedication of his library. “That what is right will always eventually triumph.” These lines of the Reagan creed were etched over his grave at the Reagan Library. But the closing words of his poignant farewell to the American people were the ones that were better remembered, that captured the belief that made him irresistible to so many. The shadow of forgetfulness was growing long across his path, yet his optimism and faith in his country remained undiminished as he wrote, “I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.” —Sources: "Reagan: The Life" (2015) by Henry William Brands and "Ronald Reagan: An American Journey" (2018) by Bob Spitz

10th Anniversary at Lake Powell: June Allyson & Dick Powell (Modern Screen)

The Powell family sets out for an angling afternoon. The Powells have a lake right on their property so all they have to do is roll out of bed and make with the lines and sinkers. The lake is well stocked with bass and blue gill, contributed by the government as insect insurance, plus goldfish contributed by the Powells. Lake Powell is teeming with finny folks.

The privacy of Lake Powell suits June and Dick just fine because they’ve had more than their share of prying eyes over ten years of marriage. The Powells have had some troubles and arguments, whether more or less than any other Hollywood couple they wouldn’t be telling. “I can say this, though,” Dick remarks wryly, “both of us have taken our marital obligations and our try at happiness with considerable and determined seriousness. Ten years, two children and intact marriage vows add up to quite a respectable achievement. In some cases, I think it even surpasses that of the few writers who have chosen to throw harpoons in our direction.” Counting’ their blessings on this their tenth year of marital bliss, June and Dick didn’t forget Lake Powell. The Powells’ three-quarter acres of rippling, sky-blue water has been a source of joy and contentment for the whole family. 

Sportsman Dick instructs his willing wife in the fine art of casting. “See . . . it’s easy, all in the wrist . . . just sort of flick the line out over the water and wait for the fish to bite.”

Ricky has even made friends with a fish. He runs to the edge of the water, night and morning, with bread crumbs. He calls and whistles and in a few moments up swims a little black fish about ten inches long. Then, little Bosco, his name, turns and swims away. June and Dick swear they’ve seen it happen. Dick Powell is a truly kind man, as indicated by his casual reference to the annual rash of stories to the effect that he and June might not be long for this domestic world. They never quite get used to the attacks, but the nearest Dick has come to wrath on the subject was just after he and June had returned from their “tenth honeymoon,” spent aboard a yacht in Fourth of July at Cove off Catalina Island. A columnist asked how he and June were doing marriage-wise. “Fine,” Dick replied. “Just fine!”

Jubilant June shows off a ring that Dick gave her as a present for their tenth anniversary.

“But,” interjected the reporter, with a smirk, “what about tomorrow?” “Who knows about tomorrow?” Dick responded, “but as long as you’re making a sardonic approach, let me tell you about a friend of mine. He was getting along perfectly with his wife one day, and the next morning...” “Yes,” the reporter broke in, sensing a bit of gossip, “what happened then?” “Nothing happened, not much,” Dick replied, before walking away. “He just got out of bed the next morning and fell out of an open window. Now tell me, how’ll things be with you tomorrow?” There has been a big change in the life of June and Dick, though, in recent weeks. That anniversary celebration aboard a chartered yacht was the most fun they’ve had since Dick owned his own boat, the Santana. “I sold the Santana,” he says, “because it was so expensive to keep up, and only a real rich guy like Humphrey Bogart could afford yachting that often.”

June and Dick are silent about the week they spent to celebrate the beginning of their eleventh year of marriage. “I had quite a time getting June to go, in the first place,” he recalled. “June is a girl who hates to go anywhere, but when she gets there, she always hates to leave. When it came time to weigh anchor, her excuse was, ‘Hadn’t we better stay awhile longer? It’s liable to be rough sea on the way back!’ ” But the Powells had to come home, for a new and important chapter was about to begin in their lives, marked by Dick’s decision to produce and direct the remake of It Happened One Night. They had worked together as actor and actress before, but June had never worked for Dick under his direction. She had some surprises in store. For one thing, he looked at her critically one day, then said, “We’re going to change your make-up.”

 

June grinned and retorted, “Yes, boss.” For years she’d been made up by the all-time Hollywood experts. Dick felt she just didn’t come alive under that treatment. After long hours of experimentation with a new type of make-up, tests showed that June blossomed like a rose. She admitted that she was glad Dick has been so persistent, but she was really worried when he went after her hair styling. That very nearly brought on an argument of the type any director can have when a big star backs up and puts her foot down. But when Dick came home with some sketches, which showed her with a sort of “modified Claudette Colbert” hair do, she surrendered. And these changes went back to the big shift of June's featured part in Best Foot Forward in 1943. Allyson had a rocky start in Tinsel Town and, after playing supporting roles, was nearly dropped by MGM. But very wise counsel from her future husband Dick Powell led to her taking the “plain Jane” sister lead in Two Girls and a Sailor (1944), which was a big hit and made her a star.

With location scenes in San Diego and Phoenix now finished and shooting going on apace at Columbia studios for interiors, the rushes indicate that Dick Powell hasn’t done wrong by the new June Allyson. Rumor has it Dick wanted a minimum of kissing, since he was afraid his wife would fall in love with Jack Lemmon like her last leading man. As for You Can't Run Away from It, completely new in color and wide screen, plus the hit title song and other musical numbers by Johnny Mercer and Gene De Paul, the word is out that the remake of this famous picture is liable to duplicate if not exceed the roaring success of Oklahoma! June said: “No one could have done it but Dick.” Dick says: “No one could have done it without June.” In the serious parts, June Allyson is just as serious as Claudette Colbert, but her Ellie is less refined; she is believable as a frustrated Texas girl as opposed to a New York heiress. Ellie is funnier in the remake, and June’s brilliant comedic timing and humorous antics make her so. And on a recent evening when Mr. Powell came home, he said to Mrs. Powell, “We’ve been working pretty hard. Let’s take a trip somewhere.” Mrs. Powell said “Oh, now, Richard, do we have to—you know how I hate to travel,” replied in jest. “Hear, honey. We’ve never been to Europe, or Timbuktoo for that matter. You name the place and let’s go!” And they probably will. —Modern Screen magazine (January 1956)

The hypnotic sensibility of Taxi Driver (1976)

The hypnotic sensibility of Taxi Driver attempts to incubate the viewer in a limbo state between sleeping and waking. Paul Schrader, the screenwriter, cited the assassination attempt of Arthur Bremer as inspiration for Travis’s destructive ambition. He also drew from Dostoevsky’s Notes From The Underground, where an isolated and bitter narrator delivers rambling monologues similar to Travis’s diary entries. “All my life needed was a sense of someplace to go. I don’t believe that one should devote his life to morbid self-attention. I believe that someone should become a person like other people,” writes Travis Bickle in his diary. Many artists process their traumatic experiences through writing, a sort of self-therapy. Screenwriter Paul Schrader’s life had some parallels with Travis Bickle's. “Life dealt me a few blows, and I found myself in a dark place. So I realized I had to turn to fiction to get out of this place. I had to create this character, or else I was going to become him,” Schrader said in an interview at the TIFF in 2019. “I was out of work; I was in debt. I fell into a period of isolation, living more or less in my car. A grim time. And out of isolation came Taxi Driver,” Schrader said in 1992. “I was writing fairly soon for LA Free Press, which was the alternative paper. I got involved in anti-war protests at UCLA, and I got arrested. So all of a sudden I was in this world that’s not who I was. In reflection I think the origins of that character come from the origins of that dislocation.” 

Travis Bickle suffers from a similar existential crisis as Schrader, his catalyst being the Vietnam War. His character study is unequivocally about a man's loneliness. In the original script, it begins with Thomas Wolfe’s poem God’s Lonely Man. The main reason why Travis is a misanthrope is because he forces a negative mindset upon himself. He forces himself to bear witness to the most miserable parts of humanity, and sometimes it seems Travis only sees the bad side around him. Travis’s cab is the symbol for Travis’s isolation, drifting through the streets, watching the people through his adjusted rearview and the rain-drenched windows. He puts Palantine stickers all over his apartment. Why? Simply because Betsy is a political supporter of him. His whole courtship with Betsy is based around this notion that Travis is desperate to fit in, to re-assimilate himself into a normal life after his time in Vietnam. Taxi Driver is, at its heart, about Travis’s relationship with two women, whether it be the sexualized world of Iris or the politicized world of Betsy. Betsy is introduced to the audience in an angelic manner, as a woman who seems unattainable. Travis remarks on this in one of his first journal entries, saying “they cannot touch her.” Travis only looks at her from afar. After Betsy rejects him romantically, Travis is incapable of facing Betsy's dismissivenes objectively, telling her with fury: “You’re in hell, and you’re going to die in hell like the rest of them. You’re like the rest of them.” 

Travis expresses this frustration early in the film, ironically to Palantine: “I think that the President should just clean up the whole mess here; you should just flush it right down the f***ing toilet.” Palantine’s reaction is to feed him a political line to flex his personality: “Well, uh, I think I know what you mean, Travis, but it’s not going to be easy. We’re going to have to make some radical changes.” Travis decides that he must defeat Sport and Palantine in this westernized battle in order to give his life a sense of purpose. In a 1976 interview with Martin Scorsese by Roger Ebert, Ebert: “In Taxi Driver, the hero can’t relate to the women at all.” Scorsese: “I don't see it that way. I think he relates to Iris. But that takes him to its logical conclusion. The better man is the man who can protect a woman and kill another man. This guy shows that kind of thinking, shows the kind of problems some men have. You’ve been raised to worship women, but you don’t know how to approach them on a sexual level. The girl he falls for, Betsy,   it’s really important that she’s a blue-eyed blonde goddess.” Pity might lead to self-sympathy, which Travis finds unacceptable, so he's projecting his merciless self-criticism onto his bleak and unwelcoming environment. And it is something he is actively inflicting to himself.

That's why Travis reacts so harshly and compulsively to Betsy's rejection, he can't accept her reasoning on face value. He's making these desperate attempts for connection when he is at such an absurdly low point. When he implies he wants to be normal, he's coming from a place of isolation that he probably can't escape without help. In the same interview with Roger Ebert in 1976, Schrader said, “He goes from a goddess to a child goddess. The teenage prostitute he’s trying to rescue — she’s unapproachable, too, for him.” In Travis’s mind, Betsy and Iris have become symbols of status and purity. Especially Iris, whom he wants to protect and send her back home. But also, his actions are larger attempts to display his masculinity towards the aggressors/rivals in his life. Because he has been romantically rejected by Betsy, he resorts to expressing his masculinity in a psychosexual form of violence. And directly in front of Iris, Travis tries to kill himself, but he is out of bullets and he fails. The fact he was going to kill himself in front of Iris shows that Travis convinced himself that he was going to die with a purpose. Iris might symbolize America's endangered soul and Travis is its patriotic, dark avenger, because in his delusional way he wants to save America, irregardless of New York's rotten core.

Pauline Kael's review on The New Yorker: Taxi Driver has a relentless movement. Travis has got to find relief. It’s a two-character study—Travis versus New York. As Scorsese has designed the film, the city never lets you off the hook. There’s no grace, no compassion in the artificially lighted atmosphere. The neon reds, the vapors that shoot up from the streets, the dilapidation all get to you the way they get to Travis. He is desperately sick, but he’s the only one who tries to save a young hooker, Iris (Jodie Foster); the argument he invokes is that she belongs with her family and in school—the secure values from his own past that are of no help to him now. Some mechanism of adaptation is missing in Travis; the details aren’t filled in—just the indications of a strict religious background, and a scar on his back, suggesting a combat wound. The city world presses in on him, yet it’s also remote, because Travis is so disaffected that he isn’t always quite there. We perceive the city as he does, and it’s so scummy and malign we get the feel of his alienation. Scorsese’s New York is the big city of the thrillers he feasted his imagination on—but at a later stage of decay. 

The street vapors become ghostly; Sport romancing Iris leads her into a hypnotic dance; the porno theatres are like mortuaries; the congested traffic is macabre. And this Hell is always in movement. Some actors are said to be empty vessels who are filled by the roles they play, but that’s not what appears to be happening here with De Niro. He’s gone the other way. He’s used his emptiness—he’s reached down into his own anomie. Violence is Travis’s only means of expressing himself. He has not been able to hurdle the barriers to being seen and felt. When he blasts through, it’s his only way of telling the city that he’s there. And given his ascetic loneliness, it’s the only real orgasm he can have. The violence is so threatening precisely because it’s cathartic for Travis. And it’s a real slap in the face when we see Travis at the end looking pacified. He’s got the rage out of his system—for the moment, at least—and he’s back at work, picking up passengers in front of the St. Regis. It’s not that he’s cured but that the city is crazier than he is. —The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael (2011)

Liberals are not afraid of revolution. But liberals will remain reluctant revolutionaries. It is one reason why the American Revolution went so much better than the French one. What is liberalism, then? A hatred of cruelty. An instinct about human conduct rooted in a rueful admission of our own fallibility and of the inadequacy of our minds to be right frequently enough to act autocratically. A belief that the sympathy that binds human society together can disconnect us from our clannish and suspicious past. A program for permanent reform based on reason. The opposite of humanism is fanaticism; the opposite of liberalism is not conservatism but dogmatism. Liberalism is an evolving political practice that makes the case for the necessity and possibility of (imperfectly) egalitarian social reform and ever greater tolerance of human difference through reasoned and unimpeded demonstration and debate. The contemporary left can sometimes seem to have an insufficient respect for the fragility of the very same liberal institutions that allow its views to be broadcast without impediments. Marxists called this “heightening the contradictions” of the system. But no good has ever come from heightening these contradictions. All that happens is that the institutions get weaker, and authoritarians become stronger in the weakened spaces. There’s really an awful lot of stuff about life now known that once was not. Whenever we look at how the big problems got solved, it was rarely a big idea that solved them. 

It was the intercession of a thousand small sanities. Skepticism, constant inquiry, fallibilism, self-doubt—these don’t mean not knowing. They mean knowing more all the time. Liberal cities and states are the tiny volcanic islands risen on a vast historical sea of tyranny. And that fight will never end. Liberalism is the work of a thousand small sanities communicated to a million sometimes eager and more often reluctant minds. That’s the work of liberalism, and even if the worst happens, as it may, it is work that won’t stop, can’t stop, because it is also the real work of being human—all those enforced acts of empathy, where we had to make bargains in the company of people we couldn’t stand—people fundamentally unlike yourself, in order to live at peace. —"A Thousand Small Sanities" (2019) by Adam Gopnik

The Myth of Raymond Chandler's "unsolved" murder in The Big Sleep (1946)

Every time The Big Sleep is mentioned one of the biggest myths of the story tends to also be mentioned: That Chandler wrote such a convoluted story that one of the character’s murders (Owen Taylor, the Sternwood’s chauffeur) is never explained. Not so. This is the relevant passage from The Big Sleep novel, where detective Phillip Marlowe is brought in as the Sternwood’s chauffeur has been found dead: "The plainclothesman scuffed at the deck with the toe of his shoe. Ohls looked sideways along his eyes at me, and twitched his cigar like a cigarette. ”Drunk?” he asked, of nobody in particular. The man who had been toweling his head went over to the rail and cleared his throat in a loud hawk that made everybody look at him. “Got some sand,” he said, and spat. “Not as much as the boyfriend got—but some.” The uniformed man said: “Could have been drunk. Showing off all alone in the rain. Drunks will do anything.” ”Drunk, hell,” the plainclothesman said. “The hand throttle’s set halfway down and the guy’s been sapped on the side of the head. Ask me and I’ll call it murder.” Ohls looked at the man with the towel. “What do you think, Buddy?” The man with the towel looked flattered. He grinned. “I say suicide, Mac. None of my business, but you ask me, I say suicide. First off the guy plowed an awful straight furrow down that pier. You can read his tread marks all the way nearly. That puts it after the rain like the Sheriff said. Then he hit the pier hard and clean or he don’t go through and land right side up. More likely turned over a couple of times. So he had plenty of speed and hit the rail square. That’s more than half-throttle.”

So, in a few paragraphs, Chandler offers three theories as to what happened to the chauffeur: 1) He was drunk and ran off the pier. 2) He was murdered, hit on the side of his head and the car run off the pier with him in it to make it look like an accident. Finally, 3) He committed suicide. The first explanation, that he was drunk, is quickly debunked. He “plowed an awful straight furrow down the pier” and this shows someone who was in control of the car until it smashed through the pier and into the water. The second explanation is also discarded because not only did the car “plow an awful straight furrow,” but also the car was moving very fast. So fast that it was the only way it could smash through that pier and land “right side up.” Thus Chandler clearly offers the third explanation, that the chauffeur committed suicide, as the one that makes the most logical sense. The car was going very fast (and straight!) to the end of the pier and had to ram through it to hit the water upright so someone was driving the car through but if there was a murderer inside the car that seems awfully dangerous to do at night. They couldn’t “jump out” before hitting the pier because they could injure themselves. Further, smashing through the pier and landing in the water before “swimming away” was also an incredibly dangerous thing to do. Therefore the most logical explanation is the third one and clearly that’s the one Chandler was going for. 

Further, suicide makes sense as we find the chauffeur was in love with Carmen Sternwood and attempted to help her because she was being blackmailed. His help wound up being for naught and it made sense he was despondent and did himself in. The bump on Owen’s head is also explained later in the novel: Brody confronted Owen and “sapped” him but he swore he left him alive. This makes sense as Brody got what he wanted and had no real reason to kill Owen. Now many people are curious why this story has had such traction. I suppose it’s a fascinating thing to say that an author created such a “complex story” that he somehow forgot to explain away one of the deaths within it but considering how easy it is to verify this by going to the novel itself and seeing the relevant passage it must have been more than that. Raymond Chandler was dismissively viewed around Hollywood at the time. While he was a great writer, he was also a difficult person to work with, especially because he was snarky and a heavy drinker. So we souldn’t be shocked if this story kept making the rounds as a way to insult Chandler, to say “hey Mr. Brilliant writer... you couldn’t figure out one of the deaths in your very own story! What a bozo!”

As for Chandler supposedly stating he “didn’t know” who killed Owen Taylor when asked by the studios… We have yet to see any concrete evidence or printed interview where Chandler or anyone of the crew involved in the making of The Big Sleep who stated this is what actually happened. We only have read vague stories about people “overhearing” Chandler say he didn't know, of Chandler writing the studios a letter when asked about the chauffeur's death and saying he “had no idea,” and how others “discovered” this element but it all feels really like tall tales. Another possibility is that Chandler’s response was just a snarky way of shading the film version of Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep. The movie made some important changes from the novel and perhaps when Chandler said he “had no idea” (if indeed he said this) about Owen’s death he was shading the film version rather than his novel. 

Dmytryk's Murder, My Sweet and Hawks' The Big Sleep not only simplify Chandler's novels but also defuse Chandler's social critique, transforming plot and adapting characters when not eliminating them outright. Chandler was very critical of other writers. For example, he lamented Hemingway’s poor performance in the late 1940s. James M. Cain, the author of the novel Double Indemnity that Chandler adapted for the screen, was akin to a pornographer. Chandler did, however, praise some writers such as Somerset Maugham, who set the gold standard for spy novels. And he was particularly admiring of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald and Chandler make an interesting comparison. Although Fitzgerald had a much more rosey-eyed view than Chandler, both were capable of poetic atmosphere. Toward the end of his life, Chandler came to feel that L.A. had become a grotesque and impossible place to live. It was a “jittering city,” sometimes dull, sometimes brilliant, but always depressing to him. In his later years, Chandler commented that he felt L.A. had completely changed in the years since he’d arrived. Even the weather was different. “Los Angeles was hot and dry when I first went there,” he said, “with tropical rains in the winter and sunshine at least nine-tenths of the year. Now it is humid, hot, sticky, and when the smog comes down into the bowl between the mountains which is Los Angeles, it is damned near intolerable.” Source: www.judithfreemanbooks.com

Hollywood's Glitz, Triumphs & Tragedies

Lucille Ball fared well in her show Lucy goes to a Hollywood Premiere (February 7, 1966). The script was weak but enlivened by the guest appearances of such big name stars as Edward G. Robinson, Kirk Douglas, and Vince Edwards, with whom she had co-starred in the past. Later, Lucille made two TV appearances, each with Dean Martin. The first, on February 10, was on The Dean Martin Show, with other guests who included Kate Smith, Dan Rowan and Martin. Dean Martin had long been one of Lucille’s admirers. Martin always had the same greeting for her, “Hi ya, Redhead!” Dean had once joked with her over lunch, “In Hollywood, if a guy’s wife looks like a new woman, she probably is.” Allegedly, June Allyson asserted that one night, she wanted to talk with Dino after they’d been messing around, but Martin curtly told her, “Wanna talk? Call your stuffy husband.” Dinah Shore had warned Lucille and June, “Dean Martin is a bastard. At night, it’s wine, roses, and champagne. But in the morning, it’s a pat on the ass with the promise, ‘See you around, gal.’”

During one of their skits on the Dean Martin Show, Martin and Kate Smith delivered a duet of songs from the early days of 20th Century vaudeville. As a chorus girl in the background, Lucy had acted her way through a pantomime of their lyrics. As “repayment” for agreeing to star on his show, Martin returned the favor by appearing in an episode of her show in Lucy Meets Dean Martin (February 14). There’s a zany aspect to its plot, as always. Lucy wants him to take her out on a date, but he’s too busy. He tells her that he’s going to fix her up instead with his stunt double, Eddie Feldman. But at the last minute, Eddie is not free, so Martin goes instead. Without knowing it, Lucy dates the real Dean Martin, thinking the man she’s with is merely a stand-in. According to its scriptwriter Bob O’Brien, “I didn’t think it was any good.” On Sunday afternoons, Desi Arnaz often retreated to his kitchen, where he turned out Cuban specialties introduced to him in Santiago, Cuba, when he was a boy. “I challenge anyone to make a better black bean and rice casserole than ‘yours truly.’” One night at a party in Palm Springs, he told Dean Martin, “I hear Don Juan seduced 1,003 gals. I never bothered to count my seductions. My highlights besides Lucy were Betty Grable, Lana Turner, and Ginger Rogers.” 

“How about you?” “Oh, it’s hard to say,” Martin answered. “Marilyn, certainly, but June Allyson ranks at the top of my list. That gal was a real challenge for me. Lana, too, was a treat for me. But so was Rita Hayworth. And Judith Campbell Exner. She was sleeping with both Jack Kennedy and with Sam Giancana, maybe passing messages between them. What the tabloids never knew was that I was also bedding her. She assured me that my dick was bigger than JFK's and Giancana’s.” Eventually, Martin went mute about June Allyson, probably intimidated by her very jealous and proprietary husband Dick Powell's scolding. Hedda Hopper had advised Powell to broke the nose (job) of Dino, but it's likely Powell instead used his sharp tongue to demolish Martin's ego. Mel Tormé appeared as a regular on CBS’s The Judy Garland Show (1963-64). In the aftermath of many wrenching arguments and disputes, Garland fired him. In episode 87 of The Lucy Show, Lucille is working for the president of a record company. Tormé, her neighbor, is an aspirant songwriter. They went over so well together that she would invite him back later on. 

For the two episodes that followed, Joan Blondell, who had desperately wanted to permanently replace Vivian Vance, was hired. The first, released on October 11, was entitled Lucy and Joan. In it, Lucy tries to fix her up with studly Keith Andes, a man who had sustained a friendship with her since they’d co-starred together on Broadway in Wildcat. In The Lucy Show’s next episode, Lucy and the Stunt Man (telecast October 18), Blondell returned to the series. In this episode, Blondell has a boyfriend who is a stuntman. Lucy replaces the injured man and saves the day by performing (with disastrous but occasionally comic results) his dangerous stunts. All did not end happily for the two female leads. At the end of Blondell’s big scene, Lucy confronted her. “So you think you know how to do comedy?” she asked. “You didn’t make one of your lines the least bit funny.” “That’s because your writers only fed me straight lines to deliver to you,” Blondell protested. At this point, Lucille mockingly mimed the act of pulling the “flush” chain of an old-fashioned toilet and imitated the sound of flushing. “Why are you doing that?” Blondell asked. “Because you stink and I’m flushing it.” “Fuck you, Lucille Ball!” Blondell shouted at her before storming off the set, never to return. Later, members of that day’s live audience spoke to the press, relaying what had happened: “We were stunned,” said a fan from San Diego. Joan Blondell learned that Vance’s slot might be still available, and although she promoted herself, she was rejected. “Blondell is a fine actress, and I’ve worked in the past with her and would again in our future. But there is just no chemistry between us,” Lucille said.

Despite his own marriage to Zsa Zsa Gabor, the hotel mogul Conrad Hilton, warned his stubborn son Nicky Hilton that he was “falling in love with a photograph” when he started dating Elizabeth Taylor. But Nicky married her anyway. Taylor later told her friend June Allyson that “it was well worth the wait.” Sinatra had become the leader of the Rat Pack band. It would be easier to draw up a list of actresses he didn’t seduce. Included among the more famous of the women he conquered were Ava Gardner, Marilyn Monroe, Lana Turner, Marlene Dietrich, Elizabeth Taylor, Natalie Wood, Lauren Bacall, Shirley McLaine, Judy Garland and possibly Nancy Reagan. “When Sinatra dies, they’re giving his zipper to the Smithsonian,” claimed Martin. After hawking his talents at several different studios, Sinatra finally signed a contract with RKO, and was immediately cast in the film version of Higher and Higher (1943). It had originated as a Broadway musical in the spring of 1940, starring June Allyson. For $15,000, RKO had purchased the rights to this film specifically as a vehicle starring Frank Sinatra, featuring him singing four songs by Jimmy McHugh and Harold Adamson. However, because of pre-existing contracts with Michèle Morgan and Jack Haley that gave these performers the star spots, Frank received third billing. For some reason Variety magazine's review was cruel: “At least Frank Sinatra gets in no one’s way.”

Peter Lawford, a self-loathing heel supposedly said to Sinatra's valet George Jacobs: “Frank and I ended up seducing some of the same women, like Marilyn Monroe, Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, Marilyn Maxwell, Dorothy Dandridge, and June Allyson.” Jacobs didn't put much stock on Lawford's drunken confessions. According to James Spada, some of Lawfords’s female conquests might have included June Allyson, Janet Leigh, Lucille Ball, Anne Baxter, Judy Holliday, Judy Garland, Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, Lee Remick, Elizabeth Taylor, and even Nancy Davis Reagan. On Rita Hayworth, Lawford went on another limb: “She was the worst lay in the world. She was always drunk.” It seems that didn't stopped Dean Martin of bragging of his own pretense fling with Hayworth. Certainly both Lawford and Martin were often inveterate liars. After Frank Sinatra’s breakup with Ava Gardner, Lawford asked her out on a “date” in 1954. It seemed relatively harmless, and apparently did not lead to a renewal of their sexual trysts of the 1940s. But that is not how Sinatra viewed it. Peter recalled that he was in bed alone when a call came in from Frank who did not identify himself. “Listen, creep, and listen good. You wanna keep your nuts intact? Stay away from Ava. I’m warning you only this one time. Got that, faggot?” 

By the time Dean had actually passed his prime, his drinking-for-show had evolved into drinking-for-real. He was in pain, having developed ulcers and several liver problems. He’d also become addicted to Percodan, which he had originally taken as a pain-killer for alcohol-induced headache. “I like Judy a lot, and, except for me, she’s the most popular singer in America,” Sinatra told Ava Gardner. “I called it off with Judy because hysterical women are not my cup of tea.” One night, back in Hollywood, Judy called Joan Blondell at around 10pm. She contacted Joan only when something major was going on in her life. Judy begged her to come over for dinner, and after listening to her protests, Joan finally gave in. When she arrived at Judy’s home, she found an elegantly set table, still under the glow of candlelight. Judy confided in her, “Frank was due here for supper. He stood me up.” An hour later she disappeared into her bathroom and emerged looking drugged. Whatever she’d taken seemed to have loosened her tongue. “I’m in love with Frank. He’s going to be my next husband.” “But he stood you up tonight,” Joan said, trying to bring reality into the conversation. Judy insisted that Joan go into Liza’s room where the little girl was sleeping. Later Judy collapsed on the floor of her living room, and Joan covered her with a fur and quietly left the house. 

It would be later June Allyson who became Judy's main confidante after Blondell's rushed flight. On MGM’s set of Annie Get Your Gun, Judy often arrived drugged after a night of heavy boozing. It was a western, and she had a phobia about guns and horses. After spending a million dollars (in 1949 money), there were only six minutes of usable footage. Judy’s contract was suspended as of May 10, 1949. Judy placed an urgent call to Frank Sinatra, although his career also seemed in a hopeless slump. This time, he took her call, hoping to cheer her up. He didn’t want to marry her, but he sure as hell didn’t want her to despair, either. “We’ll come back,” he told her. “We’ll show the bastards. One day in the near future we’ll come back bigger than before,” before finally claiming, “Let’s just be friends.” In spite of their occasional rifts, Frank was always there for Judy when she faced her latest crisis. During her stay in a Boston hospital, he did more than send flowers every day. He even flew in a plane load of friends from Hollywood to cheer her up. Frank Sinatra was always protective of Judy, the way he had been with Marilyn Monroe. He spoke frequently about Judy to his fourth and final wife, Barbara Marx. One night, he introduced Judy to Barbara. “She was so enormous and puffy-faced,” Barbara recalled. “It was sad to see her like that.” Frank was such a loyal friend that he opted to be with Judy the night Liza Minnelli was born. “I ordered pizzas for the waiting group of Judy loyalists,” he said. “When I first heard cries from Lisa’s throat, I knew a star had been born.”

Because of film offers on the horizon from both RKO and MGM, Sinatra had moved to California with his family in the spring of 1944. Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra starred with Esther Williams in Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1949), a Technicolor period piece set in 1908. Betty Garrett returned to the screen to work with Frank in this ode to the nostalgic fun of baseball. Esther was a last-minute choice. Originally, the role had been intended for Judy Garland, who had become undependable because of her drug habits. The part then went to June Allyson, who had became pregnant from Dick Powell. The film grossed four million dollars, which defined it as a hit in those days. Frank Sinatra also seemed to have known June Allyson, in what capacity it's kind of a mystery. When Peter Lawford allegedly asked Sinatra if he’d ever had a fling with her, Frank said, “I’m not dodging the question. I truly don’t remember.” Although for some folks Frank was falling in line with Dean Martin's sudden silence, it's much more probable that Sinatra was just teasing and mocking Lawford. Indeed, June Allyson never mentioned Sinatra in a romantic context, and she never mentioned Martin, for whatever reason. As a young man, Freddy Frank worked as an extra, mainly on every picture Bud Abbott and Lou Costello made. Costello seemed intrigued with Freddy’s endowment. Costello spread the word that it was “The Eighth Wonder of the World,” using the same claim used by Chaplin about his own endowment. In private, Costello revealed the names of some of Freddy’s conquests. The honor list would have shocked the Hollywood censors: Lucille Ball, Lana Turner, Tallulah Bankhead, Lynn Bari, Wendy Barrie, Constance Bennett, Joan Crawford, Paulette Goddard, Betty Grable, Norma Shearer, Ann Sheridan and maybe June Allyson!

Virginia Gregg joined up with 5 other young female musicians. They called themselves The Singing Strings and they were fortunate to be hired as staff at CBS-Radio and after a year, as staff at Mutual Broadcasting. Though she loved music she had dreamed of being an actress. In 1938 Virginia played twenty shows a week at the studio and had to rehearse for all of them, but she still managed to find enough time to play a few small parts and one lead at the Pasadena Playhouse. Virginia had listened to enough rehearsals to know the script and she asked if she could read it. The director didn't like the idea, but there wasn't anything else for him to do, so he gave her the script. Virginia played the part on the air, taking her cues from a very nervous director. It wasn't until after the broadcast that she had time to tell him about her acting experience. Virginia credits Calling All Cars as being the first radio show she appeared in regularly. She most likely joined it in the late 1930s. Around 1941 other radio worked followed. Fortunately she had friends who were already in the radio business and they helped her get started in shows like the prestigious Lux Radio Theater.  

Dick Powell and Virgina Gregg during the ABC run of Richard Diamond from KECA Studio X in Hollywood. She was "Helen Asher" to Dick Powell's Richard Diamond, Private Detective on NBC-Radio from 1949 to 1952, then on CBS-Radio for the 1952-53 season. "Helen" was the Park Avenue girlfriend who was always trying to lure Diamond up to her gorgeous digs, where, if he ever did have time to get there he would head for her baby and burst into song! Virginia also guest-starred on The Adventures of Philip Marlowe (CBS-Radio 1948-51) starring Gerald Mohr (Dick Powell was actually radio's first "Marlowe") for which Mohr, in 1950, was named Best Male Actor on Radio by Radio and Television Life Magazine. Virginia was also "Betty Lewis" on the radio series Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, under production of her husband Jaime Del Valle. Virginia witnessed how steeply Powell's marriage to Blondell crumbled. She hinted that Blondell left Powell for Mike Todd in 1943. When Lux Radio Theater was purchased in 1954 by philanthropist Huntington Hartford, it was briefly called the Huntington Hartford Theater and then the Doolittle Theater. 

Gracie Allen played a piano concert at the Hollywood Bowl. Allen hired a composer to write the "Concerto for Index Finger," a joke piece in which the orchestra would play madly, only to pause while Allen played a one-finger scale with a final incorrect note. The orchestra would then play a musical piece that developed around the wrong note. On her final solo, Allen would finally hit the right note, causing the entire orchestra to applaud. The actual index-finger playing was performed offstage by a professional pianist. The concerto was featured in the film Two Girls and a Sailor (1944) starring June Allyson. Allen found Allyson refreshing, and like Virginia Gregg, she couldn't understand the vitriol that Joan Blondell spread behind her back. Jane Wilkie hints that June had an ease to form female friendships that eluded Blondell. June identified easily with other female stars in Hollywood: Marie McDonald, Ginger Rogers, Rosemary Lane, Lucille Ball, Judy Garland, Gloria DeHaven, Claudette Colbert, Elizabeth Taylor, Janet Leigh, Lana Turner, Dinah Shore, Doris Day, Virginia Mayo, etc. 

Patricia Dorothy Douglas (1917–2003) was a dancer and movie extra. Douglas was the subject of the documentary Girl 27 (2007) documenting her sexual assault in 1937 by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer salesman David Ross. Douglas was one of the first people to come forward after experiencing sexual assault in the film industry, leading to a massive scandal. Douglas retired from the industry after the scandal, but appeared on camera 65 years after being contacted by biographer David Stenn, who learned about her while uncovering the story of the 1937 assault and the MGM cover-up. Speaking out against her rapist was reevaluated with the emergence of the Me Too movement. Actresses such as Jessica Chastain and Rose McGowan praised the documentary and the telling of Douglas's story. “You’re trusting with the studios. You’re not expecting anything except to work in a movie. That’s what you’re there for,” explained Patricia Douglas, who remembered that one of the few sympathetic stars was Dick Powell (at the height of his fame after starring in Gold Diggers of 1937). Powell offered her a compassionate ear and a lunch serving her a milkshake to console her. Yet Powell was tied up because he belonged to another studio Warner Bros. MGM treated Patricia Douglas like trash, but she outlived all her abusers. Louis B. Mayer died from leukemia in the 1950s. Burton Fitts died by suicide in the 1970s. And David Ross died from rectal cancer in the 1960s. Douglas, meanwhile, became a great-grandmother until 2003 when she died at the age of 86.

As his marriage to Jane Wyman deteriorated, Ronald Reagan spent more time socializing with MGM star George Murphy, featured with Judy Garland and Gene Kelly in For Me and My Gal (1942). Dick Powell also became part of that circle. Both he and Murphy were staunch Republicans who greatly influenced Reagan’s new political direction. Although firmly entrenched as the Democratic President of the Screen Actors Guild, Reagan would eventually switch his allegiance from the Democrats to the Republicans. Preoccupied with her own career, Jane Wyman resented Reagan’s attempts to enlight her on every matter. One evening while Reagan was debating with Dick Powell about politics, Wyman leaned over to Powell’s wife, June Allyson, and told her, “Don’t ask Ronnie what time it is because he will tell you how a watch is made.” George Murphy entered politics before Reagan, running successfully for the seat of a California senator. He later urged Reagan to enter politics by running for the governor of California. —Sources: "Frank Sinatra: The Boudoir Singer" (2011) and "Hollywood Remembered: Glamour, Glitz, Triumph & Tragedy: All the Gossip from the Glory Days of Hollywood" (2024) by Blood Moon Productions