Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [106]
Reagan’s willingness to work with the government law enforcement agency most anathema to the Hollywood left was one more sign of the political metamorphosis he was undergoing during the summer and fall of 1946. Reagan’s disillusionment with the AVC and HICCASP, his cooperation with the FBI, his rise to leadership at the Screen Actors Guild during Hollywood’s worst period of labor strife—all these were taking place almost simultaneously. One experience reinforced the other and perhaps made the transformation from “near-hopeless hemophiliac liberal”113 to anti-Communist crusader seem something like an act of fate.
Reagan returned to the SAG board in February 1946 on the recommendation of his conservative debating partner from This Is the Army, George Murphy, who had succeeded another conservative, Robert Montgomery, as 1 7 2
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Guild president. Although several liberals, including James Cagney, Gene Kelly, and Henry Fonda, sat on the board, it tended to be dominated by its more middle-of-the-road and conservative members, among them Reagan’s friends Pat O’Brien, Dick Powell, Robert Taylor, and William Holden. Jane Wyman had stayed on all through the war, and was one of only four women on the forty-four-member board.114 One of those women, Anne Revere, was an outspoken leftist who would later recall that Reagan let down his liberal colleagues within a matter of months.115
In the spring of 1946, SAG was considering forming a tri-guild council with the somewhat more liberal Screen Directors Guild and the decidedly left-wing Screen Writers Guild. But the attempt to draft a statement of purpose for the proposed council led to a sharp disagreement on SAG’s board: Murphy and Montgomery insisted on language condemning Communist, as well as Fascist, “influence in the motion picture industry or the ranks of labor.”116 When the wording came up for a vote in mid-June—just two weeks before Jimmy Roosevelt and de Havilland raised the very same issue at HICCASP—Reagan voted with the board’s anti-Communist majority. He also joined Murphy and Montgomery in rejecting the tri-guild council after the directors and writers agreed to the entire statement of principles except the condemnation of Communism.117 He was proving himself a valuable liberal ally to SAG’s conservative powers that be and, perhaps, was starting to see things their way. Murphy and Montgomery, he would later write, were “equally aware of the strange creatures crawling from under the make-believe rocks in our make-believe town.”118
On July 1—the day before the showdown at HICCASP—Herbert Sorrell, the head of the Conference of Studio Unions, called a strike. It was the latest skirmish in the sometimes violent struggle for control of Hollywood’s thirty thousand studio workers between the upstart CSU and the en-trenched International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) that had been raging on and off since early 1945. The July strike was settled in two days by an agreement known as the Treaty of Beverly Hills because it was negotiated in a bungalow at the hotel of the same name by union and studio representatives brought together by an emergency committee of SAG’s board.119 Reagan was one of the committee’s six members,120 and from that moment on he would play a central role as SAG’s point man in the increasingly byzantine—and ideologically charged—conflict.
Hollywood’s labor war had begun almost absurdly—with a decision by Ronnie and Jane: 1941–1946
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the seventy-seven member Society for Motion Picture Interior Decorators to switch its affiliation from IATSE to the CSU—and quickly engulfed the entire movie industry. Despite rulings by the National Labor Relations Board and the War Labor Board, IATSE refused to recognize the switch.
The battle was engaged in earnest on March 12, 1945, when the CSU’s ten thousand members went on strike in support of the decorators and began picketing the studios. The studio bosses backed IATSE, the older and less militant of the labor coalitions, partly because it included the