Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [108]
SAG’s emergency committee, including Reagan, who had been nominated third vice president of the Guild, met with IATSE chief Roy Brewer and suggested that he abide by the August Clarification until the matter could be taken up at the AFL’s national convention in October, but Brewer argued that Sorrell wouldn’t be satisfied until the CSU controlled every union worker in Hollywood. Reagan attended at least one of the Producers Labor Committee’s secret meetings with IATSE leaders, on September 11, so there is some basis for believing he knew of their plans.126 That same day he called Sorrell on behalf of SAG and urged him Ronnie and Jane: 1941–1946
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not to call another strike.127 According to Reagan, Sorrell rebuffed him, probably because he had already ordered CSU painters and carpenters not to work on IATSE-built sets, thus making a confrontation inevitable.
Both sides were clearly spoiling for a fight, and had already lined up muscle: the longshoremen’s union for the CSU; the Teamsters for IATSE.
SAG’s leaders tried to cast themselves as innocent bystanders. “The Guild is not interested in the merits of the case,” Montgomery proclaimed at the board’s September 17 meeting, “but feels that all possible steps should be taken to prevent a strike which would throw 30,000 people out of work because of 300 jobs.”128 Reagan spoke out strongly for a motion stating that “members of the Guild be instructed to go through picket lines and live up to their contracts . . . and that the Guild make every effort to see that the studios provide adequate physical protection for its members when crossing picket lines.” The motion passed with only two dissenting votes, from Boris Karloff and Anne Revere.129 The board also called an emergency meeting of the entire membership for October 2 and asked Reagan to prepare a speech explaining SAG’s strike policy.
A few nights later, Reagan and Bill Holden, his closest friend on the SAG board, “crashed” a meeting of SAG’s leftist contingent at Ida Lupino’s house. According to Reagan, the seventy-five actors gathered on Lupino’s patio were “astonished and miffed” by their arrival. The meeting was chaired by Sterling Hayden, who would later testify to HUAC that he had been assigned by his Communist Party cell to line up SAG support for Sorrell. “The whole thing was a brainwash job,” Reagan recalled. “The C.S.U.
was lauded to the skies, the I.A.T.S.E. was damned, and the SAG drew faint praise indeed for trying to be blessed with the peacemakers.” When he defended SAG’s policy, he was booed and heckled. John Garfield, who also sat on SAG’s board, tried to quiet the group, but was pulled aside by Howard Da Silva—both Garfield and Da Silva were secret Party members at the time.130
The next day Reagan was filming a beach scene at Point Mugu for Night Unto Night—he had started shooting his second postwar movie on September 20—when he was called to the phone. “There’s a group being formed to deal with you,” an anonymous caller said. “They’re going to fix you so you won’t ever act again.” He was escorted back to the studio, where the security office issued him a .32 Smith & Wesson pistol and a shoulder holster. The fear was that CSU hotheads were planning to throw acid in Reagan’s face; he claimed not to take the threat seriously until he saw a police car guarding his 1 7 6
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House house that night. “Thereafter, I mounted the holstered gun religiously every morning and took it off the last thing at night. I learned how much a person gets to lean on hardware like that. After months of wearing it took a real effort of will to discard it. I kept thinking: ‘The very night you take it off may be the night when you need it most.’”131
Meanwhile, between September 12 and September 24, 1,200 carpenters and painters had been fired, and they started picketing the studios. On September 26, the CSU called a strike to halt work on the fifty films then in production at the eight largest studios. In a repeat of the previous fall’s Battle of Burbank, CSU