Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [109]
Over the next several days ugly battles erupted outside MGM, Universal, Columbia, and Paramount. The AVC’s Hollywood chapter voted to support the CSU and ordered its members to join the picket lines in full military uniform, a move an outraged Reagan saw as proof that it had become “a hotbed of Communists.” By October 1 more than two dozen veterans had been hospitalized for injuries suffered in clashes with police.135
On October 2, Reagan gave his speech urging SAG’s membership to support the board’s policy of neutrality and to honor their contracts by crossing the picket lines. Three thousand actors had gathered for the mass meeting at the Hollywood Legion Stadium, an old boxing arena, where a podium was set up in the ring. Outside, some two thousand pro-CSU
demonstrators were handing out leaflets and shouting taunts demanding that SAG support the strike. Reagan’s friend Robert Stack recalled the tense scene: “There was a group outside and inside that was trying, supposedly, to take the Guild away from us. I don’t know if they were Communists, but when we arrived at the stadium they were about ten deep, and we had to walk in single file. There was a guy standing on the marquee taking pictures as we walked in, saying, ‘You better know how to vote, because we’ll know how you vote.’ Inside people were yelling. Bob Mitchum got up and said, ‘Look, as an American you can ask me what to do, but damn it, don’t tell me what to do.’ There was a racket going on; they were marching in cadence on the roof. Ronald Reagan stood up in the middle Ronnie and Jane: 1941–1946
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of the boxing ring and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I implore you, stay to the bitter end tonight. Because if you don’t, you’re going to lose your union. I don’t care how early your call is, but please stay tonight.’ And he went on and on. He’d had death threats. In fact, Chuck Heston told me that they were flattening Ron’s tires and stuff.”136
After the meeting, a half-dozen Teamsters led Reagan and Wyman through a gauntlet of hecklers to their car. “A group of us went to Trader Vic’s,” Stack remembered. “And I said, ‘You know something, Ron, I was very impressed by you. I can’t think of anyone else who could have gotten up there and done what you did. And I feel strongly that if you’re as gifted as you are and if you believe in democracy, as an American, you have an obligation to do something for your country. You really should do something with that leadership quality.’ He looked at me kind of funny, gave me a quizzical smile, and said, ‘You mean if I run for president, you’ll vote for me?’ I said, ‘Yeah, you bet your ass.’ And everybody laughed.”137
SAG members voted 2,748 to 509 in favor of the board’s—and Reagan’s—position.138 Thus empowered, Reagan stepped up his efforts to keep the studios open and end the strike. He persuaded SAG’s board to let him lead a delegation to the AFL’s Chicago convention, and Warners suspended production on Night Unto Night so that he could go. The star-studded group—Wyman, Murphy, Edward Arnold, Robert Taylor, Gene Kelly, Walter Pidgeon, Alexis Smith, Dick Powell and June Allyson—
threatened to tour the country condemning the AFL’s leaders if they didn’t do more to mediate the dispute. Back in Los Angeles, Reagan met with the technicians at Technicolor who had voted to switch sides from IATSE
to the CSU, but they walked out anyway, a major setback for the studios because they had no other way to process color film. In late October, Reagan organized a SAG-sponsored roundtable of forty-three local unions at the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel, which ended badly, with Sorrell screaming at his friend Gene Kelly and