Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [110]
According to Reagan, “Now various homes of the I.A.T.S.E. members were bombed at night; other workers were ambushed and slugged.”140 Warners employees were being brought to the studio each morning on buses driven by Teamsters; CSU picketers threw rocks and bottles as the buses whizzed through the gate.141 On November 13, Reagan watched as the Warners bus on which he usually commuted went up in flames on Beverly 1 7 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Boulevard, not far from his house.142 Two days later, in violation of a court injunction prohibiting more than eight pickets at any studio gate, 1,500
strikers led by Sorrell marched on Columbia. The CSU boss was among the nearly seven hundred arrested on charges ranging from unlawful assembly to assault and conspiracy and held on bail of $500 each, a steep sum for carpenters and painters in 1946.143
That same week, SAG left-wingers, including Sterling Hayden, Howard Da Silva, and Hume Cronyn, tried to persuade the Guild’s board to reverse its “anti-union, anti-labor, anti-democratic policy” and support the strike.
When the board refused to change course, three hundred SAG members signed a petition demanding another mass meeting on strike policy.144 On December 19, Reagan again addressed his fellow actors at the Hollywood Legion Stadium. Edward G. Robinson and Katharine Hepburn spoke for the other side. Reagan later dismissed Hepburn’s speech as “a word-for-word copy of a CSU strike bulletin several weeks old.”145
By a ten-to-one margin this time, SAG members voted to support their board.146 Without the actors, the CSU’s days were numbered. SAG executive director Jack Dales congratulated Reagan on a brilliant performance, and Jack Warner announced, “Ronnie Reagan . . . has turned out to be a tower of strength, not only for the actors but for the whole industry, and he is to be highly complimented for his efforts on behalf of everyone working in our business.”147 Others thought he was an opportunist, a bastard, a scab.
One actor called him a Fascist to his face. Both the compliments and the insults testified to the crucial role Reagan had played in isolating Sorrell and the CSU.
And all the while he was acting as a labor leader by night, he was playing an epileptic biochemist by day. Shooting on the abysmal Night Unto Night dragged on through the Christmas holidays. Reagan didn’t get along with either his director or his co-star, the young Swedish sex-pot Viveca Lindfors, who found him bland and untalented. “I don’t remember a single conversation with him of any substance,” she later wrote. “I do remember some chitchat about sex, which was up my alley. . . . ‘It’s best in the afternoon, after coming out of the shower,’ he said, and then he laughed.”148
Supporting actress Rosemary DeCamp was more sympathetic. “He worked 18 to 20 hours a day,” she remembered, “at night trying to resolve an ugly industry strike . . . then all day on that baffling film about a man with epilepsy. But he remained cheerful and loquacious with three or four Ronnie and Jane: 1941–1946
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hours of sleep a night. This went on for months and may have been the cause of his divorce from Jane Wyman, who must have had a difficult and lonely time as Mike and Maureen were very young.”149
At the end of the year, the North Hollywood Women’s Professional Club named Jane Wyman its “Ideal Working Mother.”150 But according to the wife of a Hollywood personality who saw a lot of Ronnie and Jane in those days, it was clear that all was not well in the marriage. “Ronnie used to sit around with Adolphe Menjou and George Murphy and talk about Communism—at parties, when it was boring to talk about this evil force that was penetrating our society. People would say, ‘There go Adolphe and George and Ronnie talking the Red Menace.’ Don’t you think Jane was bored by all that talk? She wasn’t interested in politics. Jane was a very pert, fresh-faced little thing who wanted to dance