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Henry Wallace at which J. Parnell Thomas and “all their ilk” were denounced by the star speaker, Katharine Hepburn. Her fiery speech had been written partly by one of Warner’s listees, Dalton Trumbo; another, Ring Lardner Jr., had scripted the movie that launched her on-screen partnership—and off-screen romance—with Spencer Tracy. A Bryn Mawr graduate, Hepburn inherited her progressivism from old-money East Coast parents who prided themselves on their unconventionality: her father, a prominent Hartford surgeon, was a longtime Henry Wallace admirer; her mother, born a Houghton in Boston, was a suffragette and early birth control militant. By 1947 the thirty-eight-year-old actress had already won her first Oscar and been nominated for three more, but she was more respected than beloved in Hollywood, where she was perceived as a lock-jawed snob and an eccentric radical. Yet she managed to get along with Loyal and Edith Davis when she and Tracy were their houseguests in Chicago.

The playwright Arthur Laurents, then a young screenwriter at MGM, accompanied Hepburn, Tracy, and Irene Selznick (the more unconventional of Louis B. Mayer’s two daughters) to the PCA rally that night. In his memoir, Original Story By, Laurents captures the drama and glamour, the sheer 2 0 0

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House spectacle, of Hollywood politics at the time—and also reveals its precious-ness:

The Progressive Citizens of America held a big rally at Gilmore Stadium for Henry Wallace as part of a drive to stem right-wing attacks on unions and the arts. . . . At the most dramatic moment, at the peak of excitement, a very high platform was hit with blazing spotlights and there was Katharine Hepburn in a red Valentina gown.

The stadium roared. Hepburn’s grin carried to the top of the bleach-ers and she delivered magnificently a speech fighting the destruction of culture. The crowd wouldn’t stop cheering. Henry Wallace could have been elected president if Katharine Hepburn, in that red dress, on that blazing tower, could have been transported from city to city all over the land.

Afterward, she, Tracy, Irene, and I went back to her house on Tower Drive, high in the Beverly hills. She was euphoric, proud of her speech. I had been one of the writers of that speech. . . .

Tracy was bothered by the speech, more that she had made any speech at all. Actors had no place in politics, period, according to Spencer Tracy. I’d heard that before, I was sure I’d hear it again, but I never once heard it from a liberal. Only from the most conservative—and Spencer Tracy, congenial and pleasant as he was, was a right-winger. So was Louis B. Mayer. So were Cecil B. DeMille and Sam Wood. So were Barbara Stanwyck and Ronald Reagan and George Murphy, John Wayne, Ginger Rogers—stars born on the wrong side of the tracks who thought playing footsie with conservatives would allow them to cross over.27

Ronald Reagan was not yet a full-fledged right-winger in mid-1947—

and George Murphy was born on the Yale campus, where his father was a famous track coach—but the point Laurents makes is a valid one. Consciously or not, social motives often color political views. So does the company one keeps. Reagan’s postwar friends—the guys he went out for a drink with after SAG meetings, the couples he and Jane saw at Saturday night dinner parties and Sunday afternoon barbecues—were mostly self-made and mostly Republican. Even those who generally avoided party politics—the Bennys, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Claudette Colbert—

were intrinsically conservative, patriotic, entrepreneurial, and obsessively concerned with the high taxes they were paying on their six-figure incomes.

Divorce: 1947–1948

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Reagan considered Bill Holden, who was seven years younger, his best friend. A moderate Republican, the handsome actor was known as Golden Holden, partly because his first hit film, released in 1939, was Golden Boy; partly because he had grown up in monied South Pasadena and his mother was descended from George Washington.28 Ronnie and Jane were also close to Dick