Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [129]
A Quaker from Minnesota, Ayres was the son of divorced musicians.
He had been signed by MGM in 1929, when Greta Garbo chose him out of a line of young actors to play opposite her in The Kiss, and he won fame the following year as the lead in All Quiet on the Western Front. Between 1938 and 1942, he solidified his stardom in the title role of nine Dr. Kil-dare movies. But when he declared himself a conscientious objector in March 1942, the studio was flooded with letters branding him a coward and a traitor. He turned public opinion around by serving as a battlefield medic in the Pacific, and by the time he was discharged in 1945, even Hedda Hopper was calling him a man of principle.55
It was rumored that Wyman and her co-star had an affair while making Johnny Belinda. She always denied it, and the consensus seemed to be that the relationship was more spiritual than carnal. “It was platonic,” said studio publicist Jim Reid, adding “but it was intense.”56 Ayres had been married and divorced twice in the 1930s, to actresses Lola Lane and Ginger Rogers. (Of the latter, he said, “Ginger Rogers was married to her career and that mother of hers. I interfered with both relationships.”)57 There can be little doubt that working with and being around Ayres did wonders for Wyman’s confidence personally and professionally. “No matter what they do,” she told director Jean Negulesco, “the Oscar is mine this year.”58
While his wife was in Mendocino, Reagan was between pictures and almost totally focused on his duties as SAG president. The Guild finally concluded negotiations with the producers in mid-September, though the new contract, unlike the ten-year pact it succeeded, was for only two years. In Reagan’s account, “Actors had gotten raises ranging from 52 to 166 percent. Working conditions had been vastly improved and we had wearily 2 1 0
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House agreed to a stopgap clause that settled nothing with regard to movies someday being reissued on television—but then everyone said they’d be crazy to sell their movies to a competing medium.”59
SAG members approved the agreement 3,676 to 78, but there was little cause for celebration. On September 15 the board was shaken by the resignation of its treasurer, Anne Revere. A well-liked character actress who had won an Oscar as Elizabeth Taylor’s mother in National Velvet in 1945, Revere had been identified to the FBI by Reagan in April as someone who always voted the Party line, though the rest of the board did not know that he had done so. Now she was the only Guild officer who refused to sign an affidavit stating that she was not a Communist, as required of union officials by the Taft-Hartley Act.60
Reagan and the board had been struggling with this issue since the controversial labor law was passed in June. The following day Reagan offered an explanation in a New York Post guest column. Speaking for himself and former SAG presidents Montgomery, Murphy, and Edward Arnold, he wrote, “We are violently opposed to indiscriminate Red-baiting, but believe that every union in our country must awaken to the menace of Communist party members who are seeking to destroy our trade unions by boring from within.”61 Most of the board resented the government’s intrusion into union affairs, a position shared by the AFL’s national leadership, which considered the legislation unconstitutional and supported its repeal. Reagan said he agreed, but he also argued that the Guild faced sanctions