Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [131]
Huston, Wyler, and Dunne quickly rallied more than five hundred Hollywood personalities to their cause—not only such committed liberals as Humphrey Bogart, Rita Hayworth, Frank Sinatra, Gregory Peck, Burt Lan-caster, and Judy Garland but also such moderate Republicans as Irene Dunne, Jimmy Stewart, and William Holden, and even the anti-political Spencer Tracy.73 Reagan apparently decided not to get involved. “Willy Wyler has told me he was present at an early meeting,” Dunne wrote in his memoir, Take Two.74 But one of the Unfriendly 19, screenwriter Lester Cole, remembered “the conspicuous absence of such self-proclaimed liberals as Ronald Reagan.” According to Cole’s memoir, Hollywood Red, early one evening he went “to Ronnie Reagan’s . . . house to ask him to a meeting of the First Amendment group. . . . Wyman told me Reagan was lying down, not feeling well, but she’d talk to him. She was back in moments, seemingly embarrassed, and asked me to tell Humphrey Bogart and Willie Wyler that he was not well, but was thinking seriously about joining them. He would let them know the next day. He didn’t.”75
Perhaps Reagan was just too busy to join one more committee. He was in Illinois doing a celebrity turn at Eureka’s annual Pumpkin Festival when the first subpoenas were served in Los Angeles, which, given his aversion to flying, meant a three-day train ride each way. He was still an active member of ADA’s Hollywood organizing committee, which ran ads of its own in the trades urging HUAC to respect due process and “creative freedom.”
He continued to assist the ADA’s recruitment drive, and was one of fifty guests at a cocktail party Melvyn Douglas, its California state chairman, gave in early October to enlist new members, with Hubert Humphrey as guest of honor.76 The day after the party, Reagan set out for Mendocino, an eighteen-hour trip by car, and he spent ten days there waiting for Jane to finish location shooting on Johnny Belinda. They returned home on Octo-Divorce: 1947–1948
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ber 17, and that night he left for Washington by train, a four-day trip. If Lester Cole came calling that afternoon—and it appears to be the only day before the HUAC hearings when Ronnie and Jane were both home—is it any wonder he was sent away?
HUAC’s “Big Show,” as The New York Times called “the most thoroughly publicized investigation [the committee] has ever undertaken,” opened on Monday, October 20. The hearings were held in the Caucus Room of the Old House Office Building, the largest auditorium on Capitol Hill after the House and Senate chambers, with batteries of klieg lights aimed at the witness table and floodlights hanging from the chandeliers. Six newsreel crews, announcers from the three major radio networks, and 120 newspaper and magazine reporters covered the proceedings, and D.C. police had a hard time holding back the throng of movie fans who rushed the doors as each session opened, hoping to get one of the four hundred seats reserved for spectators.77
Jack Warner was the first to testify. “Ideological termites have bur-rowed into many American industries,” he declared in a prepared opening statement. “Wherever they may be, I say let us dig them out and get rid of them. My brothers and I will be happy to subscribe generously to a pest-removal fund. We are willing to establish such a fund to ship to Russia the people who don’t like our American system of government and prefer the Communistic system to ours.”78 Mayer, who came next, also read an opening statement designed to please his inquisitors, asserting that he had personally “maintained a relentless vigilance against un-American influences” at MGM and calling for “legislation establishing a national policy regulating employment of Communists in private industry. . . . It is my belief they should be denied the sanctuary of the