• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3036 0

Stars in Hollywood. “As far as we are concerned any man or woman who is a fellow traveler, or belongs to a Red front organization, or has supported Communism with financial or moral support, a la Charlie Chaplin, or has come out in open support of the ten branded men who defied the Parnell Thomas investigation, or associates with known Communists, openly or in secret, is just as guilty of treason, and is just as much an enemy of America as any outright Communist.”)55 Although the studios continued to deny that they were blacklisting anyone, some of those whose names appeared on such lists suddenly found auditions were canceled, or parts were cut from movies in which they had already been cast, or their agents stopped returning their calls.

At MGM, Louis B. Mayer, clinging to power in his all-white office lined with framed photographs of Herbert Hoover, J. Edgar Hoover, and New York’s Cardinal Francis Spellman, sometimes whispered that he wondered if Dore Schary was a Communist, and Schary threatened to sue Hedda Hopper for referring to the studio as “Metro-Goldwyn-Moscow” because it employed him. Schary was one of the few studio executives who tried to resist the rising tide of guilt-by-association blacklisting.56 Gale Sondergaard, a well-regarded character actress who had a supporting role in East Side, West Side, was married to one of the Hollywood 10, director Herbert Biberman, and under investigation by both the FBI and HUAC while the film was being shot. Not surprisingly, Sondergaard had signed the amicus curiae brief.

Seeing a fellow cast member’s name on the Hollywood Reporter’s list made Nancy all the more nervous.57

2 3 8

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House LeRoy tried to reassure Nancy by telling her that the studio would take care of her problem, and on November 7, Louella Parsons ran an item declaring her “100 percent American” and pointing out that there was another Nancy Davis, who supported “leftist theater” and “Henry Wallace’s politics.”58 The Hollywood Reporter also ran an item clarifying the matter, but Nancy was still not satisfied. LeRoy told her he would talk to his old friend from Warners, SAG president Ronald Reagan, and ask him to call her. As she later wrote, she sat up all night waiting for the phone to ring. “I had seen him in films and, frankly, I had liked what I had seen.” She continued, “On the set the next day, a beaming Mervyn reported that Ronnie had checked me out . . . and the Guild would defend my name if it ever became necessary. I told Mervyn that was fine, but I was so worried I’d feel better if the Guild president would call me and explain it all to me.”59

“She had her heart set on meeting Ronnie,” LeRoy told a reporter years later. “I knew they’d make a great pair, so I went along with it and fixed them up.”60

The phone rang soon after Nancy got home that afternoon. Reagan said he had an early call the next morning, but if she was free they could have a quick dinner to discuss her concerns. She told him it was awfully short notice and added that she, too, had an early call. “I didn’t, of course, but a girl has to have some pride,” she would write. “Two hours later, my first thought when I opened the door was, This is wonderful. He looks as good in person as he does on the screen!”61

“The door opened,” Reagan wrote in describing the same scene, “not on the expected fan magazine version of a starlet, but on a small, slender young lady with dark hair and a wide-spaced pair of hazel eyes that looked right at you and made you look back. Don’t get ahead of me: bells didn’t ring or skyrockets explode, although I think perhaps they did. It was just that I had buried the part of me where such things happened so deep, I couldn’t hear them.”62

A year and a half had passed since Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman were divorced, in June 1948, and although he put on his usual cheerful face, bachelorhood did not agree with him. To cope with his loneliness, he was going out too much, drinking too much, and spending too much—his nightclub bills alone were running $750 a month.63 And