Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [165]
“Dad and Nancy became a family unto themselves after Patti was born,”
Michael recalled. “Until then, Nancy had treated Maureen and me like her own kids. It soon became apparent that we were becoming less and less important in her life and Dad’s.”29 Like any new wife and mother, Nancy was understandably more focused on building a family than on fixing the one she had inherited. “I was just running our little house,” she said when I asked her about her first year of marriage. “And wheeling Patti up and down the street.”30
On November 10, 1952, Ronald Reagan formally stepped down as president of SAG at a meeting of the entire membership, who gave him a standing ovation and a gold lifetime membership card. He remained on the board and the executive committee. Nancy also kept her seat on the board, but was glad to see Ronnie give up the presidency, feeling that after one appointed and five elected terms he had done enough for his fellow actors. “There’s no question in my mind that Ronnie’s political involve-ments had begun to hurt his prospects for work,” she later wrote. “By the time I came along, he had become so identified with the Screen Actors Pacific Palisades: 1952–1958
2 6 7
Guild that the studio heads had begun to think of him less as an actor than as an adversary.”31
He was succeeded by Walter Pidgeon, who four months earlier had been instrumental in persuading the board to approve one of the most controversial decisions Reagan took in his long tenure as the Guild’s chief: to grant an unprecedented blanket waiver to his own agency, MCA, allowing it to produce an unlimited number of television shows. Until then, waivers of the bylaw forbidding agents to act as producers had been given on a case-by-case basis for film production; the Guild was in the process of drawing up a similar rule for television. But MCA’s chairman, Jules Stein, and president, Lew Wasserman, approached Reagan with a tempting proposal at a time when unemployment among actors in Hollywood was at a record high, live television production was booming in New York, and the old-line studio moguls still saw the new medium as a threat rather than an opportunity. According to Garry Wills, they told Reagan that MCA’s recently launched Revue Productions “would undertake [television] production on an ambitious scale, furnishing employment to Hollywood actors, but they could only do this if the Guild would not undercut the project at some future date by making production an impermissible activity for agents.”32
In addition, MCA quietly agreed to pay actors residuals when Revue shows they appeared in were rerun, a concept the Association of Television Producers had rejected out of hand in negotiations with SAG earlier that year. The hush-hush deal was worked out by MCA’s freshly hired lawyer, Laurence Beilenson, who had been SAG’s lawyer for years, and who had represented Reagan in his divorce proceedings. (Ten years later, when Reagan was subpoenaed in a Justice Department investigation of alleged an-titrust activities by MCA, he would claim that he had no memory of this backroom pact. And although the feeling that he gave special treatment to his own agents would persist, he was never formally charged with wrongdoing of any kind.)33
The blanket waiver proved to be a bonanza for MCA. “The Octopus of Show Biz,” as it came to be known, would dominate television throughout the 1950s—producing shows for its own talent, including Jack Benny, Edgar Bergen,