Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [166]
profits go on to acquire Universal Studios in 1958. Actors also benefited tremendously from Reagan’s decision, because once MCA agreed to pay
“reuse fees,” other producers had no choice but to follow. As one MCA 2 6 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House agent later put it, “Every writer, actor and director in this town ought to get down and kiss Ronald Reagan’s feet.”34
If there was a payoff for Reagan personally, it would be some time in coming. His contract with Universal was closed out with Law and Order in the fall of 1952, and he would not make another movie for fourteen months. “Ronnie was upset with Lew for the way things worked out with Universal,” Nancy Reagan told me.35 The Wassermans had also pulled back from Reagan socially after his remarriage, probably because, as Nancy Reagan pointed out, “Edie and Jane were very close.”36 (In 1955, Revue Productions launched Jane Wyman Presents the Fireside Theater.) In fact, Wasserman no longer actually represented Reagan, having turned him over to Arthur Park, a vice president at the agency.
“The phone continued to ring for Ronnie,” Nancy later wrote, “but now he was being offered bad roles in bad films—pictures he described as ‘They don’t want them good, they want them Thursday.’”37 She supported her husband in his refusal to make any more “clunkers,” but the financial strain was considerable. Reagan was in debt to the IRS for income tax he had de-ferred during the war, the horse ranch was mortgaged and losing money, there were two mortgages on the Amalfi Drive house—and no furniture in the living room because they couldn’t afford any.38
So Nancy made a clunker instead: “Five months after Patti was born, and despite my decision not to be a working wife, I went back to work for one picture. Quite simply we needed the money. This was a blow to Ronnie, but we had to face facts, and face them together. I could get work, but his movie career was at a standstill.”39 She was paid $18,000 for Donovan’s Brain, a low-budget sci-fi thriller about a mad scientist who preserves the brain of an evil tycoon. In a master stroke of irony, Lew Ayres played the scientist and Nancy his wife. (She claimed they did not talk about Jane.) Her best line: “Call me when the brain quiets down.” According to one critic, she “walked through the movie in a state of utter bafflement, giving a new dimension to the word dumbfounded.”40
Although he was almost as dismissive of television as the studio bosses, Reagan agreed to go on The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show in May 1953, and later that year he started going to New York to make guest appearances on such shows as Revlon Mirror Theater, Lux Video Theater, and What’s My Line? “Dear Nancy Pants,” he wrote from the Sherry-Netherland on one such trip. “Yesterday I went directly from the train to rehearsal—
only stopping to check in here. . . . Back at the hotel I put in a call to you Pacific Palisades: 1952–1958
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and then I tried for Lew Wasserman—not in town! [MCA agent] Sonny Werblin—away on vacation! Nancy Poo Pants Reagan—away out yonder!
Eight million people in this pigeon crap encrusted metropolis and suddenly I realized I was alone with my thoughts and they smelled sulphurous.”41
Ronnie may have been feeling sorry for himself, but he was only down and out by Hollywood standards, staying as he was at a luxurious Fifth Avenue hotel and, as he went on to tell Nancy, enjoying a half-bottle of Pi-chon Longueville with his dinner at “21.” Still, he couldn’t resist expressing resentment of those who had it easier in life, namely a fellow at an adjacent table, “a Brooks Brothers character who was evidently a Fond Fathers junior partner with plenty of loot he never could earn for himself.” Mainly, however, he missed Nancy: “Man can’t live without a heart and you are my heart, by far the nicest thing about me and so very necessary. There would be no life without you nor would I want any.” He signed off, “I Love You, the Eastern Half of Us.”42
That Christmas, Reagan recalled,