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was “the lowest point of all.” Then a script from MGM “came down the chimney to the sound of sleigh bells and tiny hoofs on the roof.” Reagan earned $30,000—less than half his fee just two years earlier—for Prisoner of War, in which he played an American intelligence officer captured and tortured by the North Koreans. The script was based on interviews with POWs released after the end of the Korean War in June of that year, and the role seemed custom-made for an anti-Communist crusader. But Prisoner of War was a critical and commercial disappointment. “Unfortunately, production and release were both rushed, with the idea the picture should come out while the headlines were hot,” Reagan rationalized. He also felt that the film was hurt by

“the reluctance of extreme liberals to enthuse about anything that upset their illusions.”43

Reagan was not in a position to say no when Art Park came up with another way to bring in some cash: doing a Las Vegas act. He found the idea “outlandish,” but when Park told him that he could make $15,000 a week, Reagan agreed to consider it. On the morning of his meeting with Park, he and Nancy checked the daily astrology column of “one of our good friends . . . Carroll Righter.” Reagan later wrote that he “almost suspected an MCA plot: my word for the day read, ‘This is the day to listen to the advice of experts.’ Cutting out the item, I walked into the meeting, and without even saying hello, asked, ‘Are you guys experts?’ ”44

After assuring Reagan that he would have to do little more than what 2 7 0

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House he had done at countless benefits over the years—tell a few jokes and introduce other acts—Park made a call to Beldon Katleman, the owner of the El Rancho Vegas Hotel Casino. Katleman was eager to book Reagan, whom he knew from the Friars Club, but when it turned out that he wanted him to emcee a show featuring a stripper, Reagan balked.45 Instead, he was booked into the Last Frontier for a two-week stint in mid-February 1954.

MCA hired comedy writer John Bradford to help prepare Reagan’s act.

“I was scared to death because I had never heard of a performer who couldn’t sing or dance doing a Vegas act before,” Bradford recalled. “So I met with Ron and Nancy—she was always with him, always—to see what he could do. I tried him out singing, and he was great; I gave him a sample monologue, and his timing was perfect. He loved telling jokes in an Irish brogue, and he was good at it, so I felt a little better. My wife and I then spent every day for the next three weeks with the Reagans working on the act, and Ron was terrific; he really knocked himself out because he was on his uppers and needed the dough. . . . [Nancy] attended every rehearsal and took notes like a secretary; she was that concerned.” Bradford added, “I remember he wanted me to put a lot of tax jokes in the monologue because he’d just been hit with a whopping bill for back taxes and he hated the IRS. He said the Internal Revenue Service should be abolished.

‘Everyone should pay ten percent of their income and that’s it,’ he said.”46

Reagan’s ninety-minute show featured the Continentals, a male quartet that had appeared in nightclubs and on the Ed Sullivan television show. It also included the Honey Brothers, slapstick comedians known for their blue humor (though most of that was cut for Reagan’s show), a musical duo called the Blackburn Twins, and a line of showgirls in feathered headdresses. Reagan wrote most of his self-deprecating monologue, and good-naturedly went along with skits that required him to crack lowbrow jokes in a German accent while wearing an apron advertising Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and get smacked on the head with rolled-up newspapers by his fellow performers. According to one of the Continentals, Nancy sat through two shows every night, “sipping nothing more than a glass of ice water.”47 “I never got bored,” she said, putting a good face on what must have been a somewhat painful experience.48

Ronnie and Nancy didn’t gamble in Las Vegas until their last night, and