Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [173]
Edgar Bergen was a staunch Eisenhower supporter, and through the Bergens the Reagans became friendly with Freeman Gosden, the President’s Pacific Palisades: 1952–1958
2 7 9
Palm Springs golfing partner, and his second wife, Jane. Coincidentally, Gosden knew Edith Davis from his days in Chicago, where the Amos ’n’
Andy radio show had been produced, and, according to Nancy, her mother was the only woman to have been on the program—once. In 1948, Gosden, along with his partner, Charles Correll, had sold the show to CBS for more than $2 million. He was an important behind-the-scenes player in national Republican circles; the brainy, elegant Jane was as passionate about politics as her husband.
Dick Powell and George Murphy, according to June Allyson, were still trying “to shift Ronnie Reagan into the Republican Party” over dinners at Mandeville Canyon.78 So was Holmes Tuttle, the Ford dealer, who tried to persuade Reagan to run for the U.S. Senate in 1954. “I turned down the offer with thanks,” Reagan told the Los Angeles Daily News at the time.
“I’m a ham—always was and always will be.”79
During the years he worked for G.E., most of Reagan’s political energies were channeled into the speeches he gave on his tours. “He never directly hawked G.E. products,” noted Paul Gavaghan, who was the company’s publicity director for New England. “He promoted anticommunism and the free enterprise system.”80 From the beginning, Reagan realized that he “couldn’t be a mouthpiece for someone else’s thoughts. . . . I had to have something I wanted to say, and something in which I believed.”81
As Reagan’s reputation as a speaker spread, he found himself addressing increasingly powerful groups, including the National Association of Manufacturers and the Executives Club of Chicago, and his message evolved from a rose-colored defense of the unfairly maligned citizens of Hollywood into a full-frontal attack on the dangers of big government, with its wasteful welfare programs and power-grabbing bureaucracy. “My speeches were nonpartisan as far the two major political parties were concerned,” he later noted, “and I went out of my way to point out that the problems of centralizing power in Washington, with subsequent loss of freedom at the local level, were problems that crossed party lines.”82 In the late 1950s, according to Lou Cannon, Reagan was told by a G.E. executive that “he was more in demand as a public speaker than anyone in the country except President Eisenhower.”83
“I heard Ronnie speak at a gathering of maybe two hundred people in Tennessee or Kentucky,” G.E. Theater producer Bill Frye told me. “He was 2 8 0
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House unbelievable. He sounded as though he were running for something. Of course, this was before one ever thought that he’d be running for governor, let alone president. Those people just loved him, and I was totally surprised. I knew he was good on-screen, when the camera was going, but he was just as good without the cameras. They used to say about Jimmy Stewart, ‘He saves it for the camera.’ Well, Ronnie didn’t save it for the camera. Ronnie did just as much before a group of two hundred people as he did in front of that camera for a million people.”84
Bill Frye and his friend producer James Wharton were among Hollywood’s most popular extra men, and they frequently gave dinner parties at their house on Coldwater Canyon. “Every so often the G.E. people would come to town and I’d have to give a dinner for them,” Frye told me. “I’d call my social Hollywood friends and say, ‘Listen, the G.E. people are coming and I thought I