Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [199]
Losing his G.E. job was an unexpected blow to Reagan. Though he denied the story, the widow and sons of BBD&O’s then chief executive Charles Brower told Edmund Morris that Reagan had gone to see Brower in New York a few days after the cancellation. In Mrs. Brower’s recollection, Reagan “begged” her husband to try and change G.E.’s decision, crying as he pleaded, “What can I do, Charley? I can’t act anymore, I can’t do anything else. How can I support my family?”28
Lew Wasserman was hardly more comforting when Reagan went to see him about reviving his movie career. “You’ve been around this business long enough to know that I can’t force someone on a producer who doesn’t want to use him,” the MCA president told him. Reagan saw this rebuff as politically motivated, too, since Wasserman was one of Kennedy’s most active supporters in Hollywood. He told Morris that he had felt
“betrayed,” and Nancy added, “Ronnie was devastated.”29
However, Wasserman’s Kennedy connection may have saved Reagan from more serious problems. In June 1962 the Justice Department filed a civil suit against MCA for conspiracy in restraint of trade and named SAG
as a co-conspirator. A remarkably quick and favorable settlement was reached in July, when MCA agreed to dissolve its talent agency, which by then was only a small part of an empire that included Universal Studios and Decca Records, as well as Revue Productions.30 While this was good news in terms of Reagan’s legal situation, it meant that as of July 23, 1962, he and 1,400 other MCA clients no longer had an agent.31
At fifty-one, Reagan was forced to think about what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. Even though he had effectively given up a $200,000-a-year job because he would not stop talking about politics, he still found it The Kitchen Cabinet: 1963–1966
3 2 1
hard to see himself professionally as anything other than an actor. The possibility of a career in politics was always there, looming from as far back as 1940, when Dick Powell tried to get him to switch parties and run for Congress. He had been asked to run for Congress again in 1952, by the Democrats, and that same year for the Senate, as a Republican, by Holmes Tuttle. Ten years later the wealthy Ford dealer tried to get him to run for the Senate again, this time by challenging the incumbent Thomas Kuchel in the Republican primary.32 He turned Tuttle down but agreed to chair the campaign of Loyd Wright, who ran instead. Perhaps he sensed that the race was unwinnable; perhaps he listened to Nancy, who craved security, and Loyal Davis, who, as he put it, “cringed at the prospect of his beloved son-in-law stepping into what he called ‘a sea of sharks.’ ”33 As it turned out, a few weeks later he was unemployed and had plenty of time to hit the hustings not only for Wright but also, in the general election, for John Rousselot and Richard Nixon—all of whom lost. In Phoenix that Easter, there was talk around the family table that maybe Ronnie should consider a political career of his own after all.34
Ronnie and Nancy were in much stronger shape financially in 1962
than they had been the last time he hit a fallow period, shortly after they married. Although G.E. was no longer acting as his booking agent, he was more in demand as a public speaker than ever, earning several thousand dollars a speech from business groups and conservative organizations around the country. In October he was honored by the Young Americans for Freedom at a rally on Long Island attended by thirteen thousand junior Cold Warriors.35 He also agreed to serve on the advisory board of the fast-growing organization, which had been founded at the Buckley family’s Connecticut estate in September 1960 and would provide an army of volunteers for Goldwater’s 1964 campaign.
At some point in 1962 or early 1963, Reagan started working on his autobiography, Where’s the Rest of Me?, with Richard Hubler, a Hollywood writer who specialized