Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [41]
As the fish grew bigger, the pond seemed smaller, and the Iowa winters seemed colder and longer. So in February 1936, Dutch Reagan, star broadcaster, came up with a way to get WHO to give him “an all-expense paid holiday under the California sun.” Every winter the Chicago Cubs trained on Catalina Island; if the radio station let him accompany them there, he would agree to count the trip as vacation time. It was more than the weather that impelled him toward Los Angeles. He may have put off his dream of movie stardom, but he hadn’t abandoned it. An interview he did shortly before that trip made him realize that Des Moines was not, after all, that far away from Hollywood.
Joy Hodges had started out as a child singing star on WHO and gone on to become a semisuccessful big-band singer in Hollywood, with hopes of a contract at RKO; the Des Moines press gave her star treatment when she came back to town to visit her parents. Dutch was only too happy to interview her at WHO. His first question: “Well, Miss Hodges, how does it feel to be a movie star?” Her answer: “Well, Mr. Reagan, you may know one day.” As she explained many years later, “He sat across the microphone from me in riding breeches, which I found amusing. But he was very good-looking even with his glasses.”50
After the interview he seemed reluctant to let her go. He grilled her about Hollywood, as well as her personal life: “Next thing I know he’s got me to agree to a riding date in the morning. I change my mind overnight, 6 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House and pretend to be out when he rings our bell. He just keeps on ringing, ringing, ringing. I thought he’d never go away! Ring, ring. I had to go stand in a closet and cover my ears. Well finally he stopped, but honey, you can’t believe that purposefulness! And do you know, later on, when he and I became such dear friends, he never once mentioned how I’d stood him up!
Like it never happened. That’s why I’ve always known Dutch can’t be hurt.
It’s water off a duck’s back.”51
Reagan didn’t get to Hollywood on his first trip to California, and Joy Hodges was cool when, on the one night he was in Los Angeles, he looked her up at the Biltmore Hotel’s nightclub, where she was the singer with the house band. (The Biltmore, with its 1,500 rooms, was the largest and most important hotel in town.) He spent three weeks on Catalina Island covering the Cubs. He arrived on a record-breaking 82-degree day at the beginning of March and couldn’t wait to get into his swimming trunks and jump into the Pacific, which was freezing—“Everyone knew that except hick me.” Three weeks later he packed his linen suits, white sports jacket, and white buckskin shoes and took the Southern Pacific Railroad back to Des Moines, thinking, he said, California was “a nice place to visit, but . . .”52
In 1937, WHO again sent him to cover the Cubs in Catalina. He arrived in Los Angeles on March 12, in the middle of a hailstorm, which made crossing to the island impossible that day. He checked into the Biltmore and caught a trolley out to Republic Pictures, where the Oklahoma Outlaws, a hillbilly group that had played on WHO’s Saturday night barn dance program earlier that year, were filming with Gene Autry in one of his cowboy pictures. It was the first time he had been on a movie set, and he found it entrancing. That evening he looked up Joy Hodges again at the Biltmore Hotel’s nightclub, and this time she joined him for dinner between floor shows. “I confessed to Joy,” he later wrote, “that sports announcing had actually been chosen years before as a steppingstone to acting.”53
“Take off your glasses,” Joy Hodges told him. He did, and she promised to introduce him to her agent. The next day he flew to Catalina on a tiny seaplane. The flight was turbulent, the plane made him feel claus-trophobic, and he vowed never to fly again.54 The day after his return from Catalina two weeks later, minus his glasses and barely able to see,