Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [42]
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others. Ward called Max Arnow, the casting director at Warner Bros.
“Max,” he said, “I’ve got another Robert Taylor sitting in my office.” According to Reagan, he could hear Arnow bark back, “God only made one Robert Taylor.” But he told Ward to deliver Reagan to the studio in Burbank for an interview that same day, which happened to be Good Friday.
Arnow greeted the hopeful with a battery of orders and questions: “Stand up against that door. Are those your own shoulders? Let me hear your voice. Is that your voice?” “It’s the only one I’ve got,” Dutch told him.
The casting director and the agent, he later wrote, “circled me like a pair of hummingbirds,” talking about his face and body, “as if I wasn’t even in the room.”55
Finally Arnow handed Dutch a few pages of the Philip Barry play Holiday and told him to memorize them over the Easter weekend for a screen test early the next week. The actual test—opposite Helen Valkis, an actress from Iowa whom Warners had signed earlier that year—lasted but a few minutes. When Arnow informed Dutch that it would be several days before Jack Warner, the studio boss, could watch it, he said he couldn’t wait around, he had to get back to his job in Des Moines. Both Arnow and Ward were taken aback, and Reagan himself later worried that he had
“blown the whole thing.”56
But on April 9, his first day back at WHO, he received a telegram from the Meiklejohn Agency: warner’s offer contract seven years stop one year’s options stop starting at $200 a week stop what shall i do? Dutch wired back: sign before they change their minds.57
On April 16, at the request of the sponsor of his baseball broadcasts, Wheaties cereal, he addressed a meeting of sports announcers in Chicago.
Four days later, back in Des Moines, he signed the contract that had come from Warner Bros. It was a standard-issue studio contract of that time, not quite indentured servitude but not exactly a fair deal either. He couldn’t quit for seven years, but the studio had the option to fire him every six months. If they kept him on, he would receive a raise every six months, so by end of the fourth year he would be making $600 a week, and would then have his first opportunity to renegotiate. He was guaranteed his salary for only nineteen weeks out of every twenty-six, and any earnings he made from radio, advertising, or personal appearances would go to the studio. He had no right to choose which movies he appeared in, and he could be loaned out to other studios for a fee greater than his salary, with the difference going to Warners, not to him.58
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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House In other words, he was giving up a sure thing—General Mills, the maker of Wheaties, had a made a counteroffer to keep him at WHO—for a high-risk dream. On his last night in Des Moines, May 21, 1937, the radio station presented him with a large suitcase at an on-air farewell party attended by some of the city’s celebrities, including the mayor.59 Reagan’s contract required him to report for work on June 1. He set out for Los Angeles early the next morning in his open-topped Nash and drove six hundred miles a day through Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada, reaching California on the third day.
“Sundown saw me driving that long stretch between the banked orange trees from San Bernardino to Los Angeles,” he later wrote. “Today the orange trees are gone, replaced by tract homes even closer together than the trees had been planted, and smog has replaced the fragrance of blossoms.”60
Four days after her son had left for Los Angeles, Nelle wrote a letter from Dixon to Reverend Cleaver and his wife, who had been transferred to Cerro Gordo, Illinois. It reads in part:
I am enclosing some clippings regarding Ronald. I hardly know how to explain “our feelings,” but when people ask me if I am not afraid to have him go to such a wicked place as Hollywood, all I can answer is that I feel