Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [58]
Yet set within this WASP utopia was the most ostentatiously powerful Jewish community in the nation, led by the self-made moguls who founded and ran the Hollywood studios. The two most important men in prewar Los Angeles were probably Harry Chandler, the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, the city’s dominant newspaper, and Louis B. Mayer, vice president and head of production of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the largest and grandest of the five major and three minor studios. Chandler, the de facto dictator of the downtown oligarchy that ran Los Angeles, used his newspaper as a promotional vehicle for his vast real estate ventures, and was by far the city’s richest citizen, leaving an estimated $500 million fortune at his death in 1944. Mayer, the undisputed king of the movie industry, owned stock in 20th Century Fox and Columbia Pictures as well as MGM;11 he was the highest-paid individual in the country in 1937, earning $1.3 million in salary and bonuses, and would remain so until 1946. Though they were hardly friends, both men were union-hating, moralistic, conservative Republicans—Mayer was actually chairman of the California Republican Party’s central committee in the 1930s.12
On matters of politics and industry standards the other studio heads kowtowed to Mayer—except for his great rival, Jack Warner, vice president and head of production at Warner Bros., the second-largest studio. If Mayer and his family were Herbert Hoover’s first dinner guests at the White House in 1929, Jack Warner would brag in his autobiography that he “virtually 9 6
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House commuted” to the Roosevelt White House—“court jester, I was, and proud of it.”13 If Metro was the Tiffany’s of the studios, Warners was the Ford, an efficient assembly line known for its low budgets and long hours. The Warners—Jack’s older brother Harry was the studio’s New York–based president—saw themselves as upstarts, outsiders, innovators, whose movies made up in realism and relevance what they lacked in gloss and sophistication. They had made the first talkie, The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson, in 1927, and pioneered the gangster movie, the headline movie based on news stories, and movies about such controversial subjects as labor disputes and race relations. The studio motto was “Combining good citizenship with good movie-making.” “The motion picture,” Harry Warner told Fortune magazine in December 1937, “presents right and wrong, as the Bible says. By showing both right and wrong we teach the right.”14
Although Harry and Jack Warner were not really liberals—they counted FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and the jingoistic newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst among their closest friends—many of the studio’s producers, directors, and writers definitely leaned to the left, including Hal Wallis, the executive producer responsible for most of the studio’s A movies, and Jerry Wald, its most important writer (and later producer). With the exception of Dick Powell, a dedicated Republican, most of the studio’s major stars—Edward G. Robinson, Paul Muni, James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis—were also prominent liberal Democrats.
One can see why an idealistic FDR fan from a working-class background like Ronald Reagan would fit in at Warner Bros. One can also see why an optimistic Disciple of Christ from Illinois by way of Iowa would feel at home in Los Angeles.
On May 24, 1937, as night fell over the glittering coastal metropolis, twenty-six-year-old Dutch Reagan drove into town in his open-topped Nash. The first thing he did, after checking into the Biltmore, was to thank Joy Hodges, who had made the introduction that led to his contract and who was still working in the hotel’s nightclub. The next day, wearing a new white sports coat and blue trousers, he presented himself at Warner Bros. in Burbank—a week early. “Where in hell did you get that coat?” was the way Max Arnow greeted him. Summoning a young assistant, the casting director ordered, “Take him over to Wardrobe and see what the tailor can do with this