Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [59]
Over the next few days he was put through the studio makeover mill.
Warner Bros.: 1937–1941
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The makeup department told him his head was too small and gave him a new hairstyle. The wardrobe department said his shoulders were too wide and his neck too short and sent him to Jimmy Cagney’s shirtmaker for custom-made shirts with trick collars (which he would continue having made for the rest of his life). The publicity department hated the name Dutch Reagan, even though he insisted it was known throughout the Midwest. When he told them his real name was Ronald, they said they loved it—Ronald Reagan!—and acted as if they had thought it up themselves. In an industry where most of the stars had their names changed, the name Ronald Reagan had the alliterative symmetry the studios considered classy and commercial. And so he came to be called by his proper name for the first time in his twenty-six years.16
In his first six months at Warners, he had the lead in two B movies and supporting roles in two A movies, a pattern that would prevail over the next four years. He played a radio announcer in Love Is on the Air, a sports reporter in Swing Your Lady, a cavalryman in Sergeant Murphy, and an assistant to Louella Parsons in Hollywood Hotel, which was based on the gossip queen’s CBS radio show of the same name. Meeting Parsons, one of the two dominant columnists in Hollywood—the other being her bitter rival, Hedda Hopper—would prove to be a boon to Reagan’s career. She took an immediate liking to him when she learned that he was from Dixon, Illinois, her beloved hometown, and from then on seized every opportunity to promote him in her daily column in the Hearst-owned Los Angeles Examiner, which was syndicated in six hundred newspapers worldwide.
Among the Warners stars he worked with in these early movies were Humphrey Bogart and Dick Powell, who would become a close friend.
During the three weeks it took to complete Love Is on the Air, he started dating his co-star, the beautiful June Travis. The daughter of a vice president of the Chicago White Sox, she had another suitor at the time, a rich playboy from Philadelphia named Walter Annenberg.
Annenberg was only three years older than Reagan but had already been romantically involved with Lillian Vernon, a Ziegfeld Follies girl (and later a mail-order entrepreneur), and Ethel Merman, then the hottest new star on Broadway, among others. He had been coming out to California since 1932, when his father, Moses Annenberg, the multimillionaire owner of the Daily Racing Form, started a Hollywood-based fan magazine called Screen Guide. (Walter always took the train, because Moses, who had seven daughters but only one son and heir, wouldn’t let him fly.) He was introduced 9 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House around town by Louis B. Mayer, and he knew everyone there was to know from William Randolph Hearst and his movie star mistress, Marion Davies, to Jack Warner and his glamorous second wife, Ann. The press scion cruised around town in a custom-made Lincoln convertible, stayed in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and spent weekends partying and gambling in Palm Springs, then the Hollywood elite’s favorite hideaway.17
Nonetheless, June Travis preferred her co-star from Iowa, and Annenberg graciously withdrew. But he kept up a passing friendship with Reagan all through the late 1930s and 1940s, though the Republican Annenberg, whose father had bought the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1936 and made it a rabidly anti-FDR organ, often disagreed with Reagan’s liberal views. Eventually, however, they would come to see eye-to-eye, and Walter Annenberg would be one of the most important backers of Ronald Reagan’s political rise.
Love Is on the Air was released in September 1937, to generally good reviews. Variety called Reagan a “find.” The Hollywood Reporter, the other major trade paper, called him a “natural.” “Bill Meiklejohn assured me it was safe to send for Nelle and Jack,” Reagan recalled, and that same month he sent his parents