Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [60]
Three of Reagan’s Drake friends from Des Moines also followed him west that fall; three more moved to Los Angeles a few months later.20 For a while Reagan was “the group’s sole support,” in his words, but he was only too happy to be surrounded by familiar faces. After a long day at the studio, he would drive out to Santa Monica to join his buddies for body-surfing or volleyball on the beach, followed by onion soup, chili, and beer at Barney’s Beanery, a West Hollywood bar that became their hangout.21
Reagan frequently took Joy Hodges—another Iowan—out to dinner, though they were never romantically involved. “We discussed politics more than any other subject,” she recalled. “I was so fond of him, but he was a passionate Democrat and I a Republican and we used to go round and round about that. . . . He loved anything and everything about government, history and politics. So did I, and I loved hearing him relate accounts of Indian battles.”22
Warner Bros.: 1937–1941
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On December 1, 1937, Warner Bros. picked up his option, raising his salary to $250 a week. He bought his parents a small house in West Hollywood, at 9031 Phyllis Avenue, just over the Beverly Hills line, the only piece of real estate they would ever own. Its small yard was filled with rosebushes, which Jack discovered he liked to tend. After his heart attack, Jack had finally given up drinking, but not chain-smoking. He was fifty-four and in failing health. “Every morning he would take the slow, careful walk his doctor had prescribed,” his son later wrote. According to Reagan, Jack always joked about the new neighborhood, “There’s nothing, by God, but real estate offices and hot dog stands.”23 For Christmas, Reagan gave his father a club chair with an ottoman so that he could put his feet up and listen to sports—and FDR—on the radio, which was also a gift from him. When Reagan’s option came up again in June 1938, he persuaded the studio to give his father a $25-a-week job helping with his fan mail.24
On Sunday mornings, Reagan usually accompanied his mother to the Hollywood-Beverly Christian Church on Sunset Boulevard, and Nelle often fixed dinner for his Iowa friends on Sunday nights. “They were in and out more than I was,” he later recalled, “and I think Nelle would have given someone an argument if he pointed out she hadn’t really given birth to the whole gang.”25 The fact that they all came from a Disciples of Christ college no doubt pleased Nelle, whose life in Los Angeles, as in Dixon, revolved around her church and lay missionary work. She made regular trips to the Olive View Sanitarium in the San Fernando Valley, where she entertained the tuberculosis patients with dramatic readings, and Christmastime 1938 found her wrapping five hundred presents her church had collected for “needy folks.”26
In a letter Nelle wrote to an Illinois friend that year, she gives a sense of the new life the Reagan family had in Hollywood. “Ronald said he was very glad to get your letter. Although he was so small when he left Tampico he still holds a soft spot for the home of his birth. I am acting as Ronald’s secretary and open all the mail, and there is a lot to open. Of course, all the mail from former friends from the old hometown is turned over for him to read, so you can rest assured that he read yours. Last month he received mail from forty-two states and three foreign countries, so you see if he had to answer his mail he would have not much time for work. . . . Ronald has finished three pictures now that he has taken the lead in, and is very well thought of at the studio. But really I don’t yet 1 0 0
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House know how to act with these people. I don’t just fit in somehow