Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [68]
Evidently Jane wasn’t much of cook. “Ron and I practically lived at the Warner Bros.: 1937–1941
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Derby,” she later wrote in the introduction to a book about the Brown Derby at Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street, one of four restaurants in the chain. Their favorite dish was Catalina Sand Dabs Meunière, and they sometimes played gin at their table after dinner.89 Soon Ronnie became an enthusiastic wine connoisseur. “He got me started on a wine collection,”
recalled actor Robert Stack, who became friends with Reagan around 1940. “He got me a cellar, and, being a class act, he got me Romanee Contis and Pomerols and Montrachets.”90 Reagan may have been trying to impress Stack—who was from a socially prominent Los Angeles family and eight years younger than he—with his newfound sophistication.
On the other hand, Nelle’s son couldn’t help disapproving of Stack’s wild ways and friends, who included another future president of the United States. “Jack Kennedy was also a friend of mine,” Stack told me. “He was a just a young guy who happened to be the son of Joe Kennedy, who was then the ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Jack had a key to my apartment, which I could never get into because he was always there with a pretty girl.
We had a little room called the Flag Room. It had flags going up the walls and over the ceiling and one very large triple bed. The object of that room was that the girl had to match the flag to the country or otherwise pay a penalty. There were more penalties paid and more happy customers came out of that Flag Room.” According to Stack, “Ron kept trying to get me to settle down. ‘It’s high time you became a responsible citizen,’ he would say.
‘Okay, sure, Ron. Very good. Thank you. I think I’m busy now.’”91
Ronnie, who clearly loved being married, called his wife Button Nose, leading the movie magazines to dub Maureen “Button Nose the Second.”
Completing this picture of young marital bliss in Hollywood was a pair of Scottish terriers—the same breed as FDR’s famous Fala—named Scotch and Soda.
Warners put Ronnie and Jane in two more movies together after they married, An Angel from Texas and Tugboat Annie Sails Again, both in 1940. But her career stalled as his took off with the two A films that would make his name: Knute Rockne, All-American, in 1940, and Kings Row, filmed in 1941 and released in early 1942. In the first he played George Gipp, a famous halfback for Notre Dame known as the Gipper, who died of a strep infection at age twenty-five in 1920. Reagan took the idea to Warners, then had to fight to get the part, and probably succeeded only because his friend Pat O’Brien, who was cast in the title role of the famous Notre 1 1 2
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Dame coach, pushed hard for him. Reagan’s parting words in his deathbed scene, “Win one for the Gipper,” would become a battle cry for his supporters in his political campaigns. His most memorable line in Kings Row was also delivered from bed, and would become the title of his autobiography: Where’s the Rest of Me?
Everyone involved in Kings Row was first-rate: the producer Hal Wallis, the director Sam Wood, the screenwriter Casey Robinson, the cinematographer James Wong Howe, the composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and a cast that included Robert Cummings, Claude Rains, Charles Coburn, and Judith Anderson. Its budget exceeded $1 million, an exceptional amount for frugal Warner Bros., and larger than that for any previous Reagan film.92 It was based on a controversial best-seller by Henry Bellamann, which involved incest, insanity, euthanasia, and homosexuality in a small Midwestern town, and which had to be severely diluted to get the script approved by the