• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2928 0

Hays Office censors. Reagan gave what he and most critics considered the best performance of his career as the thoughtless young rake who loses his inheritance to a crooked banker and his legs to a sadistic doctor, but finds a uniquely American kind of redemption in the love of a girl from the wrong side of the tracks, played by the stunning Ann Sheridan, who marries him and helps him become a successful real estate developer. (Interestingly, Sheridan’s character is wiser than Reagan’s, she consults with a psychiatrist about how to handle her husband’s depression without telling him, and his first real estate project is her idea, though she pretends it was his.) Reagan took his father to the premiere of Knute Rockne at Notre Dame in October 1940. Warners invited two train cars full of stars and press from Los Angeles, and an estimated 250,000 fans crowded into South Bend, Indiana, for the three-day publicity event, which included a football game between Notre Dame and the College of the Pacific. Franklin Roosevelt Jr. read a letter from his father at the banquet following the opening. As Reagan later told the story, he had been eagerly anticipating the trip for weeks:

Nelle cornered me one day and told me that someone else was excited. Jack would never let me see it, but the dream of his life was to make this trip. Here was an Irishman who had really worshipped from afar: he’d never seen a Notre Dame team play; he’d never even been to South Bend. He thought Pat O’Brien was the greatest man since Al Smith. And he sensed somehow his youngest son would pass a kind of milestone before the trip was over.

Warner Bros.: 1937–1941

1 1 3

What a simple thing this would be for me to fix—still, I felt a chilling fear that made me hesitate. We had all lived too long in fear of the black curse. Nelle’s optimism was in full tide—she’d tell Jack how important it was that he vote dry on the trip and she knew he could be trusted. Whatever happened, I’m glad that she was so persuasive. It only took a phone call and the studio said yes before I got the question out of my mouth. . . . Saturday was the big day with lunch in the dining hall of St. Mary’s followed by the game and at night the premiere.

First thing in the morning I called Jack’s room, but there was no answer. All unsuspecting, I called the desk to ask if he had gone out.

I was informed he and Pat had just come in. His weakness was prosperity, and this was prosperity in capital letters. The evening before at the university banquet he had sat with an old Dixon friend, and heard students, faculty, and distinguished alumni greet us with a thunderous ovation. Then while I peacefully slept, he had been taken into the inner circle, so to speak, by Pat who had adopted him in his warmhearted way. Some time later I was told of their early morning return to the hotel—it must have been quite a scene. Jack was sure the empty streets were a trap and that the quarter-million fans were lurking in an alley, just waiting to swoop down on Pat for autographs. At each intersection he would halt Pat while he tiptoed up to the corner, and peered cautiously around; then he would signal Pat to join him and they would scamper across the street to the shelter of the buildings. Pat loved every minute of it.93

If any movie star was the perfect friend for Jack Reagan it was Pat O’Brien—the grandson of four Irish immigrants, a devout Catholic, a faithful family man, a hard drinker, and a fervent FDR supporter. Famous for playing Irish cops and priests, he was also a Milwaukee schoolmate and Navy buddy of Spencer Tracy’s (and, like Tracy, a friend of Edith Davis’s from their theater days). Ronald Reagan and O’Brien, who was eleven years his senior, had hit if off on the first film they made together at Warners, Submarine D-1, three years earlier; Reagan’s part ended up on the cutting room floor, but it was the beginning of a friendship that, as he later wrote, “would play an important part in all that has happened to me.”94

O’Brien kept up with Jack Reagan after their South Bend bender, taking him to the