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me there was a part available for me in a play she had on tour, Ramshackle Inn. That first part is the hardest to get. Until then, when producers or casting directors or agents ask you what you have done, you can only speak of college plays or summer stock. When you get your first part in a professional production, then you have a credit. I grabbed the offer and joined the company in Detroit, where the girl who had been playing the part was leaving. I played the role of a girl who has been held captive in an upstairs room. At one point, I came downstairs, spoke my three lines, and was returned to my room. It wasn’t much but it was a start, and I was out on my own with the best wishes of my parents.”136

Ramshackle Inn had opened on Broadway in January of that year to mediocre reviews—the newspaper PM called it “a dreary piece of hocus-pocus with a soporific first act and a helter skelter second and third.”137 But ZaSu Pitts was a big draw, with a long career behind her as one of America’s most prolific and popular comediennes. Everything about her was funny, 1 4 8

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House from her name, which was real, to her “blinking eyes, fluttering hands, and quavering voice.”138 Yet she gave two of the most highly praised dramatic performances of the silent film era in Erich von Stroheim’s Greed and The Wedding March. Born in Kansas and raised in Santa Cruz, California, she was made a comedy star by the director King Vidor in the 1920s. She was forty-six when Nancy went to work with her. Off screen, she was married to a Pasadena businessman and best friends with Hedda Hopper, with whom she shared a devotion to Catholicism and high fashion and an antipathy to Communism.

Pitts took Nancy under her wing, sharing her hotel rooms and dressing rooms with the young actress. “It was a brand-new world to me and, not being used to the road, having a friend was very comforting. ZaSu had been a great beauty in her youth and at this point in her career looked ageless,”

Nancy wrote. “We traveled with the play across country and wound up in New York, playing the ‘subway circuit.’ We played theaters in Brooklyn, Long Island, The Bronx, and so forth.”139

When Ramshackle Inn ended its tour in New York, Nancy decided to stay and pursue a theater career. She told me many years later, “When I graduated from college, I hadn’t found the man I wanted to marry, and I certainly didn’t want to sit in Chicago and be a post-deb. So I decided I wanted to be an actress. I’d done summer stock when I was in college, and I had been exposed to actors all those years. Of course, I’d seen the best. You know, I’d seen people who were very successful.”140

C H A P T E R S E V E N

RONNIE AND JANE

1941–1946

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. . . . In a great number of countries, far from the Russian frontiers and throughout the world, Communist fifth columns are established and work in complete unity and absolute obedience to the directions they receive from the Communist center.

Winston Churchill, “Iron Curtain Speech,”

March 5, 1946

Show people are emotional. You’ll find very few in this business who participate in politics on an intellectual level. Slam-bang convictions, violent loyalties, passionate enmities, purple principles, and utter naïveté—these are the ingredients of political action in show business.

Robert Ardrey, quoted by Stephen Vaughn

in Ronald Reagan in Hollywood 1

ON DECEMBER 2, 1941, FIVE DAYS BEFORE PEARL HARBOR, WARNERS’ PUBlicity department announced that Ronald Reagan had received more fan mail that year than any other male star at the studio except Errol Flynn; James Cagney was in third place.2 A few months earlier, a Gallup survey had ranked Reagan 82nd among the top 100 stars. By the beginning of 1942, he was tied for 74th place with Laurence Olivier, and Gallup estimated that he was earning $52,000 per film, while Flynn was earning $157,000 and Clark Gable, America’s box office king, $210,000.3

Reagan was getting leading roles