Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [92]
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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House potatoes atmosphere of Warners,”4 where executive producer Hal Wallis promptly cast him as a concert pianist in Million Dollar Baby. He was in such demand that he had to do reshoots for International Squadron and the opening scenes of Nine Lives Are Not Enough on alternating days during June 1941; the latter would win him critical praise for his comic turn as a hapless newspaper reporter.5
Reagan was filming Kings Row when he received his first call to active duty in August 1941, but the studio was able to secure a deferment for him until the end of production. “The first time I ever met Ronald Reagan was on the set of Kings Row, ” the set designer and producer Jacques Mapes told me. “Ann Sheridan was a friend of mine, and she was shooting Kings Row in the morning and The Man Who Came to Dinner in the afternoon. That’s the way they used to work at Warners. I thought what he was doing was really remarkable—that role was such a stretch for him. It’s too bad that he didn’t have more properties like that earlier. And then the war came in.”6
Reagan received two more deferments and starred in two more A movies produced by Hal Wallis— Juke Girl, a message movie about migrant farm workers in Florida, co-starring Ann Sheridan again, and Desperate Journey, a pro-British war picture directed by Raoul Walsh and co-starring Errol Flynn—before he went into the Army on April 20, 1942. Jack Warner tried to pull strings in Washington until the last minute, hoping to pair Reagan and Sheridan for a third time in the upcoming Casablanca, after the tremendous box office success of Kings Row, which had been released that February. There was also talk of the studio’s casting Reagan in Frank Capra’s Arsenic and Old Lace and giving him the title role in The Will Rogers Story, a biography of the plainspoken cowboy-philosopher.7
One of Ronnie’s major concerns before going away was arranging for his fifty-nine-year-old mother’s well-being. He had no trouble supporting Nelle on the $1,650-a-week salary that Lew Wasserman had secured when he renegotiated his contract with Warners the previous fall. But Jane, who was making $1,450 a week, would now have to pay the mortgage and support herself and Maureen on her own. There was no question of Nelle’s moving in with her daughter-in-law. According to Leonora Hornblow, Jane was not very fond of Nelle—or her brother-in-law, Neil, for that matter—and “had them around as little as she could.”8 Reagan tried to get the studio to pay his mother $75 a week to answer his fan mail, but Jack Warner refused on the grounds that other stars going off to war would Ronnie and Jane: 1941–1946
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make similar demands. He finally agreed to give Reagan an interest-free loan of $3,900, from which Nelle would draw a weekly salary for one year.9
(The arrangement was not renewed at the year’s end, though Warner, in a typically paternalistic gesture, later forgave the loan.)10
Although Ronnie and Jane had bought the land on Cordell Drive and started building their dream house in 1941, they did not move in until March 1942. Jane was still furnishing it with decorator Connie Rennick on the eve of her husband’s departure for Fort Mason, in San Francisco.
On Saturday, April 18, she gave Ronnie a surprise farewell party at home with many of their Hollywood friends, including Pat O’Brien, Ann Sheridan, Jack and Mary Benny, and Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor.
Ronnie knew something was up when he returned home from a baseball game with Bob Cobb, the owner of the Brown Derby restaurants, and saw sixteen Cadillacs lining the driveway.11 On Sunday night the Reagans were photographed having dinner at the Hollywood Brown Derby—he in uniform, she in a dark dress, matching hat, and fur wrap—before driving to Glendale, where he boarded