Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [93]
The following morning Reagan reported for duty as a second lieutenant in the Army Cavalry and was given a physical examination. His eyesight was so poor that one of the examining doctors told him, “If we sent you overseas, you’d shoot a general.” A second added, “Yes, and you’d miss him.” Thus disqualified for combat, he spent his first seven weeks in the armed forces as a “liaison officer loading convoys with troops bound for Australia.”13 His greatest triumph was persuading Jeanette MacDonald, the favorite movie star of Fort Mason’s commanding general, to give a concert on I Am an American Day—a new national holiday created by Congress earlier that year—for seventeen thousand soldiers waiting to be shipped overseas.14
Three days before Reagan reported for duty, Jack Warner had been sworn in as a commissioned officer in the Army Air Corps, the predecessor of the U.S. Air Force. The patriotic mogul had been lobbying Washington for months to establish “a very effective propaganda department” at his studio, with him in charge.15 At a meeting in March with General Henry “Hap”
Arnold, chief of staff of the Army Air Corps, Warner, not entirely in jest, proposed that he be made a one-star general. He didn’t get the rank he wanted, but by late June the newly established First Motion Picture Unit of the Army Air Corps (FMPU) was temporarily installed at Lieutenant 1 5 2
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Colonel Warner’s Burbank studio, and Second Lieutenant Reagan had been transferred there from San Francisco.16
“Jane Wyman and wee daughter are probably the happiest people in town since husband and daddy Ronald Reagan has been temporarily sent back to Burbank to make Government shorts,” reported Photoplay. 17 The new assignment meant that Reagan frequently spent evenings and weekends at home, a comfort to Jane in the jittery atmosphere of wartime Los Angeles. Fear of an imminent Japanese attack was acute during the first half of 1942, when the Japanese fleet still dominated the Pacific. Paranoia about a fifth column among the city’s large Japanese population was so widespread that on February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the internment of 112,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans at inland military camps for the duration. On February 23, a Japanese submarine shelled an oil field near Santa Barbara, damaging a derrick and a pier. The following night, Los Angeles residents were awakened at 2:30 in the morning by air-raid sirens responding to reports of as many as one hundred unidentified aircraft flying over the coast, and antiaircraft fire lit up the sky for five hours. The so-called Battle of Los Angeles was a false alarm,18 but the city remained on complete war status, with gun batteries installed at Pacific Palisades, Playa del Rey, Manhattan Beach, and Redondo Beach, klieg lights spaced along the shore at five-mile intervals scanning the ocean nightly, and frequent air-raid drills and blackouts keeping people on edge.19
Although Reagan would later quip that he “flew a desk” during the war, his military service, in Hollywood terms, fell somewhere between that of Captain Jimmy Stewart, who volunteered as a bomber pilot and won a Distinguished Flying Cross for his 25 combat missions over Germany, and that of John Wayne, who was so determined not to put his career on hold that he managed to secure deferment after deferment while making movies with—and love to—Marlene Dietrich at Republic Pictures.20 Errol Flynn, Cary Grant, and Frank Sinatra also avoided wartime service, while Robert Montgomery and Robert Taylor joined the Navy, and Tyrone Power became a Marine. Jack Warner wasn’t the only mogul who signed up: Darryl F. Zanuck, the head of Fox, “donated his entire string of 20 Argentine polo ponies to West Point”21 before flying off to the European front as a colonel in the Army Signal Corps. Director John Ford, who served as a captain in the Navy, earned a Purple Heart for wounds suffered during the tide-turning Battle of Midway in