Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [94]
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City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940’s, “By October 1942 some 2,700 Hollywood people—12 percent of the total number employed in the movie business—had joined the armed forces.”23
Those who did not don uniforms entertained the troops and promoted the sale of war bonds—337 stars sold almost $850 million in bonds in September 1942 alone.24 Bette Davis was the president and MCA chairman Jules Stein the chief underwriter of the Hollywood Stage Door Canteen, where every night thousands of GIs danced and socialized with gorgeous movie stars. Bob Hope kicked off his Hollywood Victory Caravan at a White House garden party in April 1942; after touring sixty-five military bases across the country, he took the show overseas.25 Hedy Lamarr and Lana Turner sold kisses, for $25,000 and $50,000, respectively, to aid the war bond drive, which had been initiated by Treasury Secretary Henry Mor-genthau and was spearheaded by MGM publicity director Howard Dietz.
As head of the actors’ division of the Hollywood Victory Committee, Clark Gable sent his wife, Carole Lombard, on one of the first tours, in January 1942, to her home state of Indiana, where she sold $2 million worth of bonds. Lombard, her mother, and her publicist were killed when the plane taking them back to Los Angeles crashed near Las Vegas. After six months of heavy drinking, Gable enlisted as a private in the Army Air Corps, where he served as a combat cameraman in Britain, rose to the rank of major, and eventually was furloughed to Fort Roach, as the First Motion Picture Unit headquarters came to be known. Gable’s discharge papers were signed by Ronald Reagan, who by then had risen to the rank of captain.26
Reagan would later claim that he had turned down a promotion to major—“who was I to be a major for serving in California, without ever hearing a shot fired in anger?”27—and he was undoubtedly self-conscious about his lack of combat service. But the FMPU was doing important work at Fort Roach, and Reagan was well suited for his assignment. As Stephen Vaughn explains in Ronald Reagan in Hollywood, “General Arnold’s headquarters used its films to several ends: to increase enlistments, train servicemen, build morale, define the enemy, create unity, and promote air power.
. . . Reagan seemed an appropriate choice to narrate and appear in the FMPU’s films, even if in reality he did not like to fly. Warner Bros. had already created an image for him as a pilot-hero skilled at using aviation technology in Secret Service of the Air, Murder in the Air, International Squadron, and Desperate Journey.”28
Reagan’s first film for the military was Rear Gunner, which was designed 1 5 4
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House to make turreteers seem as heroic as bomber pilots. He would go on to act in or narrate such indoctrination movies as Target Tokyo, Beyond the Line of Duty, Fight for the Sky, Land and Live in the Desert, Fighter Bomber Against Mechanized Targets, and For God and Country (in which he played a Catholic chaplain whose two best friends are a Protestant and a Jew and who dies in battle trying to save an American Indian buddy).29
Reagan also emerged as an effective administrator in the military. Shortly after arriving at Burbank, he was made personnel director of the FMPU, charged with interviewing and processing producers, directors, writers, technicians, and fellow actors. “A great many people to this day harbor a feeling that the personnel of the motion picture unit were somehow draft dodgers avoiding danger,” he later wrote. “The Army doesn’t play that way.
There was a special job the Army wanted done and it was after men who could do that job. The overwhelming majority of men and officers serving at our post were limited service like myself, or men who by reason of family, age, or health were exempt from normal military duty.”30
In the fall of 1942, Jack Warner gave up his commission—though he still insisted on being called Colonel—to turn out his own war movies