Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [97]
In 1943, Reagan became friendly with Bernard Vorhaus, an FMPU
writer-director who had been active in the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League in the late 1930s and would be blacklisted as an alleged Communist. The New York–born, Harvard-educated Vorhaus was Fort Roach’s resident left-wing intellectual, and Reagan was no doubt flattered to be taken seriously by him.
Vorhaus directed Reagan in the instructional short Recognition of the Japanese Zero Fighter in January 1943, and according to Edmund Morris, Reagan and Vorhaus developed the same kind of “political intimacy” that Reagan would later share with his longtime California aide and national security adviser, William Clark. Although Vorhaus was never able to win Reagan over entirely to his pro-Moscow views, he told friends at the time, “Dutch R.
knows more about politics than any other actor in Hollywood.”45
That year Reagan joined the Hollywood Democratic Committee—curiously, for someone so highly opinionated, he had managed to avoid joining any political organization until then. The HDC had been formed as a
“support group” for the Roosevelt administration after the Republicans 1 5 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House made significant gains in the 1942 midterm elections, but it was more radical than its name suggested. Several Communists, including the Party’s not-so-secret Hollywood leader, screenwriter John Howard Lawson, sat on its board, alongside such liberal stalwarts as Walter Huston, Gene Kelly, Olivia de Havilland, and Ira Gershwin. So did Herbert Sorrell, the fiery Hollywood union leader, who may have been a Communist.
Officially chaired by liberal screenwriter Marc Connelly, the HDC was actually run by George Pepper, “an energetic young violinist whose career was cut short by a hand injury” and who was later identified as a Communist Party member.46
With nearly one thousand members by January 1944, the HDC had
“emerged as the most sophisticated partisan political organization Hollywood had ever seen: well-funded, fluent in the latest campaign technology, and committed to hardball campaigning,” according to Ronald Brownstein in The Power and the Glitter: The Hollywood–Washington Connection.47
In the July primaries, it was credited with unseating anti-FDR Representative John M. Costello—a Rita Hayworth broadcast castigating him as a
“renegade Democrat” was thought to be the final blow—and with securing the party’s nomination in a second Los Angeles congressional district for one of its members, actress Helen Gahagan Douglas.
As the influence and prestige of the HDC grew, the movie colony’s frustrated right wing reacted by forming an activist organization of its own. In February 1944, one hundred industry conservatives, including Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Ginger Rogers, Irene Dunne, Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor, Adolphe Menjou, and Walt Disney, met at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel to announce the formation of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Director Sam Wood, with whom Reagan had argued politics on the set of Kings Row, was named president, and MGM screenwriter and producer James Kevin McGuinness, a favorite of Louis B. Mayer’s, became executive committee chairman. Both were fanatic anti-Communists, eager to purge Hollywood of what they saw as a dangerously subversive minority and convinced that the Roosevelt administration was a Trojan horse packed with Reds and pinkos poised to take over the government.48
“The American motion picture is, and will continue to be, held by Americans for the American people, in the interests of America, and dedicated to the preservation and continuance of the American scene and the Ronnie and Jane: 1941–1946
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American way of life,” Wood declared at the Beverly Wilshire meeting.49
The group’s Statement of Principles—which attempted to cross Harry Warner