Authors: Bob Colacello
By then the strike that had violently disrupted the industry for a large part of the previous year was sputtering to an end, and Herbert Sorrell was a desperate figure, the victim of his own demagogic excesses and the relentless right-wing campaign to hang the Communist noose around his neck. After SAG led twenty-four other Hollywood unions in declaring the CSU “a rump organization, conflicting with our duly constituted A.F.L. central labor council of Los Angeles,” workers deserted the picket lines in droves. “The CSU dissolved like sugar in hot water” is the way Reagan put it.9 “Crushed to powder” was more like it, said liberal screenwriter Philip Dunne, adding that Reagan was “always careful to hide his own aggression.”10
Larger forces were at work, too, creating a climate in which left-wing union activism was increasingly untenable. In the November 1946 elections, Republican majorities took control of both houses of Congress for the first time since 1928; among the newcomers were Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin and Representative Richard M. Nixon of Southern California.
On March 12, 1947, the White House announced the Truman Doctrine to defend Greece and Turkey from Soviet aggression. That same month Harry Truman signed an executive order requiring loyalty oaths of all federal employees.11 In June the new Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act over Truman’s veto; it outlawed the closed shop, prohibited jurisdictional strikes, forbade unions to contribute to political campaigns, and required elected union officials to take an oath that they were not Communists.
Divorce: 1947–1948
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Across the nation, the right was resurgent, and the left was divided and on the defensive. In the last week of 1946, ICCASP merged with the National Citizens Political Action Committee, another left-wing group, to form Progressive Citizens of America (PCA), laying the groundwork for a third-party challenge to Truman in the 1948 election by Henry Wallace.
In Hollywood, the remains of HICCASP—including Gene Kelly, Lillian Hellman, John Howard Lawson, and Dalton Trumbo—voted to go along with the merger.12
One week later, in January 1947, a group of nationally prominent liberals met in Washington to launch Americans for Democratic Action. The organization had “two objectives,” wrote Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “to infuse the Truman administration with the spirit of the New Deal, and to liberate the democratic left from Communist manipulation.”13 Schlesinger was an ADA founder, along with Eleanor Roosevelt; Harold Ickes, the former executive director of ICCASP; Hubert Humphrey, then Mayor of Minneapolis; economist John Kenneth Galbraith; columnists Stewart and Joseph Alsop; labor leaders Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers and David Dubinsky of the Ladies’ Garment Workers; and AVC national head Charles Bolté.14
“The liberal split was crystallizing,” Schlesinger explained. The two new organizations “were in substantial agreement on domestic issues, but they disagreed on qualifications for membership. A.D.A. rejected ‘any association with Communism or sympathizers with Communism as completely as we rejected any association with fascists or their sympathizers. Both are hostile to the principles of freedom and democracy on which this Republic has grown great.’ P.C.A., on the other hand, welcomed ‘all progressive men and women in our nation, regardless of . . . political affiliation.’ . . . And the admission of Communists moved P.C.A. toward the Soviet side in the Cold War.”15 Mrs. Roosevelt agreed: “The American Communists seemed to have succeeded very well in jeopardizing whatever the liberals work for. Therefore, to keep them out of policy-making and staff positions seems to be very essential even at the price of being called red-baiters.”16
Actor Melyvn Douglas became ADA’s California chairman in early 1947, and Reagan joined fellow liberal anti-Communists Walter Wanger and Philip Dunne on its organizing committee.17 Olivia de Havilland, Bette Davis, and Will Rogers Jr. also signed on.18 At the same time, Reagan was working closely with Jimmy Roosevelt and Douglas trying to save the AVC’s Hollywood chapter from a total Communist takeover. By that 1 9 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House spring they gave up, and started the separate, anti-Communist Hollywood Chapter No. 2.19
“Our highest aim should be the cultivation of freedom of the individual for therein lies the highest dignity of man,” Reagan told Hedda Hopper in an interview published in May. “Tyranny is tyranny, and whether it comes from right, left, or center, it’s evil. Right now the liberal movement in this country is taking the brunt of the Communist attack. The Reds know that if we can make America a decent living place for all of our people their cause is lost here. So they seek to infiltrate liberal organizations just to smear and discredit them.”20 Hopper, the avenging angel of the Hollywood right, was obviously taken by Reagan, despite his defense of liberalism, and told her readers that he “commanded the respect of his most bitter opponents.”21
That same month, HUAC came to town. The committee was now chaired by New Jersey Republican J. Parnell Thomas, a former insurance salesman whose office featured a picture of the American flag with the slogan “These colors do not run.”22 But the committee’s driving force was a reactionary Mississippi Democrat named John Rankin, who terrified the larger part of Hollywood because of his tendency to conflate Communism and Judaism.
On May 8 and 9, Thomas and two other committee members held closed hearings at the Biltmore Hotel on Communist influence in the movie industry, and then Thomas announced to the press that “hundreds of very prominent film capital people have been named as Communists to us.”23
Nearly all of the fourteen “frank and cooperative” witnesses—including screenwriters James Kevin McGuinness, Howard Emmett Rogers, and Rupert Hughes, an uncle of Howard Hughes’s—were from the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, which itself had an anti-Semitic taint. Alliance stalwart Robert Taylor told the congressmen that the Roosevelt administration had delayed his entry into the Navy in 1943 so that he could finish shooting
Song of Russia
, a film he considered pro-Soviet propaganda. Ginger Rogers’s mother, Lela, testified that her daughter had insisted on cutting the Marxist line “Share and share alike—that’s democracy” from Dalton Trumbo’s screenplay for
Tender Comrade
.24 Veteran character actor Adolphe Menjou swore that if the Communists took over Hollywood, which he thought was close to happening, “I would move to the state of Texas . . . because I think that Texans would kill them on sight.”25
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Jack Warner was the only studio chief to testify, and he did so secretly, one week later. Some said that he was still fuming over the CSU siege of Warner Bros. during the 1945 strike, others that he was eager to clear his name as the head of the studio that had invented the liberal-message movie. The other moguls, led by Mayer, hoped that if they ignored the committee it would go away. But Warner told the inquisitors what they wanted to hear, and in doing so assured that they would be back. There was, he testified, a conspiracy to slip anti-capitalist, un-American propaganda into Hollywood films, and it was led by the screenwriters. “They en-deavor to inject it,” he said. “Whatever I could do about it—I took out.”
Stretching the truth, he added, “Anyone I thought was a Communist or read in the papers that he was, I dismissed at the expiration of his contract.”
He then listed sixteen suspect writers, including Lawson, Trumbo, Ring Lardner Jr., Irwin Shaw, and Clifford Odets, many of whom were still typing away in studio bungalows in Burbank.26
Like the moguls, the anti-Communist liberals of ADA, including Reagan, didn’t pay too much mind to HUAC’s Hollywood foray. But four nights after Jack Warner testified, PCA held a rally for Henry Wallace at which J. Parnell Thomas and “all their ilk” were denounced by the star speaker, Katharine Hepburn. Her fiery speech had been written partly by one of Warner’s listees, Dalton Trumbo; another, Ring Lardner Jr., had scripted the movie that launched her on-screen partnership—and off-screen romance—with Spencer Tracy. A Bryn Mawr graduate, Hepburn inherited her progressivism from old-money East Coast parents who prided themselves on their unconventionality: her father, a prominent Hartford surgeon, was a longtime Henry Wallace admirer; her mother, born a Houghton in Boston, was a suffragette and early birth control militant. By 1947 the thirty-eight-year-old actress had already won her first Oscar and been nominated for three more, but she was more respected than beloved in Hollywood, where she was perceived as a lock-jawed snob and an eccentric radical. Yet she managed to get along with Loyal and Edith Davis when she and Tracy were their houseguests in Chicago.
The playwright Arthur Laurents, then a young screenwriter at MGM, accompanied Hepburn, Tracy, and Irene Selznick (the more unconventional of Louis B. Mayer’s two daughters) to the PCA rally that night. In his memoir,
Original Story By
, Laurents captures the drama and glamour, the sheer 2 0 0
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House spectacle, of Hollywood politics at the time—and also reveals its precious-ness:
The Progressive Citizens of America held a big rally at Gilmore Stadium for Henry Wallace as part of a drive to stem right-wing attacks on unions and the arts. . . . At the most dramatic moment, at the peak of excitement, a very high platform was hit with blazing spotlights and there was Katharine Hepburn in a red Valentina gown.
The stadium roared. Hepburn’s grin carried to the top of the bleach-ers and she delivered magnificently a speech fighting the destruction of culture. The crowd wouldn’t stop cheering. Henry Wallace could have been elected president if Katharine Hepburn, in that red dress, on that blazing tower, could have been transported from city to city all over the land.
Afterward, she, Tracy, Irene, and I went back to her house on Tower Drive, high in the Beverly hills. She was euphoric, proud of her speech. I had been one of the writers of that speech. . . .
Tracy was bothered by the speech, more that she had made any speech at all. Actors had no place in politics, period, according to Spencer Tracy. I’d heard that before, I was sure I’d hear it again, but I never once heard it from a liberal. Only from the most conservative—and Spencer Tracy, congenial and pleasant as he was, was a right-winger. So was Louis B. Mayer. So were Cecil B. DeMille and Sam Wood. So were Barbara Stanwyck and Ronald Reagan and George Murphy, John Wayne, Ginger Rogers—stars born on the wrong side of the tracks who thought playing footsie with conservatives would allow them to cross over.27
Ronald Reagan was not yet a full-fledged right-winger in mid-1947—
and George Murphy was born on the Yale campus, where his father was a famous track coach—but the point Laurents makes is a valid one. Consciously or not, social motives often color political views. So does the company one keeps. Reagan’s postwar friends—the guys he went out for a drink with after SAG meetings, the couples he and Jane saw at Saturday night dinner parties and Sunday afternoon barbecues—were mostly self-made and mostly Republican. Even those who generally avoided party politics—the Bennys, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Claudette Colbert—
were intrinsically conservative, patriotic, entrepreneurial, and obsessively concerned with the high taxes they were paying on their six-figure incomes.
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Reagan considered Bill Holden, who was seven years younger, his best friend. A moderate Republican, the handsome actor was known as Golden Holden, partly because his first hit film, released in 1939, was
Golden Boy
; partly because he had grown up in monied South Pasadena and his mother was descended from George Washington.28 Ronnie and Jane were also close to Dick Powell and June Allyson, the vivacious young blonde Powell had wed in August 1945, a month after divorcing Joan Blondell. Powell had been in films with both Ronnie and Jane:
The Cowboy from Brooklyn
, among others, with him, and two musicals,
Gold Diggers of 1937
and
The
Singing Marine
, with her. June Allyson recalled in her 1982 memoir, “Ronnie and Richard were close buddies—a love of arguing politics drew them together just as a distaste for the same subject brought me and Jane Wyman together in a fortuitous blending of couples.”29
Powell and Allyson were both major stars in the late 1940s: after a decade of crooning and swooning with Ruby Keeler in Warner Bros. musicals, he had miraculously transformed himself into a leading man in noir classics such as RKO’s 1944
Murder, My Sweet
; she had been signed by MGM in 1942, and had gone from hit to hit, starting with
Girl Crazy
with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland. Both were from the wrong side of the tracks—he from the Ozarks, she from the Bronx—and both loved life among the swells. Louis B. Mayer gave her away at their wedding in the Holmby Hills house of Johnny Green, MGM’s musical director. Powell played polo and golf, owned a yacht, which he sailed with Humphrey Bogart, and piloted his own plane.
In 1947, Powell and Allyson bought a Tudor-style mansion on Copa del Oro Drive in Bel Air, and Dick, according to June, “began ordering beautiful old oaken pieces directly from England. And when everything was in place I couldn’t imagine it any other way—it was indeed like living in an old English castle complete with swords, shields, armor, mugs, and even a wishing well outside.”30
“Ronnie and Jane and George and Julie Murphy were among our first dinner guests,” Allyson remembered.
Jane asked me to show her around the house so we could both get away from the men talking politics. I took Jane upstairs and showed her our separate bedroom suites. I am glad to say that Richard did not use his much, but he liked having a bedroom in masculine colors—brown and beige. . . . My bedroom suite was in a misty rose.
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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House And it had a niche for my collection of stuffed animals, witches, and, especially, Raggedy Ann dolls.
Back downstairs Jane Wyman and I joined the men, and Julie Murphy, around the fireplace. It was a riot to listen to Ronnie, a staunch Democrat, try to convert Richard while Richard argued just as hard to turn Ronnie into a Republican. I figured the only way to get into this conversation was to pop some basic questions at Ronnie.