Reagan: The Life by H. W. Brands Page A

thought
you
were one,” she rejoined.

7
    M EANWHILE, HE STILL got no good movie roles. He blamed his unlucky timing. If not for the war, which pulled him from the screen at the moment of his dramatic breakthrough in
Kings Row
, he might have become the nextJimmy Stewart orHenry Fonda. The war had set him on a side track. Now, in the wake of conflict,Warner Brothers gave the best parts to actors the younger postwar audiences found more appealing.
    His complaint had merit; great success on the screen, like great success in any number of endeavors, requires the complicity of fate. The stars must align in the heavens for stars to shine in Hollywood. Yet there was more to the faltering of Reagan’s career. If he was being brutally honest, he had to acknowledge his own narrow acting range and limited sex appeal. During his life many acquaintances would comment on Reagan’s unwillingness to share his deepest feelings. He could know people for years but never let them close. His reserve might have been partly innate, but it doubtless reflected the need for the son of an alcoholic father to shield himself from the disappointments that come from seeing the one who should be your emotional pillar lying drunk in the snow.
    Reagan could play light roles, the ones that let him skate on the fragile surface of human existence. But the dark parts, those that required digging deep and conveying essential inner conflict, were too risky. He liked to think his Drake McHugh role showed what he could do. And in that role he did indeed display terror at a profound personal loss. Yet this was just a moment in a career, a moment he wasn’t able to reproduce. He blamed the war. But other actors’ careers survived the war. The simple fact was that Reagan wasn’t temperamentally suited to serious acting. Thesame defenses that kept acquaintances at a distance personally kept audiences at a distance dramatically.
    As for the limited sex appeal, it might have had similar roots. Love is the riskiest of all endeavors. Or it might have been something different. But in any event, Reagan didn’t exude the sexual desire and desirability that made contemporaries likeErrol Flynn irresistible to female audiences and instructive to their male escorts.
    H OLLYWOOD ’ S LOSS WOULD be America’s gain. But not yet. For now, Reagan simply knew, or rather felt, that he had to find a new stage. Most of the youthful insecurity was gone. And why not? He was rich, famous, and married to a beautiful woman. What more could a man of thirty-five want? But he still looked outward to quiet the inner voices, to prove he wasn’t like his father. He still craved the applause of an audience. If Warner wouldn’t give him one, he would find his own.
    He had joined the Screen Actors Guild in 1937, at the start of his Hollywood career. In 1941 he attended a meeting of the SAG board, in the place of a temporarily indisposed member. His connection to the board continued, indirectly, during the war years, throughJane Wyman, who became a board member in 1942. He returned to the board in early 1946, as a replacement for a departing member, and he won sufficient notice among the other members that he was chosen third vice president that autumn.
    He discovered he liked the politics of the film industry. He came to relish the give-and-take of SAG affairs. And he gradually realized he possessed a gift for writing his own lines, lines that reflected the opinions he was developing about the film industry and the broader world.
    Reagan’s return to the SAG board coincided with a labor battle that split Hollywood and inflicted scars on the movie industry that would last for decades. The Americanlabor movement had long been riven by disagreements over workers’ relationship to the capitalist system. Unions that represented skilled workers typically accepted the permanence of capitalism and simply sought better pay and conditions for their members within the existing system. Unions that