biggest western leap of all: California.In 1937,five years after saying good-bye to Illinois, it was now“goodbye sports . . . hello Hollywood!” for thetwenty-six-year-old Reagan. It made perfect sense.
Nancy Reagan, who knew her husband better than anyone, later succinctly explained to me: he couldn’t get stuck out there in middle America. She understood her future husband’s youthful yearnings to escape because she’d once experienced them herself.A native New Yorker, she’d moved to Chicago at the age of eight when her divorced mother remarried.Returning after her four years at Smith College, she, too, managed to escape and never come back. They were two of a kind—the kind that didn’t stay put until they got where they were meant to be.
It was a moment of manifest destiny: Ronald Reagan proceeding all the way west for the first time.He’d gone as a radio sportscaster,sent to Los Angeles to report on spring training.But the chance to take a Warner Bros. screen test trumped his original purpose,to keep an eye on the Chicago Cubs, warming up for the season on Catalina Island.
As they say in politics, you make your breaks.In Los Angeles, he spotted a poster advertising the evening’s entertainmentin the Biltmore Hotel’s ballroom.One performer was a singer he knew from Des Moines.He sent a note inviting her to dinner between shows. This led to her offering to introduce him to her agent, who in turn proved able to arrange a screen test for the young radio announcer.It was a break that led to a two-hundred-dollar-a-week, seven-year Warner Bros. contract that Reagan quickly signed, agreeing with the stipulation thathe be billed as Ronald, not “Dutch,” Reagan, the name he’d been going by. He was on his way.
Reagan’s first film saw him playing a radio reporter, the very job he’d just left behind. Love Is on the Air was a B picture shot and released quickly as the second half of a double feature.The reviews in the trades were approving, “likeable” being the basic verdict—and, of course, they weren’t wrong. It would prove to be his lifelong signature quality.Over the next few years, Ronald Reagan, working regularly, turned up—more than once, as I’ve said—as Brass Bancroft the Secret Service agent.He appeared as a military cadet in the 1938 comedy Brother Rat with Jane Wyman, whom he’d soon make his first wife,and as an army private in Sergeant Murphy (1938), the title character of which was a horse.In a change of pace, he was a pleasure-loving playboy in the Bette Davis picture Dark Victory (1939). His big break arrived in1940, the year Knute Rockne — All American was released.
On the Warner lot, Reagan had become pals with Pat O’Brien, one of the most prolific stars of the era and the leader of Hollywood’s “Irish mafia,” a group that included James Cagney, SpencerTracy, and others.Each day at lunch in the Warner Bros. commissary O’Brien would hold court, surrounded by his buddies, and before long he invited Reagan to join the gang.
When O’Brien won the part of famed Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne in a highly anticipated upcoming biopic,he soon learned from Reagan how eager he was to be in it,and that he’d grown up worshipping both Rockne and George Gipp, the young football player who’ddied in 1920 just days after leading his team to victory. The young Reagan had been so taken with the Gipp story thathe’d once even started writing a screenplay of his own. To press his case at Warner Bros.,he brought in his college yearbook, which showed him on the playing field. In an effort to help, O’Brien made sure the studio bosses knew the young contract actor was the real deal.“This is a helluva important role. A lot of the people you have under contract don’t know a football from a cantaloupe. This guy does,” O’Brien told Jack Warner.
In a further effort to help, O’Brien interceded with producer Hal Wallis on behalf of his younger friend. Finding Wallis initially
Nancy Reagan, who knew her husband better than anyone, later succinctly explained to me: he couldn’t get stuck out there in middle America. She understood her future husband’s youthful yearnings to escape because she’d once experienced them herself.A native New Yorker, she’d moved to Chicago at the age of eight when her divorced mother remarried.Returning after her four years at Smith College, she, too, managed to escape and never come back. They were two of a kind—the kind that didn’t stay put until they got where they were meant to be.
It was a moment of manifest destiny: Ronald Reagan proceeding all the way west for the first time.He’d gone as a radio sportscaster,sent to Los Angeles to report on spring training.But the chance to take a Warner Bros. screen test trumped his original purpose,to keep an eye on the Chicago Cubs, warming up for the season on Catalina Island.
As they say in politics, you make your breaks.In Los Angeles, he spotted a poster advertising the evening’s entertainmentin the Biltmore Hotel’s ballroom.One performer was a singer he knew from Des Moines.He sent a note inviting her to dinner between shows. This led to her offering to introduce him to her agent, who in turn proved able to arrange a screen test for the young radio announcer.It was a break that led to a two-hundred-dollar-a-week, seven-year Warner Bros. contract that Reagan quickly signed, agreeing with the stipulation thathe be billed as Ronald, not “Dutch,” Reagan, the name he’d been going by. He was on his way.
Reagan’s first film saw him playing a radio reporter, the very job he’d just left behind. Love Is on the Air was a B picture shot and released quickly as the second half of a double feature.The reviews in the trades were approving, “likeable” being the basic verdict—and, of course, they weren’t wrong. It would prove to be his lifelong signature quality.Over the next few years, Ronald Reagan, working regularly, turned up—more than once, as I’ve said—as Brass Bancroft the Secret Service agent.He appeared as a military cadet in the 1938 comedy Brother Rat with Jane Wyman, whom he’d soon make his first wife,and as an army private in Sergeant Murphy (1938), the title character of which was a horse.In a change of pace, he was a pleasure-loving playboy in the Bette Davis picture Dark Victory (1939). His big break arrived in1940, the year Knute Rockne — All American was released.
On the Warner lot, Reagan had become pals with Pat O’Brien, one of the most prolific stars of the era and the leader of Hollywood’s “Irish mafia,” a group that included James Cagney, SpencerTracy, and others.Each day at lunch in the Warner Bros. commissary O’Brien would hold court, surrounded by his buddies, and before long he invited Reagan to join the gang.
When O’Brien won the part of famed Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne in a highly anticipated upcoming biopic,he soon learned from Reagan how eager he was to be in it,and that he’d grown up worshipping both Rockne and George Gipp, the young football player who’ddied in 1920 just days after leading his team to victory. The young Reagan had been so taken with the Gipp story thathe’d once even started writing a screenplay of his own. To press his case at Warner Bros.,he brought in his college yearbook, which showed him on the playing field. In an effort to help, O’Brien made sure the studio bosses knew the young contract actor was the real deal.“This is a helluva important role. A lot of the people you have under contract don’t know a football from a cantaloupe. This guy does,” O’Brien told Jack Warner.
In a further effort to help, O’Brien interceded with producer Hal Wallis on behalf of his younger friend. Finding Wallis initially
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