Early Reagan by Anne Edwards

Author:Anne Edwards
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781589797444
Publisher: Taylor Trade Publishing

Reagan’s remaining scenes were given top priority for completion before his departure.* His major concern was money. In spite of Jack Warner’s patriotic bravado, players’ salaries were suspended the same day they went off to war.

With all the expenses of the new house, Jane was not going to have an easy time budgeting, despite her increased salary. Then there was Nelle, whom Reagan had been supporting. He wrote Steve Trilling (now Jack Warner’s assistant) asking if his mother could be paid $75 a week by the studio to answer his fan mail. Trilling sent a memo to Warner, who refused the request with: “We can’t start a precedent.” Reagan then approached Warner for a loan of the $75 a week to be paid directly to Nelle while he was in active service. Warner rejected this idea as well, but finally Reagan signed a note for $3,900; Nelle was to be sent $75 a week for one year. And Reagan, upon his return from his war service, was to repay the loan, interest free, to the studio at the rate of $200 a week for eighteen weeks and $300 on the nineteenth week.

He entrained for Fort Mason, California, near San Francisco, as 2nd Lieutenant Cavalry Reserve U.S. Army on April 19, 1942. He had learned beforehand that he would be on the staff there as a liaison officer loading convoys, so the physical he had on his first day of military service was redundant. But he claimed that after the eye examination one of the two doctors said, “If we sent you overseas, you’d shoot a general.” And the other doctor countered, “Yes, and you’d miss him.”

* During the several hundred interviews conducted for the purpose of this book, a pattern began to form. As Reagan’s political influence began to grow, his personal detractors multiplied significantly. After 1941, private opinion became jarring in its diversity. Some coworkers still found him “a wonderful guy” and “thoroughly likeable,” but a considerable segment referred to him as “power hungry” and “dangerous,” or as “boring,” with “no depth,” “a cardboard figure.”

* Jehovah’s Witnesses believe the Second Commandment made the saluting of the flag a crime against the Lord (“You shall not make for yourself a graven image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them.”)

† Upon meeting old Dixon acquaintances in 1980, he had been able to pinpoint the exact locations of homes they had occupied fifty-five years earlier.

* Ruth Walgreen Dart went on to become a writer and poet (The Flight, My Crown, My Love and Prelude to Poetry) and publisher (The Tiger’s Eye, a literary magazine).

* In later years, Reagan used lines from these films in many of his political speeches to underscore or make a point, treating the film line or situation as reality.

† Originally titled Jook Girl.

‡ Life Begins at Eight-Thirty (The Light of Heart in Great Britain) and Moontide.

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