His Days in Hollywood: Ronald Wilson Reagan (1911-2004)

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His last film (really a TV movie released in theaters because it was deemed too rough for the small screen) was The Killers in 1964. It's a bit of a cheap thrill to watch Reagan play a crime heavy and do his professional best in a scene where he has to slap Angie Dickinson. The Killers, violent and cynical, was a curious coda to Reagan's career. But, in a way, he had only been moonlighting as a movie actor ever since his Army days. He was moving into politics, graduating from Hollywood in the '40s to Sacramento in the '60s to Washington in the '80s.

Reagan served as president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) from 1947 to 1952. He negotiated the first contract that gave actors royalties for films but not for television work (a boon to his old friend Wasserman, who would run the largest TV production company). He also applied grease to the wheels of the anticommunist witch hunt. Reagan had been reflexively left-wing in the '30s and '40s. Edmund Morris, his authorized biographer, believes the story that Reagan had tried to join the Communist Party but was rejected on the grounds that he would be more valuable as a fellow traveler (a rumor Reagan blithely denied to Morris in 1987). By the early '50s, though, Reagan had turned firmly and forever to the right. His confidence as a speaker and SAG boss nudged him into pitchman and executive roles--first as the host of TV's General Electric Theatre and Death Valley Days, then as Governor and President.

Truth is, he was a TV actor before there was TV drama. A movie star typically projects danger and a TV star comfort and familiarity. Reagan had this domesticated appeal--bred in him, perhaps, but also hammered into him by all those roles in which he essentially played the sensible master of ceremonies to a cast of more gifted or committed actors. This steadiness, combined with a voice suggesting unforced manliness and homespun wisdom, made him a welcome, authoritative TV figure and a superb politician.

Reagan tipped Jack Warner's prophecy on its end, persuading most Americans that they were being governed by their best friend. So it is Jimmy Stewart who was the great actor. Was Ronald Reagan a great President? Well, he brilliantly played one on TV. And where's the best of him? In the easy authority he projected--the image of an American hero he rarely got to play in the movies.