Feb 6, 1911

Tampico, Illinois, USA

Ronald Reagan is, arguably, the most successful actor in history, having catapulted
from a career as a Warner Bros. contract player and later television star into the
governorship of California and two terms as President of the United States. As
president, his folksy oratory skills earned him the sobriquet "The Great
Communicator" while his his movie-star charisma helped him avoid responsibility for
breaches of the public trust that might have resulted in impeachment for a lesser
mortal. F... ... (read more...) or that intrepid skill, being able to deflect the muck of partisan
politics and the detritus left in the wake of his administration's own insalubrious
activities, his reign became known as "The Teflon Presidency." His starlight
remained strong even to the end of his term, when his contract with the American
people lapsed, and it renewed itself before he shuffled off this mortal coil,
hailed as the man who lifted the Iron Curtain.

The young Reagan was a staunch admirer of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (even
after he evolved into a Republican) and was a Democrat in the 1940s, a
self-described 'hemophilliac' liberal. He was elected president of the Screen Actors
Guild in 1947 and served five years during the most tumultuous times to ever hit
Hollywood. A committed anti-communist, Reagan not only fought more-militantly
activist movie industry unions that he and others felt had been infiltrated by
communists, but had to deal with the investigation into Hollywood's politics
launched by the House Un-Amercan Activities Committee in 1947, an inquisition that
lasted through the 1950s. The House Un-American Activities Committee investigations
of Hollywood (which led to the jailing of the "Hollywood Ten" in the late '40s)
sowed the seeds of the McCarthyism that would rack Hollywood and America in the
1950s.

In 1950, U.S. Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas (D-CA), the wife of "Dutch"
Reagan's friend Melvyn Douglas, ran as a Democrat for the U.S. Senate and was
opposed by the Republican nominee, the Red-bating Congresman from Whittier, Richard
Nixon. While Nixon did not go so far as to accuse Gahagan Douglas of being a
communist herself, he did charge her with being soft on communism due to her
opposition to the House Un-Amercan Activities Committee. Nixon tarred her as a
"fellow traveler" of communists, a "pinko" who was "pink right down to her
underwear." Gahagan Douglas was defeated by the man she was the first to call
"Tricky Dicky" because of his unethical behavior and dirty campaign tactics. Reagan
was on the Douglases' side during that campaign.

The Douglases, like Reagan and such other prominent actors as Humphrey Bogart and
Edward G. Robinson, were liberal Democrats, supporters of the late Franklin Delano
Roosevelt and his New Deal, a legacy that increasingly was under attack by the right
after World War II. They were NOT fellow-travelers; Melyvn Douglas had actually been
an active anti-communist and was someone the communists despised. Melvyn Douglas,
Robinson and Henry Fonda - a registered Republican! - wound up "gray-listed." (They
weren't explicitly black-listed, they just weren't offered any work.) Reagan, who it
was later revealed had been an F.B.I. informant while a union leader (turning in
suspected communists), was never hurt that way, as he made S.A.G. an accomplice of
the black-listing.

Reagan's career sagged after the late 1940s, and he started appearing in B-movies
after he left Warners to go free-lance. However, he had a eminence grise par
excellence in Lew Wasserman, his agent and the head of the Music Corp. of America.
Wasserman, later called "The Pope of Hollywood," was the genius who figured out that
an actor could make a killing via a tax windfall by turning himself into a
corporation. The corporation, which would employ the actor, would own part of a
motion picture the actor appeared in, and all monies would accrue to the
corporation, which was taxed at a much lower rate than was personal income.
Wasserman pioneered this tax avoidance scheme with his client James Stewart,
beginning with the Anthony Mann western Winchester '73 (1950) (1950). It made
Stewart enormously rich as he became a top box office draw in the 1950s after the
success of "Winchester 73" and several more Mann-directed westerns, all of which he
had an ownership stake in.

Ironicaly, Reagan became a poor-man's James Stewart in the early 1950s, appearing in
westerns, but they were mostly B-pictures. He dd not have the acting chops of the
great Stewart, but he did have his agent. Wasserman at M.C.A. was one of the
pioneers of television syndication, and this was to benefit Reagan enormously.
M.C.A. was the only talent agency that was allowed to also be a producer through an
exemption to union rules granted by S.A.G. when Reagan was the union president, and
it used the exemption to acquire Universal International Pictures. Talent agents
were not permitted to be producers as there was an inherent conflict of interest
between the two professions, one of which was committed to acquiring talent at the
lowest possible cost and the other whose focus was to get the best possible price
for their client. When a talent agent was also a producer, like M.C.A. was, it had a
habit of steering its clients to its own productions, where they were employed but
at a lower price than their potential free market value. It was a system that made
M.C.A. and Lew Wasserman, enormously wealthy.

The ownership of Universal and its entry into the production of television shows
that were syndicated to network made M.C.A. the most successful organization in
Hollywood of its time, a real cash cow as television overtook the movies as the #1
business of the entertainment industry. Wasserman repaid Ronald Reagan's largess by
structuring a deal by which he hosted and owned part of "General Electric Theater"
(1953), a western omnibus showcase that ran from 1954 to 1961. It made Ronald Reagan
very comfortable financially, though it did not make him rich. That came later.

In 1960, with the election of the Democratic President John F. Kennedy, the black
and gray lists went into eclipse. J.F.K. appointed Helen Gahagan Douglas Treasurer
of the United States. About this time, as the civil rights movement became stronger
and found more support among Democrats and the Kennedy administration, Ronald Reagan
- fresh from a second stint as S.A.G. president in 1959 - was in the process of
undergoing a personal and political metamorphosis into a right-wing Republican, a
process that wold culminate with his endorsing Barry Goldwater for the Reublican
presidential nomination in 1964. (He narrated a Goldwater campaign film played at
the G.O.P. Convention in San Francisco.) Reagan's evolution into a right-wing
Republican sundered his friendship with the Douglases. (After Reagan was elected
President of the United States in 1980, Melvyn Douglas said of his former friend
that Reagan turned to the right after he had begun to believe the pro-business
speeches he delivered for General Electric when he was the host of the "G.E.
Theater.")

In 1959, while Reagan was back as a second go-round as S.A.G. president, M.C.A.'s
exemption from S.A.G. regulations that forbade a talent agency from being a producer
was renewed. However, in 1962, the U.S. Justice Department under Attorney General
Robert F. Kennedy successfully forced M.C.A. - known as "The Octopus" in Hollywood
for its monopolistic tendencies - to divest itself of its talent agency.

When Reagan was tipped by the California Republican Party to be its standard-bearer
in the 1965 gubernatorial election against Democratic Governor Pat Brown, Lew
Wasserman went back in action. Politics makes strange bedfellows, and though
Wasserman was a liberal Democrat, having an old friend like Reagan who had shown his
loyalty as S.A.G. president in the state house was good for business. Wasserman and
his partner, M.C.A. Chairman Jules Styne (a Republican), helped ensure that Ronald
Reagan would be financially secure for the rest of his life so that he could enter
politics. (At the time, he was the host of "Death Valley Days" on TV.)

According to the Wall Street Journal, Universal sold Ronald Reagan a nice piece of
land of many acres north of Santa Barbara that had been used for location shooting.
Reagan then converted the property into a small fortune by selling off most of the
land, keeping only a small percentage for his own ranch. Reagan, who was now rich,
could afford to throw his cowboy hat into the ring. Pulling himself up by his own
boot-spurs (with a little help from his friends), Ronald Reagan won the governorship
and began what is surely the greatest comeback for any actor in history, surpassing
even that of Marlon Brando in 'The Godfather' (1972). For while "The Godfather"
comeback meant that Marlon Brando was again a superstar, Reagan's comeback from
B-movie actor and TV-series host culminated with him headlining the Free World. It's
an act that cannot be topped!

"All the world's a stage," Shakespeare famously wrote, "And all the men and women
merely players./They have their exits and their entrances,/And one man in his time
plays many parts,/His acts being seven ages." Ronald Reagan played many roles in his
life's seven acts: radio announcer, movie star, union boss, television
actor-cum-host, governor, right-wing critic of big government and President of the
United States. While historians still debate his ultimate legacy as Chief Executive
and First Magistrate, the fact is this amiable man played the biggest and most
important role ever limned by a actor, and pulled it off with grace and aplomb as
befits a great headliner. Died on 5 June 2004, Bel Air, Los Angeles, California,
USA. (pneumonia and Alzheimer's disease)