Ronald Reagan arrived in Hollywood with a great idea for a movie: It was the story of the famous college football coach Knute Rockne and his star running back, George Gipp. After scoring eighty-three touchdowns for Notre Dame, Gipp died in his senior year—only a few weeks after playing his last game.
In 1940 the Warner Brothers studio decided to make a movie about Coach Rockne. But Ronald Reagan almost didn’t get to be in it.
The director thought he didn’t look like a football player. Reagan had to bring in pictures from his yearbook to prove that he really had played the game.
In the end, Reagan was cast as young George Gipp. In one of the last scenes, the dying football star is with his coach. He says to use his example to inspire future Notre Dame players. In the movie, he exclaims, “Someday, when things are tough, maybe you can ask the boys to go in there and win one for the Gipper.” It became one of the most famous lines in film history.
Now that he was in the movies, Reagan was able to bring his parents to California and buy them a house. He still found it hard to forgive his dad for getting drunk. But he invited him to come along to Notre Dame for the premiere of Knute Rockne—All-American. Jack Reagan was thrilled. A few months later, he died of heart failure. Reagan felt lucky that they had made up their differences.
By now, Reagan was starting his own family. On the set of the movie Brother Rat, he met a beautiful actress named Jane Wyman. They were married in January 1940.
The fan magazines went crazy over Jane and Ronnie. Stories described them as the ideal movie-star couple. They were glamorous in an all-American way. In 1941 the Reagans had a daughter, Maureen. Four years later, they adopted a son, Michael.
In two years, Reagan made more than a dozen movies. The studio didn’t like him to be seen wearing glasses. Movie stars weren’t supposed to be nearsighted! So he memorized his parts at home before the shooting started. Luckily, this was easy for him.
Mostly, he played good guys. And he got a lot of attention for being handsome. Art students at the University of Southern California voted Ronnie Reagan their “twentieth century Adonis.” That meant that he looked like a Greek god. He thanked them by posing for their art classes.
World War II was raging in Europe, and war movies were very popular. Reagan often played the part of a soldier. In four pictures, he was cast as a Secret Service agent chasing counterfeiters and Nazi spies.
Boys and girls who wrote to the studio were enrolled in a Junior Secret Service Club. They got membership cards signed by the Secret Service “chief,” Ronald Reagan. Articles in the club newsletter were written in a secret code that only members could read.
All during his movie career, Reagan enjoyed roles like this. He got to take boxing lessons from an ex-champ named Mushy Callahan. But one day on the set, someone shot off a gun loaded with blanks too close to Reagan’s head. He was hard of hearing in his right ear for the rest of his life.
Little by little, he was starting to get more important roles. After playing George Gipp, he was cast in a serious drama called Kings Row. In Reagan’s big scene, his character wakes up after an operation to find that a scheming doctor has amputated both his legs for no reason. “Where’s the rest of me?” he shrieks. That line, too, became famous.
In December 1941 the United States entered World War II. Ronald Reagan was already in the army reserves. His unit made films for the United States Army Air Corps.
Reagan narrated films that told the public about the air corps’ latest campaigns. He watched films taken during battles, a lot of them too horrible for the public to see. These images made a deep impression, especially the scenes shot inside Nazi concentration camps. He kept a copy of this reel to show to his children when they were older.
Then the war ended, and Ronald Reagan went back to the movie studio. He made twenty-one more movies. But being an actor wasn’t as much fun for him as it used to be.
Politically, it was a difficult time in the United States, especially in Hollywood. In the past, some Americans had belonged to the Communist Party. Now World War II was over and the Soviet Union, a Communist country, was America’s number one enemy. In Congress, a committee was investigating Communist activities in Hollywood.
Ronald Reagan was elected president of the actors’ union, called the Screen Actors Guild. It was a tough job. Some of his movie star friends warned him that Communists in the United States—people loyal to the Soviet Union—were using the unions to gain power in Hollywood. Reagan was against Communism, but he also wanted to protect peoples’ rights. He was against blacklisting, which denied jobs to actors with Communist Party connections.
Reagan told the congressmen that he didn’t think they needed to pass any new laws, such as making it illegal to belong to the Communist Party. It would be better to let “democracy do its work.”
“If all of the American people know all of the facts, they will never make a mistake,” he said. It was something he believed all his life. |