Landslide (9 page)

Indeed. As she walked away, the country station, like radio stations everywhere, cut to a news bulletin.
Years later, Siegel would still recall the announcer’s words—“We shockingly regret to inform you that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy has just been assassinated in Dallas, Texas …”—and then, from Dickinson, “a loud, piercing scream.” The actress crumpled in the director’s arms.

Production on
Johnny North
came immediately to a halt. The film was on a tight production schedule, but the movie studios were shutting down, just like everything else. Wasserman made it known that there would be no more work on the film that Friday, and Monday would be a day of mourning as well.

Ronald Reagan spent that evening at home. He had never been a supporter of John F. Kennedy. He had been a staunch anticommunist and a true believer in conservative principles since the 1950s, and in recent years he had become active in Republican politics. He traveled the country giving speeches extolling the virtue of the free market, warning against the Soviet threat, and worrying over a turn toward statist policies in America. Three years earlier, in the 1960 presidential campaign, he had made numerous appearances on behalf of Kennedy’s opponent, Richard Nixon, and he planned to do the same for the conservative Arizona senator Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential campaign.
Kennedy, he’d once implied, was a Marxist with a pretty face.

A day earlier, that sort of talk would have been unpopular but acceptable. In the wake of Kennedy’s death, it was tantamount to treason. The newscasts that Friday afternoon still had little information on Oswald, the apparent shooter, or his politics. But Dallas was a well-known hotbed of right-wing extremism. It didn’t take much imagination to see some way that leaders of the conservative movement might be culpable in Kennedy’s death.
Walter Cronkite didn’t help matters when he erroneously reported that Goldwater, asked for a response to the news of Kennedy’s death, had offered nothing
more than a cold “No comment.”
A mob was forming outside National Draft Goldwater Committee headquarters screaming “Murderers!”

In Southern California, Reagan’s eleven-year-old daughter Patti watched her school’s flag being lowered to half-mast that Friday. School was canceled, the principal announced, and it was time for the children to go home. Waiting for her mother, Patti was confronted by a fellow student: “
Well, your parents will probably be happy!”

They weren’t, but there was little use in arguing the point. Any kind of political discussion was suddenly in bad taste. For the moment, politics—Reagan’s greatest passion in recent years—had become an unspeakable subject. Like everyone else in America, he spent time that weekend with his family, watching the unbelievable events on TV.

And waiting. For Reagan, the delay in filming would mean more days off camera. He had had plenty of those in recent years. And it would mean a revised schedule for shooting, stretching past Christmas. Which meant more time until this movie was over. This movie, which was beginning to look like a mistake.

The signs of trouble were obvious. Reagan had arrived the previous morning to shoot a scene at a location in the Toluca Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. Thanks to the oddities of a studio schedule, the first scene to be shot in official production would be the last scene of the movie. The plan for the day was to shoot the exterior portions of the film’s climactic confrontation in which Lee Marvin’s character, Charlie Strom, tracks Reagan’s Browning and Dickinson’s Sheila Farr to an upscale suburban house. Despite suffering from a gunshot wound himself, Strom nonetheless manages to capture them both at gunpoint. Farr begs for mercy, but Strom won’t hear it; he shoots Browning and Farr dead and then lurches outside, where he stumbles in extended agony and dies. It was mostly Marvin’s scene, and mostly Marvin’s day.

But when it came time to start shooting, Marvin wasn’t there.
Reagan stepped in to fill the time, filming a simple exterior shot in which a nervous Browning hurries into the house, clutching a long case in which he’s stored a large gun. They got it on film without incident.

The hours went by with no sign of Marvin. Morning turned to afternoon. Finally, a car came into view, careening back and forth across the street before coming to a stop on the lawn in front of the house. Out staggered Marvin, seriously drunk.

Siegel set to work, instructing the actor on the choreography of the death stumble. Marvin, clutching a 7-Up bottle filled with vodka, nodded along silently. “
Lee had a theory about drinking,” Siegel said later. “If you didn’t talk, no one could smell you.”

Then a funny thing happened. The camera started rolling and Marvin began to resemble his character. Sure, he could be difficult to work with, but it was hard to argue with his theatrical talents. And for an actor tasked with staggering around like he’s bleeding to death, a 7-Up bottle’s worth of vodka can come in handy.

The performance required multiple takes and reshoots. But the version that made it onscreen, cut with the interior shots to form the final scene of the film, was a tour de force. It begins with a close-up of Charlie Strom’s feet. First, viewers see blood fall onto his shoes, then his gun drops into the frame. He is steps away from death, but he’s determined to send Farr and Browning there first. Inside the house, he moves with agonized urgency, falling to the floor and yet, somehow, still managing to pull a gun on Farr and Browning. Each pleads for their life, but Marvin promptly shoots them both dead anyway. Next, he emerges back into the daylight, his white shirt soaked with blood. He wants to escape but as he struggles to get into his car, he sees a police cruiser pulling up. He points his finger as if to shoot at the cop in a final act of defiance. Then he falls straight backward. Dead. “
An actor likes a death scene,” Marvin’s costar Clu Gulager would later say, and Marvin’s was “the greatest death onscreen I think I’ve ever seen.”

Indeed, Marvin’s performance was so captivating to watch, it
was easy to forget that the film’s final sequence included two other actors’ death scenes as well. Angie Dickinson didn’t even get to die on camera. Reagan at least got to portray Browning’s final moments of life. In a five-second shot, viewers see him clutch the gunshot wound in his abdomen, raise his head in agony, and fall dead on the floor. Altogether it was a serviceable, believable performance. And an utterly forgettable one compared with the long, engrossing struggle of Marvin’s Charlie Strom, the one and only star in the scene.

So that would be the payoff for the long weeks of work ahead of him, to be a minor character in another man’s death scene. For Reagan, too, this would be an agonizing part to play.

A
FTER ALL,
R
ONALD
Reagan liked to be the star as well.

For Americans in the twenty-first century, who know how the story of Reagan’s life turned out, the role of hero seems a natural fit. His presidency was filled with dramatic triumphs: the “morning in America” economic boom that followed years of economic hardship, the two landslide elections, the hard-line challenge to the Soviets that climaxed in America’s triumph in the Cold War. And he was always careful to look as much like a hero as he could. He was more attractive than anyone else in Washington, his lighting was better, and his timing and his set pieces were superior, too. His adversaries were always appropriately evil, and he dealt with them with satisfyingly quick dispatch. And, most important, there was his remarkable journey from the B-movie ranks to the top echelon of revered presidents. The improbability of this progression suggested America was either a ridiculous country or a great one. Most Americans have chosen the latter interpretation. Only in their great country could an individual make such a lucky and heroic rise.

Over time, Reagan’s admirers have created a familiar account of that rise, with mutually agreed-upon dramatic contours. In that story, a child of the small-town Midwest works his way from a local lifeguarding job to regional radio announcer to movie idol in late 1930s and ’40s Hollywood. He finds early success playing wholesome
characters in pleasant, if inconsequential, films. His onscreen persona matches his offscreen life; he has a beautiful movie star wife and children, and he’s so well liked and respected in the film colony that, in 1947, his peers elect him president of the Screen Actors Guild.

Then, in the late 1940s, the hero meets his great obstacle: the collapse of his film career and the end of his first marriage. He struggles and suffers, emotionally and physically. But he perseveres, and in time he manages to reinvent himself. He finds a new wife and a new kind of celebrity as a television star and host on
GE Theater
. He grows in seriousness and stature, taking an interest in issues of substance, specifically the threat posed to the American way of life by the spread of Soviet Communism. He becomes a respected conservative speaker on politics and international affairs. By the mid-1960s, he has grown convinced that his country has reached a perilous position and that its very existence is threatened. With some reluctance, he yields to the entreaties of others and begins a career in public service that will inevitably lead to the White House, his destiny all along.

Much of this narrative is true. And yet when we ask the famous question of the storybook Reagan
—Where were you the day Kennedy was shot
?—we find a man caught someplace he is not supposed to be. He’s not a retired movie star. He’s a working actor, toiling in less than ideal conditions on a movie set. He’s not the wholesome good guy. He’s playing a distinctly unwholesome character in a distinctly unwholesome film. He’s not a decade beyond the great career crisis of his life. His career is on the rocks once more. He is not obviously destined for greatness. He is fifty-two years old, looking toward his future anxiously, unsure if there is any more greatness to come. Indeed, after a couple days of shooting
Johnny North
, he has caught a glimpse of a different kind of future, one devoid of greatness, one in which he was on camera but mostly unseen.

For Reagan, that particular vision of the future would have been unpleasant in the extreme. For the real story of Reagan’s life is not
the story of a natural and inevitable hero, a man unquestionably destined for greatness. It is the story of a man who
makes
himself a hero while fulfilling a consuming need to be seen. Like Johnson, he longed to feel the eyes of the world on him as he played a heroic part in a grand performance. And throughout his life, he worked as hard as he could to make sure that part was his.

Like Johnson’s, Reagan’s drive to be seen was born in childhood. Not long before he shot his scenes in
Johnny North
, Reagan began work on a midlife memoir, eventually published in 1965. In it, he imagined the scene of his birth:

To the family, the “fat Dutchman” image would stick—Reagan would always be known as Dutch. He grew up in Tampico and a succession of other small Midwestern towns, far from any spotlight. His father, a first-generation Irish American named Jack Reagan, worked as a shoe salesman. Handsome, friendly, and charismatic, Jack dreamed of making it big but had a penchant for heavy drinking that kept his dreams out of reach. His wife, Nelle, a devout Christian, took care of her husband, but her own ambitions for greatness were for her two sons: her eldest, Neil, and her favorite, Dutch.

When the boys were children, Neil was always the one in the limelight—the more popular brother, the better athlete, the bigger flirt. Dutch kept to himself, reading books and arranging toy figurines in elaborate fantasy scenes. But the quiet Reagan dreamed of
greatness in his games. “
His heroes,” writes Lou Cannon, Reagan’s esteemed biographer, “were always heroes: generals and presidents and captains of industry who had arisen from the ranks.”

He hoped that someday the hero might be him. In his teenage years, he began to look the part. By then the Reagans had settled in Dixon, Illinois, the small community he would always consider his hometown. Tall, lanky, and muscular, with honey-brown hair and misty blue Irish eyes, he was a vision of youthful beauty. He knew it, and he made sure everyone else did, too. He passed some of the happiest years of his life working as a lifeguard at a popular local beach, basking in the warmth of admiring gazes. It was hard work—twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week, every day of the summer—but Reagan loved it, returning to his post each year for seven summers.

Later, his admirers in the conservative movement would identify the seed of Reagan’s greatness in that bronzed lifeguard on the banks of the Rock River: Reagan the rescuer, coming to save the drowning swimmers as he would later come to save a nation fighting for its life. Reagan himself was less grandiose when recalling those summers. “
You know why I had such fun at it?” he said. “Because I was the only one up there on the guard stand. It was like a stage. Everyone had to look at me.”

Soon he went in search of other stages. At Illinois’s Eureka College, where he enrolled in 1928, he quickly grasped the campus pecking order and joined the football squad. Initially, his eyesight and slight frame kept him on the bench, but he worked hard and eventually gained a respectable reputation as a solid player, if not a standout. Recognition came easier in the college drama club, where he immediately distinguished himself as a star. “
All of this commenced to create in me a personality schizo-split between sports and the stage,” he later wrote. “The fact was, I suppose, that I just liked showing off.”

It was in college that he discovered the amazing effect this “showing off” could have on people. In his freshman year he spoke at a
campus meeting to ask for a vote of protest against administrative cuts to academic programs. In his 1965 memoir, he recalled his performance. “
I discovered that night,” Reagan wrote, “that an audience has a feel to it and, in the parlance of the theater, that audience and I were together. When I came to actually presenting the motion there was no need for parliamentary procedure: they came to their feet with a roar.… It was heady wine.”