Reagan likes to end his sessions with a bit of down-home give-and-take with his audience — ‘You, the American people’. He points to each raised hand with a jerk of hip and shoulder, like a man drawing six-guns, and he listens to each question with his head shyly inclined. The more personal the question, the more he enjoys his own reply. ‘Of all the people in America, sir, why you for President?’ Reagan grins. ‘Well, I’m not smart enough to tell a lie.’ Laughter, applause. ‘But why do you want it, sir?’ Reagan flexes his worn, snipped, tucked, mottled face. “This country needs a good Republican and I feel I can do the job. Why? I’m happy. I’m feeling good.’ Here he turns. ‘And I have Nancy to tuck me up at night.’ Laughter, applause, hats in the air. Right on! Hot damn.’ You got it!
Then you realise: they love this actor. And I don’t mean ‘ex-actor’. I mean actor. He would have been one anyway, with or without Hollywood. He may not be smart, but there is plenty of cunning in him; and his ambitions are as tangled and cumbrous as anyone else’s. ‘I am one of you’ is his boast, and the American people blush at his flattery. Watching him talk, his off-centred smile, his frown of concentration, his chest-swelling affirmations, you feel moved in that reluctant way you feel moved by bad art — like coming out of Kramer versus Kramer, denouncing the film with tears drying on your cheeks. Reagan is an affable old ham, no question. He would make a good head waiter, a good 6utlins redcoat, a good host for New Faces. But would he make a good leader of the free world?
This is serious. How did it happen?
Reagan grew up in respectable poverty in rural Illinois, the second son of stoical Presbyterian parents. His father Jack worked in a shoe shop; his mother Nelle worked in a dress shop. During the early years of the Depression, the young Ronald attended little-known Eureka College, a Christian Church establishment near Peoria; he moonlighted to supplement his modest scholarship. Reaganites often boast that their man is the only candidate with a degree in economics. Reagan himself sometimes cautiously mentions this fact too. But he was no scholar, to put it mildly (even today his reading consists entirely of the Bible, Reader’s Digest and assorted press-clippings). When Eureka gave him an honorary degree in 1957, Reagan cracked, ‘I always figured the first one you gave me was honorary.’
Eureka saw the emergence of the early radical vein in Reagan’s political thinking – if that isn’t too exalted a phrase for the gruff simplicities he now trades in. When there was talk of a cut-back in the academic courses offered by the college, Reagan organised a student strike. Like his father, Reagan was at this time a faithful devotee or Roosevelt and the New Deal. (He remains an admirer or Roosevelt — and of Ike and Coolidge, partly because they didn’t work too hard. ‘Show me an executive who works all the time’, Reagan is fond of saying, ‘and I’ll show you a bad executive.’) Reagan continued to be a registered Democrat well into his forties. Towards the end of his Hollywood heyday Reagan led another successful strike: as president of the radical Screen Actors Guild. And during the days of the McCarthy witch hunts, he made a tough, shrewd stand against the Committee of Un-American Activities.
Reagan worked his way into films through sportscasting (for the World of Chiropractic station in Des Monies, Iowa) and through his own natural good fortune. He signed for Warner Brothers in 1937, at the age of twenty-six. He made about sixty films. They include Cowboy from Brooklyn, An Angel from Texas, Sergeant Murphy, Swing Your Lady, Brother Rat, Brother Rat and a Baby, Bedtime for Bonzo (about a baby chimp: Reagan refused to star in the sequel, Bonzo Goes To College — ‘Who could believe a chimp could go to college? Lacked credibility,’ said Reagan sternly), Hellcats of the Navy, She’s Working Her Way Through College, The Winning Team, Law and Order, All American. Towards the end of his career Reagan’s looks cragged up and he started playing villains. It was time to quit.