Reagan: The Hollywood Years

From Barnes & Noble

In 1937, Ronald Reagan took a Hollywood screen test that changed his life -- and ours. The resultant seven-year Warner Bros. contract made this likable Illinois native a familiar face, if not a revered actor. (Reagan himself made modest quips about his talents and the quality of films.) However, though not destined for cinematic immortality, he did leave his mark. In his eight terms as president of the Screen Actors Guild, this B-movie actor became a leader and spokesman, thus paving the way for his historic political career. Celebrity biographer Marc Eliot (Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart) knows a good story when he hears it, and he's filled Reagan: The Hollywood Years with nearly 400 pages of entertaining yarns.

Publishers Weekly

For 30 years, Ronald Reagan was dedicated to a film and television career. Yet Eliot (who has written bios of Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart, among others) claims previous studies of the former president gloss over this influential era. "To be able to fully comprehend Reagan the man, one must also understand Reagan the actor." With that charge, Eliot chronicles Reagan's film career, from his numerous "B" pictures, such as Girls on Probation, to the image-enhancing Knute Rockne All American, which contained Reagan's future political rallying cry: "Win one for the Gipper." Interspersed with tales of Hollywood casting maneuvers, Eliot takes a no-holds-barred approach to Reagan's personal life, whether his numerous affairs, his rocky marriage to Jane Wyman or Nancy Davis's single-minded determination to marry him. Eliot also examines his time heading SAG, the actors' union, which proved prescient. By 1962, Reagan was out of work, reduced to giving his "Price of Freedom" speech to interested groups. His delivery at a Goldwater fund-raiser was so inspiring that it jump-started his second career, clearing the way for the "Central Casting version of what an American president should look like." Extensively researched, this biography is an accessible and eye-opening read. (Oct.)

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Library Journal

Nearly 20 years after Ronald Reagan's presidency, his name means different things to different people. To some, it's the Berlin Wall, Reaganomics, or the Cold War; to those who knew his entertainment career, it's derisory reminiscences about Bedtime for Bonzo, the Gipper in Knute Rockne All American, or comedian Rich Little's mocking, rosy-cheeked, and head-shaking "Well...." Seeking to tie the entertainment and political sides of Reagan together and paint a more holistic portrait of the man, best-selling author Eliot (Cary Grant: A Biography; Down 42nd Street) succeeds in adding a little soul to a Hollywood career that has been undervalued if not entirely dismissed while setting the stage for what was yet to come. Although the book feels as though it is written too much in hindsight-Eliot's tendency to foreshadow and add melodramatic weight to occurrences occasionally gets the best of him-this is a valuable supplement to other biographies that focus more on Reagan's presidential years and is an important addition to large public and academic biographical and entertainment collections.
—Ben Malczewski

Kirkus Reviews

Eliot (Song of Brooklyn: An Oral History of America's Favorite Borough, 2008, etc.) charts the less-than-stellar career of Ronald Reagan, the actor. The late president was once a perennial second banana of middling looks and talent who dependably and forgettably assayed roles as the hero's best friend in dozens of B movies during Hollywood's Golden Age. This was, of course, before finding his true metier as a public speaker and political force in the tumultuous early days of Hollywood unions, most notably the Screen Actors Guild. Eliot paints the young Reagan as a Midwestern model of Rockwellian rectitude, a genial cipher with an unquestioning devotion to family, heartland values and a knack for self-promotion. Local celebrity as an athlete and radio sports announcer led to an undistinguished career in motion pictures, with the exceptions of his roles in Knute Rockne, All American and King's Row, both of which interestingly found him declaiming classic dialogue from the sickbed. Eliot delves deeply into the precariousness of Reagan's finances and ego during this period, as film after film failed to establish him as an A-list star and his marriage to the mercurial actress Jane Wyman ended in humiliating divorce. The image of Reagan pontificating about current events, filling the house with pipe smoke while Wyman writhed in crushing boredom, is a particularly poignant one. Much of the narrative focuses on Reagan's self-actualization as a political animal through his deep involvement with SAG and its role in the blacklist and various other scandals, such as its underhanded dealing with Lew Wasserman's MCA in negotiating residuals for its members. This occasionally dry material illustratesReagan's fuzzy drift from liberal Democrat to conservative Republican, as well as an apparently innate ability to cover his tracks with his aw-shucks charm and selective memory. The book ends with a determined Nancy Davis, herself a failed actress, steering her new beau toward a more socially desirable set of friends-well-connected, well-heeled conservatives-looking for a new pony to back after the flameouts of Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater. An enlightening, richly detailed and suggestively disturbing look at the American Dream and one of its truest dreamers.

From the Publisher

" Extensively researched, this biography is an accessible and eye-opening read." —-Publishers Weekly