Meagan cast for is greatest role

Press, 22 July 1980, Page 17

Meagan cast for is greatest role

By

ARTHUR SPIEGELMAN,

Reuter-NZPA

Ronald Reagan’s films used to end with someone else getting the girl. He once co-starred opposite a monkey and the monkey got the better reviews. Now. long after his acting career ended, he has the best role of his life, as the Republican nominee for President. Come the November 4 election he may be the leading man in the most powerful job in the Western world. „ , The United States has had Presidents from all sorts of backgrounds — generals and tailors, patricians and profesors, while the incumbent is a peanut farmer wrestling with a harvest of discontent. Ronald Reagan, who may be the next President, is a 69-year-old former actor with a cinematic vision of the world, a n i c e-guy conservative whose message, written in his own personal shorthand on small index cards, has frightened some Americans. It has stirred others to believe he can make the country great again. He is Main Street, America, the upholder of nostalgic values — the family, hard work, partriotism. He has a simple view of the world, but bristles at being labelled simplistic. In a sense, the handsome, boyishly charming collector of careers — he has been a sports broadcaster, an actor, a trade union leader, and a twoterm California governor — has talked his way into the nomination of the nation’s second major party. He speaks as no other politician in American life does, offering a vision that moves gracefully, albeit narrowly, from stirring images of America becoming “a shining city on a hill” to brusque warnings against enemies within arid without.

Reagan, the experts say, is superb at articulating the fears of the average American. He is against welfare cheats, bureaucracies, government regulations, and communists. He uses the same lines over and over again but

delivers them with a freshness each time that belies their age. His second wife, Nancy, stands at his side when he speaks and gazes lovingly at him with a fixed, adoring smile. She is a former actress and plays her role superbly. . A standard Reagan line in this campaign, with Americans worried about their country’s declining world image, is: “It’s time we told the rest of the world we don’t care whether they like us or not; we want to be respected.” He has also painted an image of the Soviet Union as a nation aggressively on the move, a country that cannot be trusted, and a country outstripping America in constructing weapons of destruction. He has called detente an illusion and the second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II) a bad deal for the United States.

“Newsweek” magazine quoted him as telling his son, Michael, that he once had a vision of sitting around a table with Leonid Brezhnev negotiating SALT II and, after listening to the Soviet President speak for an hour and a half, standing up to him and saying, “Nyet.” “I don’t think Brezhnev has ever heard that word before,” he was quoted as saying. That vision, as “Newsweek” duly noted, was cinematic, as is much of Reagan’s imagery. His political career began in earnest only 14 years ago when he became governor of California. His first opponent, the Republican he beat for the party’s gubernatorial nom-

ination, did not know what hit him. “I can’t believe it. He’s just an actor,” George Christopher complained. An actor, yes, but had prepared for the role of governor by serving two terms as president of the Screen Actors’ Guild during the turbulent communist witchhunts of the 1950 s and being for years a spokesman for conservative causes. As a union chief, Reagan had supported the ousting of communists from Hollywood jobs but he also defended actors wrongly accused of being 1 too Left-wing. He himself

had been raised as a Liberal Roosevelt Democrat and during the 1940 s he supported liberal causes, so many that some people thought he was a communist. His political turning point came when Hollywood divided on the communist issue. Reagan was bom on February 6, 1911, to a poor Tampico, Illinois, family. His father was a shoe salesman frequently out of work because of alcoholism. After college, he became a sports broadcaster in lowa and then decided to go to Hollywood to become an actor. When he arrived there,

an agent he met telephoned Warner Brothers and declared: “I have the new Robert Taylor sitting in my office.” The call led to a contract. Reagan was on his way.

Throughout his early career as a radio sports commentator, through Hollywood, the war, and his two periods as president of the. Screen Actors’ Guild (1947-52 and 195960), Reagan remained a registered Democrat. An increasingly conservative one, to be sure, but he was still openly affiliated to the party long after the rest of Beverly Hills had become card-carrying Republicians. In 1954, when his Hollywood career was nosediving, Reagan became host of General Electrical Theatre, a half-hour weekly T V series sponsored by the giant conglomerate. The $125,000-a-year contract was a handsome foundation for a career in politics: he was seen each 'week on network television, and he travelled the country expounding G.E.’s big-busi-ness, free-enterprise politics to its executives and employees. Thus began Reagan’s years on what he still calls “the mashed potato circuit,” where he now commands $lO,OOO a speech. In the process he became rich, accumulating hefty . investments and a series of increasingly large California ranches. Like so many before him, Reagan’s abandonment of social democracy came with his own arrival in the upper tax bracket. He has been married twice. His first marriage

to the actress Jane Wyman ended in divorce. Several years later' he married another actress, this time of lesser talent, Nancy Davis, who gave up her career to be a "fulltime wife.

The Reagans are especially close. They hold hands in public, he calls her “mommie,” and Nancy is said to wield enormous influence over her husband. even in the political realm.

Reagan has four children — two from each marriage. His oldest daughter, Maureen, aged 39, twice-divorced, is said to have political ambitions of her own and to be planning to run for office, possibly the United States senate, in California. His oldest son. Michael, is a speedboat racer turned businessman. His youngest daughter, Patti, is an aspiring actress, who once lived with a rock singer, while his youngest son, also Ronald, is studying to be a ballet dancer.

While the older children have campaigned furiously for their father, the younger two have kept out of the campaign. The fact that young Ron is a ballet dancer appears to have embarrassed the famly. Reagan told one interviewer: “He’s all man. We made sure of that.” Reagan, who frequently stresses the importance of family life in his speeches, does his best to keep his own family life private. Since becoming governor of California, he has tried three times for the party’s presidential nomination — in 1968, 1976, and this vear. His 1976 run against the former President, Gerald. Ford, bitterly divided the party and was a factor in Ford’s defeat that year for the Presidency by Jimmv Carter. Whatever friction existed between the two men has now been healed and Ford has promised to campaign strongly for Reagan’s election. While Reagan’s rhetoric stands firmly on the right, his aides insist that he is a practical politician.