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It was good money in those days—and he had to work for it; he once made eight movies in eleven months. During the war, Army Captain Reagan spent most of his time in Hollywood narrating service films but took one commercial role in Irving Berlin's This Is the Army. Even then, there were little cracks appearing in his liberalism, for—as he says today—he saw that in a big-government operation like the Army "there was an appalling amount of waste and a stupefying amount of bureaucracy."
Leading the Way. Reagan's greatest jolt came shortly after the war when he was elected to the first of his six terms as president of the Screen Actors Guild and discovered—"belatedly, because I just didn't want to believe it" —that the union had been thoroughly infiltrated by Communists. George Murphy played an important role in Reagan's life at that stage. He had preceded Reagan as guild president and had spotted what Reagan later called "strange creatures crawling from under the make-believe rocks in our make-believe town." Murphy tried to warn him about the Communist encroachment but could not penetrate what Reagan now regards as his "early white-eyed liberal daze." Reagan became furious at Murphy, labeled him "an archreactionary." But Murphy persisted and, alter Reagan recognized what was happening, the pair patched up their differences. Now Murphy, haying led the way from show biz to public office, is an eager backer of Reagan's cause.
Reagan recalls with pride his years as a labor-union president. As a result of that experience, he has taken a strong pro-labor position on right-to-work laws. Even so, present-day labor leaders, who cannot believe that he stands as a liberal, have been almost unanimously hostile to his candidacy.
Breakfast Reading. In the late '40s, Reagan was plagued with problems beyond his political and professional environment. His wife of eight years, Actress Jane Wyman, whom he had met while filming Brother Rat, decided to divorce him in 1948. Neither she nor Ronnie has ever discussed their breakup in public, but a close mutual friend recalls that Reagan had long been in the habit of delivering animated readings from the newspaper over breakfast and then insisting on an analytical discussion of current events. Jane, the story goes, finally revolted against eggs-and-cerebration and fled with their two children, Maureen, now 24, and Michael, 21.
In 1952, Reagan married Actress Nancy Davis, now 43, the daughter of Chicago Neurosurgeon Loyal Davis. Reagan first met her when she complained to the Screen Actors Guild that she was receiving unwanted Communist literature in the mail. They have two children, Patricia, 13, and Ronald Prescott, 8. The Reagans have a 305-acre ranch at Lake Malibu, where they raise Thoroughbreds, and a house in Pacific Palisades, with a pool, a view of Los Angeles, and a monumental assemblage of electric gadgets and appliances—a reward for Reagan's duties on "the mashed-potato circuit" as a lecturer for General Electric.