Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
May/June 1991 | Volume 42, Issue 3
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
May/June 1991 | Volume 42, Issue 3
In April of 1942 I enlisted in Psychological Research Unit 3 at the Santa Ana Army Air Base. I had written the story for a historical film called Ten Gentlemen from West Point, and when it played at the post theater I became a local celebrity and was promoted from private to sergeant and assigned to the Public Relations Office.
I was sent to an old movie studio near Hollywood on orders of Gen. Henry (“Hap”) Arnold, who had established the first Motion Picture Unit of the Army Air Corps to produce aviation training films and send combat camera units around the world. I presented my papers to the personnel officer, a handsome, friendly thirty-one-year-old lieutenant with horn-rimmed glasses and reddish brown hair, named Ronald Wilson Reagan.
In 1937 Reagan had enlisted in the U.S. Cavalry Reserve as a second lieutenant. In April 1942 he was earning a thousand dollars a week as a movie star at Warner Brothers in Burbank when he was called to active duty at Fort Mason, San Francisco. Reagan expected to be shipped overseas, but when an eye examination showed him to be myopic, he was restricted to limited service in the continental United States.
After I saluted, he stared at me quizzically. “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before, Sergeant?”
“Could be, Lieutenant,” I replied. “I worked as a writer for seven months at Warner Brothers in 1939. We didn’t meet because the only actors who ate at the writers’ table in the greenroom were Errol Flynn and Humphrey Bogart.” What I couldn’t tell him was that the snobbish big-city writers, led by John Huston, regarded him as a small-town boy.
Reagan sent me to Capt. Robert Carson, head of production and a well-known novelist who had co-written the classic A Star Is Born. Carson studied my papers and sergeant’s stripes. “So you’ve been in the Army for six months, like Ronnie Reagan?” I nodded. “And you completed your basic training and all that military crap?” I nodded again. “Well,” he said, “we’re lucky to get guys like you and Ronnie because the rest of us are really civilians pretending to be soldiers. We’re fresh from studio lots, and the younger boys are right out of the mailroom at Warner Brothers.
“Writing assignments will be coming up soon. But in the meantime, there’ll be odd jobs to keep you out of trouble.”
One of these “odd jobs” was acting in a film. I had done radio and stage acting but I’d never been on the screen, so it was with great anticipation that I reported to a hospital set. I was to play a pilot