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  Then, in the late 1940s, the hero meets his great obstacle: the collapse of his film career and the end of his first marriage. He struggles and suffers, emotionally and physically. But he perseveres, and in time he manages to reinvent himself. He finds a new wife and a new kind of celebrity as a television star and host on GE Theater. He grows in seriousness and stature, taking an interest in issues of substance, specifically the threat posed to the American way of life by the spread of Soviet Communism. He becomes a respected conservative speaker on politics and international affairs. By the mid-1960s, he has grown convinced that his country has reached a perilous position and that its very existence is threatened. With some reluctance, he yields to the entreaties of others and begins a career in public service that will inevitably lead to the White House, his destiny all along.

  Much of this narrative is true. And yet when we ask the famous question of the storybook Reagan—Where were you the day Kennedy was shot?—we find a man caught someplace he is not supposed to be. He’s not a retired movie star. He’s a working actor, toiling in less than ideal conditions on a movie set. He’s not the wholesome good guy. He’s playing a distinctly unwholesome character in a distinctly unwholesome film. He’s not a decade beyond the great career crisis of his life. His career is on the rocks once more. He is not obviously destined for greatness. He is fifty-two years old, looking toward his future anxiously, unsure if there is any more greatness to come. Indeed, after a couple days of shooting Johnny North, he has caught a glimpse of a different kind of future, one devoid of greatness, one in which he was on camera but mostly unseen.

  For Reagan, that particular vision of the future would have been unpleasant in the extreme. For the real story of Reagan’s life is not the story of a natural and inevitable hero, a man unquestionably destined for greatness. It is the story of a man who makes himself a hero while fulfilling a consuming need to be seen. Like Johnson, he longed to feel the eyes of the world on him as he played a heroic part in a grand performance. And throughout his life, he worked as hard as he could to make sure that part was his.

  Like Johnson’s, Reagan’s drive to be seen was born in childhood. Not long before he shot his scenes in Johnny North, Reagan began work on a midlife memoir, eventually published in 1965. In it, he imagined the scene of his birth:

  The story begins with a closeup of a bottom in a small town called Tampico in Illinois, on February 6, 1911. My face was blue from screaming, my bottom was red from whacking, and my father claimed afterward that he was white when he said shakily, “For such a little bit of a fat Dutchman, he makes a hell of a lot of noise, doesn’t he?”

  “I think he’s perfectly wonderful,” said my mother weakly. “Ronald Wilson Reagan.”

  To the family, the “fat Dutchman” image would stick—Reagan would always be known as Dutch. He grew up in Tampico and a succession of other small Midwestern towns, far from any spotlight. His father, a first-generation Irish American named Jack Reagan, worked as a shoe salesman. Handsome, friendly, and charismatic, Jack dreamed of making it big but had a penchant for heavy drinking that kept his dreams out of reach. His wife, Nelle, a devout Christian, took care of her husband, but her own ambitions for greatness were for her two sons: her eldest, Neil, and her favorite, Dutch.

  When the boys were children, Neil was always the one in the limelight—the more popular brother, the better athlete, the bigger flirt. Dutch kept to himself, reading books and arranging toy figurines in elaborate fantasy scenes. But the quiet Reagan dreamed of greatness in his games. “His heroes,” writes Lou Cannon, Reagan’s esteemed biographer, “were always heroes: generals and presidents and captains of industry who had arisen from the ranks.”

  He hoped that someday the hero might be him. In his teenage years, he began to look the part. By then the Reagans had settled in Dixon, Illinois, the small community he would always consider his hometown. Tall, lanky, and muscular, with honey-brown hair and misty blue Irish eyes, he was a vision of youthful beauty. He knew it, and he made sure everyone else did, too. He passed some of the happiest years of his life working as a lifeguard at a popular local beach, basking in the warmth of admiring gazes. It was hard work—twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week, every day of the summer—but Reagan loved it, returning to his post each year for seven summers.

  Later, his admirers in the conservative movement would identify the seed of Reagan’s greatness in that bronzed lifeguard on the banks of the Rock River: Reagan the rescuer, coming to save the drowning swimmers as he would later come to save a nation fighting for its life. Reagan himself was less grandiose when recalling those summers. “You know why I had such fun at it?” he said. “Because I was the only one up there on the guard stand. It was like a stage. Everyone had to look at me.”

  Soon he went in search of other stages. At Illinois’s Eureka College, where he enrolled in 1928, he quickly grasped the campus pecking order and joined the football squad. Initially, his eyesight and slight frame kept him on the bench, but he worked hard and eventually gained a respectable reputation as a solid player, if not a standout. Recognition came easier in the college drama club, where he immediately distinguished himself as a star. “All of this commenced to create in me a personality schizo-split between sports and the stage,” he later wrote. “The fact was, I suppose, that I just liked showing off.”

  It was in college that he discovered the amazing effect this “showing off” could have on people. In his freshman year he spoke at a campus meeting to ask for a vote of protest against administrative cuts to academic programs. In his 1965 memoir, he recalled his performance. “I discovered that night,” Reagan wrote, “that an audience has a feel to it and, in the parlance of the theater, that audience and I were together. When I came to actually presenting the motion there was no need for parliamentary procedure: they came to their feet with a roar.… It was heady wine.”

  And having tasted it, he craved more. Upon his graduation from Eureka in the spring of 1932—a time when people were lucky to find a job anywhere—he determined that he had to make his living in show business, Depression or no. Through persistence, he wangled himself a job as an announcer on Iowa radio. There, he first tasted the pleasures of celebrity. (“You were always aware when he came into a room that someone was in the room,” recalled the program director for a Des Moines station.) Then, in the winter of 1937, he went to Hollywood. Calling on an acquaintance from his radio career, he secured, in quick succession, a screen test, an agent, and a contract with the studio Warner Bros. He proved a workhorse, appearing in eight films in the year 1938 and another eight in 1939. In 1940, after his memorable appearance as the doomed George Gipp—“the Gipper”—in Knute Rockne All American, he was close to the destiny he’d always imagined for himself: life as a genuine national star.

  By then, Warner Bros. was lending its considerable resources to the cause. As part of an effort to erase Hollywood’s Depression-era image as a sin-filled sewer, Warner’s publicity promoted the clean-cut midwesterner with his apple-pie good looks as part of a new breed of all-American heroes in the film colony. Reagan happily played along. “I like to swim, hike and sleep,” Reagan wrote in Photoplay magazine in 1942. “I’m fairly good at every sport except tennis, which I just don’t like. My favorite menu is steak smothered with onions and strawberry shortcake. Mr. Norm is my alias.” The homespun heartthrob in the movie magazines neatly matched Reagan’s image of himself. He preferred, always, to play the good guy—just like everyone else, only better. In the early days of his political career, reporters would say he’d often played “the guy who didn’t get the girl,” a description that left him resentful. In an interview with Cannon in the 1960s, he was adamant: “I always got the girl.”

  He was particularly proud to “get” the up-and-coming actress Jane Wyman, who agreed to be his real-life wife in 1940, in a marriage made for public consumption. The Warner Bros. publicity department encouraged the match. So did the gossip columnist Louella Parsons, who threw a wedding recepti
on for the couple at her home. In the press, the pair of nice-looking celebrities with a baby daughter named Maureen was a shining example of the wholesome new Hollywood. “The Reagans’ home life is probably just like yours, or yours, or yours,” said Reagan in a Warner Bros. release. “We do the same foolish things that other couples do, have the same scraps, about as much fun, typical problems and the most wonderful baby in the world.”

  It read like press agent nonsense, but Reagan, Cannon writes, “appears to have accepted the studio propaganda as literally true.” Such was the pattern of his life. In high school and college, the girls he dated were widely admired beauties. Morris notes that when they were with him, some of these women sensed a feeling of pleasure in Reagan, the pleasure of being seen in a handsome couple, the attractive lovers, the handsome man and his gorgeous girl. With Wyman, he would be half of a beautiful, glamorous couple, and he was happy in part because the whole world could see how beautiful and glamorous they were.

  His career was looking more and more wonderful, too. In 1942, Reagan earned genuine critical acclaim for King’s Row—a serious drama, he would remind people years later, and one in which he believed he’d done his finest work. His industrious agent, Lew Wasserman, successfully negotiated with Warner Bros. to secure a new seven-year contract for Reagan, worth an impressive one million dollars.

  Then war came, and his luck ran out. Reagan was a reserve cavalry officer in the U.S. Army, and after Pearl Harbor and the nation’s entrance into World War II, he was placed on active duty. His poor vision prevented him from serving overseas. Instead, he was assigned to the Army Air Force’s First Motion Picture Unit, producing military training films. The assignment meant that, unlike other actors of his generation, he would spend the war largely out of the public eye. Thanks to Wasserman, he still had a big studio contract, but after the war ended, Reagan saw the harsh new truth. Public tastes had changed. The emerging postwar movie idols conveyed a new kind of sensitive, complicated masculinity and rugged, rebellious appeal that were utterly foreign to “Mr. Norm.”

  Not yet forty, Reagan was a has-been. The descent left him despondent. He was still very much on the scene, fulfilling the obligations of his contract by appearing in increasingly lower-budget movies, and serving as president of the Screen Actors Guild. But he’d made the grim transition from burgeoning Hollywood star to familiar Hollywood presence. Attending a Guild meeting one night, he passed a crowd of photographers. “Well, at last,” said a caustic onlooker, “Ronald Reagan is having his picture taken.”

  A series of personal calamities ensued. A newborn baby daughter died in infancy in 1947. Reagan himself became severely ill with viral pneumonia. He came close to death and would have succumbed, he later wrote, but for a kindly nurse watching over him, “coaxing me to take a breath.”

  And on top of it all, his treasured marriage was no longer camera-ready. Tensions in the Wyman-Reagan union had become all too easy to see. The problem: the female half of the Hollywood dream couple found her dashing leading man to be a terrific bore. “Don’t ask Ronnie what time it is,” Wyman was said to have warned the actress June Allyson, “because he will tell you how a watch is made.” By 1947, she had given up on the marriage, and the next year, she filed for divorce. In her petition to the court, she complained that her husband talked about politics incessantly. Industry gossip had her complaining about Reagan’s self-absorption—“I couldn’t stand to watch that damn ‘King’s Row’ one more time …”

  The breakup was public and protracted, and Reagan was the obviously humiliated party. At first, Reagan refused to accept that his idyllic union could come to an end. That didn’t stop Jane, whose career was faring far better than her husband’s, from getting on with her life. Attending the 1948 Academy Awards, Reagan witnessed Wyman, still legally his wife, arrive on the arm of another actor, Lew Ayres. Ayres and Wyman had starred together in the film Johnny Belinda, where—according to the Hollywood rumor mill—they had grown particularly close. “Lew is the love of my life!” Mrs. Ronald Reagan declared at a Hollywood gathering around that time. Humiliated but still unwilling to give up, Reagan turned for solace to the place where his romance had first blossomed: the gossip pages. There he proceeded to further humiliate himself. “The trouble is she hasn’t learned to separate her work from her personal life,” he told Louella Parsons. “Right now Jane needs very much to have a fling and I intend to let her have it.” He was sure that in time, he and Wyman would reconcile and “end our lives together.” But his best hopes came to naught. In 1949 the Reagan-Wyman union was officially dissolved. Out of love, and out of the public eye, Reagan was at his lowest, alone.

  And then he found someone who saw him as even more heroic than even he had dreamed he could be. As it happened, Nancy Davis, the pretty actress Reagan took as his second wife on March 4, 1952, had enormous eyes that seemed always to be fixed on her handsome husband. Years later, the press would write derisively about Nancy’s hypnotized affect as she watched her husband on political stages. The critique was unfair: the frozen public stare masked one of modern politics’ savviest thinkers. Still, it is true that when Nancy Reagan looked at her husband she saw, always, the greatest hero she could imagine. In their marriage, “Ronald Reagan always received top billing,” said Michael Deaver, the long-serving Reagan aide who observed Ronnie and Nancy’s marriage at close range. “Nancy wouldn’t have it any other way.” Nancy agreed. “My life,” she wrote in her memoir, “didn’t really begin until I met Ronnie.”

  Chastened by the sensational coverage of his divorce, Reagan was at pains to keep his new marriage out of the papers. His wedding to Nancy had only two witnesses—the actor Bill Holden and his wife, Ardis. Still, within their cocoon, the Reagans were happiest being stars together. For a wedding gift, they asked Nancy’s parents for a camera they could use to make home movies of each other. Ronnie especially treasured a birthday gift from Nancy: framed still photos from all of his movie roles.

  Nancy was determined to give Ronnie in his second marriage all the things that he had lacked in his first. “Jane had said publicly that she was bored by all of his talking,” Nancy wrote. “But I loved to listen to him talk, and I let him know it.” Edmund Morris, Reagan’s perceptive biographer, asked him to recall his mindset in the painful early days after the end of his first marriage. Reagan responded with a line he used in other places over the years: “I think the thing that I missed most was not, uh, somebody loving me. I missed not having someone to love.” Writing down Reagan’s words, Morris followed them “with a spiral curlicue useful to biographers, meaning, He feels the opposite of what he says.”

  Yet he did love Nancy, and he was devoted to her, in his own particular way. Ronnie and Nancy, as it happened, were exceptionally well matched. Like her husband, Nancy was the product of a troubled, transient early childhood, leaving her to long for storybook pictures of domestic bliss. Nancy’s ideal marriage was one that looked idyllic almost all the time. At the house they would eventually move into in Pacific Palisades, California, Reagan drew a heart in the drying concrete. Inside was the inscription “ND and RR.”

  That house would be comfortably appointed by General Electric, the other great force of salvation in Ronald Reagan’s life. By the early 1950s, Reagan’s big-money Warner Bros. contracts were gone. Income was low, and commitments—two children from his first marriage, a new baby with Nancy, the mortgage in Pacific Palisades and a sprawling California ranch called Yearling Row—were high. He needed cash. He was reluctant to entertain offers from television—TV actors were considered the poor relations of the era’s big Hollywood stars. But after a dispiriting run as a Las Vegas nightclub act, he grudgingly agreed to serve as the host for a new half-hour television program, General Electric Theater, a teleplay he would introduce each week and in which he would occasionally appear as a player.

  Then something wonderful happened: General Electric Theater was an immediate standout hit. Onscreen in front of millions each week, he was a cel
ebrity again—and he knew it. His reservations about television vanished. “I am seen by more people in one week,” he said proudly, “than I am in a full year in movie theaters.” These were the early days of TV, when an advertiser’s evening offerings held a place of honor in the American family’s routines. Many children of the baby boom, a generation with whom Reagan would have a long and complicated relationship, would first encounter him on their living room sets, a smiling man with a warm voice, introducing that evening’s program. He became as big a celebrity as he’d ever dreamed he could be. By 1958, a survey would determine he was one of the most recognizable names in America.

  And he had ample opportunity to be recognized. In addition to his television appearances, Reagan’s GE contract required him to serve as a corporate ambassador, traveling the country speaking to the company’s workers. The routine was punishing—in his first year, 1954, he traveled to some 185 facilities, meeting a hundred thousand GE employees. Sometimes he would give as many as fourteen speeches a day. To him, the people in the audience were strangers. But they all knew who he was. It is impressive to see your face on a screen or your name in lights. But to travel through a series of strange cities filled with strangers who recognize you—that is fame.

  Fame feels different the second time around. The young man who first encounters it assumes it will be a permanent condition. The middle-aged man who has lost it once before knows that at any moment it might disappear.

  And by 1963, when Reagan went to work on the set of Johnny North, fame had disappeared. A year earlier, General Electric had pulled the plug on Reagan’s television show. Reagan always suspected that he was being punished for his politics. GE liked his free market talk well enough, he figured, but company executives worried about alienating the Kennedy administration, on which they depended for large contracts. The reality was probably more prosaic: the show was getting beaten in the ratings by Bonanza. Either way, the practical effect was the same: by 1962, Ronald Reagan was out of the public eye once more.