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convenient symbol. The sixties were a lot bigger than just another fading TV star.
    Yeah, that’s right. His glory days were over. He was on his way out. You’re surprised to hear that, aren’t you?
    Look. I’ll tell you something. Kennedy was not a good actor. In fact, he was goddamn lousy. He couldn’t act his way out of a pay toilet if he’d had Charlton Heston in there to help him.
    But—it didn’t matter, did it? Hell, acting ability is the last thing in the
world a movie star needs. It never slowed down whatsisname, Ronald Reagan.
    Reagan? Oh, you wouldn’t remember him. He was way before your time. He was sort of like a right-wing Henry Fonda, only he never got the kind of parts where he could inspire an audience. That’s what you need to make it—one good part where you make the audience squirm or cry or leap from their seats, shouting. Anything to make them remember you longer than the time it takes to get out to the parking lot. But Reagan never really got any of those. He was just another poor schmuck eaten up by the system. A very sad story, really.
    Yeah, I know. You want to hear about Kennedy. Uh-uh. Lemme tell you about Reagan first. So you’ll see how easy it is to just disappear—and how much of a fluke it is to succeed.
    See, Reagan wasn’t stupid. He was one of the few wartime actors who actually made a successful transition into television. He was smart enough to be a host instead of a star—that way he didn’t get himself typecast as a cowboy or a detective or a doctor. Reagan was a pretty good pitchman for General Electric on their Sunday night show and then—wait a minute, lemme see now, sometime in there he got himself elected president of the Screen Actors Guild, and that’s when all the trouble started—there was some uproar with the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities, and the blacklist and the way he sold out his colleagues. I don’t really know the details, you can look it up. Anyway, tempers were hot, that’s all you need to know, and Reagan got himself impeached, almost thrown out of his own Guild as a result.
    Well, nobody wanted to work with him after that. His name was mud. He couldn’t get arrested. And it was just tragic—’cause he was good, no question about it. Those pictures he did with the monkey were hysterical—oh, yeah, he did a whole series of movies at the end of the war. Bonzo Goes To College, Bonzo Goes To Hollywood, Bonzo Goes To Washington. Yeah, everybody remembers the chimpanzee, nobody remembers Reagan. Yeah, people in this town only have long memories when there’s a grudge attached.
    So, Reagan couldn’t get work. I mean, not real work. He ended up making B-movies. A lot of crap. Stuff even Harry Cohn wouldn’t touch. He must have really needed the money. The fifties were all downhill for him.
    I remember, he did—oh, what was it?— Queen of Outer Space with
that Hungarian broad. That was a real waste of film. Then he did some stuff with Ed Wood, remember him? Yeah, that’s the one. Anyway, Ronnie’s last picture was some piece of dreck called Plan Nine From Outer Space. Lugosi was supposed to do the part, but he died just before they started filming, so Reagan stepped in. I hear it’s real big on the college circuits now. What they call camp, where it’s so bad, it’s funny. Have you seen it? No, neither have I. Too bad, really. No telling what Reagan could have become if he’d just had the right breaks.
    Oh, right—you want to talk about Kennedy. But you get my point, don’t you? This is a sorry excuse for an industry. There’s no sympatico, no consideration. Talent is considered a commodity. It gets wasted. People get chewed up just because they’re in someone else’s way. That’s the real story behind Kennedy—the people who got chewed up along the way.
    Anyway, what was I saying about Kennedy before I got off the track? You wanna run that thing back? Oh, that’s right. Kennedy had no talent. Yeah, you can quote