Reagan: The Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

shooting than almost anywhere else in the country. By 1910, Hollywood, a community west of downtown Los Angeles that had begun life as the brainchild of real estate developers,was attracting some of the budding industry’s best talent.D. W. Griffith shot
The Birth of a Nation
there; the tendentious depiction of the Civil War and Reconstruction that appalled Jack Reagan and other advocates of racial equality riveted large audiences who paid the exorbitant price of $2 to see the three-hour film. By 1920 several motion-picture studios, Hollywood’s answer toHenry Ford’s assembly line, were together churning out hundreds of movies per year.
    In the process they were making stars. The actors in the earliest films hadn’t been credited, but audiences nonetheless came to have favorites. Some studios resisted promoting these favorites, fearing they would demand higher wages. Yet the shrewder executives recognized the potential for establishing brand names, and they signed the crowd-pleasers to long-term contracts. The star system was born.
    It was the star system that drew the attention of Nelle Reagan’s sister and the millions of Americans who dreamed that they or their children would go to Hollywood and acquire fame and wealth. Both attributes were on gaudy display in the movie capital in the 1920s.Mary Pickford, the object of Dutch Reagan’s filmic affections, earned half a million dollars a year before becoming a movie mogul herself as a founding partner—with Griffith,Charlie Chaplin, andDouglas Fairbanks—of theUnited Artists studio. Pickford and Fairbanks were romantic partners as well as business associates; their romance was a sensation, partly because it began while each was married to someone else but mostly because it seemed a match made in Hollywood heaven. Their lavish wedding provided reams of copy for the rapidly growing movie press; their Beverly Hills estate, Pickfair, was soon the most popular stop on the homes-of-the-stars tours that became a staple of Southern California tourism.
    T HE MAGIC OF Hollywood grew more essential to the American psyche when the 1920s crashed to a close with a stock market collapse in the final months of the decade. The bubble in share prices had grown unsustainable, and when it burst, it knocked the wind out of Wall Street. The woes of the financial industry became the agony of America when the country was rudely awakened to the fact that bankers had been playing the market with depositors’ money. Their losses triggered defaults by their banks, leaving depositors without cash or recourse. The federal government might have salvaged the situation by flooding the financial markets with money; in fact the dominant figure on theFederal Reserve Board,Benjamin Strong, had advocated readying just such a response as the stock bubble grew. But Strong died untimely and his successors lacked the nerve to open the spigots, and the money supply shrank by a strangling one-third. Prices plunged, merchants canceled orders, and manufacturers laid off workers in a vicious circle that continued until a quarter of the workforce lacked jobs.
    Reagan had the good luck to be in college during the first two years of the depression but the bad luck to graduate, in June 1932, when conditions were worse than ever. He recalled the Christmas Eve of his senior year; he and Neil were at home when Jack received a special-delivery letter. Jack read the letter and muttered, “Well, it’s a hell of a Christmas present.” He had lost his job. Reagan sent Nelle money during his last semester to help with the grocery bill, and he resolved anew not to wind up like Jack.
    He returned to lifeguarding for his postgraduation summer, but this bought him barely two months. Come autumn, he’d have to compete with the many other unemployed for a permanent job. He knew what he wanted to do; he just couldn’t figure out
how
to do it. His love for movies had only grown, as had his appetite for the applause that kept his