Word: warner
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...which is a long way from Hollywood, but he persuaded radio station WHO to send him to California to cover the spring training of the Chicago Cubs. A Des Moines friend who was working as a singer sent him to see her agent, who called the casting director at Warner Bros. and said, "I have another Robert Taylor sitting in my office." Warner gave him a screen test, then signed him for $200 a week...
...year, were forgettable. But there was one part that he yearned to play. He wanted somebody to film the life of Notre Dame's great football coach Knute Rockne so that he could play Rockne's star halfback, George Gipp. Reagan proselytized so fervently that someone filched the idea. Warner announced it would make the Rockne story, but the announcement made no mention of Reagan. He went to see the producer, asked for the part of Gipp and was told he was too small...
...same year he played Gipp, he married actress Jane Wyman. Warner assigned him to Kings Row. Playing a small-town lothario named Drake McHugh, he seduces the daughter of the town surgeon, who takes revenge by amputating both of the youth's legs. The horrible moment of self-discovery made a deep impression on Reagan. The day the scene was shot he clambered onto the sickbed, which had a hole cut in the mattress to hide his legs. "I spent almost that whole hour in stiff confinement," Reagan said. "Gradually the affair began to terrify me. In some weird...
...June 1, 1937, the 26-year-old radio spieler strode into a $200-a-week contract at Warner Bros. His visible attributes: a golden smile; a long, lanky frame; a thick mane of dark hair, slicked back. But Reagan's most supple instrument was his voice. His Chicago Cubs play-by-play gig honed his ability to deliver dialogue with speed, assurance and conversational authority. Warner was a studio of fast-talking actors, but most of the men either sounded straight off the sidewalks of New York City (Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Pat O'Brien) or had acquired a well...
...first Warner years, Reagan shuttled between supporting roles in A-level films and starring parts in B's. Brother Rat, set in the Virginia Military Institute, handed him the thankless role of the one sensible cadet in a bunch of college cutups. He was a radio announcer, again, in Boy Meets Girl--a good bit part, letting him display a frantic aplomb at a movie premiere as chaos erupts and he tries both to describe it and to rein...