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Forrest Gump times two

The weird new “authorized” biography of Ronald Reagan, entitled “Dutch,” tells the story of an actor who was continually thrust into roles he couldn’t quite master.

Contrary to what the spin doctors have told us, Reagan’s early life in Hollywood was anything but a meteoric success. Stubbornly diligent and hard-working, Reagan always knew his lines and hit his marks, but studio executives reminded him that, compared to the Bogarts and Cagneys, his persona was basically blah. His first wife, Jane Wyman, dumped him, complaining to gossip columnists that he was “dull.”

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Despite his bland, aw-shucks exterior, however, Reagan was oddly drawn to union politics, handily winning election five times as president of the Screen Actors Guild. Ultimately he was scorned by many fellow actors for being a friendly witness before black-listing Congressional committees. He also signed that infamous waiver allowing MCA to produce TV shows as well as represent talent, which greatly benefited Reagan’s powerful agent, Lew Wasserman. The waiver was later nullified by the government.

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In short, Reagan remained a confusingly fuzzy figure in Hollywood and indeed later in Washington — so much so that his biographer, Edmund Morris, felt impelled to invent an imaginary, Forrest-Gumpish character to interact with his subject. Having been handed a $ 3 million book contract plus total access to Reagan and his papers, Morris found himself with nothing to write. While the fictional character helped unblock the biographer, he remains an irritant to the reader who must continually sort out the real from the unreal.

The young Reagan trying to make it in Tinseltown emerges as earnest and opportunistic, an actor who never turned down a role nor demanded a rewrite. Bigger stars like Bogart always seemed to be on suspension but never Reagan. A quick study, Reagan learned how to spin the press, forming a bond with the feisty Louella Parsons, who also came from a small Midwestern town. He regularly hung out at the comics table at the Warner Bros. commissary, pilfering jokes and sharpening his storytelling skills.

“Reagan remained all his life an actor, a man of exits and entrances,” Morris tells us. “When he stepped onto the set, he knew exactly how to fill the space allotted to him.”

His biographer fails to explain, however, why someone so eager to “get along” nonetheless found himself in the middle of so many political dogfights. Morris even chased down a rumor that Reagan once dabbled with the idea of joining a Communist cell, but he couldn’t get that story confirmed from other than now very elderly party members.

There seemed to be no defining event that chased Reagan from the liberal to the conservative side of the political spectrum. Yet even as he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Reagan was quietly opposing the blacklist within SAG’s inner sanctum and decently chastising studio chiefs for recklessly labeling fellow actors as Reds.

Through it all, Reagan ploddingly pursued his acting career, trying not to get mired in B pictures. Though pathologically afraid of flying as a young man, he nonetheless played a succession of heroic pilots, his aircraft all the while rooted to the floor of the soundstage. Not even the role of “The Gipper,” however, lent him a distinctive screen presence (Pat O’Brien was more memorable as Knute Rockne).

It was not until the mid-1950s when he strode onto the set of TV’s “General Electric Theater” and announced “progress is our most important product” that Ronald Reagan made an indelible impression on the American consumer (and voter).

There are those who noisily insist that Ronald Reagan created our economic boom, realigned American politics and ended the Cold War. Reading about Reagan’s Hollywood period, however, one is pulled toward a less cosmic conclusion: Reagan worked fine as a TV or film actor, but when he was offscreen he seemed somehow out of focus, that 875 pages of authorized biography fail to penetrate. “Where’s the rest of me?” remains his most famous onscreen line. Indeed.

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