I picked up this book about Ronald Reagan because I greatly enjoyed Marc Eliot's biography of Cary Grant. This one, though, isn't nearly as good. The problem is that the subject himself is not nearly as interesting as Grant. Yes, Reagan is, overall, more important and fascinating than someone like Cary Grant. However, Eliot focuses only on Reagan's movie and television career, and the book ends in 1964 just as Reagan decides that he wants to run for Governor of California. It is as if Eliot went to his publishers and said, "Hey, I'd like to write a book about the most boring part of an interesting person's life." At times, the book feels like an endless list of awful B-movies starring Reagan and nobody else I've heard of. The best that can be said is that Reagan at least pals around with some famous people. Granted, there are important sections on Reagan's presidency of the Screen Actor's Guild, which clearly had an impact on his later career, although to be honest some of the labor history was a little over my head.
Admittedly, the book's not all boring. On the lascivious side, Ronnie does seem to sleep with a lot of actresses. At one point after his divorce to Jane Wyman, Reagan was sleeping with a different actress every night. Meanwhile, the main reason he married Nancy is that he had gotten her pregnant. Now, this is the type of material we need more of in Presidential biographies!
I also had one other problem with the book. I started to doubt its accuracy, which can be a problem when you're reading a biography. This is mainly because of Eliot's section on "Casablanca." Eliot writes, "Bogart was cast in the role that [Jack] Warner had originally designated for Reagan, whom the government insisted could not make for-profit movies while in the military."
This is a theory that seems to be discredited in several places, such as here. I don't know enough to say that Eliot is necessarily wrong, but it seems suspect that he states something so commonly thought to be a myth without a more thorough discussion.
One final note: The lack of updates here is mostly because I have, for some unknown reason, decided to read five books at once (six, if you count Dickens). I'm not sure if I would recommend this, but it is interesting to switch randomly between several books. I imagine I'll be finishing all five at once and will eventually have a flurry of entries here.
