All that Dutch asks of a first-time reader is that he or she be willing to accept, in its early pages, the presence of a fictional narrator.
The understatement here belies the controversy and outrage that what is being asked of the reader stimulated upon the initial publication of the book. Despite the title, this is in no way your typical memoir. In the first place, it is not an autobiography; it is structured as the memoir of someone who has known Reagan all his adult life. Secondly, it is the memoir of an entirely fictional construct. The book is written from a first-person point of view as if from an actual witness to the events describe, but this is not the case. Controversial and experimental to be sure, but something significant is gained with the conceit. The narrator expresses a worldview and political ideology entirely consistent with the subject of the biography and so although it is not an autobiographical memoir, it often comes across quite believably as if it were just that.
Dutch’s “cocker spaniels,” as he strangely dubbed them, tend to remember two things about him. One was his wounded quality, which at times verged on the masochistic: he would even visit the sets of Jane’s pictures to watch her act, while she studiously avoided his gaze. The other thing was his torrential talkativeness. He seemed unable to understand that this, more than anything, had brought about his divorce.
The spaniel reference is, of course, to the women that Reagan dated during his Hollywood days between marriages. The centerpiece of this quote, however, is not about Dutch the womanizer, but the strange sort of womanizer Dutch became during this period of his life. The era in question being that period in which Reagan’s transformation from New Deal Democrat to anti-communist Republican was taking place. That transformative interlude also marks the beginning of Reagan’s evolution from Hollywood also-ran to political player.
“It was forty years ago, Phil. Forty years exactly that he stood up at that second mass meeting and decided he’d had it with stardom, it was politics from now on.”
The date of this (fictional) conversation is December 19, forty years after Ronald Reagan gave a speech before the Screen Actors Guild that forever changed history. For much of his life as a Hollywood actor, Reagan was a liberal democrat. A change began to slowly take place which ramped up to mach speed once the Hollywood blacklist and the communist witch hunt came to a boil. Reagan was instrumental in turning up the heat beneath the pot: on April 10, 1947 FBI agents visited his home where he and then-wife Jane Wyman proceeded to hand over the names of at least six members of the Screen Actors Guild whom they suspected to be or had direct knowledge of being a member of the Communist party. He did so under anonymous cover of his FBI code name, T-10. The beginning of Ronald Reagan’s political career is here being attributed to the dominating performance he gave during a speech two years after that visit in which he shredded any lingering doubts among old comrades that he was a liberal democrat or anything remotely like it anymore.
Dissolve to the ambulance taking REAGAN home from the hospital. He is seventeen pounds lighter and hardly able to lift an arm without gasping. But he cannot get enough of the world streaming past his window—even the most ordinary things seem transfigured to new, strange beauty.
The fictional narrator of an autobiographical memoir of another person is not the only element of the book that diverges from the conventions of the genre. One stretch of the narrative is presented in screenplay form. It is a screenplay for a documentary that covers an essential short block of time in the life of Reagan that commences with the fever went from keeping him from showing up on the set of That Hagen Girl to being near-death. The excerpt quoted above describes the condition in which Reagan was in when at the same time as he was recovering, Wyman gave birth to a child that died the next day.
