"I'm a plain guy with a set of homespun features and no frills. I like to swim, hike, and sleep eight hours a night. My favorite menu is steak smothered with onions, and strawberry shortcake. Mr. Norm is my alias."
—Ronald Reagan, movie star, in an interview with Photoplay magazine

It was 1942. The world was at war, the nation a nervous wreck as fathers and sons went off to fight. Those waiting at home would sometimes try to forget, if only for a few hours, by escaping to the movies, where all the players were heroes and all the endings fairy-tale perfect.

It was against this backdrop that Ronald Reagan reached the height of his film career. He would do his part for the war effort, serving in the Army for nearly three years. Bad eyesight kept him stateside, where he mainly made morale-boosting training films. But it was his uplifting Hollywood flicks, in which he repeatedly portrayed ordinary men doing extraordinary things, that perhaps helped the most by raising the war-weary country's morale. "Average will do it," the man who would be president told Photoplay, insisting that he was just a regular guy who owed his success to his ability to connect with ordinary Americans. It was a theme that would run through his political and movie careers. So closely was Reagan identified with his on-screen characters, that he would be dogged for much of his political life by questions of where Reagan the actor ended and Reagan the person began; whether the president of the United States could distinguish between reality and the celluloid world created by Hollywood.

Years later, Reagan would write in his autobiography that Hollywood gave him a "light rosy glow." It also gave him money, fame, two Hollywood wives, and an apprenticeship in politics, as a member and then president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1947 to 1952 and, again, in 1959. Labor struggles and the Communist scare divided the film community in the 1930s and '40s, and as the Cold War moved in, Reagan, a Roosevelt liberal when he arrived in Hollywood, became increasingly anti-Communist, calmly testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He never publicly named names, but documents would later reveal that he secretly worked as an informant for J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, passing along names of suspected Communist colleagues. "The Hollywood years were the turning point in Reagan's political life," says Stephen Vaughn, professor of communication history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and author of Ronald Reagan in Hollywood.

But first there were the movies. Reagan finagled his way to Hollywood in 1937, by convincing the brass at radio station WHO in Des Moines, where he worked as a sportscaster, that he should accompany the Chicago Cubs to Southern California for spring training. He quickly made his way to Los Angeles. He couldn't have picked a better time. Americans, trying to leave the Depression behind, were flocking to the movies. And they wanted their stories wholesome and happy. Hollywood, on the verge of becoming a very profitable industry, was glad to oblige, offering up its mythic best: films full of God, family, and love of country. At 26, Reagan was tall, dark, handsome, and apple-pie wholesome. Just the kind of guy Warner Bros. was looking for to compete with Jimmy Stewart, who was burning up the box office for MGM. Reagan, no stranger to a microphone, so impressed the studio with his first screen test (he read for Holiday, which would later star Cary Grant) that he was quickly offered a seven-year contract with a starting salary of $200 a week.

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