Looking at this dish, I wouldn’t want to check out either.
The UK Daily Mail reports that America begins a year of nationwide celebrations in January to commemorate the centenary of the birth of Ronald Reagan, for eight years the 40th President of the United States, and for another eight years before that, 33rd Governor of California.
When Reagan won the presidential election in 1980, he was dismissed by the cynics of Capitol Hill as a political lightweight and as an indifferent actor in a series of undistinguished B-movies, in one of which, Bedtime For Bonzo, he memorably co-starred with a chimpanzee.
But Reagan’s critics underestimated him both as an actor and politician. Nothing showed this more clearly than the ease with which he trounced incumbent President Jimmy Carter in televised debates, before winning a landslide victory by a huge majority of 489 electoral votes to Carter’s 49.
Last year, Reagan’s widow, Nancy, stood at President Barack Obama’s shoulder in the White House to hear him praise her husband as a man who helped ‘to restore a sense of optimism in our country, a spirit that transcended politics’.
Since his death, Reagan has come to be regarded as one of the greatest of all American presidents.
Millions of words have been devoted to his life and legacy. But a new book, by British film historian Michael Hodgson, makes startling and dramatic new claims about him.
If they are to be believed, Nancy might never have become Reagan’s wife, and Reagan might not have survived to enter the White House.
In his biography of Patricia Roc, one of the British cinema’s top box-office stars of the 1940s and 1950s, Hodgson alleges that in 1945, with his first marriage to screen star Jane Wyman in ruins, Reagan suffered a severe nervous breakdown.
This startling fact has never been revealed before, but Hodgson had access to Miss Roc’s private papers and they detail her scandalous affairs with married men — which earned her the name ‘Bed Roc’ within the film industry,
According to Hodgson, it was only Roc’s willingness to have a passionate affair with Reagan that prevented him from taking his own life — something he was threatening, such was the depth of his depression following the collapse of his marriage.
Their relationship, which began in Hollywood, where Roc was starring in a movie, continued in London while Reagan was filming at a British studio.
And Hodgson maintains that if Roc had accepted the newly-divorced Reagan’s subsequent proposal of marriage in 1948, there would have been, in the fullness of time, an English First Lady in the White House.
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