Free Landslide by Jonathan Darman Page A

went into production on Thursday, November 21. The next morning, Siegel went to visit his leading lady at a costume fitting. It was a happy scene. There was country music on the radio. Dickinson twirled to show her director a stunning red dress. “You’ll steal the show,” Siegel said. “I’ve ninety more dresses to show you,” the actress said before turning happily back toward her dressing room. Later, she was to shoot the film’s one truly romantic scene, inwhich she would wear a shimmering white gown and dance with Cassavetes to a slow, sad song called “Too Little Time.”
    Indeed. As she walked away, the country station, like radio stations everywhere, cut to a news bulletin.Years later, Siegel would still recall the announcer’s words—“We shockingly regret to inform you that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy has just been assassinated in Dallas, Texas …”—and then, from Dickinson, “a loud, piercing scream.” The actress crumpled in the director’s arms.
    Production on
Johnny North
came immediately to a halt. The film was on a tight production schedule, but the movie studios were shutting down, just like everything else. Wasserman made it known that there would be no more work on the film that Friday, and Monday would be a day of mourning as well.
    Ronald Reagan spent that evening at home. He had never been a supporter of John F. Kennedy. He had been a staunch anticommunist and a true believer in conservative principles since the 1950s, and in recent years he had become active in Republican politics. He traveled the country giving speeches extolling the virtue of the free market, warning against the Soviet threat, and worrying over a turn toward statist policies in America. Three years earlier, in the 1960 presidential campaign, he had made numerous appearances on behalf of Kennedy’s opponent, Richard Nixon, and he planned to do the same for the conservative Arizona senator Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential campaign.Kennedy, he’d once implied, was a Marxist with a pretty face.
    A day earlier, that sort of talk would have been unpopular but acceptable. In the wake of Kennedy’s death, it was tantamount to treason. The newscasts that Friday afternoon still had little information on Oswald, the apparent shooter, or his politics. But Dallas was a well-known hotbed of right-wing extremism. It didn’t take much imagination to see some way that leaders of the conservative movement might be culpable in Kennedy’s death.Walter Cronkite didn’t help matters when he erroneously reported that Goldwater, asked for a response to the news of Kennedy’s death, had offered nothingmore than a cold “No comment.”A mob was forming outside National Draft Goldwater Committee headquarters screaming “Murderers!”
    In Southern California, Reagan’s eleven-year-old daughter Patti watched her school’s flag being lowered to half-mast that Friday. School was canceled, the principal announced, and it was time for the children to go home. Waiting for her mother, Patti was confronted by a fellow student: “Well, your parents will probably be happy!”
    They weren’t, but there was little use in arguing the point. Any kind of political discussion was suddenly in bad taste. For the moment, politics—Reagan’s greatest passion in recent years—had become an unspeakable subject. Like everyone else in America, he spent time that weekend with his family, watching the unbelievable events on TV.
    And waiting. For Reagan, the delay in filming would mean more days off camera. He had had plenty of those in recent years. And it would mean a revised schedule for shooting, stretching past Christmas. Which meant more time until this movie was over. This movie, which was beginning to look like a mistake.
    The signs of trouble were obvious. Reagan had arrived the previous morning to shoot a scene at a location in the Toluca Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. Thanks to the oddities of a studio schedule, the first scene