DARK VICTORY Ronald Reagan, MCA, and the...

DARK VICTORY Ronald Reagan, MCA, and the Mob by Dan E. Moldea (Penguin Books: $7.95)

The story of MCA’s transformation from one of Hollywood’s most successful talent agencies to one of its largest studios is little known. Even less well-known is the major role Ronald Reagan played in that metamorphosis as MCA client and president of the Screen Actors Guild in 1952, when his guild granted MCA a precedent-shattering “blanket waiver” allowing them to serve both as talent agent and as producer of television. (In exchange, Moldea posits, MCA breathed new life into Reagan’s flagging career and gratefully enlisted him in a series of business ventures that made him a multi-millionaire.)

Moldea also traces the control organized crime was able to assert, not only on Hollywood’s labor unions but on its powerful studio chieftains. In the end, a sordid history of power and its abuses.