When Ronald Reagan pursued the presidency, Jack Warner, his former boss, said, “No, Jimmy Stewart for President. Ronald Reagan for best friend.” This story may be apocryphal a combination of political and Hollywood lore.
Reagan, the nation’s 40th president, stands at the crossroads of politics and show business as the ultimate example of the nexus between the two. After an acting career that lasted nearly 30 years working for Warner and other studio heads, Reagan ran for Governor of California twice and won both times—1966 and 1970. During the Reagan presidency in the 1980s, the actor-turned-politico reportedly said, “How can a president not be an actor?”
Such is the quandary of Dave Kovic, an impersonator of President William Harrison Mitchell in the 1993 movie Dave; Kevin Kline plays the title character.
After a speech at the Monroe Hotel, the president engages in a tryst with his secretary in a hotel room while Dave—also played by Kevin Kline—substitutes for him in the lobby, waving to people as he exits. Mitchell’s staff procured Dave’s services after learning of a promotional appearance as the president at a car dealership. Presidential impersonation is a side business to Dave’s job—running a temporary employee agency.
When President Mitchell suffers a stroke in flagrante delicto, Chief of Staff Bob Alexander and White House Media Advisor Alan Reed persuade Dave to continue impersonating the president, who lies in intensive care several feet below the White House in a super-secure area. An appearance at Camden Yards appears in a montage of scenes showing the “new” President Mitchell rebounding from his stroke with positive energy.
Kline filmed Dave during 1992, a presidential election year that brought George Herbert Walker Bush, William Jefferson Clinton, and Henry Ross Perot into the campaign arena where they were marred by blood, sweat, and late night television comedy. “I really tried to avoid doing George Bush,” said Kline in an interview with Susan Lehman of the Washington Post. “If I had, it would have put us in the realm of impersonation or parody. And rather than do a parody of any conservative president of the last 12 years, I tried to understand the psychology of a guy whose popularity polls had hit bottom, who no longer enjoyed his job, who had bought into the whole public polling, image-creating aspect of his job and had lost touch with who he was. You know, at one time, he may have had the best intentions when he entered politics, but ultimately it got the best of him.”
There is no designation of a political party in the movie.
Before an Orioles-Tigers game on August 3, 1992, Kline filmed the scene of him throwing out the first ball. Baltimore’s birds won the game 6-3. Storm Davis restricted the Tigers to no hits during his 2 1/3 innings of hurling. Orioles first baseman Glenn Davis knocked a two-run home run in the fifth inning.
Storm and Glenn were not brothers—pretty close, though. Storm’s family adopted Glenn, for all intents and purposes—though not formally—when the boys played baseball at Jacksonville’s University Christian High School. Glenn Davis’s parents divorced just about when he was learning to walk, leaving the Davis matriarch struggling to raise three children on her own.
This difficult home situation made Storm’s family life a paradigm of structure, safety, and belonging. “Glenn started coming over to the house his sophomore year, sometimes staying for dinner,” wrote Molly Dunham and Mike Klingaman in a 1991 article for the Baltimore Sun. “He lived on the north side of Jacksonville; Storm’s family lived on the south side, about 15 miles away. Sometimes Glenn took the bus. He never really said how he got there other times.”
In his 13-year major league career (1982-1994), Storm Davis played for Baltimore, San Diego, Oakland, Kansas City, and Detroit; Davis’s career win-loss record is 113-96. Glenn Davis played for two teams—Houston and Baltimore—in his 10-year major league career (1984-1993), compiling 965 hits, 190 home runs, and a .259 batting average.
A version of this article appeared on www.thesportspost.com on April 1, 2016.