Early Reagan

by Anne Edwards

  Sarah Jane was not the only teenager trying to crash Hollywood as a chorus girl. Betty Grable was fourteen when she gave her first high kick before a camera. But Sarah Jane’s cherubic face and her snub nose made her look even younger (she was claiming to be twenty). Following Grable’s lead (who was also coached by Leroy Prinz), she plucked her eyebrows into a pencil-slim arch and bleached her natural brown hair to a Harlowesque platinum. For the next few years she breezed in and out of films—The Kid from Spain, Elmer the Great, College Rhythm, All the King’s Horses, Stolen Harmony and Rhumba—in bits or as a chorus girl. In 1935, she signed with the Small and Landau Agency, who secured her small parts in King of Burlesque, Anything Goes (she had a crush on the star, Bing Crosby) and My Man Godfrey. The Depression was in full swing and the Fulks-Weymann family barely hung together (“All we had was a roof over our head”). Sarah Jane’s meager paychecks were badly needed as Morie’s practice dwindled alarmingly.

  To her great relief, Warners signed her to a contract on May 6, 1936, at sixty-five dollars a week, after insisting she change her name. Seated in the front office with her agent (William Demarest from Small and Landau, a silent-screen actor who later became well known as a character actor), she had to make a quick decision. Since she had never liked her first name, dropping the Sarah was not difficult. She would call herself Jane—but Jane what? She said “Weymann,” it apparently being the first name that came to mind. “Jane Wyman,” the studio executive decreed.

  For two years Warners cast her in B-picture comedy roles as a brassy, empty-headed blonde. The image was one that carried over into her private life. “She was a fly-away girl, very blonde, liking only the frivolous things,” one old friend commented. But another added, “I always thought there was something sad about Janie—like the guy who tries desperately to be the life of the party because he’s really insecure. In reality she was never the party girl she appeared. She just wanted to be liked, to be part of the ‘in’ group.” There were many “in” groups in Hollywood—the “kids” (the young potential stars), the big studio “brass,” the “head-hunters” (intellectuals), and the “Broadway Joes” (the theater folk who came but protested they would never stay). Jane was terribly ambitious, constantly working to improve her talent. A number of the girls who had danced in films with her were now on their way to stardom—Paulette Goddard, who had become involved with Charlie Chaplin, for one.

  Jane’s name appeared in movie magazines and gossip columns as having been seen at the Trocadero or the Cocoanut Grove in the company of one or another available man-about-town. Judging by the list of escorts, it seems her inclination was toward older men. In 1936, she met Myron Futterman, thirty-five years old and divorced (newspaper accounts of their courtship erroneously age him considerably). Futterman owned a successful dress company in Los Angeles, although he still maintained ties to his hometown of New Orleans. He had the soft, graceful charm of a Southern gentleman. The father of a teenage girl only six years younger than Jane, he had a paternalistic attitude toward his young girlfriend. They were married in New Orleans on June 29, 1937. Futterman had met her in a period of his life when he was chasing his youth. Once he was married, his needs changed. He expected her to settle down, to do away with her brassy blonde look, to let her career go and become his wife and a hostess to his business associates, whereas she had thought he would help her to succeed. Three months after the wedding, the couple separated.

  On November 10, 1938, seventeen months after their marriage, Jane filed suit for divorce on grounds of mental cruelty, claiming Futterman was obsessively jealous, did not want a child (whereas she did), and constantly compared her to his former wife. The divorce was amicable. Futterman gave her a small settlement which included the car he had bought her, the furnishings of their apartment (which she retained), lawyers’ fees and a thousand dollars in cash. The final decree came through in December 1938, several months after principal photography had been completed on Brother Rat.

  To promote the film, Warners did a score of photographic layouts of the cast. Wyman and Reagan were called to the gallery (photography department) to pose together. There had been a mix-up in the appointment, and they had a long wait. “My first impulse, as always, was to resent it,” Wyman remembered, “to feel that my rights had been imposed upon, feel that someone was ‘pushing us around.’

  “‘It’s just a mistake,’ Ronnie soothed. ‘It’s no one’s fault. No one would inconvenience us on purpose.…’

  “I couldn’t help wondering if some of his easy good nature could be an ‘act.’ It didn’t seem possible that a man could have so even a disposition consistently.”

  He asked her for a date to the premiere of Second Fiddle, a Sonja Henie film. One date led to another until they were seeing each other on a weekly basis. Reagan’s attitude to her was protective (he was six years older), and she felt safe with him. Yet, at the same time her self-confidence began to slip. His knowledge overwhelmed her, and his dedication to his mother and his general goodness intimidated her.

  “When he took me out to dinner, even at a strange restaurant, we always seemed to receive special consideration and particularly good service. That was because his manner was as kind, as friendly when he spoke to a waiter as it was when he spoke to a friend. The veriest strangers liked him on sight… it was no ‘act.’ It was the real Ronnie. He lived in an apartment not far from his father and mother. When he was between pictures he never let a day pass without dropping in to see them at least for a few minutes. If he was working he called every day from the studio and saw them on the weekend.

  “His mother never had rigid rules when he was a boy. He was free to bring anyone he wanted home from school. When I was in [Los Angeles] high school… the girls in my group hero-worshipped the boys on the football squad. If one of them spoke to one of us in the corridor it was a thrill. You went to cheer practice and yelled your lungs out, picturing the dramatic spectacle. I was never allowed to see one of the football games… I had to be home at a certain hour each day and there were no excuses for not being there.… I never had a mother-and-daughter relationship. If I thought about running away from home when I was very young it was because I suffered a sort of claustrophobia—an imprisoned feeling at home [a main reason for her leaving high school to work]. Ronnie had this wonderful relationship with his mother. I sensed it. I wanted to have a part of it.

  “I went to work to support myself when I was still in my early teens. I had been punished at home for things I did not understand, things I had thought were the right thing to do.… I went around most of the time with a mild form of hate eating into me. After I had the contract at the studio… I was constantly on the alert for signs that someone was trying to spoil my job for me. I suspected a hairdresser of trying to ruin my looks for a test… a press agent for trying to make me look silly in print.… I trusted Ronnie. For the first time in my life I truly trusted someone.”

  Although Brother Rat was the most substantial film he had yet made, his third-place position (“[Eddie] Albert gives a splendid performance… Wayne Morris provides a good characterization… Ronald Reagan is fine as the third member of the group…”) did not advance his career. From January to October 1939, he appeared in nine films. Going Places (January 9, 1939)* had little to recommend it except a marvelous rendition of the song “Jeepers Creepers” (the name of the horse in this race film) by Louis Armstrong. Once again, Reagan was in a film with Dick Powell. The most that could be said of his role as a member of the wealthy, horsey set was, “Ronald Reagan has a minor assignment that is taken care of satisfactorily.” March found him cast as Lieutenant Brass Bancroft in Secret Service of the Air† (March 2, 1939). “All we can say,” said the New York Times reviewer, “is that the Warners have made considerable melodramatic ado about nothing, since the new film is an uninspired reworking of the old story about smuggling aliens across the border.”

  Despite such reviews, Warners again picked up Reagan’s option. Though he was not exact
ly in the money, his salary allowed him to upgrade his living accommodations. He moved from the Montecito Apartments to 1128 Cory Avenue, a small cottage with a lovely yard on a corner above Sunset Boulevard. Jack and Nelle were only five minutes away, as was Barney’s Beanery, but he seldom appeared at the latter anymore. He had not exactly “gone Hollywood,” but he had changed his social habits considerably. He dated various young starlets and took them to good restaurants or went dancing (he loved to ballroom dance and was good at it) at places like the Cocoanut Grove.

  David Selznick had purchased film rights for the play Dark Victory for Merle Oberon and then abandoned the idea of making it. Warners subsequently acquired the property (for twenty-seven thousand dollars) for Kay Francis. Following Cagney’s example, Francis, to the studio’s surprise, had not accepted the plum role and sued to get out of her contract. Warners cast Bette Davis, who had recently returned to the lot after losing a court case to Jack Warner. Davis had been offered a top role by Alexander Korda and had gone to England—”in the hope of adding a few cubits to her reputation” by appearing in a Korda film—and filed suit there to break her contract. Much chastened and somewhat poorer with her defeat, Davis honored her contract and accepted the secondhand role. But she had not completely swallowed her resentment.

  Though the ultimate in soap-opera tearjerkers, the film was Reagan’s first journey into the world of the super-upper-crust movie. Davis had recently won the Academy Award for her portrayal as Jezebel and, despite her lawsuit, she remained the studio’s top female star. It is always difficult to remember the other performers in a Davis film, and seeing Humphrey Bogart in a supporting role as a horse trainer sexually drawn to Davis’s rich society girl comes as a surprise whenever the film is viewed. George Brent as a brain surgeon is the leading man. (The studio had wanted to borrow Spencer Tracy from MGM for this role, but Tracy was unavailable.*) Reagan was given fifth billing as Alex Hamm, a wealthy “frequently inebriated” dilettante hopelessly in love with the giddy socialite (Davis as Judith Traherne) who suffers a fatal brain tumor. Dark Victory, with a budget of $517,000, was one of the four truly prestigious films Reagan made during his long Hollywood career,† and he gave a one-dimensional performance. Part of his problem could well have been that while filming Dark Victory he had to do retakes for Secret Service of the Air (because of censorship cuts), and the transition from Brass Bancroft to Alex Hamm could not have been easy. Still, the character was the kind Lew Ayres (and later Robert Walker and Van Heflin) could have turned into a dazzling cameo even with Davis stealing every scene. Ayres had managed a similar feat the year before as Hepburn’s alcoholic brother in Holiday.

  Reagan claimed his big scene in Dark Victory was badly acted because the director, Edmund Goulding, did not give him his head and let him play it as he saw the character. “He was a top director, doing only top pictures [among them Grand Hotel and Love with Garbo], I was up in that class on a rain check. He didn’t get what he wanted, whatever the hell that was, and I ended up not delivering the line [s] the way my instinct told me [they] should be delivered.” The antagonism with Goulding began early in the production. “I was playing, he told me, the kind of fellow who could sit in the girls’ dressing room dishing the dirt while they went on dressing in front of me. I had no trouble seeing him in that role, but for myself I want to think I can stroll through where the girls are short of clothes, and there will be a great scurrying about and taking to cover.”

  The last statement says quite a lot about Reagan’s sense of sexuality, while at the same time it displays a total lack of sensitivity to the actor’s craft. He felt that not only was Goulding less than masculine (“He saw my part as a copy of his own earlier life”) but also that the director wanted him to play the role with sexual ambivalence. Goulding was right. He understood that Alex Hamm drank because he felt impotent and loved a woman like Judith Traherne because she was unattainable. The character might very well not be a practicing homosexual but a man struggling with his sexuality and tragically losing the battle. Reagan could not deal with anything other than black and white. Yet, he was capable of identifying with the roles he played. This was one reason he enjoyed doing the Secret Service films, in which he was the macho superhero.

  He had been given a good supporting role in a major film and did not score. His personal dislike of Goulding had been a rare exception to his reputation of always being obliging, pleasant and—better than anything else—noncompetitive. He was shoved into Naughty But Nice, another Dick Powell musical potboiler, in which Ann Sheridan (ballyhooed as the “oomph girl”) had top billing, and which Bosley Crowther in The New York Times would dismiss by writing: “Staffed by a competent cast of pranksters… this item might be steady fun if it were anything more than a batch of old gags strung together.”

  His next two films, Hell’s Kitchen and Angels Wash Their Faces, had him supporting the Dead End Kids. In the first, “Margaret Lindsay and Ronald Reagan are nicely teamed.” In the second, “Miss Sheridan is happily married off to the District Attorney’s handsome son [Reagan].” Judging by the poor reviews on Smashing the Money Ring, his next Lieutenant Brass Bancroft epic (whose title tells it all), one wonders seriously why Reagan’s option was picked up again. But he was cast in Brother Rat and a Baby.

  The entire cast had been reassembled for the sequel to Brother Rat. Jane Bryan was now engaged to a man named Justin Dart and planned to marry and leave the screen. Dart, as coincidence would have it, was in the process of divorcing Ruth Walgreen, Charles Walgreen’s daughter, although he had maintained his business connections with Walgreen and owned a large piece of the business, given to him during his marriage to Ruth. Dart was a large, gruff man, dogmatic in his opinions. Reagan and Dart hit it off straightaway. They had the Walgreens and Jane Bryan in common. But it was more than that. Justin Dart had a fantastic grasp of economics, and he and Reagan could go around and around debating issues for hours. While Hal Gross had not been able to win many points with Reagan, Dart, also a Republican, did score. During the production of the film, German troops had invaded Poland, bombs fell on Warsaw and Great Britain went to war. Dart was concerned that a war in Europe might provide a pretext for Roosevelt to run for a third term, an idea that had been circulating ever since the 1936 election.* Roosevelt had led the country out of the Depression and the people trusted him. But Dart wanted Reagan to understand that other forces were involved—the big-city bosses who were reluctant to lose their power, and the New Deal bureaucrats afraid they might lose their jobs. A lot of Reagan’s naivete was disappearing. Larry Williams noted that for the first time, though still a strong Roosevelt supporter, Reagan faulted the Democratic party about high federal payrolls. From this point on, Justin Dart was to have a great influence on Reagan’s political views.

  Reagan had been dating Wyman on a fairly steady basis during the making of Brother Rat and a Baby,† The cast recognized that Jane was very much in love with Reagan, but he treated her in a casual way, calling her “a good scout,” “loads of fun to be with,” not exactly the descriptive phrases used by a man in love. At the end of principal photography, Jane suffered a recurrence of an old stomach disorder and was hospitalized. Reagan sent flowers with a card: “Hope you’re feeling better, Ronald.” When he appeared at the hospital during visiting hours, Elsie Wyatt greeted him in the corridor to tell him that Jane did not want to see him. He returned again the next day. This time he refused to be barred from her room. When he left, they were engaged to be married.

  First he told Nelle and Jack and then the studio, who gave Louella Parsons the scoop. Parsons then approached Warners with the idea of sending Reagan and Wyman and other contract players on a tour with her and they agreed. The final group consisted of Parsons, Reagan, Wyman, Susan Hayward, June Preisser, Arlene Whelan* and Joy Hodges, who had returned to Hollywood after her success in the Rodgers and Hart musical and had just had a featured role in Universal’s Little Accident. ‘Jane was… making jokes constantly, [and was] terribly
jealous of Ronald Reagan, with whom she was falling in love,” Parsons recalled of the first days of the tour. Susan Hayward’s attention to Reagan had distressed his fiancee (who sported a reported fifty-two-caret amethyst engagement ring—which was Reagan’s birth-stone).

  The variety-show format of “Hollywood Stars of 1940 on Parade” met with some indifference when it made its debut at San Francisco’s RKO Golden Gate, sharing the bill with Jean Hersholt in a Doctor Christian film. “Hot diggity! Movie stars, movie stars, movie stars!” Paul Spiegle of the San Francisco Chronicle sniped. “The Golden Gate is just crawling with them.… It’s an autograph fiend’s dream… they [all] pirouetted prettily before their groggy fans, and then Louella Parsons, with ‘honey’ and ‘darling’ bubbling from every pore, walked upon the scene.” Before this point the audience had had to sit through three other vaudeville acts (Barney Grant, “Hillbilly Humor”; Heller and Ruley, “Songs and Gags”; and the Six Tumbling Jordans) which had seemed endless. Swathed in mink, choked with pearls, Parsons “gurgled in the best high school elocution class manner, ‘Hello, am I late?’“

  Then out came the Hollywood Stars Chorus, singing “Oh, Louella” to the music of “Oh, Susanna,” ending each verse with: