Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  Reagan went out with three other co-stars during 1938—Anita Louise, Susan Hayward, and Ila Rhodes—some say for real, others for publicity purposes. He was even reported to have been “briefly engaged” to the obscure but apparently voluptuous Rhodes. None of these relationships seems to have been intimate, and some have suggested that Reagan may have been a virgin when he met Wyman.53 His description of a studio-Warner Bros.: 1937–1941

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  arranged date indicates his innocence at that time: “A publicity man asked me to escort a young girl under contract to the studio, who had recently done a great deal for sweaters in a Mervyn LeRoy picture. She was very young and very beautiful and we were both very scared—she in a gown borrowed from wardrobe, and I in a dinner jacket from the same place.

  Lana Turner and I went to the premiere in a taxi because I was afraid to drive my old convertible. I hadn’t learned how easy it was to rent a limousine and play big shot.”54

  Jack Warner’s right-hand man, Richard Gully, described Reagan when he got to know him in the late 1930s. “There was always an aloofness about him. He was warm, but he had the extraordinary ability to stop any familiarity. He would be horrified if you went up and slapped him on the back. He was not that kind of man, but he was never disagreeable.” Gully added, “He was not a womanizer or oversexed, believe me. He was not interested in women in the way Errol Flynn or Clark Gable was interested.

  He and Jane were just a great fun couple when I knew them as kids.”55

  Wyman filed her divorce petition on November 10, 1938, alleging that Futterman was obsessively jealous and refused to have a child with her. The divorce was granted on December 5, 1938. She got $1,000 in cash, her legal expenses, the car that Futterman had bought her, and the furnishings of their apartment, which she continued to occupy.56 It was a big two-bedroom with a private entrance and a fabulous view at 1326

  Londonderry Terrace, directly above the Sunset Strip and less than a mile from Reagan’s place on Cory Avenue. By the spring of 1939 he had moved into her building (though it’s not clear whether to her apartment or an adjacent studio). “We all knew he was living with her,” was how Leonora Hornblow put it.57 But Reagan and Wyman would later primly claim they had their first date at about that time. She said he took her to dinner and the premiere of Second Fiddle, starring Sonja Henie, the Norwegian ice-skating star.58

  In all versions, the courtship reads a bit like a campaign, waged by Wyman, rather than Reagan, with persistence, guile, and some emotional blackmail. She wooed everyone around him that mattered: the Drake College friends, Nelle Reagan, Louella Parsons. The girl who had loved making entrances in nightclubs wearing fancy clothes and big hats suddenly became

  “a bug for outdoors” and “a swell scout,”59 playing volleyball on the beach with Reagan and the guys, going to Disciples services with Nelle, signing up for committee assignments at the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), and taking 1 0 6

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Reagan with her to meetings. It was an amazing performance, though perhaps not entirely convincing.

  “Jane and Ronnie really made a strange combination,” observed her friend Jerry Asher, a fan magazine writer. “She was so experienced, hard-boiled, intense, and passionate, and he was so pragmatic, down-to-earth, not overly imaginative. Sure everyone respected . . . his clean-living ways and solid character, but he was—well, rather a square. Serious, respectful of women, steady of mind and manners. In short, predictable and a little dull. He was a very sexy-looking man, of course—looked wonderful in swimming trunks, great body and all that, but he was a little earthbound for someone like Jane.”60

  Wyman herself explained, “It was Ronnie’s easy friendship which attracted me to him first. Everyone liked him and it seemed to me that he liked nearly everyone. I began to analyze what it was in me that he liked

  . . . and to try and have more of it!”61 She also said, “For the first time in my life I truly trusted someone.”62

  Brother Rat, released that fall, was “a top picture and a big money maker,” according to Reagan, but it didn’t do for his career what he had hoped. “My part was enough to provide a steppingstone to stardom,” he wrote. “Unhappily I learned another lesson. There is room for only one discovery in a picture. Eddie Albert stole all the honors, and deservedly so.”63

  Nor did it do much for Wyman’s career. Warners gave her the lead in four B movies after Brother Rat, playing boxers’ girlfriends in two and Torchy Blane, girl reporter, in the other two. Reagan, meanwhile, in 1939 blew his one big chance, Dark Victory, starring Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart;

  “wooden” is the adjective most frequently used to describe his performance as a rich young lush. In the fall of 1939, Warners reassembled the Brother Rat cast for a sequel, Brother Rat and a Baby, which in retrospect is most memorable for a line Wyman delivers to Reagan: “You might as well back down, because I’m gonna get you.”64

  On October 4, 1939, as they were about to begin shooting the picture, Wyman was taken to the Hollywood Receiving Hospital with what was officially recorded as a stomach disorder. Years later Nancy Reagan told Edmund Morris that it was an overdose of pills, that Jane had sent Ronnie a suicide note, and that he rushed to the hospital and gave in to her demand that he marry her.65 According to a previous version told by Anne Edwards, “Jane suffered a recurrence of an old stomach disorder,” and when Ronnie went to the hospital, her sister—Emma Fulks’s daughter, Warner Bros.: 1937–1941

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  whose married name was Elsie Wyatt— told him that Jane didn’t want to see him. The next day, “he refused to be barred from her room. When he left, they were engaged to be married.”66

  Louella Parsons announced the engagement of “two of Hollywood’s very nicest young people” in early November, adding that Reagan had given Wyman a ring with a 52-carat amethyst—his semiprecious birth-stone.67 To make sure the deal stuck, Parsons took them on a nine-week, cross-country “Stars of Tomorrow” tour, along with six other young actors, including Susan Hayward and Joy Hodges. After a tryout in Santa Barbara, Louella’s troupe opened at the Golden Gate Theater in San Francisco, where their forty-minute variety show, with Reagan as master of ceremonies, played to full houses as many as five times a day. They then flew east on a chartered TWA DC-2, refueling in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where Louella was made an honorary member of the Pueblo Indian tribe and given the name Ba-Ku-Lu, which means starmaker. The plane was forced to land in a snowstorm in Chicago, and Reagan once more swore he would never fly again—and didn’t for twenty-five years. From there they traveled by train to Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, New York, and Washington—all cities that Reagan and Wyman were seeing for the first time. It was also the first time that Reagan found himself pursued by clamoring young female fans, screaming his name and pulling at his clothes. On New Year’s Eve morning, their one day off in Washington, he persuaded Wyman and Hodges to drive out to Mount Vernon, George Washington’s house in Virginia. Hodges later recalled how fascinated Reagan was, “especially with Washington’s personal writing desk.” Wyman took note, and bought him a replica for his study.68

  On January 26, 1940, three weeks after they returned to Los Angeles, Jane and Ronnie were married, following in the footsteps of such two-star couples as Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Paulette Goddard and Charlie Chaplin, Betty Grable and Jackie Coogan, and Warner Bros.’ own Joan Blondell and Dick Powell. The ceremony took place at Wee Kirk o’

  the Heather, a small chapel with a Scottish theme in Forest Lawn Memorial Park, the burial ground of Old Hollywood. “It was doomed,” noted Leonora Hornblow, who was a bridesmaid. “But they were very attractive together and crazy about each other.”69

  The bride wore a pale blue gown of heavy satin, high-collared and long-sleeved, set off by a mink hat and a mink muff on which she had pinned a purple orchid corsage. The groom wore a dark suit. In their wedding 1 0 8

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White Hous
e photograph, Reagan looked waxen, perhaps because he had been in bed with the flu and was still running a fever.70 The ceremony was performed by Reverend Cleveland Kleihauer of the Hollywood-Beverly Christian Church. The wedding party was mostly family: Jack and Nelle, Neil and Bess Reagan, Emma Fulks and Elsie Wyatt, who was matron of honor. Reagan asked one of his Iowa friends, Will Scott, to be his best man, passing over Neil. Louella Parsons’s third husband, Harry “Docky” Martin, an alcoholic urologist who specialized in venereal diseases, walked the bride down the aisle.71

  Parsons, who had been ceaselessly promoting Jane and Ronnie as the ideal all-American couple next door and took credit for engineering the marriage, gave the reception at her house on North Maple Drive in Beverly Hills. Hornblow thought Nelle seemed out of sorts at the party: “She looked like a pioneer woman. I don’t mean she wasn’t well dressed, she was. She wasn’t forthcoming. She was cold and uncommunicative. But everyone was extremely nice to her. Who would be rude to Ronnie’s mother?”72 Louella drank almost as much her husband, which may have been the cause of her chronic incontinence—she was famous for leaving a puddle wherever she sat—and perhaps that bothered Nelle.73

  The newlyweds drove to Palm Springs that night. As if getting married in a cemetery wasn’t omen enough, it rained in the desert for most of their one-week honeymoon. Fifty years later I asked Jane Wyman if she remembered the first time she went to Palm Springs—which was on that honeymoon. “No, not particularly,” she said, flashing me such a cold and angry look that I thought she might murder me right there in her pink-and-lavender retirement condominium.74

  “Theirs is the perfect marriage,” Louella Parsons proclaimed in a column shortly after the wedding. “Jane always seemed so nervous and tense before she found Ronnie. She was a girl on the make—for life, for love. I think she wanted—well, everything. But steady, solid, decent young Ronnie has slowed down her pace, and it is all for the best. Yes, it was an ‘opposites-attract’ thing, but I’m predicting here and now that these opposites will celebrate their twenty-fifth and fiftieth wedding anniversaries—together.”75

  The first two years of the marriage were full of promise and good news.

  Their daughter, Maureen Elizabeth Reagan, was born on January 4, 1941.

  The Meiklejohn Agency was bought by the increasingly powerful Music Corporation of America, and Lew Wasserman, the slick young protégé of Warner Bros.: 1937–1941

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  MCA founder Jules Stein, became their agent. By the fall of 1941 Wasserman had renegotiated both of their contracts at Warners, tripling their salaries overnight. Ronnie was now making $1,650 a week, Jane $1,500, and both of them had been elected to the SAG board.76 They bought a plot of land on Cordell Drive, high up in the Hollywood Hills with a view that extended from the Pacific Ocean to downtown Los Angeles, and built an eight-room “English farmhouse,” with big picture windows and a huge stone fireplace, inspired by Rosalind Russell’s house in This Thing Called Love. (They actually borrowed the plans from Columbia Pictures.)77 They continued to see the Iowa crowd, but they were also becoming friendly with such established stars as Claudette Colbert, then the highest-paid actress in Hollywood.78 Reagan was proud of being included by James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Pat O’Brien, and Dick Powell at their regular table in the studio commissary.79 Powell took a particular liking to Reagan, who had made three movies with him, and offered to sponsor him as a candidate for Congress, if he would become a Republican.80

  Bogart, Powell, and many other Warners stars were members of the Lakeside Country Club, in nearby Toluca Lake, as were Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, and Walt Disney. Reagan was accepted for membership, but he resigned when he realized the club did not allow Jewish members or guests.

  “What happened was Ronnie took a Jewish friend to play golf,” Nancy Reagan told me. “And he was informed afterward that you couldn’t do that.

  Ronnie said, ‘You mean Jewish people are not allowed?’ They said that was right. Ronnie was furious and resigned. They were mad at Ronnie and he was mad at them. It was a Mexican standoff. They put his membership card on the bulletin board and threw darts at it. And then Hillcrest made him an honorary member.”81

  The Hillcrest Country Club, near Beverly Hills, was known as the Jewish club because it had been founded in 1920 by Jewish businessmen who could not get into the city’s oldest country club, the Los Angeles Country Club, which excluded not only nonwhites and Jews but also movie people. By 1940, Hillcrest was the bastion of the Jewish elite of Hollywood: studio chiefs Louis B. Mayer, Jack and Harry Warner, Adolph Zukor, and Harry Cohn were all members. At Hillcrest, Ronnie and Jane became part of the social set centered on the great husband-and-wife comedy teams Jack Benny and Mary Livingstone and George Burns and Gracie Allen.

  “Popular legend had it that one could be a part of the Jack Benny–George Burns group just by being able to tell a good, funny joke,” notes Jill 1 1 0

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Robinson, the daughter of producer Dore Schary, in her memoir, With a Cast of Thousands. 82

  Jack Benny’s annual salary for his Jell-O-sponsored radio show had just been raised to $350,000, and he was earning another $200,000 a year in movies for Paramount.83 Burns and Allen, who were also under contract to Paramount, were making $9,000 a week for their radio show on CBS. Although both Benny and Burns were a good decade older than Reagan, these friendships would last all their lives, and no doubt helped him hone his sense of humor. “I’ve taken up golf,” Jane Wyman told a reporter in 1941. “You just can’t keep me away from the club. I have a date with Mary (Livingstone) Benny this afternoon. Ronnie and I play together when we’re both not working.”84

  “Jane was completely self-satisfied,” said Leonora Hornblow of the new bride. “And Jane was Mrs. Full Charge. I don’t think she ever asked Ronnie if he wanted a blue sofa—she just ordered what she wanted. The house was perfectly nice but very banal. And there were literally no books, just the news magazines for Ronnie and the ladies’ magazines for Jane.

  Jane wasn’t a great reader either.”85 Reagan may not have been a book-worm, but he reportedly immersed himself in current events by reading both the Christian Science Monitor and the Wall Street Journal in addition to the local papers.86

  Louella Parsons was a constant presence on Cordell Drive. Little Maureen called her “Aunt Lolly” and later wrote, “She was pretty much a fix-ture in our household during the early years of my childhood.” In fact, Parsons thought the child should have been named for her, and was not above trying to get usable information out of the toddler. As Maureen put it, “One of my most enduring memories about Louella Parsons is that she was someone I wasn’t supposed to talk to too much.”87

  The Reagans also grew close to Lew Wasserman, who was not yet all-powerful but was working on it, and his equally ambitious wife, Edie.

  Their daughter, Lynne, played with Maureen (and gave her the nickname that would stick for the rest of her life, Mermie). Jane Wyman told producer William Frye, a longtime friend of Reagan’s and Wasserman’s, “Ronnie and I started going to Chasen’s when it was just a stand. We’d go there with Lew and Edie almost every Saturday or Sunday night for a hamburger and chili.” Frye told me, “Lew and Edie were very, very close to Jane and Ronnie. Lew was behind both of them in a very big way in those days.”88

  Evidently Jane wasn’t much of cook. “Ron and I practically lived at the Warner Bros.: 1937–1941

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  Derby,” she later wrote in the introduction to a book about the Brown Derby at Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street, one of four restaurants in the chain. Their favorite dish was Catalina Sand Dabs Meunière, and they sometimes played gin at their table after dinner.89 Soon Ronnie became an enthusiastic wine connoisseur. “He got me started on a wine collection,”

  recalled actor Robert Stack, who became friends with Reagan around 1940. “He got me a cellar, and, being a class act, he got me Romanee Contis and Pomerols and Montrachets.”90 Reaga
n may have been trying to impress Stack—who was from a socially prominent Los Angeles family and eight years younger than he—with his newfound sophistication.

  On the other hand, Nelle’s son couldn’t help disapproving of Stack’s wild ways and friends, who included another future president of the United States. “Jack Kennedy was also a friend of mine,” Stack told me. “He was a just a young guy who happened to be the son of Joe Kennedy, who was then the ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Jack had a key to my apartment, which I could never get into because he was always there with a pretty girl.

  We had a little room called the Flag Room. It had flags going up the walls and over the ceiling and one very large triple bed. The object of that room was that the girl had to match the flag to the country or otherwise pay a penalty. There were more penalties paid and more happy customers came out of that Flag Room.” According to Stack, “Ron kept trying to get me to settle down. ‘It’s high time you became a responsible citizen,’ he would say.

  ‘Okay, sure, Ron. Very good. Thank you. I think I’m busy now.’”91

  Ronnie, who clearly loved being married, called his wife Button Nose, leading the movie magazines to dub Maureen “Button Nose the Second.”

  Completing this picture of young marital bliss in Hollywood was a pair of Scottish terriers—the same breed as FDR’s famous Fala—named Scotch and Soda.

  Warners put Ronnie and Jane in two more movies together after they married, An Angel from Texas and Tugboat Annie Sails Again, both in 1940. But her career stalled as his took off with the two A films that would make his name: Knute Rockne, All-American, in 1940, and Kings Row, filmed in 1941 and released in early 1942. In the first he played George Gipp, a famous halfback for Notre Dame known as the Gipper, who died of a strep infection at age twenty-five in 1920. Reagan took the idea to Warners, then had to fight to get the part, and probably succeeded only because his friend Pat O’Brien, who was cast in the title role of the famous Notre 1 1 2