Love Triangle: Ronald Reagan, Jane Wyman, & Nancy Davis (Blood Moon's Babylon Series)

by Darwin Porter

  She and Futterman had nothing in common. She liked nightclubs and movies. He wanted to go to bed at ten o’clock. For relaxation, he attended a ball game or else went to the fights. Not only that, he wanted to live in New Orleans, not Hollywood.

  Whenever he came back to Hollywood, he accused her of flirting with everybody from Errol Flynn to Bing Crosby. Actually, he was right about that.

  What he didn’t know was that in the final weeks of their marriage, she had met a handsome young man that she felt “I could really go for.”

  The inevitable confrontation between Futterman and Jane occurred one rainy afternoon. Jane came home early from Warners, feeling sick. When she turned the key in the door, she sensed something unusual going on in the apartment. Loud music was coming from the bedroom.

  When she opened the door, she discovered Futterman in drag, wearing a white satin gown with large red polka dots. To his astonished face, she said the first thing that flashed in her mind. “Myron, you’re far too big to wear polka dots.”

  She left soon after, packing an overnight bag. Divorce was inevitable.

  For $200, Demarest got Jane a divorce lawyer and arranged for her court date. Before a judge, she told him that Futterman had refused to conceive a child with her. She also claimed that he abandoned her for weeks at a time, returning to her and charging her with adulturous affairs. “I was constantly harassed and compared unfavorably to his first wife. He made me insecure and neurotic.”

  The judge granted the divorce on December 6, 1938. As part of the settlement, Jane was awarded $1,000 in cash, plus her attorney’s fees. The title to her car was still in his name, but he transferred it to her.

  At 1326 Londonderry Terrace, overlooking Sunset Strip, he’d lived in an apartment with her during his trips to Hollywood. During their marriage, he had allowed her to furnish the apartment with the modern pieces she preferred, although he wanted more traditional choices. After their divorce, he told her, “Take all of this crap. I’m just removing my clothes—and that’s it. Enjoy!”

  Many years later, Futterman gave a brief interview to a reporter. He said, “I knew that Jane would blossom into a great screen actress one day. Stardom was everything to her, and it was backed up by a steely determination. She really wanted to be a big Hollywood star, and she didn’t want a husband to block that pursuit.”

  As Jane’s star rose on the horizon, Futterman became a footnote in the history of a great actress. However, an inveterate grave finder tracked down his tombstone, discovering that he had moved to California and had died in Los Angeles on March 6, 1965. He was buried in the Garden of Everlasting Peace on lot 5298 in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park at Glendale.

  When this evidence was presented to her, she snapped, “Gone and forgotten.”

  Chapter Two

  “LeadingLady-itis”

  (Falling In Love Again…and Again…and Again)

  In Ronald Reagan’s first movie, Love Is on the Air, June Travis took him to her breast both on and off the screen, although she later denied it. The former sports reporter, age 26, made his Hollywood debut as a crusading radio announcer.

  As a young Lothario, Regan found “love” again, at least for three weeks when he was teamed with pretty, perky Mary Maguire in Sergeant Murphy (1938). Here, she salutes him for a job well done. Exactly what performance was she praising?

  ‘It’s a tough racket, but when you consider the rewards you’re shooting at—fame such as couldn’t be won in any other profession and wealth that amounts to dizzying heights—it’s worth the chances you take.” —Ronald Reagan

  “When I was young and had just arrived on the Warners lot, I shacked up with any female who caught my eye—and I got an eyeful.”

  —Ronald Reagan

  For twenty hours, without sleep, Reagan had driven his Nash convertible across the desert, heading west for Los Angeles. He had stopped only for food and gas. “By the roadside, I watered a lot of cactus along the way, since I had dry throat all the way. At the wheel, I must have drunk enough bottled water to flood the banks of the Colorado River.”

  Warners Four: left to right, Albert, Harry, Sam, and Jack. As young Polish immigrants, the sons of a cobbler, they did everything—butchering hogs, making leather shoes, selling homemade soap (later, bicycles).

  In time, they would become movie moguls, the bosses of Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, and a young Ronald Reagan.

  Eventually, his battered, dust-covered car pulled up at the entrance to the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. “After I got there, I think I slept for the first twenty-four hours,” he recalled.

  He had checked into the Biltmore because his friend, the singer, Joy Hodges, had returned for another singing engagement in the nightclub there. He called her to thank her for arranging a screen test for him.

  Reluctantly, she admitted why she had stood him up on what was supposed to have been their first date several months before. “You wanted to go riding, and I didn’t have any riding clothes, but I was too ashamed to admit it. Since then I’ve bought an outfit that makes me look like the Queen of the Sagebrush.”

  That Sunday, the two of them went riding together. She later admitted, “There was no sexual chemistry between us, in spite of what people said. He was new to Hollywood and lonely, and he needed someone to talk to.”

  “I knew he needed some action, so once again, I called my friend, Betty Grable, to the rescue,” Hodges said. “I knew she’d soon be knocking on his door at the Biltmore. Later, when I saw Ronnie in the movies, I realized that I’d missed out on something, and regretted turning him over to Betty.”

  [Hodges, had previously appeared with Grable in Old Man Rhythm.]

  “When I went on a promotional tour with Ronnie, months later, I was about to move in on him, until I learned that both Jane Wyman and Susan Hayward were already fighting over him.”

  In spite of Grable’s upcoming marriage in November of 1937 to the former child star, Jackie Coogan, she seemed more than willing to slip around town on Reagan’s arm.

  When he asked her about Coogan, she told him, “He’s probably visiting some whorehouse tonight. He likes very experienced gals who will do everything.” She went on to tell him that when she’d first started to date him, she thought Coogan was rich. As a child star, he earned $4 million [the equivalent of some $50 to $65 million in the U.S. currency of 2014].

  “But now, I usually have to pick up the restaurant or nightclub tab,” she said. “He has no money. As a grief-stricken 20-year-old, after his father died in an accident, he turned all his assets over to Lillian, his mother. She’s got a greedy lover, Arthur Bernstein.”

  [In an interview, Lillian had shamelessly informed the press, “Every dollar a kidearns before he is 21 belongs to his parents. His money is now mine to spend on fur coats, diamonds, expensive cars—whatever I want. The little devil won’t get a cent of it. He’s been a bad, bad boy.”]

  “Jackie went to Chaplin, since he’d made millions for him,” Grable said, “but all he got from Chaplin was a thousand dollars.”

  [Coogan would later sue his mother and Bernstein, but all he rescued from his previous earnings was $126,000. His legal battle with his mother led to the enactment of the California Child Actor’s Bill, often called “The Coogan Law,” which requires a child actor’s employer to set aside 15% of his earnings in a trust.]

  One morning, Betty, in her car, drove Reagan around Hollywood, his new home. He had never really seen much of it, and was shocked at buildings painted Halloween orange, chartreuse, or pink. “Out here, we call it pussy pink,” Grable said. Her potty mouth sometimes startled him.

  As their friendship intensified, Grable got him a pass to enter the grounds of Paramount, where he had lunch with her in the commissary. She told him she was making a movie called This Way, Please, starring Charles (“Buddy”) Rogers, who was struggling to rescue his sagging film career.

  “LeRoy Prinz is my dance instructor,” Grable said. “The talented little midget
is often screwing around with my fellow starlet, Jane Wyman. He’s teaching her dance steps ‘movie star style’—among other lessons.”

  Unlike the women Reagan had previously known, Grable had no hesitation about discussing “Who’s screwing who,” as she put it. She suggested that she had been shacking up with Rogers ever since they had appeared together in the 1935 Old Man Rhythm. “He’s not getting much from Mary”

  [She was referring to “America’s sweetheart,” Mary Pickford, who, prior to her decline, had been the most lucrative female star of the silent era. She had married Buddy Rogers in 1937, in the wake of her divorce from Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.]

  Later, when Hodges joined Grable and Reagan for a rendezvous, she complimented Reagan on his new eyewear. She turned to Grable, “I got him to get rid of those damn horn rim glasses. Now he’s leading man material.”

  After a few days at the Biltmore, shacked up during some of them with Grable, Reagan moved into less expensive lodgings, in this case, the Hollywood Plaza. His agent, George Ward, had instructed him that he should live closer to Warner Brothers.

  On Wednesday, Ward retrieved Reagan at his new hotel for an appointment at Warners. It would be his introduction to the co-producers and director who were thinking about casting him in his first movie role.

  “Our agency has high hopes for you,” Ward said. “We’ve already warned one of our highest-paid clients, Robert Taylor, that Warners is aggressively interviewing and grooming his competition. Bob may be prettier, but you’re a good looker yourself. At least your shoulders are broader than Bob’s, and I’m sure your dick is bigger. Bob is rather deficient in that department.”

  Such talk embarrassed Reagan. Later that day, he complained to Grable, “Men shouldn’t talk about each other’s personal equipment that way. I don’t like it.”

  “Get used to it, sweet cheeks,” Grable warned him. “Out here in Hollywood, when we’re not talking about upcoming pictures, and whether there’ll be a role for us, movie stars talk about dick sizes and the measurements of a woman’s breasts. Bette Davis said that Hollywood lives in a tit culture. She might have said in a ‘tit and dick’ culture.”

  When he was alone, Reagan wrote to Nelle and Jack, informing them that he was having a difficult time adjusting to “this semi-desert environment in a city without a past.”

  He had heard that immigrant moguls from Eastern Europe, often one-time peddlers and junk dealers, ran the film studios of Hollywood, ruling with iron fists and autocratically hiring and firing dancers, singers, comedians, cowboys, real-life gangsters, beauty queens, and handsome leading men. Many, he learned, had escaped Hitler’s “final solution” in the gas chambers of Central Europe, and now lived in harmony with Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl, hundreds of whom worked as laborers in the film studios.

  ***

  In his new status as a contract player at Warners, Reagan was paid $200 a week to join a roster of big name stars including James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Errol Flynn, and the queen of the lot, Bette Davis. Humphrey Bogart was also on hand in case a director needed an actor who could play a convincing villain.

  Before signing with Warners, Reagan had read whatever he could about the studio.

  Jack Warner was its vice president in charge of production. He was one of four Polish-Jewish brothers—Harry, Albert, Sam, and the youngest, Jack himself. Around the turn of the century, each of them had settled in the United States, where they were among the first to envision the future of the movie industry. By 1903, they had opened their first theater—in Newcastle, Pennsylvania—featuring early films such as The Great Train Robbery, a historic short (12 minutes long) silent film.

  Depicted here at the peak of his power and glory, Jack Warner, the tycoon who ran Warner Brothers, established his studio, along with his brothers, in Hollywood in 1923. They wanted to escape the licensing fees of the anti-Semitic Thomas A. Edison.

  Jack never believed Reagan would be a star—”perhaps a leading man, or the pal of the leading man.”

  Based on their objections to the payment of licensing fees to Thomas A. Edison, within seven years, they were producing their own films. Edison seemed to dislike Jews intensely, wanting to bar them from an involvement in the movie industry. When the Warner brothers started to produce their own films, Edison accused them of exploiting sex on the screen.

  Near the end of World War I, the Warner brothers moved to Los Angeles, opening a studio on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, then a boom town in the making. They scored a big success with “The Wonder Dog,” Rin Tin Tin. The dog, an exceptionally intelligent German shepherd, had been brought to America by a soldier who had found it wandering about after his master, a French soldier, was slain by the Germans.

  During their early debut in Hollywood, Warners hired wisely, employing Darryl F. Zanuck and the brilliant director, Ernst Lubitsch. In addition, they wisely signed stage actor John Barrymore to a contract, scoring a big hit with Beau Brummel (1924).

  Before the end of the 1920s, Warners was the first studio to become a pioneer of talkies, although Harry had initially (and loudly) objected. “Who in hell wants to hear an actor talk?”

  Jack shot back, “Ever hear of Shakespeare, brother dear?”

  Jack ventured into sound, casting Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer, which featured a limited number of sound segments. It became a sensation, signaling the twilight of the Silents and the end of the careers of many big stars who did not have a voice suitable for Talkies.

  In the 1930s, Warners produced musicals along with socially realistic films “drawn from the headlines. After turning out such hit films as The Public Enemy, which made James Cagney a star in 1931, and Little Caesar, which did the same thing the same year for Edward G. Robinson, Warners became known as the gangster studio.

  Their pre-Code Talkies were daring and provocative.

  By 1934, censors from the Production Code Administration (PCA), as spearheaded by Joseph Breen, tightened their control over Warners movies, ordering that it restrict itself to more moralistic, less gritty, and more idealized storylines. As a response to their increasingly strident demands, Jack turned to historical dramas, along with swashbucklers, women’s pictures, and adaptations of best-selling novels. Some of their pre-Code stars, “tainted” as they were with reputations for sexual profligacy and indiscretion, ended up working for low budget studios along “Poverty Row.”

  To help buttress the revenues of their A-list pictures, the Warner brothers needed quickies, usually shot in three weeks to a month and sometimes running no more than 60 minutes. Bryan Foy (“The Keeper of the Bs”) was hired to supervise and organize their production.

  “Brynie,” as he was nicknamed, had been the youngest member of the famous vaudeville act, “Eddie Foy and the Seven Little Foys.”

  Ironically, Ronald Reagan, at Warners—usually under Foy’s supervision during the late 1930s, would become famous as “The King of the Bs,” and as “The Errol Flynn of the Bs.”

  Foy himself came out to greet Reagan and welcome him to the studio. Foy told him that he’d been named co-producer of Reagan’s first film, Love Is On the Air, a 59-minute B-movie released in 1937. “You’ll play a radio announcer.”

  According to the plot, Reagan is an aggressive radio announcer who investigates a local crime wave. When sponsors complain, Reagan is demoted to the humiliating job of hosting a kiddie show on the air. He usurps the job from Jo Hopkins, a character played by June Travis. Eventually, she falls for him and joins his anti-crime crusade. In the end, good guy Reagan triumphs heroically over the mob.

  “Type casting,” said Reagan. “I was a radio announcer.”

  “But now, you’ve got to become one on the screen, which takes another kind of talent,” Foy cautioned.

  The producer handed him a copy of the script. “I’m taking you to meet Jack Warner. He’s a very busy man, and we can’t take more than four or five minutes of his time. He’ll do all the talking. Listen to him as if God himself were speaking. You don�
��t have to curtsy, but suck up!”

  ***

  The flamboyant showman, Jack Warner, lived up to his billing and a magazine’s description of him. “He was always smiling through a tan under his thin, oiled hair.” He was also the self-proclaimed “court jester” at the Roosevelt White House, where, in his capacity as head of Warners, he was a frequent visitor. Like Reagan, Jack was a liberal supporter of the social policies of FDR—a “New Dealer.”

  In his $35 suit, Reagan was introduced to Jack in his $1,000 Savile Row tailored clothing, which included a silk handkerchief and a necktie. To Reagan, he was an intimidating figure. Jack did almost all the talking.

  “Here at Warners, we’re a peddler of dreams, the creator of illusions,” Jack said. “During the depression, Warners has been the American drug of choice.”

  Later, when he was alone, making use of his fantastic memory, Reagan wrote down Jack’s pronouncements.

  “With the coming of a World War, which I know is inevitable, we’re hiring patriotic, all-American white Protestant guys like yourself—guys with good looks. Catholics we can cast as priests, Jews as intellectuals. Leggy blondes will play bad gal roles, and aging brunettes will be mothers baking apple pies. Actors with foreign accents will be Nazi spies.”

  “We’ve replaced Al Jolson with a very wholesome Dick Powell—no more blackface shit. Negroes will be cast as servants, usually lazy and retarded, just shuffling along. We’ll cast anti-heroes like Bogart with heroic types like yourself.”

  “Your agent [George Ward] told me you’re a shirt-chasing, red-blooded American boy with a perpetual hard-on—there’s not a homo streak in you. That’ll be a change from our popular hero, Errol Flynn, who will stick it in any hole. That one’s heading for trouble. You’re free to chase after our beautiful starlets, but don’t knock them up. In case you do, we’ve employed a resident abortionist to take care of unwanted babies.”