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

by Darwin Porter

  “When he returned from Catalina and reported for work on Monday morning, Ronnie was reluctant to talk about his weekend,” Grinde said. “I finally got it out of him: The two men had shared a double bed. In the middle of the night, Ronnie was awakened by William going down on him. He pulled away from that encounter in horror and spent the rest of the night on the sofa.”

  “Most straight actors I’ve known will let a homo go down on them if no women are available,” Grinde said. “Not so Ronnie. I don’t think he had a queer streak in him.”

  “He was very upset, and I tried to wise him up to the ways of Hollywood,” Grinde said. “I told him that the industry was populated by homos. ‘Every day, a dozen or more are getting off the train at Union Station, fresh from the hinterlands.’ I warned him that as a good-looking guy, he’d be solicited, frequently.”

  “You’ve got to turn them down firmly but politely,” Grinde told Reagan. “They’ll be co-starring with you, applying your makeup, styling your hair, dressing you, shooting your publicity stills while you’re in a bathing suit, and even directing your pictures. I think you should make up with William, shake his hand and assure him you still want to be friends. Don’t treat him like a pariah. He probably feels like a shit because of your rejection. And lest you forget, you certainly don’t want to piss off Hedda.”

  Reagan obviously took Grinde’s advice. In a few weeks, he was once again seen on double dates with William, who was escorting actress Isabel Jewell, his arm candy for the evening. At the time, Reagan seemed to be dating a different woman six nights a week. Sundays were reserved for family dinners with Jack and Nelle.

  Grinde’s advice to Reagan was astute. Hedda’s son would play a New York reporter in one of Reagan’s most famous films, Knute Rockne—All American (1940). In fact, he would appear in an amazing total of nine films with Reagan between 1937 and 1942.

  During its filming, Reagan frequently viewed the advance rushes of Love Is On the Air. “When I first saw myself on the screen, as others see me, I sank into my seat. I’ve been doing that in every movie since.”

  The film opened on November 12, 1937, at the Palace Theater in Manhattan, where it played second fiddle in a double feature that included the prestigious Stage Door, starring Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers.

  Love Is On the Air, Reagan’s quickie, had been cobbled together in just three weeks for a budget of $119,000.

  The film’s makeup chief, Perc Westmore, had issued a warning to the cameraman: “When Reagan gets tired, his left eye starts to travel.”

  Although Love Is On the Air was akin to a frivolous and minor potboiler, it received generally favorable reviews. The Hollywood Reporter defined Reagan as “a natural,” and Variety labeled him as “a find.”

  Jack Warner was impressed enough to pick up Reagan’s option and raise his salary to $250 a week.

  Confidant that he’d succeed as a movie star, Reagan purchased a house in West Hollywood for his parents, Jack and Nelle. He sent them the train fare to Hollywood, and eventually moved them into 9031 Phyllis Avenue, the only home they’d ever owned in their lives.

  In failing health, Jack had given up drinking after his heart attack, although he remained a chain smoker. “So Dad won’t feel he was on relief,” Reagan gave him a job, paying $25 a week, answering his fan mail, which had begun arriving at Warners. He told his father that he didn’t have to respond to letters from homosexual men.

  With his increase in salary, Reagan moved into a cottage at 1128 Cory Avenue, a block north of Sunset Boulevard. He boasted to his male friends, “It’s become known as the love cottage of Hollywood.”

  Soon, his brother Moon followed his family to Hollywood, and Reagan succeeded in getting him a job as an announcer at WFWB, a radio station owned by Warner Brothers.

  ***

  It was Priscilla Lane, the singer and actress, who sought him out when she learned that he had lived in her native state of Iowa. She was from the small college town of Indianola, south of Des Moines, and had sung, live, at the radio station in Des Moines where Reagan had been a sports announcer.

  Priscilla was the youngest of the singing Lane Sisters, a trio which included Lola and Rosemary. The sisters had made their professional debut at Des Moines’ Paramount Theater. During his residency in the city, Reagan had been one of the theater’s best customers.

  Orchestra leader and radio personality Fred Waring heard the Lane sisters and subsequently lured them to Hollywood for appearances with his band, the Pennsylvanians, in the bemusedly frothy Varsity Show (1937), starring Dick Powell.

  Priscilla turned out to be the most promiscuous of the three sisters, engaging in an affair with Powell before moving on to Wayne Morris, with whom she was later cast in Love, Honor, and Behave in 1938. Morris was also dating Jane Wyman, even though she was married at the time to Myron Futterman, who, as a salesman, was often out of town and on the road.

  “Priscilla liked to date different men,” Waring said. “At Warners, she told me, ‘I’ve died and gone to heaven. So little time, so many men. She got really busy when Busby Berkeley cast her in Men Are Such Fools (1938)—one night with Morris, another night with Humphrey Bogart, another co-star in that movie. She also spent an occasional weekend with this handsome newcomer, Ronald Reagan. Warners was a very incestuous place in the late 1930s, with everybody sleeping around with everybody else.”

  Over their first lunch together in the commissary, Reagan and Priscilla shared different memories of how they broke into show business.

  She told him she’d had her first screen test in New York, with two other aspiring actresses, Margaret Sullavan and Katharine Hepburn, whom she described as “a strange-looking girl with her hair slicked back in a sort of bun and with a weird voice. Not very pretty. All three of us were turned down when MGM saw our screen tests. Fortunately, other studios had better taste.”

  Reagan later recalled, “Priscilla and I came roughly from the same part of America, and both of us were just feeling our way around Hollywood and learning its special kind of morality. My friend Mugs would definitely not approve. The girls I dated didn’t go to church on Sunday.”

  “Nelle met some of my dates. My mother told me, ‘I wish you’d find some nice girl and settle down instead of running around with those painted hussies from Warner Brothers.’”

  Priscilla became a frequent visitor to Reagan’s love cottage. They would sometimes be spotted leaving for the studio together during the early morning hours when it was still dark.

  After watching a movie, Priscilla and Reagan often dined together at Barney’s Beanery on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood. Both of them loved Barney’s chili and his cold beer. They always began their meal with his famous onion soup, enjoying it under a crude sign that read FAGOTS (sic) STAY OUT.

  Priscilla Lane, one of the singing Lane Sisters, liked to make love to her leading men both on and off the screen. Lane courts the young Hollywood newcomer, Ronald Reagan.

  Barney, explaining his stance to them, and later to Life magazine, which had to censor his provocative comments, said: “I just don’t like queers. There’s no excuse for them. They’ll approach any good looking guy and put the make on him. Anybody who does any recruiting in my place is shown the door. I’ve seen them take a guy home and turn him into a queer for life. Some guys completely give up with women once a queer has bedded them. That’s because a queer will do things no decent woman will do. I say, shoot ‘em. Who gives a fuck if one more faggot bites the dust? What I can’t understand is why any man in his right mind would prefer plugging a smelly asshole to a juicy pussy.”

  Reagan said nothing and appeared embarrassed at these comments. Priscilla chimed in, “Barney, you’ve got a lot to learn about sex, my friend. I understand homos to my toenails. Who wouldn’t like dick?”

  ***

  Shortly thereafter, Reagan was assigned the lead in another film, Sergeant Murphy (1938). He was a last minute choice, based on the fact that the highly temperamental J
ames Cagney had originally intended to star in the film. But Cagney had objected to the final script by Warren Jacobs, based on a true story by Sy Bartlett. With a running time of only 57 minutes, the picture would be directed by B. Reeves Eason, and produced by Bryan Foy (“The Keeper of the Warner Bs”) who had been in charge of Reagan’s first film.

  Sergeant Murphy, set against a backdrop of the pre World-War I U.S. cavalry, was inspired by a racehorse with that name. Eason was a logical choice to direct a picture about horses. He had staged the most famous racing scene in pictures, the frenzied chariot race in the original (1926) version of Ben Hur, starring Ramon Novarro and Francis X. Bushman.

  In Sergeant Murphy, Reagan’s starring vehicle, the horse is an expert jumper, but freaks out at the sound of gunfire, which, of course, makes him useless as a military animal. He’s destined for a meat factory until Reagan, cast as Private Dennis Murphy, saves his life and acquires him. The horse is smuggled into England, where it enters the prestigious Grand National Steeplechase. The film was a low-budget quickie, so location shooting at the fabled British course was not possible. As a substitute, Eason used the Santa Ana Racetrack in California instead.

  He wrote a dispatch to the Des Moines Register, claiming, “I’m no hero, but if you’re yellow and refuse to risk a few bruises, and occasionally something more serious, you might as well leave Hollywood.”

  The film would later generate protests from the Screen Actors Guild because real military men were used, denying jobs for Hollywood actors. But Jack Warner, based to some extent on his contacts with the Roosevelt White House, had obtained the permission of Harry Woodring, U.S. Secretary of War. The secretary claimed, “It is essential for the public to see a true picture of the Army rather than one based on a director’s imagination.”

  In Sergeant Murphy, on a much more limited scale than what he’d later bring to fruition in 1939, the director made use of Reagan’s equestrian skills and his love of horses. After receiving approval from Warners not to use a stunt man, Reagan did his own riding himself. Jack Warner had sent a threatening memo, warning about any cruelty to the horses. “If a horse is forced into a scene where it breaks a leg and has to be put down, I’ll break a few legs myself,” the studio mogul had threatened.

  Eason sent a memo to Foy. “Reagan is very professional, shows up on time, and knows his lines. Unlike many actors I’ve worked with, he arrives on the set sober.”

  Cast in the film as the Army’s post commander was veteran actor and director, Donald Crisp, a Londoner. Previously, he had played General Ulysses S. Grant in D.W. Griffith’s controversial masterpiece, the racist silent drama, The Birth of a Nation (1915). Crisp was an experienced horseman himself, having served as a trooper in the 10th Hussar during the Boer War, where he had befriended a young Winston Churchill.

  On the set of Sergeant Murphy, Reagan contracted another case of “Leadinglady-itis” when he was introduced to an eighteen-year-old Australian beauty, Mary Maguire. Her father was Mickey Maguire, a racehorse owner. “She knew her way around a stable,” Reagan said.

  At first, Reagan, in uniform, was attracted to “my delicate, petite Aussie,” Mary Maguire.

  After the war, he’d have nothing to do with her, having heard that she’d been closely associated “with a coven of British Nazis.”

  Almost immediately, she asked him to call her Peggy and told him, “I think you’re one handsome man. You should have been an Aussie. We need more men like you Down Under.”

  Reagan was delighted when Eason sent the actors and crew on location to the Monterey Peninsula, the home of the 11th U.S. Cavalry. After work, Reagan and Maguire went together on long, romantic walks along the sea shore, which she claimed reminded her of her native Australia. The red-tiled roofs and adobe buildings, however, evoked the era when Mexico ruled over the land.

  They stayed in separate rooms at the local lodge, which was rather elegant, requiring formal wear at dinner.

  When the picture was released and the reviews came out, several critics claimed that Reagan appeared to be more in love with Sergeant Murphy (the horse) than with his leading lady. Off the screen, that was not the case.

  On several occasions, Eason spotted Maguire leaving Reagan’s bedroom before dawn. When interviewed years later, Eason said, “Reagan’s affair with the sophisticated, smart-talking Priscilla Lane prepared him for his marriage to Jane Wyman, and his romantic fling with Mary Maguire, more demure in demeanor, was a rehearsal for his wedded bliss with Nancy Davis.”

  Although only eight years younger than Reagan, Maguire came to view him as a kind of father/lover, according to both Crisp and Eason. A fellow Australian expat, John Farrow (later, the father of actress Mia Farrow), had arranged an interview for Maguire with the casting director at Warners, who ordered a screen test for her.

  “So far, I don’t like these ingénue roles,” she told Reagan. “I’m a serious actress. The script on this clunker says I’m to say my lines in four different ways, ‘sweetly, frigidly, impulsively, or excitedly.’ How insulting to me as an actress!”

  After the location shooting was completed in Monterrey, and after their return to Hollywood, Maguire and Reagan had a strong disagreement. Contrary to Reagan’s strongly expressed advice, she threatened to instigate “a mutiny” against Jack Warner. Ignoring her lover’s caution, she stormed into Warner’s office, demanding better and more dramatic parts, “the kind you assign to Olivia de Havilland or Bette Davis.”

  Predictably, the mogul refused. Her militancy led to the abrupt end of Maguire’s career at Warners.

  Before her eventual return to England, she paid a farewell visit to Reagan, who seemed to have lost his romantic interest in her, having moved on to other starlets. They shared, however a mutual disappointment in the fact that Warners had delayed the release of Sergeant Murphy for eighteen months.

  When it was eventually released, its critical reception did virtually nothing for either of their careers.

  In reference to Sergeant Murphy, film critic Dorothy Masters, writing in The New York Daily News, issued a prophetic pronouncement, alluding to the virtually unknown medium of television: “In the movies, only because television isn’t yet equipped to do him justice, Ronald Reagan’s erstwhile radio announcer’s looks and personality scoop out toeholds for a plot that can barely make the grade. These are the thrills attendant to daring horsemanship, comedy is in abundance, but the scenario has no villain (and therefore, no suspense).”

  Bert Harland in the Hollywood Spectator issued faint praise: “Reagan has gained noticeably in ease, in sureness of gesture, and in ability to get his thoughts and emotions into the camera.”

  After her humiliating failure in Hollywood, shunned by the studios because of her outburst in Jack Warner’s office, McGuire moved to England. There, in 1939, she married the controversial British fascist Robert Gordon-Canning, thirty years her senior. The widely detested leader of the British Union of Fascists, he was a rabid anti-Semite.

  In the summer of 1940, during the Battle of Britain, he was jailed under the De-fence Regulation Act and not released until 1943.

  McGuire wrote to Reagan and others in Hollywood, claiming, “I do not share my husband’s Fascist sympathies. I will not be a party to his political agenda, and I oppose Hitler’s policy regarding the Jews. As you know, I worked with many Jews in Hollywood with no prejudice against these people.”

  Maguire divorced her husband in 1945 when he purchased a large marble bust of Hitler from a sale of German Embassy property. Gordon-Canning had announced to the press, “Jesus, 2,000 years ago, was mocked, scorned, and crucified. Today, he is a living force in the hearts and minds of millions of people. The same fate awaits Hitler, a charming and fine man.”

  Maguire returned to Hollywood in an attempt to revive her career, but her reputation remained tainted. She later blamed “Hollywood Jews for blocking my return to the screen.”

  ***

  Pictured above: Wayne Morris, Doris Weston, and Pat O’
Brien. Reagan ended up on the cutting room floor.

  Having been cast as the lead in his first two pictures, Reagan proclaimed, “I’m on top of the world.” Then reality set in. During the context of his next three pictures, he either ended up on the cutting room floor or in bit parts.

  He had hardly stripped off his U.S. Cavalry uniform before he had to don the uniform of a Navy flier, and rush south to Coronado, California, where his first A-list movie, Submarine D-1 (1937), was nearing completion.

  Directed by Lloyd Bacon, the film offered many insights into the U.S. Navy submarine force on the eve of World War II.

  [One of its plot devices focused on then high-tech new devices, including the Momsen lung, an experimental underwater breathing device which some experts say may have killed more submariners than it rescued.]

  Warners had cast three of its A-list male stars as the movie’s male leads: Pat O’Brien, George Brent, and Wayne Morris.

  Reagan was disappointed to find that his role was hardly more than a walk-on. As he later wrote, “Some place in the studio higher echelons, it had been decided to provide a surprise ending to the picture so that neither (sic) of the three stars would end up with the girl. I would come in as her fiancé in the last reel.”

  Uncharacteristically, Reagan didn’t succumb to Leadinglady-itis after his introduction to Doris Weston, the female star of the picture. They had lunch at a café one day, finding that both of them hailed from Illinois.

  The Chicago-born singer, actress, nightclub singer, and radio performer had been chosen to replace Ruby Keeler opposite Dick Powell in The Singing Marine (1937).

  During lunch, she revealed that while filming The Singing Marine, she’d befriended “a cute little thing with a button nose. Her name is Jane Wyman. She saw you in a movie and thought you were good looking. She wants to meet you. I invited her to join us here, but she’s needed for a scene.”