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

by Darwin Porter

  When she got there, Hedda offered her a drink and said, “I’ll get right to the point. I can give you a major star build-up in my column, but I want something in return.”

  “Within reason, I’ll oblige,” Jane promised.

  “I want you to marry my son.”

  Jane was so startled that it took her a moment to recover.

  It seemed that William had been caught in a sexual and romantic scandal with Jon Hall, who was enjoying great success as the hero of John Ford’s epic, The Hurricane (1937). He co-starred in it, often wearing a sarong, opposite Dorothy Lamour, who also wore a sarong and hibiscus flowers, throughout most of the tropical-island action/adventure/romance.

  At first, Jane was very reluctant to get involved, but Hedda could be very persuasive. After her third drink, Jane agreed to meet with William to discuss the arrangement’s details and implications.

  “Don’t worry,” Hedda said. “If you’re discreet, you can see other men on the side. It’s what we call in Hollywood a ‘lavender marriage.’”

  Jane immediately realized that Hedda had previously lied to her. Hedda had known that her son was a homosexual for years.

  Shortly before her departure from Hedda’s apartment at around midnight, after listening to the reams of publicity such a marriage would generate, Jane agreed to go through with it.

  There was, however, one important problem: Hedda had not bothered to check with William. Although he adamantly refused to participate in the arrangement, Hedda assured Jane that she could talk him into it.

  As it turned out, she could not. After less than a week, their so-called “engagement” was canceled.

  Jon Hall survived that potential scandal with William Hopper, and many other scandals after that, and eventually, in the 1940s, became a star, often appearing with campy Maria Montez.

  Jane co-starred with William Hall before he began interpreting Hollywood as “the boulevard of broken dreams.”

  Later, during one of William’s conversations with Jane, he asked her, “You’re not mad at me for rejecting that offer of marriage, are you?”

  “Not at all,” she said, smiling and giving him a hug and a kiss on the cheek. “Let’s be brother and sister instead. Besides, the marriage would never have worked. We just wouldn’t have been right for one another.” `

  ***

  For Jane’s next film, since Warner’s had no immediate use for her, she was lent out to Universal Studios for a role in The Spy Ring (1938). Its director, Joseph H. Lewis, cast her as the female lead. Even though her role was secondary, Jack Warner decided to give her star billing, and for some reason, ordered that she be hailed as “The Year’s Best Actress!” which she clearly was not.

  With the same sinking feeling she’d associated with Public Wedding, she didn’t have high hopes for this film, either.

  Lewis was known for his stream of hastily produced B-movies, most of them low-budget westerns, action pictures, and thrillers. Around Universal, he was known as “Wagon Wheel Joe,” for his cowboy movies, usually shown to the kiddies at Saturday matinees across the country.

  Jane had never heard of the star of the picture, William Hall. Universal had recently signed this Brooklyn-born actor, planning to groom him for major stardom. The Spy Ring was designed as a trial balloon to see if he appealed to audiences. Jane learned he was already thirty-five years old, which struck her as “a bit long in the tooth” to be launched as a possible matinee idol.

  He played an army officer and the star player on the camp’s polo team. Lewis, the film’s director, shot so many miles of polo footage that to Jane, it appeared to be “another horsey oats opera” instead of a spy thriller.

  The executives at Universal had so much faith in Hall that after shooting was completed, he was cast and contracted as the male lead in yet another film, Escape by Night (1938), even before The Spy Ring was released. Jane lunched with her friend, Anne Nagel, who was on the set that day for a meeting with Hall. She had been cast as his leading lady in his yet-to-be-shot spinoff film [i.e., Escape by Night.]

  She did not want Jane to speak about her late husband, Ross Alexander, who had recently killed himself. She still seemed in shock and would go into seclusion for three years after she finished her final film commitment. When she resurfaced, she joined Universal as one of its “scream queens” in B-picture horror flicks.

  [Both the reviews and box office receipts for The Spy Ring were disappointing. By the time William Hall’s second film was released for public consumption, Universal had dropped him. Even though he played the lead, Hall’s name was not used within the film’s promotions and publicity.

  Consequently, Hall disappeared from the Hollywood scene. In 1986, Jane noticed a small obituary in Variety, reporting that he had died in obscurity in Kerr County, Texas. She had only one comment. “Hall was tall in the saddle. The loftiest actor I ever worked with, towering at 6’4”.”]

  ***

  After her temporary loan-out to Universal Pictures, Jane’s return to Warners, her home studio, was filled with disappointment. Her star roles had gone largely unnoticed, contained as they were within programmers designed to precede, in theaters, more noteworthy, A-list competitors.

  The director, Mervyn LeRoy, who had helmed her in The King and the Chorus Girl, had cast her this time in a small role in Fools for Scandal (1938), starring Carole Lombard, with Fernand Gravey and Ralph Bellamy as her leading men.

  Recognizing that Fernand’s last name, “Gravey,” didn’t sound romantic in English, the studio changed its spelling to “Gravet” on posters with Carole Lombard.

  The role was so small that Jane’s name didn’t even appear in some of the listings. “LeRoy was going around still claiming that he’d discovered me,” Jane lamented. “But what had he discovered? Not a star, that’s for god damn sure. He’s doing better with Lana Turner in more ways than one.”

  The first day on the set, Jane resumed her affair with Gravey, with whom she had become involved during the shooting of The King and the Chorus Girl. She had been told that the film had greatly offended the Duke of Windsor, who had threatened to sue.

  Gravey hadn’t called her since that movie, and he tried to explain why. “At the time I was temporarily separated from my wife [the French actress Jane Renouardt]. We had had a big fight around the time I met you. I got angry at her and told her that she was old enough to be my mother.”

  “I can see why a wife wouldn’t like that,” Jane said.

  “My wife and I are now back together again and limping along in our marriage,” he said. “But she’s learned a big lesson. I’ll stay married to her, but will also see other women. It’s my nature.”

  On their first night out again, dancing at the Troc, he told her he didn’t hold out much hope for the commercial success of Fools for Scandal. “Lombard and I have no chemistry. I don’t see why Clark Gable finds her so hot. She’s appealed to Gary Cooper and to John Barrymore, but not to me. Perhaps we Frenchmen have more exacting standards for women.”

  Even though he was predicting failure for their present movie, Gravey told her he was about to be loaned out, short-term, to MGM. “I’ve signed to play Johann Strauss in The Great Waltz, opposite Luise Rainer. I’m hoping this big production will put me over the top.”

  “I’ll be cheering you on,” she said. “I adore your Continental charm, unlike some of the jerks I’ve been cast with. Take Joe E. Brown, for instance.”

  During his nights with Jane, Gravey seemed morbidly depressed over what was about to happen to his beloved France. He feared an attack from Germany. “Hitler’s Nazi war machine will overrun Paris,” he predicted.

  [Gravey’s fears came true in 1940. MGM was set to star him in the film version of Rafael Sabatini’s novel, Scaramouche. But Gravey turned it down and returned to France just before the Nazi invasion. Throughout the war, he was a member of the French Secret Army, and later joined the French Foreign Legion to fight the Nazis. By war’s end, the French people hailed him as a
war hero.

  Renouardt forgave him his many indiscretions, and they stayed married until his death of a heart attack in 1970, her death following two years later.]

  Fools for Scandal, the screwball comedy, had a convoluted, rather silly plot, with Lombard cast as Kay Winters, a film star living in Paris. She is pursued by both Gravey and Ralph Bellamy. Lombard remembered Jane from her brief stint in My Man Godfrey. She told her that she was sorry that her role didn’t make the final cut of that previous movie, and she invited Jane to her dressing room for a few drinks.

  At one point, Lombard pulled off her robe and stood nude in front of a full-length mirror. “Guess what?” she said, surveying her curves. “Only today, the Hollywood Reporter wrote that ‘I’m a platinum blonde with a heart-shaped face, delicate, impish features, and a figure to be swathed in silver lamé.’ That’s what somebody on that paper thinks. Let me ask you. If you were a lesbian, would you be muff diving on me right now?”

  “I’d be eating you up,” Jane said, jokingly.

  She was fascinated by Lombard’s dialogue. Life magazine had asserted that off-screen, “Her conversation, often brilliant, is punctuated by screeches, laughs, growls, gesticulations, and the expletives of a sailor’s parrot.”

  At the time of filming, all of Hollywood knew that Gable, despite his status as a married man, was involved in a torrid affair with Lombard. One day, she announced that Gable was going to show up on the set for lunch with her. She told Jane that she wanted her to serve as a “beard,” along with Bellamy, Isabel Jeans, and Jenkins.

  In spite of the fling Jane had had with Gable during the filming of Cain and Mable, he did not seem to remember her. Or perhaps he was pretending ignorance to throw Lombard off the scent. Bellamy later told Jane, “Gable has had all the major female stars at MGM, and half the starlets. How can he remember every conquest?”

  With nothing to conceal in front of her fellow actors, Lombard talked openly about her affair with Gable, although that didn’t seem to set too well with him. She claimed that she’d been included in his otherwise all-male hunting and fishing trips. “In the future, I’m going to seriously limit the number of films I make every year. It was those conflicting schedules that ruined my marriage to William Powell.”

  “That and the fact that you two guys were not compatible,” Gable interjected.

  The talk inevitably turned to the upcoming filming of Margaret Mitchell’s novel, Gone With the Wind. Most of America wanted Gable to play Rhett Butler. But Jane was shocked when Lombard claimed that its producer, David O. Selznick, had more or less promised her the lead female role of Scarlett O’Hara.

  “Myron Selznick, David’s brother, is my agent, and I can’t stand him,” Lombard said. “But I’m keeping him because I think he’ll push David into signing a contract with me.”

  “You should be grateful to Myron,” Gable cautioned. Then, addressing the other listeners present, he said, “He got her a contract with Paramount for $450,000 big ones a year.”

  “Well, you’ve got something there,” she said. “That makes me the highest paid pussy in Hollywood.”

  Gable admitted that he was a bit leary about appearing in another period costume drama after the failure of his film Parnell (1937). “Carole here feels that the role of Rhett Butler will be the high point of my career.”

  “I know I have stiff competition for Scarlett,” Lombard said. “Everybody from Lucille Ball, that low-rent RKO hooker, to Katharine Hepburn, a lesbian and Miss Box Office Poison herself, wants it. Joan Crawford and Bette Davis would each kill for it, and Paulette Goddard is telling everyone the role already belongs to her.”

  “Would you believe that my dear, departed Jean Harlow, whom I loved dearly, read that thick novel when it came out and began to imagine herself as Scarlett?” Gable said.

  He warned Carole not to get her hopes up, because he’d heard rumors that Selznick feared that casting a pair of “illicit lovers,” like Lombard and himself, in the same movie might cause a moral backlash if and when their affair were discovered, and lead to boycotts of the movie, nationwide.

  Before the meal ended, Lombard lamented the script of Fools for Scandal. “I think I’m making my worst film, although how can it be more horrid than The Gay Bride (1934)?”

  [Lombard’s dire forecast turned out to be accurate. Even her most dedicated fans stayed away “in droves” from Fools for Scandal. She was so disappointed with the film that for a while, at least, she opted to appear only in dramatic roles instead of comedies.]

  Since Jane had never read Gone With the Wind, and since everyone else was talking about it, she bought a copy one Friday afternoon and canceled all engagements. By late Sunday night, she had waded through it, savoring every scene that featured Melanie—the character who marries Scarlett’s love, Ashley Wilkes.

  When Jane encountered Carole the following Monday morning, she aggressively lobbied for the role. “I think I’d be perfect as Melanie.”

  Carole looked Jane over skeptically for a moment and then smiled. “Honey, I think you’re mousy enough to pull off that sob sister role.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, Carole continued: “Despite all the press about those other Scarlett wannabees—including that old hag, Tallulah Bankhead, for god’s sake— I’ve got the role of Scarlett sewn up. I practically have Selznick eating breakfast out of my honeypot. I can promise you this: The role of Melanie is yours. I’ll see to that.”

  “Do you really mean it? Jane asked. “You really think so?”

  “My word is like a certified check that you can take to the bank.”

  ***

  By now, Jane viewed herself as a hard-working staple on the Hollywood wannabee scene, attending auditions, showing up on time for appointments, and generally emoting on and off the screen in efforts to advance her screen image and career.

  Her next gig involved another star billing in He Couldn’t Say No, a film released in 1938. Except for Frank McHugh, her leading man, Jane didn’t know any of the actors appearing with her in this film directed by Lewis Seiler. Even though the movie had clearly, since its inception, been configured as a B picture, she was delighted that once again, she’d been awarded with a highly visible role.

  She was less excited when she read the script. McHugh starred as a timid man who works for a linoleum company for $30 a month. Cast as Violet Coney, Jane plays his domineering girlfriend. When his boss gives him a ten-dollar-a-month raise, she and her mother decide that it’s time for him to get married.

  At an auction, he purchases a nude statue modeled after the girl of his dreams, whom he adores from afar. Regrettably, her father, a senator, is campaigning against public nudity and wants to confiscate the statue. After a series of complications, McHugh gets the girl of his dreams, and dumps the complaining, kvetching character played by Jane.

  “It’s just as well,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to end up in the arms of Frank anyway.”

  Released with low expectations as a B-list programmer, She Couldn’t Say No was quickly tossed into the Hollywood’s dustbin.

  ***

  Jane was a bit heartsick, or so she claimed, when she was cast in Wide Open Faces (1938), once again appearing in a movie with “Big Mouth,” character actor Joe E. Brown. This time, she was Brown’s co-star, unlike the smaller role she had played years before in Polo Joe, their previous film.

  When she met with the film’s director Kurt Neumann, she told him, “I’ll have to wear a chastity belt and throw away the key if that horndog Brown chases after me like he did on the set of Polo Joe.”

  Wide Open Faces: Ingenue Wyman with Joe E. Brown. She called him “a horny old toad.”

  Neumann assured her that Brown, in spite of his lovable screen image, still “has a taste for the ladies, especially if they’re young and pretty like you. I do, too.”

  “Are you going to take director’s privilege with me?” she asked.

  “We’ll see,” he said. “For the moment, I’ve got my eye on th
is hot little blonde number, Barbara Pepper. I’ve cast her in a bit part.”

  As she chatted with Neumann, she came to realize he’d been given the wrong picture to direct. Born in Nürnberg, Germany, he’d come to Hollywood in the early talkie era to direct German-language versions of Hollywood films, as was the custom back then. Once he’d mastered English, he was also assigned low-budget programmers such as The Big Cage (1933).

  Starlet Barbara Pepper (left) was Lucille Ball’s best friend. Ball introduced her to Craig Reynolds, Jane’s beau, who immediately dropped her for Pepper.

  Later, as a fat lady (right) she appeared in several episodes of I Love Lucy.

  Wide Open Faces, a short film of only 67 minutes, is a story of criminals gathering at a lakeside inn where a bank robber has stashed $100,000. Brown plays Wilbur Keeks, a soda jerk, and Jane a character called Betty Martin. She gets ensnared in the subterfuge when she and an aunt move into an abandoned mansion where the crooks believe that the stash is hidden. Before long, the mobsters are chasing after both Jane and Brown. The script was poor, and the film—released during Brown’s waning film career—bombed at the box office.

  Lucille Ball, Jane’s former friend from the chorus line, appeared on the set one day. At first, Jane thought her appearance was for a reunion with her, but it turned out that Ball’s real reason for showing up was to greet her other friend, Barbara Pepper, who had a supporting role in Wide Open Faces.

  Until Ball showed up, Jane hadn’t noticed the blonde New York actress. During her stint as one of the Goldwyn Girls, Pepper had met her lifelong friend, Ball.

  Ball invited Pepper and Jane to lunch in the commissary, where Jane’s sometimes beau, Craig Reynolds, showed up to join them.

  Ruefully, Jane would later inform Ball, “Your friend, Miss Pepper, stole Craig from me. I think they exchanged phone numbers when I went to the ladies’ room. All I know is that three nights later, he was seen around town with Pepper when not dating one of his menfolk.”