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

by Darwin Porter

  Boy Meets Girl opened across the country on August 27, 1938, and—mainly because of Cagney’s involvement—it attracted a respectable box office. Many fans went to see it, thinking—in spite of its title—that it was a gangster movie, perhaps a saga about Bonnie and Clyde.

  ***

  Reagan was a last minute choice to play the young attorney in Girls on Probation (1938). Originally, it had been intended to star John Garfield, a newcomer to Warners.

  A potboiling and pedestrian programmer, Girls on Probation, by anyone’s estimation, was a Grade B flick with limp direction and a weak script by Crane Wilbur. Running only an hour, it didn’t get much publicity or even a lot of notice at the time of its release in 1938. It made a “retro comeback,” however, in the early 1980s when Reagan was president.

  In spite of the picture’s weakness, Reagan was glad to be cast as its male lead. Jane Bryan got first billing.

  [In the film, Bryan plays the innocent young Connie Heath, who is falsely accused of theft by the witchy Gloria Adams (Susan Hayward). At a party, Gloria publicly accuses Connie of stealing her evening gown and Connie is arrested. As it turns out, the gown was illegally “borrowed” by Connie’s bad-girl friend, Hilda (Sheila Bromley) from a local dry-cleaning shop.

  In the luridly titled Girls on Probation, Reagan, as a crusading district attorney, came down with another case of “Leadinglady-itis” when he met Jane Bryan, whom the script reveals is really a “nice girl,” despite her embarrassing problems with the law.

  Onscreen, her character revealed how much she appreciated his help in explaining things to the judge.

  Offscreen, based partly on the hysterical jealousy she faced from Susan Hayward, she told him, “Let’s confine our friendship to a handshake.”

  Connie is subsequently tried for grand larceny, but a handsome, bright prosecuting attorney (Reagan) gets her off on probation. Later, based on a series of spectacularly foolish choices, Connie again hooks up with Hilda, once again gets into trouble, once again is publicly shamed, and once again is arrested.

  She is ultimately rescued by Mr. Do-Right (i.e., Reagan), who gets her off again, this time because he’s fallen in love with her.]

  Reagan did more than fall in love with Bryan on screen. He fell for her off-screen, too, developing another case of Leadinglady-itis. But his luck in seducing his leading ladies had run out. She told him she liked him a lot, and although she wanted to be his friend, “Let’s keep it sealed with a friendly handshake and not a kiss.”

  Jane Bryan, a good girl on probation, dependent (in the film, at least) on the loving ministrations of a prosecuting district attorney (i.e., Ronald Reagan).

  A child of Hollywood, Bryan was a beautiful young woman being groomed for stardom at Warners during the late 1930s. She had already appeared in some memorable films, including Marked Woman (1937), with Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart; Kid Galahad (1937), with Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart, and Davis, and Each Dawn I Die (1939), with James Cagney and George Raft.

  Watching each of these movies, Reagan had been drawn to Bryan’s winsome, fresh face, an innocent contrast to the cynicism of gangster-playing stars like Robinson, Raft, and Bogart. Bryan, even though she was only ten years younger than Davis, would play her daughter in four separate films. In two additional films, she would be cast as her sister.

  Girls on Probation would be the first of three films Bryan would appear in with Reagan, the others being Brother Rat and Brother Rat and Baby.

  Bryan had become an almost inseparable protégée of Davis, the star. Based on their extremely close friendship, and based on Davis’ penchant for demanding that she be cast in films with her, rumors spread of a lesbian love affair. Bryan appeared with her mentor in The Sisters (1938), and played her daughter in The Old Maid (1939).

  Unusually generous for Davis, she predicted stardom for Bryan, suggesting that she was on the dawn of becoming one of the great stars of Hollywood. “Of all the younger actresses around, Jane, to me, is the most likely to develop amazingly.” [Oddly, in retrospect, Bryan’s lackluster and unspectacular performances seem unworthy of such lavish praise from Warners’ reigning diva.]

  Reagan’s ego was soothed when he learned the reason for Bryan’s rejection of his sexual overtures. At the time, she was secretly dating Justin Dart, “the Boy Wonder” of the pharmaceuticals industry. They would marry in 1939, the union lasting until his death in 1984.

  In 1945, he’d take over the floundering Rexall drugstore chain, building it into a food and consumer products conglomerate which later merged with Kraft Foods.

  Cast as the bad girl of Girls on Probation, Sheila Bromley wasn’t as cozy with Reagan as she’d been when they’d made Accidents Will Happen. She resented the excessive attention he was paying to Bryan.

  As a future budding politician, Reagan was always gracious to the supporting players in each of his films, and especially to their directors. He enjoyed his time with the Pennsylvania-born director of Girls on Probation, William C. McGann. In just one decade, beginning in 1930, he would helm fifty-two movies.

  One evening, as previously arranged, Reagan picked up Hayward at her cheap bungalow court, where she was living with her brother, sister, and mother in a sleazy apartment with broken bed springs, a tattered sofa, and splintered chairs.

  He took her to dinner at Chasen’s. “At last, I’ve got a part in Girls on Probation, where I at least appear on the screen for ninety seconds, even though I play a bitch. My only problem is that I’m supposed to be a socialite, but with my Brooklynese, I sound more like one of the Dead End Kids than a debutante.”

  She claimed that whenever she could, she had attended various screenings of Ronald Colman’s The Prisoner of Zenda (1937). “He has perfect diction. I listen to it. I’ve seen the picture so many times I know all his lines. When I get home, in front of the mirror, I stand there and mimick his lines. I’ll learn proper English yet.”

  At Chasen’s, he noticed that she had brought a doggie bag. She bagged the entire bread basket and asked for another one. She even scooped up the leftovers on Reagan’s plate. Previously, he’d taken her one day to lunch at Schwab’s, where she had emptied the contents of their table’s sugar bowl into a container she’d carried with her.

  “Are things that bad at home?” he asked. “I’m far from rich, but I could lend you some money.”

  “I’m too proud to accept charity,” she answered. “We’ll get by.”

  She was carrying on bravely, always believing that she’d eventually achieve success by working harder. “I have to dream hard, too,” she’d told him.

  One night when he arrived on her doorstep, she was almost giddy with excitement. She’d just met with director William Keighley, who had cast her as the female lead of an upcoming movie, Brother Rat. Wayne Morris and Eddie Albert had been selected as two of the three male leads.

  “It takes place in a military school,” she told him. “Keighley said you’re being considered for the third male lead.”

  Regrettably, Hayward’s enthusiasm lasted for only a few days. Jack Warner had sat through a screening of Four Daughters, and had been so excited by the performance of Priscilla Lane that he’d decided to drop Hayward and cast Lane in Brother Rat instead. He told executives at Warners, “Priscilla, unlike her sisters, Rosemary and Lola, is headed for bigtime stardom.”

  Hayward’s disappointment increased when Warner screened her brief scene in Girls on Probation. He immediately realized that she had not yet overcome her Brooklynese, a dialect that he considered inappropriate for her role in Brother Rat. Consequently, he ordered his staff not to renew her contract with Warners. “The bitch speaks pure Flatbush,” he claimed.

  Reagan spent almost an entire weekend trying to rescue Hayward from the depths of her despair. She was almost inconsolable. At one point, he feared she might commit suicide.

  But by Monday morning, her steely determination had returned. She told him that she was going to hire an agent for herself and storm
the gates of Paramount.

  ***

  Carole Landis was among the young wannabees cast as inmates of a women’s prison in Girls on Probation. A viewer would have to look closely to spot her.

  Her affair with Busby Berkeley was winding down. She was last seen in public with him in the spring of 1938, when he took her to a costume party at the Hawaiian Paradise Club.

  Her first husband, Irving Wheeler, had arrived on the scene and was trying to extort money from Jack Warner. He was not willing to give him one dollar.

  Wheeler had hired a crooked lawyer and filed a lawsuit. A headline in The Hollywood Reporter read—BUSBY BERKELEY NAMED IN $250,000 LOVE THEFT SUIT. Although they’d only lived together for less than a month, way back in 1934, Wheeler’s lawsuit charged that Berkeley had stolen his wife from him.

  Berkeley’s lawyer counter-filed with a demurrer that the case be thrown out of court, which it eventually was. But ultimately, the scandal hurt everyone’s career, including Berkeley’s. In the aftermath of the public shame the lawsuit caused, Berkeley’s original choreography for the Scarecrow in MGM’s The Wizard of Oz was scrapped.

  Two views of Carole Landis: (left) Coochey-coo? and (right) Haute fashion, circa 1942.

  During the course of the lawsuit, Landis made a powerful ally. Attracted to her beauty, Gregson (Greg) Bautzer, a handsome Hollywood attorney, had represented her.

  Bautzer was known for seducing some of the stellar lights of Hollywood, which, over the years, would include Joan Crawford, Dorothy Lamour, Ginger Rogers, Paulette Goddard, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Jayne Mansfield, Ann Miller, and Lana Turner. In time, he would become the lover of Jane Wyman, too.

  During Landis’ turmoil and public humiliation, Reagan offered her whatever emotional support he could, but he rejected her proposal of marriage, fearing that she was far too controversial. On the other hand, she hoped that a stable marriage to Reagan would bring a stop to the barrage of bad publicity that had virtually earmarked her as a Hollywood whore.

  Looking as regal as an empress, the former prostitute, Carole Landis, one of the blonde bombshells of World War II, is seen on a date with ladies’ man, Greg Bautzer, future lover of Jane Wyman.

  Landis pleaded with Reagan to marry her, but he was turned off by her lifestyle, her emotional instablity, and her notorious past.

  Reagan allegedly informed his Irish Mafia friends, including Pat O’Brien and James Cagney, that “Carole is a girl you sleep with, but don’t bring home to your mother.”

  Late one night, Landis called him in tears. “Jack Warner is not renewing my contract. I’m adrift.”

  ***

  The upcoming director of Brother Rat, William Keighley, called Reagan and invited him to lunch at the Warners’ commissary. “The role of the third cadet is yours,” he promised. “At lunch, I’ll introduce you to Jane Wyman. I’ve cast her as your girlfriend in the movie.”

  Brother Rat had opened on Broadway on December 16, 1936, and had run for 577 performances. Eddie Albert as Bing Edwards would repeat his stage role on the screen, but the parts of the other two male stars would be recast. Frank Albertson had starred as Bill Randolph in the play, but the movie role went to Wayne Morris. And although one of America’s most outstanding actors, José Ferrer, had played Dan Crawford on Broadway, Reagan was assigned the role for the movie version.

  When Reagan came together for the first time with Jane, he found her reasonably attractive, but no more so than any number of starlets he’d previously dated. In the beginning, she seemed more attracted to him than he was to her.

  Her divorce from the dress peddler, Myron Futterman, would not be finalized until December of that year (1938). Consequently, Reagan still regarded her as a married woman and at first kept his distance. She signaled her willingness to date him, but “he took his god damn time getting around to it,” she later complained to director Keighley, who had originally introduced them at lunch.

  Privately, Reagan confided to the director, “I’m still hot for another Jane, Jane Bryan, who you’ve also cast in this movie. But her heart belongs to another.”

  The plot of Brother Rat ordained that Wayne Morris would romance Priscilla Lane, that Eddie Albert would be happily though somewhat dysfunctionally married to Jane Bryan; and that Reagan and Jane would fall passionately in love.

  Brother Rat [the nickname used for each other by military cadets] had been on Broadway, staged by George Abbott. It had starred Albert in a breakthrough role, although his part had been considerably reduced in the film script written by Jerry Wald and Richard Macaulay. The setting for the film and its rowdy cadets was the Virginia Military Institute, defined as the West Point of the South.

  Whereas Reagan was the more conservative cadet, the one who always seemed to be going “along for the ride,” Morris’ role was that of “someone who can get into more shakes than you can shake a shako at.” Albert played the slow-thinking married cadet “who plugs along to accomplish things the hard way.”

  After sitting through the first rushes, watching the high-energy characters developed by Morris and Albert explode onto the screen, Reagan told Keighley, “I think I’ve gotten lost in the sandwich.”

  Reagan later recalled, “I was just a foil for Wayne and Eddie. I was this conservative roomie going along with Wayne’s hare-brained shenanigans, but rather grudgingly.”

  To add some spark to his character, Reagan risks trouble by romancing the academy’s stern Commandant’s daughter, played by Jane as the bespectacled Claire. She’s intent on becoming a bacteriologist. In one scene, as a means of making herself more alluring to Reagan, she removes her horn-rims and tosses them onto a cot. Her direction was to appear as “cutely alluring,” and she does. The director noted the on-screen sexual chemistry between Jane and Reagan, which had not been fulfilled off screen.

  Fraternal Rats: (left to right) Ronald Reagan, Wayne Morris, and Eddie Albert.

  Whereas George Abbott on Broadway was an impresario known for his fast-paced action on stage, Keighley, was known through his film work for cadenced melodramas, such as Each Dawn I Die. As a film, in comparison with the Broadway play, the action moved more slowly.

  For the first time, Reagan revealed on screen that he had a talent for comedy. Partly as a result of his work in Brother Rat, many other comedic roles lay in his future in the 1940s and 50s.

  Priscilla Lane, the female star of the movie, was doing more than just sipping a shared soda with Wayne Morris (left) and Reagan.

  During the course of the comedy, Albert learns that his wife is pregnant, which threatens his ability to graduate. [According to the plot premises, cadets are forbidden to marry while attending the academy.]

  Lane told Reagan that her part had been intended for Olivia de Havilland, who rejected it, and that his role had originally been cast with Jeffrey Lynn. For Lynn, an even bigger disappointment had involved losing the role of Ashley Wilkes to Leslie Howard in David O. Selznick’s Gone With the Wind. “I lost out on Ashley, too,” Reagan told Lane.

  [Handsome and tall, a schoolteacher from Massachusetts prior to his migration to Hollywood, Jeffrey Lynn was interpreted as the front runner for the role of Ashley Wilkes, partly because of his physical resemblance to the character, as defined by Margaret Mitchell in her novel. Lynn was used extensively during David O. Selznick’s “Search for Scarlett,” playing Ashley in the screen tests for many of the actresses who tried out, sometimes disastrously, for the part. Selznick eventually cast the more experienced British actor Leslie Howard, much to Lynn’s disappointment.]

  Although Reagan’s sexual liaison with Lane had ended, he noticed that Morris was still visiting her dressing room. “Wayne and I are just rehearsing our roles,” she jokingly told Reagan.

  Unaware of Reagan’s previous links to Lane, Jane complained to her, “Ronnie seems to prefer hanging out with his frat brothers who visit him on the set. I don’t see him dating any girls.”

  Eddie Albert, decades before his fame as the male lead in the TV sitcom
Green Acres, in a broadcast studio for one of the networks during the 1940s.

  “Honey,” Lane said. “You just go on believing that fantasy.”

  Years would pass before Reagan learned that Jane was also carrying on an affair with Morris, one that would stretch on and off way into her future.

  As was his custom, Reagan bonded with the rest of the cast. “Everybody liked him,” Jane said.

  He discovered that Albert hailed from Illinois like he did. “I was born with the name Heimberger, but I had to change it because of the anti-German prejudice.” He told Reagan that he never planned to be an actor, and that instead, his original mission involved “conquering Wall Street.” The crash of 1929 put an end to that.

  Albert followed his stockbroking gig by accepting whatever job he could. “For a time, I was a man on the high-flying trapeze,” he said. “Before becoming an actor, I even sang in a night club.”

  Long before Reagan and Jane conquered the medium of television, Albert got there first. As early as 1936, in the “prehistoric” days of early TV, Albert became one of the first television actors, performing live in RCA’s first television broadcast.

  He also became a friend of Jane’s, although he was decades away from interpreting the starring role of Carlton Travis on TV’s Falcon Crest with her.

  [Albert’s life came to an end in 2005. Like Reagan, he suffered from Alzheimer’s disease during his final days. He became one of four Illinois-born “nonagenarians” of Hollywood’s Golden Age who lived until the 21st century. The other three included Buddy Ebsen, Karl Malden, and Reagan himself.]

  ***

  Before meeting Reagan, Jane had dyed her hair platinum. “When I changed my hair, I actually changed my entire personality,” she told him. Before I became a blonde, I had tried everything to get a start as an actress, but no one gave me a tumble.” She paused. “So to speak.”