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

by Darwin Porter

  He later recalled, “A lot of script changes went on every day. You never knew what the action was or what your lines were until you arrived on the set. Morse was working with a very small budget and a time clock that was ticking. The movie was released, warts and all.”

  Since the title, Smashing the Money Ring, revealed the ending, movie-goers felt no suspense during the 57 minutes the film was unwinding on the screen. “Everything was predictable,” Reagan said. “The dialogue was boring, the action lame.”

  “I made many films in Hollywood I was not proud of,” he said. “Smashing the Money Ring was one of them.”

  In a bizarre attempt to promote the movie, Jack Warner ordered that theater lobbies showing the serial be filled with fingerprint booths, WANTED posters, and “crime clue boxes.” Patrons were encouraged to drop the names of suspicious neighbors into the boxes. Reagan objected to the promotion, defining it as “a Big Brother Is Watching You” kind of spying.

  Reagan also objected to the way that he was being promoted both on and off the screen. Bancroft was defined in promotional materials as “a man with smashing fists when guns aren’t handy.”

  Jane Wyman embracing Kid Nightingale (John Payne), the “Singing Swinger.”

  “Reagan off-screen is much different,” the publicity department trumpeted. “Don’t get out of line around him, or you might get a taste in private of what the villains get on the screen.”

  Reagan pointedly informed the publicity people, “I’m not a violent person.”

  In response, one member of the staff said, “Get real! You should thank us for publicizing your testosterone quotient. It worked for Errol Flynn, didn’t it?”

  ***

  Jane closed out her lackluster film career of the 1930s with yet another programmer, Kid Nightingale, co-starring John Payne. Thinking it would be “just another picture to grind out,” she ultimately interpreted the experience of making that movie as “life-changing.”

  When she arrived on the set, her plans to marry Ronald Reagan had moved from the back of her brain to its frontal lobes. But, as she told her friend Paulette Goddard, “Life has this funny way of throwing you a curve ball. While dreaming of walking down the aisle with Ronald, along comes John Payne. God has this talent for creating exceptional men.”

  The devastatingly handsome John Payne and the pert, beautiful blonde, Jane Wyman, fell in love in both real and reel life.

  Since Goddard had never met Payne, Jane expressed her opinion: “He’s a Southern gentleman from Virginia raised in an antebellum mansion. He is devastatingly handsome, with a devilish smile and an eye-catching cleft in his chin. He stands six feet four, and he can also sing a love song. Not only that, he exudes sex appeal with his super-wide shoulders and rocklike muscles, enough to make a weak-kneed girl swoon.”

  “There’s just one major drawback,” Jane said. “This Greek god is married to that little nobody actress, Anne Shirley. The lucky cow gets to paw those manly inches every night. Imagine waking up in the morning with a nude John Payne in bed with you? God, I detest that creature for snaring John when I want him. He could have his pick of Hollywood goddesses, and he chose Stella Dallas’ bitch of an ungrateful daughter.”

  The notorious “crotch shot” of John Payne from Kid Nightingale became an underground favorite of American homosexuals.

  As Roddy McDowall recalled, “It did for John what that Betty Grable pinup pose did for her in World War II.

  She was referring to the 1937 movie Stella Dallas, the tearjerker soap opera that Shirley made with the long-suffering character who played her mother, Barbara Stanwyck.

  The thin, silly plot of Kid Nightingale focuses on a singing waiter who gets into a fight with some obnoxious diners and knocks them out, for which he is fired. A shady boxing promoter, played by Walter Catlett, witnesses Payne’s pugilistic skills and signs him up to become a boxer. “The quick buck artist” bills the character played by Payne (Steve Nelson) as “Kid Nightingale.”

  As the woman who falls for Payne, Jane, cast as Judy Craig, is a rehearsal pianist and singer. She and Payne get to perform a musical duet. He also sings operatic arias and Tin Pan Alley songs. Because of his studly physique, he attracts hordes of screaming females to his boxing matches, which are rather brief. His manager even hires an orchestra to accompany him, musically, after each of his knockouts.

  “I got the role only because your friend, Dick Powell, turned it down as he was making his exit from Warners,” Payne told Jane.

  The director, George Amy, had a front-row position as he watched Jane fall hard for the seductive charms of Payne. “It was obvious to the whole cast that by the second day, Jane was madly in love,” Amy said. “When they weren’t due on the set, Jane spent all her time in Payne’s dressing room. I didn’t think Payne was going to divorce Shirley and marry Jane, although stranger things have happened. Jane was a sweet girl, but I feared she was heading for heartbreak. Like so many of Hollywood’s leading men, Payne would probably drop her at the completion of the picture and return home to Shirley and their baby girl.”

  “Reagan showed up on two occasions,” Amy said. “That guy liked to talk. I was known as a film editor more than as a director, and he asked me tons of technical questions, showing me he had a keen mind.”

  Johnnie Davis (center figure) is cheerfully positioned between Reagan (left) and John Payne (right). But it was actually Jane coming between the two men.

  When Reagan heard about Jane’s interest in Payne, he came over to work out with him in the studio gym. “Perhaps he wanted to check out the competition,” Davis said.

  When Payne was shown this candid shot, he said, “My chest is better developed than Ronnie’s, and my legs are more muscular.”

  Amy was one of the best film editors in Hollywood, a favorite of other directors such as Howard Hawks and Michael Curtiz. His editing was one of the reasons Warners became known for turning out a steady stream of pictures with fluid style and at a breakneck pace.

  Years later, Payne told the press, “When I made Kid Nightingale with Jane Wyman, she was so much in love with Reagan that she couldn’t wait for our love scenes to end so she could rush to his arms.”

  Actually, however, in his capacity as a married man who was cheating on his wife, Payne was putting a good spin on his relationship with Jane, hoping to distract reporters from suspicions about his not-very-secret affair with his co-star.

  Jane wanted to know every scrap of information about Payne she could learn from him. “I was flattered,” he told Amy. “No woman had ever shown that much interest in me.”

  She learned that he had attended a prestigious military school, the Mercersburg Academy, in Pennsylvania. Later, in 1930, he’d studied journalism at Columbia University, earning a living writing pulp fiction—“The bodice ripper type.”

  He had also studied drama and took voice lessons at Julliard in New York City. “I drifted from odd job to odd job,” he said. “At one point, I was a wrestler billed as Alexei Petroff, ‘the Savage of the Steppes.’ I operated an elevator in a hotel, worked at the switchboard, and served beer to pool hall sharpies when not mopping up their vomit in the men’s toilet. I was a male nurse and also a nanny to two unruly brats.”

  He later sang on the vaudeville stage. There, a talent scout for Samuel Goldwyn spotted him at Broadway’s Shubert Theater in 1934. “Once I made it to Hollywood, I was bounced from studio to studio,” he said. “I’ll soon be leaving Warners and signing with Fox. I don’t like the image, but they plan to turn me into a pretty boy to compete on screen with MGM’s Robert Taylor.”

  It was pure speculation, but Amy suspected that one of the reasons Payne so easily strayed with Jane was because he’d heard that his wife was having a torrid affair with John Garfield on the set of the movie they were making, Saturday’s Child, released in 1940.

  His affair with Jane marked the beginning of Payne’s roving-eyed conquests of many other screen goddesses, including Alice Faye, Betty Grable, Sonja He
nie, Linda Darnell, Gene Tierney, and Susan Hayward.

  As their affair quickly deepened, Jane confessed to Goddard, “John and I are in love, but he’s not going to leave that dreadful little Shirley thing. He’s made that painfully clear to me. But he had a counter-proposal: I couldn’t turn that down. I’m crazy for him, and he’s agreed to be my back alley lover, even if I marry Ronnie. That way, I can hold onto him. I mean, the sexual chemistry between us is explosive. I decided not to be greedy. If I can’t devour the whole pie, I’ll settle for a slice of it.”

  “Go, girl, go,” Goddard advised.

  “Kid Nightingale opened to rather bad reviews. The New York Times “yawned” through the picture, but praised Catlett as a “flibbertigibbet pug scout,” Harry Burns as a fake singing teacher, and “Porky” Ed Brophy as “a dyspeptic manager.”

  Kid Nightingale also got a snicker from Variety. “The producer must have had his tongue-in-cheek. It’s a combination of one film of every kind of pap, hokum, and comedy business that Hollywood has used since Mack Sennett and the Keystone Cops. It’s so absolutely silly, it’s almost good.”

  ***

  In the beginning, Susan Hayward did not view “pretty, pert” Jane Wyman as a romantic threat to her relationship with Reagan. She knew that he’d dated her during the filming of Brother Rat, a pattern he had followed with many of his other leading ladies. When his films were completed, so were his affairs, respectively, with these other starlets. At least that’s what she had been led to believe.

  She had also heard that Jane had divorced some dress manufacturer from New Orleans.

  On several occasions, Reagan had told Susan that he always rejected invitations to date married women. “I don’t care whether they are in the midst of a divorce or not. Until they get their papers, it’s no dice with me.”

  She had taken him at his word, as he had seemed sincere in his dishonesty. It’s true that he rarely dated married women. Jane had been an exception to his usual rule, but there had been others.

  If anything, Hayward felt that her greatest competition for Reagan’s affections derived from Priscilla Lane, who had been cast as the female lead in Brother Rat. Hayward, more or less, had been promised that role, fueling her resentment of Priscilla.

  Years later, in her apartment in Fort Lauderdale, Hayward spoke with bitterness about that time in her life. “They called that whore, Priscilla, ‘Warners’ blonde sweetheart.’ She pretended to be a Goodie Two-Shoes, but everyone knew what a slut she really was. She was not only fucking Reagan, but also Bogie, Wayne Morris, Bruce Cabot, Flynn, and for all I know, Edward G. Robinson, except I heard that he was a closeted gay who really preferred boys. Can you imagine that? Little Caesar himself chasing after pretty young boys? That was Hollywood back in those days.”

  “I remember Reagan as if it were only yesterday,” Hayward ranted. “It was Friday night. I had spent the better part of the day working on my makeup and finding the sexiest dress I could wear. He had called me for a date, and I was very excited. I put clean sheets on my bed and stocked my medicine cabinet with his favorite gargle. He told me he had some important news to tell me. I knew what it was: He was going to propose!”

  “When the doorbell rang that night, I took one look in my full-length mirror for reassurance. Then I went to the door. There he stood, in a white jacket, his hair slicked back. He smelled like he’d just stepped out of the shower. That was one clean man. I wanted to grab him, pull him inside, and rape him on the spot. But like Bette Davis said in some awful movie, ‘I’d love to kiss you, but I just washed my hair.’”

  Hayward recalled that he’d kissed her, but gently. She had thought that was because he didn’t want to mess up her makeup. “I was in full warpaint, and we were heading for Cocoanut Grove.”

  “On the drive down, we made only small talk. I knew he was avoiding the subject of marriage. That would come later in the evening. I was almost certain he was carrying an engagement ring in his white jacket.”

  She remembered that “everything had gone swimmingly that night. He ordered champagne, but I asked for a Scotch to begin the evening. I found myself shaking. I thought a hard drink would steady my nerves.”

  She claimed that before dinner was over, she was wondering if she should keep her name of Susan Hayward, or else change it in future billings, to Susan Reagan.

  “Since very few fans had even heard of Susan Hayward back then, it would have been no big deal. A lot of actors in the 1930s changed their names after appearing in only a couple of pictures.”

  Over an after dinner drink, Reagan told her that he had “an important secret to share with her.”

  “I won’t get Louella on the phone right away,” she said with a smirk. “I mean, she’s got to know, sooner than later, but I promise to keep it a secret at least for forty-eight hours.”

  As she remembered, “He looked quizzically at me.”

  “You mean, you don’t know?” he said. “God, I thought you’d heard the gossip by now. Word travels fast in this town.”

  “It suddenly occurred to me that Reagan and I were on two different pages. ‘You’re going to ask me to marry you tonight, and my answer is yes! There! That’s out in the open even before you ask me. Us Brooklyn gals like to make it easy for our beaux.’”

  Reagan looked startled before blurting out, “You don’t understand. I’ve fallen in love with Jane Wyman. I’m going to ask her to marry me.”

  Blind with rage, Hayward rose from the table. She took a glass of champagne and tossed it in his face before storming out of the club, causing a scene.

  “My tears were falling like a faucet,” she said. “I called to the doorman to summon a taxi. When Reagan caught up with me, I hauled off and gave him the slap of his life. Growing up in Flatbush, I knew how to slap a man. He must have felt like he’d been stung by a nest of mad hornets.”

  Hayward claimed she spent the next ten nights alone, barricaded within her apartment. “Thank God I didn’t have to report to the studio. I cried my eyes out. They got all puffy, and I looked like shit. The phone rang several times. I didn’t know if it was Reagan or not. Finally, on the eleventh day, I picked up the receiver, expecting it to be either the studio or Reagan. It was neither.”

  Louella Parsons was on the other end of the line. “Susan, darling, I’ve been desperate trying to get in touch with you. I want to book you on a nationwide publicity tour. Jane Wyman and Ronald Reagan have already signed up for it.”

  ***

  Louella Parsons had rounded up a troupe of starlets, plus Reagan, to accompany her on a coast-to-coast personal appearance tour, a kind of vaudeville act billed as “Parson’s Flying Stars.” The tour was to last eleven weeks, for which Parsons would be paid $7,500 a week. The columnist allotted $4,200 of that to be divided among her six young subcontractees.

  Before leaving Hollywood, she told Hayward that “the stars of the show will be those two lovebirds, Ronnie and Janie.” That caused Hayward’s face to turn as red as her hair. She confessed to Parsons that she was still carrying a torch for Reagan. “I can’t believe any sane man would dump me for that little mouse, Wyman.”

  Ronald Reagan with Louella Parsons, getting ready to make headlines on their return visit to Dixon, Illinois.

  He knew how to handle “The Most Feared Woman in Tinseltown” better than any other actor.

  Ever the two-faced one, Parsons confidentially claimed that she agreed with Hayward. In contrast, she told Jane how happy she was for her to have snared Reagan.

  “There’s no way Jane’s gonna become a star,” the self-styled “Gay Illiterate” told Hayward. “She’s not beautiful. She’s not talented. Her career will be confined to bit parts, and I think her days before the camera will be very short. She’ll probably become a housewife for Ronnie, raising his children.”

  “That won’t be true forme,” Hayward predicted for herself. “I’m gonna have to build extra shelf space to store my Oscars.”

  Parsons assured her that sh
e liked an actress with confidence.

  When Hayward learned the names of the other starlets in the traveling troupe— Joy Hodges, Arleen Whelan, and June Preisser—she exclaimed, “I am not overwhelmed.”

  Hodges had scored a success on Broadway in a Rodgers and Hart musical, and had completed a co-starring role in Little Accident (1939) for Universal.

  Reagan had always been grateful to her for helping him get launched in pictures in the aftermath of his early migration to Hollywood. Their dating had been “harmless,” in his words. “No big deal, but we did have a love for each other.”

  Before she contracted for the tour, Parsons had visited the studios, including MGM, Warners, and 20th Century Fox, asking for suggestions about how to choreograph and promote her vaudeville preview of “The Stars of Tomorrow.” As she admitted, “I’ve always had this soft spot in my heart for Ronnie. He and I share something in common. We both came from Dixon, Illinois.”

  Reagan was very nervous about having to be in such close intimacy with Hayward so soon after he’d dumped her. But he was delighted that his friend, singer Joy Hodges, was going along.

  David Niven had described Parsons as “Short, dumpy, and dowdy, with large brown eyes and a carefully cultivated vagueness.” But Reagan liked her, mainly because she was constantly plugging him and his career in her column.

  He had, on occasion, been entertained at her home for intimate dinners with her third husband, Dr. Harry Martin, whom Parsons called “Docky.” He specialized in treating movie stars who had contracted venereal dis eases.

  Nymphomaniacal Norwegian Darling of the Nazi hierarchy, and former fuck-buddy of JFK—Sonja Henie

  The first time Reagan had dined with the drunken doctor, he had loudly whispered to him, “I’ve just treated Clark Gable for the clap.”

  Because Parsons worked for the Hearst newspapers, she had booked her tour of just those cities where her boss, press baron William Randolph Hearst, owned a newspaper. That way, she would be assured of getting favorable reviews for her show. The hard-working starlets, along with Reagan, would be called upon to perform four or five shows a day, usually scheduled as part of the screening, in theaters, of a double feature.