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

by Darwin Porter

  In an almost shocking omission, which his editors at Duell, Sloan, and Pearce let him get away with, Reagan didn’t even mention that he married Jane.

  [In March, 1961, Duell, Sloan and Pearce became an affiliate of Meredith Publishing Company, which later sold parts of it to the Academic Learning Company, LLC and to Prentice-Hall.]

  Although Reagan was dating other women, even doing more than dating, he and his blonde starlet, Jane Wyman, more or less let the world know that they were “an item.”

  All dolled up, they descended the steps of the Biltmore Hotel on February 23, 1939, after the Oscar ceremony. Jane’s coat was a gift from Myron Futterman, her second husband.

  Parsons had plenty to say about the upcoming marriage. “Jane was always so nervous and tense before she found Ronnie. She was a girl on the make—for life, for love. I think she wanted, well, everything. Steady, solid, decent young Ronnie has slowed down her pace, and it is all for the best. It is an opposites-attract thing, but I’m predicting here and now that these opposites will celebrate their 25th and 50th wedding anniversaries—together.”

  Joy Hodges, who had accompanied Parsons on her cross-country vaudeville tour, saw potential trouble in the upcoming marriage. “Even back in 1940, Ronnie was almost fanatically interested in politics, always talking about the war, Hitler, FDR, Lend-Lease, whatever. Jane was clearly bored with such talk. She made that rather obvious. She told every body, ‘Don’t ask Ronnie what time it is, or he’ll tell you how a watch is made.’ She liked talking about movies and gossiping about the latest indiscretions within the Hollywood colony.”

  “I knew both of them pretty well, especially Jane, if you get my drift,” said Wayne Morris. “I thought their attraction was almost entirely sexual. For that reason, when the novelty wore off, I predicted the marriage was due for a crash landing. I don’t believe that a zebra can change its stripes. Jane was a playgirl who loved night clubs and handsome men, especially guys like me. Reagan was a magnet for the babes, attracting most of the little hotties running around the Warners’ lot. He was also smarter, better educated. She didn’t know what he was talking about half the time. Their temperaments were entirely different. Except for sex, the marriage had little going for it.”

  Eddie Albert, who once again had co-starred with them in Brother Rat and a Baby, talked to Reagan two days before the marriage. “Ronnie described Jane as ‘lots of fun to be with’ and ‘a good sport.’ That didn’t sound like a man too deeply in love. I think she pressured him into marriage with that suicide attempt. I was convinced that my good buddy couldn’t give up his pastime of screwing beautiful babes.”

  By the time Reagan entered into marriage, he was making $1,650 a week, whereas Jane was drawing only $500 a week as a contract player at Warners.

  Although a so-called movie star, Jane had not yet been able to cash in on her growing fame. He knew he was not marrying a woman of means, but he soon learned his bride-to-be was not only flat broke, but heavily in debt, too.

  Warners’ Publicity wanted to use their budding romance to promote their careers. So they posed for a series of pictures demonstrating what a happy couple they were.

  For the November, 1941 issue of Screenland, Jane had given an interview to writer Virginia Wood. “When I married Ronnie, I was drowning in debt. I was marrying a man who could not let a bill lie on his desk for more than ten days. I tried to pay all my debts before I walked down the aisle, but I was not making enough money to pay them off. On one account, I was paying it off at two dollars a week.”

  “Ronnie told me that when we were married, he would see to it that both of us saved half of everything we made,” she said.

  Before their marriage, Joan Blondell and her husband, Dick Powell, took the Reagans to the Cocoanut Grove where Powell was invited to sing a song for the guests.

  Louella Parsons (left), the gossipy columnist and “Tinseltown Tarantula,” came down hard on many relationships, including Clark Gable, a married man, living with Carole Lombard.

  Although she was known for exposing indiscretions, she always gave Reagan and Jane a pass when she heard of one of their adulterous scandals.

  “Later, Jane and I went to the powder room,” Blondell said. “She made a confession to me.”

  “I can’t help wondering if Ronnie’s easy nature is some sort of an act,” Jane said. “He’s just too god damn good natured. It doesn’t seem possible that a man could have so even a disposition consistently. I’ll let you know in two weeks if I’m marrying a Dr. Jekyll who turns out to be Mr. Hyde.”

  Jane didn’t wait long between marriages. Her divorce from Futterman was finalized right before Christmas of 1939. She married Reagan on January 26, 1940. The rite of marriage was celebrated at the Scottish-themed Wee Kirk o’ the Heather Chapel in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.

  Jane later joked to Blondell, “It was Nelle Reagan’s idea to have the marriage performed in a cemetery. I practically had to stumble over the graves of Lon Chaney (Senior) and Marie Dressler to get to the chapel on time.” The chapel had been the setting for the 1937 funeral of Jean Harlow.

  The Rev. Cleveland Kleihaur performed the ceremony, which was traditional in every sense except for the bridal kiss. Jane didn’t even get a peck on the cheek. That showed sensitivity on Reagan’s part, not the reverse. “To get to the chapel, I had to rise from my deathbed, where I was suffering from the flu. I felt so weak during the ceremony, I thought I was going to pass out.”

  In a gown with accessories borrowed from the wardrobe department of Warners, Jane made a dazzling bride in her floor-length, high-necked, long-sleeved blue satin gown with a mink fur hat and a matching muff.

  Two generations of Reagans at the “Ronnie and Janie” wedding. Nelle, in the frumpy finery of her era, and Reagan’s father, Jack, flank the groom and bride.

  For his best man, Reagan selected Bill Cook, a friend from his Des Moines days as a radio announcer. Cook had been a member of Reagan’s barbershop quartet.

  Jane introduced her maid of honor, Elsie Watt, as her sister. Technically, Elsie was not her sister, but the daughter of Emma Fulks, who had reared Jane as a young girl when her real parents had abandoned her. To give the bride away, Louella Parsons had arranged for her husband, Dr. “Docky” Martin, to walk Jane down the aisle.

  Blondell was rather cynical about the wedding. “I met Moon Reagan, Ronnie’s brother. He held down jobs in media, but I found him rather dumb and boorish. But he was a doll compared to Ronnie’s mother, Nelle. She looked like some severe religious fanatic, a real Midwest Puritan. His father, Jack, was already drunk before the ceremony began. I heard Jack approach Jane and beg her ‘not to take Dutch away from us.’”

  “Louella hovered over the newlyweds like some devouring mother hen,” said Dick Powell. “She even hosted the reception at her home on North Maple Drive in Beverly Hills. Louella was so excited, she wet her pants. I mean that literally. But she did that at most of the parties she attended. Weak kidneys, I suppose.”

  The couple left for their honeymoon in Palm Springs, a resort that would more or less become her home in time to come.

  Unusual for the desert resort, it rained almost every day, ruining Reagan’s plans about playing golf, a game that Jane also enjoyed. He was going to teach her to swim, but that plan also fell through.

  Fifty years after that honeymoon, and at the same resort, correspondent Bob Colacello asked Jane to recall her rainy honeymoon.

  “Is there anything about it that stands out in your mind?” he asked.

  “No, not particularly,” she said.

  He later claimed, “She flashed me such a cold and angry look that I thought she might murder me right there in her pink-and-lavender retirement condominium.”

  When Reagan and Jane drove back to Los Angeles, he moved his meager belongings into her modest three-bedroom apartment at 1326 Londonderry View, off the Sunset Strip.

  That Monday, Blondell called and invited Jane to lunch at
her favorite spot, the Brown Derby. “Ducky, how’s married life?”

  “We’ve had our first argument,” she answered. “He wants to start a family right away, and I want to stay lean and mean and continue my movie roles, waiting for the big one.”

  “And now for the most important question,” Blondell said, even though she knew the answer. “How is Ronnie in bed?”

  “If Hollywood was Mount Olympus Lew Wasserman (depicted above) was Zeus,” said the late Jack Valenti, former president of the Motion Picture Association of America.

  “He’s about as good in bed as he is on the screen,” Jane answered.

  ***

  Back in Hollywood, Reagan became suspicious that the mobs of crazed bobbysoxers in Philadelphia, who had previously disrobed him, had actually been paid to do so. The prime suspect was his aggressive new agent, Lew Wasserman, representing the Music Corporation of America (MCA).

  Born in Cleveland to Jewish-Russian immigrants, Wasserman had begun a meteoric rise, beginning in 1933 as a theater usher at a movie house in Cleveland and eventually evolving, under the MCA baton, into the most powerful actors’ and entertainment industry agent in the world.

  His clients included not only Reagan and Jane Wyman, but Warners’ über-diva, Bette Davis. In fact, most of the big stars at Warners were represented by him.

  If Wasserman were indeed the culprit who had staged the mob scene in Philadelphia, he had a reason. It was his attempt to convince Jack Warner that his new client was a sex symbol, with the intention of getting him a breakthrough role in an A-list picture.

  Warner believed that Errol Flynn and George Raft were sex symbols, but not “a clean-cut boy like Ronnie, whom I like personally, inviting him to my dinner parties.”

  “My male stars—Bogie, Ronnie, and Edward G. Robinson—are not sex symbols. Bogie and Edward G. are too ugly, almost repulsive, and Ronnie is every gal’s big brother, but not one she wants to commit incest with.”

  Wasserman had met with Warner to try to get him to cast Reagan in an A-picture, the role of George Gipp in Knute Rockne—All American, which was to star Pat O’Brien as the coach.

  For a while, William Holden and John Wayne had been leading contenders for the role of Gipp, although Robert Young and Robert Cummings provided heavyweight competition.

  At one point, a handsome Canadian actor from Manitoba five years older than Reagan, Donald Woods, was in the lead. He had appeared in several B pictures, making his film debut in 1928, at the dawn of the Talkies. Occasionally he got to appear in an A-list picture, too, including A Tale of Two Cities (1935) and Anthony Adverse (1936). Warner finally concluded that Woods “is even more clean cut than Reagan. I hear he’s faithful to his wife. My god, from what I heard, those two lovebirds fell in love with each other in the first grade.”

  [Woods had married Josephine Van der Horck in 1933, and he was still married to her when he died in Palm Springs in 1998.]

  “The role of George Gipp is not particularly romantic,” Wasserman protested.

  “Okay, I’ll consider Ronnie and get back to you,” Warner promised.

  It was believed that after this meeting, Wasserman then hired young women in Philadelphia to forcibly disrobe Reagan when he emerged onto the street through his hotel’s front door.

  But, then again, maybe not. No smoking gun was ever discovered, and Wasserman, of course, denied the charge.

  “Ronnie’s come a long way since he got rid of those god damn horn-rimmed glasses,” Warner had told Wasserman.

  [After 1940, Reagan was never again seen in any film with glasses. He had been among the first Hollywood star to wear contact lenses, something new on the market then in America. But there were problems. “Each lens has a little bubble over the cornea that you have to keep filed with a saline solution,” Reagan told his friends. “Every couple of hours, the solution turns gray and you go blind. You’ve got to take them out, remove the liquid, and put in a clear solution. They’re difficult to wear, but vanity prevails.”]

  Knowing that Wasserman also represented Jane Wyman, Warners issued an order concerning her appearance, too. “I don’t want her to wear glasses like she did in those Brother Rats. It makes her look too scholarly. Also, I want her to be blonder. Tell her hair stylist to make her hair lighter. I’ll invent a name for the kind of hair color I want. Call it ‘Vroom Blonde.’”

  Wasserman succeeded in negotiating more money for each of these soon-to-be-married clients of his. He arranged a seven-year contract for Reagan at $3,500 a week, referring to him as “my first million-dollar client.”

  He also convinced Warner to raise Jane’s salary from $500 a week. He secured a three-year contract for her, beginning at $1,500 a week, with the stipulation that it would eventually climb to $2,500 a week.

  Since she was still heavily in debt, she was delighted with the money. But as each new role came in for her, and she read yet another lackluster script associated with a B-picture, she continued to harass Wasserman to get her better parts. “I’ve got money in the bank, but I’m still a B-picture baby.”

  That long-anticipated A-picture role, her breakout movie, would not come until war’s end in 1945.

  In contrast to Jane, who was always complaining, Reagan became “the darling of MCA.”

  “Reagan was unlike all of our other clients, who bombarded us with complaints day and night,” said Taft Schreiber, an MCA executive. “Bette Davis constantly storms our citadel with one complaint after another. The diva even came to us one time to complain that Jack Warner had never felt her up.”

  Newlyweds for hire: An artfully staged, skilfully choreographed (by the studio) marriage. Three views of “America’s most ideal couple.”

  “I understand that Mr. Warner likes to put his filthy paws up a girl’s dress,” Davis said. “But he’s never done that to me. Does that mean he thinks I’m not a sex symbol like Kay Francis?”

  “If a star gets trapped in a rotten flick, we’re to blame,” Schreiber said. “But Ronnie never blames us. He suffers through the B with good spirits, knowing that his big break will come, feeling secure that we’re working to build him up.”

  Wasserman predicted that Reagan would become one of the biggest wartime stars in Hollywood. “Let’s face it,” Wasserman said to Reagan. “Sooner or later the United States will be attacked. All the glamour boys, unless some of them are too old, will be in the service. You’re blind. They won’t draft you. You can take over those matinee idol roles. Just be patient a little longer.”

  ***

  Whereas Brother Rat (1938) had been a hit, its sequel, Brother Rat and a Baby (1940), was lackluster. However, Warners hoped that the publicity generated by the marriage of Reagan with Jane would beef up the box office receipts.

  In the sequel, the original cast was reunited—Wayne Morris, Priscilla Lane, Jane Bryan, and Eddie Albert, plus Reagan and Jane. Instead of William Keighley, a new director, Ray Enright, a familiar face to both Jane and Reagan, was brought in to helm the script, written by Jerry Wald and Richard Macaulay. A strong supporting cast included such stalwarts as Arthur Treacher, Paul Harvey, Berton Churchill, and Humphrey Bogart’s quarrelsome wife, Mayo Methot.

  The baby in the movie, the one supposedly belonging to Eddie Albert and Priscilla Lane, was the usually congenial toddler, Peter Good. At one point during the filming, Elsa Maxwell, the famous hostess, threw a party for him at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. The kid was brought screaming into the party, and he continued screaming for another fifteen minutes until he was finally removed.

  The film’s most memorable and prophetic line was delivered when Jane says to Reagan: “You might as well back down, because I’m gonna get you.”

  Reagan noted that Enright was frequently impatient and seemed to deliberately rush through the script. At one point, he told Reagan, “Speed it up. I want out of this shit pile.”

  On the set, Reagan met a struggling, young, and rather handsome actor, Alan Ladd, who was appearing in a small role.

&nb
sp; “My great dream is to become a big star like you,” Ladd said to Reagan.

  “You flatter me,” Reagan answered. “I’m hardly a big star.”

  Ironically, the stardom during World War II that might have gone to Reagan, had he not been drafted, went to Ladd, after he appeared as the laconic gunman in the 1942 This Gun for Hire.

  “Hollywood’s two midgets, Ladd and his frequent co-star, Veronica Lake, became the screen team that Jane and I dreamed of becoming,” Reagan said. “Jane and I never made it, but they sure did. No hard feelings, kids.”

  Critic George Browne wrote, “What was mildly amusing when Morris, Albert, and Reagan were enrolled at the Virginia Military Institute as cadets seems silly and rather childish now that they have graduated to being so-called ‘adults.’ Their antics don’t seem to work anymore, and we’ve heard that Jack Warner has ruled, ‘No more glasses for Wyman.’”

  Another critic noted, “Reagan looks distinctly uncomfortable kissing Wyman on the screen. Maybe they should practice more at home. Dare I point out that all the principal stars were far too old to play the roles assigned?”

  Jane Bryan in 1939, off-camera, and her husband, drugstore czar Justin Dart, Sr. They evolved into major financial backers of political Reagan.

  Another reviewer suggested that “If Reagan is trying to succeed in screwball comedy, as this film suggests, somebody should tell him Cary Grant he ain’t.”

  Enright told Reagan that their film, Brother Rat, had angered some graduates of V.M.I., and that consequently, all references to that military institution were eliminated from the sequel.

  By the time Reagan worked again with Jane Bryan on the sequel, his original crush on her had gone the way of the summer wind. She was engaged to wealthy Justin Dart. Dart was unaware of Reagan’s former passion for his wife-to-be, and he and Reagan bonded in spite of their differences. A staunch Republican, Dart was large, gruff, with a brilliant grasp of economics. Mostly, they debated FDR, Reagan in his capacity as a liberal Democrat, wanting FDR to seek re-election, and Dart fearing that he would.