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

by Darwin Porter

  In addition to his performance in Casablanca, he would also make a startling appearance as a Nazi soldier in Mrs. Miniver (1942) with Greer Garson.

  Reagan renewed his friendship with William Lundigan, Errol Flynn’s boyfriend, with whom he had worked on Santa Fe Trail.

  When Reagan had lunch with him, the handsome young actor was very candid. “Errol treats me like a Saturday night pussy. He ignores me for days, then calls and expects me to come running, which I always do. He never treats me like an equal, but like some boy in his harem. Right now, he’s seeing a lot more of Bruce Cabot than he is of me. He calls him ‘Big Bruce,’ for obvious reasons, I guess.”

  “I find Errol a bit hard to take,” Reagan said.

  “I find him hard to take, too,” Lundigan said.

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” Reagan said. “You boys always twist a man’s words.”

  “Sorry…And by the way, I’ve got some news for you,” Lundigan said. “It’s been announced that Errol is going to make Desperate Journey (1942), an anti-Nazi movie. He asked Jack Warner to designate you as his co-star. He liked you a lot when we made Santa Fe Trail. In fact, he told me that he’s going to get you yet. How do you think that makes me feel?”

  “Rest assured,” Reagan said. “I can fend off any advances from Mr. Flynn. He should know by now I don’t go that route.”

  “Perhaps you will,” Lundigan said. “Others, both men and women, have said that, but they finally collapse under Errol’s charms. He’s very persuasive. If his charm fails, he can revert to rape.”

  “I’ll call for your help if he tries that,” Reagan said.

  One afternoon, Flynn arrived on the set and greeted Reagan. “How’s about a kiss, sport?”

  “Instead of that, how about a punch in the nose?” Reagan asked.

  While waiting for Lundigan to complete a scene, Flynn was introduced to Dantine. As Reagan stood witnessing it, Flynn was instantly attracted to the Austrian actor, and made his intentions obvious. The young actor seemed mesmerized by Flynn, in a way that implied, according to Reagan, that Lundigan would suddenly face competition for Flynn’s affections.

  It came as no surprise, months later, when Dantine was announced as one of the supporting actors in Flynn’s upcoming picture, Desperate Journey.

  Tod Andrews was cast in International Squadron as a French pilot, the boyfriend of the character played by Bradna. In their movie, Andrews played a character named Michele Edmé. He liked the name so much, he changed his professional name to an English-language derivation of it, being henceforth known as “Michael Ames.” Reagan would soon find himself competing with Ames for the role he wanted in Kings Row.

  The brass at Warners’ became upset at the slow pace of International Squadron, and Mendes was replaced by Lewis Seiler as director. He had previously helmed Reagan in Hell’s Kitchen with the Dead End Kids. “I thought Mendes was a rough taskmaster, but Seiler, anxious to conclude filming on schedule, was reckless,” Reagan said. “He almost caused me to go up in flames.”

  Reagan had requested a double for one or two of his character’s dangerous stunts, but Seiler rejected his requests. In one scene unfolding inside the cockpit of a plane, Reagan was to set a mop on fire, open the cockpit’s hood, and toss the blazing mop outside. That stunt was intended to incite Luftwaffe pilots into thinking that his plane was on fire and to move on to other targets.

  Reagan ignited the mop. But then, when he tried to open the hood of the cockpit, it jammed, and the cockpit began filling up with flames and smoke. Two grips eventually forced the hood open and rescued him. Reagan was rushed to the hospital for treatment of smoke inhalation.

  When he was released two days later, Seiler demanded that the scene be reshot immediately. Against his better judgment, Reagan performed the same scene with a new mop. This time, the scene went off without incident.

  International Squadron bore remarkable similarities to 20th Century Fox’s A Yank in the R.A.F. (1941), a “hero aviator” film co-starring Tyrone Power and Betty Grable.

  Consequently, Darryl F. Zanuck at Fox wrote threatening letters to Jack Warner, accusing him of stealing the plot of A Yank in the R.A.F. “You’re planning a low-budget picture to capitalize off the fame of our movie,” Zanuck charged.

  Warners’ position was that International Squadron was a remake of its 1935 movie, Ceiling Zero. Consequently, they went ahead and released the Reagan film without going to court to defend it.

  Upon the release of International Squadron, many reviewers hailed the movie as Reagan’s best work to date, although he had little competition for that honor, considering the lackluster reviews generated by his previous string of B movies.

  However, when the film was screened in England, some technically savvy members of the audience laughed. The “Spitfire” Reagan’s character had piloted was nothing more than a doctored-up Ryan monoplane that didn’t even have a retractable landing gear. In his memoirs, Reagan wrote that “people accepted our makeshift props with the same kindly understanding they gave the local high school play.” In writing that, perhaps he didn’t hear the mocking laughter that howled out of England at the time.

  Patriotic Fervor: Tyrone Power with Betty Grable in Darryl Zanuck’s sword-rattling answer (A Yank in the RAF) to Jack Warner’s International Squadron.

  Although America had not yet entered World War II, Jack Warner ordered major promotion of the film, knowing that audiences, except for “America Firsters” and German-Americans, were siding with the British. International Squadron was blatantly anti-Nazi, a slant which censors interpreted as a flagrant violation of America’s neutrality.

  Warner wanted to promote Reagan as a star, with the understanding that if he was rejected by the Army because of his eyesight, he’d become the biggest star at Warners, especially in wartime movies about airplane pilots.

  Ads for International Squadron proclaimed: “This is the role that zooms Ronald Reagan to the heights of stardom.” History would demonstrate, of course, that that advertising slogan was a gross exaggeration.

  Isolationists in Washington were outraged by the anti-German slant of International Squadron. Warners was accused of “war-mongering,” and the Warner Brothers were specifically blamed as “Jews selfishly maneuvering American troops into World War II.”

  A politically motivated investigation was called. A Subcommittee of the House Committee on Interstate Commerce summoned Harry Warner to Washington for questioning. Since the release of Confessions of a Nazi Spy, Warners was considered the most anti-Nazi film studio in Hollywood.

  Before the committee, Warner delivered an eloquent defense of his studio, claiming a responsibility to let the American public know about what was happening in Europe and the world. He said that of all the books published the previous year in America, seventy percent of non-fiction books were anti-Nazi, and ten percent of all fiction reflected the same point of view. He also claimed that ten percent of all film scripts submitted to Warners were virulently anti-Nazi.

  But in early December of 1941, within days of the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the committee’s war-mongering charges against Warners were dropped. At that point, all Hollywood studios began churning out pro-America wartime propaganda films that were not only anti-Nazi, but anti-Japanese as well.

  ***

  A sprinkling of snow early one morning hinted at a cold upcoming autumn in Dixon, Illinois. Louella Parsons set out with Ronald Reagan to celebrate “Louella Parsons Day” in their native town of Dixon, where both of them had grown up.

  Seizing the moment, Jack Warner rushed an early cut of International Squadron to a movie theater in Dixon for a world premiere.

  Using her power as a ruthless Hollywood columnist, Parsons rounded up a bevy of Hollywood stars, spearheaded by Bob Hope, to accompany Reagan and her on their tour of her native Midwest.

  Others in her all-star troupe included the comedian Jerry Colonna, along with Ann Rutherford, who had played Scarlett O’Hara’s sister
, Coreen, in Gone With the Wind. The handsome leading man, George Montgomery, went along too, as did silent screen star, Bebe Daniels. She was accompanied by Ben Lyon, who had scored such a hit in the Howard Hughes production of Hell’s Angels in 1930, the year in which he’d married Daniels.

  Jane Wyman, recovering from minor surgery, was not able to make the trip, so Reagan’s mother, Nelle, accompanied her son instead, lamenting, “I’m so sorry that Jack didn’t live to see this day.” Her husband (Reagan’s father) had died that May.

  To take over when Hope’s humor failed him, comedian Joe E. Brown, Jane Wyman’s least favorite film partner, also joined the troupe aboard the train heading east.

  A few moments after the train’s arrival at Dixon’s railway station, Parsons stepped in front of a waiting microphone to deliver a “thank you, thank you, thank you,” to the assembled crowd.

  Then Hope claimed the microphone from her. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “Over there is the birthplace of your townswoman, Louella Parsons. Do you wonder that this glamour girl—ablaze with orchids, dressed to the teeth, bedecked and bejeweled— wants to forget it? Do you wonder that the little lady is overcome with emotion?”

  Parsons was irritated at such an enigmatic and downbeat introduction, but flashed an insincere smile nonetheless.

  A crowd of 50,000, many from neighboring homesteads and hamlets, had journeyed to Dixon to see the stars. A ten-block parade, with five bands and fifteen floats, was staged along the elm-lined Galena Street, the shop-flanked main artery of the little city. Parsons would recall the parade that seemed “to spin in my memory like a happy but dizzy dream.”

  She rode in an open convertible, waving her white-gloved hand to the bystanders in a style she’d lifted from watching newsreels of British royalty moving through the streets of London.

  In all his Brylcreemed glory, Reagan rode in a separate car with a frail Nelle, as both waved to the crowds. The parade ended near Geisenheimers Department Store, where Parsons had once worked as a sales clerk in the corset department, merchandizing contoured undergarments to restrain the flesh of her corn-fed customers. This was near the old store where Jack Reagan had once fitted shoes onto local farmers who came from outlying fields into Dixon to shop.

  Louella Parsons, accompanied by Ronald Reagan, returns to the little town of Dixon, where she once sold undergarments and corsets to farmers’ wives.

  Later, Parsons dedicated the Louella Parsons Children’s Ward, a new facility within the town’s Katherine Shaw Bethea Hospital.

  The hospital visit was followed by speeches in the park. At the podium, Reagan delivered a rather long-winded speech, much to Parsons’ obvious annoyance.

  “I want all of you to know that I did not sleep last night, thinking of my trip back here, where I could meet old friends. I counted the seventy-seven persons whom I have been credited with pulling out of the Rock River at Lowell Park many times during the night.”

  Snapped in Dixon, and portraying a finger-pointing Ronald Reagan, the face of the mystery woman in the photo above is obscured in shadow.

  Some newspapers labeled her as Louella Parsons; others as Nelle Reagan. You be the judge.

  Then, Parsons managed to grapple the microphone from Reagan. Before that, Colonna had whispered in her ear, “Reagan thinks he’s running for Congress.”

  Two hundred special guests were invited to a “rubber chicken” luncheon paid for by Warners. These box lunches were served on the lawn of Hazelwood, the Myrtle Walgreen estate.

  In the afternoon, Reagan visited Lowell Park, where he discovered that the log on which he’d notched a record of the seventy-seven men and women he’d saved from the Rock River had washed away. At a ceremony, he was presented with a clock with the engraving, “From 77 Grateful People.” Before the crowd, he said, “I came to know the victims better in five minutes than their mothers did in a lifetime.”

  Following a banquet at Dixon’s Masonic Temple, a local movie house held the premiere of International Squadron, which, at its conclusion, received a standing ovation.

  Parsons announced that director Frank Capra wanted Reagan to star in his upcoming film, Arsenic and Old Lace (1944). That role, however, was later awarded to Cary Grant. Parsons also announced that Jack Warner wanted Reagan to star in The Will Rogers Story. That didn’t happen either.

  [Ironically, a decade later, in 1952, The Will Rogers Story would be made, but its star was Will Rogers, Jr., playing opposite Jane Wyman, by then divorced from Reagan.]

  Reporters from Hollywood interviewed the locals for firsthand memories of either Parsons or Reagan. Several women remembered Louella as “a silly romantic girl, a big sentimentalist with dreams of being a writer.” Several recalled “ her gooey personality.” She had attended Dixon College followed by a year of teaching in a country school. Later, she worked part time as a reporter on the Dixon Star.

  Biographer Edmund Morris rounded up some opinions of Reagan at the time: “Loves to talk, hates to listen. Exaggerates his college football prowess. Dislikes tennis and tomatoes. Combs his hair the wrong way. Keeps on his shoes as he undresses. Also keeps a scrapbook of flattering news clips of himself. Nurses a beer longer than Carrie Nation. Likes Bing Crosby and macaroni and cheese. Steals jokes from George Burns and Jack Benny. Dick Powell and some Republicans want him to run for Congress on their ticket, but Reagan remains a passionate New Dealer.”

  A reporter for the Dixon Star wrote: “If beauty-starved Dixonians were looking forward to ogling Ronald Reagan’s curvaceous wife, they were doomed to disappointment. Instead of an eyeful of Jane Wyman, they got an earful of Louella Parsons.” Newspapers proclaimed that Louella Parson’s Day generated more excitement than did the parade dedicated to Charles Lindbergh when the fabled aviator visited Dixon. All media hailed the rags-to-riches story of both Parsons and Reagan, citing them “as typically American Sunday supplement heroes.”

  On a broadcast over CBS’s Chicago affiliate, Reagan proclaimed that the event in Dixon “fulfilled a dream which probably every boy has at some time—that of coming home and being acclaimed by the local folks.”

  ***

  After recovering from minor surgery (a curettage), Jane Wyman reported to work as a loan-out to RKO. Her next picture, a vehicle for bandleader and singer Kay Kyser, was entitled My Favorite Spy (1942), a comedy caper revolving around Nazi spies working undercover in America. After reading the script, she was displeased with her role, regarding the film as a vehicle for the musician. “I’m just the blonde fluff,” she claimed in a call to Reagan.

  “So what else is new?” he asked her.

  During her brief stint in the hospital, she’d been discreetly visited, on separate occasions, by both John Payne and Dennis Morgan. They brought flowers and well wishes, and Payne even talked about the possibility of marriage if they ever divorced their respective spouses.

  In response, she told him she had no intention of divorcing Reagan. “But check with me later,” she said. “I might change my mind.”

  Morgan, as he’d told her before, never planned to divorce his wife, but preferred their present sexual arrangement. Jane seemed in agreement.

  During his final visit, Payne brought casting news: “I heard from Gregory Ratoff, who’s directing, that you’re going to be loaned out again, this time to Fox. We’re going to appear in this thing called Footlight Serenade (1942) with Betty Grable and Victor Mature. Those two are involved in a torrid affair.”

  In the aftermath of her surgery, she’d returned home. There, the producer of My Favorite Spy, Harold Lloyd, the famous silent screen comic, dropped in for a visit.

  Kay Kyser, bandleader and entertainment mogul, gets amorous with Jane in My Favorite Spy.

  As a little girl, she’d seen him on the screen playing bespectacled nebbishes in peril. In the pantheon of silent screen comics and their popularity with movie-goers of that era, he had placed third after Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.

  In a moment of levity, she told hi
m, “The last time I met Chaplin when I was a little girl, he tried to molest me. How safe am I with you?”

  “Very safe,” Lloyd said. “I molest no one. I’m the one who’s usually molested.”

  She told him that as regards their upcoming My Favorite Spy, she’d been disappointed to find herself taking third billing after Kyser and Ellen Drew, a former beauty contest winner who, in the film, would play Kyser’s bride.

  Ellen Drew

  “I think it’ll be a big hit,” Lloyd predicted, not addressing her concern.

  Kyser, at the time, was a popular bandleader and singer, a well-known radio personality of the 1930s and the war years. His big hit on radio was as the quizmaster of an ongoing variety show, “Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge.”

  [A native of North Carolina, Kyser was also a vocalist, a Big Band director, and a master of swing and jazz. To capitalize off his fame, Hollywood had cast him in a number of movies, including That’s Right You’re Wrong in 1939 and You’ll Find Out in 1940. His last film had also been John Barrymore’s last, Play mates, made in 1941. Barrymore died in the spring of the following year.]

  Before shooting of My Favorite Spy began, Jane lunched with its director, Tay Garnett. He was very blunt. “I asked RKO to hire you because I wanted your fine acting and style to camouflage the fact that Kyser is a swinging musician, but a lousy actor.”

  A native of Los Angeles, Garnett won Jane’s approval. She’d seen two of the films he’d directed, including Eternally Yours (1939), which had co-starred Loretta Young and David Niven. [In future years, Jane would appear with Niven in film, and Young would become her best friend.] Before the end of their lunch, Garnett invited Jane to a screening of his latest movie, Seven Sinners, starring John Wayne and Marlene Dietrich as a torch singer.

  On the set, Jane had a reunion with William Demarest, who’d been cast in a minor role. In the 1930s, he’d been her friend, mentor, and agent. She chided him: “After you discovered her in an ice cream parlor, you seemed to do better with Ellen Drew’s career than with mine.”