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

by Darwin Porter

  Ronald Reagan may have been Nancy’s consolation prize after losing Clark Gable, but the B-picture star became the love of her life. She made up her mind long before he did.

  The problem was: How to get this roving post-Wyman Romeo to quit dating every starlet in Hollywood and settle down to home and hearth with her?

  During World War II, Ronald Reagan (always in uniform) and Jane Wyman arguably became the most publicized couple in Hollywood, representing a fantasy version of what the American male in uniform and his wife and baby daughter on the homefront should look like. What was going on in their private lives beyond the screen was not known at the time, nor even today.

  Alert, aware, intelligent, and ambitious. Nancy Davis in 1950.

  As for Nancy Davis of Chicago, she almost fell off the radar screen until after the war, when her biography could resume after a long and dormant slumber.

  After Nancy’s graduation from Smith College in 1943, she secured work in summer stock that was so minor it’s hardly worth mentioning.

  Nancy still pursued a theatrical career, beginning at the lowest rung on the ladder, appearing in New England as an apprentice in mostly summer stock theaters.

  “An apprentice meant you had to do everything, even clean the toilet in the star’s dressing room,” Nancy recalled.

  Diana Barrymore, called “The Barrymore Brat” because of her Hollywood excesses, was the star, Nancy Davis the apprentice, in summer stock.

  “I appeared in rickety old summer stock playhouses along the Eastern Seaboard, including Bass Rocks, Massachusetts. “Sadly, most of them are gone today.”

  Nancy remembered her excitement when she actually had a line in one of these plays. “It wasn’t much of a part. I wore a black uniform and a starched white apron. I came out and spoke my line: ‘Madam, dinner is served.’ Often an actress starts at the bottom, and I was following that age-old custom.”

  During that summer of 1943, Walter Hartwig, director of the Ogunquit Playhouse in Maine, cast Diana Barrymore in You Can’t Take It With You, by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. Nancy had wanted the role for herself, but was hired as an apprentice.

  Diana was the daughter of the legendary John Barrymore, an alcoholic Don Juan who had died the previous year (1942). Her mother was the poet, Blanche Oelrichs, who had been Barrymore’s second wife.

  In the year of her father’s death, Universal had signed Diana to a contract and promoted her as “1942’s Most Sensational New Screen Personality.” But within months, she’d become known as “The Barrymore Brat,” because of her intake of alcohol and drugs and her lack of self-discipline.

  In response to the negativity building up against her in Hollywood, and as a means of fine-tuning her dramatic technique, Diana decided to take a respite and do summer stock in 1943, where she often showed up drunk at curtain time. She was also recovering from a disastrous affair with Errol Flynn, who had housed her dissipated father during his dying days. In her memoirs, Diana denied an affair with Flynn, but friends claimed otherwise.

  Say it isn’t so. When Nancy Davis worked in summer stock with Buddy Ebsen (upper photo), she developed a powerful crush on him. Her taste in men later improved.

  In the lower photo, hayseed Ebsen is seen in the TV series, The Beverly Hillbillies with Irene Ryan as possum-hunting Grannie.

  Ironically, when Diana’s memoir, Too Much, Too Soon was adapted into a film, Flynn played her father, with Dorothy Malone appearing as Diana. Nancy noted the brouhahas surrounding Diana during her apprenticeship, discussing them later with Joshua Logan.

  Nancy was later hired to work on Ogunquit’s summer stock production of The Male Animal, in which Buddy Ebsen was one of the stars. He was known for his inimitable, eccentric dancing style, with his tall, lanky frame doing rubbery gyrations. Nancy had seen him perform on the screen with both Shirley Temple and Judy Garland. He told her that he had lost out on the role of “The Tin Man” in The Wizard of Oz (1939), because he was allergic to the silver makeup.

  When Nancy Davis was signed by MGM, the studio at first tried to promote her (upper photo) as a femme fatale. But she had formidable competition from true femmes fatales like Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, and a rapidly maturing Elizabeth Taylor.

  Nancy’s image (lower photo) did end up in a stack of movie star postcards distributed before World War II in Sweden, each of them sized and formatted like baseball fan cards.

  John Edenstone worked on the production that summer and later claimed that Nancy developed a powerful crush on Ebsen. She admitted to that in a memoir. Eden-stone recalled, “Perhaps Nancy should be forgiven for her taste in men. Ebsen was a jerk. Even though many members of the production staff were gay, he was always attacking what he called ‘queers.’ Heshouldn’t have been alarmed. No self-respecting homo would be attracted to that hay-seed. In later years, he sure found his calling when he played the rube, Jed Clampett, in The Beverly Hillbillies on TV.”

  Nancy’s job as a backstage apprentice involved switching on recorded music backstage when Ebsen, on stage, walked over to a Victrola. “I was so mesmerized by him that I ignored the cue, and he had to ad-lib while I got the stars out of my eyes, and played the music.”

  Since her crush on Ebsen was going nowhere, she headed back to Chicago at the end of the summer with men on her mind—one in particular.

  ***

  Young Dr. Daniel Ruge (upper photo) was one of Nancy Davis’ first lovers when he worked for her stepfather, Dr. Loyal Davis, in Chicago.

  Later, he became Reagan’s White House doctor, and was with him at the time of an attempted assassination in 1981. Dr. Ruge may, in fact, have saved the life of the President.

  Nancy was rumored to have begun a three-month affair with Dr. Daniel Ruge, the longtime partner of Loyal Davis, her stepfather. Ruge later denied it, claiming, “You reporters have gotten me mixed up with Clark Gable, whom Nancy did date. Not me, brother, although she was a nice, beautiful young lady.”

  Hollywood biographers such as Mart Martin have long included Dr. Daniel Ruge among Nancy’s post-war lovers. “For twenty years,” Ruge said, “I was loyal to Loyal, but I didn’t share his racist attitudes. Neither did Nancy, She loved her stepfather and let him rant, never challenging him.”

  Born in Nebraska in 1917, he had earned his medical degree and a doctorate in pharmacology at Northwestern Medical School in Chicago. As a student, he had contracted tuberculosis, which had scarred his lungs. While training as a neurosurgeon in Chicago, he had worked for Loyal.

  Ruge’s assistant, Peter Winter, originally had wanted to be a doctor himself, but finally dropped out, having concluded that studying medical journals “was not my thing.”

  Winter had a front row seat to Ruge’s growing interest in Nancy. “She was the one who chose to go after Daniel, in my view,” Winter said. “He was an easy conquest. I think she’d lost her virginity long before they became secretly involved. I saw evidence that they were going at it hot and heavy. Very masculine, Daniel stood 6’2” and was appealing to a lot of the nurses. But Nancy got the prize.”

  “I don’t think he was in love with her, but found her a reliable sex outlet. He was too much of a gentleman to go into clinical details, but he always came in with a smile on his face after a night out with Loyal’s stepdaughter. I often saw them heading out at night, with theater tickets. Loyal knew about it and didn’t object. He trusted Daniel not to get her pregnant, or, if he did, he knew how to take care of it.”

  “The affair ended,” Winter said in an interview, “when Nancy settled in New York and found many other beaux, of that I’m certain. But she and Daniel would remain friends for years to come, even in the White House.

  [Fast forward to March 30, 1981. The local time in Washington, D.C., is 2:25pm, and President Ronald Reagan is leaving the Hilton Hotel after a speech before the AFLCIO. Suddenly, six shots ring out from a .22 caliber Rohm RG-14 revolver. The assassin was the deranged, Oklahoma-born John W. Hinckley, Jr., age 26.

  Reagan was
not hit directly. One bullet ricocheted off the President’s armor-plated, black Lincoln limousine and penetrated his left side. The bullet hit his rib and punctured and collapsed a lung before lodging in the spongy tissue an inch from his heart. The President had come close to instant death.

  Reagan’s press secretary, Jim Brady, received a direct shot, the bullet entering his brain. Police officer Thomas Delahanty was shot in the neck. As he was trained to do, Secret Service Agent Timothy McCarthy stood his ground and turned to face the gunfire. He took a bullet aimed at Reagan. It hit him in the chest. All the men shot around Reagan survived, through Brady remained paralyzed on the left side of his body until his death in August of 2014.

  In one of the ironies of history, Dr. Daniel Ruge, Nancy’s former beau, was functioning at the time as chief physician at the White House. He stood close to Reagan during the attack on the President’s life.

  Rushed to George Washington University Hospital with Reagan, Ruge ordered that the President be stripped naked so he could locate the entry point of the bullet. Blood transfusions were ordered at once. The President was calling out, “I can’t breathe.” He was suffering a massive loss of blood. Emergency surgery was performed, and some members of the staff were on the verge of rushing to their phones to announce that Reagan was dead, and that George H.W. Bush had assumed the presidency.

  There was great confusion at the time as to who was running the government. Secretary of State Alexander Haig proclaimed, “I am in control here.” At the time, Bush was flying to Washington from Texas.

  Ruge later admitted, “I made a grave error in not notifying the proper people that, according to the 25th Amendment, Bush should have been named Acting President. Reagan was completely drugged and out of it. He was in no shape to preside over World War III, should it have come.”

  Rushed to the hospital, Nancy was in a state of hysteria. That night she wrote in her diary, “Nothing can happen to my Ronnie. My life would be over.” Her anguish and depression lasted for months.

  Ruge, still friends with Nancy after all those years, later discussed his term as chief physician at the White House. He said, “I inspected every inch of Reagan’s body, inside and out. He was seven years older than me, and he was in a hell of a lot better shape than I was. He didn’t smoke cigarettes and took care of himself.”

  He also denied that Reagan, during his first term, showed signs of his oncoming Alzheimer’s disease. “He had a good memory then. I don’t know about his last years in office. I never saw any signs of mental deterioration.”

  Ruge claimed he didn’t remain in his post for a second term, because, “I found the job vastly overrated. It’s not one of the glamour jobs at the White House. For example, Nancy often could not fit me in for a seat at State dinners. Dressed in a tux, I had to sit in my office solving crossword puzzles, waiting for the President to have a stroke, which never happened.”

  Ever faithful, Nancy was always there for Reagan throughout his hospital ordeal. In her 1989 memoir, My Turn, she claimed she had the White House chef deliver her husband “two favorite soups: hamburger and split pea.”

  As Reagan recovered, the story grew more bizarre. At his trial on June 21, Hinckley was charged with thirteen offenses, but found not guilty by reason of insanity on June 21. After the trial, he wrote that the “shooting was the greatest love offering in the history of the world.” In his deranged mind, he seemed to believe that his act would earn the love of actress Jodie Foster, with whom he had maintained an obsession ever since he’d seen her in the 1976 film, Taxi Driver. In it, she played a child prostitute.

  Before heading off to kill Reagan, Hinckley considered tracking Foster down and committing suicide in front of her, but he soon rejected the idea. In his crazed mind, he figured that assassinating a President would elevate him to the level of a historical figure like Lee Harvey Oswald—and therefore, her equal. Oswald was his role model.]

  ***

  George Batson’s Ramshackle Inn opened on Broadway on January 5, 1944, marking the New York debut of ZaSu Pitts on the stage. The play got poor to occasionally tepid reviews. But because of Pitts’ draw as a popular comedienne, it nonetheless ran for 216 performances. The newspaper PM reviewed it as “a dreary piece of hocus-pocus, with a soporific first act and a helter-skelter second and third. Batson seemed to tailor the role of “Belinda Pride” to Pitts’ specific talents, with her “blinking eyes, fluttering hands, and quavering voice.”

  The plot concerns a retired librarian (Pitts) who buys a decaying colonial inn on the beach for only $3,000. As would be expected, it is falling apart and has a leaky roof. As one critic wrote, “Pitts is the imperturbable librarian who encounters ghosts and secret trunks, as she wanders through mysterious situations and thunderstorms, meeting both the living and the dead as innkeeper.”

  Most of the residents of the inn are bizarre—characters, viewers might have believed, from the twilight zone. There’s a bootlegging operation going on in the basement.

  Pitts liked her role so much that she persuaded the producers to take it on the road, first to Washington, then to Chicago. It was here that Nancy, along with her parents, Loyal and Edith Davis, took her to see the play, following the performance with a reunion with Pitts.

  There was a small role in the play for “Alice Fisher,” a gangster’s moll who is kidnapped and sedated. Alice, dazed, drugged, and confused, makes only a brief appearance. The young actress interpreting that role dropped out in Chicago.

  Subsequently, Pitts asked Nancy if she’d step in and take over the role as Ramshackle Inn headed for Detroit and points throughout the Middle West.

  Nancy later wrote in one of her memoirs, “I suspect Edith had a hand in getting me the role. It was my first part in a professional production, and I grabbed my big chance. I played the role of the girl held captive upstairs. It wasn’t much of a part, but it was a start, and I was on my own, with the best wishes of my parents.”

  In Detroit, Pitts took Nancy under her wing, even letting her share her dressing room. “It was a brand new world for me,” Nancy said, “and having a friend like ZaSu was very comforting. She had been a great beauty in her youth, and at this point in her career looked ageless. We traveled with the play across country.”

  Nancy’s mentor, inspiration, and unofficial guardian was a family friend and actress from the Silent era: ZaSu Pitts.

  Here, she’s depicted with Mary Pickford (right) in a 1917 scene from the silent film, A Little Princess.

  During the tour, the players stopped off at the Danforth Lodge on Lake Oconomowoc in Wisconsin. Nancy was seen going out with two different beaux, described as “farm-fed, red-blooded, all-American types.”

  John Sheldon, a stagehand, later said, “Even though she was under ZaSu’s protective eye, Nancy seemed to have a few stage door Johnnies waiting to take her out. She was not an obvious showgal cutie, but men, some much older than Nancy, seemed to find her sexually alluring. I don’t know if she were putting out for these guys or not. She never said anything. But there was a lot of gossip about her backstage.”

  Veteran actress ZaSu Pitts claimed, “Nancy is like a daughter to me.”

  The play returned to New York, but not to a theater on Broadway. “We played the subway circuit,” Nancy said, referring to theaters in Brooklyn and the Bronx. At one point, they appeared on Long Island.

  When the tour ended, Nancy decided to remain in New York, pounding the streets of Broadway, looking for a job in the theater. “I fancied myself the second coming of Helen Hayes,” she said, jokingly. “I’d grown up surrounded by such great artists as Spencer Tracy and Lillian Gish. Now, I wanted to become part of their exclusive fraternity, even if it meant getting attacked by a lecherous Tallulah Bankhead.”

  ***

  Moving into the least expensive room at the Barbizon, an all-woman’s hotel known for housing acting hopefuls at the time, Nancy began her conquest of Broadway. To keep her from feeling alone and adrift, she lived close to family fri
ends when she moved to a small apartment on East 51st Street, near the man she still called “Uncle Walter,” Walter Huston. He urged her to date and meet people in the theater. He even arranged escorts for her with people who might get her a part in a show.

  Spencer Tracy lived in the Waldorf Suites, and sometimes, Katharine Hepburn stayed with him. Nancy grew closer and closer to him, and he would play an important role in her career as it advanced.

  During the day, she walked the streets, going from one casting office to another. She later denounced a lot of these casting calls as “meat markets.” Horny producers often asked her to show them her legs—and many of them wanted her to lie on their casting couch or else perform fellatio on them as they sat at their desks. For the most part, she avoided such advances. “I want to be a serious actress,” she told family friend, Lillian Gish. “I don’t intend to become a Ziegfeld Girl.”

  Spencer Tracy in an early photo with his son, John, who was deaf, living “in a world of silence,” as his father, with anguish, described.

  In her first memoir, Nancy (1980), she admitted to having dated “a lot of actors, mostly writers, directors, assistant directors, and assistant producers.” On occasion, she dated more influential producers and directors, some of whom took her to the Stork Club. “No serious romances,” she recalled.

  She was on a lean budget and had to “watch every penny, or at least every nickel” (her words). Visiting movie stars stopped at the Stork Club, then one of the most fashionable after-dark rendezvous spots in New York, and one night, she caught her first glimpse of the very glamorous Joan Crawford. Ethel Merman was a regular, and Nancy saw her showing up on the arm of J. Edgar Hoover. When Nancy mentioned her sighting to Tracy, he said, “It’s all a cover. He’s a homo, and she’s really a dyke.”