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

by Darwin Porter

  Back in Los Angeles, she waited two weeks before showing up on his doorstep again. He welcomed her into his apartment.

  “We did our thing,” she later said. “But there was never any commitment, any definition of our relationship, or whether it had come to an end. It did, eventually, of course, but I ended it…Not him! Do I know men?”

  ***

  Mobile again, no longer walking with a cane, Reagan launched one of his most serious romances, one within a series of “between marriages affairs,” this time with gossip and entertainment columnist Doris Lilly. Cindy Adams, the New York Post columnist, once wrote, “Doris was never fond of poverty. She was meeting rich people when the rest of us were in camel’s hair. She received a prized sable coat from a male admirer, who was a little bit married.”

  “If it were true that money grew on trees, all my friends would be married to apes,” Lilly said. For years, she wrote a popular gossip column for the New York Post. Later, she admitted that her column was sometimes “silly,” and that the people she wrote about were often “shallow.” But they’re pleasant and they smell good and they eat well and drink good wines—and that’s all right.”

  Columnist Doris Lilly was a social butterfly whom Reagan called “My Gilded Lily” as she flitted from millionaire to millionaire.

  Even as a young contract actress working for Cecil B. DeMille, Lilly had an eye for people already established, but also for up-and-coming millionaires. She sensed that Reagan, although a “failed actor” (her words) when she began to date him, was “really going places one day, perhaps in a field different from the movies.”

  Lilly told author Kitty Kelley that Reagan “liked the big, outdoor blonde, Pasadena Rose Bowl Parade queen type of California woman. I know, because I was one of them. Whenever they were in town, we went to see George Jessel or Sophie Tucker, his favorite entertainers. We went ice skating in Westwood by the old veterans’ home. I listened to all his stories and his endless rants about politics. We were often separated on different coasts. Sometimes the references in his letters were sexual.”

  On April 28, 1948, in a letter he wrote to her, he said, “I’d like to be tossing off a ‘short one’ with you.”

  One Sunday morning, when she called him, and after a few minutes of dialogue, she accused him of having “another blonde in bed with you.”

  He later sent her a note. “Your call interrupted no Sunday matinee (d--n it: I was just fogged over and sleepy.”)

  He never wrote out the words “damn” or “hell.” They were always abbreviated to “d—n” or “h—l.”

  On their dates, he was still driving that turquoise Cadillac, that birthday gift from Jane Wyman before their divorce.

  “Reagan and I had a delightful little romance in 1948,” Lilly claimed. “Intimately, he was nothing memorable, but he was an appealing-looking guy who was very, very sweet. I hate to say that he was weak—maybe a nicer word would be ‘passive.’ He loved to go out and be seen at all the nightclubs in Hollywood in those days, and he loved to drink, but was never a drunk. He was a very gentle, very square, very hayseed type of man.”

  She later denied that she had ever admitted to an intimate relationship with Reagan. “I don’t talk about sex. That’s not my generation.” However, it was well known among Reagan’s friends that Lilly often indulged in a sleepover with Reagan, leaving before dawn. William Holden and Reagan’s best male friends were aware of the relationship, because he talked privately about his plans to marry her. He confessed to Holden and others, “The sex was great.” Obviously, based on what she later said, it was greater for Reagan than it was for Lilly.

  Years later, she recalled that one night, Reagan was filled with total despair, “I just can’t get it right,” he told her. Reportedly, he was almost sobbing. “I’m no good alone. I need someone to share my life, and Doris, you are that someone.”

  She said, “What I knew for sure was that he didn’t love me, and I didn’t love him. I could have had him if I’d wanted him. If I was willing to make the big moves, push, be there, encourage him, never leave him alone for a moment. He would never leave me if I made him think it would be wrong to do so. Those soft, vulnerable eyes staring into mine. I couldn’t do it [i.e., marry him]. I would only bring him more misery later on. I let the moment go.”

  “But the day was saved,” Lilly said. “Along came Nancy to save his soul.”

  In 1951, after she broke up with Reagan, Lilly’s tongue-in-cheek novel, How to Marry a Millionaire was published by Putnam. Ironically, its 1953 adaptation into a film became one of the most popular movies Marilyn Monroe ever made.

  Lilly later wrote a sequel, How to Marry a Billionaire (Delacorte, 1984). “A million dollars isn’t much money these days. You can’t even get a decent house for that.”

  Lilly is also said to have been the inspiration for the Holly Golightly character in Truman Capote’s novella, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which evolved, in 1961, into a movie hit starring Audrey Hepburn. [Capote had wanted Marilyn Monroe to interpret the role. Other women, not just Lilly, also claimed to have been the inspiration for Holly.]

  Lilly said, “There was a lot of wondering about who was the original Holly Golightly. Pamela Drake and I were living in this brownstone walk-up on East 78th Street, exactly the one in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Exactly. Truman used to come over all the time to watch me put on my makeup before I went out. There’s an awful lot of me in Holly Golightly.”

  Lilly later said, “After me, I don’t think Ronnie went out with anyone on a very serious basis. He was a new bachelor with a roving eye. From what I heard, he took out a girl only once or twice before dumping her. Some of his affairs lasted a whole week.”

  When Reagan became President, Lilly sold two of the love letters he’d written to her for $4,400. Financier Malcolm Forbes purchased them and presented them as a gift to Nancy Reagan. He waited until Reagan left office so that she would not have to declare them as gifts.

  Lilly was furious when she heard what Forbes had done. “That bitch [a reference to Nancy] is so jealous of any other woman who knew Ronnie that she’ll probably destroy the letters so that future generations won’t know there was anyone else but her in his life. It’s a damn shame that Malcolm gave them to her, because those letters should be preserved as part of history.”

  ***

  Perhaps out of friendship with Reagan, both Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons rarely reported on his post-Wyman romances. However, columnist Sidney Skolsky ran many a juicy tidbit, detailing a number of affairs of the women in his life, including Adele Jergens, Monica Lewis, Patricia Neal, and Nancy Davis, whom he referred to as “a pretty model.”

  Connie Wald, who had been married to Jerry Wald, a close friend of Reagan, recalled that period of his life “between marriages.”

  “His career was going downhill, and he was drifting from the bed of one beautiful young woman to another. I must say, the girls really went for him. He had his pick of Hollywood beauties. He was so sweet and nice, and he still had his good looks. Yet he was a very private man. He didn’t want anyone to look inside. He was never really serious about anyone until Nancy Davis came along, and even she had a hard time nailing him. She faced stiff competition from half the dames in Hollywood. Many a starlet was anxious to become the second Mrs. Ronald Reagan, president of the Screen Actors Guild.”

  Even the fan magazines picked up on Reagan, the new “Hollywood swinger.” Silver Screen wrote, “Never thought we’d come right out and call Ronald Reagan a ‘wolf,’ but let us face it. Suddenly, every glamour gal considers him a super-sexy escort for the evening. He admits he’s missed a lot of fun and is out to make up for it. Some say that the torch of Jane Wyman has finally been reduced to a feeble flame.”

  Reagan claimed his hot date, Kay Stewart, had “Betty Grable legs and Betty’s blonde hair, although in this picture she had reverted to her natural “wren brown.”

  ***

  Sometimes, Reagan double dated with other marrie
d couples, particularly Robert Taylor and Barbara Stanwyck, who were having their own marital troubles. They would divorce in 1951. One night, Reagan was spotted with starlet Kay Stewart, whom he called “My Yellow Rose of Texas.

  Stewart and Reagan often talked about how they got started in Hollywood in the late 1930s. She had a brief appearance in Ernst Lubitsch’s 1939 Ninotchka, and she had worked with Preston Sturges in his comedies. Reagan said, “Kay had never really had a chance to show off her talent.”

  Both Stewart and Reagan were recovering from recent divorces. She had been married to Langdon William Proctor.

  Reagan told Stanwyck, “Kay wants to be as big a movie star as you are.”

  Stanwyck shot back, “As if that were possible.”

  Penny Edwards, shown here in full cowgirl drag with Roy Rogers. When the “King of the Cowboys” wasn’t in the saddle, Reagan became the horseman.

  Actually, Stewart went on to garner nearly a hundred credits, mostly in TV series, such as Charlie’s Angels, Baretta, Medical Story, and The Doris Day Show.

  “My romance with Kay ended before it really began,” Reagan told Taylor. “She’s looking for another husband, and it isn’t going to be me.”

  ***

  Penny Edwards had a small role in That Hagen Girl with Reagan and Shirley Temple. Three weeks after making that box office failure, he called her for a date, which led to several outings and what was rumored as a prolonged sexual fling.

  At the time Reagan met her, she was appearing in Two Guys from Texas (1948), with Dennis Morgan and Jack Carson. He quizzed her a lot about Morgan, and she said she knew very little about him, except Jane paid at least five visits to the set to see Morgan. Edwards later said, “I think Ronnie suspected something was going on between Dennis and Jane. I felt something was, but I’m not a blabbermouth.”

  Edwards was blonde and blue-eyed—“just my type,” Reagan said.

  Stanwyck said, “Ronnie was a gentleman who preferred blondes but married brunettes.”

  Edwards had appeared in 1943 in The Ziegfeld Follies with Milton Berle. “He took my virginity and gave me the wrong impression about men. I had never seen a nude man before, so I just assumed that all of them had a tree truck between their legs. Did I soon learn differently.”

  Reagan would go for long periods without calling and then suddenly, “in the middle of the night, he’d ring up for a date,” she recalled.

  He learned that she’d become involved on and off the screen with Roy Rogers, “King of the Cowboys.” When his wife, Dale Evans, retired as “Queen of the Cowgirls,” Edwards filled in for her, signing on for such pictures as Sunset in the West (1950). She told Reagan “You take Roy out of the saddle, and he isn’t much, if you get my drift.”

  “I’ve heard the same said about John Wayne,” Reagan said.

  “They can’t say that about you, lover boy,” Edwards said. “What stamina! What endurance!”

  “My thing with Ronnie might have gone somewhere had it not been for my mother,” Edwards recalled. “She was a real Bible thumper, a religious zealot. She hated Ronnie, and called him a whoremonger.”

  He met her a few more times, including as part of a date with her right before he married Nancy Davis. She told him she was making Pony Soldier (1952) with Tyrone Power. “Guess what? I’m shot with an arrow, I ride in a burning wagon, I am kidnapped by Indians and thrown from a horse. I have to swim in a raging river, and I’m tied to a flaming stake to be set on fire. Otherwise, there’s not much action, certainly not from Ty Power.”

  He later learned she’d taken up with bisexual Rory Calhoun, with whom both of them had worked on That Hagen Girl. But then, she abandoned her film career to join the Seventh Day Adventists. The Los Angeles Times headlined the news—PENNY EDWARDS CALLS WHOA TO HOSS OPERAS.

  A veteran infighter of the diva wars: Peggy Knudsen.

  Her retreat was only temporary. In the late 1950s, she returned briefly to film some Westerns. She ended her life making appearances at Western conventions, dressed in cowgirl outfits and signing autographs for members of her dwindling fan base.

  ***

  Reagan’s involvement with starlet Peggy Knudsen was so brief it hardly counts. From Duluth, Minnesota, she arrived in Hollywood hoping to break into the movies. As she told Reagan, “I ended up working with two of the biggest bitches in Hollywood, Bette Davis in A Stolen Life (1946) and later, that same year, with Joan Crawford in Humoresque.”

  She also appeared with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep. “Don’t believe all those stories about Bogie being faithful to his wife,” Knudsen said.

  When she dated Reagan, she had emerged from a divorce from Adrian P. Samish. She finally decided that Reagan wasn’t going to marry her, so she went after and won Jim Jordan in 1949.

  Reagan never saw her again, but read in Variety that she was appearing in Istanbul (1957) with Errol Flynn. Reagan had seen Flynn, drunk and extroverted, at a party a few months earlier. “Poor Peggy,” he said. “She’s getting Errol on his last legs, just before the lid is closed on his coffin.”

  ***

  Florida-born Dorothy Shay, known as “The Park Avenue Hillbillie,” was another Reagan conquest. As part of her art, she usually dressed like a Park Avenue socialite, but when she opened her mouth, she sounded like a low-end Florida cracker from the Panhandle.

  Dorothy (“The Park Avenue Hillbillie”) Shay.

  When Reagan met her, she had scored one of her biggest recording hits, “Feudin’ and Fightin.” Her 1947 The Park Avenue Hillbillie, rose to number one on Billboard’s chart of bestselling popular albums.

  Later, Shay worked with Bud Abbott and Lou Costello in the movie, Comin’ Round the Mountain (1951). “Lou and I used to talk dirty,” she said. “Real raunchy stuff. I told him that of all the guys I’d bedded, Ronnie was strictly missionary position. In contrast to him, I did everything. I think my kinky maneuvers turned him off. I don’t believe he’d ever experienced any ‘rosebud’ fore-play. There was a part of him that he wanted to keep very, very private.”

  Eileen Howe, whose “True Confessions” were promoted on the front page of this French magazine.

  Reagan became intrigued by starlet Eileen Howe after reading about her in the newspapers. For a time in the late 1940s and early 1950s, she was hailed as “the prettiest girl in Hollywood.”

  In December of 1946, Louella Parsons ran a strange item in her column, claiming, “Eileen Howe is allergic to touch, and can’t even hold hands with her boyfriend.”

  “Where in hell did Louella get that idea?” Reagan later asked after dating Howe.

  A former model for the Hartford Agency in New York, Howe became fodder for gossip columnists once she’d arrived in Hollywood. In May of 1947, Dorothy Kilgallen claimed, “Gilbert Roland, once Constance Bennett’s husband, is wooing Eileen Howe.”

  As a starlet in Hollywood, she was secretly dating Lew Ayres, who otherwise was expressing “undying love” for Jane Wyman.

  Howe’s date book was filled with suitors who included Jimmy Van Heusen, Errol Flynn, Dean Martin, and movie Tarzan Lex Barker.

  Like those men, Reagan was drawn to her measurements of 35-23-35. She had to work Reagan in between calls from Howard Hughes. Ted Briskin was seen dating her after his divorce from Betty Hutton. Tony Curtis, Vince Edwards, and Scott Brady were also on her trail.

  Reagan gave up the chase in January of 1952 right before he married Nancy. Columnist Hay Hoye wrote: “Gary Cooper’s latest ‘friend’ is Eileen Howe.”

  Reagan’s conclusion about her: “She didn’t do too bad for a gal who can’t stand to be touched.”

  ***

  Singer Evelyn Knight was not the most beautiful blonde Reagan ever dated, but she was talented, quite good looking, and had a bubbly personality that charmed him, at least temporarily.

  Known as “The Lass with the Delicate Air,” she was a popular recording artist in the 1940s and 50s, having scored a big hit with “Buttons and Bows.” Her
duet with country singer Red Foley, “My Heart Cries for You,” was a lament heard on jukeboxes from Maine to Florida and west to Oregon.

  Reagan first spotted her during a visit to the Blue Angel Nightclub in Manhattan. He waited until her final performance and then invited her out for a midnight date. She was seen leaving his hotel suite the following morning. Back in Los Angeles, he attended her shows at both Ciro’s and the Cocoanut Grove.

  He claimed that Knight was his favorite singer, saying that he preferred her to Jo Stafford, Peggy Lee, and Dinah Shore. He told William Holden that his greatest night with her was at a small club in San Fernando Valley, where both of them had been drinking heavily. Knight took the microphone and sang all the favorites whose names were called out to her from the audience. “She knew them all, and never missed a beat,” he said. “We ended up closing the joint down.”

  Singer Evelyn Knight dedicated “My Heart Cries for You” to Reagan.

  He asked Holden, “Guess who my competition is? Tony Martin, Bing Crosby, and Gordon MacCrae. Those singers are a randy bunch.” He’d heard that Ray Sinatra, a cousin of Frank Sinatra, had signed on as her musical conductor. “I wonder if Ray takes after Frank.”

  The last time he saw Knight was in 1954, two years after his marriage to Nancy. She told him, “I’m getting out of the business. Supper clubs are dying, and the sound of rock and roll fills the air waves.”

  Knight ended up living in obscurity in Phoenix, where she hired out as a babysitter, usually to people who knew nothing of her illustrious past.

  ***

  Reagan dated the Massachusetts-born Ruth Roman, a sultry brunette, before she married Mortimer Hall in 1950. When he learned that she was the daughter of immigrant parents from Lithuania, he told her, “If all the girls in Lithuania look like you, I’m taking the next boat there in the morning.”