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

by Darwin Porter

  “She claims she’s pregnant, and I’m the father,” Reagan told Larson. “I’m not so sure. This may be just a trick to lure me into the marriage trap.”

  That night, Reagan left Larson’s home and drove alone to Slapsie Maxie’s nightclub on Wilshire Boulevard. It was one of his favorite haunts. Although she was on a date with someone else, he spotted starlet Selene Walters.

  She was later described as “a big California blonde star, like one of those beautiful Rose Bowl queens Reagan always lusted after.”

  At some point, Walters slipped him her phone number and address. She would later become the centerpiece of one of the most notorious chapters in Reagan’s “between marriages” horndog periods.

  Larson later lamented having rejected Reagan’s proposal of marriage. “I made a terrible mistake,” she confessed. “I liked him a lot, although I was not in love with him. I could not have imagined that one day, he would be Governor of California. If I had married him, I would have been First Lady of California. It never occurred to me that he’d rise that far in politics.”

  Larson died in 1973, and, of course, wasn’t alive to see her former lover obtain an even more important government office.

  Actually, what hastened the end of the Reagan/Larson affair was the day she told him that she had fallen in love with Gary Cooper and that they were engaged in a torrid affair in spite of their age difference.

  In 1989, someone asked Reagan if he’d ever proposed marriage to Christine Larson. “I do not recall any person by that name,” he said. “I have no memory of her whatsoever. I dated a number of young ladies in those days, but nothing serious—that is, until my dear Nancy came along.”

  ***

  Bob Thomas, author of Jack Warner, Crown Prince of Hollywood, said of Jacqueline Park, “Her life had been the stuff of trashy novels. Born in Philadelphia without a father; raised in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen by a promiscuous mother, worked as a dancer in Manhattan night spots; recruited by a madam as the plaything of millionaires; went to Hollywood for the kinky pleasures of director Edmund Goulding. She tried to be an actress, but mostly she worked nighttime for well-known figures including Cary Grant, who introduced her to the mind-expanding capabilities of LSD.”

  This blurred photograph shows Jacqueline Park, dressed receive visitors. She had a brief fling with Reagan, but a longer, more enduring affair with Jack Warner.

  “A kinky footnote in dating career,” Reagan told William Holden.

  George Paley, a businessman from the Los Angeles area, introduced Park to Reagan, who seemed entranced by her beauty and her self-assured personality. He asked for her telephone number and called her the next day at the Studio Club, where she lived.

  At that time, before his eventual move to a ranch in the Hollywood Hills, he was still living in the Londonderry Apartments. He made a date with her for the following night. He suggested that since he lived only a short distance away, it would be cheaper to take the bus. “Right away, I knew he was cheap, but I went over anyway.”

  At his apartment door, he greeted her in a red silk bathrobe with an ascot. “Our first date got off to a rough start,” she later confessed. He didn’t want to leave his apartment with me. When things got amorous later in the evening, it was embarrassing. He couldn’t perform. He blamed it on the fact that he was still in mourning over his wife, Jane Wyman, who had divorced him.”

  In spite of that disaster of an evening, Park claimed she continued to see him. “He was an important man, the president of SAG. “We both were confident that his sexual prowess would return—and it did.”

  Transportation was always an issue between them. On her first date, she asked for cab fare back home. “I told him I was afraid to be out on the streets, a woman alone at two o’clock in the morning.”

  “He told me there were no rapists in his area, and that it was foolish to waste money on a cab. I barely had enough bus fare in my purse. It continued that way throughout our entire relationship. No cab fare…ever. He never took me to a night club. He never bought me a gift. He occasionally ordered take-out. I still don’t know why he didn’t want to be seen with me. I sure as hell didn’t look like chopped liver. And he was divorced, after all.”

  Reagan had a more favorable memory of Park than she had of him. He told June Allyson, “Jackie is a curious mixture of a fragile beauty and worldly wisdom learned through the school of hard knocks.”

  His relationship with Park ended brusquely on the night she arrived at the Londonderry Apartments and confronted him with news that she was pregnant. “It was the worst night of my life,” she recalled. “He accused me of having affairs with other men. At one point, he shouted at me, ‘All you starlets are trying to entrap a man by getting pregnant and demanding marriage. First, I don’t think the kid in the oven is mine. We were never seen together. There’s no proof we ever had a sexual relationship. You’re going to have to deal with this god damn thing yourself. I know I’m not responsible. You’ll not get one cent from me. One of your other boyfriends will have to give you the money for the abortion.’”

  In tears that night, she left his apartment, “taking the bus, of course. I didn’t plan to go after him in court with a good lawyer. I was afraid that if I defied him, I’d lose my membership in SAG.”

  A friend of hers, Bentley Ryan, came to her rescue. She credited him with arranging the details of her abortion.

  As was later speculated, had she given birth to Reagan’s child, there might have eventually been another son (or daughter) arriving at the door of the White House, “demanding to see Daddy.”

  After Reagan, Park dated many famous men, including Frank Sinatra after Ava Gardner dumped him. “Frank liked orgies,” she said. “I didn’t. We broke up when he demanded I go to bed with him and another woman.”

  For a time, she conducted a secret affair with the handsome lawyer and playboy, Greg Bautzer. “One night, he told me to arrive after midnight. By then, I had a car. Before I got out of my car, I spotted a woman leaving his house. I saw him kissing her goodbye. When she walked under the streetlight, I recognized her face. It was Jane Wyman.”

  Ironically, in 1961, Park became the mistress of Jack Warner, Reagan’s former boss. “He was just as cheap as Reagan. A lousy tipper. His underwear was torn. He patched together thin bars of soap in his bathroom. He gave me a weekly allowance of $200, but sometimes shortchanged me.”

  She recalled being taken to London, where they attended a reception in which he introduced her to Princess Margaret. “Jack told her Royal Highness, ‘Jackie here has a heart of gold and a snatch to match.’”

  “He refused to take me to the White House when he got an invitation from John F. Kennedy in 1962,” Park claimed. “His excuse was, ‘I can’t take my mistress to the White House.’ Later, when he returned to Hollywood, he told me, ‘I’ll be damned. Jack Kennedy slipped away with me to one of the private rooms. Waiting for us was his own mistress and a gal for me, too.’”

  Years later, after Warner ended their relationship, Park recalled Reagan: “He just ran out on me when I got pregnant. He was a swinger in those days. He went out with this girl and that girl. But the moment he married Nancy, he became a Republican. He reformed, and there is nothing more boring than a reformed swinger.”

  Park later became a Manhattan “psychodramatist,” [in this case, a sex therapist], charging male clients $100 an hour to act out their sexual fantasies. She also wrote a book, Memoirs of a Hollywood Mistress, but found trouble finding a publisher.

  ***

  When Kitty Kelley’s 1991 book, Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography, came out, the accusations of actress Selene Walters made headlines. A typical one read GIPPER THE RIPPER. Her stunning charge was that Reagan had raped her. Only two American presidents have ever been charged with rape—first, Reagan, and later, Bill Clinton.

  Walters did admit to meeting Reagan, “the lone wolf,” when he appeared at Slapsie Maxie’s nightclub one night when she was in the company of anoth
er man. She also claimed that she slipped him her phone number and address. Her motives may have been more career-oriented than based on any physical attraction for him.

  “He was the president of the Screen Actors Guild, and I thought he might help my career. God knows, I needed some help.”

  She later said that she was asleep when her doorbell rang at three o’clock that morning. It was Reagan.

  “I opened the door and let him in,” she later told People magazine. “Once inside, it was the battle of the couch. I was fighting him. I didn’t want him to make love to me. He’s a very big man, and he just had his way. Date rape? No, that was Kelley’s phrase. I didn’t have a chance to have a date with him.”

  Based on the events of that night, Walters said she had no ill will toward Reagan. “I even voted for him for president. I don’t think he meant to harm me.”

  Some reporters claimed that Reagan’s aides managed to keep Walters’ revelations from being printed in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times.

  But the week Kelley’s book was released, Reagan was accosted on the steps of a church, where he and Nancy were paying one of their biannual visits.

  In front of TV cameras, a reporter called out: “Did you rape Selena Walters?”

  Reagan politely said, “I don’t think church would be a proper place to use the word I would have to use in discussing that.”

  The reporter later commented, “That was not exactly a denial.”

  The reporter’s encounter with Reagan, with Nancy clinging tightly to the arm of her husband, was broadcast on TV news across the nation.

  ***

  Did Ronald Reagan rape Selene Walters (shown supine, above)?

  Both Doris Day and Jane Wyman appeared in Reagan’s next film, It’s a Great Feeling (1949), a silly piece of fluff spoofing Hollywood. But none of their scenes was together. In addition to Day, the actual stars of the picture were Dennis Morgan and Jack Carson, in yet another of their movies together.

  Is It Really a Great Feeling?

  Reagan appeared in a cameo with Dennis Morgan in a scene that takes place in a barbershop. It is one of the few times that Jane Wyman’s former lover (Reagan) came together with her present lover (Morgan).

  In her autobiography, Doris Day, Her Own Story, by A.E. Hotchner, Ernest Hemingway’s friend, Day claimed that she had met Reagan through mutual friends who had moved to Los Angeles from New York.

  This was at the time Reagan was divorcing Jane, and Day was in the throes of divorcing her second husband, saxophonist George Weidler. She had previously been married to trombonist Al Jorden, with whom she had a child, Terry Jorden, who later changed his name to Terry Melcher, adopting the name of Day’s third husband, Martin Melcher.

  At the time she started dating Reagan, Day had just emerged from a romance with Jack Carson, her co-star in her first film, Romance on the High Seas (1948). Carson and Day had also co-starred in her next film, My Dream is Yours (1948). Their romance had been called “mutually therapeutic.” She was trying to keep him from drinking himself into oblivion, and he was attempting to wean her from her addiction to smoking three packages of Camels a day.

  “The first time I saw her, I adored this pretty blonde with the freckles,” Reagan said. “She had a real bubbly personality.”

  Reagan’s first date with Day was in May of 1948, at the time Jane was filing for divorce. Day remembered that he spent most of the first evening “talking mainly about Janie. I lamented George.”

  “I’m a failure,” she said to him.

  “Not at all!” he responded, trying to reassure her. “Jack Warner told me you’re going to become one of the biggest stars in Hollywood.”

  “But I failed at the two things I wanted most in life—that was to be a good wife, and to have a happy marriage.”

  “There were two things that impressed me about Ronnie,” Day wrote. “How much he liked to dance, and how much he liked to talk. Ronnie was really the only man I’ve ever known who loved dancing. There was a little place on Cienega that had a small band and a small dance floor, where he often took me. He danced well and had a pleasant personality, so I invariably enjoyed going out with Ronnie.”

  Whereas Day was a Republican, Reagan at the time was still a liberal Democrat. She listened intently to his discourses, although his points often didn’t match her conservatism. She suggested he might tour the country giving speeches. “He’s what I would call a political personality—engaging, strong, and very voluble.”

  Reagan was overshadowed by other actors in the “cattle call” that Jack Warner issued for most of his then-underused stable of movie stars.

  Depicted above: Doris Day, Dennis Morgan, and Jack Carson, listening through a peephole.

  As Day’s biographer, David Bret, wrote: “The two would sneak off to his apartment high in the Hollywood Hills, and make love while marveling at the panoramic view below.”

  Previously, Reagan and Day had each been directed by Michael Curtiz. She complained that he had given her great insecurity. “He wants me to lose weight and have hollow cheeks like Marlene Dietrich.”

  “I’m back to being a bachelor again,” he said. “This was my first apartment in Hollywood. When I married Jane, I took her to live with me here. But these days, or nights, it gets pretty lonely wandering around this bachelor flat without anyone to love. This place brings back a lot of memories, both good and bad.”

  “I’m surprised you moved in again,” she said. “I’d have preferred starting over again somewhere else.”

  As Reagan told June Allyson, “Doris needs a lot of reassurance about her looks.”

  She told him, “Sometimes I look at myself in the mirror, and I burst into tears at all those freckles.”

  “You’re beautiful,” he said. “So fresh-faced. The freckles add to your charm.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I have to spend so much time in makeup that I feel I’m wearing a plaster mask whenever I face the cameras. I’d give my soul to look like Hedy Lamarr.”

  He was vaguely disturbed when he learned that Alexis Smith and Craig Stevens had befriended her and welcomed her to Hollywood, asking her to parties. These included an invitation to the home of Stanley Mills Haggart, the set designer and advertising agent.

  Reagan always felt that Smith and Stevens had only “set Jane and me up so that, as a bisexual couple, they could move in on us.”

  Even though he apparently never made his intentions known to Day, Reagan talked about the possibility of proposing marriage to her to such good friends as George Murphy. Dick Powell and June Allyson were also aware of the possibility of a marriage between the singing star and Reagan.

  He even went so far as to discuss with Murphy the business angle of such a liaison. “I didn’t want to become Mr. Jane Wyman, but I’m thinking over being Mr. Doris Day. That might be a career goal, as I move into middle age. The roles are already drying up. I could be very aggressive, get the best movie deals for her, the fattest recording contracts. I’d make a great manager for her.”

  On the set of It’s a Great Feeling, Reagan shook the hand of the director, David Butler, who welcomed him. Butler had been a former actor himself on the stage, and later in the Silents, but he became better known for second-rate musicals. Reagan soon learned that Butler had developed an unreciprocated crush on Day.

  Reagan learned that he and Jane were not alone in making a cameo appearance in Butler’s film. They were joined by Errol Flynn, Gary Cooper, Joan Crawford, Sydney Greenstreet, Danny Kaye, Patricia Neal, Eleanor Parker, and Edward G. Robinson, along with Directors Michael Curtiz, Raoul Walsh, and King Vidor. Butler even had cast himself in a cameo.

  Reagan had only one scene, set in a barbershop, not with Jane, but with Morgan and Carson. There was an undercurrent of sexual rivalry. Either known or unknown to Reagan, Jane had continued her long affair with Morgan. Complicating matters, Day had broken off with Carson before landing in Reagan’s welcoming arms.

 
; In the scene, Carson is in the barbershop, lamenting his difficulties in shooting his latest film. In the seat beside him is a man whose face is covered with a hot towel. When the towel is removed, it’s revealed that the mystery man is Reagan himself.

  Day plays a woman trying to break into Hollywood with the help of Morgan and Carson.

  Before heading back to Wisconsin, Day appears as a Parisian prostitute in a black wig, crooning, “There’s Nothing Rougher Than Love.” Finally, she gives up and returns to her hometown of Gurkeys Corners, where she is set to marry her local hayseed boyfriend, Jeffrey Bushfinkle. Carson finds them at the altar. The bride and bridegroom have their backs to the camera. After their marriage vows, Bushfinkle lifts the veil of his bride to kiss her. He is seen for the first time. He looks like Errol Flynn. It IS Errol Flynn!

  Later, Carson complained to Reagan. “When I made my first picture with Doris, Romance on the High Seas (1948), I was the fucking star. By the time this turkey is in the can, I’ll be out there as her supporting player. She’ll be the star.”

  At the end of the shoot, Carson encountered Reagan again. “In that last scene with Flynn, he and I almost came to blows—no, not that kind…”

  Reagan later speculated why he and all the stellar personalities were cast in this “lightweight fluff. Jack Warner had all of us under contract, and I think he wanted to give us something to do until something better came along.”

  After finalizing his cameo, he called Lew Wasserman. “Get me a Western, god damn it!”

  “Not now, Ronnie, baby,” his agent said. “You’re going to be flown to England to make The Hasty Heart with Patricia Neal. If you’re lucky, you’ll get to fuck her, although Gary Cooper is a tough hoss to follow.”

  ***

  At the time of his cameo in It’s a Great Feeling (1949), Reagan, as president of SAG, was facing the “growing menace” of television and its threat to the Hollywood film industry. He wrote: “Supplies of headache powder are running low, and there’s moaning and groaning in the land of make believe—for Hollywood and the entire entertainment industry are caught in the throes of a revolution.”