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

by Darwin Porter

  When he still refused, she denounced him. “I’m good enough for you to fuck, but not to be seen with in public,” she said.

  [Eventually, Marilyn would not only get to meet her idol (Rogers) but would work with her as well. Along with Cary Grant, they starred together in Monkey Business (1952).]

  Critical response to Storm Warning was essentially negative. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times defined Storm Warning as a “mechanically melodramatic film, superficially forceful but lacking real substance or depth.” Critic Dennis Schwartz claimed that the film “trivializes the serious subject of race hatred with an inadequate depiction of the KKK. Surprisingly, the racial hate message of the Klan is never touched upon. These Ku Klux Klan members seem to be only interested in keeping outsiders away from their town, dressing up in their robed costumes to act tough while in disguise and using the Klan to hide their thieving criminal activities.”

  One critic claimed that Reagan was “his usual mediocre self.” The reviewer for Cue liked it, calling it “a first rate melodrama—a grim, gripping story.”

  The film marked Wald’s last effort for Warner Brothers. After his work on it was finished, he left the studio to form his own production company. His relationship with Reagan went back to his early days at Warners when Wald was a contract screenwriter.

  After that, Reagan pitched many projects to Wald, describing the kind of roles he wanted. He expected to spend part of the 1950s starring in films produced by Wald. But proposals from Wald never came in. Wald did, however, contact Jane Wyman, casting her in her memorable 1951 film, The Blue Veil.

  In the 1980s, Rogers would be invited to Reagan’s White House. “I didn’t get to dance with Ronnie, but Vice President George Bush told me that his ‘great dream’ involved dancing with me, based on his having seen Fred Astaire and me in Top Hat (1935).”

  ***

  More than Kings Row, more than Knute Rockne—All American, Reagan is famous for having made Bedtime for Bonzo (1951) for Universal. He was cast as Peter Boyd, a psychology professor, who tries to teach human morals to a chimpanzee (Bonzo), hoping to solve the “nature versus nurture” question. To that effect, he employs Jane Linden (actress Diana Lynn) to pose as the chimp’s mother, with Reagan the father. As a scientific experiment, they raise him exactly like a child growing up in the 1950s.

  Their “child,” a chimp named Bonzo, causes bedroom consternation for Ronald Reagan and Diana Lynn.

  When it opened, Bonzo got rather good reviews, Variety defining it as a “first-rate comedy,” and The Hollywood Reporter labeling it as “a smash.” But when Reagan’s political enemies viewed it in the 80s, one Democratic candidate wrote, “Bonzo wasn’t the only actor in this embarrassment with his tail hanging between his legs.”

  Regardless of whether any of them saw the movie, political opponents used Reagan’s making of this film to mock him with such headlines as BONZO GOES TO WASHINGTON. Some critics claimed that Bonzo showed more intelligence than Reagan. A random survey taken in Los Angeles revealed that the only film most people on the street could name that Reagan ever made was Bedtime for Bonzo.

  Frederick de Cordova was designated as director of this trifle. In time, he helmed such stars as Elvis Presley, Tony Curtis, Audie Murphy, Yvonne de Carlo, Humphrey Bogart, Bob Hope, and Errol Flynn. But he was forever mocked for having directed Reagan in Bedtime for Bonzo. When he directed Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show, the TV host frequently ridiculed Reagan and, less frequently, De Cordova for Bonzo.

  Reagan’s leading lady was a Los Angeles actress, Diana Lynn, who had been a child prodigy at the age of twelve, showing an amazing talent at the piano, and eventually developing a deep and abiding friendship with author Gore Vidal. She appeared in the comedy My Friend Irma (1949), in which Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis made their film debut.

  A Viennese character actor, Walter Slezak, played a zoology professor, with his corpulent figure, bushy hair and mustache, his shifty eyes, and high-pitched, sneering voice.

  For some reason, Reagan never saw the complete cut of Bedtime for Bonzo until he ordered, during the course of his presidency, that it be screened at the White House. His only comment was, “You’re a chump if you make a movie with a chimp—they’re born scene stealers.”

  ***

  After Bonzo, Reagan’s longtime wish came true. Director Lewis R. Foster at Paramount, in a production for William H. Pine and William C. Thomas, cast him in a western, The Last Outpost (1951). As a “man in gray on horseback,” Reagan was cast as an officer in the Confederate Army in conflict with his brother, depicted by Bruce Bennett playing a Union officer. The plot revolves around the Confederacy trying to intercept gold shipments heading East from the Southwest. Reagan insisted that the producers pay for the transport of his own horse, “Baby,” to Arizona.

  You’ll have to see the movie to learn why Reagan, cast as the dashing leader of a Confederate cavalry unit in Arizona, ends up dressed as “a Yankee in blue.” At least his dream came true: He finally got to star in a Western.

  Here, he has eyes only for the ravishingly beautiful Rhonda Fleming, Hollywood’s Queen of Technicolor.

  Other than his horse, what made the film exciting was its female co-star, Rhonda Fleming, who would also be cast as his leading lady in three future productions.

  Still not married to Nancy Davis, he came down with a new bout of his chronic “Leadinglady-itis.” Stunningly beautiful, Fleming was one of the few actresses he ever worked with who was actually born in Hollywood instead of having migrated there. At the time she met Reagan, she was between husbands.

  Reagan’s actual relationship with Fleming has been one of the most misunderstood in his repertoire. George Murphy claimed that he “fell in love with Rhonda during the making of The Last Outpost.”

  June Allyson said that one night, when she invited Reagan to dine with her husband, Dick Powell, and herself, “All he did was talk about Rhonda. He may have been the first guy who called her the ‘Queen of Technicolor.’ He went on and on until I got jealous, praising how ‘incredibly beautiful’ she appeared before the color cameras with that porcelain skin and flaming red hair.’”

  In Reagan’s tell-nothing memoir, Where’s the Rest of Me? he merely mentions that he was cast opposite Fleming. However, Irv Kupcinet, a columnist for the Chicago Sun Times, in his autobiography, published in 1988, included a curious passage. He claimed that Reagan, “the handsome bachelor, was mad about the girl” (Fleming).

  “Rhonda was fond of Ronnie, but not in love. One night, Reagan was so frustrated that he pulled out his gun and fired a shot at her. I’m sure he was wide of the mark purposely, but he did scare the romance out of their idyll. I often wondered what the course of history might have been.”

  A year later, Fleming called Kupcinet’s story “awful” and “crazy.” In a statement, she claimed: “Reagan and I weren’t social on or off the set. We certainly didn’t have a romance.”

  In Edmund Morris’ book, Dutch, he wrote: “My research cards show Reagan stepping out with at least sixteen young and beautiful actresses from Doris Day and Rhonda Fleming to the peachy and not-yet-legal Piper Laurie. God knows how many more there were or how many came back to spend the night. He was always shy about speaking of such matters when I interviewed him as an old man.”

  ***

  Since he needed money, Reagan agreed to accept a low salary of $45,000 for starring in Hong Kong (1952) less MCA’s ten percent commission. He remembered the day at Warners when he got $150,000 per picture.

  This movie poster is significant for one reason: The designer misspelled Reagan’s last name, billing him as “Regan.”

  The producers of The Last Outpost, William H. Pine and William C. Thomas, as well as director Lewis R. Foster, and even its distributor, Paramount, were so pleased with the on-screen chemistry of Rhonda Fleming with Reagan that they cast them together in Hong Kong (1952).

  As Reagan recalled, “This was my first time to play a bum.” He was cast as Jef
f Williams, an often un-shaven, down-on-his-luck, American ex-soldier who decides to stay on in Hong Kong after the end of World War II. He hopes to make a lot of money selling surplus equipment left in Asia by the departing Armies.

  “First a fucking chimp, now a four-year-old Chinese boy to steal the scenes.” He was referring to child actor Danny Chang, who had the third lead. Reagan takes him in after discovering him wandering lost and alone.

  He plots to steal a precious jeweled idol the boy possesses, and then to desert him, until his better nature, as prompted by his growing love for the very decent character played by Fleming, a Red Cross volunteer. At the time he meets her, Reagan has been embittered by his run of bad luck, but he’s eventually won over by the charm and innocence of the boy and by the loving compassion of Fleming.

  In an interview, Fleming said that Reagan was “more glowing and vibrant when he was telling yarns offscreen than when he was playing before the cameras. I don’t think he felt very comfortable as an actor. Actually, I think he truly wanted to be in some other profession.”

  Here, in Hong Kong, Reagan appears with child star Danny Chang. With a touch of bitterness, he later said, “Never appear with scene stealers like a chimp or a child.”

  Reagan told director Foster, “I’ll soon be forty-five years old. At this point in my life, I had hoped to be either Duke Wayne or at least Bill Holden. I should have playing the hustler, Joe Gillis, in Sunset Blvd.”

  Reagan said “Hong Kong, with its paranoid politics about the communists, came and went before you could blink your eyes.”

  The film’s review in The New York Times suggested that its title might more aptly have been “Ping Pong.”

  ***

  Reagan returned to Warners, his alma mater, for two more movies. Reunited once again with Virginia Mayo, he co-starred with her in She’s Working Her Way Through College (1952). Shortly before she died, Mayo told author Darwin Porter, “I thought Ronnie and I had something going, and I liked him a lot. But Nancy Davis showed up all the time—and nothing came of it.”

  She’s Working Her Way Through College would not be the only time Reagan toiled in burlesque. At the nadir of his career in the 60s, he’d MC a burlesque act in Las Vegas.

  Mayo played a woman who, in an effort “to improve her mind,” abandoned her career in burlesque to enroll in a Midwestern college, where she rents a room from Reagan, a professor, and his wife, as played by Phyllis Thaxter. Between classes, in an attempt to boost ticket sales for the University’s floundering drama department, Mayo’s character choreographs a musical, in which the very talented Gene Nelson, cast as a football star, joins her, as does another blonde beauty, Patrice Wymore, who was even more famous for her marriage (1950-1959) to Errol Flynn.

  Director H. Bruce Humberstone also cast Don DeFore as Shep Slade, an obnoxious, boastful, ex-champion footballer, who still has a yen for Reagan’s wife, his former sweetheart from younger days.

  When Reagan went to see the final cut of She’s Working Her Way Through College, he remarked, “It’s (nothing but) a showcase for Virginia’s gams.”

  ***

  As his farewell to Warners, Reagan starred in a baseball picture, The Winning Team (1952), with Doris Day as his wife. “Since you didn’t become my wife off screen, I guess you can play my wife on screen,” he told Day.

  Reagan cuddles up with a “working student,” Virginia Mayo.

  He was cast as Grover Cleveland Alexander, one of the foremost legends of American baseball. He later said that he enjoyed making the film as much as he did Knute Rockne—All American. “I also got to do some real acting dealing with Alexander’s drinking problem—shades of Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend.”

  Alexander, of course, was the baseball great who won the championship for the St. Louis Cardinals against the New York Yankees in the 1926 World Series.

  Before shooting began, Reagan trained for three weeks with Cleveland’s Bob Lemon and with Detroit’s Harry Priddy, pitching and learning “the difference between throwing from the mound and just throwing.”

  Alexander, the baseball great, nicknamed “Old Pete,” had died in 1950. Although Day got star billing because of her box office clout, the real star of the picture was Reagan.

  Although Reagan continued for a while to be cast in minor film roles, The Winning Team hastened the end of any big movie career for him as a middle-aged actor. Day’s biographer, Tom Santopietro, summed up the problem: “Reagan did not have the emotional depth of acting chops to bring off the complex characterization required. He is simply not a very interesting actor, and is not up to the task of appearing in every scene. His lack of technique and resulting inability to access the required emotional complexities are evident in every scene requiring a display of emotion.”

  Later, Day was reported to have said, “My role required for me to do little more than appear angelic and be supportive and helpful. My God, where was Nancy Davis? She should have played my part.”

  Lewis Seiler, who helmed The Winning Team, had first directed Reagan in Hell’s Kitchen (1939) with the Dead End Kids.

  Reagan actually liked the script about Alexander, who had been a heavy boozer and suffered epileptic seizures. This was Reagan’s second time playing an epileptic, beginning with “that dismal failure,” Night Unto Night (1949).

  Day and Reagan were backed up with strong support from character actor Frank Lovejoy, who defined himself as “a boy from the Bronx.” At the time he met Reagan, he had just appeared with Joan Crawford in Goodbye, My Fancy (1951). That movie would become his best remembered. “I’m always cast as the movies’ Everyman,” he told Reagan.

  Reagan almost faced a disaster. He had recovered from breaking his right leg in a charity baseball game. However, in one scene from The Winning Team, he fell and almost inflicted the same injury to his left leg. Priddy, Detroit’s second baseman, had accidentally stepped on him. “I suffered a painful laceration,” Reagan claimed, “and had to hobble around for days. At least he didn’t break my leg.”

  Day later recalled, “Aimee, the wife of Grover Cleveland Alexander, was the most boring role I ever had to play. I wasn’t surprised when it failed to score a home run at the box office. Ronnie was already in his 40s trying to act like a 21-year-old.”

  Both of them talked about their upcoming marriages, Reagan “praising Nancy as if she were a goddess fallen to earth,” in Day’s view.

  She was more realistic about her own new spouse. “I’ve settled down in Toluca Lake with Martin (Melcher) to a life of non-bliss.”

  Time dismissed The Winning Team, attacking the “rookie performance” by Reagan.

  Even though Day “hated myself in the thankless role,” she won Photo-play’s Gold Medal for being “the most popular actress of the year.”

  Reagan departed from the Warner’s lot on January 28, 1952, after fifteen years of filmmaking. There was no fanfare, “not even a gold watch,” he said. “I thought a goodbye from Jack Warner might be in order. I got only silence. I asked for my final paycheck. I was told, ‘It’s in the mail.’”

  As he pulled his car out of the studio parking lot that day, he noticed an attendant removing his “permanent” nameplate from in front of what had, for years, been his parking space.

  Years later, when he was running for Governor of California, Warner was approached to open his wallet for the campaign.

  Refusing to contribute, he said, “No, no, no, Dennis Morgan for governor, Ronald for first friend.”

  ***

  Released from his long-enduring contract with Warner Brothers, Reagan found himself adrift in a sea of aging, unemployed actors, each of them on the verge of turning fifty. Dick Powell had told him, “The road between forty-five and fifty goes by as quickly as a summer cloudburst.”

  Once again, he was rescued by the same Paramount team that had cast Rhonda Fleming and him in The Last Outpost and Hong Kong: producers William H. Pine and William C. Thomas, along with director Lewis R. Foster.

  The
moment Reagan read the script for Tropic Zone (1953), he knew it would be a dud. He called it “a sand-and-banana epic,” although it was hardly an epic.

  “The script was hopeless, but I was grateful to the boys for hiring me before. As a favor to them, I agreed to make Tropic Zone.”

  Actually, Lew Wasserman, his agent, later revealed, “I practically had to beg Pine and Thomas to use Ronnie again.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  A “Cougar on the Prowl,” Jane Seeks Young, Hot, and Handsome Male Flesh on the Hoof

  Jane lamented to Paulette Goddard, “Just my luck. To win Ronnie, I had to fight off Betty Grable, Susan Hayward, and a wagon load of starlets at Warners. To get my claws into my new husband, Fred Karger (depicted twice with Jane in photos above), I had another road block. Little Miss Monroe herself. Freddie is that rare specimen—a living doll!”

  “But just when I thought I’d knocked Marilyn out of the race, around the bend comes another Adonis...Rock Hudson, who can offer Freddie something I can’t.”

  “BELOVED BELINDA IN A LOVABLE NEW ROLE,” proclaimed the ads at Warners. As Jane reported to work at her home studio, these ads were already in production in the art department. She had a leading role in a fluffy new comedy, a Kiss inthe dark. Her co-star would be David Niven, on loan from Samuel Goldwyn. In events which transpired, the British actor’s name would be billed over hers.

  David Niven, whose mysterious war record as an Allied spy is still a matter of conjecture, played this love scene with Jane’s full understanding of his former affair with her gossipy friend, Paulette Goddard.