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

by Darwin Porter

  She called Jane, wanting to know if she had yet succumbed to his manly charms.

  “No,” Jane answered. Since shooting began, he’s had this sore throat and retreats to his dressing room when he’s not needed on the set.”

  “Sorry about that, girl,” Goddard said. “You’re missing out on something really wonderful. I should know.”

  The second male lead would be played by Wayne Morris, her old flame from the late 1930s. But as Jane told Paulette Goddard, “With Wayne and me, the candle has already burnt out at both ends.”

  Over lunch with Jane, Morris told her, “I’ve gone from leading man to the meathead boyfriend who loses the girl—like in this thing we’re making!”

  “At least you’ve got a job, sugar,” she told him. “And in the Hollywood of today, that’s a damned fine accomplishment!”

  The three leads would be supplemented with a strong supporting cast that included Victor Moore, Broderick Crawford, and Maria Ouspenskaya.

  After reading the script, Jane told her director, Delmer Daves, “I thought that Jack Warner could come up with stronger material for an Oscar winner like me.”

  “Be patient,” he told her. “I see another Oscar in your future. After all, you can’t expect to win Oscars back to back like Luise Rainer.”

  A Kiss in the dark’s plot centered around a concert pianist, Eric Phillips (Niven), who returns from a tour to discover that he’s inherited an apartment house with loony tenants. His favorite is a beautiful photographer’s model, Polly Haines (Jane). Niven has trouble with his resident manager, the zany Victor Moore, the scene stealer of the film.

  Jane remembered her role chiefly for the fact that as a photographer’s model, she had to undergo more than two dozen wardrobe changes.

  She had first met Crawford when they had appeared together in larceny, inc. with Edward G. Robinson. “What a puny role for a star like me,” he told her. The events of 1949 would later represent the pinnacle of his career, as he’d win the Best Actor Oscar for his role as the crooked politician in all the King’s Men, its script based on the bestselling book by Robert Penn Warren.

  Jane had great respect for Ouspenskaya, and was later very sorry to learn that a Kiss in the dark was the final role for the aging Russian actress. After many distinguished performances, she died on December 3, 1949, at the age of 73. She suffered a fatal stroke after severe burns from a fire in her house. She had ignited it after falling asleep with a lit cigarette.

  She Falls in Love with Her Co-Star, Rock Hudson, Until the Night She Discovers Him in Bed With Her Husband

  In addition to being sick, Niven could not master moving his fingers across the piano keybord in any convincing way. He later admitted, “An expert played the piano with his arms through my tailcoat while I rolled my eyes and looked soulful.”

  She tried to put a good face on the film, saying, “The role is a test of my versatility. Comedy is as exacting as drama. It demands more of a performer technically, although audiences aren’t as apt to give a good comedy performance the recognition it deserves.”

  The observer in London defined a Kiss in the dark as “one of the silliest and trashiest stories seen on the screen for many a long day.” Time claimed, “The film is a daffy romantic comedy apparently intended to show that Oscar-winning Jane Wyman is not really a deaf-mute.”

  ***

  Preparations for her next film began with a call from director Michael Curtiz, telling her that Jack Warner had cast her in a comedy called The octopus and Miss Smith.

  “Your leading man, girlie, is Dennis Morgan. Maybe you guys will spend time on film, not all time fucking. Morgan is no more big box office. He’ll play second violin to you.”

  “You mean, second fiddle,” Jane said.

  “Fiddle, violin, trumpet, who gives a fuck?”

  Jane was cast as Jennifer Smith, with Morgan as Davy Jones (alias Bill Craig), who claims he’s a zoologist, maneuvering an underwater vehicle. He is actually a submarine engineer on a secret government mission. After an accident at sea, he rescues Jane, but because of the secrecy associated with his job, he can’t tell her who he is.

  When she recounts the story of her rescue to her business partner (Eve Arden), and to representatives of the Tyson Institute, which intends to finance a project for her, they think she’s crazy. Since Morgan can’t tell her who he really is, the inevitable complications ensue. All ends well, however, and eventually, Jane wins her sailor both on and off the screen.

  Jane blew her top when she heard that the film’s title had been changed to The lady Takes a Sailor (1949), but she was otherwise cooperative.

  When she was criticized for accepting such a silly part, she told Louella Parsons that had she not accepted the role, a lot of employees at Warners would have been fired, based on Jack Warner’s policy of laying off employees because of dwindling post-war profits. “It might have been a mistake, but I made a lot of the crew happy by accepting the role.”

  Jane maintains her resolve in this comedy about ladies, sailors, errors, and mistaken identities. above, Dennis Morgan, Eve Arden, and a mystified (until the final reel) Jane.

  Curtiz had assembled a supporting cast that was stronger and more talented than the frothy and somewhat silly plot. Its members included Eve Arden, Allyn Joslyn, Fred Clark, Tom Tully, and William Frawley. Jane’s former friend, Craig Stevens, was awarded a minor role, but the two of them avoided each other whenever possible. Jane and Reagan had broken from Stevens and his wife, Alexis Smith, after that weekend in Palm Springs.

  She told Curtiz, “I’ve been away from comedy too long, and I’m off in my timing. Comedy is damn tricky. I take my hat off to anyone who can play it well. Fortunately, we’ve got my gal pal, Eve Arden. She’s always on her mark.”

  On her final day on the set of The lady Takes a Sailor, Curtiz told Jane she had to sail to England for her next movie, Stage Fright, to be directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

  “Who’s my leading man in this one?” she asked Curtiz.

  “Marlene Dietrich,” he answered.

  ***

  Before leaving for England, Jane filmed a cameo for inclusion within the otherwise completed it’s a Great Feeling (1939), a film in which her lover, Dennis Morgan, played the male lead. Reagan was in the picture, too, but he and Jane had no scenes together in that all-star Warner Brother’s extravaganza.

  In one scene of that movie, Jack Carson and Morgan are grooming Doris Day for stardom. Carson says, “I’ll see to it that she’s as good in this as Jane Wyman was in Johnny Belinda.”

  “She didn’t even talk in that one,” Morgan says.

  Carson replies, “Well, you can’t have everything.”

  it’s a Great Feeling marked the film debut of Maureen Reagan.

  It was positioned into a scene where Jane is called into the office of the producer (played by Bill Goodwin), and is told that Carson was going to direct her in Made-moiselle Fifi, her next movie. Jane faints upon hearing that she has to work with a director who, the audience learns, is notoriously temperamental.

  Jane’s attempt to train her daughter Maureen, pictured above in a scene with her from it’s a Great Feeling, sparked the child’s interest in becoming an actress.

  Jane later said, “If producers and casting directors were looking for ‘cute’ and ‘perky’ in the early 1950s, I was their gal.”

  At this point, a blonde kid (Maureen) enters with a glass of water. She hands it to Jane and says, “Here, Mommy, take this.”

  Maureen, in a latter-day evaluation of her first screen appearance, claimed, “I thought I was just terrible, certainly the weak link in an otherwise fine production.”

  ***

  Reagan had returned from England after making The Hasty Heart. Plans called for him to care for and protect Maureen and Michael while Jane went to London shooting Stage Fright with Alfred Hitchcock. Jack Warner promised her star billing over her co-star, Marlene Dietrich.

  The two male leads were Michael Wilding and Ri
chard Todd. Ironically, Todd had been Reagan’s co-star in The Hasty Heart.

  “When I first arrived at the studio, Marlene was the first to greet me,” Jane recalled. “She was the epitome of graciousness, although I heard from Hitchcock that she bitterly resented getting second billing. Ironically, she became the most visible star of the picture.”

  “I admired Marlene’s figure,” Jane said. “She was almost fifty, yet retained her sense of glamour and enchantment. She invited me to lunch that day and stuffed herself with steak and kidney pie. I had to watch my weight and settled for a salad. Yet she never gained weight.”

  Hitchcock usually opted to include a “blink of the eye“ cameo of himself in each of his films. In Stage Fright, he opted to make that appearance in a London street scene with Jane.

  As it happened, according to Dietrich, Hitchcock would have preferred for an English actress to play Jane’s role, and he would have been happier if Tallulah Bankhead (whom he had previously directed in lifeboat (1944), had been given the part played by Dietrich. Jack Warner had personally vetoed each of those preferences.

  Later, when Jane confronted the director about his preference for an English actress, he admitted that he had wanted Jean Simmons.

  Are the most menacing killers always the handsomest? Here’s Jane in Stage Fright with the film’s scariest psycho, her tormentor, Richard Todd.

  Stage Fright was a murder mystery, some of it relayed in flashback, based on the Selwyn Jepson novel, Man Running, with a screen treatment from Whitfield Cook, Ranald MacDougall, and Alma Reville (the director’s wife). Dietrich rewrote some of her own dialogue.

  Jane was cast as Eve Gill, an American who is studying at RADA, wanting to become an actress. She develops a crush on fellow actor Jonathan Cooper (Todd), who is secretly in love with the flamboyant stage actress and singer, Charlotte Inwood (Dietrich).

  Jane befriends Todd when he claims that Charlotte came to him in a blood-stained dress after killing her husband. When he went to retrieve a new dress for her at her home, witnesses saw him leaving the scene of the crime and he was fingered as the killer.

  Eve meets Detective Wilfred O. Smith (Wilding) and is drawn into his orbit, finding out that his middle name is “Ordinary.” She bribes Charlotte’s cockney dresser, Nellie Goode (Kay Walsh), and Jane becomes “Doris Tinsdale,” hired to be Charlotte’s maid.

  From that point on, the plot employs many of Hitchcock’s tricks before it reaches its dramatic conclusion. It turns out that Jonathan is the real murderer after all, and that Hitchcock tricked the audience with a faux flashback.

  Super glamorous Marlene Dietrich lights up for demure Jane Wyman in this scene from Stage Fright. Jane complained to Hitchcock, “I may have an Oscar, something Marlene doesn’t have, but she has everything else--She’s taken a bite out of Richard Todd, she’s snared Michael Wilding, she’s got the Dior wardrobe, the glamour, and the songs.”

  “She might be telling us she’s “The Laziest Gal in Town,” but she’s damn busy looking after Marlene!”

  Two veterans of the English stage were cast as Jane’s parents, Alastair Sim as Commodore Gil, and Sybil Thorndike as Mrs. Gill. Sim was a Scottish character actor who, in addition to his theatrical career, had been a leading star in British cinema in the 1950s, appearing in more than fifty movies. Jane was amazed at the tonal control of his voice and his sensitivity to the nuances of the English language. “Only John Gielgud rivaled him,” she said.

  She adored Thorndike, who had been made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. George Bernard Shaw had written Saint Joan specifically for her.

  Others in the cast included Hitchcock’s daughter, Patricia Hitchcock, in her movie debut as Chubby Bannister in a humorous vignette.

  Even though Dietrich detested Hitchcock, he gave her the star treatment, allowing her to bring in Cole Porter to help her with her one big song in the movie, “The Laziest Gal in Town.” At first, she’d rejected it, claiming “It is too old.” But it went over so big with audiences that she sang it on tour for the rest of her professional life.

  For her other song, “La Vie en Rose,” Dietrich purloined the signature song of her French lover, Edith Piaf. Hitchcock finally agreed to include it in the film, after protesting that the song was already too well known.

  He also let Dietrich hire Christian Dior to design her wardrobe, which the diva insisted on taking home with her at the end of filming.

  “Next to Marlene, I looked like a little brown wren,” Jane complained.

  When she saw the first rushes, Jane burst into tears, seeing herself depicted on the big screen as a drab maid. She called Jack Warner and he agreed. He phoned Hitchcock, ordering him, “Let Jane spiff herself up. After all, she is one of our studio’s marquee attractions, and there is nothing to be gained by making her look like Marjorie Main on a bad day.”

  Hitchcock tried to reassure Jane. “You’re an attractive woman in your own right. You’re one type, Marlene is another. You’re also twelve years younger than she is. The camera will catch that. So why worry?”

  “Jane’s refusal to stick to the script annoyed me,” Hitchcock said. “She should have been a pimply faced girl. Wyman just refused to be that, and I was stuck with her. Suddenly, with Warner’s blessing, she started showing up with more makeup. She just refused to stay in character the way it was written.”

  Although Jane frequently tangled with Hitchcock, their relationship remained more tranquil than his with the more temperamental Dietrich. Jane later said, “We had a pleasant uneasiness between us at all times. In other words, I didn’t find him a cuddly teddy bear. I also didn’t like it when he told me that he preferred to direct blondes.”

  As shooting progressed, Dietrich began to pay more and more attention to Jane, overcoming her initial jealousy at her star billing. As Jane recalled, “On days when Marlene had no studio call, she would come on the set just the same. She’d fix my dress, make suggestions about my hair and makeup, and help me in many ways.”

  Later, Jane had unattractive stories to relay to Paulette Goddard, who was no friend of Dietrich, since Goddard was jealous of the star’s appeal to Erich Maria Remarque, the renowned writer whom Goddard eventually married.

  Jane claimed, “At one point, when Dietrich was messing with my hair, she fondled my breasts.”

  It isn’t known if this really happened, or whether Jane was being spiteful to Dietrich. However, the German diva had been known to pull that stunt with other female stars, as once reported by, of all people, Mae West.

  Dietrich told Jane, “If the Academy gave Oscars for great performances as a lover, I would have a shelf filled with replicas of that statuette.”

  At first, Jane found the Irish-born stage and film actor and former soldier, Richard Todd, “Handsome enough to win any maiden’s heart.” That year, he would marry Catherine Grant-Bogle, whom he’d met at Scotland’s Dundee Repertory Theatre. “Hitchcock told me that Marlene had already ‘auditioned’ the young man [i.e., Todd], who was two years younger than me,” Jane said.

  As regards Todd, Michael Wilding said, “Dick was taking bachelor’s privilege before settling down to wedding bliss. That is, of course, bedding any available lass he could. Jane seemed the most susceptible to his Irish charm and wit.”

  At the time of Jane’s first excursion to a Mayfair pub with Todd, he turned her off by talking about his experience of working with Reagan in The Hasty Heart.

  “If you don’t mind, I’d rather close that chapter of my life.”

  During her filming of Stage Fright, Jane’s attorney sent her documents defining the date of her divorce from Reagan as July 18, 1949.

  Jane rejected Todd’s next two invitations for pub crawls with him. Then one afternoon, she received a letter from Lew Ayres. In it, he reminded her that he’d been married twice before (to Lola Lane and Ginger Rogers), and telling her that he had no desire to repeat the process. “I may never marry again. At least you and I made a great film together, and
had endearing moments of love. But it must end.”

  Louella Parsons was in London at the time, and she heard that Ayres had dumped Jane. Normally, the gossip maven and the actress were the best of friends, but on this occasion, Parsons told friends that “Jane was icy cold.”

  “I have no plans to marry anyone,” Jane told Parsons.

  “Perhaps I got Jane on the rebound,” Todd recalled to Wilding and others. “But she came to my dressing room and fell into my arms. I think she needed reassurance that she was still desirable to men. Before that night ended in her hotel suite, she was assured about just how desirable she really was. It took a loving Irishman like myself to do that job. From then on, we had this thing, although I kept it from my bride-to-be. There was a lot of sneaking around.”

  Dietrich got involved in details associated with Todd’s upcoming marriage. She wanted to know the birth dates of both Todd and Grant-Bogle.

  Astrologist Carroll Righter was Dietrich’s professional stargazer. The actress consulted him at least three times a week. A cultured homosexual, he would advise her to see Jean Gabin one evening, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. another evening, or Ernest Hemingway on a third night.

  In front of Jane, Dietrich told Todd what she’d learned from her astrologer. “You must not marry that girl. The stars are never wrong. My life is ruled by the stars. If you marry her, you’ll be making a ghastly error.”

  Todd later said, “Marlene, or rather her stargazer friend, was right. My marriage ended in divorce.”

  Hitchcock told Jane, “The only thing I like about Todd is his expressive eyes. You have other qualities, but I think you also have some of the most expressive eyes of any actress in film today.”

  “Thank you,” Jane said, “but I can assure you that Richard has hidden talent—not just his eyes.”

  “I see, my dear,” Hitchcock replied. “I will have to take your word for it. Unlike George Cukor, who is in town filming a movie, I do not put my leading actors on a casting couch.”