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

by Darwin Porter

  “Even when sober, he has a violent temper,” Jane told Blondell. “We attended this premiere. Some stupid fan called out to me, ‘Jane, who’s the guy with you? Is he important?’ That really pissed off Freddie. I had to restrain him or else he’d have slugged that fan.”

  The most shocking revelation she learned about Karger was that he had a bad heart condition similar to that of his father, Maxwell, a condition so serious it had led to the producer’s early death.

  “Up to then, I thought my husband was a stallion,” Jane said. “Now I know differently. He seems to go day and night, a fulltime job at Columbia and all those late night gigs with his band. He’s tired, overworked, completely exhausted, which makes him irritable.”

  In March of 1953, he endured a mild heart attack. “We had him rushed to the hospital in an ambulance,” Jane told Allyson. “The doctor warned me he had to cut back on his schedule and give up smoking those three packages of cigarettes a day. I’m urging him to give up the band, too. I didn’t tell him that I’m often embarrassed to go to a Hollywood party to find Freddie and his band working as the hired hands for the night.”

  A big blowup in their marriage occurred right before Christmas of 1953. Jane was late arriving home, and Karger and the children were collectively decorating the living room and the Christmas tree. When young Michael was left alone in the living room, the boy began lighting candles. He accidentally set fire to the decorations on Jane’s antique dining table, which was covered in heirloom lace.

  A fire broke out and blazed out of control The fire department was summoned as it spread. When Jane got home, she was shocked to find her living room soaking in water, the ceilings blackened, and some of her valuable possessions destroyed.

  She had such a fight with Karger that he moved out before Christmas Eve, spending two weeks in a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Reportedly, Marilyn Monroe, in the aftermath of one of her frequent tiffs with DiMaggio, moved in with Karger when the former baseball player, in a rage, flew to visit his relatives in San Francisco.

  Finally, Jane admitted to Blondell, “I miss the sex. I’m going over to the hotel to make up with Freddie and ask him to come home. The living room has been redone.”

  After a year of marriage, Jane told Blondell, “I think I had a Hasty Heart rushing into marriage to Freddie.”

  Her words were a reference, of course, to Reagan’s movie, The Hasty Heart.

  ***

  Jane received a call from director Douglas Sirk, informing her that Universal had decided to remake that tearjerker, Magnificent obsession, based on Lloyd C. Douglas’s bestselling novel, originally published in 1929.

  Its plot had previously been adapted into a film in 1935, starring Robert Taylor and Jane’s friend, Irene Dunne, in the lead roles. The script had originally been offered to Jane’s other Catholic friend, Loretta Young, but she had rejected it. “Irene is my best friend. I don’t want to remake the picture in which she was so glorious,” Young said.

  Jane’s career in the mid-1950s was slipping, and Universal executives decided to give her a boost in this seminal soap. Executive Ed Muhl also insisted that “America’s new heartthrob,” Rock Hudson, be cast as the male lead. “The original Magnificent obsession made a big star out of Robert Taylor. I think the remake can do the same for Rock. Maybe lightning will strike twice.”

  Jane had rehearsed how to be a deaf mute before shooting Johnny Belinda. A month before the filming began, on Magnificent obsession, she studied how blind people react. “They just don’t go around careening into the furniture and tripping over themselves,” she said. The character she plays is blind throughout part of the movie.

  Based on the directives of Jack Warner, the ads that promoted the tender love story portrayed by Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson were sensationalist and lurid.

  Posters screamed: “A Story Of Love That Will Become One Of The Deepest Emotional Thrills Of Your Lifetime!“, and “This was the moment unashamed, when this man and this woman felt the first ecstasy of their Magnificent obsession!”

  Two days before shooting, Rock had taken an inner tube to ride the waves at Santa Monica beach. Soon, he was drifting way out to sea, where he rode the crest of a wave back toward the shoreline. Before he reached it, the crashing surf landed him on the beach with a broken collarbone.

  Fearing that he’d jeopardize his big chance, he refused to let doctors put a cast on him, although he was warned that the bone would not heal properly and that he might feel pain for the rest of his life.

  On the first day of shooting, Jane sensed that something was wrong with him when they came into body contact during rehearsals for a scene together. She went with him to his dressing room, where he confessed that his collar bone was broken. She promised not to tell anyone and to be careful in her love scenes with him.

  Rock, born in Winnetka, Illinois, in 1925, was considerably younger than Jane. He stood 6’5” and towered over her. He was not only tall, but exceedingly handsome, wavy haired, and solidly built, a former Navy man who had become a Hollywood beefcake pinup, thrilling millions of teenage girls and gay men of all ages.

  Jane was very patient with Hudson, even when some of their scenes had to be reshot thirty or even forty times.

  On the set, producer Ross Hunter huddled with Sirk and Jane, telling both of them, “I want this to be a three-hanky movie. I like to give the public what it wants—a chance to dream, to live vicariously, to see beautiful women, jewels, gorgeous clothes, and to experience melodrama.”

  Hunter told Jane, “I’m the world’s champion crier. That’s why I’m so good at producing junk like our movie. Call me the ‘Sultan of Soap Operas.’ Even though I find it repulsive, I hawk heterosexual romance. In fact, I worship at its altar because it makes big bucks for me.”

  Hunter had served in Army Intelligence during World War II. Later, this gay man became a theatrical producer and director, known for light films starring Doris Day, Lana Turner, Debbie Reynolds (the Tammy movies) and later, Julie Andrews.

  A Dane, Sirk had been one of Germany’s leading stage directors before the war, later working for UFA studios. He was credited with making a star of Zarah Leander in Nazi cinema. Because his second wife, Hilda Jary, was Jewish, he said, “goodbye to Adolf” (his words), leaving Germany in 1937. By 1942, he was making anti-Nazi films in Hollywood.

  Hudson later told Sara Davidson, who was working with him on his autobiography, “Doug would lock his office door, have the secretary hold his calls, and come after me on his knees. It was enough to keep him hooked and eager to help my career.”

  In Magnificent obsession, Rock was cast as a spoiled playboy, Bob Merrick. He has an accident in his speedboat, and his rescuers send for the only resuscitator in the area. Regrettably, Jane, cast as Helen Phillips, discovers her husband as he suffers a heart attack and dies. He, too, needed that resuscitator, the assumption being that if its life-saving powers hadn’t been squandered on the character played by Rock, Jane’s husband would have lived.

  Jane’s Helen refuses to accept Bob’s generous offers and apologies. When he tries to pursue her by jumping inside her car, she escapes onto the street, where she is hit by an oncoming car and, as a result, becomes blind.

  From then on, heartstrings are pulled. Along the way, Merrick discovers his spirituality, learning about the “magnificent obsession of helping others without making them aware of it. As only a Ross Hunter movie would dare, he even becomes a brain surgeon, not only saving Helen’s life, but restoring her sight. After a long struggle and endless resistance, she falls in love with him, leading to an improbable but happy ending.

  On the set, Jane was reunited with her friend, Agnes Moorehead, who had starred with her in The Blue veil. In Magnificent obsession, she played the role of Jane’s trusted friend, Nancy Ashford.

  It was during the filming that Agnes Moorehead’s friend, the outrageously campy Paul Lynde, came on the set.

  When Moorehead was called away, he told Jane, “The whole worl
d knows Agnes is a lesbian—I mean classy as hell, but one of the all-time Hollywood dykes.”

  “I can play them all,” Moorehead told Jane. “Bring ‘em on. Domineering mothers, comical secretaries, neurotic spinsters, puritanical matrons.”

  Barbara Rush, a beautiful young actress, was cast as Joyce Phillips, Jane’s stepdaughter in the film. Married to actor Jeffrey Hunter, she would appear opposite such stars as Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Richard Burton, James Mason, Frank Sinatra, and Kirk Douglas during her movie career. She affectionately called Ross Hunter “Uncle Mame.”

  One of the supporting players, Otto Kruger, had been a matinee idol in the 1930s, later cast as suave villains or shady fellows. He’d appeared in films starring everyone from Barbara Stanwyck to Grace Kelly.

  Mae Clarke, born Violet Mary Kootz in Philadelphia, had a small supporting role. Her career had peaked in 1931 when she played Frankenstein’s bride and was chased by Boris Karloff in Frankenstein. That same year, James Cagney in The Public enemy smashed a grapefruit in her face at the breakfast table.

  Hudson’s romantic life was growing more and more complicated. One night, Ross Hunter invited him to Chasen’s for dinner. “As Hudson entered the room, all the eyes, even the jaded ones attuned to male beauty, cast their gaze upon him,” Hunter said.

  He later told a jealous Sirk, “Rock was especially stunning that night. After two bottles of champagne, I told him that I wanted to spend the weekend with him in Palm Springs. It was even bigger than I had imagined.”

  “By the end of that weekend, I told him, ‘I love you, Rock!’”

  “Even with a broken collar bone, I was really put on the casting couch—first with Sirk, and, to top it off, now Hunter.” Rock said. “I was getting a real workout.”

  Rock confided his being a victim on the casting couch to his friend and fellow gay actor, Roddy McDowall.

  “Jane was always gracious and put me at ease in front of the camera,” Hudson said. “I was nervous and didn’t want to fuck up this big picture. It was my first real break. I think I brought out the mother instinct in her. Things got out of hand one night, though. What shall I call it? Mother love, perhaps? You get my drift.”

  “It’s not that I had not had intimate contact with a woman before. In my day, I’ve delivered a few mercy fucks, notably with Joan Crawford at her house. Or a weekend with Tallulah Bankhead in Las Vegas. Those mercy fucks extended to fading matinee idols like Errol Flynn and Tyrone Power. I didn’t mean for it to happen with Jane. I respected her too much. I think she turned to me when she heard Fred Karger was back, banging Marilyn Monroe.”

  When the film was released, it made ten times as much money as the original Taylor/Dunne version—in other words, it was a major hit.

  Hudson got the worst reviews. Critic Doug McClelland called him, “comic strip handsome, thrashing about with no special distinction, his scenes lined up with all the depth and subtlety of great colored blocks.”

  The new York Times appraised Jane: “In appealing contrast to Miss Dunne’s pristine languor, Miss Wyman is, as usual, refreshingly believable throughout.”

  Magnificent obsession was a big hit, earning $5 million for the studio. Thousands of letters poured into Universal, citing Hudson’s stunning male beauty—“and those soulful eyes.”

  A star was born.

  Magnificent obsession brought Jane another Oscar nomination. But that was the year (1955) that Grace Kelly won the Best Actress Award for The Country Girl.

  ***

  Escorted by Fred Karger, Jane had flown to New York to promote Magnificent obsession. A suite was reserved for them at the Waldorf Astoria. Rock Hudson flew in the following day and paid an early afternoon visit to their suite. It was made clear that Rock and Karger would work out together at a health club on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and that Jane would spend part of the afternoon having her hair styled in advance of their gala event that evening. All of them agreed to return to Jane and Karger’s suite later that afternoon, allowing time to dress in formal wear for that evening’s gala event.

  After some additional chitchat, Jane departed for her appointment with the hair-dresser. Twenty minutes after leaving the Waldorf, she realized she’d left a diamond bracelet—one of her most expensive pieces of jewelry—on a tabletop back at the Waldorf. She hurried back to the suite, fearing that a member of the housekeeping staff might steal it.

  She entered the suite believing that she it was empty. Suddenly, she heard noises from the bedroom. When she opened the door, she found Karger and Rock engaged together in lovemaking. Karger was on the bottom, and he was the first to see her. “Oh, my God, Rock. It’s Jane.”

  She grabbed her diamond bracelet and walked quickly toward the exit, leaving the men alone together. She didn’t know what happened between them after that.

  When she returned to the suite later that afternoon, she found Karger alone. He was already dressed in his tuxedo for the premiere. Rock, apparently, had left.

  She said nothing. It was Karger who spoke first: “You’ve got to understand, honey. Both Hunter and Sirk told me that Rock is going to become the biggest star in Hollywood in just a year or so. I had to give in to him. He came on strong. With him headed for super stardom, he could get me assigned as musical director on all his films. I was doing it for career advancement…for us, darling.”

  Presumably, she assumed her most convincing mask of sophistication and tolerance. “It’s okay, darling,” she said. “Rock is very seductive. I, of all people, know that.”

  “You mean…?” He looked flabbergasted.

  “I mean just that, my husband,” she answered. “I had him before you. We’ll have to ask him which of us he prefers.”

  “I can’t believe this is happening,” he said.

  “I’m flying back to California alone,” she said. “I hope you’ll understand. Now let me get dressed so we can put on our best smiles as Mr. and Mrs. Jane wyman on the red carpet.”

  ***

  The months ahead were rough on the marriage. Jane called it “marriage on the rocks.” Karger was gone nearly every night of the week. On some of those occasions, he was appearing with his band. But she suspected many of those nights were spent at Rock’s home.

  Karger and Jane began a slow drift apart. Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons were soon made aware of their marital troubles.

  That summer, Jane revealed to Parsons, “There will be no reconciliation. I have decided that things aren’t working out between us.”

  “There’s no hope?” Parsons asked.

  “None.”

  “When Parsons contacted Karger, he told the gossipy columnist, “Let Jane speak for the both of us. It’s her decision.”

  Hopper one morning led her syndicated column with the headline WYMAN/KARGER MARRIAGE ON THE ROCKS. She had learned that Karger had gone back to living with his mother, Anne, and his daughter, Terry.

  Five weeks later, Parsons spoke to Jane and had a long talk with her. “I told Jane that both of them were equally to blame. I also said that I knew they had problems, but they were not important ones. I convinced her to take him back.”

  In a week, Karger was sleeping in Jane’s bed again, and both Hopper and Parsons were writing about their reconciliation.

  It is not known who, but some gossipy “friend” of Jane’s reported an incident he’d learned. According to the revelation, Karger had spent a long weekend in Palm Springs, occupying a hotel suite with both Tyrone Power and Marilyn Monroe.

  Jane might have overlooked his dalliance with Rock, but bringing Marilyn back into his life was too much. She could tolerate a liaison between him and Power, but not with Marilyn, or so she told Joan Blondell.

  On November 10, 1954, she filed for divorce, charging mental cruelty. Her papers came through on December 7.

  The day before that, she was received into the Roman Catholic faith, which, of course, frowns on divorce.

  Blondell later said, “Many stars in Hollywood, though loyal Catholi
cs in their spiritual hearts, don’t always adhere to the church’s rigid teachings. The Pope is so un-bending, only the most devout can follow his dictates. The church’s sense of morality is too rigid for a mere human being with needs and desires. Life is about having fun. It’s so damn short.”

  ***

  With movie roles drying up, Jane, in 1955, became the host of Jane wyman Presents the Fireside Theater, her gig lasting for three years.

  “I was following Ronnie by appearing on the little black-and-white box,” she told friends.

  Fireside Theater was an anthology drama series that ran on NBC from 1949 to 1958, becoming the first successful series on American television. Shooting schedules were short and budgets skimpy, but the public loved it, even though most critics panned the telecasts. For most of its run, Fireside Theater was among the top ten most popular shows on television.

  Both Frank Wisbar and Gene Raymond predated Jane as host, but she became the most successful because of her famous name, winning the most viewers.

  It wasn’t that she was not getting any film roles. Offers were for movies she didn’t want to make, including Friendly Persuasion (1956) with Gary Cooper, a role that went to Dorothy McGuire. She praised the great latitude she had working in television during her tenure. She also agreed to star in fourteen of the series’ episodes, eventually appearing with Joseph Cotten, Paul Henried, and Linda Darnell. One of them was Holiday in autumn (1955), wherein she co-starred with Fay Wray of King Kong fame. She also worked with actors she knew from earlier periods of her career, including Jack Carson and Dane Clark, even her former lover, Peter Lawford.

  When she left the series, it would not be Jane’s last venture into TV drama. “Bigger and better things—and a lot more money—were my distant horizon,” she recalled much later.

  ***

  Returning to the big screen, Jane starred in “a woman’s picture,” lucy Gallant, for producers William H. Pine and William C. Thomas. It was set for release in 1955.