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

by Darwin Porter

  For the first time, she’d be working with the strikingly handsome, muscular, 6’3”, square-jawed actor, Charlton Heston. On being introduced to her, Heston startled her with his opening line.

  “Did you know that Ronald Reagan and I have something in common?” he asked her.

  “And what might that be?” she asked.

  “We both posed nude for sculpture classes,” he said.

  [NOTE: whereas Reagan retained his “bloomers” during those modeling sessions, Heston, by all accounts, did not.]

  The film’s director, Georgia-born Robert Parrish, was a former child star. He was also a screenwriter and editor, having won an Oscar for the film, Body and Soul in 1947. As an actor, he’d appeared with her former lover, Lew Ayres, in the 1930 all Quiet on the western Front.

  Jane was supported by two talented actresses, Claire Trevor, cast as Lady Mac (short for MacBeth), and Thelma Ritter as Molly. “Any time Trevor or Ritter appeared on camera, you can be assured they’ll steal the scene,” Jane said to Parrish.

  On the first read through of John Lee Mahin’s film script, based on the Margaret Cousins novel, Jane found out just how disappointed Heston was to be co-starring with her. “This movie is nothing but trashy soap opera,” he said.

  Off screen, Charlton Heston was cynical about his role in lucy Gallant, telling Jane:

  “It’s basically your show, with me wandering in and out for stud duty,” Heston said. “I’m contracted to make this buzzard for one reason. Dollar bills!”

  Jane didn’t know what Heston was getting, but she was drawing $163,000 for ten weeks’ work.

  “When I heard you were my leading lady, I thought it was one of those May-December romances,” he told her. I mean, you’re thirty-seven, but I’m only thirty, although I look twenty-five.”

  After that put-down, she struck back. “Perhaps you’re right. I see you’re still carrying around your baby fat in that pudgy ass of yours. Better take it off, Chuck.”

  Although insulted, he took her advice and slimmed down for all of his next pictures, many of which had him half nude.

  Haute mode: Jane, prepping for lucy Gallant’s fashion promenade with designer Edith Head.

  “Edith was a lesbian,” Jane claimed. “She always managed to cop a feel when fitting me for one of my gowns.”

  During the shoot, she found him, “cold and distant,” and he obviously did not like working with her in this story of marriage vs. career, the saga of a dress designer who sets up shop in a hick Texas oiltown where women, for the most part, are attired in calico and gingham.

  Into her life comes Casey Cole (Heston), a lanky local rancher, who falls in love with her. Their love scenes were unconvincing. At one point, Heston joins the Army, but upon his return, he becomes an oil tycoon. Lucy’s shop burns to the ground, and she faces a perennial question: Stay on and build a bigger store, or retreat into a marriage? Feminists hated her final choice.

  Ritter’s advice was “Having a man is better than ending up a rich old maid with a monogrammed water bottle.”

  The highlight of the movie was a spectacular fashion show. The film’s costume designer, Edith Head, actually makes a rare appearance on camera. So did Alan Shiver, the actual then-governor of Texas, who introduces the fashion show.

  Paramount publicity ran a promotional ad that both Heston and Jane found vulgar:

  HE’S COLD—SHE’S HOT—SHE WARMS HIM UP.

  Another copywriter got carried away, defining the movie as:

  A STORY WITH THE FORCE AND POWER OF AN EXPLOSIVE GUSHER.

  At the end of the shoot, Heston said, perhaps falsely, that “Jane’s a lot of fun, down-to-earth, and unaffected.”

  When asked what she thought of working with Heston, Jane uttered: “No comment!” and walked away.

  Bosley Crowther of The new York Times wrote: “Some of it catches sudden flashes and briefly revealing glints of the crudities and vulgarities of the Texas nouveaux riche. The ostentation of such things as lavish spending and going to backyard barbecues in evening gowns is subtly satirized.”

  The film, lucy Gallant, limped into theaters across the country, soon disappearing with a broken leg and quickly forgotten.

  ***

  The teaming of Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson was so successful in Magnificent obsession that Universal decided to unite them again as a romantic couple in all That Heaven allows (1955).

  The Rock Hudson she’d worked with on Magnificent obsession (1954) was not the same actor she had encountered on the set of all That Heaven allows (1955).

  He had, during the interval between these films, become a big star. In the fan magazines, he and Marilyn Monroe were written about more than any other celebrities. Fan clubs had sprouted up in all the States.

  Once again, the producer was Ross Hunter, who commissioned Peg Fenwick to write the screenplay based on a story by Edna L. Lee and Harry Lee.

  It was the story of a May-September romance between a wealthy widow, as played by Jane, who lives in a small, suburban New England town with two college age children. One day, an exceedingly handsome and virile young gardener arrives to prune her trees. He is Don Kirby (Hudson), an intelligent, down-to-earth passionate younger man who leads an idealistic, Thoreau-inspired, walden Pond-style life outside the gossipy, mean-spirited town. Gradually, the couple fall in love, despite the difference in their age and class.

  Her children are horrified. Son Ned (William Reynolds) accuses his mother of besmirching her late husband’s memory. Daughter Kay (Gloria Talbot) is equally unenthusiastic, fearing that her mother will disgrace the family. She prefers her to wed Harvey (Conrad Nagel), a longtime family friend. In real life, Nagel, born in 1897, had been a romantic leading man on the silent screen. Jane doesn’t seem attracted in any way to this older man, who could conceivably have played her father. At the time of shooting, Jane was forty-one, Rock, 29, although he looked even younger.

  Jane with Douglas Sirk, who had slept with her acting partner.

  Jane knew that Sirk was a sometimes lover of Rock’s and she felt she could discuss her embarrassment with him. She revealed that she’d walked into her suite at New York’s Waldorf and had found Rock seducing Fred Karger.

  Jane, backstage, with Rock Hudson, who had slept with her husband.

  “That is a problem,” he said. “There will be love scenes between Rock and you.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll pull them off regardless of how I feel about Rock’s betrayal,” she said. “I won’t be the first actress in Hollywood who has faced this dilemma.”

  She decided she needed another hit, and she threw herself into this story of small town bigotry, prejudice, and narrow-mindedness.

  On the set, at one of their first reunions since their embarrassment at the Waldorf, Hudson walked right over to her and kissed her on the cheek. “Great to be working with you again. Our last picture made me a biggie. People treat me different. Sometimes they just stare at me in awe. If I let out a fart after eating a bowl of chili, I get applause, like I’ve done something wonderful. It seems that everybody I meet thinks I can walk on water.”

  Cover boy William Reynolds, hailed as a “classic male beauty,” played Jane’s son in all That Heaven allows. Director Sirk told Jane, “I’d like to direct a love scene between ‘Billy Boy’ and Rock, but the world isn’t ready for that...Yet!”

  “I don’t!” she said sharply.

  “Oh, Janie, let’s make this picture and forget about Freddie,” Rock said. “He’s trying to find himself. You must understand that in Hollywood, these things happen more than you would know.”

  For the sake of the picture, she told him she’d cooperate with him.

  He said he’d been tapped by George Stevens to appear in his upcoming film Giant (1956), based on the Edna Ferber novel. His co-stars would be James Dean and Elizabeth Taylor. He claimed that both Alan Ladd and William Holden had wanted the lead role in Giant, but both had been rejected.

  “Maybe you’ll bed both of them
, too,” she said, sarcastically.

  “Actually, that’s what I plan to do,” he said.

  During the course of the day, he told her that his gay agent, Henry Willson, was forcing him into a lavender marriage with his secretary, Phyllis Gates, who was a lesbian. “I hate the idea of getting married, but too many of the fan magazines are running stories headlined: WHY ISN’T ROCK MARRIED?”

  Within the first week, Jane was either introduced or else renewed her acquaintance with the rest of the cast, particularly Agnes Moorehead, who had previously starred with Rock and herself in Magnificent obsession.

  When Jane filmed a scene with Reynolds playing her character’s son, in reference to the character played by Hudson, he tells her, “All you see is a good-looking set of muscles.”

  Ironically, that is what Rock saw and appreciated when he was introduced to Reynolds.

  [Many film critics have hailed Reynolds—who was native to los angeles and of norwegian ancestry—as the most stunning of the so-called “pretty boys” of the 1950s, others of whom included Robert wagner, Tony Curtis, and Tab Hunter.]

  Sirk told Jane that he felt “Rock will go for this hunk big time. Billy boy is just his type. The question is, will Reynolds swing in Rock’s direction?”

  It is not known if Rock ever made a pass at Reynolds, as he so often did with handsome young men who worked with him on his films, once falling in love with a cameraman.

  Reynolds had married Molly Sinclair in 1950 and remained wed to her until the time of her death in 1992.

  The only published source attesting that Rock and Reynolds might have been lovers was a 2004 biography, Rock Hudson, by the prolific writer, David Bret. But there is no other confirmation, and the claim could have been just speculation.

  During the filming of all That Heaven allows, as Jane moved deeper and deeper into her on-screen romance, the script rekindled sad memories of how the gossips of Hollywood had destroyed her own engagement to Travis Kleefeld, a young man she’d loved at the time. As an actress, she was drawing on that experience as a means of bringing the character of the affluent older widow in love with a younger man to the screen.

  When reporters came to the set, Jane put up a brave front: She said, “After working with Rock Hudson the second time around, I’d say that he’s got to be the biggest thing to hit the industry.”

  After Sirk read that that comment in the papers, he said to her, “Rock’s got the biggest thing all right.”

  “Oh, you size queens,” Jane responded, dismissing him.

  During the filming, Jane bonded with Virginia Grey, who was her same age. Born in Los Angeles, Grey told Jane that Gloria Swanson had been her first babysitter. At the age of ten, Grey had made her film debut in the silent, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1927).

  Jane, as well as most of Hollywood, knew of Grey’s long-enduring affair with Clark Gable. She confided to Jane that she was heartbroken when he married Lady Sylvia Ashley in 1949. “He’d proposed to me months earlier,” she said. “I’ll never marry any other man if I can’t have Clark. After all, once you’ve gone to bed with Clark Gable, no other man will do.”

  Virginia Grey: ”It’s Clark Gable or no one.”

  Unknown to Grey, Jane herself had long ago had an affair with Gable. Her appraisal of him as a lover was remarkably different from Grey’s high evaluation.

  The same year (1955) that Grey had worked with Jane, she’d also played a role in the film version of Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tattoo, working with the volatile and very temperamental Anna Magnani and the (calmer and more restrained) Burt Lancaster.

  As Jane was leaving the studio late one afternoon, she ran into Karger, who was just arriving. At first, she thought he had come to see her, perhaps hoping for a reconciliation, although they had only recently divorced. He was courteous but distant, as she would later recall to Sirk, with whom she still confided.

  It turned out that Karger was at Universal to retrieve Rock in advance of the plans they’d formulated for that evening. He explained it to Jane by claiming that Rock had hired his band as part of one of his upcoming outdoor parties.

  That was the last time she saw Karger on the lot. However, Sirk and others told her that after that, Karger made it a point to wait for him across the street from the entrance to Universal. He was parked there many afternoons around the time when shooting had ended for Rock that day.

  As Jane told Sirk, “Fred is obviously not playing for Rock every night of the week. Or perhaps he is, so to speak.”

  Don’t worry,” Sirk said. “Their romance won’t last long. Rock is very promiscuous. I get him once or twice a week. And he usually keeps three or four studs on call at all times. The thing with Fred will blow over soon enough.”

  “I don’t know why I’m so concerned about it,” she said. “After all, I divorced him.”

  Critics dismissed all That Heaven allows as another “soaper from Sirk.” However, it scored so big at the box office that in the wake of its success, Universal wanted to cast Jane and Rock in a series of romantic comedies together.

  Rock would go on to his biggest success in light, romantic comedies, but the female role would not go to Jane, but to Doris Day, as it did in Pillow Talk (1959), a mega-hit.

  Years later, Jane lunched with Sirk. She asked, “What’s a damsel like me to do? I lost my husband to Rock, but his thing with Fred is over by now. Alas, those romantic comedies featured Doris Day instead of me.”

  “Well, why don’t you chase after Fred and remarry him?”

  “That’s about the dumbest idea I ever heard,” she said. “You can take that idea and shove it where the sun don’t shine. I’ll never remarry that jerk. NEVER!”

  “Jane, my darling, You’re protesting too much.”

  ***

  When all That Heaven allows was initially released, and dismissed as “a woman’s weepie,” Sirk said, “There is a short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.”

  In the 21st Century, many film historians are inclined to agree with Sirk’s assessment. all That Heaven allows has won praise from such filmmakers as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Quentin Tarantino.

  In 1995, the United States’ National Film Registry added it to their list of films that it defined as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

  Film historians today cite the movie as a critique of the conformity-obsessed America of the Eisenhower era.

  ***

  Jane had a reunion with Van Johnson on the set of their latest picture, Miracle in the Rain (1956). Whereas she had returned to Warners (at least for the filming of this movie), he had been let go from MGM, where, in the 1940s, he’d been billed nationwide as America’s Sweetheart, along with his female counterpart, June Allyson. In 1945, he had tied with Bing Crosby as America’s top box office star.

  Johnson poured out his frustrations to her.

  Jane’s “Miracle” with Van Johnson.

  Before the end of his contract with MGM, he had co-starred with Elizabeth Taylor in The last Time i Saw Paris (1954). He’d also teamed with Gene Kelly as the sardonic second lead in Brigadoon, both pictures released in 1954.

  He was still married to Evie Wynn, the former wife of Keenan Wynn, who had divorced her so that Johnson could marry her. As prompted by Louis B. Mayer, he had hoped that by doing so, he would squelch rumors about his homosexuality.

  It wasn’t just his declining career that troubled Johnson that particular day, but his loss of a role he coveted: He had wanted to play the Texas rancher, Bick Benedick, in the movie version of Edna Ferber’s Giant, opposite Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean. But the coveted role had gone instead to Rock Hudson.

  Jane tried to comfort him. “Rock stole that choice part from you, and he ran off with my husband, the sleep-around Fred Karger.”

  Perhaps with a bittersweet sense of irony, she told Johnson, “This is my last picture at Warner Brothers. I got my first screen
credit here back in the 1930s—and now it’s over. I don’t expect Jack Warner to come out and say goodbye. He had another actor moving into Ronnie’s dressing room before he had even finished packing. Things get gone and quickly forgotten around this joint.”

  ***

  The sappy plot of Miracle in the Rain by Ben Hecht had appeared in The Saturday evening Post back in 1943. Warners had invested $75,000 for the story back then, which at the time was considered a very high price. Hecht was a successful and highly visible screenwriter, known for such hits as His Girl Friday (1940), so he could command top dollar for his material. Yet for some reason, his Miracle had never been brought before a camera.

  Before Jane’s picture reached the big screen, Hecht’s story had already been transformed into four separate productions for live television, in 1947, 1949, 1950, and 1953, respectively.

  After reading the script, Warner said, “It’s such a goddamn sad ending, it’s bound to bring in an Oscar or two. After all, the soldier is killed and our meek little typist also dies in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, clutching the G.I.’s talisman in her palm. You can’t beat crap like that!”

  In Manhattan’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Jane lights a candle in memory of her dearly departed after being comforted by a (very handsome) priest.

  To her chagrin, she was later advised, “Movies about Catholic miracles have gone out of style.”

  Miracle’s plot involved a young woman who falls in love with a soldier during World War II, Weeks later, he is killed overseas. The miracle arises when she gets up from her sickbed, even though she’s seriously ill, and makes her way to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Miraculously, her dead lover appears again before her, giving her a lucky coin he had taken overseas with him, which later provides “proof” that he (i.e., his spirit) had really been there, and that she was not hallucinating.