Falcon Crest would go out on the CBS network for its first broadcast on December 4, 1981, running for nine trauma-infused seasons, shutting down on May 17, 1990.
Its lifespan more or less paralleled the two-term presidency of Ronald Reagan.
When Stanwyck bowed out, Hamner thought it would be wise to exploit the publicity generated by Jane Wyman, Reagan’s first wife, who was back in the news again. He reportedly said, “Dare we bill her as ‘The Woman Who Almost Became First Lady?’”
In the original pilot, Jane sported a gray wig, but that was later changed to her own dyed brown hair. “The preview audiences laughed at me for wearing that dreadful wig, and I put my foot down. Also, I told Hamner to soften my role. Originally, my character was too much of a god damn bitch.”
He later called Jane “A tough broad, but she knew what she was doing. It was not her first time at the rodeo.”
As a Napa Valley wine tycoon, Angela would spend the series feuding with and fighting her relatives, plus others, as a means of retaining control of the family legacy.
She battles one of the heirs to Falcon Crest, Robert Foxworth, and his wife, Susan Sullivan, but dotes on her handsome playboy grandson (Lorenzo Lamas), the real-life son of Fernando Lamas and Arlene Dahl.
“The Iron Lady of the Vineyards,” Jane Wyman, veteran survivor of changing times in Hollywood, with the Falcon Crest gang in 1984.
Throughout the 8½ year run of the series, guest stars came and went, including Celeste Holm, still remembered for her role in all about eve (1950), who nearly burns down Falcon Crest.
A good hunk of tout Hollywood, notably Lana Turner, showed up for guest appearances. Jane had always detested her, an enmity dating back to the time “she messed around with Ronnie.”
To boost ratings, other featured notables included Gina Lollobrigida (after negotiations with Sophia Loren fell through); Robert Stack, Cliff Robertson, Kim Novak, Leslie Caron, Lauren Hutton, Eddie Albert, Eve Arden, and Ursula An-dress, whose involvement caused a tiffle because of her status as one of Nancy Reagan’s best friends.
One of the highlights of the series transpired when Jane, as Angela Channing, married Falcon Crest’s lawyer, Phillip Ericson (Mel Ferrer). Consistent with her character, as developed by Jane, Angela does this not only for love, but for access to greater power. Ferrer’s character maneuvered ambitiously through the politics of the family legacy until the writers of the series had him killed off in a plane crash.
At one point, Ginger Rogers, perhaps the ultimate symbol and archetype of Golden Age Hollywood, was proposed for the role of Susan Sullivan’s mother. But the blonde was ruled as “not the right type” for the role. Jane Greer, star of many a 1940s film noir, was hired instead.
Hamner notified Jane that he was casting César Romero, as her co-star in the role of a very wealthy tycoon, who helps her “save the plantation.” The script was still being written when she was told, “There will be some on-screen romancing.” At the time, Romero was in his seventies and white-haired.
Although Jane had often accepted Romero as an occasional escort between her marriages—this lifelong bachelor had been the escort of many great Hollywood divas, including Joan Crawford—she was alarmed at the prospect of that new twist in the series’ storyline. She was especially disturbed at the prospect of any kissing scenes between them.
Celebrity psychic John Cohan was a friend, confidant, and psychic advisor to Jane for many years. He had followed her interaction with another of his friends, Rock Hudson, during their filming of Magnificent obsession and all That Heaven allows.
[Cohan has been a celebrity seer and channel of wisdom to stars who have included elizabeth Taylor for more than thirty years. during much of that time, he supplied columnist Cindy adams with his yearly predictions, many of which turned out to be surprisingly accurate.
Many insights about the stars can be found in Cohan’s tantalizing memoir, Catch a Falling Star: The Untold Story of Celebrity Secrets, published in 2008. in it, he has much to reveal about former friends and clients, including natalie wood, Merv Griffin, John Kennedy, Jr., elvis Presley, Mick Jagger, and Rudolph nureyev. He also writes about “my dear friend” nicole Brown Simpson as well as “the love of my life,” Sandra dee, the former wife of singer Bobby darrin.]
John Cohan...privy to celebrity secrets.
Cohan was also a friend of Romero, and was well aware of his long-lived crush on Desi Arnaz. When Jane learned that Romero was to be assigned as her love interest in Falcon Crest, she called Cohan to express her possible objections. “I don’t want him on the show if there’s to be a kissing scene,” she said. “There’s an AIDS epidemic, I don’t know where his mouth has been the night before.”
Cohan had a talk with her, telling her that “Cesar is a gentleman and a fine actor. I can assure you that he’s as meticulous in his hygiene as he is in his grooming. You have nothing to fear.”
César Romero...”The Latin from Manhattan.”
Obviously, Cohan convinced her that Romero would present no threat, even during an embrace. She called Hamner the next day and told him, “I think Cesar will be ideal in the part of my beau.”
Jane’s friendship with Romero remained intact, despite her fears. A few weeks later, Romero resumed escorting Jane to various premieres or tributes to aging players in the film industry. They’d sometimes end the evening dancing. “He’s a great dancer,” she told Cohan, something he already knew, of course.
***
Starting out at $25,000 per episode, Jane’s fee for her involvement in Falcon Crest eventually rose to $100,000 per episode, making her the highest paid woman in television.
John O’Connor, in The new York Times, summed up Falcon Crest in 1981. “And so it goes, the standard stuff of soaps, with a crisis bubble bursting at least three times between commercial breaks. At fadeout, Jane Wyman is meaningfully stroking a falcon on the grounds of her estate. The stage is set for anything.”
The other actors in the series often complained to Hamner that Jane was telling them how to act. When Hamner confronted her with this, she said, “The poor dears, for the most part, have had no experience. If they’re bad, I’ll look bad. Now we can’t have that happening, can we?”
Throughout the run of the series, Jane bitterly resented any publicity that linked her to the Reagan presidency. Her former association with the President became especially visible at the 1984 Democratic Convention, when protesters opposing Reagan’s policies carried signs “JANE WYMAN WAS RIGHT” within view of television crews.
Her salary as a highly visible actress was sometimes compared to that earned by Reagan in his capacity as president, columnists suggesting that she was being paid ten times more than he was.
She didn’t like it when critics jokingly referred to her series as “dallas with grapes.”
“We were more glamorous than dallas [1978-1991], but not as outrageous as dynasty [1981-1989],” she said.
Because of her declining health, Jane was absent throughout much of Falcon Crest’s final (1989-1990) season. She rallied, however, to the point where, in defiance of her doctor’s orders, she returned for the season’s last three episodes. In the final scene of the series, she raises her glass to either the vineyards or the series (no one was really, sure, as the moment was richly symbolic), “A toast to you, Falcon Crest,” she said, “and long may you live.”
On the last day of the series’ filming, she had told Hamner, “Honey, I’ve seen them come and go…mostly go. And now it’s time for me to make my exit. I’ll say this: It’s been a ride to hell and back. And I’m still here. Now I want to be alone.”
***
Golden age icon Loretta Young, Jane’s then closest friend, had married the famous dress and costume designer, Jean Louis, in 1993, when she was eighty and he was eighty-four. Young had been instrumental in motivating Jane to become a member of the Third Order of Saint Dominic, informally known as “Lay Dominicans.”
[Lay Dominicans define themselves
as “Men and women, singles and couples, living a Christian life with a Dominican spirituality in the secular world. We find our inspiration following the same spiritual path taken by many Saints, Blesseds and other holy men and women throughout the almost 800 year history of the Dominican Order.”]
As a means of living closer to her friend, Jane had moved into the upscale resort community of Rancho Mirage in Riverside County, near Palm Springs, 120 miles southeast of Los Angeles.
When Young died in 2002, Jane was very distraught. More than ever, she seemed to cling to her Catholic religion.
The year (2001) after Young’s death, Jane’s only biological child, her daughter, Maureen, died from melanoma. Jane told Cohan, “There’s nothing worse for a parent than to outlive her own children.”
She was further devastated when Reagan died in 2004. She issued a rare statement about him. “America has lost a great President and a great, kind, and gentle man.”
Cohan recalled going to see her on his final visit, when he found her bedridden and in seriously declining health.
She asked him to stay overnight with her. In her condition, that was obviously not a sexual overture. She told him she was very lonely and just wanted someone to hold her. “I need that like a plant needs water,” she said.
Jane Wyman, on the set between takes during the final season of Falcon Crest. Forlorn, she looks into her future. The chorus girl cutie of the 1930s had become an aging matriarch.
He stayed with her and comforted her, later commenting on what a “charming, bright woman she was as a person, not just a great actress.”
At the age of ninety, on the night of September 1, 2007, death came to her in her sleep. She had left instructions to be buried in her Dominican habit.
A funeral mass was held two days later at the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in nearby Palm Desert. Michael Reagan delivered a short eulogy, asserting that “Hollywood has lost the classiest lady to ever grace the silver screen.”
In her later years, she had a favorite remark, “I am a little too old to be happy, but just old enough to be grateful.”
Many newspapers ran banner headlines, proclaiming, “THE FIRST MRS. REAGAN DIES.”
She had told Young and others, “I’m sure many headline writers will do that, but I would have preferred to be recognized as a star with my own achievements, rather than for a marriage I entered into decades ago.”
Let’s remember Jane Wyman and Ronald Reagan not as old and decrepit—and ill—relics who survived to see the 21st Century, but as two kids in love with each other, or at least in love with love.
Late in her life, when Jane was shown this picture, she said, “God, we were gorgeous, and about to become the most publicized happily married couple of World War II.”
Special Feature: Hellcats of the Navy
“Ronnie and Nancy,” as they were now called, never became the screen team they had dreamed about—a working duet equivalent to William Powell and Myrna Loy or Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy.
But they did make one attempt at it in Hellcats of the Navy, a 1957 release from Columbia Pictures.
For Hellcats of the Navy, Columbia granted Reagan the usual contractual clauses allowing a star to select his own director. Subsequently, Reagan opted for Nathan Juran, who had helmed him in Law and Order (1953). Then Reagan successfully persuaded the studio to designate Nancy as his co-star.
Juran had been an Oscar-winning art director for such films as The Razor’s Edge (1946). A year after his direction of Hellcats of the Navy, he’d achieve a rank in “camp heaven” after directing the sci-fi horror flick, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman (1958), a libidinous romp that seemed perfect back then for a Saturday night date at a drive-in. [Its storyline? After an aborted murder attempt, an alluring and scantily clad socialite, massively and majestically enlarged after an encounter with Aliens, seeks revenge on her lying, abusive, and cheating husband.]
One evening, the co-starring, co-habiting, married couple sat down in their living room to read the script of Hellcats. It was based on a widely publicized book by U.S. Admirals Charles A. Lockwood and Hans Christian Adamson, about a real-life Naval operation that had unfolded in 1944. The film would open with an introduction by Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, who had directed a naval campaign in the Tsushima Strait and the Sea of Japan during World War II. His mission’s aim involved maneuvering a flotilla of U.S. submarines through underwater obstacles and heavy minefields. In the movie, Nimitz’s character was portrayed by the actor Selmer Jackson.
The film’s scriptwriters were credited as David Lang and “Raymond Marcus.”
It wasn’t until 1986 when an anti-communist U.S. president learned that the film-script had actually been written by a blacklisted screenwriter, Bernard Gordon, who had opted for “Marcus” as a pseudonym.
In the screenplay, Nancy is in love with Commander Casey Abbott (Reagan). Simultaneously, she’s also involved in a minor romance with a member of his crew, frog-man Les Barton (Harry Lauter).
Abbott must struggle not to get his personal feelings mixed up with his high-profile role as commander.
Reagan, as Abbott, leading a fictional submarine, U.S.S. Starfish, is ordered to interrupt the flow of war supplies en route from Japan to voracious Japanese forces invading China. Most of the action takes place in the obstacle-studded, heavily mined waters off the Asiatic mainland.
As an actor, Reagan’s worst problem was that he suffered from claustrophobia, a lifetime terror of small, enclosed spaces. For unrelenting hours at a time, he was forced to work with as many as sixteen cast and crew members, all of them packed like sardines into the tiny reconnaissance tower of a working submarine.
A dramatic point in the film occurs when Reagan, as Commander Abbott, has to make a “Command Decision,” evocative of the 1948 Clark Gable film of that same name. In Hell-cats, when Reagan makes an equivalently crucial decision, he signals its weightiness to the audience by narrowing his squinty eyes, tightening his jaw muscles, and furrowing his brow, which was beginning to wrinkle at this stage of his middle-aged years.
As Nancy studied her character of Nurse Lt. Helen Blair in Hellcats of the Navy, she found she’d been cast in a “Love Triangle,” perhaps evoking memories of her own life and the role played in it by Jane Wyman, the third part of a competitive trio that flourished prior to Nancy’s marriage to Reagan.
When a Japanese destroyer bears down on them, Reagan orders his submarine to dive into very deep waters as a means of avoiding enemy shells. Lauter, preoccupied with his duties as a frogman, and outside the sub on the waters of the wide open sea, is left to die. A few scenes later, audiences know that Reagan’s competitor for the love and carnal affections of Nurse Nancy has descended to a watery, fish-bitten grave.
The submarine’s chief officer, Lt. Commander Don Landon, and the film’s third male lead is played by Arthur Franz, who had previously appeared in such war movies as The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) with John Wayne, and The Caine Mutiny (1953) with Humphrey Bogart.
Unlike Reagan, Franz had been a real-life hero during World War II, serving in the U.S. Army Air Force. His plane had been shot down over Romania, and he was incarcerated in a POW, from which he escaped and made his way to freedom.
Offscreen, in the photo above, actor and co-star Arthur Franz (left) is all smiles with the Reagans when the cameras weren’t rolling. But on screen, he and the character played by Reagan were bitter enemies.
Audiences didn’t find Nancy alluring as Reagan’s girlfriend in this movie. She was clad in a starched and un-sexy uniform, droning her nagging lines to Reagan without a trace of charm. Obviously, she was more alluring to him as a wife in private than as his on-screen lover.
Throughout most of Hellcats, the characters portrayed by Reagan and Franz are locked into a bitterly competitive feud until the end, when Reagan, by now working as a frogman himself, is rescued by Franz. All is forgiven, and Reagan, without a rival in love, can at last claim Nurse Nancy.
She
later wrote that the kissing scenes with Reagan were the easiest she’d ever played on screen, not that there had been that many.
In the final reel, Reagan agrees to marry Nurse Nancy. She later told Juran, “I had less trouble getting Ronnie to marry me on film than I did in real life.”
Reagan’s assignment as commander of the Hellcats involved retrieving actual Japanese mines from enemy-patrolled waters so that Naval experts could determine, in the safety of their laboratories, why they were resistant to detection by sonar.
Reagan was disappointed when he saw the final cut of Hellcats of the Navy. In his first autobiography, Where’s the Rest of Me?, he stated that he had wanted to make a film that evoked the quality of Destination Tokyo, a suspenseful 1943 film that had co-starred Cary Grant with John Garfield. Such was not the case. Reagan lamented that Columbia was more interested in the budget than in the script, and strongly criticized the recycling of stock footage from the studio’s archives.
Edmund Morris, Reagan’s authorized biographer, said that Hellcats was “a turkey so many-feathered it practically squawked off the screen.”
After it was finished, and for a brief time, Reagan considered retiring to his little stud farm to become a fulltime breeder of race horses, a lifestyle that evoked his role, and the character he developed, in Stallion Road (1947).
“Hellcats ended movies for me,” Reagan said.
[Actually, it didn’t. The ill-advised The Killers (1964), still in his future, would represent his final adieu to films.]
Critic Glenn Erickson defined the script of Hellcats as “completely derivative and cornball.” He also criticized the lack of realism derived from its use of stock footage. David Krauss called the production “bargain basement,” and evaluated both Reagan and Nancy as “stiff.” He went on to say that Juran’s direction was “as dry as a military briefing.”
Love Triangle: Ronald Reagan, Jane Wyman, & Nancy Davis (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) Page 99
