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

by Darwin Porter

  During their weekends together, Reagan often shared his views with her on many subjects, as he was well informed. In most cases, even if she disagreed with him on a subject, she never argued. She was far more tolerant and sophisticated about homosexuality than he was.

  He told her, “It’s a tragic mistake and we should continue to view homosexuality as an illegal act. Participants should be subject to arrest and imprisonment.”

  When he became governor, he said, “Perhaps the only place in government that can employ homosexuals is the Department of Parks and Recreation.”

  In the media, that remark was widely denounced and defined as “vulgar, crude, ignorant, and tasteless.” There were calls for “impeachment of the bigot.”

  Before Co-Ruling the Free World, Nancy Learns to Shovel Horse Manure at Her Boyfriend’s Malibu Ranch

  Nancy knew that their dating was getting more serious one night when he told her, “I really miss having someone to love—in fact, I hunger to have someone love me.”

  She later told her friends, “I knew at this point I had him.”

  ***

  During the final year before their marriage, Nancy and Reagan were living together, mostly at her apartment, like husband and wife. Weekends were usually spent at his Malibu ranch, sometimes with Michael and Maureen, when they weren’t away at school. When they were in town, the children lived with Jane.

  The ranch lay half a mile inland from the Pacific. Once there, visitors discovered a rundown old farmhouse that was gradually being fixed up. In March of 1951, Reagan had paid $85,000 for the property, on which he raised horses. When the first colt was born—he described it as “a gorgeous dapple filly”—he named her “Nancy D.”

  Ranching was not Nancy’s thing. Her expressed distaste for it may have caused her to lose Clark Gable. She wasn’t going to let that happen again. On the ranch, she threw herself into the spirit of it all, although admitting to friends, “I carried water to the horses and even shoveled manure. The closeness of animals, bugs, and dirt was a bit of a stretch for me, but at least I got to work shoulder-to-shoulder with Ronnie.”

  Sometimes, when Reagan drove the children back to Jane, she would invite him inside, even if Nancy were with him. “Jane was perfectly nice to me,” Nancy wrote. “Not only had she been married to Ronnie, but she was very much ‘The Star,’ and it was her house and her children. I felt out of place, and I was a little in awe of her.”

  Later, as their “Love Triangle” continued, Nancy became very angry at Jane when she learned that Jane had convinced Reagan not to remarry until she did. She was dating bandleader Fred Karger at the time. Jane felt it would be embarrassing to her if Reagan remarried while she was still unwed.

  When he learned about Jane’s upcoming marriage to Karger, he felt he could go ahead and propose to Nancy.

  As more and more people in the film industry learned about Nancy’s link to Reagan, she was often asked, “What is he really like?”

  She had a pat answer: “The secret is that there really is no secret. He is exactly the man he appears to be. The Ronald Reagan you see in public is the same Ronald Reagan I live with. He is not a fraud or a phony.”

  ***

  Reagan had seen Dr. Loyal and Edith many times, and both of them heartily approved of him. Loyal thought he was be “a good provider.” Edith, on the other hand, told Nancy, “If I were twenty years younger, you would have me to fight off for this stud. He’s a real catch.”

  When Nancy married Reagan in 1952, her movie career was drawing to a close. Months before the pre-defined end of her MGM contract, Nancy was told that it would not be renewed.

  Mightier moguls than Nancy had already succumbed to the ax: Louis B. Mayer himself had resigned, more or less against his will, in the aftermath of a series of money-losing pictures he’d made.

  As a means of softening the journalistic impact of her impending departure from the movie industry, Nancy preferred to tell reporters that she planned to retire from the screen and devote herself to her new role as a housewife and mother, a position that paralleled many of the beliefs and role models of the Eisenhower era.

  But she still had a handful of undistinguished films to make for dwindling audiences to sit through. Worsening things was that she never really developed a fan base like Wyman and, to a lesser extent, Reagan.

  ***

  The prospect of remarrying perplexed not only Reagan but Jane, Michael, and Maureen, too.

  While he was still dating Nancy, Reagan was rumored to have spent the night of January 5, 1951, with Jane, celebrating her birthday, and, one assumes, some shared memories. The next day, he placed an excited call to Dick Powell. “Janie and I have made up. We’re going to remarry.”

  But in just two weeks, Jane apparently changed her mind. The reasons are not known, but June Allyson speculated, “I think Ronnie told her that one day, he wanted to be President of the United States, and she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life on the road to the White House.”

  Louella Parsons told of a private talk she’d had with Jane, not for publication. She had asked the columnist, “What’s the matter with me? Will I ever find happiness?”

  For a while, Reagan dated starlet Penny Edwards. According to her, he told her one night, “I like you just fine. But I think I’ve forgotten how to fall in love.”

  Another of Reagan’s dates was Ann Sothern, who had once co-starred with Nancy. “When I dated Reagan, he had two things on his mind, politics and Jane Wyman. Even when he was supposed to be hot and heavy with Nancy, I noticed it was Ruth Roman he invited to the premiere of his film, The Hasty Heart (1949).

  Sothern said, “He told me he gave Jane a small poodle with a note—‘This is to keep you company until your lovin’ man comes home again.’”

  When Jane started work on a new movie, Three Guys Named Mike (1951), Reagan sent her a large bouquet of red roses. “I know you’ll be safe with Van Johnson. But I don’t know about Howard Keel and Barry Sullivan. Especially Keel.”

  One night, June Allyson and Dick Powell invited Reagan over to dinner by himself. He wanted to talk to the couple, who had remained his close friends over the course of many years. Allyson had also maintained an intense friendship with Jane until they had a falling out.

  Reagan was wondering if he could more or less incorporate both Jane and Nancy into an extended family, celebrating reunions with Maureen and Michael during communal weekends at the ranch. He had promised Jane she could go to the ranch any time she wanted for horseback riding.

  “Ronnie,” Allyson said. “That’s not going to work out. Nancy won’t like it. It’s a stupid idea unless you’re planning to set up a ménage à trois. And a ménage à trois will only take place in your sexual fantasies.”

  As Michael later said, “Back in those days, the press was trying to promote a feud between my mother and Nancy. When I met separately with each woman, they had nothing but derogatory things to say about each other. I agreed with whichever one I was with at the time.”

  When friends asked Jane if theirs was a feud like that of Joan Crawford with Bette Davis, she denied it. “I have no grudge against Miss Davis. To show that there are no hard feelings, I plan to attend the funeral of the bitch.”

  Before and after his marriage to Nancy, Jane tried to avoid attending events or private parties and dinners where she would encounter Nancy. Reagan had stopped bringing Nancy by her home when he drove over to return Maureen and Michael to their mother.

  However, on certain occasions, they were trapped together. One such event occurred in 1964, when Maureen hosted a lavish reception at the time of her second marriage (i.e., to David Sills). Nancy, Reagan, and Jane stood together in the reception line to greet their guests.

  Although it was all smiles in the reception line, Jane and Nancy avoided each other for the rest of the day. Jane left early, privately telling Maureen, “Better luck with your second choice of a husband. I hope it won’t be as disastrous as your marriage to that policem
an—what’s his name.”

  ***

  Joan Blondell described a last minute drama that transpired during the planning phases of the Nancy/Ronnie wedding.

  “Jane came to see me and we talked and drank until around three o’clock in the morning,” Blondell said. “She wondered if she should stage an eleventh hour maneuver to get Ronnie back. She was determined to go to him in the pre-dawn hours and plead with him to remarry her. That ended when I reminded her that if she did that, she might have to get him out of bed with Nancy.”

  Chains of love, Till death do us part: A proud, much-manipulated “Papa.”

  “Later,” Blondell continued, “she told me that she had contacted Ronnie, and he agreed to meet her for a late breakfast at a secluded café in Santa Monica. I think she did ask him to take her back. But it was too late. He told her he was going ahead and marrying Nancy, even though he was still in love with Jane.”

  “Ronnie won his victory,” Blondell said. “She wanted to be his wife again. Ronnie had always predicted she’d change her mind and want him back. But, according to Jane, he held out a compromise: He promised that during his upcoming marriage, he’d slip away and see her on occasion.”

  “We’ll make love like we used to for old time’s sake,” he reportedly said.

  ***

  Before and after Reagan’s marriage to Nancy, Maureen, his older offspring, revealed her fears about his upcoming marriage to Nancy. “She’s still young enough to have children. Not only will I have to think about adjusting to half brothers or sisters, but I’ll be torn between two families. Please understand, siblings aside, my loyalty will always be to you and my mother. I love both of you dearly.”

  “How are you getting along with Nancy?” Reagan asked Maureen.

  “I find her sympathetic to the problems of a young girl like me growing up in Hollywood. But any motherly love I have will be reserved for mother.”

  Patti Davis, daughter of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, was the prodigal daughter, dumping the Reagan name and using her mother’s maiden name instead to symbolize her disgust with her father’s right-wing political views.

  As for her own politics, she was a pot-smoking liberal. At the age of 41, she posed for the July, 1994, edition of Playboy, appearing on the cover with the hands of a black man cupping her (otherwise naked) breasts. She also made a direct-to-video Playboy Celebrity Centerfold, the tape showing her cavorting in lesbian settings outdoors, followed by a solo masturbation scene.

  Patti’s first novel, Homefront, published in 1986, recorded fictionalized events inspired by her own childhood and teenaged years, an artistic choice which seriously pissed off her father’s Republican friends.

  “I understand that,” he said.

  [Maureen would later write a memoir, First Father, First Daughter, in which she discussed the problems of Reagan marrying “The Other Woman.” Adding to the complications of her family landscape, Nancy and Reagan eventually presented her with a half-sister and a half-brother.

  Maureen later said, “Dad married Nancy just in time. Patricia Ann Reagan was born by cesarean on October 21, 1952.

  Years later, Maureen suggested that there was jealousy between her half sister and herself. She remembered sitting on the sofa in the Reagan living room, watching her father bounce Patti on his lap, later tossing her up in the air. Maureen wistfully, and perhaps with deep touches of envy, remembered when she sat on her dad’s lap, and when he had tossed her into the air.

  With Reagan, Maureen would always try to be the loyal daughter, presenting Patti in the most unfavorable light. “She even changed her name to Patti Davis,” Maureen said. “I’m proud to be a Reagan. She’s not!”

  Indeed, Patti Davis grew up to be the “black sheep” of the family. She became known for her liberal viewpoints, many of which contrasted with her father’s conservatism. She was pro-choice on abortion, and favored gay rights. Reagan did not.

  She was also an author, not portraying her family in a positive light in The Way I See It, in which she called her father, “cold, distant, and aloof to everyone except Nancy.” She also charged Nancy with physical abuse.

  Ron Reagan, Jr. “Like father, like son” in every instance except his love of ballet.

  Nancy’s mother was horrified in 1994 when Patti posed for Playboy.

  On May 28, 1958, both Maureen and Michael would be presented with another sibling, born Ron Reagan, Jr. He, too, reportedly embarrassed his father when he dropped out of Yale to become a ballet dancer.

  As President, Reagan was quizzed by reporters about his son’s sexual orientation. Reagan answered, “We checked him out. He’s definitely straight.”

  One amusing incident occurred on Saturday Night Live, during his father’s presidency. In a funny skit, Ron Jr. parodied Tom Cruise’s performance in Risky Business (1983) by dancing in his underwear—presumably while his parents were away— in a replica of the interior of the White House.

  Nancy and Reagan watched the show that night, but reportedly did not understand it. When it was explained to the President, Reagan asked, “Who is this Tom Cruise fellow?”

  In 1988, one reporter confronted Reagan, “Is it true, as some have it, that your son is not only a liberal, but an atheist?”

  “I’ll have no comment,” the President said.]

  ***

  Reagan’s friends, Robert Taylor, George Murphy, William Holden, and Dick Powell, claimed that “Ronnie went through the jitters about marrying again.”

  If both Tom Cruise and the President’s son worked in a male strip club, which would women prefer? Your choice.

  “I’m still in love with Jane, but I also love Nancy, but in a very different way,” he explained to Murphy.

  “Nancy,” he continued, “will be loving and supportive. I know that about her. But Jane is a seductive little vixen. She’ll betray you, infuriate you, but you keep going back for more of what she dishes out. I’ll share a secret with you. Unlike Nancy, Jane talks real dirty in a guy’s ear—What a turn-on!”

  Reagan later admitted that during his courtship of Nancy, “I did everything wrong, doing everything that could have lost her if somebody up there hadn’t been looking after me.”

  In his autobiography, he wrote, “In spite of my determination to remain foot-loose, in spite of my belief that the pattern of my life was all set and would continue without change, nature was trying to tell me something very important.”

  “I loved Jane, and I am still in love with her, but as a wife, she never understood me and my aspirations. Nancy is just the opposite. She understands.”

  ***

  From the beginning of her relationship with Reagan, as Nancy later claimed, she sensed that acting was not providing fulfillment for Reagan. He seemed to want a career in something else, and she assumed that was politics, since he talked about that subject all the time.

  Biographers have suggested that Nancy was the single most important source for leading Reagan out of the liberal camp into the right-wing den. But she denied that, claiming he was the one who got her interested in politics.

  Before she married Reagan, Nancy consulted with Carroll Righter, Hollywood’s reigning astrologer. He assured her that the “stars would shine on such a union.” She felt confident to move ahead.

  ***

  At long last, on February 29, 1952, that day arrived. At the marriage bureau, when they applied for a marriage license, an onlooker described their arrival.

  “Ronnie looked a little pale in a turtleneck and trench coat, Nancy radiant in a white-collared black dress.” It was the same black dress she’d worn on her first date with him.

  Four days later, on the day of his wedding, Reagan was forty-one and had lost the youthful good looks that had drawn so many women to him during his early days in Hollywood. Nancy was thirty-one, although most of America thought she was twenty-six, because that’s what was published in interviews.

  In addition to their ranch, he would purchase a dream house along the Pacific P
alisades.

  In 1954, when he became a spokesperson for General Electric, that company would fill the house with every imaginable electric gadget designed for modern living, including a chandelier wheel with a dozen recessed colored lights, prominently positioned above their dining table.

  William Holden was designated as Reagan’s best man, his wife Ardis (the actress known as Brenda Marshall) serving as Nancy’s matron of honor.

  Nancy noticed that the Holdens weren’t speaking to each other. They had had a fight the night before, after Ardis learned that her husband had had a fling with the bisexual actress, Judy Holliday, when they had co-starred together in Born Yesterday (1950).

  Midway through the ceremony, Holden, with a few drinks in him, came up to Nancy. “Let me be the first to kiss the new Mrs. Ronald Reagan.”

  She quickly whispered to him. “You’re jumping the gun. The ceremony’s not over yet.”

  “No I’m not,” Holden said, and kissed her anyway.

  Nancy later claimed, “I certainly remembered that kiss from Bill. But I don’t remember getting a kiss from Ronnie.”

  He had said he wanted no publicity. However, when they arrived at the Holden home for their modest reception, a photographer was waiting to record this historic event. Ardis had ordered a wedding cake.

  At the reception, Reagan stood with Holden, looking over at Nancy and Ardis on the other side of the room.

  “At least I know that with Nancy, I won’t have a wife outshining me on the screen. No one is ever going to call me Mr. Nancy Davis, I can assure you.”

  “I’m with you, man,” Holden said. “No one ever called me Mr. Brenda Marshall. That’s what we get for marrying unimportant actresses, unlike Jane Wyman.”

  For their honeymoon night, Reagan drove Mrs. Ronald Reagan to the grandly historic Mission Inn in Riverside, where incognito movie stars often went for off-the-record trysts, especially on weekends. [In 1940, Richard and Patricia Nixon had celebrated their wedding reception here.]