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

by Darwin Porter

  After that night of passion, Reagan and Nancy set off to Phoenix to join Dr. Loyal Davis and his wife, Edith, who were vacationing there at the time.

  Nancy later said, “Having a honeymoon with one’s in-laws might have been a bit strange, I admit. But it worked beautifully, and Ronnie enjoyed the company of my parents who were so pleased with my choice of a husband.”

  As Edith told Reagan, “Honey, if you don’t get it right the first time with Wyman, you’re going to make it with Nancy. She’ll be the best little wife a man could hope for, unlike those whores of Babylon out there in California.”

  During their drive from Phoenix back to Los Angeles, Reagan and Nancy were trapped in the worst sandstorm to hit western Arizona in twenty years. “The winds were harsh enough to make a coyote airborne,” Reagan later said.

  The winds at one point ripped the canvas of the retractable top of their convertible. For part of the ride, Nancy had to position herself on her knees on the front passenger seat, facing backwards, and holding the torn canvas together. Her hands became so frozen they had to stop periodically so that she could rub them together to help the blood circulate.

  To some couples, the storm might have represented an evil omen. But for Nancy, at least, it wasn’t so. She was totally optimistic.

  Years later, as President of the United States, Reagan, one afternoon in the White House, told his aide (Secretary of the Treasury and later, Chief of White House Staff) the similarly named Donald T. Regan, “I found the ideal Cinderella. The shoe fit her little foot perfectly. As her Prince Charming, I promised to make her my Princess. Instead of that, I made her Milady and put her in a position more important than any damn run-of-the-mill princess. In fact, I plunged her into a life beyond her wildest dreams.”

  A Special Feature

  This photograph, taken on July 5, 1981 at the White House, on the occasion of Nancy Reagan’s sixtieth birthday, was published on the frontpages of newspapers throughout the United States, even abroad.

  Nancy was dancing, embraced in the arms of “the man of my dreams,” Frank Sinatra, although he’s wearing one of his worst toupées. She obviously regrets the intrusion of her husband, Ronald, who always suspected that “something was always going on between those two.”

  Originally, when he was still a pal of John F. Kennedy, Ol’ Blue Eyes detested the Reagans. But when Bobby Kennedy, then Attorney General, made Frank persona non grata at the White House, the singer switched his political alliances.

  He’d once said, “Reagan is a stupid bore who can’t get a job in pictures.” He’d also called Nancy, “A dumb broad with fat ankles who can’t act.”

  But at this White House gala in 1981, he sang:

  “I’m so proud that you’re First Lady, Nancy,

  Also so pleased that I’m sort of a chum.

  The next eight years will be fancy as fancy as they come.

  Nancy, Nancy, Nancy, with the smiling face.”

  “Gorbachev, Tear Down That Wall”

  —Joyce Hodges

  The 1930s-era starlet, Joy Hodges, was the woman who, early in the game, had filled Reagan in on the lowdown aspects of the entertainment industry during his first venture into Lotus Land. Consequently, she and Reagan became life-long friends. She lived through his presidency and beyond, dying on January 19, 2003, in Palm Springs, California, at the age of 88.

  Auld Lang Syne: Two views of actress and danseuse Joy Hodges, from the era she welcomed then-newcomer Ronald Reagan to Hollywood.

  Hodges once told reporters, “I got Ronnie his first pair of contact lenses and his first screen test. He was the first leading man in Hollywood to wear contact lenses, and he would take them out on a regular basis to show their then-new technology to friends.”

  When Reagan occupied the White House, he often invited her to dinner. Later, she commented, “At one party I found myself seated next to President Mikhail Gorbachev. I turned to him and said, ‘Gorby, tear down that wall—and he did! Of course, Ronnie in Berlin later stole my line and it became his most famous statement as president.”

  She recalled her final meeting with Reagan in January of 2001. “He looked at me and summoned up a name from somewhere deep in his memory. He called me ‘Miss Jones.’”

  She figured that he had recalled how she had played “Miss Jones” in the 1937 Broadway musical, I’d Rather Be Right, produced by Richard Rogers and George Kaufman. Its most memorable musical number was “Have You Met Miss Jones?”

  The plot centered on a beautiful heroine (Miss Jones, as played by Hodges) and her boyfriend (Austin Marshall). The couple desperately needs to increase their income before they can get married. Before the final curtain, a show-biz representation of the President of the United States steps in and gracefully solves the lovers’ dilemma.

  “Ronnie probably remembered me from the play, or if not, at least as the subject of that song,” Hodges said.

  REST IN PEACE

  At a White House Governor’s Dinner, Ronald Reagan, 40th U.S. President, chats with Bill Clinton, the 42nd U.S. President, and Hillary Rodham Clinton, possibly the 45th U.S. President.

  Near the conclusion of his first autobiography, Where’s the Rest of Me?, Reagan was in a nostalgic mood. He remembered many of the people he had known, specifically acknowledging “May Robson, Alan Hale, Lionel Barrymore, Ethel Barrymore, Zasu (sic) Pitts, Eddy Arnold of the booming laugh, kindly Paul Harvey, roistering, scratching Wallace Beery, Charles Coburn (who amputated my legs), Adolph (sic) Menjou, and the greatest of all actors, Walter Huston.”

  Demurely, Reagan went on to label some of the less inhibited, more flamboyant actors he had known, specifically defining Ty Power, Errol Flynn, “Bogey,” “Coop,” Dick Powell, Wayne Morris, Clark Gable, and Jack Carson, as members of “a special breed.”

  Reagan ended his first (and relentlessly opaque) memoir on a reassuring, feel-good note, citing the usually rather blunt Clark Gable as saying, “The most important thing a man can know is, as he approaches his own door, that someone on the other side is listening for the sound of his footsteps.”

  Referencing the happiness he’d found in married life with Nancy, and the wisdom he had found after the termination of his film career, he concluded, “(At last) I have found the rest of me.”

  The Long Goodbye

  In August of 1994, five years after his departure from the Oval Office, Ronald Reagan, with the ever faithful Nancy at his side, received the devastating news that he’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

  Reacting to that, in November of that year, as autumn winds blew in from the Pacific, he penned a handwritten message to the American people. In part, it read:

  “I have recently been told that I am one of the millions of Americans who will be afflicted with Alzheimer’s Disease…

  “At the moment I feel just fine. I intend to live the remainder of the years God gives

  me on this earth doing the things I have always done…

  “I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life. I know that for America, there will always be a bright dawn ahead.

  “Thank you, my friends. May God always bless you.”

  From there, his health and his memory continued to deteriorate.

  His friend, Merv Griffin, remembered visiting Reagan in his office in Los Angeles, at Century City. During that visit, the former President picked up a photograph of the White House. “This building looks familiar,” he said to the TV talk show host. “Where is it?”

  Before he arrived in Hollywood, Reagan had been a gifted swimmer and lifeguard who saved 77 lives from drowning in the Rock River, near his home town of Dixon, Illinois.

  But in retirement, he had to wear water wings and be propped up whenever he entered or departed from the waters of his pool by a security guard.

  Flailing around for ways to fill his time, he developed and then defined a “special mission” for himself—gathering up magnolia leaves that had blown onto the pool’s surface. Reco
gnizing the importance that Reagan associated with this task, Secret Service agents routinely collected bags of these leaves from other sites, placing them onto the surface of the pool’s water so he could then take credit for removing them.

  Once a football star at Illinois’ Eureka College, Reagan, during his retirement, began to imagine that he had to get into uniform for the big game. “The team needs me!” he urgently and repeatedly told Nancy. He began to confuse scenes from his movies with his real life. Omnipresent were scenes from his famous football picture, Knute Rockne— All American (1940) that produced his all-time most famous line, “Win just one for the Gipper.”

  One morning, the fast-deteriorating former president woke up sobbing, asking attendants nearby, “Where’s the rest of me?”—a question inspired by his critically acclaimed performance in Kings Row (1942), after a sadistic surgeon had maliciously amputated his legs. Decades later, from the depths of his dementia, he imagined that his own legs had been surgically removed.

  The aging Titan would sometimes “cry like a baby” about taunts that his brother, Neil Reagan, had hurled at him, based on his belief that “Moon” had uttered those insults only a few hours before. Preceding him to the grave, his brother had died of Alzheimer’s Disease in 1996.

  In reaction to her husband’s deterioration, Nancy, growing increasingly frail and having lost an alarming amount of weight, said “My heart is broken.”

  As the first U.S. President to die during the 21st Century, Reagan passed on at his home in Bel Air, California, on June 5, 2004, not knowing that he had once been the most powerful elected leader in the World. His longevity defined him as the second longest-lived president in U.S. history, having survived 93 years and 120 days, just 45 days fewer than Gerald Ford.

  After a state funeral in Washington’s National Cathedral, a ceremony presided over by then-president George W. Bush, Reagan’s body was flown back to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California.

  There, at a sunset Memorial Service and Internment Ceremony, Nancy, overcome with grief, lost her composure, crying in public for the first time that week.

  She accepted the folded flag that had been draped over the coffin of her one-and-only husband. As she kissed the casket, she mouthed the words, “I love you,” before her sad departure.

  Her final words were, “Ronnie’s long journey has finally taken him to a distant place where I can no longer reach him.”

  ***

  Ronald Reagan did not fear departing on another journey. He added a personalized footnote to his favorite poem, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Crossing the Bar, verses that were read at his Memorial Service:

  Sunset and evening star.

  And one clear call for me!

  And may there be no moaning of the bar,

  When I put out to sea.

  “We have God’s promise that I have gone on to a better world, where there is no pain or sorrow. Bring comfort to those who may mourn my going.”

  —Ronald Reagan

  “Who is this strange woman and why is she kissing me?” Reagan might have asked on February 6, 2000 the occasion of his 89th birthday.

  As part of the celebration, Nancy had given him a piece of cake and a kiss. Their 45th wedding anniversary, scheduled for March 4, would transpire in less than a month. But he didn’t know who she was. He had no idea that he had ever married her.

  Acknowledgments

  Jane Wyman, Nancy Davis, and Ronald Reagan (despite the latter two’s “reveal nothing” memoirs) chose not to tell us very much about what used to be called their “salad days.” Perhaps they were just being discreet, preferring to emphasize their triumphs rather than their compromises and indiscretions.

  We at Blood Moon subscribe to Oscar Wilde’s adage that there’s nothing else to do with gossip but spread it around. So consequently, we have decided to do it for them.

  It took some effort, actually decades of it, to assemble this portrait of the Reagans’ “Love Triangle.”

  We were aided in our research by a vast array of collaborators in the film colony. Virtually everyone who ever worked with the Reagans had opinions and insights about them, both good and bad. If we listed all of them—some of them wanted anonymity—it would fill many dozens of pages.

  Those people quoted in this book were viewed as newsworthy enough to have been the subject of individual interviews over the course of many years. As the Reagans became increasingly famous, many “lesser souls” wanted to talk about their involvements with Nancy, Jane, and Ronald.

  The list is long and convoluted, but here is a sampling of some of the contributors:

  Jack Carson (who was especially insightful about his best friend, Dennis Morgan); John Payne (from a hospital bed in New York, following an accident); Susan Hayward (when she was semi-retired and my neighbor in Fort Lauderdale).

  There were so many others: Glenda Farrell, Frank McHugh, Eddie Albert, Wayne Morris, Pat O’Brien, Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, Allen Jenkins, Mervyn LeRoy, Priscilla Lane, Adele Jergens, Virginia Mayo, Ida Lupino, Phillip Terry, Ann Sheridan, Kent Smith, Audrey Totter, Rock Hudson, Raoul Walsh, Bruce Bennett, John Litel, Ray Enright, Tom Drake, Peter Lawford, Milton Berle, Bryan Foy, William Clemens, Lloyd Bacon, Anita Louise, Eddie Foy, Jr., Gale Page, Lewis Seiler, Michael Curtiz, Merv Griffin, Richard Thorpe, Alan Hale, Sr., Curtis Bernhardt, David Lewis, Jerry Wald, Viveca Lindfors, Alexis Smith, Peter Godfrey, Shirley Temple, Eve Arden, David Butler, Lewis R. Foster, Andrew Marton, Allan Dwan, and Nathan Juran.

  As everyone in the business knows, the Hollywood Hills and the canyons of Manhattan are filled with (sometimes embittered) unpublished memoirs. It seems that everyone who was anybody, along with those who wanted to be, view their lives as worthy of a memoir. Year after year, most of these go unpublished

  Blood Moon, however, receives some of these at regular intervals. Some representative titles have included: I Was Tyrone Power’s Secret Male Lover, Liberace’s Secret Life, and My Affair with Oprah Winfrey. Fear of libel often prevents the publication of many of these revelations.

  Although many of their manuscripts never saw the light of publication, we are nonetheless grateful to the literary agencies operated by Bertha Klausner, Jay Garon-Brooke, and Ilsa Lahn for letting us wade through their “slush piles.”

  Manuscripts on Robert Taylor, Barbara Stanwyck, and especially Paulette Goddard (written by her former secretary) were most helpful, as were portraits of Dick Powell, Dennis Morgan, George Murphy, Betty Grable, Lucille Ball, and William Holden. Long before us, other authors attempted separate manuscripts on the subjects of this book—i.e., “tell-alls” about Nancy, Jane, and Ronald.

  One of our greatest contributors was Joan Blondell, a dear friend and house guest. She was very helpful about the early career of her “fellow chorine,” Jane Wyman, and filled with wonderful stories about backdoor intrigue at Warner Brothers in the 30s.

  Another close friend, Van Johnson, on whose Manhattan terrace I spent many hours in the company of our mutual friend, songstress Greta Keller, had known and co-starred with Jane Wyman and (to a lesser degree) Reagan since World War II.

  June Allyson was filled with revelations about the Reagans, especially in her later years, after she broke with Jane over a disagreement.

  No one was more helpful than Stanley Mills Haggart, my former boss. He arrived in Hollywood during the Silent era and began writing about the film colony’s fun and foibles in his voluminous diary. (It was never submitted for publication, and for good reason!) In the late 30s and early 40s, he had been Hedda Hopper’s “leg man.” In that much-envied and highly competitive position, he was often aided by his long-time companion, William Hopper (Hedda’s son). William was a close personal friend of Reagan’s, and appeared in bit parts in many of his early films.

  Although Hedda couldn’t print many of the indiscretions that Stanley and her son uncovered, confirmed, and delivered to her, she wanted to be keenly aware of what was happening after dark and dur
ing the pre-dawn hours of the industry that employed and fascinated her.

  LOVE TRIANGLE

  ITS AUTHORS

  DARWIN PORTER

  As an intense and precocious nine-year-old, Darwin Porter began meeting movie stars, TV personalities, politicians, and singers through his vivacious and attractive mother, Hazel, a somewhat eccentric Southern girl who had lost her husband in World War II. Migrating from the depression-ravaged valleys of western North Carolina to Miami Beach during its most ebullient heyday, Hazel became a stylist, wardrobe mistress, and personal assistant to the vaudeville comedienne Sophie Tucker, the bawdy and irrepressible “Last of the Red Hot Mamas.”

  Virtually every show-biz celebrity who visited Miami Beach paid a call on “Miss Sophie,” and Darwin as a pre-teen loosely and indulgently supervised by his mother, was regularly dazzled by the likes of Judy Garland, Dinah Shore, Veronica Lake, Linda Darnell, Martha Raye, and Ronald Reagan, who arrived to pay his respects to Miss Sophie with a young blonde starlet on the rise—Marilyn Monroe.

  Hazel’s work for Sophie Tucker did not preclude an active dating life: Her beaux included Richard Widmark, Victor Mature, Frank Sinatra (who “tipped” teenaged Darwin the then-astronomical sum of ten dollars for getting out of the way), and that alltime “second lead,” Wendell Corey, when he wasn’t emoting with Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Crawford.

  As a late teenager, Darwin edited The Miami Hurricane at the University of Miami, where he interviewed Eleanor Roosevelt, Tab Hunter, Lucille Ball, and Adlai Stevenson. He also worked for Florida’s then-Senator George Smathers, one of John F. Kennedy’s best friends, establishing an ongoing pattern of picking up “Jack and Jackie” lore while still a student.