by Bob Spitz
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The work was constant. Ronnie appeared in eight movies released in 1938, playing opposite Humphrey Bogart (Swing Your Lady), Dick Powell and Pat O’Brien (Cowboy from Brooklyn), James Cagney (Boy Meets Girl), and Susan Hayward (Girls on Probation). They were mostly B pictures and mostly forgettable, but they gave him solid credentials as a member of the Warner Bros. family. He was known for being a “dependable guy, never late, hung-over or difficult to work with.” He learned his lines as well as everybody else’s, a trusty college skill that earned the directors’ respect. He polished his technique, refining his delivery, striking a balance between the blustery, quick-talking rat-a-tat tempo that was a Warner Bros. trademark and a more serviceable relaxed style that could land him in tough-guy roles as well as romantic leads. He projected a likable, all-American screen image useful to the studio.
Warner Bros. was the urban studio, the studio of charismatic stars who weren’t patently handsome or glamorous. Cagney, Robinson, Bette Davis, Paul Muni, Joan Blondell, Humphrey Bogart: ferocious actors—but mugs. Errol Flynn, the studio’s one dashing heartthrob, would have been more comfortable at 20th Century Fox, whose head, Darryl Zanuck, loved men with dark looks and mustaches. Nor did Warner’s stars look like their MGM counterparts. MGM epitomized glamour: Clark Gable, Greta Garbo. Robert Taylor, MGM’s top leading man, was known as “the man with the perfect profile,” a beautiful statue. If an actor had looks and charm, MGM was the studio of choice.
Warner Bros. didn’t try to compete with MGM. “Their actors portrayed the lowlifes,” says Neal Gabler. “They spoke to a different constituency. They were the studio of the little guy, the underdog.” No other picture company would have ended a movie like The Public Enemy, with Cagney all trussed up. Or subscribed to the philosophy of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang: “How do you live?” “I steal.” The big number at the end of Busby Berkeley’s 42nd Street is “The Forgotten Man.” That forgotten man was Warner Bros.’ audience.
How did Ronald Reagan fit into this scenario? In theory, he might have been at the wrong studio. His all-American looks, his wholesale affability, his aw-shucks nature would have been more at home at MGM. Its Andy Hardy movies were sentimental comedies celebrating an idealized—Midwestern—American life. He would have stood out in Dinner at Eight, The Thin Man, Boys Town, and Goodbye, Mr. Chips. At Warner Bros., his choices were narrower—darker.
But the boss liked him. Jack Warner saw something in his young contract player that fit into his concept of a Warner Bros. star. Ronald Reagan had an impact on the screen, that je ne sais quoi. It was impossible to put a finger on it, but Warner knew it when he saw it. From the outset, Ronnie was never without work. Through 1938 and 1939, he moved continuously from production to production, working with James Cagney, Dick Powell, Ann Sheridan, Ralph Bellamy, Pat O’Brien, and Wayne Morris. He was handed the starring role in an action-adventure series, playing Brass Bancroft, a Secret Service agent, based on the memoirs of former G-man William H. Moran. Those movies might not have been critical gems—critics referred to them as “uninspired” and “obvious . . . cheap action melodrama”—but they were popular, filling Saturday matinees with teenage boys.
The early Ronald Reagan films were a hodgepodge of threadbare plots woven together for production-line simplicity. Some, such as Brother Rat and Going Places, were loosely based on plays. Others, such as Girls on Probation and Naughty but Nice, were pedestrian B features saddled with mediocre screenplays. All of them quickly sank into obscurity.
Reagan wasn’t being offered the juicy parts. “I learned that progress, career-wise, could be made only by getting into the A-pictures,” he complained, and at the moment, they weren’t being offered to him. Even so, he was thrust into the star-making machinery that contributed to building his stature. For the premiere of Warner’s 1938 blockbuster Jezebel, starring Henry Fonda and Bette Davis, the studio enlisted him to escort “sweater girl” Lana Turner to the red-carpet gala at Grauman’s Egyptian, after which it put out a photo spread of the two hinting at a romance. Of course, it was nothing more than a stunt. Publicity departments often manufactured relationships between their contract players, hoping to receive national newspaper and fan-magazine coverage. The flirtation with Lana Turner was pure Hollywood make-believe. Neither star had much interest in the other.
But the arrangement had its benefits. “Press agents were constantly trying to pair me with my leading ladies and new starlets,” Ronnie recalled—and he wasn’t bashful about taking them up on the offer. He enjoyed brief dalliances with actresses Margaret Lindsay and Susan Hayward, both of whom co-starred with him in 1939. His relationship with twenty-four-year-old Ila Rhodes developed into something more serious. They’d met while filming Secret Service of the Air, the first Brass Bancroft potboiler, and followed each other into Dark Victory, with bit parts opposite Bette Davis. Finding themselves together again in Hell’s Kitchen spurred “lunch-break trysts and weekends together” that blossomed into a full-blown romance. Rhodes would claim she dated Ronnie throughout 1938 and “became engaged—with a ring on my finger.” If that was the case, they kept it under wraps. There was no fan-magazine gossip, no active studio promotion; in fact, Warner Bros. might have downplayed the relationship as the studio lost interest in Rhodes’s career and put its weight behind Ronnie’s. In any case, after “eight or nine months,” Rhodes said, he “grew distant, withdrew a little,” which signaled to her the engagement was over.
Rhodes assumed the studio put an end to their affair. She might have read the tea leaves correctly, but she overlooked the obvious. Another co-star had taken her place.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“BUTTON NOSE”
“You might as well back down, because I’m gonna get you.”
—JANE WYMAN TO RONALD REAGAN, Brother Rat and a Baby (1940)
It would take a secret agent no less gifted than Brass Bancroft to uncover the truth about Jane Wyman’s past. Her birthdate was given variously as either January 4 or 5, 1914, or January 28, 1917, depending on whether her name was Sarah Jane Mayfield or Sarah Jane Fulks. By the time she met Ronald Reagan, she had also been known as Jane Durrell, was rumored to be the daughter of French chanteuse LaJerne Pechelle, and had either been married once or twice, depending on whether her first husband, Eugene or Ernest Wyman or Weymann, was actually her stepfather or even existed. The Jane Wyman who, in 1936, became a member of the Warner Bros. stock company—the self-described cocky, loud, platinum-blonde chorus girl—was largely a figment of her own invention.
By the time Jane Wyman ascended to the screen, she was already an inveterate chameleon, leaving many to wonder who she really was. This much is indisputable: She was born Sarah Jane Mayfield in St. Joseph, Missouri, on January 5, 1917. When she was four years old, her parents, Manning Mayfield and Gladys Hope Christian, split, father heading to San Francisco and mother moving to Cleveland. Sarah Jane was handed off to neighbors. Richard and Emma Fulks, middle-aged empty-nesters, raised her as their own daughter. Like Ronald Reagan, she received a Midwest upbringing in a scenic river town founded by a fur trader, and she lived there as Sarah Jane Fulks, although she was never legally adopted. She was “crippled” by shyness and “grew up with hurt and bewilderment.” And like Ronald Reagan, her childhood was shaped by an imperfect father figure, in her case Richard Fulks, an unsparing disciplinarian whom Sarah Jane detested and was unable to please.
Early in adolescence, Sarah Jane persuaded them to enroll her at the Edward A. Prinz Dancing Academy, a longtime St. Joseph’s institution, where she blossomed from an introvert into a dancer whose talents were hard to ignore, especially for her foster mother, Emma. From the moment Sarah Jane strode onto the dance floor, angled her body into a well-formed plié, and launched into a routine, Emma’s head swam with possibilities. Watching her daughter blossom also touched off a personal catharsis. When her husband died, in March 1928, Emma decided it was high time to escape St. Joseph,
and Sarah Jane would be her ticket out. They packed up and headed straight to Hollywood, where Emma brought Sarah Jane around for auditions at every studio in town. But there were no takers. No matter how adorable and precocious Sarah Jane was, there were few parts for dancing twelve-year-olds claiming to be twenty.
In the meantime, Sarah Jane finished school in Los Angeles and apparently got married, though she refused to confirm or deny it for the rest of her life. Rumor had it that she had married a fellow high school student at the age of sixteen and separated from him after only a month. Eugene Wyman was the name most often bandied about by gossip columnists. A certificate was filed with the California Department of Welfare Services attesting to the marriage of Jane Fulks, daughter of Richard D. and Emma Reise Fulks, to Ernest Eugene Wyman on April 8, 1933. The bride listed her age as nineteen, though she had just turned sixteen.
It took another two years before a divorce became final. In the interim, Jane—she had left the name Sarah behind in Missouri—bumped around Los Angeles, waitressing in a coffee shop, modeling, and operating a switchboard. She later boasted that she’d gone back to school at the University of Missouri, that she’d done serious theater in St. Louis, and sang on radio shows throughout the country, none of which was true. Acting remained her ultimate goal. In an effort to attract attention, she bleached her hair Jean Harlow–blonde and plucked her eyebrows to a fare-thee-well. “Before I became a blonde, I had tried everything to get a start as an actress but no one in Hollywood gave me a tumble,” she said. Her break came in 1935 courtesy of LeRoy Prinz, the son of her hometown dance instructor. He had become a noted Hollywood choreographer and was preparing elaborate routines for Leo McCarey’s latest musical extravaganza, The Kid from Spain, on the Samuel Goldwyn lot. Thanks to Prinz’s largesse, Jane won a part in the chorus line, alongside leggy Betty Grable, Paulette Goddard, and Lucille Ball.
Like most young dancers in Hollywood, Jane worked sporadically and lived hand-to-mouth. Her movie roles were bit parts, few and far between, and fraught with the kinds of casting-couch auditions that hardened her toward powerful, demanding men. “I had had enough of being manipulated and exploited by men for the wrong reasons,” she would recall. She was also tired of the hard knocks, the constant struggle. Embracing her independence, she haunted the nightclubs, dance halls, and parties that drew the fast Hollywood crowd. At five feet five, with a short, turned-up nose and enormous eyes offset by exquisitely angled cheekbones, she was as striking as any of the town’s other aspiring starlets. She became a fixture at hot spots like the Trocadero and the Cocoanut Grove, “a girl on the make,” as Louella Parsons called her, invariably on the arm of an older man.
One such escort was Myron Futterman, who represented everything that was missing from Jane’s life. He was mature, successful, and a gentleman, with courtly Southern charm and paternal instincts. A manufacturer of upscale children’s clothes, he wore impeccably tailored suits and drove a late-model sedan. Futterman, at thirty-five, seventeen years older than Jane, was confident, outgoing, and thrillingly attentive. With her self-esteem at an all-time low, Jane threw herself into the relationship.
In May 1936, after a string of bit parts, Warner Bros. offered her the chance to become one of its vaunted contract players. This was a stunning break, though for most of a year the studio tucked her away, unbilled, in clunkers like Smart Blonde, Slim, Public Wedding, and Ready, Willing and Able. She was cast as the “wise-cracking chorus girl” or “dumb bunny” or “floozie” in a series of forgettable B’s. While struggling to establish her identity as an actress, Wyman yielded to the promise of security that Myron Futterman represented and married him in New Orleans on June 29, 1937. The marriage quickly soured. He had a serious jealous streak, accusing her of flirting whenever they went out, and compared her unfavorably, ceaselessly, with a wife from a previous marriage. When she pressed him to begin a family, he refused. He showed little interest in Jane’s movie career; in fact, he seemed to resent it. Three months later, she’d had enough. They separated and she filed for divorce. At this point, she already had her eye on Ronald Reagan.
* * *
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Ronald Reagan arrived at Warner Bros. the same month Jane Wyman married Myron Futterman. It seems unlikely that they were formally introduced, but there is no doubt they were aware of each other, if only as “family members” of the studio. Legend has it that she was walking into the commissary for lunch and passed him on the steps, a tall, strapping Adonis, quintessentially Midwestern. “That’s for me!” she supposedly told herself. The attraction was instant.
Friends might have dismissed it as another one of Jane’s infatuations, of which there were a sizable number. But those closest to her knew otherwise. “Ronnie was the dream of true, perfect manhood personified that this little girl had always held in her heart through thick and thin,” recalled William Demarest, one of her longtime confidants, who later portrayed grouchy Uncle Charley on TV’s My Three Sons. Despite the failure of two short-lived marriages, she was still searching for her white knight. Ronald Reagan had the right credentials. He was secure, charismatic, understanding, and outwardly wholesome. “She was the aggressor,” Demarest said, “the intent pursuer from the start.” In the past, Jane had jumped in too quickly, pushed too hard, acted too vulnerable, demanded too much. She’d be more cautious this time. Besides, she was married.
Work also kept them apart. Each maintained a furious pace on different sections of the lot, and their paths never crossed until late in 1938, when both were assigned to Brother Rat. By then, Jane had been in twenty-four movies, Ronnie ten.
For both of them, Brother Rat was a giant step up. It was adapted from a hit Broadway play and developed primarily to showcase a cast of newcomers—Warner Bros.’ fresh-faced young stock company. A rich lode of talent was on the verge of breaking out—Wayne Morris, Jane Bryan, Priscilla Lane, Eddie Albert, Johnnie Davis, and, of course, Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman. In the story, three Virginia Military Institute cadets—or “brother rats,” as they called themselves—are facing graduation and decide to take a weekend off to visit girlfriends. Naturally, hijinks and moral dilemmas ensue to ensure a slippery, frenetic pace.
Early in production Ronnie and Jane were ordered to report to Warner’s Portrait Gallery—the room above the makeup department where photo shoots for ad campaigns, head shots, and pinups of starlets took place. Jane, impatient and high-strung, didn’t like to be kept waiting and bristled at a delay in their scheduled appointment. In one recounting of this episode, Jane offered her first impression of Ronnie as being calm, cool, and imperturbable. “It’s just a mistake,” he told her. “It’s no one’s fault. No one would inconvenience us on purpose.” To Jane, this was a display of incredible inner strength.
Ronald Reagan was still struggling to control what he called “leadingladyitis,” an ailment he claimed he’d been afflicted with since college. The symptoms were unmistakable: a passing touch, an errant stare, a fatal kiss from a co-star—any one of those during the course of a scene could drive a young man to yearning and, worse, romance. He’d suffered it at Eureka and had even stepped out on Margaret Cleaver with his love interest in The Brat while Mugs was on sabbatical during her junior year. It hit him again with June Travis after their duet on Love Is on the Air. And so it was again: on the set of Brother Rat, he asked Jane Wyman out on a date.
By the time Brother Rat swung into production, the Reagan-Wyman romance was in full bloom. “Everyone could see that Janie and Ronnie had fallen in love,” said Priscilla Lane, featured in the film as Wyman’s college roommate. Wayne Morris also picked up on the intrigue. “You got the feeling those two couldn’t wait to get to the love scenes.”
There were more dates to restaurants and nightclubs, but with “hands held under the table” and an arm’s-length distance between them when they got up to dance. Jane wasn’t yet divorced from Myron Futterman, and a new relationship might compromise the proceedin
gs. When Ronnie introduced Jane to his parents, nothing was said of her situation. Nelle, had she known, would never have approved.
Friends and cast members rooted for them, but not everyone did. “I just couldn’t see [Jane] matched up with Ronnie Reagan,” admitted Alex Gottlieb, who would go on to produce films featuring both of them, “but she wanted the semblance of propriety.” They seemed to be on different trajectories to Gottlieb, who felt Ronnie’s plain-vanilla B-picture appeal would be a drag on Jane’s path to stardom. “She had real fire,” recalls Olivia de Havilland. “Ronnie wasn’t cut from that kind of cloth, and I worried he would get burned by what she gave off.” Jack Warner was also skeptical. He eagerly encouraged romances between his actors, but for publicity and make-believe, not for real. Real-life romance threatened to interfere with their work.
None of their objections mattered once Louella Parsons got wind of the Reagan-Wyman liaison. Parsons fed off such goings-on. Innuendo was catnip to her, but outright romance was a gold mine. She mined it for all it was worth in her column. It was hard to believe that readers would crave gossip about two relatively unheralded B actors, but she wrote as though they were Gable and Lombard.
Her relentless promotion of Jane and Ronnie continued when they were cast together later that year in Brother Rat and a Baby, a treacly sequel starring the same troupe of young actors. To some it seemed like Ronnie’s heart was no longer in the courtship, adrift from the fissionable chemistry so obvious on their previous set. Perhaps her marriage-mindedness got too real for him once her divorce from Myron Futterman was finalized, on December 5, 1938. On Brother Rat, Ronnie had nicknamed her “Button Nose,” as an endearment. This time around, observers noticed that that nickname had been downgraded to “good scout.”
Reagan might simply have been distracted. Politics was claiming more and more of his attention. Even in Hollywood, the darkening world situation was an unavoidable concern.
