The Mansions of Limbo

by Dominick Dunne

  The estimated time for the reconstruction of the palace is between eighteen months and two years. The ten-year loan period for the collection will not begin until the pictures are actually hung in the Villahermosa. In bottom-line terms, the loan of the pictures is in reality a rental for a ten-year period. “There is an annual fee of $5 million paid as a rent to the Bermuda foundation,” said the Duke de Badajoz. Spain also has to provide insurance and security.

  Critics of what has come to be known as the baron’s Spanish decision say that he coyly received proposals from a host of suitors, playing one off against the other, when all the time he knew he was going to defer to his wife’s wishes and send the collection to Spain, at least for a decade. Prince Charles flew to Lugano to lunch at the Villa Favorita in an effort to get the collection for England, and Helmut Kohl, the chancellor of West Germany, made a similar foray, offering a Baroque palace or a brand-new museum to house the collection. It is not out of the question that one or the other of these countries will be so favored when the baron’s permanent decision is made. A London newspaper stated at the time of his last divorce that he had a tendency to ask for his gifts back, although the journalist was referring to jewels and not paintings. An interesting observation made to me by a prominent woman in Madrid was that, whatever decision is made, the Spanish pictures in the collection—the Velázquezes, the Goyas, the El Grecos—will never be allowed to leave the country. All the reports over the last year about the agreement have included the added attraction of Tita Thyssen getting the title of duchess. “It has never been part of the negotiation,” said the Duke de Badajoz. “It is the king’s privilege to grant such a thing.” In fact, Baron Thyssen will be offered a dukedom, which would elevate the baroness to duchess. “Of course, you cannot make a duke for ten years,” said the Duke de Badajoz, which means, in practical terms, that the baron and baroness would not be elevated to duke and duchess if at the end of the ten-year loan period they decided to remove the pictures to England, or France, or West Germany, or Japan, or the United States. In the meantime, the Spanish government has already decorated Baron Thyssen with the Grand Cross of Carlos III, one of Spain’s highest honors, for outstanding service to the Spanish government, and has decorated the baroness with an Isabel la Católica medal, for outstanding civil merit.

  For the present, Baron and Baroness Thyssen will be spending more and more time in Madrid to be near the Villahermosa during the reconstruction period and to take part in deciding how the collection will be hung. Their new house on the outskirts of Madrid, in an area that is reminiscent of the Bel-Air section of Los Angeles, is the kind of house that Californians talk about in terms of square feet. It is immense, with an indoor swimming pool next to the gymnasium, and an outdoor pool which may be one of the largest private swimming pools in the world. The décor is pure movie star: beige marble, beige terrazzo, beige travertine, indoor waterfalls, plate glass in all directions, and a security system that defies unwanted entry. “I want to get rid of all this,” said the baroness after her first night there, waving her hands with a sweeping gesture at the custom-made beige leather sofa and chairs. “And all that in there,” she continued, waving at the furniture in another of the many rooms, shaking her head at its lack of beauty. They bought the almost new house furnished. She said that she would give all this “modern furniture” to a benefit for the poor that the aristocratic ladies of Madrid were putting on and that she would furnish the new house with the antique furniture from Daylesford, which has been in storage since that estate was sold.

  The Thyssens were scheduled to leave the following morning in their private plane for Barcelona, where the baroness and the Spanish opera singer José Carreras were to receive awards from the city of Barcelona. “It will be nice to settle down and decorate this new house. We are having the gardens all done over too. We’ve also bought the lot next door so there will be privacy. And there’s the new house in Paris that I have to do over. All this traveling. It gets so tiring.”

  As we walked through her new gardens, she said, “When I die, I am going to leave all my jewelry to a museum. I hate auctions, when it says that the jewelry belonged to the late Mrs. So-and-so.”

  January 1989

  JANE’S TURN

  Remember, I’ve been in this business fifty-four years. I made eighty-six pictures and 350 television shows. I have not been idle.” As she spoke, she leaned forward and her forefinger tapped the table to emphasize her accomplishment. The speaker was Jane Wyman, a no-nonsense star in her mid-seventies, who is one of the highest-paid ladies in show business. Her immensely successful television series for Lorimar, “Falcon Crest,” is in its ninth year, and it is she, everyone agrees, in the centerpiece role of Angela Channing, that the public tunes in to see. She got an Academy Award in 1948 for Johnny Belinda, in which she played a deaf-mute who gets raped. She was nominated for Oscars on four other occasions, and she has also been nominated twice for Emmys. She has behind her what can well be called a distinguished career.

  We met in a perfectly nice but certainly not fashionable restaurant called Bob Burns, at Second Street and Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica, California, not far from where she lives. Bob Burns is her favorite restaurant, where she has her regular table, a tufted-leather booth. It is one of those fifties-style California restaurants that are so dark inside that when you step in from the blazing sunlight you are momentarily blinded and pause in the entrance, not sure which way to go. When she arrived, I was already at the table. My eyes had become accustomed to the dark, and I was able to watch her getting her bearings in the doorway. It was twelve noon on the dot, and we were the first two customers in the restaurant. Even to an empty house, though, she played it like a star. She is taller than I had expected. Her posture is superb. Her back is ramrod-straight. She is rail-thin, too thin, giving credence to the speculation that she is not in good health. She walks slowly and carefully. Some people say she is seventy-two, some say seventy-five, others say older. What’s the difference? She looks great. Her hairdo, bangs over her forehead, is the trademark style she has worn for years. “Is that you?” she asked, peering.

  “Yes.” I rose and walked toward her.

  She held out her hand, strong and positive. The darkness of the restaurant was flattering to a handsome woman of a certain age, but that is not her reason for liking the place. “The three people who own it went to school with my kids,” she said. The words “my kids” were said in the easy manner any parent uses when talking about his or her children. She happens not to be close to either of hers, but we didn’t talk about that.

  She is private in the extreme, almost mysterious in her privacy, a rich recluse who chooses to live alone, without servants even, in an apartment in Santa Monica overlooking the Pacific Ocean. She is a woman in control at all times. There is not a moment off guard. What you see is the persona she wants you to see, and she reveals nothing further. Any aspect of her career is available for discussion, but don’t tread beyond. And for God’s sake, I was told, don’t mention you-know-who or she’ll get up and walk out. Simply put, it pains her that a marriage that ended forty-one years ago seems to interest the press and public more than her career.

  “The reason I enjoy TV more than pictures now is that I like the pace better. You’ve got so many hours to do so much, and you have to get it done. I was on The Yearling for eleven and a half months! Sometimes we only did two pages of dialogue in four days,” she said. She shook her head in wonderment at the difference in the two media. She was ready to order lunch. “Are the sand dabs breaded?” she asked the waitress. “Why don’t we have a Caesar salad first?” she suggested.

  For several years before “Falcon Crest” went on the air, she was in a state of semiretirement, spending most of her time painting. Although I have not seen any of her pictures, I have heard from her friends that she is an extremely talented landscape artist. In 1979 her work was exhibited in a gallery in Carmel, California, and so many of the pictures were sold that she n
ow has none of her own work in her apartment. During those years, she said, she was always being sent film and television scripts, “like Baby Jane, or playing a lesbian, and I didn’t want to do that. But when I was sent the pilot script for ‘Falcon Crest,’ I could see so many facets to the character of Angela Channing. I said, ‘I’ll give it two years.’ It’s now nine.”

  “People say that you control ‘Falcon Crest’,” I said.

  “I am a creative consultant only. They run things by me, or I run things by them. I just want to keep up the quality of the show,” she replied. “I usually have my chair at an odd place on the set where no one can bother me. And I do help the young actors on the show. I hold a riding crop out, saying ‘Don’t do that!’ ”

  “Is it true that actors on the show are told not to speak to you?”

  “I hope not,” she answered.

  An actor who had appeared in a part that ran for three episodes told me that he had been informed by his agent, who in turn had heard it from the assistant director, that he was not to approach Miss Wyman on the set, as she did not like to be disturbed. He was also told never to go to her dressing room. He was also told that President Reagan was not to be discussed on the set, ever. The surprise to this particular actor was that Miss Wyman “could not have been more delightful, or friendly. She came right up and introduced herself. One time I did knock on the door of her dressing room. I told her that I didn’t think that the scene that we were to do together worked, and she asked me in, and we went over it and made some changes.

  Susan Sullivan, who played her daughter-in-law on the series for eight years, said, “Jane is the most professional person I have ever worked with. I have seen her battle through illnesses and fatigue and still keep working. She says, ‘Let’s get this done. We have a job to do,’ and everyone gets behind her. She is always willing to help younger actors. She gives instructions nicely and with humor. She once told me, ‘You can tell anybody anything if you do it with humor.’ She ruled the set with a kind and intelligent hand.”

  Rod Taylor, who plays her current husband in the series, agreed. “Sure, she rules the set, but everybody expects that. I adore her.”

  David Selby, who plays her son and has developed the closest friendship of any of the cast members with her, said, “Never once has she asked to be excused from standing in while the other actors in the scene are having their close-ups. She would be upset if you did your close-up without her. She has never once been late. If we go out to dinner, we go to her favorite little spot. I’ve never been to her apartment.”

  Another cast member said, “I’ve spent years working with her, and I still don’t know her. She does not let herself be known.”

  An insider on the show had told me that an attempt would be made on Angela Channing’s life in the new season of the series. “Is it true that you are going to be smothered with a pillow in the third episode and that the audience won’t know whether you’re dead or alive?”

  Her eyes became very large. She was surprised that I knew that. She thought for a moment how to answer. “I am going into a coma for a while,” she said. She has a way of letting you know when she is finished with a topic, without actually telling you that she is.

  “Do you have a social life?” I asked.

  “Not really. When you’re on a series, it, the series, becomes your life. I don’t go out.” She gets up at 4:30 each morning the series is in production. “I can’t drive in the dark, so I’m picked up by a studio driver. I leave my apartment at exactly 5:50. It’s a long drive to the studio. I do my own makeup when I get there.

  “I’m a great reader. And I have some close friends. We do a lot of telephoning. My friends understand me when I say, ‘Everything is on hold until the series is finished.’ ” Among her closest friends are the two great film and television stars Loretta Young and Barbara Stanwyck, both of whom have had careers and led lives similar to Jane Wyman’s. “Jane is a good girl. She’s also a very determined woman,” Barbara Stanwyck told me. “She has worked very hard for her successful career. I do mean hard, and she deserves all her success because she earned it.” She then added, “I know this is a story about Jane, so be very good and very kind. She would be to you.”

  In an interview with Jane Wyman from the forties, published in a movie magazine of the period and discovered in the Warner Brothers archives at the University of Southern California, the writer noted, “Talking to her, one gets the impression she’s wound up like a tight spring.” Approximately forty years later, the same line could still be written about her, except for when she is talking about her career. Then she relaxes. She is a virtual oral historian of the decades she spent at Warner Brothers. She was under contract to Warner’s for years, beginning in 1936 at $166 a week. She had been at Fox and Paramount before that. Somewhere along the line, her name was changed from Sarah Jane Fulks to Jane Wyman. “I stayed at Warner’s until I went into television,” she said. She started out as a wisecracking comedienne and singer, with no interest whatever in dramatic roles. “Jane Wyman has no yen for drama,” read one of her early press releases. “Leave that to other people,” she was quoted as saying. Her studio biography described her as “pert, vivacious, with plenty of pep. Jane Wyman is a human tornado.” Not all of her films were distinguished, but her memory is as astonishingly sharp for details of the making of middling and less-than-middling films as it is for those of such classics as Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend. “We were in a three shot,” she said, remembering one B-picture incident. “I was in the middle. Jack Carson was on one side, and Dennis Morgan on the other.”

  The star names flew from her lips. She calls James Cagney Cagney and Bob Hope Hope. “Cagney was my dream man,” she said. “Hope wanted me to do this picture with him. You know Hope.” Ann Sheridan. Humphrey Bogart. Joan Blondell. Bette Davis. “Bette Davis’s dressing room was right next to mine, but we were never friends.” Olivia de Havilland. Errol Flynn. “Jack Warner would never put me into any of their costume epics. He said I had the wrong looks. I think Jack was probably right.”

  She had an early marriage to Myron Futterman, a New Orleans dress manufacturer, about whom almost nothing is known. In 1940 she married Ronald Reagan, a fellow contract player at Warner Brothers, with whom she made four films. Their wedding reception was held at the home of the most famous of all Hollywood gossip columnists, Louella Parsons, who was raised in Dixon, Illinois, where Reagan grew up. Every movie magazine of the period recorded the idyll of the young stars’ marriage, in the approved, studio-orchestrated publicity jargon. When Jane became pregnant, the studio announced that she was expecting a bundle from heaven. The bundle from heaven was Maureen Reagan, now forty-eight, who was born in 1941. Four years later the young couple adopted a son, Michael. They were promoted by Warner’s as the dream Hollywood couple, and every fan magazine monitored their lives. “Ronnie and I are perfect counterparts for each other. I blow up, and Ronnie just laughs at me. We’ve never had a quarrel, because he’s just too good-natured,” said Jane in one interview. Several years after that, the lovebirds became known in the press as “Those Fightin’ Reagans,” and rumors of a rift in the marriage were rampant. Louella Parsons, who thrived on such matters, told Jane in a column, “I want to write a story and settle all this talk once and for all.” Jane was quoted by Louella as replying, “Believe me, I’m going to find out who has started all this talk.… Can’t gossips let us keep our happiness?”

  In 1947 the marriage did break up. “We’re through,” Jane said to a columnist during a trip to New York. “We’re finished, and it’s all my fault.” Reagan found out about the termination of his marriage when he read it in the column. He gave long interviews to Louella and to her archrival, Hedda Hopper, both of whom took his side. “If this comes to a divorce, I’ll name Johnny Belinda as co-respondent,” Hedda Hopper quoted him as saying. Jane had become so immersed in her new career as a dramatic actress that she wore pellets wrapped in wax in her ears so that she would not be abl
e to hear during the filming of the deaf-mute movie. Hedda Hopper had more to say on the subject: “I can’t really believe it yet. I don’t think Ronald Reagan does either. It caught him so flatfooted, so pathetically by surprise. I talked to Ronnie the day he read in the newspapers what Jane should have told her husband first.”

  They were divorced in 1948, the same year she won the Academy Award. Jane got custody of the two children, and Reagan got weekend visitation rights. Jane testified that her husband’s overriding interest in filmland union and political activity had driven them apart. Friends speculated at the time that Jane’s emergence as a bona fide star and Reagan’s concurrent slide from box-office favor contributed to the breakup. Others felt that Jane was simply bored with him. Before the governorship and his truly remarkable rise as a recognized world leader, friends from that period remember, he did indeed engage in long, ponderous, yawn-producing discourses on a variety of subjects. An ongoing joke in Hollywood during his campaign for the governorship of California was a remark attributed to Jane Wyman about her former husband. When asked what he was like, she allegedly said, “If you asked Ronnie the time, he’d tell you how to make a watch.”

  In 1954 Reagan married the actress Nancy Davis, who had been a contract player at MGM. Not long afterward, Jane married the bandleader and musical arranger Freddie Karger, a popular and handsome man-about-town in Hollywood. She divorced him a year later. Karger is often mentioned in Marilyn Monroe biographies as one of her lovers. Years later Wyman married Karger again, and then divorced him again. She has not married since.

  In 1954 Jane was converted to Catholicism through the intervention of her great friend Loretta Young. Her Catholicism is a mainstay in her life. In fact, when asked her age, according to friends, she very often replies, “I’m thirty-five.” She is counting from the year of her conversion to Catholicism. “She goes to Mass all the time,” said a member of the cast of “Falcon Crest.” “Sometimes she even has Mass said in her room.” One of the ongoing characters in the series is a Catholic priest. “We need a lot of advice, because some of the characters are Catholic in the show,” said Jane. The priest character is played by a real priest, Father Bob Curtis, a Paulist.