Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  During the three weeks it took to complete Love Is on the Air, he started dating his co-star, the beautiful June Travis. The daughter of a vice president of the Chicago White Sox, she had another suitor at the time, a rich playboy from Philadelphia named Walter Annenberg.

  Annenberg was only three years older than Reagan but had already been romantically involved with Lillian Vernon, a Ziegfeld Follies girl (and later a mail-order entrepreneur), and Ethel Merman, then the hottest new star on Broadway, among others. He had been coming out to California since 1932, when his father, Moses Annenberg, the multimillionaire owner of the Daily Racing Form, started a Hollywood-based fan magazine called Screen Guide. (Walter always took the train, because Moses, who had seven daughters but only one son and heir, wouldn’t let him fly.) He was introduced 9 8

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House around town by Louis B. Mayer, and he knew everyone there was to know from William Randolph Hearst and his movie star mistress, Marion Davies, to Jack Warner and his glamorous second wife, Ann. The press scion cruised around town in a custom-made Lincoln convertible, stayed in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and spent weekends partying and gambling in Palm Springs, then the Hollywood elite’s favorite hideaway.17

  Nonetheless, June Travis preferred her co-star from Iowa, and Annenberg graciously withdrew. But he kept up a passing friendship with Reagan all through the late 1930s and 1940s, though the Republican Annenberg, whose father had bought the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1936 and made it a rabidly anti-FDR organ, often disagreed with Reagan’s liberal views. Eventually, however, they would come to see eye-to-eye, and Walter Annenberg would be one of the most important backers of Ronald Reagan’s political rise.

  Love Is on the Air was released in September 1937, to generally good reviews. Variety called Reagan a “find.” The Hollywood Reporter, the other major trade paper, called him a “natural.” “Bill Meiklejohn assured me it was safe to send for Nelle and Jack,” Reagan recalled, and that same month he sent his parents train fare.18 He rented them an apartment at 1842 North Cherokee Avenue in Hollywood, a few blocks from his own in the Montecito Apartments at 6650 Franklin Avenue, a ten-story Art Deco building constructed in 1931. Not long after, Neil and Bess Reagan joined the rest of the family, and Neil was hired as an announcer at the Warner Bros. radio station, WFWB.19

  Three of Reagan’s Drake friends from Des Moines also followed him west that fall; three more moved to Los Angeles a few months later.20 For a while Reagan was “the group’s sole support,” in his words, but he was only too happy to be surrounded by familiar faces. After a long day at the studio, he would drive out to Santa Monica to join his buddies for body-surfing or volleyball on the beach, followed by onion soup, chili, and beer at Barney’s Beanery, a West Hollywood bar that became their hangout.21

  Reagan frequently took Joy Hodges—another Iowan—out to dinner, though they were never romantically involved. “We discussed politics more than any other subject,” she recalled. “I was so fond of him, but he was a passionate Democrat and I a Republican and we used to go round and round about that. . . . He loved anything and everything about government, history and politics. So did I, and I loved hearing him relate accounts of Indian battles.”22

  Warner Bros.: 1937–1941

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  On December 1, 1937, Warner Bros. picked up his option, raising his salary to $250 a week. He bought his parents a small house in West Hollywood, at 9031 Phyllis Avenue, just over the Beverly Hills line, the only piece of real estate they would ever own. Its small yard was filled with rosebushes, which Jack discovered he liked to tend. After his heart attack, Jack had finally given up drinking, but not chain-smoking. He was fifty-four and in failing health. “Every morning he would take the slow, careful walk his doctor had prescribed,” his son later wrote. According to Reagan, Jack always joked about the new neighborhood, “There’s nothing, by God, but real estate offices and hot dog stands.”23 For Christmas, Reagan gave his father a club chair with an ottoman so that he could put his feet up and listen to sports—and FDR—on the radio, which was also a gift from him. When Reagan’s option came up again in June 1938, he persuaded the studio to give his father a $25-a-week job helping with his fan mail.24

  On Sunday mornings, Reagan usually accompanied his mother to the Hollywood-Beverly Christian Church on Sunset Boulevard, and Nelle often fixed dinner for his Iowa friends on Sunday nights. “They were in and out more than I was,” he later recalled, “and I think Nelle would have given someone an argument if he pointed out she hadn’t really given birth to the whole gang.”25 The fact that they all came from a Disciples of Christ college no doubt pleased Nelle, whose life in Los Angeles, as in Dixon, revolved around her church and lay missionary work. She made regular trips to the Olive View Sanitarium in the San Fernando Valley, where she entertained the tuberculosis patients with dramatic readings, and Christmastime 1938 found her wrapping five hundred presents her church had collected for “needy folks.”26

  In a letter Nelle wrote to an Illinois friend that year, she gives a sense of the new life the Reagan family had in Hollywood. “Ronald said he was very glad to get your letter. Although he was so small when he left Tampico he still holds a soft spot for the home of his birth. I am acting as Ronald’s secretary and open all the mail, and there is a lot to open. Of course, all the mail from former friends from the old hometown is turned over for him to read, so you can rest assured that he read yours. Last month he received mail from forty-two states and three foreign countries, so you see if he had to answer his mail he would have not much time for work. . . . Ronald has finished three pictures now that he has taken the lead in, and is very well thought of at the studio. But really I don’t yet 1 0 0

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House know how to act with these people. I don’t just fit in somehow—I get my fork in the wrong hand but I don’t care, just so the boy gets along.”27

  By the end of the year, Reagan’s salary was up to $350 a week, and he had rented a cottage at 1128 Cory Avenue, a block north of Sunset Boulevard and three or four blocks from Jack and Nelle’s.28 He was a seeing a recently divorced actress from the studio named Jane Wyman. When their engagement was announced by Louella Parsons eleven months later, Nelle wrote a friend in Dixon, “I hope my Ronald has made the right choice. I was in hopes he would fall in love with some sweet girl who is not in the movies.”29

  Jane Wyman, “a little, loud, brassy blonde,” according to Hedda Hopper,30

  was not the sort of girl most mothers would choose for their son: a high school dropout, a former chorus girl, a divorcee twice over at twenty-one, beautiful to be sure and eager to please, but also touchy and tough, impulsive and needy. Nelle probably didn’t know most of this; for one thing, it is highly unlikely that Wyman told Reagan about her first marriage, which she kept a secret, as she did so much about her past. This was not uncommon in Hollywood, where studio biographies were masterpieces of ellipsis and embellishment, but Wyman seemed to take things a step further. A decade later, when Nancy Davis signed with MGM, she would take two years off her age and erase the existence of her real father; Jane Wyman erased both her real parents, upgraded the professional status of the man she claimed was her father, and added three years to her age, just in case her teenage marriage to Ernest Eugene Wyman, the mysterious first husband, from whom she took her screen name, ever came out.31

  Jane Wyman was born Sarah Jane Mayfield in St. Joseph, Missouri, on January 5, 1917, to Manning and Gladys Hope Mayfield, seven and a half months after they were married. Her parents separated in late 1921, and her father took a job with a shipping company in San Francisco. Her mother filed for divorce and moved to Cleveland, leaving Sarah Jane, not quite five, with friends named Richard and Emma Fulks. Manning Mayfield died of pneumonia the following year; a trip Emma Fulks made to California with Sarah Jane that winter may have been to see him on his deathbed and to arrange for the girl’s guardianship. According to a neighbor of the Fulkses’, al
though Gladys Mayfield occasionally visited her daughter in St. Joseph, the child went by the name of Sarah Jane Fulks, and she maintained that Richard and Emma Fulks were her real parents.32

  In the 1986 authorized biography, Jane Wyman: The Actress and the Woman, Warner Bros.: 1937–1941

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  author Lawrence J. Quirk makes no mention of the Mayfields and states that she was “christened” Sarah Jane Fulks,33 choosing that word perhaps because he knew the truth but was not allowed to print it. In contrast to Nancy Reagan’s eagerness to substitute Loyal Davis for Kenneth Robbins as her one and true father, Jane Wyman’s embrace of the Fulkses, and theirs of her, seemed to be based more on necessity than devotion. The prominent neurosurgeon took his time in making Anne Frances Robbins his legal daughter, but there is no record of Richard and Emma Fulks having adopted Sarah Jane Mayfield.

  The Fulkses were both in their fifties when Gladys Mayfield left her little girl with them. Both had been previously married: Richard had a son from his first marriage; Emma, a daughter and a son; all three offspring were a generation older than Sarah Jane and living away from home when she was taken in. According to Quirk, “the Fulks house was a Victorian gingerbread horror, the furnishings lank and forlorn.”34 Richard Fulks was said to be a remote and tyrannical figure; the German-born Emma was more approachable, but equally demanding and strict.35 Warners would later claim Wyman’s “father” had been mayor of St. Joseph; in reality he was a frustrated politician who had been elected county collector for one term (as a Democrat) in 1916, and then joined the police department, where he rapidly rose from patrolman to chief of detectives.36

  Emma Fulks dressed her charge in “drab, utilitarian clothes,” Quirk writes. “Bows or furbelows of any kind were verboten. ”37 Strangely, she waited until September 1923 to register Sarah Jane in first grade, when she was nearly seven. Very occasionally, she would take the girl downtown for lunch and a Saturday matinee.38 In interviews Wyman gave after she became famous, she mostly remembered feeling inferior, isolated, unwanted. When she was eight, a neighbor woman “hurt her deeply” by announcing loudly enough for her to hear, “With that turned-up nose and those bug eyes, no one will ever take that child seriously.” She told Quirk, “Shyness is not a small problem; it can cripple the whole personality. It crippled mine for many years. As a child, my only solution to the problem of shyness was to hide, to make myself as small and insignificant as possible. All through grade school I was a well-mannered little shadow who never spoke above a whisper.” But somehow she persuaded the Fulkses to let her take dance classes at 50 cents a throw with a local hoofer known as Dad Prinz.39 Not surprisingly, this gloomy little girl had dreams of becoming a movie star.

  On March 25, 1928, after a long, unspecified illness, Richard Fulks died 1 0 2

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House at age sixty-three, leaving his widow little more than their house. Emma decided to rent it out and move to Los Angeles, where her children by her first marriage lived. She took Sarah Jane, then eleven, with her. They moved in with Emma’s daughter, Elsie Weymann; her son, Morie Weymann, an eye-and-throat doctor, helped them out financially. No doubt motivated by the need for an income, Emma turned into a full-fledged stage mother, taking her “daughter” to singing and dancing lessons, scrimping to buy her pretty clothes, sending her photographs to talent agencies and movie studios, all without evident success.40

  By 1932, Sarah Jane, then fifteen, had left Los Angeles High School without graduating, started working as a coffee shop waitress to pay for her lessons, and bleached her hair platinum blond à la Jean Harlow. That year she appeared in her first film, The Kid from Spain, a Samuel Goldwyn musical starring Eddie Cantor, kicking her legs in the air alongside two other young hopefuls named Betty Grable, then sixteen, and Paulette Goddard, then twenty-one. Between 1933 and 1935, she worked as a model, a switchboard operator, a manicurist, and a secretary, as well as a waitress, and had bit parts in six more movies, mostly at Paramount, mostly in the chorus line.41

  “It was work when the family badly needed the money,” she later said of her chorus line days, “but for a girl who had grown up in terror of being looked at, it was also agony. Then I made a discovery: a good shield for shyness is a bold exterior. Did my heart turn over when the man with the megaphone bellowed out my name? Were all the other dancers prettier?

  Never mind. I covered up by becoming the cockiest of all, by talking the loudest, laughing the longest, and wearing the curliest, most blatantly false eyelashes in Hollywood.”42

  On April 8, 1933, she married Ernest Eugene Wyman, whom she may or may not have met in 1931, when they were both high school students, and who may or may not have been a salesman. She said she was nineteen on the marriage certificate, the beginning of the lie about her age. According to a 1957 Movie Life story, “Still in her teens, she impulsively entered marriage. Jane never talks about her first heartbreak, but in less than a month she knew it was a terrible mistake and the marriage was dissolved.”43 Other sources say she wasn’t divorced until 1935. Much confusion surrounds this period of her life. In the summer of 1933, according to one report, she returned to St. Joseph, where she stayed with a woman named Gladys H. Johnson, who may or may not have been her real mother Warner Bros.: 1937–1941

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  with a new surname. A neighbor remembered her having been married then and sitting in the yard trying to write.44 Another version, in the 1949

  Current Biography, which usually relies heavily on the subject’s word, had her returning home in 1935, very briefly enrolling at the University of Missouri, then touring the Midwest and South as a radio vocalist, using the name Jane Durrell. Lawrence Quirk says she never went back to St.

  Joseph, a place which she disparaged as “oppressive, strait-laced, hypo-critical.”45

  All sources agree that in May 1936, on the recommendation of William Demarest, an older actor who was also an agent, she was given a standard contract by Warner Bros. She was in the chorus line in her first film there, Stage Struck, a Busby Berkeley musical featuring two of Warners’ biggest stars, Dick Powell and Joan Blondell, and didn’t get a leading role until a year later, in her tenth film for the studio, Mr. Dodd Takes the Air, opposite the crooner Kenny Baker. Still, she was thrilled to be at Warners, and when asked “What is your long-range ambition?” in a 1937 studio questionnaire, she answered, “To be not just an actress but the actress at the studio.”46 (No wonder Bette Davis, then queen of Warners, wasn’t that friendly.) In the meantime, Jane was willing to take on such starlet tasks as showing up at parties for potential investors and wealthy cronies of the studio brass. It was at one of these parties that she reportedly met Myron Futterman, a middle-aged businessman from New Orleans who owned a dress company in Los Angeles. Futterman was divorced and had a teenage daughter a few years younger than Wyman, but that seemed to make little difference to either of them, because on June 29, 1937, they were married—Quirk calls it an elopement—in New Orleans.47 The strange thing is that only six days before a story had appeared in the daily Variety under the headline jane wyman hospitalized for nervous breakdown.48

  June 1937 happened to be Ronald Reagan’s first month at Warners, and in one version of events he and Wyman were introduced in the commissary soon after his arrival on the lot. In another, they met in the publicity department while having their pictures taken. Wyman later said that from the first moment she saw him, she thought to herself, “That’s for me.”

  “The knight on a white charger had finally showed up,” William Demarest said. “Ronnie was the dream of true, perfect manhood personified that this little girl had always held in her heart through thick and thin. She was the aggressor, the intent pursuer, from the start. . . . I think Ronnie at 1 0 4

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House first was somewhat bewildered by her fast come-on; then he started to like it, then her, and then he fell in love.”49

  Futterman and Wyman separated sometime between Oc
tober 1937 and January 1938—he wanted her to tone down her look, give up acting, and play hostess for his business associates, none of which she had any intention of doing.50 Reagan and Wyman started discreetly dating sometime during those months, though both would later insist that they hadn’t started going out with each other until 1939, after she had divorced Futterman.

  They definitely drew closer to each other during the filming of Brother Rat, from July 5 to August 11, 1938. It was the first of five films they would appear in together at Warners, and the first A movie in which either had a principal role. Reagan, Wayne Morris, and Eddie Albert played cadets at the Virginia Military Academy, known as the West Point of the South; Wyman, Priscilla Lane, and Jane Bryan were their respective love interests.

  The plot line reflected the state of the emerging Reagan-Wyman relationship: because she is the commandant’s daughter, he has to proceed with caution, and when they finally kiss for the first time in the boys’ dormitory, the heat seems to be coming more from her than from him. Their reported behavior on the set was more indicative of where the relationship would eventually go: while a loquacious Reagan held forth on New Deal policies and Hitler’s demands on Czechoslovakia for fellow liberal Eddie Albert, a moody Wyman made lumpy clay models of other Warners actresses and stuck pins in their eyes.51

  Leonora Hornblow, then married to Wayne Morris and a frequent visitor to the set, told me that she and Reagan often discussed politics. “That’s why we became such friends. Ronnie was devoted to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Democratic Party. So was I. So we would talk. The studio bosses were all Republicans. And they’d say things like, ‘that cripple in the White House,’ which would make me crazy, and Ronnie too.” Was Reagan critical of these rich Republicans? “Not at all. Ronnie was never against rich people. There was no such talk.” Hornblow noted that her own husband and Jane Wyman were “apolitical.”52