Every afternoon on her way home from school, Jane would walk by Edward A. Prinz’s Dancing School, where young girls could enroll for lessons for fifty cents. His students called him Dad.
From the street below, Jane could hear the echo of staccato, syncopated taps. She dreamed that one day, she might become a dancer.
Since coming to live with the Fulks, Jane had never asked for anything, but she began to beseech Emma to enroll her in the dancing school. For the first few weeks, Emma resisted, but when Jane’s teacher summoned her for a discussion about her foster daughter, she warned her that Jane’s extreme shyness was growing more severe. “It’s almost a sickness that can lead to social retardation. The only thing she expressed an interest in involves dancing lessons. It might bring her out of her shell. Right now, if a grown up speaks to the poor child, she bursts into tears. Something has to be done to help her, and I think dancing lessons will help a lot.”
Even though her husband, Richard, remained adamantly opposed, Emma bundled Jane up one afternoon and enrolled her in Ed Prinz’s School. For the first time, Jane met a man she could idolize.
As the weeks progressed, Prinz singled Jane out for special attention, devoting two hours a day to training her after the classes had “officially” ended. Even though his resources were limited, he purchased three beautiful white dresses for her and bought her red ribbons. He took special care in dressing and undressing her in her dance costumes, which he paid for himself.
In later years, she would remember his excessive fondling of her during costume changes. In those days, most of the residents of St. Joseph didn’t even know what a pedophile was.
Later, Jane said, “At no point did I feel I was being used. I was just delighted that a grown-up was doling out love and affection to me, something I never got at home.”
Working extensively with her, Prinz took an ugly little duckling and transformed her into a beautiful swan.
***
By 1922, Emma had saved up enough money for Jane and herself to head west, by train, to Los Angeles. Ostensibly, as she explained to her husband, she wanted to visit her children, Morie and Elsie, who were now married and had families of their own. She’d never seen her grandchildren. Richard’s son, Raymond, had moved to Texas years earlier, and had never been heard from again.
Richard agreed to come down to St. Joseph’s railway station to see Emma and Jane off to California. Jane noticed that he was walking with a limp. Lately, he’d gone to a doctor to see what was wrong with him. The doctor had found nothing, suggesting that he was far too ambitious and was working too hard, keeping long hours. His physical condition had deteriorated during the previous years.
Frugally, Emma had packed provisions in a basket for them to eat along the way en route to Los Angeles. By the time the train had crossed the Missouri State Line, heading west, Emma made a confession to Jane.
“Actually, I may never come back to your Papa,” she said. “If my plans go well, you’re going to be discovered in Hollywood and made a child star.”
***
As Hollywood séguéd into the Roaring Twenties, the studios were no longer the precarious enterprises they had been during the previous decade. Studios had become film factories, and talent was being devoured as a means of meeting weekly production quotas. Movie theaters were springing up across the country,
Wyman’s role model, and the wealthiest pre-teen in Hollywood: BABY PEGGY.
At first anonymous, stars had now emerged as distinctive icons in their own right. Household names included Rudolph Valentino, Gloria Swanson, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, William S. Hart, and Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., among many others.
If at this early stage, Jane had a role model, it was Diana Serra Cary, billed as “Baby Peggy.” At the time, the “Million Dollar Baby” was receiving 1.2 million fan letters annually. Emma had taken Jane to see the star’s first film, Playmates, in 1921, in which the actress had appeared with the canine star of Century Studios, Brownie the Wonder Dog. Emma bought Jane a Baby Peggy doll, and the young girl drank milk from a container that featured a portrait of Baby Peggy on the label.
Child star Jackie Coogan is seen here in a tender embrace with Charlie Chaplin in The Kid (1919).
Young Sarah Jane wanted to be in their next picture. She discovered that The Little Tramp was even fonder of little girls.
***
One of the first magazines Emma ever purchased at a Hollywood newsstand featured a headlined, ambition-fueling story—“YOUR CHILD SHOULD BE IN PICTURES.”
“Just think of it,” Emma told Jane. “You could be earning a million dollars a year, like Jackie Coogan with Charlie Chaplin in The Kid (1919). I heard those were real tears the boy cried.”
Every weekday morning, Emma, with a carefully dressed Jane, set out to make the rounds of the studios, beginning at Century Studios. Jane said, “I soon learned that the world was filled with blonde, curly haired little girls being pushed before a bored director.”
Emma eagerly read the trade papers, and she came across an item announcing that Charlie Chaplin was considering making a film in which he plays the errant father of a little orphan boy and girl he adopts, which leads to a series of wild antics. It had already been announced that Jackie Coogan, who had played Chaplin’s irascible sidekick in The Kid, had been contracted to play the boy. But the search was on to find a girl to appear opposite Coogan and The Little Tramp. Emma was convinced that Jane would be ideal as Coogan’s little sister.
Arriving at Chaplin’s office, Jane and Emma were disappointed to find at least twenty blonde little girls waiting to see the superstar. They had to wait four hours before they were ushered into Chaplin’s office. Emma wanted to accompany Jane, but the secretary insisted that Jane go in alone.
What happened that late afternoon between Chaplin and Jane became part of Hollywood’s whispered lore. Years later, Jane spread the scandalous story about what took place, claiming that during the course of her interview with the star, he unbuttoned his trousers and exposed himself to her.
Unfamiliar with male anatomy, she was said to have giggled nervously at his exposed penis. For her, it must have been a daunting introduction to the male body, as Chaplin claimed he possessed a twelve-inch appendage, which he defined as “the eighth wonder of the world.” Because Chaplin’s fondness for little girls was well documented, the story of the alleged encounter between Jane and Chaplin gained traction. Previously, he had gone on record as saying, “The most beautiful form of life is a very young girl just starting to bloom.”
Regardless of what happened that day, Jane was rudely kicked out of Chaplin’s office.
After making all the rounds with no ensuing job offer, Emma and Jane received more bad news. Morie Fulks (one of Emma’s biological children and their host during their time in L.A) told them one night over their meager dinner that he could no longer support them and that he had already purchased two one-way tickets for their transit back to St. Joseph.
***
After her return to St. Joseph, Jane sank into a deep depression. The town had never looked so bleak.
On March 25, 1928, Richard Fulks died, leaving Emma a widow at the age of sixty-two. She managed to sell the house, but because it was heavily mortgaged, there was very little left over. Nonetheless, with her meager savings, she decided to pack her things and return to Hollywood with Jane. Arriving in Los Angeles, Jane and Emma found a cheap room in a shabby boarding house that mostly catered to out-of-work actors.
Still a lackluster student, Jane enrolled in Los Angeles High School, which she found “was overrun with predatory boys.”
She wanted both singing and dancing lessons. She lied about her age and found a job as a waitress at Mannings, a coffee shop, burger joint, and ice cream parlor, where she worked for tips, sometimes coming home with two dollars a night.
During the day, she took singing and dancing lessons. Frustrated that her calendar was overloaded, she dropped out of school without telling Emma.
One spring night in 1933, when Jane was only sixteen, a tall, well-built young man came into the coffee shop and ordered a chocolate malt. She’d never seen such a handsome male. He looked older than her. Actually, he was twenty-seven.
Sipping his malt, he stared at her, not taking his eyes off her. “I felt he was undressing me,” she recalled.
“Listen, gal,” he said to her. “I don’t care how many boyfriends you have. From now on, you’re going to be my girl, belonging just to me. Is that understood?”
She was flattered but pretended otherwise. “I understand nothing of the sort. You just walk in here and think you can take over my life. I don’t even know who you are.”
“Let me introduce myself,” he said in a husky, masculine voice. “I’m Eugene Wyman. I dropped out of school, and I’ve got this job as a mechanic at a nearby garage. So now that you know who I am, just who in hell are you, other than being a soda jerk?”
“Sarah Jane Fulks,” she said, already mesmerized by him.
“The name of Sarah has got to go,” he said. “Sounds like some old maiden aunt. I like the name of Jane, however. I’ll let you keep it. But the Fulks will have to go, too. Sounds like a dirty word. But don’t worry about it. Before the end of the month, I will have changed that name from Fulks to Jane Wyman.”
“You’re pretty sure of yourself,” she said.
“Baby Doll, I’ve got a lot to be sure about. The girls call me a walking steak of sex. I’m gonna hang out here till you get off from work. Then I’m gonna take you dancing. If you’re a good girl, I might even tell you I’m in love with you.”
Prologue #3
Handsome, red-haired Sangston Hettler, Jr., always claimed he was the first man to “deflower” Nancy Davis. Did she discover why he was nicknamed “Sock?”
Nancy’s mother, actress Edith Luckett, nicknamed “Lucky,” was a beauty, a bigot, and “slept on both sides of her bed,” as it was called then.
Born Anne Francis Robbins on July 6, 1921 (not in 1923, as she’d later claim), the future First Lady, Nancy Davis, grew up a theatrical world of make-believe. She was the daughter of the actress, Edith (“Lucky”) Luckett.
For some reason, her mother chose to call her “Nancy,” instead of Anne. After a difficult delivery, the infant entered the world at Sloane Hospital in Flushing, Queens, a borough of New York City.
As a weapon in her campaign of remaining “eternally young” on stage, Edith claimed she’d been born in 1896, although the actual year of her birth was 1888, when Grover Cleveland was president. She invented a glamorous background for herself, a Tara-like setting inspired by something from the life of Scarlett O’Hara, falsely claiming that she was a Southern belle from one of the first families of Virginia.
The infamous movie star lesbian, Nazimova, was designated as Nancy’s godmother.
Actually, she was born the youngest into an expansive and boisterous brood of nine children, the daughter of Charles Edward Luckett, a clerk for Railway Express. To make ends meet, her mother, Sarah Frances Whitlock, ran a boarding house near the railroad tracks in Washington, D.C.
The family lived in rooms over buggy stables near the theater where Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated. It was called “Swampoodle,” (a swamp filled with puddles), and was inhabited mostly by working class Irish Catholics. As Edith remembered it, “all the men got drunk on Saturday night.”
Six years younger than Edith, Nancy’s father was Kenneth Seymour Robbins, who grew up in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. His family had deep colonial roots.
From all reports, Kenneth was a mama’s boy, the type of kid his mother attired in white and dressed until he was nine years old. He wore his hair in long blonde curls, evocative of Mary Pickford.
He always claimed that he was a graduate of Princeton, although no record has ever surfaced to prove that. He attended a theatrical performance at the Colonial Theater in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he spotted Edith in a small part. He went backstage and introduced himself. Soon, they were dating, which eventually led to their marriage on June 27, 1916.
When America went to war in 1917, Kenneth volunteered and served until January of 1919, when he was honorably discharged.
Shortly after his return from the Army, he and Edith separated. He was not living with her when Nancy was born. After she recovered from childbirth, Edith took the infant girl on the road with her, as she traveled from town to town as part of a touring theatrical troupe. She hired babysitters along the way.
“When Judy Garland later sang about being born in a trunk, I knew what she meant,” Nancy later recalled. “Before I was three, I had greasepaint in my veins. My ambition from the age of five was to become an actress like my mother.”
In the meanwhile, Edith had grown into a beautiful young girl with blonde hair and larkspur blue eyes. She matured early, dressing like the fashion-conscious soubrettes of the day, with cloche hats, silk stockings, peacock feathers, and hobble skirts.
She preferred to hang out with the male actors and learned “to curse like a Turkish sailor.” No joke was too bawdy for her potty mouth. Many of the women who worked with her found her vulgar, but the men seemed to adore her.
In the selection of Nancy’s godmother, Edith made an odd choice, designating Alla Nazimova, the Russian-Jewish actress, born in Yalta in 1879, and the reigning queen of MGM in Hollywood and its highest paid star in 1920.
Edith and Loyal at their wedding. She lied about her age.
Edith had met Nazimova on Irving Place in Manhattan at the townhouse of the city’s most celebrated literary agent, Bessie Marbury. Her lists of clients had included Oscar Wilde, W. Somerset Maugham, H.G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw. Marbury lived with her love, the society decorator Elsie de Wolfe, who later became famous as Lady Mendl.
Nazimova was said to have been enthralled with Edith’s youthful beauty and had taken her as a lesbian lover the night they met.
Later, Nazimova cast Edith in a small role in ‘Ception Shoals, which opened on Broadway on January 10, 1917.
***
After years on the road, Edith decided that her vagabond lifestyle was hardly ideal for bringing up a daughter. She took her to the home of her older sister and brother-in-law, Virginia and C. Audley Galbraith, who lived in a small house in Bethesda, Maryland, outside Washington, D.C. For herself, Edith rented an apartment in Manhattan in the theater district.
Married since 1904, the Galbraiths were a tightly knit, conservative family who offered Nancy a stable environment. A small little corner of an upstairs porch was converted into a sleeping quarters for the newly arrived Nancy.
As Nancy entered grade school, Edith began to face the fact that she’d always be a second tier actress appearing in “third rate productions,” for which she usually earned $60 a week. She was approaching middle age, recognizing that if stardom were to come to her, it would have visited her during her twenties.
However, based to some degree on her bubbling personality, she had developed a friendship with big name stars.
One by one, Nancy got to meet such greats as Lillian Gish, Colleen Moore, Walter Huston, and ZaSu Pitts. Edith became extremely intimate with Spencer Tracy, who in time practically became a member of the household. As a young girl, Nancy suspected that Tracy and her mother were having an affair, although he had a wife, Louise, and a deaf son, John.
***
Before the 1920s came to an end, life changed drastically for Edith and ultimately for Nancy, too. Sailing for Europe from the port of New York aboard the SS New York, Edith met Dr. Loyal Davis, who hated his first name. Edith was at the “dangerous” age of thirty-nine, back when a woman that old found it almost impossible to find a second husband.
Nancy Robbins Davis at graduation from Girls’ Latin.
Davis was only thirty-one and an associate professor of surgery at Northwestern University. He had earned his M.D. in 1918, and five years later, had studied with Dr. Harvey Cushing, later hailed as the pio
neer of modern neurosurgery in America.
Davis himself had become the first neurosurgery specialist in Chicago. “I operate on man’s most delicate parts, his brain and his spinal cord,” Loyal said.
A shipboard romance was launched, though Edith was disappointed after learning that he already had a wife, Pearl, in Chicago, and a two-year-old son, Richard. He assured Edith that his marriage was all but over.
After he delivered a speech at a medical conference in London, he headed with Edith for an adulterous holiday on the French Riviera, settling into chic Cannes.
Although they went their separate ways after their return to America, they vowed to meet again after he solved his domestic problems in Chicago.
In a fit of delayed good intentions during a stopover in New York, the recently divorced Dr. Loyal married Edith in a union that would survive till the end of their respective lives. Huston functioned as their best man at their wedding in October of 1928. Young Nancy, back in Chicago, did not attend.
The newly married couple soon provided a home in Chicago for Nancy.
Loyal could afford to send Nancy to the exclusive Girls’ Latin School of Chicago. He was charging $500 for a major brain operation; $150 for a prefrontal lobotomy.
His marriage to Edith would last fifty-three years and became, in time, a sort of role model for Nancy’s long-enduring marriage to Ronald Reagan.
Politically, at the time, Edith was perceived as “a short, gay Democrat,” and Loyal labeled as a “tall, serious Republican.”
Although Loyal did not officially adopt Nancy until 1938, she always referred to him as “my father.” Later in her life, when challenged about that claim, she said, “I don’t care. Loyal was my father in my mind.” In her memoirs, she wrote: “Since Kenneth Robbins was such a small part of my life, it is impossible for me to think of him as my father.”
Love Triangle: Ronald Reagan, Jane Wyman, & Nancy Davis (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) Page 3