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

by Darwin Porter

  Inside his apartment, furnished in what she called “gangster modern,” she was introduced to Mack Grey. Raft referred to him as “My Man Friday.”

  Raft put on some recorded music. To her astonishment, he ordered Grey to dance for him. When his servant wasn’t dancing fast enough to please his boss, Raft removed a revolver and shot two .38 caliber bullets at the floor, narrowly missing Grey’s feet. After that, he danced faster.

  One of the two bullets had penetrated through to the floor below, embedding itself into the sofa of Mrs. Jack Warner, the former Irma Solomons, an heiress. It caused a small scandal that was quickly hushed up.

  As Jane later reflected, “That bullet could have ended both my future career at Warners and Raft’s, too.”

  In spite of her disastrous first date, she agreed to return to the Trocadero with Raft on a second date. She still wanted that part in his next movie.

  When Raft escorted Jane to the dance floor at “The Troc,” the two professional dancers created such a sensation that the other couples quit dancing and formed a circle around them to watch the exhibition.

  Later, at table, Raft told her, “I could have become mainstream Hollywood’s first X-rated dancer. I was very erotic in my dances in New York. I caressed my body, especially Black Snake. To make it bigger, I fondled it as I danced, and it grew bigger and bigger, much to the delight of the squealing women in the audience.”

  Raft always referred to his large penis as “Black Snake,” and, according to women who had gone to bed with him, it was an apt description.

  As Jane would later tell Lucille Ball, “Grey wasn’t there at his apartment that night. Raft didn’t attempt to seduce me with any subtlety. He was drunk and attacked me, ripping my dress. He raped me, although, frankly, I didn’t put up much resistance.”

  To Jane’s surprise, she learned later that both of her friends, Ball and Betty Grable, had each had flings with Raft, too.

  Once, Ball confessed that she’d become involved with Grey before her involvement with Raft. “He doesn’t have a pretty face, but he can have any woman he wants when he takes off his clothes.” Grey had risen from the back streets of Brooklyn and had been known by the mob as “The Killer.”

  Ball admitted that Raft finally seduced her himself, although Tallulah Bankhead had warned her that she’d gotten gonorrhea from Raft. Before his involvement with Ball, Raft had assured her that he’d been cured.

  “We had several fights,” Ball claimed. “One time he got so mad at me, he broke into my apartment and cut up all my clothing with a pair of tailor scissors.”

  Ball also confided, “Did that guy like to screw. On his day off, he devoted at least twelve hours a day to prolonged screwing. He told me he averaged at least two women a day.”

  Years later, Grable also told Jane about her own disastrous involvement with Raft, who beat her on occasion. “He said he wanted to marry me. No way! Personally, I think he’s a latent homosexual, in spite of his womanizing.”

  Raft carried through on his promise to Jane and got her a small part in Stolen Harmony (1935), directed by Alfred L. Werker, who had been involved in filmmaking beginning with the Silents in 1917. He had earned the undying animosity of the temperamental director, Erich von Stroheim, when Fox called him in to reshoot and re-edit the director’s film, Hello Sister! (1933).

  After working with Jane and others, Werker, in the early 1940s, had directed a number of comedies for Laurel and Hardy.

  In Stolen Harmony, Raft was cast as a dancer/actor/gangster who, after his release from prison, joins Ben Bernie’s Swing Band, playing a mean saxophone. Various misadventures take place before Raft finally saves the day and rescues the band.

  Band leader Ben [“The Old Maestro,”] Bernie and his band starred in the movie. Bernie was a jazz violinist and radio personality known for his showmanship and memorable bits of snappy dialogue. Jane had often danced to his hit record, “Sweet Georgia Brown.”

  To beef up her income, Jane asked if she could appear as a vocalist with his band, since she was also a singer. He turned her down, later picking Dinah Shore for the spot instead.

  Lloyd Nolan, born in San Francisco, made his film debut in Stolen Harmony. He would go on to become one of the leading character actors in Hollywood.

  Jane was on the set of Stolen Harmony as a witness to one of the most violent cops-and-robber shootouts in the history of the movies. After the film’s release, it was determined that some of its scenes were so violent that a few states refused to allow the movie to be screened until parts of it were cut.

  Variety infuriated Raft when it suggested that a double was used in many of his dance numbers. “I don’t need a fucking double. I’m a dancer. There are two dancing gangster actors in Hollywood, George Raft, number one, and James Cagney, a distant second.”

  ***

  Jane was beginning to despair at the direction of her career, since she seemed stuck as an uncredited cutie in the film industry’s chorus line. Yet when she was offered another uncredited part, this time in King of Burlesque (1936), she accepted. During those Depression years, any paycheck, even a meager one, was welcomed.

  But 1936 would turn out to be one of her best years so far, as she appeared in six movies.

  At Paramount, Jane was not under contract, but was simply an extra, hired whenever a “perky” blonde was called for. She stood 5’5”, tall for the day, and her hair and trim figure were in style. She had large brown eyes and high cheekbones. She photographed well, but she was still self-conscious about her appearance, working hard to gain confidence.

  She had also picked up an agent, actually an actor/agent. Minnesota-born William Demarest had worked in vaudeville before coming to Hollywood in 1926 to begin a career in silent films. He’d have his greatest film success with Preston Sturges, appearing in such hits as Sullivan’s Travels and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek. Like Jane, he’d go on to big success in television, notably in the sitcom My Three Sons [it ran from 1965 to 1972], in which he appeared opposite Fred MacMurray.

  In the mid-1930s, when acting jobs were scarce, he hustled roles for other actors, including Jane.

  She later commented on that period of her life. “A lot of men had tried to exploit me, and it had toughened me up. I heard a lot of sweet talk and heaps of promises that amounted to nothing. But a few along the way genuinely had my welfare at heart, notably William Demarest.”

  Years later, she spoke of this time to Guidepost magazine. “For a girl who grew up in terror at being looked at, it was agony for me to appear on camera. Then I made a discovery: A good shield for shyness is a bold exterior. Did my heart turn over when the man with a megaphone bellowed my name? Were all the other dancers prettier? Never mind. I covered up my shyness by becoming the cockiest of all, by talking the loudest, laughing the longest, and wearing the curliest, most blatantly false eyelashes in Hollywood.”

  Even thought her role was small in King of Burlesque, Jane was thrilled to be working with some top professionals in the business. The one-time jazz musician and vaudevillian star, Sidney Lanfield, had signed to direct. He had been working at Fox since 1930. In 1955, he and Jane would work together again on television’s Fireside Theater.

  She wasn’t thrilled to see Jack Oakie again, this time cast in third billing, but she was impressed with the film’s other star, Warner Baxter, who at the time was the highest paid male movie actor in Hollywood, and the blonde singer, Alice Faye, goddess of the 20th Century Fox lot until she was replaced in the 1940s by Jane’s friend, Betty Grable.

  At the wrap party, Demarest, her agent, told Jane, “You’ve got to do a quickie with Big Mouth.”

  “Oh, no, not Joe E. Brown again,” she protested.

  “Oh, yes,” he said.

  William Demarest, Jane’s first Hollywood agent: “God, she was jumpy. Thought I was going to rape her.”

  ***

  On the set of Polo Joe (1936), Jane once again faced Joe E. Brown, whose contract with Warners was nearing its en
d. As his farewell gesture to the studio, Brown and his gaping mouth appeared in this lackluster slapstick directed by William McCann.

  Years later, Jane claimed she could not remember what she had to do in the movie. All that she recalled was Brown telling her what pleasure he could provide her with his canyon of a mouth.

  On the set of Polo Joe, Jane escaped from the hot pursuit of Brown and fell into the strong, muscular arms of Wayne Morris, a tall, good-looking blonde with a slow drawl who had just signed a contract with Warners.

  To Jane, Wayne represented the ideal American male. She told her friends, “Every high school has a Wayne Morris type. He’s usually the captain of the football team. I could easily fall in love with him, but I held my heart in check when I learned that he went out with a different girl at least four nights a week. With him, the line of beauties pursuing him formed on both the left and the right.”

  “Until I learned more about him, I was in love with him,” Jane said. “Yes, it led to a sleepover in his apartment. He’s completely skilled in the art of lovemaking. Wayne was like a kid in the Hollywood candy store, wanting to sample all the sugary goodies, of which I was a nugget.”

  [Polo Joe marked Jane’s long association, both professional and private, with Morris.

  A native of Los Angeles, Morris played football at Los Angeles Junior College. Later, he worked as a forest ranger. He returned to Los Angeles and studied acting at the Pasadena Playhouse, where a Warner Brothers talent agent spotted him in 1936. Blonde and open-faced, he was the perfect type for “the boy-next-door” parts.]

  ***

  Co-starring Carole Lombard and William Powell, My Man Godfrey (1936) was a comedy-drama directed by Gregory La Cava, a freelancer throughout most of his career. The story was about a Depression-era socialite (Lombard) who hires a dignified, handsome derelict (Powell) to be her family’s butler, only to fall in love with him.

  Both Constance Bennett and Miriam Hopkins had been considered for the role, but Powell had insisted on Lombard. [The couple had been married from 1931 until their divorce in 1933. Their cinematic pairing was interpreted at the time as a rare example of friendship triumphing over heartbreak in the aftermath of a stormy marriage.]

  As he had during the course of their real-life marriage, Powell continued to object to Lombard’s obscene vocabulary, every other word being “fuck” or “shit.” During her divorce proceedings, she had accused him of being a very emotional man “cruel and coarse in manners of language who displayed his temper repeatedly.” Ironically, at least for the purposes of their reappearance on screen, their former courtside acrimonies were set aside.

  Jane agreed with Graham Greene’s 1936 assessment: “Mr. Powell is a little too immaculate, his wit is too well-turned, just as his clothes are too well-made; he drinks hard but only in the best of bars. He is rather like an advertisement of a man about town in Esquire.”

  Wayne Morris was a Warner Brothers’ heartthrob of the 1930s. Jane had nothing but praise for “his football player physique and his virility.”

  Although an aging actor, born in 1892, Powell was still an attractive, sophisticated man. Jane was reluctant to flirt with him, because all of Hollywood knew that he was in love at the time with the platinum blonde bomb-shell Jean Harlow.

  [In June of 1937, Harlow’s early death would shock the world. Clark Gable forced his way into her home after she had been absent from the studio, and incommunicado for a week. He discovered that the star was dying because her mother, a Christian Science devotee, refused to send her to the hospital for an operation.]

  On the set, Jane spotted the director, La Cava, sitting by himself after lunch. She approached him and asked for advice about her career. He looked her over very carefully. “My suggestion is that you learn to play sickeningly sweet, pure honey type of roles,” he told her. “That way, you can replace Loretta Young on the screen.”

  Jane was at first delighted to have been cast in My Man Godfrey, calling it “my first big break.” I’ve got two lines of dialogue with Lombard. In the 20s, I heard that Howard Hughes had taught her about the birds and the bees. I flubbed my lines three times, but Carole was very helpful.”

  Jane recalled, “I faced real competition to get noticed from the other players in this film. In the supporting cast was Alice Brady, who stole the picture, along with Gail Patrick, Jean Dixon, my old buddy, Eugene Pallette, Alan Mowbray, and Mischa Auer. How do you follow acts like theirs?”

  Jane was cast in a scavenger hunt scene, but most of the footage ended up on the cutting room floor. “I’m still in the picture,” she said. “You can catch me next to the organ grinder and this damn vicious little monkey. The bastard bit me so hard, I screamed.”

  ***

  Running only one hour, Here Comes Carter was the fifth Warners’ short film to be directed by William Clemens, a Hollywood veteran best known for having previously helmed the three of the studio’s most durable series: Philo Vance, Nancy Drew, and The Falcon.

  Carole Lombard and William Powell in My Man Godfrey. At their divorce, she complained of his temper, and he attacked her obscenity.

  The charming and boyish-looking Ross Alexander was cast as the film’s lead—a radio commentator in a convoluted plot that involves vengeance of an old wrong through whistle-blowing on some shady Hollywood scandals.

  On the set, Jane launched a friendship with Ross. Born in Brooklyn, his life would end, shortly after their first meeting, in suicide. Ironically, Warners would almost immediately replace him with a young radio announcer from Des Moines named Ronald Reagan. Jane would later refer to his tragic life story as “a bad Hollywood movie.”

  He had a bubbly personality and spoke in a voice that Jack Warner later defined as “very similar to young Reagan’s.”

  With Jane, at least, Ross did not conceal his homosexuality.

  During his dialogues with her, he enlightened her about Hollywood actors. “Many of the biggest stars are actually homos or at least bisexual.” As an example, he cited his best friend, Henry Fonda, who had become his lover in 1933 when they first started rooming together during their joint appearances in summer stock. “Hank’s true love is Jimmy Stewart, but Jimmy is not always available, so he settles for me.”

  For years, Ross had been under pressure to camouflage his homosexuality. As a means of doing that, he had married, in February of 1934, as part of a lavender arrangement of convenience, the Broadway actress, Aleta Friels. Faced with a failed marriage and a stalled career, she committed suicide less than a year later, in December of 1935, shooting herself with a rifle in the barn of their home in the Hollywood Hills.

  [To her astonishment, Alexander revealed that he had pursued Bette Davis for three years. “If I had been able to get her to marry me, it would have been the publicity coup of my life, and I’d be a big star today. But she uncovered my secret. Bette, you know, detests homosexuals.”

  Ross’s big break came when he was chosen to play Demetrius in the all-star cast of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935).

  The same year, he starred in Captain Blood in the role of Jeremy Pitt, cast as the friend and navigator to the character played by swashbuckler Errol Flynn. Alexander told Jane that he had fallen in love with the bisexual Australian actor, and that the two men were currently involved in a torrid affair.

  “So far in my screen career, I’ve been nothing but a second rate Dick Powell, signing on to any role he rejects,” Ross told Jane.

  Before meeting Jane, Ross had entered yet another marriage, this time to Anne Nagle, an actress from Massachusetts, who was to work for 25 years in film adventures, mysteries, and comedies.

  Anne Nagel is not to be confused with Anna Neagle, Britain’s biggest female draw for seven years, and the wife of producer Henry Wilcox.]

  Also appearing in Here Comes Carter was the brassy-personaed Glenda Farrell, who had arrived in Hollywood toward the end of the Silent Era. Finding no work immediately, she worked temporarily in a whorehouse, seducing, among others, cli
ents who included a young Humphrey Bogart.

  The doomed Ross Alexander.

  Like Joan Blondell, Farrell specialized in wise-cracking, hard-boiled, and somewhat dizzy blonde roles. She and Blondell were often paired together in films. During a period of her career, Jane’s screen persona would be compared to that of both Blondell and Farrell.

  Jane and Wayne Morris didn’t have much to do in the film. Her relationship with him almost collapsed when she saw him leaving Farrell’s dressing room late one afternoon as she was heading home. She confronted him and accused him of having an affair with her rival.

  He freely admitted it. “The broad wanted to find out if all those stories about ‘Jumbo’ were true,” he said. “I plowed her. Listen, you don’t own me. I know you sleep around quite a bit yourself.”

  “He’d nailed me,” Jane later confessed. “He and I didn’t have any special arrangement. I decided to hold onto him. I’d have to be very understanding. When I wasn’t with him, I was free to date other men, so I thought it was a fair deal between us.”

  He asked to go home with her. “After two or three beers and a steak, I’ll have recovered from Farrell, and I’ll be all yours for the night.”

  “It’s a deal, Jumbo,” she said. “Forgive me for being so silly. It’s just that Farrell and I are rivals, and I resent her taking roles I want. That’s why I got so pissed when I saw her going after my man, too.”

  Demarest sent over the latest script with a brief role for Jane. She read it one night and called the next morning, with her assessment of the script. “This sounds like another turkey masquerading as a tiger.”

  She was referring to the 1936 Bengal Tiger.

  ***

  Ross invited Jane to attend an intimate dinner at the home of Errol Flynn, the swashbuckling, relatively new star at Warners. Ever since appearing together in Captain Blood, Ross and Flynn had been lovers, even though Flynn was married at the time to the French actress, Lili Damita.