The Flynns lived on Appian Way, a narrow, hairpin-curved mountain path positioned off Laurel Canyon Boulevard in the Hollywood Hills. Ross notified Jane that Damita would not be present at the dinner, as she and Flynn had had a violent argument the night before.
Before meeting him, Jane had heard many lurid stories about Flynn—that he was a lecherous, lovable rebel, a sexual pervert, and a drunkard. In the flesh, he evoked none of those qualities. Critics at the time suggested that he was the true heir to the handsome, swashbuckling traditions of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. At the time, Flynn was at the peak of his male beauty, on the verge of interpreting the title role in the aptly name The Perfect Specimen.
Glenda Farrell, often Jane’s rival for roles, once made a confession: “My first job was in a bordello, where I learned how to act by telling johns how great they were as lovers.”
As he kissed her hand, Flynn was the epitome of graciousness, and initially, at least, Jane had a very favorable view of him. Later, she referred to him as the “Tasmanian Devil,” a reference to his birthplace.
Her future husband, Ronald Reagan, who would make two movies with Flynn, had a very negative view of the Australian.
As Flynn introduced Jane to his six other guests, none of whom she had ever heard of, he was most solicitous of her. His softly accented voice was especially alluring and seductive. As she would later say, “A gal would have a hard time saying no to this guy.”
By the time she met him, Flynn had already seduced hundreds of women and dozens of men, claiming that he lost his virginity at the age of twelve to the family maid in Australia.
[Before Flynn’s early death at the age of 50 in 1959, he claimed that he had made some 12,000 to 14,000 sexual conquests with persons from all walks of life, including— during the course of one especially prolific afternoon in his dressing room—four starlets.]
Jane remembered his eyes, a seductive tool unto themselves. “They twinkle when he talks to you,” she said, “and they are flecked with gold.”
His sometimes roommate, David Niven, described Flynn “as a great athlete of immense charm and evident physical beauty, crowing lustily atop the Hollywood dung-heap.”
Flynn seated Jane with him at the head of the table, talking mostly about himself. He claimed that he got his start in life as a slave trader and prospector in New Guinea.
He also spoke about the time when Jack Warner hired him. “He said I reminded him of John Barrymore, a hard-drinking, wenching, lovable, handsome man. I think Warner wanted to be like John and me, but he wasn’t.”
“I’m supposed to be a great swordsman,” he said. “Well, I guess I am in one department. But on the screen as a dueling swordsman, I stink. I’m horrible at fencing. In the beginning, Michael Curtiz had to reshoot many of my scenes because of my inadequacies. Or else he’d call in one of the stunt doubles.”
The dinner party broke up before midnight, because of early shooting schedules the next morning. Flynn already was rather drunk when he told Jane, “I feel as horny as a three-peckered billy goat.”
“What a flattering invitation,” she said.
However, she accepted his offer to stay over. When Flynn relayed that information to Ross, he got angry and stormed out of the house.
In spite of the liquor, Flynn lived up to his reputation as a great lover. After the sex act, she cuddled in his arms until he made a confession. “I lied to you. I pretended I used precautions, but I didn’t. What’s the point of eating dinner with your gloves on?”
Errol Flynn shows off why he was selected as the star of The Perfect Specimen (1937). Overnight, he became a pinup boy.
Horrified, she jumped up from the bed and headed for his kitchen. There, she removed a bottle of white cider vinegar from his cabinet and then raced to the bathroom for a serious douche.
[During the weeks ahead, Jane feared that Flynn might have impregnated her. If so, she planned to have an abortion. Maybe it was that vinegar. Whatever, she never became pregnant.]
The next morning, on the set of Here Comes Carter, Jane told Glenda Farrell, “Every girl should enjoy the manly charms of Errol Flynn. And, at the rate he’s going, every girl will have her chance at him.”
***
Jane’s next film was Bengal Tiger (1936), directed by Louis King and starring Barton MacLane and June Travis. MacLane was cast as the blustering lion-tamer who marries his assistant’s poverty-stricken daughter, as played by Travis. To advance the plot, she then falls in love with the man on the flying trapeze (Warren Hull).
To Jane, the real star of the film was “Satan,” a tiger who did the best acting job, mauling a double, chewing up a chair, and snarling at a whip.
King was a Southern gentleman from Virginia, who had become known in the 1920s for directing westerns and adventure stories. He was the brother of the famous director, Henry King.
In her future, Jane would often be attracted to her leading man. But MacLane was a big turn-off to her. He was cast as the furrow-browed tough guy giving someone a hard time. He seemed menacing, with his squinty eyes and his mouth clamped tightly shut.
Jane told Travis, “I think the script writer got it perfect. Barton ends up as cat food in the final reel. I’ll never understand why he ever became a star. He has little talent and is both ugly and obnoxious.”
Travis seemed rather contemptuous of Jane and soon wasn’t speaking to her. She was from Chicago, the daughter of Harry Grabiner, vice president of the Chicago White Sox. With her dark brown hair and green eyes, she stood 5’4”. It was understandable why Ronald Reagan, in his first picture, was attracted to her, but ever so briefly.
Travis not only snatched Reagan from Jane before she got a chance at him, but she fell into the slot at Warners that Jane wanted for herself. Travis became another actress known as the “queen of the B’s,” something Jane had been striving for, since she feared that super stardom was but a dream.
***
When William Demarest called to tell Jane that Paramount had offered her a small role in the film version of the hit Broadway musical, Anything Goes (1936), she was elated. Later, she was disappointed to learn “just how small a small part can be.”
With music, at least some of it by Cole Porter, the film would star Bing Crosby, Ethel Merman, character actor Charles Ruggles, and a newcomer, Ida Lupino, taking the role Jane really wanted, that of “Hope Harcourt.”
An odd choice of director for a musical was Lewis Milestone, a Russian-born Jew who had achieved fame for winning two Oscars as the director of Two Arabian Knights (1927) and All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).
On the set, Merman befriended Jane, and the bigger star often complained to her about her newly written role in the film. On Broadway, she had appeared in 420 performances, but she detested the new film script. “Everything in this movie is geared to promote that stuck-up asshole, Crosby,” she told Jane. “Those jerks, Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, have written one dumb line after another for me. ‘What are you doing here?’ What’s the idea?’ Crap like that. The censors even nixed my big number, ‘Blow, Gabriel, Blow.’ Too suggestive, they say.”
Porter was furious when he heard that many of his songs with their suggestive lyrics had been removed from the film, and that new composers had been called in to fill the gap. However, they allowed “You’re the Top,” to stay in, perhaps not realizing that for a gay audience, that was a very suggestive line.
Merman knew Porter and spoke to Jane about him. “We are two very different ducks,” Merman said. “He likes cute young men, and I prefer something else. He’s Yale educated, and I never opened a book. He prefers elegant food and wine, and I’m a hamburger gal with lots of onions and catsup. He wears Savile Row suits, and I prefer loud hats and flashy costume jewelry.”
The film was about a shipboard romance in which Crosby chased after Lupino. Merman called the British-born actress “a limey bitch.”
June Travis and Barton MacClane were the stars of Bengal Tiger. Jane could never figure
out how MacLane became a leading man.
The beautiful starlet, Travis, would soon be in the arms of Ronald Reagan, both on and off the screen.
Lucille Ball dropped by the set one day to have lunch with Jane. In the commissary, Jane whispered a secret. “Ethel is one butch broad. Would you believe it, she invited me to her dressing room and put the make on me. I got out of there—and damn fast.”
“I should have warned you,” Ball said. “Ethel is a lesbian.”
[Escaping from the embrace of Merman, Jane became friends with Lupino. In a few short years, Lupino would also become a close friend of Jane and her new husband, Ronald Reagan. She visited the Reagans frequently at their apartment at 1326 Londonderry Road in Beverly Hills. To Jane’s dismay, Lupino and Reagan would talk politics all night. Both of them were liberal Democrats and supporters of FDR.
At Warners, Lupino became known as “the poor man’s Bette Davis,” accepting whatever “leftover parts” the grand diva turned down.]
As filming progressed on Anything Goes (1936), and Jane heard Crosby sing and emote on camera, she developed a crush on him. Somehow word of her interest reached him. He approached her one day. “I hear you like me,” he said. “Let’s do something about that. A date tonight, perhaps?”
***
In the days ahead, Jane and Bing Crosby launched what evolved into a long-enduring affair for each of them. It would be put into storage in the 1940s during her marriage to Reagan, but it would resume in the 50s when they made two more pictures together.
Bing Crosby with Ethel Merman performing “You’re the Top,” with its suggestive Cole Porter lyrics.
According to Merman, “I thought Crosby was somewhat of a girlie man, and he claimed I was far too macho. Nothing ever happened between us, but if it ever did, I bet I’d be the one on top.”
The crooner, with his trademark bass-baritone, sometimes preferred pretty but demure young women with delicate features, and Jane fitted that bill. There was a fourteen-year difference in their ages, but that didn’t matter to her.
As the 1930s had moved on, Jane had ceased to care if a man were married or not. Paulette Goddard had told her, “All movie stars, married or single, sleep around. It’s how we play the game out here.”
Jane was aware that Crosby in 1930 had married the Tennessee-born singer and showgirl, Dixie Lee (aka Dixie Carroll). Jane had heard reports that both were alcoholics, but that whereas Crosby had brought his liquor consumption under control, his wife had become more and more depressed.
[The 1947 film, Smash-Up—The Story of a Woman, starring Susan Hayward, was loosely based on the tragic life of Dixie Lee. She had had a brief film career at Crosby’s Paramount Studio, her most notable movie being Love in Bloom (1935).]
Crosby had a history of seducing some of his leading ladies. Of course, on the set of Anything Goes, he certainly did not plan to go after Merman. He could have made a play for Lupino, but he chose to pursue bit player Jane instead.
Crosby had bedded Miriam Hopkins (his co-star in She Loves Me, ’34); Joan Bennett (his co-star in Mississippi, ’35); Joan Blondell (his co-star in Two for Tonight, ’35); and most recently the mentally disturbed Frances Farmer (his costar in Rhythm on the Range, ’36).
Since Crosby was well known and a married man, he had to be very secretive about sexual trysts with Jane. Their love affair could not be carried out at Chasen’s, the Troc, or at the Cocoanut Grove.
Fortunately, director Frank Tuttle was only too willing to give them the use of his guest cottage. He hardly remembered Jane from her brief stint in his All the King’s Horses. Crosby was Tuttle’s friend, referring to him as “my favorite director.”
Tuttle had helmed Crosby’s Here Is My Heart (1934) and would go on to direct him in such pictures as Waikiki Wedding (1937); Doctor Rhythm (1938); and Paris Honeymoon (1939).
Many stars, directors, and other entertainers detested Crosby. His rival, Rudy Vallee, claimed, “Bing has ice water in his veins instead of warm blood.” The public, however, adored him, and he remained a beloved singer throughout the dizzy Prohibition era, during the bleak years of the Depression, and through the darkest days of World War II. She had heard stories about his troubled marriage to the beautiful but tragic Dixie Lee and his difficulties with his own sons. He was said to beat them severely.
With Jane, on occasion, he displayed a streak of cruelty, “but he never hit me,” she claimed. “However, I did on that rare occasion piss him off, but I never went too far. I learned that if you make one major wrong move with Bing, he’ll never speak to you again. For the most part, we had a very good relationship.”
One night, when Crosby and Jane were sitting out on a breeze-swept terrace in the Hollywood Hills, taking in the panoramic view of Los Angeles at night, she broached a delicate subject. She asked him if he had ever considered divorcing Lee.
“Never!” he shouted at her. “Don’t ever ask me that again. “I’ll never divorce Dixie. It’s truly an ‘until death do us part’ kind of thing.”
For all his dark side, Crosby was wonderful with minorities, according to Jane. He not only related to African Americans, including the great Louis Armstrong, but he brought the same respect to the shoeshine boy at the front gates of Paramount. He’d stop and talk to the boy and joke with him. “He was never patronizing, like most stars of the 30s to minorities,” Jane claimed.
As Jane later told Glenda Farrell, “Bing is not the stud that Wayne Morris and Errol Flynn are, but he’s adequate for the job—and I like him a lot. But he’s very distant emotionally, not physically. Nobody seems to get close to him, certainly not his family.”
***
At one point, Jane drifted into a deep depression once again, as she had so many times before, feeling that her career had stalled. The 1930s were passing, and she still hadn’t made it big. Every day, chorus girls, some no more than sixteen, were arriving from the hinterlands.
She finally decided to take Paulette Goddard’s advice and find some wealthy man to marry. “If he’s nice and charming, or even handsome, that’s all to the good, but don’t ask for everything,” the star advised. “If he’s got enough money, you can’t insist on all those other redeeming qualities.”
Along came Myron Futterman. He was a clothing manufacturer from New Orleans, who specialized in ladies’ gowns. He always lied about his age, but she suspected that he was at least twenty years older than she was. He had been born in 1903, making him fourteen years older than Jane.
Like her friend, Lucille Ball, Jane was a party girl. A studio such as Paramount or Warners could call upon her to entertain an important out-of-town client. Futterman had important connections in the business world, and someone at Warners called Jane and asked her if she’d entertain him during his visit to Los Angeles. Hoping to get cast in another Warners film, Jane agreed.
Although not as attractive as she would have preferred, Futterman was a gracious Southern gentleman, who treated her kindly, although she realized he wanted to have sex with her. She managed to hold him off until the third date. He was far from the greatest lover she’d known, but, on the other hand, he was not a disaster. As she later told Goddard, “Myron is competent in bed.”
“Count yourself lucky,” Goddard said. “Most men are incompetent between the sheets, and I should know. But if the bank account is big enough, competent is just rosy pink.”
It was Jane who pressed marriage onto him. He’d been married before and still spoke favorably of his first wife, and seemed to be mourning her loss.
He flew with Jane to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. That wasn’t all. A diamond engagement ring was followed in two days by a wedding band placed on her finger at City Hall before a justice of the peace. The date was June 29, 1937.
To her, it seemed that almost overnight, she’d become Mrs. Myron Futterman, although she had never divorced Eugene Wyman. “Who’s to know?” was her cavalier attitude.
During her honeymoon, she realized that she’d married the wrong m
an, as she’d later relate to Goddard. She hadn’t realized how conservative her new husband was. Although he marketed gowns with plunging décolletage, he didn’t want Jane to wear such a dress or gown. For days at a time, he sank into a sullen mood and didn’t want to see or talk to her. He was so withdrawn at times, he reminded her of her foster father.
For her, the worst was yet to come. He did not want her to pursue a career in Hollywood. “That’s something whores do,” he told her. He had plenty of ammunition to back up that outrageous statement. “I’ve dated plenty of starlets. All of them put out. In fact, let’s face it: That’s how I met you. I want to rescue you from the life of a tramp.”
She wasn’t as shy as she used to be, standing up to him and telling him she was going to pursue her career—“or else!”
“Faced with such a strong statement from me, he caved in,” she told Goddard.
William Demarest didn’t give the marriage much of a chance for success. “When Jane married that Futterman guy, I was really put off by him when I met him. Wherever they went, he was taken for her father. I think she married him for a sense of security, but his demands made her insecure. It was a money thing. Before she got married, she had told me that one day, she’d be thirty years old, with only $100 in her bank account.”
Fortunately for Jane, Futterman was on the road most of the time, leaving her to her own devices. That meant she could show up at the Troc or the Cocoanut Grove with a series of come-and-go beaux, becoming the dutiful wife the moment he hit town again.
“Myron is tight with the purse strings,” Jane told Demarest, “but generous with thewardrobe.”
For the first time in her life, she had all the dresses and gowns she wanted, showing up at various night clubs with a different outfit every time.
“It was just assumed that she had some sugar daddy,” Demarest said, “and at least in the clothing department, she did. Otherwise, he gave her an allowance of $50 a week.”
Love Triangle: Ronald Reagan, Jane Wyman, & Nancy Davis (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) Page 7