For her girlfriends, Jane later summed up her night with Crosby: “After being mauled by Wayne Morris, a brute in bed, my time with Bing was a cake-walk. I’ve decided that if I don’t make it in the movies, I’m going to marry a movie star, and lie around all day on a sofa, calling out, “Beulah, peel me a grape.’”
***
Two days after her visit to Bing Crosby’s home, Jane was invited to visit Wayne Morris on the set of his latest film, Kid Galahad (1937). He showed her into his dressing room and gave her passionate kiss before telling her, “This is my big break. I play a boxer, the title role. Jack Warner is grooming me for stardom as the next Errol Flynn.”
“Who else is in this picture?” she asked.
“The big names: Edward G. Robinson, Bette Davis, and Humphrey Bogart.”
The film concerned an aggressive promoter (as played by Robinson) who transforms a naïve bellhop into a boxing star. During the course of the movie, he tangles with mobster Bogart at every turn.
As a champion prizefighter in Kid Galahad, Wayne Morris, the tall, blonde, and well-built actor, saw this publicity still from Warners. “My best asset, ‘Jumbo,’ is hidden by those droopy shorts.”
Veda Ann Borg and Jane Bryan were cast in minor roles. Ironically, during the making of Kid Galahad, Ronald Reagan was having an affair with Borg, and he would soon develop a crush on Jane Bryan when they made a picture together.
In a role she hated, Davis was cast in Kid Galahad as a torch singer, the on-screen mistress of the character played by Robinson. She hated her character’s name, “Fluff” Phillips. “Whether I like it or not, I’m forced to play, once again, this annoying cardboard character,” she had said.
In addition to the affair she was conducting with one of its stars, Wayne Morris, Jane had other reasons that motivated her visits to the set of Kid Galahad. Not knowing if Davis would be available, Jack Warner had recommended Jane for the role of Fluff. It was to be Jane’s first big break at Warners.
“I lived in a dream for at least for two weeks, thinking I’d achieved my first starring role, and with Bogart and Robinson, no less! But then I got a call that Davis had suddenly become available, and consequently, I would no longer be needed.”
Although Morris was delighted to have been given such a big part, he was furious at the size of his paycheck. “It’s criminal—that’s what it is.” He was receiving $66 a week, whereas Robinson was earning $50,000 for his role in the film, with Davis getting $18,000.
During the early days of the shoot, Bette Davis had repeatedly—and seductively— invited Morris to her dressing room, and he kept refusing. He’d even asked Bogart, “How do I get this hot-to-trot mama off my back? I’m not into mothers this year.”
Morris was 23 at the time, Davis only 29.
“Why don’t you throw her a mercy fuck?” Bogart asked.
“I get it up only for teenage gals,” he said. “Perhaps if they’re hot enough, a gal in her early twenties might do.”
Jane learned that in an effort to get to Morris, Davis had even approached Curtiz and asked him to write in a passionate love scene between Morris and her. The director had refused.
Jane didn’t realize that she was being used when Morris invited Jane to join him, with Davis for lunch. At first, Davis ignored Jane, completely, directing all of her comments to Morris.
“I just had another argument with Curtiz,” Davis said. “He hates me, you know. He didn’t want me in the picture. In the early 1930s, he seduced me. ‘You’re no bigger than a little piece of okra,’ I told him later. He’s despised me ever since.”
“No wonder,” Jane said.
“That’s certainly not my problem, is it Jane?” Morris asked.
Jane didn’t immediately answer, but she noticed that Davis’ face seemed immediately consumed in a jealous rage.
Davis stood up and, for the first time, addressed Jane directly, this time as a means of insulting Morris: “When you see Kid Galahad, Miss Wyman, expect to give one big yawn. There’s no excitement except what I generate.”
The next day, when Jane once again showed up on the set of Kid Galahad, she encountered Davis. She reached for Jane’s arm. “Listen, Kid, if you think Morris is faithful to you, forget it. He’s making it with this bimbo, Veda Ann Borg, when she’s not screwing this Ronald Reagan. Borg’s role in the picture is so small, she’s identified in the cast as only ‘the Redhead.’”
Jane politely thanked Davis for her warning, and headed for Morris’ dressing room. She had long ago accepted the fact that he slept with other women, much in the same way that she slept with other men.
At lunch, Morris introduced Jane to Humphrey Bogart, who would soon be making a picture with Ronald Reagan. Like Bette Davis, he too, was disenchanted with his role in Kid Galahad.
“Can you believe that I play this creepy character whose name is Turkey? I complained to that bastard Curtiz, telling him my role was one-dimensional. He told me, ‘I make this film go so fast nobody notice character.’”
“I don’t want to bitch too much, however, because I’ve heard that Jack Warner is considering dropping me when my contract is up,” Bogart said.
Later, he said, “I ran into Robinson. I told him I had to learn to shoot better. I explained to him that in the film, I get shot and a blanket is put over me. But when I shoot him, the bullet doesn’t kill him right away, and he survives for a curtain speech he gets to deliver in the arms of Bette Davis. So while he gets to deliver this big Pietà-like death scene, I’m covered up in a flea-infested blanket.”
Later, when Morris introduced Jane to Robinson, he spoke kindly of Bogart. “For all his outward toughness, insolence, braggadocio, and contempt, there comes through a kind of sadness, loneliness, and heartbreak, all of which are very much part of Bogie the man. I always feel sorry for him—sorry that he imposes upon himself the façade of the character with which he has become identified.”
As Jane was leaving the studio with Morris, she thanked him for letting her visit the set of Kid Galahad. “At least I got a preview of the stars I would have worked with if I’d been allowed to play the role of Fluff.”
“Honey,” he said from behind the wheel of his car. “You can Fluff me any time of the day or night.”
***
As Demarest, her agent, had predicted, Jane was awarded with a role in The King and the Chorus Girl (1937). This time, instead of a role as hatcheck girl, or inclusion as an unbilled chorine, her character would have a name: Babette Latour. “How phony can a name be?” she asked Joan Blondell, the female star of the film. “But I’m glad that at least I have an identity.”
The film was notable for a screenplay officially credited to Groucho Marx. The plot focused on Alfred VII, a young and rich deposed king in exile in Paris, who is monumentally bored. That leads to his involvement with a chorus line cutie. The plot seemed inspired by the abdication of Edward VIII in England, followed by his exile to France.
Jane was anxious to meet the handsome, dashing, star of the movie, Fernand Gravey, [an actor billed in the U.S. as Fernand Gravet.] He had been cast in the role of King Alfred Bruger VII.
When Blondell introduced him to Jane, the Belgium-born actor bowed and kissed her hand. She found him enchanting, and it was obvious that he was attracted to her. He suggested that they might get together later in his dressing room for a drink.
Fernand Gravey (aka Gravet): “I may be married, but the heart wants what the heart wants.”
“I’ll count the hours,” she said, before he bid her adieu.
Later, in Blondell’s dressing room, she said, “Not that it would matter to you, but Fernand got married last year to this French actress, Jane Renouardt, who is fifteen years older than he is. Perhaps he likes older women.”
“Perhaps he’d like a little variety in his life,” Jane shot back.
“This is his first film in America,” Blondell said. “Jack Warner is giving him a big build-up, thinking he can be the studio’s leading Gallic lover
, ready and available whenever a picture calls for a good-looking Continental with impeccable manners.”
Later that afternoon, the drink with Gravey led to a sleep-over at Jane’s apartment. During the evening, she learned more about this charming new import from the Continent.
He had started performing at the age of five under his father’s direction. His parents, Geôrges Mertens and Fernande Depernay, had each been film actors during the silent era. Born in 1905, Gravey had made four movies himself in 1913 and 1914. His first good movie role was in L’Amour Chante, released in 1933.
His first English-language movie, Bitter Sweet (1933), an adaptation of an operetta by Noël Coward, was followed by a more famous reincarnation when Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald re-configured and re-filmed it in 1940.
Gravey told Jane that he could make both English and French-language movies because he’d been educated in Britain.
“I wondered why you spoke such perfect English,” Jane said.
The King and the Chorus Girl was Gravey’s first film for Warner Brothers, and he was anxious to succeed.
Over dinner at the Brown Derby, she found Gravey to be a gentleman of impeccable manners and Gallic charm. “Too bad you’re already married,” she said.
“Marriage is a legal contract, but it does not place a limitation on my desires. I’m free to follow the rhythms of my heart.”
“I agree with you,” she said. “Marriage is such a limitation.”
The next day, Blondell was eager to hear a report on her date with Gravey.
“He’s the kind of man any woman could really fall for,” Jane said. “I’m sure he has a dark side—perhaps smothering babies to death, or something like that—but he showed none of that to me. Unlike Wayne Morris, he told me his ultimate aim in bed is to please a woman—and that he did. I wonder, though, if all Frenchmen are that oral in bed.”
“I haven’t sampled enough Frenchmen to make a learned judgment,” Blondell said. “When are you seeing him again?”
“Would you believe tonight?” Jane asked.
“I’d believe it,” Blondell said. “How long do you think this is going to last?”
“At least until the end of the picture,” Jane said, “and then, I’m certain he’ll return to his other Jane, his wife from the 19th Century.”
“Can you add him to your growing list of beaux?” Blondell asked.
“Women down through the ages have managed to have more than one lover, and I’m sure I can, too. In fact, tomorrow, when I have the day off, I’ll be visiting Craig Reynolds on the set of his new movie.”
On the second day of shooting, Jane encountered Mervyn LeRoy, who was directing the picture. He kissed her on the cheek, recalling that he’d directed her in her second film, Elmer the Great, starring Joe E. Brown.
He told her that the Hays Office was objecting to the plot line of the Gravey/Blondell movie. It had issued a mandate that no film in Hollywood could be made, even under the disguise of fiction, that exploited the abdication of King Edward VIII and his subsequent marriage to the twice-divorced Wallis Warfield Simpson, a (scandal-soaked) American socialite.
As part of a spirited defense, LeRoy argued that the movie had gone into production before the abdication scandal had erupted, and that therefore, the objection of the Hays Office was without merit.
LeRoy revealed that Warners was investing a whopping $2 million in the production and filming of The King and the Chorus Girl. “I’m having the last laugh on the Hays Office. I’m directing Gravey as an effete, brandy-swilling ex-monarch, evocative of Edward VIII himself. Did you know that the jerk who gave up the throne of England ‘to marry the woman I love,’ is actually a homo?”
“I didn’t,” she said. “But now that I do, I’ll know not to proposition him if I’m ever introduced.”
Later, LeRoy invited her to the set to witness Blondell emote her way through one of her big scenes.
Even though Blondell was the star’s friend, Jane wished that the role of the chorus girl had gone to her. From what she’d seen of Blondell’s performance, this was her best yet. Later, the Los Angeles Evening Herald Express would agree, asserting that her portrayal was “the finest she has ever put on the screen. She has the subdued finesse of a Lubitsch heroine.”
Blondell would later assert that the film, with its undercurrent of star-crossed love, was her favorite.
“Dorothy was a sympathetic role for me,” Blondell said. “A woman with some intelligence and character, though ignorant of royal protocol. The kind of person chorus gals often are. It was one of those lucky breaks that sometimes comes along when you’re under contract, have made a dozen poor pictures, and are wondering if the public will ever forgive and forget them.”
On the set, Jane was happy to be reunited with Edward Everett Horton, playing Count Humbert Evel Bruger. He had previously worked with her during the filming of All the King’s Horses. “You and I seem stuck in pictures with ‘King’ in the title. For me, maybe I should be making movies with ‘Queen’ in the title.”
“If that happens, I’m sure you’ll get the title role,” Jane said, laughing with him.
On the set, Jane bonded with a blonde-haired actress, Carole Landis, who had been cast as an unbilled dancer in the chorus line at the Folies Bergère. Carole confided to Jane that she was dating a handsome newcomer to the Warners family, Ronald Reagan.
“Who isn’t?” Jane asked, sarcastically, tired of hearing the name.
Two days later, she got to witness Landis perform as a chorus girl. “I admire that gal’s guts,” she recalled. “She had a real independent streak back then, long before she became a star. She demanded—yes, demanded—that LeRoy place her at the head of the chorus line. Amazingly, she got her way. I learned something from that. Being mousy Sarah Jane Fulks would get me nowhere. I had to become more assertive.”
An uncredited actor appearing in the film was identified as “Jack Roberts.” He seemed to be annoying Landis, hanging around her uninvited. When he left, Landis told Jane, “I married the jerk back home when I was sixteen years old, and the marriage lasted one night, if that. Now the creep is trying to break into the movies. His real name is Irving Wheeler. I’ve got to get rid of him. Maybe I’ll have my new boyfriend, Ronnie Reagan, beat the shit out of him. Ronnie’s very athletic and in good shape.”
Jane and Landis gravitated to each other. Their careers seemed to share, more or less, the same position, although Landis was far more aggressive in sleeping with producers and directors as a means of procuring roles.
One night, Landis suggested that she (with Reagan) and Jane (with Gravey) go out together on a double date. At the last minute, Gravey had to cancel because Jack Warner had invited him to his home to discuss, over dinner, his upcoming build-up at Warners.
Jane later claimed that at that point in her life, she had come to accept Warners as an extended big family. “Of course, there are all sorts of families, and sometimes members don’t get along. There are petty jealousies, whatever.”
***
A Warners luminary, Kay Francis, met Jane through LeRoy. To Jane’s surprise, Francis seemed to take an interest in her.
Jane had seen a number of her movies and was enthralled that such a big star would take time out to talk with her. She invited her on several occasions to her dressing room, and one afternoon had lunch with her in the commissary.
She was impressed with this Oklahoma-born star, particularly her style of dress.
She learned that Francis had made her debut as an actress by understudying for Katharine Cornell on Broadway in The Green Hat, She told Jane that her big break had come when she’d appeared opposite Walter Huston on Broadway in Elmer the Great. Jane told her that when the play was adapted into a movie, she’d been a member of the cast.
“I saw the movie, but don’t remember you in it,” Francis said.
“You’re forgiven,” Jane said. “If you blinked, you would have missed me.”
Jane had to cancel
two dates, one with Reynolds another with Morris, to accept an invitation to spend the weekend at Francis’ home. The star had promised “to give you some pointers on wardrobe and makeup. I know what it takes to become a star, and I think I can groom you to become one yourself.”
Kay “Fwancis,” as she called herself.
Jane later conceded to Blondell that Francis taught her many secrets, especially “how to be an illumination when the camera is turned on you.” The Saturday afternoon had gone beautifully, and Jane felt she’d found a new friend.
But, according to Jane’s confession to Blondell, their relationship collapsed later that night. “She put the make on me and grabbed me and kissed me. I felt a foot-long tongue down my throat. I left her place at once. She screamed after me and called me a lot of names. I don’t object to the casting couch. I’ve been there. Lain there. Or is it ‘laid’ there? But there’s one thing I always insist upon. The person seducing me on that casting couch has to have a dick.”
Months later, a British film distributor refused to release The King and the Chorus Girl in the U.K., because of the use of the word “King” within its title. Like the character in the film, Britain’s recently abdicated king was living in exile in France. The film’s reference to the fallen monarch (Edward VIII, aka the Duke of Windsor) was too obvious.
However, when Warners agreed to change the name of their movie to Romance Sacred, it was released throughout the U.K. Despite the change in its title, U.K. audiences immediately recognized its references to their former monarch.
***
On a Sunday night, Craig Reynolds called Jane after midnight. She was asleep when the phone rang. From the background noise, she realized that he was at a wild party. His slurred voice indicated that he’d been drinking.
“It’s finally happened, Janie,” he shouted into the phone. “I’m a star.” He told her that for the first time, he was playing the leading male role in a movie, The Footloose Heiress (1937), opposite Ann Sheridan.
Love Triangle: Ronald Reagan, Jane Wyman, & Nancy Davis (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) Page 15