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

by Darwin Porter

  “I’m so happy for the both of you,” said a sleepy Jane, who tried to sound as enthusiastic as possible. She couldn’t help but be jealous of her fellow actors. Top billing seemed to be happening to everybody but her.

  Concealing her true feelings, she agreed to have lunch with Sheridan and Reynolds on Monday at noon. It took a long time for her to go back to sleep, as she was disillusioned with both her career and the men in her life.

  The day before, she’d called her former chorus line girl friend, Paulette Goddard, who had married Charlie Chaplin in 1936. “How much longer do I have to wait to become a star?” Jane asked.

  “Well, honey, I did it by marrying Charlie,” Goddard said. “Perhaps you, too, can hook your wagon to a bigtime star, or perhaps to a director or producer. It’s working for me. Charlie has become my Svengali, he wants to create an image of me as a spirited girl of the gutter, not easily given to surrender, or so he says.”

  “Good luck with that, whatever it means,” Jane said. “Perhaps only Charlie knows.” She must have recalled the time Chaplin had exposed himself to her when she was a teenager.

  On the set of The Footloose Heiress, Jane discovered that Reynolds, despite his status as the star of the picture, had not been given a private dressing room, but shared one with both William Hopper, Hedda Hopper’s son, and the character actor, Frank Orth.

  In the commissary, Jane and Reynolds waited until Sheridan’s arrival to begin eating.

  Sheridan told them that she had lingered too long at Paramount in uncredited parts. When she signed with Warners in 1936, she was hoping for star roles.

  Born in Texas and the winner of a beauty contest, Sheridan claimed she came from a straight-laced southern Baptist family. “My mother told me that ‘Vanity is bad’—just tell that to a screen actress—and she also claimed that ‘marriage is the only role for a woman.’ Like hell it is! She’s still urging me to return to Texas and become a school teacher.”

  “Even though I’ve got no tits, Jack Warner told me he’s going to launch a big publicity campaign featuring me as a sex symbol,” Sheridan confided to Jane.

  She studied the star closely, hoping to learn the secret of how she had sprung from the chorus line into starring roles. There was a no-nonsense quality to her, and she appeared down-to-earth. Hedda Hopper, the mother of her co-star, William, would later write, “Ann Sheridan is the kind of girl that wouldn’t seem an intruder at a stag party.”

  Partly because Jane wasn’t otherwise employed at the time, she showed up on the set of The Footloose Heiress every day, since she had nothing else to do.

  She told Sheridan, “My romance with Craig has gone from white hot passion to maintenance.”

  Reynolds emerged from his dressing room jauntily attired in a leather jacket and fedora, a kind of prototype of “Indiana Jones,” a movie character that loomed in Hollywood’s future.

  He introduced her to William, whom she found “extraordinarily handsome.” While he was filming a scene, Reynolds noted Jane’s interest in Hedda’s son. “Don’t get your hopes up. He’s a homo. I found that out when I undressed in front of him.”

  Later that day, Reynolds and Jane had drinks with William, who promised her he’d get his mother to plug her in her column. He spoke of his friend, Ronald Reagan, suggesting to Jane and Reynolds that they go out together on double dates.

  During her third day on the set, Jane was introduced to Anne Nagel, who had married her friend, Ross Alexander, in September of 1936. The marriage had transpired shortly after the suicide of Alexander’s first wife, Aleta Freel.

  Nagel had met Alexander on the set of Here Comes Carter. Jane was astonished. “I was in that picture, but I haven’t seen it yet. We obviously worked on it on different days.”

  “Ross is a very secretive man,” Nagel said. “Perhaps he didn’t want us to meet. Of course, Ross has a lot to be secretive about.”

  Both women described the torturous trail they’d followed since their arrival in Hollywood.

  Born in Boston, Nagel had originally planned to be a nun before becoming a photographer’s model.

  Two days later, during Jane’s final visit to the set, Nagel approached her. “Good news. Ross just called. He’s just learned that he’s going to star in the next Ruby Keeler film, and you’re in it, too.”

  “He has the male lead, and you have a credited role! Its title is Ready, Willing, and Able.”

  “Thank God I can go back to work and quit hanging out,” Jane said.

  ***

  On her first day on the set of Ready, Willing, and Able (1937), Jane was handed a copy of the script by director Ray Enright. It was a musical, conceived mainly as a vehicle for tap-dancing Ruby Keeler. Instead of Dick Powell, Ruby’s usual co-car, it starred Jane’s friend, Ross Alexander, in the male lead.

  Ruby Keeler in 1933. The dancer told Jane, “My husband, Al Jolson, is a sex pervert.”

  Before noon, Jane had skimmed the script, finding to her disappointment that her role was that of an unnamed receptionist. Becoming more assertive, she confronted Enright later that afternoon, asking if her role could be expanded.

  He told her to be patient, claiming that he would give her a better part in the next two films he was directing.

  Jane later said, “Unlike most of Hollywood, where telling a lie is an art form, Enright kept his promise tome, even though my upcoming roles weren’t the star parts I wanted. At least I was working.”

  Ready, Willing, and Able is memorable for two reasons: It introduced the (later) immensely popular song “Too Marvelous for Words;” and it featured a campy, easy-to-satirize scene in which Keeler tap dances on the keys of a gigantic, tap-tap-tapping typewriter.

  Jane was not included in the film’s publicity campaign, but her name appeared in advertisements in tiny, eight-point type as opposed to the larger 20-point type reserved for Keeler.

  She spoke briefly with Jerry Wald, one of the film’s scriptwriters. She complained to him about her difficulties in finding a good part. He warned her to be patient. “Your day will come,” he said. “Some stars are born overnight, but they are the rare and lucky ones. Most stars become stars by painfully climbing that ladder in Hollywood one rung at a time.”

  “I thought he was just bullshitting me,” Jane said. But years later, she recalled, “Jerry was absolutely right. Look what he did for my career.”

  During the shoot, Jane saw more of her new friend, Ross Alexander, than she ever had before. One day at noon, he invited her to join Keeler and himself for lunch in the commissary. Jane had already seen most of the film repertoire of this Canadian-born actress and dancer, including her breakthrough role in 42nd Street (1933), opposite Dick Powell.

  From 1928 to 1940, Keeler had been famously married to Al Jolson. Over lunch, Jane was rather surprised at how she referred to her husband with contempt. “Every day I’m married to Jolson, I have to go to confession,” Keeler said.

  Jane is Ready, Willing, and Able.

  After lunch, Keeler was called to the set, but Jane and Alexander remained behind to chat. She was intrigued by Hollywood gossip, and her actor friend was a font of information.

  “Jolson is not a faithful husband,” Alexander said. “He occasionally fucks from A-list—Barbara Stanwyck, for example—but mostly, he hires prostitutes, showgirls, and what he really prefers, ‘colored gals,’ as he calls them. Some of his conquests tell me his favorite thing is having oral sex performed on him. I also hear he demands ‘unusual positions’—especially those not approved of by missionaries.”

  Despite Jane’s envy of Keeler’s stardom, she wanted to see her perform on camera whenever possible.

  [Budd Schulberg, in The Harder They Fall, wrote: “Even in the scantiest attire, Ruby Keeler carried herself with an air of aloof respectability, which has the actual effect of an intense aphrodisiac. Seeing her with her black lace stockings, forming a sleek and silken path to her crotch was like opening a wrong door by mistake and catching your best friend’s
sister in the act.”]

  One afternoon, when Jane was watching Keeler dance in front of the cameras, Jolson himself arrived at the studio and was suddenly standing beside her. She introduced herself.

  “I can’t remember names,” he said. “So I’ll remember you as ‘Pug Nose.’”

  At one point, he asked her to step outside with him. “I expected him to offer me a role in his next picture. How naïve I was.” She relayed the details of her encounter with Jolson to Alexander. “He rudely propositioned me, wanting me to sneak off with him somewhere and perform oral sex on him. He told me it would a smart career move on my part.”

  “Did you accept?” Alexander asked.

  “I turned him down,” she said, “but I configured it into a most flattering rejection. I told him that I had heard that his penis was so mammoth I feared it would choke me to death.”

  During the shoot, Jane visited Alexander at his home—a ranch in Encino— with his second wife, Anne Nagel. They seemed to be having difficulty in their marriage. Privately, he had told Jane, “I can’t be a real husband to Anne. It’s not in my nature.”

  Jane had been escorted to the Alexander/Nagel home by her former co-star, Fernand Gravey, to spend one of the pre-Christmas holidays with the unhappily married couple. Nagel told them that, “Ross and I are planning a long-delayed honeymoon in New York when Enright tells him it’s a wrap.”

  Gravey volunteered to go into the kitchen with Nagel to help her prepare a French sauce for a dish she was serving. Alexander invited Jane to go for a walk.

  He had a confession to make, telling her that he’d picked up a hobo hitchhiker and had performed an act of oral sex on him. The stranger recognized Alexander’s face from his screen images, and threatened to blackmail him.

  “He could ruin my career,” Alexander lamented. “He demanded $10,000 in cash from me, which I don’t have. I had to go to Jack Warner, who agreed to lend me the money to avoid a scandal.”

  “I fear that because of this, Warners isn’t going to renew my contract. Publicity told me he considers me ‘too hot to handle.’”

  She offered him her deepest sympathy, promising “to stand by you until this blows over.”

  The day after Christmas, Jane received a call from Cornelius Stevenson, the butler at the Alexander household. “I wanted to talk privately with you. But I didn’t have a chance.”

  He revealed that three weeks before, he found an intoxicated Alexander loading cartridges into his pistol. He was in a very dark mood, and I feared he was going to harm himself, maybe commit suicide like his first wife did out in the barn. But he claimed he was going to shoot some birds. Perhaps you could come over later this afternoon and be with him. He really trusts you.”

  She promised she could, but Craig Reynolds distracted her, asking her to host a private party he was giving for friends.

  She heard no more from Ross’s household until January 3. A distraught Nagel was sobbing into the phone. “Ross is gone,” she said. “He shot himself.”

  Dressing immediately, Jane drove over to the house where the police admitted her after checking with Nagel. In tears and emotionally distraught, Nagel told her that Ross had taken a .22 pistol from his cabinet, claiming he was going to shoot a duck for tomorrow’s dinner.

  He went out to the barn, aimed the pistol at his temple, and shot himself. The butler found him slumped over a bag of grain in the hayloft.

  Along with Glenda Farrell, Henry Fonda, and others in the Warner community, Jane attended Ross’s funeral at Forest Lawn’s Little Church of the Flowers.

  Bette Davis had been pursued by Ross during the months he was begging for her to marry him, and she had bitterly rejected him. She told associates, “He‘s dead. One must not speak ill of the dead. Good!”

  When she and Jane returned to the studio, Enright told her that future roles intended for Ross would be assigned to the newcomer, Ronald Reagan. “They’re both handsome and they both have the same baritone voice.”

  When Ready, Willing, and Able was released, Warner ordered that Ross’s name be demoted to fifth position in the credits, even though he was the film’s lead male star.

  Henry Fonda, according to Jane, had been distraught at Ross’s funeral. Enright told her that he had been contracted to direct Fonda in his next picture, Slim, set for a 1937 release. “You’re in it, too,” he told her.

  ***

  Jane’s next picture for Warners, Slim, starred Pat O’Brien and Henry Fonda as two telephone linemen, with Margaret Lindsay playing their love interest. Jane was cast as the girlfriend of character actor Stuart Erwin, who played “Stumpy.” Craig Reynolds had a small role as “the Gambler.”

  Of all my on-screen lovers, ranging from John Payne to Rock Hudson, I ended up in Slim as the girlfriend of Stuart Erwin (left),” Jane recalled. “Hollywood can be cruel to a working gal.”

  Emerging from Squaw Valley, California, Erwin was fourteen years older than Jane, a wide-eyed, fair-haired actor who was usually cast as an amiable, none-too-bright hayseed. “With Henry Fonda up for grabs, I’m assigned Erwin as a boyfriend,” she lamented.

  When he met Jane, Erwin told her, “I usually get to play slow-witted rubes. At the rate I‘m going, I’ll probably end up playing the same type of role on Poverty Row. Oh, and just because I’m your boyfriend in the movie, don’t get the wrong idea. I’m happily married to an actress, June Collyer.”

  “Don’t worry,” she snapped back. “You’re safe with me. My real life boyfriend, Craig Reynolds, is in the film, too, so all my needs are satisfied.”

  Young Henry Fonda, at around the time he was involved with starlet Jane Wyman.

  Jane bonded with the star of the picture, Pat O’Brien. She later recalled, “He took me under his wing and was like a big brother to me. There was no funny stuff. He was a happily married man, but he taught me many tricks of the trade. I’ll always be grateful to him. He said he’d made a new male friend, Ronald Reagan, and that he’d introduce us sometime. He thought we’d make the perfect fit ‘as a romantic couple.’”

  Once again, Jane was disappointed that she didn’t get to play the female lead. That role went to Margaret Lindsay, who plays Nurse Cally in a plot that calls for her to switch her romantic affections from the character played by O’Brien to Fonda.

  The movie explores the hazards—including electrocutions—faced by telephone linemen under dangerous conditions such as storms, high winds, and lightning. Slim remains one of Fonda’s lesser-known roles. He thought so little of it, he didn’t even mention it in his autobiography, My Life.

  Ray Enright, the director who had previously helmed her in Ready, Willing, and Able, appeared on the set to greet her. “I told you I’d cast you in my next picture, and so I did.”

  “Thanks, Ray, but you could have made my role a bit bigger and written in a love scene between Fonda and me. Would you like to kiss Stu Erwin?”

  “That’s not one of my fantasies,” he answered.

  When Lindsay met Jane, the Iowa-born actress told her, “We have a mutual friend in William Hopper. I’m dating Ronnie Reagan, and we often go out on double dates with William and his girlfriend, Isabel Jewell. She’s an actress, too.”

  Jane had seen Fonda at a distance during the funeral of Ross Alexander. On the set of Slim, he came up and introduced himself. “You can call me Hank.”

  He commented on his role in Slim. “I know it’s a B picture, but I like to play earthy guys like the lineman Slim. He’s a real down-to-earth guy, the kind of blue collar man who makes America great.”

  She told him that she’d seen him at Ross’s funeral. “Ross told me how close you guys were.”

  Since he wanted to discuss his departed friend, he invited Jane to lunch. “I assumed Ross clued you in on our very secret relationship,” he said.

  “He did indeed,” she answered.

  “That means, then, that I can speak frankly to you. You know, therefore, that he was passionately in love with me, a love that I could not
reciprocate with equal emotion,” Fonda said. “It was also a love I did not reject. During my first marriage to Margaret Sullavan, she had devastated me. I didn’t feel like I was a man anymore. She can make any man feel like two cents—and two inches. She cheated on me constantly, and I felt castrated by her. How can you make love to a woman as she critiques your performance, loudly telling you that you’re both a ‘fast starter’ and a ‘lousy finisher.’”

  “A lot of men wouldn’t have put up with crap like that and would have bashed her face in,” Jane said.

  “Perhaps I should have, but I’m not a violent man. Ross built me up and constantly praised my manhood. I was attracted to him because of what he was doing to beef up my ego.”

  Jimmy Stewart told Jane, “Hank and I share our women together sometimes.”

  The death of his best friend had occurred so recently that Fonda seemed to want to unburden himself to Jane, finding her an attentive, sympathetic listener.

  “I was the best man at Ross’s wedding to Aleta Freel, whose suicide probably put the idea of his own suicide into Ross’s head.” Fonda said. “I knew the marriage wasn’t going to work, though. Ross was really in love with me, but desperately trying to conceal his homosexuality by marrying Aleta.”

  “Ross and I went to Hollywood together and lived at this place on Woodrow Wilson Drive. Dogs and goats ran freely all over the place. I found Hollywood had an unreal quality. For a while, I lived with Aleta and Ross. But I have another close friend, Jimmy Stewart.”

  “Jimmy and I rented this Mexican style farmhouse in Brentwood next door to Greta Garbo. Ross was furious at me for moving out and was very jealous of Jimmy. Jimmy and I were double dating, Lucille Ball for me and Ginger Rogers for him. I cooked dinner. Sometimes, Ross would drop in, but he obviously felt left out. He began to live dangerously, rarely returning home to Aleta. He told me he was spending his nights with studio grips, electricians, extras, messenger boys, whomever. I feared for his safety.”