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

by Darwin Porter

  “It was a golden time,” she said. “There was no smog. The weather was always sunny, and there wasn’t too much traffic. I remember the night-blooming jasmine that scented the air. It was a romantic place and a time to fall in love.”

  “For my screen test as Scarlett, I had to practice a Southern accent with a vocal coach,” Hayward said. “After all, we girls in Brooklyn didn’t speak like we had cotton in our mouths. They coiffed me and dressed me up like an antebellum Georgia peach.”

  “I made the test with Alan Marshall. It involved a scene between Scarlett and Ashley Wilkes, in the library of Twelve Oaks. I still remember my lines: “Oh, my dear. I love you. I tell you, I love you. And I know you must care about me, because…Ashley, you do care.”

  Reagan surprised her by saying that he was being considered for the role of Ashley, “although Selznick isn’t exactly beating my door down.”

  “Maybe if you’d put out a bit for George Cukor on his casting couch, the role might be yours,” Hayward suggested, provocatively.

  “I’m not that kind of guy,” Reagan said.

  “Susan was bubbling over with anticipation about that screen test,” Reagan later recalled. “I feared she was heading for heartbreak.”

  Ben Medford, Hayward’s first Hollywood agent, privately told Reagan, “The test was terrible, but I can’t tell her that. She’s a bitch to work with, but I see in her a deep emerging talent.”

  Her beauty and spirit attracted the attention of Howard Hughes, the aviator and movie producer, who ordered his pimp, Johnny Meyer, to set up a date with her.

  Hughes later told Meyer, “Susan cooked the dinner herself. In Brooklyn, do they prefer bloody chicken? Even so, I see a possibility in her for future dates. As you know, I prefer ‘wet decks.’” [That was Hughes’ reference to recently divorced women, or those who were “well-seasoned.”]

  Hayward later told Cukor, “Hughes’ favorite kind of sex is oral, both on the giving and receiving end.”

  During the next few weeks, Hayward shifted her interest in Hughes onto Reagan. She later confided to Medford. “Believe it or not, on my first date with Reagan, he didn’t even kiss me on the cheek when he said good night. I decided to take matters into my own hands. I figured that this bashful boy needed some encouragement. When he went to kiss me on our second date, I invited him inside for a night cap. He stayed over for breakfast.”

  “Neither Reagan nor I were as sexually experienced as we pretended,” Hayward, years later, told author Darwin Porter. “I mean, he knew where all the plumbing was, but he’d be no competition for more experienced men. But what the hell! One afternoon on Santa Monica Beach, I fell for him.”

  “Although we both knew that we had to conquer Hollywood, I actually began to think about settling down, getting married, stuff like that. He was one beautiful man.”

  “But there was a serious drawback,” she said. “He talked too much, babbling on about baseball scores and the fear of a war in Europe—subjects that held no interest for me whatsoever. But I was willing to overlook that. In those days, most other actors talked about what they had read in Variety or in The Hollywood Reporter, perhaps the latest gossip from Louella Parsons.”

  “He bored me, but I dug him. I wondered how he managed to crowd all those facts into his small head. But I came alive when he made love to me.”

  Louella Parsons had taken a maternal interest in Hayward, who confided in the gossip maven.

  “I want to mother him and make love to him,” Hayward confessed. “Sometimes, I enjoy lying awake at night, listening to the sound of his breathing. I feel comfortable with him, fulfilled as a woman.”

  “It’s about time you youngsters got married and settled down,” Parsons advised. “I think the two of you would make an ideal couple.”

  Hayward and Reagan found themselves jointly enrolled in the Warners’ Drama School under the tutelage of acting coach Frank Beckwith, a nervous little man who wore horn-rimmed glasses and was known to “pass wind” frequently.

  Penny Singleton and Carole Landis were also in the class. Both of them, along with Hayward, were having affairs with Reagan.

  Nervous at being exposed, he paid no undue attention to any of them. “Susan hawkeyes my every move,” he told Beckwith, who was aware of his pupil’s romantic liaisons with his fellow classmates. “I think Susan suspects there’s something going on between Carole and me. She’s always calling Carole a tramp.”

  Over lunch with Reagan one afternoon, the drama coach told him that of all the women in his class, Hayward had the best chance of making it as a star. “She’s aggressively self-assured. She could play bitches, but not a woman with a heart. She would not be convincing as a vulnerable character. On the other hand, Jane Wyman, whom you haven’t met, has heart—It would be hard for Wyman to convincingly play an icy bitch.”

  “Jack Warner told me I need to teach Hayward to cry on cue,” Beckworth continued. “Perhaps if you drop her, you’ll break her heart, and then she’ll know how to act as if she’s vulnerable.”

  “That’s not a good idea,” Reagan said. “Susan has threatened to castrate me if I dump her.”

  In Fort Lauderdale, more than twenty years later, Hayward recalled to Darwin Porter that in the beginning, during her brief stint at Warner’s, her career was going nowhere. “I was a nothing in nothing roles. If nothing else happened, I realized I might at least end up with a steady boyfriend, namely Ronald Reagan. Actually, I wanted to move from Warners to Paramount, hoping to get a contract over there.”

  Reagan’s seduction of Hayward and other starlets stirred up a debate at Warners. The head officer of his local U.S. cavalry branch told the press, “Ronnie is a greater swordsman at Warners than Errol Flynn.” That comment, when he read it, infuriated Jack Warner, who preferred to promote an image of Reagan as a chaste, clean-cut, All-American boy, saving himself until the right woman came along.

  The publicity department at Warners, reacting to pressure from above, developed an idea to promote the careers of both Hayward and Reagan by having them pose in swimwear—“a little cheesecake for the boys, a hunk of beef for the ladies.” Those candid photographs appeared in newspapers across the country.

  One of the photos was captioned RONALD REAGAN SHOWS SUSAN HAYWARD THE RIGHT POSITION. The publicist meant to suggest the right position in the water, but sexually sophisticated Hollywoodites interpreted it as a reference to the right position during sexual intercourse.

  Warner studied the photographs carefully: “I’m not a faggot, but Reagan’s legs are better than Hayward’s. She has chubby calves and knobby knees. With these pictures, Reagan is going to become the pin-up boy for every fairy in the country. THAT IS NOT THE IMAGE I WANT FOR HIM.”

  Nearly everybody on the lot interpreted Reagan as a love ‘em and leave ‘em kind of Lothario. In contrast, a noted studio writer, Owen Crump, disagreed, defining Reagan as the studio’s “porch warmer—that is, more gab than grab, with no threat to any virgin.”

  When Blondell heard that, she said, “Reagan might not have been a threat to any virgin at Warners, because no such animal existed there. All of our gals have already been laid end to end.”

  Reagan spent the night with Hayward when she learned that the coveted role of Scarlett O’Hara had been awarded to a relatively unknown British actress, Vivien Leigh.

  “The only comfort I could give her,” Reagan confessed to Medford, “was to make love to her all night.”

  Astonishingly, perhaps for reasons of political discretion, Reagan chose to completely exclude any mention of Hayward from his Hollywood memoirs, Where’s the Rest of Me?, published in 1965.

  ***

  Off the screen, a major turning point in Reagan’s career came when super agent Jules Stein, founder of the Music Corporation of America (MCA), entered his life when he purchased William Meiklejohn’s talent agency, the organization which had arranged for Reagan’s first screen test and his original contacts with Warners.

  Rising from
South Bend, Indiana, Stein was more than forty years old when he first met Reagan. He had first opened shop in Hollywood in 1937, representing such stars at Warners as Bette Davis. He also branched out to other studios, luring Joan Crawford, Betty Grable, Ingrid Bergman, Greta Garbo, and Frank Sinatra to supposedly greener pastures.

  By the mid-1940s, it was estimated that half of the movie industry’s stars—including Jane Wyman and her first agent, William Demarest, now working mainly as an actor—were being represented by MCA, by then pejoratively nicknamed “The Octopus.”

  Jules Stein, MCA’s powerful boss, with connections to the mob, told Reagan: “I’m not only going to make you our million dollar baby during the next few years, but one day, when you’re older, I’ll make you a multi-millionaire, too.”

  “Of course, when we put you in a position of power, I’ll want favors in return.”

  Through a lucrative bribe, Stein persuaded Louella Parsons to give Reagan the “star build-up” in her column.

  Reagan didn’t spend all his time dating. He became obsessed with his career. Whereas in one picture, he’d be the star, his follow-up assignment would involve only a minor role. He desperately wanted to be a major star, right up there with Pat O’Brien, Errol Flynn, James Cagney, and Edward G. Robinson.

  He had high hopes, however, for his next B picture. Entitled Accidents Will Happen, it ran for only an hour, a drama/romance about phony insurance claims. Cast in the star role, he played an ambitious insurance claims adjuster, Eric Gregg.

  Gloria Blondell, Joan’s younger sister, was appearing in this, her second film, having made her screen debut in Daredevil Drivers (1938), co-starring Beverly Roberts and Dick Purcell. Unlike Joan, she would have only a minor career as an actress.

  In 1938, just as it was emerging from the Depression, America was plagued with insurance frauds. The plot of Accidents Will Happen was, in the words of its director, William Clemens, “torn from today’s headlines.” A specialist in low-budget crime dramas, Clemens had previously directed Jane Wyman in Here Comes Carter (1936).

  In the photo above, Jane, in a backless gown, goes into a huddle with Jules Stein in a restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard.

  He allegedly told her, “Janie, I know you like to sleep around, but we’re going to promote you and Reagan as ‘the greatest romance of the 20th Century.’”

  In the film, the character played by Reagan is married to the wrong woman, Nona (Sheila Bromley), who is collaborating, without her husband’s knowledge, with the insurance fraud crooks.

  Reagan’s character, however, soon falls in love with a cigar stand sales clerk, Patricia Carmody (Gloria Blondell). In this jam-packed thriller, all ends happily, as Reagan, aided by Gloria, captures the crooks, including his own wife, and opts to spend the rest of his life with the blonde beauty hawking those cigars.

  On the set, Reagan, according to Clemens, “went crazy” over Bromley.

  The exact age as Reagan, Bromley, of San Francisco, had never quite agreed on her name, billing herself at various eras of her career as Sheila LeGay, Sheila Manners, Sheila Mannors, or Sheila Manors. She had launched her career in westerns at “Poverty Row’s” Monogram Pictures during the early 1930s, appearing with such cowboy stars as Hoot Gibson, Johnny Mack Brown, and Bill Cody.

  She had also made three films with John Wayne: Westward Ho (1935); Lawless Range (1935); and Idol of the Crowds (1937). After her affair with Wayne, she uttered a remark that was widely circulated throughout Hollywood, “There’s not enough there to mess up your mouth with.”

  In Accidents Will Happen, Reagan was cast as a naïve insurance adjustor married to a crooked wife (Sheila Bromley), but rescued by the love of a decent woman (Gloria Blondell, sister of Joan, depicted above playing a cigar stand salesgirl.)

  Although not known for beating up on ladies, Wayne once threatened her he’d mash her face if she didn’t stop mocking his lack of endowment.

  When Reagan became president of the United States in the 1980s, Bromley, then retired, was set upon by reporters eager to learn details of her affair with him.

  She consistently denied that she’d ever had any involvement with the president during the 1930s.

  However, those who worked on the picture with her claimed that she was lying. Clemens, who died as Reagan was running for election as president, said on one occasion, “Bromley spent four hours in his dressing room when I didn’t need either of them for the scenes I was filming. During the shoot, he was also pumping it to Gloria Blondell. He was quite a stud in those days before Nancy put a chastity belt on him.”

  Cast as a crook in the movie, a New York trained actor, Elliott Sullivan, specialized in gangster roles, his characters usually named “Lefty” or “Mugsy.” Before he became blacklisted in the 1950s, he made dozens of films, including King of the Underworld (1938).

  “In the movie, on the screen, [the character played by] Reagan threatened to beat me up. I liked the guy. More to the point, I envied him. It was Bromley in the afternoon, Gloria Blondell at night, with Susan Hayward showing up on occasion, too. Hayward had stamped ‘personal property’ on the guy, but that didn’t slow him down in his role as Don Juan. If only I had his looks. Clemens told me I looked like the average Joe in America who carries his lunchbox to a factory job.”

  Disregarding the pointed warning from Joan Blondell, Reagan went after her younger sister, Gloria. Joan seemed jealous of her sister, who not only resembled her, but had the same pretty, bubbly, vivacious, and curvaceous appeal.

  Reagan learned that Gloria was a girl within the “stables” of Howard Hughes, that she was part of a bevy of relatively unknown actresses he kept available in case he had a sudden need for them in the middle of the night. Systematically, he told all of them, “I made Jean Harlow a star. I can do the same for you.”

  Reagan was afflicted with “Leadinglady-itis” specifically as it applied to Gloria, but only for the duration of the picture. “It was no more than a brief fling,” Gloria later admitted to both Joan and her husband, Dick Powell, who rendezvoused with Reagan at least once a week for a game of golf.

  According to Gloria, “Reagan was not serious about me, and I viewed him as a passing fancy. It might have gone on longer than it did, but Hughes learned of our affair and sent a warning to Reagan through one of his henchmen. Reagan didn’t care enough for me to antagonize Hughes. Very soon after Reagan and I broke up, I fell really hard for someone else. Reagan didn’t want to settle down in those days. He was like a hungry, greedy little bastard who wanted to sample every dessert on the buffet table. He provided the banana for the banana split, and I provided the cherry, so to speak.”

  Before the production of Accidents Will Happen, Joan Blondell wanted to ensure, in her mind at least, that the virginity of her sister, Gloria (depicted above), would still be intact at the end of filming.

  After his first night with Gloria, Reagan learned that “she’d lost her cherry long ago, and was being kept by Howard Hughes.”

  [In the aftermath of her fling with Reagan, Gloria launched an affair with Albert R. (“Cubby”) Broccoli, one of the aviator and movie mogul’s employees and henchmen. When Hughes learned of this, he fired Broccoli and threw Gloria out of his “stable.” In 1940, Broccoli defiantly chartered a plane to fly Gloria and himself to Las Vegas, where they were married.]

  Cast in Accidents Will Happen in a minor role was Anderson Lawler. When Reagan met him, he was a part-time actor, but mainly a talent scout for Warners. “I’m already discovered,” Reagan told the talent scout.

  Reagan, as President, was an avowed anti-communist. In this scene from Accidents Will Happen, he’s seen beating up an insurance scammer and mobster, as played by Elliott Sullivan. Later, in real life, Sullivan was blacklisted as “a communist pinko.”

  During one of Reagan’s discussions with Lawler, the actor announced that he was expecting a guest, scheduled for arrival soon, for lunch with him in the commissary. “Stick around and meet him.”

  Within
fifteen minutes, Reagan was shaking the hand of Gary Cooper, who would soon be seducing Susan Hayward when they co-starred together in Beau Geste (1939).

  “If all goes well,” Reagan told him, “I’ll soon be playing your rival in Gone With the Wind, Ashley Wilkes to your Rhett Butler.”

  “I doubt that,” Cooper said. “I don’t want to play Rhett. Let Gable have it! Anderson here keeps urging me to do it, though.”

  “I think it would be the role of a lifetime for Coop,” Lawler said. “He can play Southern. His first talkie was The Virginian (1929). I’m from Alabama, so I taught him some good ‘ol Southern dialect while he was rehearsing the role.”

  Later, Reagan talked to director Clemens, regretting that he’d not been given real he-man roles like Cooper. “He seems like a real man’s man.”

  Here, Reagan gets cozy with Sheila Bromley’s ankle. When he became President, she told reporters, “Ronnie and I, contrary to reports, did not have an affair.”

  “During the making of Accidents Will Happen,” director William Clemens claimed, “when he wasn’t due on the set, our boy Ronnie was making the rounds from Gloria’s dressing room to Sheila’s.”

  “He’s a man’s man all right,” Clemens said. “He got sexually involved not only with Anderson, but with Cary Grant, William Haines, Rod La Rocque, Howard Hughes, David Lewis, Randolph Scott, and Cecil Beaton. When Edmund Goulding directed him in Paramount on Parade, I heard he ‘worshipped’ Cooper twice a day.”

  “I can’t believe that,” Reagan said. “He’s so masculine.”

  “Wise up!” Clemens said. “Some of the most masculine men in Hollywood are queer. Don’t tell me you think only effeminate men suck cock. Of course, Coop seduces women, too. Let’s name them: Claudette Colbert, Marlene Dietrich, Tallulah Bankhead, Lupe Velez, Clara Bow.”

  When Cooper was later asked about how he differed from his image on the screen, he responded. “Hollywood personalities are really applesauce. We deceive the public and get paid for it. I get paid pretty well, so I deceive the public really, really good.”