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

by Darwin Porter

  Films of the 1930s, for the most part, were supposed to have happy endings. Not Dark Victory. The doomed heroine, Judith Traherne, has an incurable brain tumor and dies in the final scene as the world grows black. Davis was cast as a spoiled rich socialite on Long Island, interested in fast cars, beaux, race horses, drinking, and parties. In her early scenes, Davis almost hysterically overacts, but settles more comfortably into the portrayal later on.

  Geraldine Fitzgerald, a little known Irish actress, was cast in the sympathetic role of Judith’s best friend, Ann. Warners, through Wallis, had signed her to a seven-year contract.

  Fitzgerald had been warned to expect “actress warfare” with Davis on the set. But they established a friendship and had mutual respect for each other’s very different talents. That same year, Fitzgerald received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress in her role opposite Laurence Olivier in Wuthering Heights.

  On the set, Reagan’s girlfriend, Ila Rhodes, was heartbroken. Her brief position as his leading lady had come and gone after the release of Secret Service of the Air. In Dark Victory, she had an uncredited bit part playing a secretary.

  Reagan offered her what comfort he could, and that involved making love to her in his dressing room. He was also balancing his ongoing affairs with Susan Hayward and Jane Wyman.

  On the set, Reagan sometimes bonded with Humphrey Bogart, who for some strange reason played a horse trainer caring for Davis’ stables. Like Reagan, he, too, was supposed to be in love with Judith Treherne. In those days, Reagan and Bogie often discussed their troubles with women.

  “Both Susan and Jane seem to have marriage on their minds,” Reagan said. “So does Ila Rhodes, that cutie I introduced you to the other day. Only problem is, marriage is about the last thing on my mind.”

  “Well, if you decide to get married, I’m prepared to divorce Mayo Methot and let you take her off my hands.”

  “Thanks, but no thanks,” Reagan said.

  Later, Bogie became less than friendly with Reagan when he heard that he had lobbied for his role as the horse trainer, urging Goulding to give his part of the repressed homosexual to Bogie. “The guy already has the lisp,” Reagan had said to the director.

  In this scene from Dark Victory, Bette Davis as Judith Traherne was slowly going blind. Her close friend, Alex Hamm (an effete society gadabout portrayed not very convincingly by Reagan) provided sympathy, but not much else.

  The script was subtle but clear—to Reagan’s horror—that the character he was portraying was that of a frustrated, deeply closeted homosexual.

  [Two weeks into the shoot, Bogie decided to play one of his practical jokes on his costar.

  One hot afternoon, he waited until he saw Reagan heading for the men’s room. Reagan was already there, urinating, when Bogie entered. There were eight urinals, but Bogie opted to stand at the one on Reagan’s immediate left.

  “To get even with the fucker and to frighten the hell out of him, I stared down at his dick,” Bogie later said to Goulding. “I leaned over close to him and whispered in his ear. ‘I can take care of that thing for you.’ Reagan didn’t even finish pissing before he was zip-ping up and out of the toilet.”

  Geraldine Fitzgerald (left), the formidable Bette Davis, and Ronald Reagan as he appeared in his first A-list role, “although I didn’t want to play it homo.”

  Throughout the remainder of his life, and despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Reagan always insisted in private that Bogie was a bona fide homosexual.]

  Goulding extended an invitation to Reagan and Rhodes for a party at his spacious home. At the time, Reagan was unaware of the exact nature of Goulding’s notorious parties, which most often degenerated into orgies. At Goulding’s home, a butler showed them into the foyer where Gouldng came out to greet them.

  To Reagan’s surprise, the director was dressed as a stern British nanny holding a wooden paddle. “I’m available tonight to deliver corporal punishment to those who have been naughty.”

  Almost speechless, Reagan later regained his voice. “I didn’t know this was a costume party.”

  “Don’t worry about it, darling,” Goulding said. “Clothing is strictly optional. On the screen, I specialize in tasteful, cultured dramas. Off screen, my specialties include promiscuity and voyeurism.”

  Ushered into a large room, Reagan and Rhodes saw about fifty other guests, male and female, most of them in various stages of dress, mostly undress. Many of the women and men, too, were in their underwear. “You can strip down if you want to,” Goulding told Reagan. “I’ve seen your publicity stills. Everything is casual here.”

  “No thank you,” Reagan said. “We’re fine.”

  He learned from fellow guest David Lewis that he and Rhodes had arrived in time for the orgy. Both Lewis and Goulding had rounded up “handsome hunks” from the various studios, along with beautiful young starlets.

  Goulding left the room to check on the evening’s “entertainment.” Reagan whispered to Rhodes, “Let’s have a polite drink and then get the hell out of here.”

  “C’mon, Ronnie,” she said to him in front of Lewis. “Loosen up. The fun is about to begin.”

  Reagan told her he was leaving, but she said, “I’m staying.”

  He never really forgave Rhodes for staying behind. It certainly marked the end of their engagement and perhaps their relationship, too. She later reported to him what happened. “Goulding was the master of ceremonies, presiding over a very debauched scene—all combinations, with lots of role playing. At the orgy, Goulding obviously preferred the hunks.”

  Two days later, Goulding walked into Reagan’s dressing room without knocking. The actor was changing for a scene, wearing nothing but a pair of white boxer shorts. He looked uncomfortable in Goulding’s presence.

  “Sorry you left the party,” Goulding told him. “But you can make it up to me.” He reached inside Reagan’s shorts and fondled his genitals. Reagan immediately yanked his hand away and reached for his pants.

  Goulding later told Lewis, “The kid rejected my advances. He’s got a pretty good hang, though, but seems to be saving it just for the ladies.”

  Moody and tormented, director Edmund Goulding solicited sex from Reagan, but didn’t get it.

  He also invited him to one of his infamous Hollywood orgies.

  “How unusual for a Hollywood actor,” Lewis responded.

  After that, Reagan and Goulding began to argue about how he should play the role of Hamm.

  In the movie, Reagan had been cast as an alcoholic who, although in love with Judith, might have fitted more comfortably into the bed of Brent. Some latter-day reviewers suggested the role might better have been cast with Lew Ayres; others that either Van Heflin or Robert Walker might have developed the role into an Oscar-winning nomination for Best Supporting Actor of the year.

  As Hamm, Reagan was supposed to play an inebriated idle dilettante, a character “full of chatter, as much so as a parrot or a woman.”

  When Reagan refused to play the role as a gossipy and—by inference—gay male, Goulding—rather than firing him outright—pared down his part to just a few scenes. In those scenes, Reagan appears as a rather dull and unimaginative man of few words, delivering a performance that’s wooden, at best.

  The character of Hamm had originally been conceived as “a drunkard, sexually ambiguous waste of a man.” Goulding interpreted that to mean “a repressed homosexual.”

  “Goulding saw my part as a copy of his own earlier life,” Reagan later wrote, an obvious reference to Golding’s own homosexuality.

  “I was playing, he told me, the kind of young man who could dearly love Bette but at the same time, the kind of fellow who could sit in the girls’ dressing room dishing the dirt while they continued dressing in front of me.”

  “I had no trouble seeing him in that role, but for myself, I want to think that if I strolled where the girls are short of clothes, there will be a great scurrying about and taking to cover,” he wrote
.

  “Goulding didn’t get what he wanted, whatever the hell that was, and I ended up delivering my lines the way my instinct told me they should be delivered. It was bad.”

  Most reviewers agreed with Reagan’s own assessment of his performance: It was bad.

  Goulding later expressed his disappointment in Reagan’s acting to Hal Wallis. “He refused to understand the nature of Hamm. He drank because he felt impotent, and he loved Judith because she was unattainable. The character was not necessarily a practicing homosexual, but a man battling his own sexual instinct and tragically losing, escaping to the bottle. Reagan saw only black and white in a character, never gray. He wanted to play good guys, supermachos like Brass Bancroft, the Secret Service agent. I went on and shot the film with him, but I should have fired him.”

  “Because Reagan refused to cooperate, I cut several possibly good scenes with him,” Goulding later said. “It could have been a juicy part.”

  On the set of Dark Victory, Reagan had never been the object of so many sexual advances, some of which came from Bette Davis herself. She was at a turning point in her life, coming to an end of her affairs with Director William Wyler and aviator-film mogul Howard Hughes. She was also divorcing her first husband, Harmon Nelson, Jr.

  One afternoon, she invited Reagan to her dressing room and was outrageously flirtatious with him. Finally, when he stubbornly refused to pick up on any of her come-hither signals, she openly invited him to go to bed with her. He politely refused and excused himself. From that point on, she contemptuously referred to him as “little Ronnie Reagan.”

  If Davis struck out with Reagan, she at least got Brent to seduce her. She had been pursuing him for years. He had just divorced his actress wife, Ruth Chatterton, and was on the market again. Davis’ most famous line in Dark Victory was “Darling, poor fool, don’t you know I’m in love with you?” She delivered that same line in private to him. Their affair would continue even after Dark Victory was wrapped. But by the time he married Ann Sheridan, it was all over between them.

  Orry-Kelly was selected to design Davis’ costumes. For years, the flamboyant gay designer was her foremost costumer, beginning with The Rich Are Always With Us (1932), and ending with A Stolen Life (1946).

  During the shoot, Davis had several feuds with Orry-Kelly over wardrobe. She wanted to show skin, even asking him to design what she called, “my naked dress.”

  When Reagan saw her in the revealing couture, he whispered to the designer. “Bette could be nude and she wouldn’t turn me on.”

  Orry-Kelly misinterpreted the remark, assuming that Reagan was actually a homosexual. Later, when the designer propositioned him, he learned differently.

  After his rejection of Orry-Kelly [the former lover of Cary Grant], Reagan asked Brent, “Are we the only heterosexuals making this movie?”

  “I’m a heterosexual,” Brent assured him. “I don’t know about you. After all, you’ve been cast as the homo—not me!”

  That snappy remark made Reagan dislike Brent even more than he had before. Ever since joining Warner Brothers, he’d felt that those gentlemanly roles assigned to Brent could have been better performed by him.

  When Dark Victory was released in 1939, it had to compete with some of the greatest films Hollywood ever made. Even so, it drew mobs of fans at the box office. The reviews, however, were mixed. Time Out London, years after its release, defined it as “a Rolls Royce of the weepie world.”

  Reviews of Reagan were sometimes harsh. A critic wrote, “He doesn’t do much of anything except guzzle vast quantities of alcohol and generally embarrass himself.”

  Bogart also didn’t fare well as Traherne’s horse trainer. A reviewer claimed that he played his role “with a creepy kind of sexuality.”

  At Oscar time, Davis received a nomination for Best Actress, losing to Vivien Leigh for her role in Gone With the Wind, a role Davis had coveted.

  After shooting wrapped, Reagan entered a confused period of his life. The women he was involved with seemed to be wanting more of a commitment from him than he was willing to deliver.

  After a sleepless night, he rose early one morning to greet the dawn.

  He later wrote about his impressions: “I saw my first real California sunrise. It comes up over the rise of the mountains that hedge Hollywood on the East, with the misty clouds radiating all the colors of the rainbow.”

  Chapter Five

  Reagan Complains:

  “Too Many Starlets Are Demanding My Services.”

  Until she met Reagan, Jane was not sports oriented, a nightclub with a drink being her favorite outing. At first, she liked to watch him at play, just to “check out his sexy body.”

  She later referred to this candid snapshot as “the happiest picture ever taken of Ronnie.”

  A picnic for two for the budding Warners starlets. They were being defined by the press as “a serious romantic item.” Within a few months of this Sunday afternoon outing, they would be hailed as “America’s Most Perfect Couple.”

  Actually, they weren’t, but they were in love.

  Movie historians cite 1939 as the greatest year in the history of motion pictures. That year, based on the release of Gone With the Wind, Scarlett O’Hara stood in the barren gardens of Tara, proclaiming, “As God is my witness, I will never go hungry again.”

  A future U.S. president as Brass Bancroft, under arrest (top photo) and on a secret mission (bottom).

  Starved for participation in A-list pictures, and yearning for good scripts, both Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman were suffering from a different type of hunger as they rushed from one B-movie to another.

  Reagan continued his role as a B-list matinee hero within a programmer series playing Brass Bancroft, Secret Agent. That’s when he wasn’t hitting the streets with the Dead End Kids or making love onscreen to his leading lady, a lesbian in private life.

  Jane had graduated from the chorus line to at least eighth billing, but occasionally, she was awarded a starring role in a very minor film. For her, the highlight of 1939 involved meeting and starring “with the love of my life.” The co-participant in that grand passion, however, wasn’t Ronald Reagan.

  Jack Warner was not pleased with Reagan’s lack-luster performance with Bette Davis in Dark Victory. “If you’ve got a weak script that none of our big male stars want, give it to Reagan,” Warner told producer Bryan Foy. “Also, have him make some more of those Bass Bancroft adventure stories.”

  “I was proud of some of the B-pictures we made, but a lot of them were pretty poor,” Reagan said. “They were movies the studio didn’t want good, they wanted ‘em Thursday.”

  Director Noel Smith was tapped once again to direct Reagan as Bass Bancroft in Code of the Secret Service (1938). Eddie Foy, Jr., repeating his earlier role, was signed on as his sidekick, Gabby. The female lead, such as it was, went to Rosella Towne.

  Running for only 58 minutes, the plot sends Reagan to a remote section of Mexico on the trail of a coven of counterfeiters using plates stolen from the U.S. Mint. At their headquarters, with the understanding that the paper used in the printing of U.S. currency is unique, the villains are bleaching real dollar bills and printing larger denominations on the same paper. The chief of the bad guys is a colorful, peg-legged character disguising himself as a Catholic priest.

  Reagan didn’t like any of his dialogue, especially the line, “Oh, you wanna get tough, huh?”

  An expert horseman, Reagan is filmed jumping onto the back of a stallion and riding at a fast clip into the setting sun. At one point, he hides out in the river, escaping a Mexican posse. He breathes through the tube of a broken reed.

  Bobbysoxers in Philadelphia Strip “Sexy Ronnie” Naked.

  John Litel was not available to repeat his role of Saxby, Bancroft’s boss, the part going instead to Joseph King. Reagan found him a bit wooden. A figure in silent films, King acted in 211 movies from 1912 to 1946.

  One can only imagine the consequences if the circumstances i
n this picture had occurred in real life, with Reagan, during his presidency, as a terrorist’s hostage. Reagan is tied up on the left, Rosella Towne on the right.

  When Reagan saw a screening of Code of the Secret Service, he was horrified. The producer, Bryan Foy, agreed with him. Both of them went to Jack Warner and pleaded with him not to release it. After viewing the film, the studio chief agreed.

  But later, he retracted his word, releasing it across the country as a minor programmer. To appease Foy, he agreed not to show it in the Los Angeles area, so as not to embarrass the producer and the actors in their home town.

  On a trip back to Dixon, however, Reagan saw that his former favorite movie house was, indeed, showing the film. The ticket taker immediately recognized the hometown boy. “Mr. Reagan,” he said. “Welcome home, but you should be ashamed of yourself for making this turkey.”

  In New York, a reviewer said, “I used to go see Pearl White in The Perils of Pauline at the Saturday matinee. Now the screen has a new Pauline facing even greater danger. Pauline is now Ronald Reagan.”

  After Warner betrayed Foy and Reagan and released the movie, Reagan said, “It was the worst film I ever made. Never has an egg of such dimensions been laid.”

  [One of Reagan’s future security chiefs, Jerry Parr, when he was a child, had a different opinion. He went to see the movie eight times. Afterward, he told his parents, “When I grow up, I’m going to become a member of the Secret Service like Brass Bancroft.”

  Ironically, he eventually became not only a member of the Secret Service, but was designated as Reagan’s Chief of Security. He accompanied Reagan on all his personal appearances, including a 1981 visit to the Hilton Hotel in Washington, where the President gave a speech to the Construction Trades Council.