After he left the hotel, the sound of gunfire cracked the air. As Reagan later wrote, “Jerry Paar grabbed me by the waist and literally hurled me into the back of the limousine. When I landed, I felt a pain in my upper back that was unbelievable. ‘Jerry, get off,’ I said. ‘I think I’ve broken one of my ribs.’”
Agent Jerry Parr, right, a childhood devotee of the Brass Bancroft series, pushes Ronald Reagan into his limousine during a 1981 assassination attempt in which the president was wounded.
Later, in the hospital, the President learned what really happened, as he suffered excruciating pain. He had taken a bullet from the demented John Hinckley, Jr. After ricocheting through his body, the bullet came to a stop about an inch from his heart.
“I began to realize that when Parrhad thrown his body on me, he was gallantly putting his own life on the line to save mine. I felt guilty that I’d chewed him out right after it happened.”
Only the week before, Reagan had gone to Ford’s Theater and looked up at the flag-draped box where Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.
Hinckley had gone to see Taxi Driver starring Jodie Foster, and had become mesmerized by her. In his memoirs, Reagan wrote, “Although I have never seen the movie, I’m told there was a scene in it in which there was a shooting; For some reason, Hinckley decided to get a gun and kill someone to demonstrate his love of the actress.”]
***
When director Roy Del Ruth called Jane Wyman to tell her that he’d cast her in his upcoming aviation picture, Tailspin, she was mildly surprised to be playing an aviatrix. But when he revealed the formidable lineup of stars, she was not only awed, but a bit intimidated. Never had she faced such an array of stars, headlined by Alice Faye, Constance Bennett, Nancy Kelly, and Joan Davis, along with the former silent screen heart-throb Charles Farrell in the male lead.
Getting sixth billing in the 84-minute film, Jane learned that she would play a woman pilot named “Alabama.” The movie was an oddity in that most films of the 1930s featured celluloid versions of only male pilots such as Clark Gable or Spencer Tracy.
According to the plot, Trixie (as played by Faye) takes off from her job as a Hollywood hatcheck girl and joins with another female aviator, Babe Dugan (Joan Davis), to enter a women’s air race from Los Angeles to Cleveland. An oil leak causes their plane to crash, but the two women survive to continue with additional airborne adventures.
Trixie’s rival, both in the air and for the romantic affections of the male lead, is socialite Gerry Lester (Constance Bennett), the daughter of a steel mogul. After lots of romantic scheming and scraping together the agreements and finances she needs to fly her plane, the optimistic and very perky Trixie eventually wins, although she was aided by the kindly rich girl, Gerry, who at first fakes engine trouble as a means of letting Trixie win, but who then gets into serious danger when her plane crashes and she is injured.
Jane Wyman, showcasing the haute mode of 1941.
Warners had lent Jane to 20th Century Fox since it had no immediate role for her. That didn’t mean that Jack Warner was pushing her aside. He had taken out an ad in The Hollywood Reporter, naming her among his top ten contract players. On that list, only Jane and a New York actor, John Garfield, would ultimately achieve stardom.
While filming, Jane’s final divorce papers came through from Myron Futterman. She had only kind words to say about him to the press, ignoring the harsh reality of their actual marriage. “I thought I was doing the right thing at the time,” she said. “Myron was a lovely, charming man, but it just didn’t work out. I guess I married too young.” She defined her marriage to him as her first, ignoring completely her marriage to Eugene Wyman.
For reasons of her own, she misled Warners’ publicity department, asserting that her father, “Ernest Wyman,” had died. There had never been such a person. [Her screen name, Wyman, had derived from her first husband, Eugene Wyman.]
During the shoot, the producer, Darryl F. Zanuck, with his cliché cigar, showed up on the set. He had come to see both Del Ruth and Faye. He met Jane briefly and said, “Welcome to Fox. Hope it won’t be your last visit.”
After a brief chat, he wandered over to Del Ruth before spending an hour with Faye. After all, Faye was his most bankable star. Jane had wanted to make a good impression on him, but she was sure he would have forgotten her by tomorrow.
Faye’s husband, singer Tony Martin, came onto the set one afternoon. Faye was emoting before the camera. Unlike Zanuck, Martin paid a lot of attention to Jane.
As she’d later tell Joan Davis, “I find him very handsome and oh, so masculine. But I didn’t want to interfere in Alice’s marriage, although Tony flirted with me outrageously. I don’t give that marriage a long life.”
Jane was right, as Faye and Martin would divorce in 1940. She’d follow that with a 1941 marriage to Phil Silvers.
On the set, Jane turned down Martin’s invitation to slip away for a drink. “He was some sharpie,” she told Davis. “Too much hair oil, and I find his singing style a bit bland. He’s no Bing Crosby. But I can see why Alice fell for the lug. He‘s very, very sexy. When he talks to a gal, he stands so close to her he rubs his ample package up against her.”
Tail Spin’s female cast members, left to right: Jane Wyman, Joan Davis, Alice Faye, Constance Bennett, Nancy Kelly, Joan Valerie.
“I found myself lost in this lineup of hot-to-trot dames,” Jane said.
The next day, Faye talked to Jane. “It seems that both of us started out as wise-cracking showgirls in films, but I, at least, have been told by Zanuck to soften my image. One reviewer said I was ‘a singing version of Jean Harlow.’ As you can see, my hair-dresser has given my peroxide blonde hair a more natural look.”
“Miss Faye, you look beautiful, and I loved you in In Old Chicago.” Jane said.
“Would you believe it, Zanuck initially turned me down for that role? He offered the part to MGM’s Harlow, but she died, of course.”
“I’m anxious to see you in Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” Jane said. “With that divine Tyrone Power. I think he is the world’s handsomest man.”
“I do, too, but he’s never given me a tumble. Most days, after work on that picture, Power rushed off with Errol Flynn, who always showed up at five o’clock. The world’s second handsomest man made off with the world’s first handsomest man. For we ladies, there is no justice.”
Three days later, Faye encountered Jane on the set. “Did you hear the latest news? My newest claim to fame. I’m the favorite movie star of Adolf Hitler!”
That same day, Jane chatted with Charles Farrell, the matinee idol of the 1920s. Appearing in more than a dozen films with Janet Gaynor, they were once hailed as “the movies’ favorite couple.” With nostalgia, he discussed Hollywood in the 20s.
“Did you catch my latest?” he asked her. “I play Shirley Temple’s dad in Just Around the Corner (1938). Alice has also played Temple’s mother. Maybe Alice and I should get married and make the little lollipop brat legitimate.”
Jane interpreted Del Ruth as a smooth, competent, director who managed to keep all those screen stars in line, along with a complicated plot that involved aerial competition and frequent wisecracks from both Davis and Jane. Del Ruth was a genuine professional, who, since 1932, had been the second highest-paid director in Hollywood.
Jane was awed by the blonde beauty of Constance Bennett, a New Yorker who was the daughter of famed actor Richard Bennett and the older sister and fellow actress, Joan Bennett. Constance seemed very independent, cultured, and rather candid.
For years, Jane had read about the star in fan magazines, learning that she liked to collect both money and men. One reporter asked her father, “Doesn’t Constance know she can’t take her money with her?”
Richard had responded, “If she can’t take it with her, she won’t go.”
Everyone in the film industry had an opinion about Constance. Columnist Adela Rogers St. John said, “She has a reputation for attracting other girls’ men
.” Bette Davis cattily remarked, “Her face is her talent. When that drops, there will go her career.”
“I’m not quite the female Casanova that rumors have it,” Constance told Jane. “In fact, I’m married at the moment. My husband will be arriving soon to take me to lunch, and I’ll introduce you.”
An hour later, Jane met James Henri Le Bailly de La Falaise, Marquis de La Coudraye, who had [from 1925 to 1931] been the third husband of Gloria Swanson. He had won Constance from the arms of her then-lover, Joseph P. Kennedy. Both Constance and Swanson had competed for the love of both Kennedy and the French nobleman.
In her capacity as Tail Spin’s third lead, Nancy Kelly was just “walking through the picture.” That same year, she was also making Jesse James (1939), interpreting the role of Tyrone Power’s love interest. Emerging from New England, she had been a child actress and model, becoming “the most photographed girl in America” at the age of nine.
Rising from the plains of Minnesota, Joan Davis was a comedic actress who had gotten her start in vaudeville. Jane had lunch with her one afternoon in the commissary. By now, she was used to actresses talking about themselves. Davis revealed that she’d appeared in a picture, Way Up Thar (1935) with the then-unknown Roy Rogers. “He told me he would have made a pass at me, but didn’t, because I was just too ugly,” Davis said.
In her private life, Jane continued to date Reagan, but, as she told Joan Blondell, “He is hardly overcome with passion at the sight of me. He’s also dating other starlets, casually playing the field. So am I. When ‘God’s gift to women’ comes along, I’ll know who he is at once. Perhaps he’s waiting just around the corner.”
She told Del Ruth, “When Ronnie goes for a while without calling me, I ring him up and ask him out. He’s too polite to refuse such a request from a lady. I do wish he’d show more aggression in pursuing me.”
Actually, as Jane would later concede to Louella Parsons, “I am much more concerned with my career than I am chasing after some man,.”
For five days, she sat around idly until a call came in from Lewis Seiler. He told her that she would be returning to her home studio at Warners, as he’d cast her in The Kid from Kokomo (1939). She learned that her co-star would be Wayne Morris.
Left to right: Gale Page, Dick Powell, and Ann Sheridan in Naughty but Nice
“Talk about a man who aggressively pursues women,” she said. “He is the master of the forward pass.”
***
“This is my swan song to Warner Brothers,” Dick Powell said, shaking Reagan’s hand and welcoming him to the sound stage of their latest movie, Naughty But Nice. “I should be twenty years younger, playing my role.”
Director Ray Enright had assembled a cast that, for a B-picture, was considered stellar. It included Reagan’s sometimes lover, Ann Sheridan; Maxie (“Slapsie”) Rosenbloom; newcomer Gale Page; plus such veteran performers as Helen Broderick, ZaSu Pitts, the ever-reliable Allen Jenkins, and band leader Peter Lind Hayes.
Although his role In Naughty but Nice was one of the smallest and least inspired in the film, Reagan managed to look “Presidential.”
Naughty But Nice was filmed in October of 1938, but Jack Warner was so disappointed with it, he delayed its release until June of 1939.
The plot whirls around Donald Hardwick (as interpreted by Powell), a young and somewhat prim music teacher who comes to New York to try to get his symphony published and to visit his colorful Aunt Martha, a role interpreted by Helen Broderick. His other two aunts are played by ZaSu Pitts and Vera Lewis.
When these idiosyncratic aunts appear on camera, they steal the show. Donald is introduced to Linda McKay (Gale Page), a lyric writer, who sees jazz and Big Band potential in Powell’s symphonic music and also falls in love with him.
Torch Singer Zelda Manion (Sheridan) vamps the young composer, luring him away, at least temporarily from “nice girl” Linda. Playing the role of Ed Clark, Reagan was cast as an honest music publisher. Linda converts Donald’s composition to swing, and the music ends up on The Hit Parade.
On the set, Page and Sheridan became friends. Sheridan told Reagan, “Gale and I are just two Cherokee squaws. I was told that Indian blood flows through our veins. Both of us are looking for a brave warrior—and you’re it, Big Boy. Gale and I decided you’re more Comanche than Cherokee.”
Warners’ Publicity Department gave Sheridan a major press buildup. No expert herself, [she was in the process of divorcing Edward Norris at the time], she was encouraged to provide women with marriage tips, suggesting that in her pursuit of a happy marriage, a woman should be a good companion—and not just a wife. Posters advertised what was pre-defined as Sheridan’s style of attracting men: “Not too much fire, not too much ice, it’s best to be just a bit Naughty But Nice.”
Sheridan met Reagan in her dressing room for what she called “a very personal reunion.” As she later told Page, “I wanted to make sure that all his equipment was still in working order and that Susan Hayward, perhaps in a fit of rage, hadn’t snipped it off.”
As he left her dressing room, Sheridan told him, “Don‘t tell Powell, but Jack Warner is giving me top billing. Warner’s thinking is that it’s better to promote one of his rising contract players than yesterday’s news. Powell is on his way out the door.”
After Reagan read the script for Naughty But Nice, co-written by Jerry Wald and Richard Macaulay, he told Powell, “You’re getting a rather tepid send-off from Warner’s with this turkey.”
“Don’t I know it,” Powell said. “But let’s struggle upward and onward.”
Originally entitled The Professor Steps Out, Naughty But Nice was a minor musical with songs by Johnny Mercer and Harry Warren.
Reagan was pleased to be working with Powell. He later recalled, “I was one of the thousands who were drawn to this very kind man, and who would think of him as a best friend. Sometimes, our paths took us in different directions, and months would pass without your seeing each other. When we did meet again, it would be as if no interruption had occurred. I cannot recall Dick ever saying an unkind word about anyone.”
Years later, in a memoir, Reagan credited one of his fellow cast members, veteran stage actress Helen Broderick, the mother of Oscar-winning actor, Broderick Crawford, of changing his mind about unions. “At first, I was not a union man, until one afternoon when Helen cornered me in the Warners Commissary. She lectured me for an entire hour about the facts of life. After that, I became the most devoted member of the Screen Actors Guild.”
Gale Page and Ann Sheridan asked Reagan if he would escort them to hear the act of Peter Lind Hayes, the vaudeville entertainer, songwriter, and occasional actor. He had a small part in their movie.
Up to then, Reagan had not paid much attention to Page, whom he found demure and rather attractive. After the show, Page invited Sheridan and Reagan to her home, where she’d already baked a tray of lasagna.
He was only vaguely familiar with Page’s short career. Both of them shared memories of their small contribution to The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse (1938), the picture on which they’d worked with Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart.
Page’s big break had come when she became a member of the “four daughters,” three of which were played by the Lane sisters—Priscilla, Rosemary, and Lola—in the highly successful film, Four Daughters (1938). The picture had induced Jack Warner to sign Page to three more sequels with the Lane siblings.
Rumors of what happened that night at Page’s apartment, where Reagan and Sheridan were guests of the young actress, eventually leaked out. The following Monday morning, Reagan confided in Powell the events of that Saturday night. “After eating, we engaged in a game of strip poker. The gals must have been con artists. They beat hell out of me, and I ended up stripped down to my underwear. After another game, even that came off, my last vestige of modesty.”
“This was my first three-way,” Reagan confessed, “and it’ll be my last!”
The story was too tantalizing for Po
well to keep to himself. That night, he told what had happened to his wife, Joan Blondell. She couldn’t resist sharing it with her co-stars on the set of The Kid from Kokomo. Reagan’s friend, Pat O’Brien, found it amusing, but Jane Wyman said she thought it was “disgusting.”
On the last day of shooting for Naughty But Nice, Page visited Reagan in his dressing room to kiss him goodbye. “You have such a great figure,” she told him. “You really should share it with others.”
“I do enough of that already,” he told her.
Months later, he would find out exactly what she meant by that strange suggestion.
Reviews of Naughty But Nice were tepid at best, or scathing at their worst. Variety called Sheridan “a slight menace, a mike siren who would break up the songwriting team just to be cut in on Powell’s future songs.” Harrison’s Reports criticized “the silly plot and trite dialogue.”
Bosley Crowther of The New York Times dismissed the film, claiming that it was “staffed by a competent cast of pranksters. This item might be steady fun if it were anything more than a bath of old gags strung together.”
Even if Reagan’s films were poor, it didn’t seem to affect his ever-growing fan mail. Hundreds of women seemed to write letters that were almost love letters in tone. One woman found his voice “…irresistible. I like the way you breathe around words. What a pillow talker you must be.”
Every week at least a dozen marriage proposals arrived. Most of them enclosed photographs of their senders in various states of dress, or undress, as the case might be.
Although Reagan’s body was widely admired, he also had an eye for the female figure—that is, when he could see it.
Edmund Morris, in his officially sanctioned biography, Dutch, related a typical moment when Reagan went to the beach with Jane Wyman and a “friend.”
Love Triangle: Ronald Reagan, Jane Wyman, & Nancy Davis (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) Page 27