“He must have been under orders not to wear his glasses in public,” the friend claimed. “He squinted painfully as he watched her retreating figure go into the water. Then he jabbed at the sides of his eyes, pulling the flesh tight, and stared long and hard through sloed slits. The effect was of almost oriental lechery.”
“All this adulation from fans is going to my head,” Reagan told Powell. “I find myself walking around with my head in the clouds. But a call from the producer, Mark Hellinger, brought me down to earth with a thud.”
The last day at the studio, Reagan went to Hellinger’s office to pick up a script of his next movie, Hell’s Kitchen, a feature he was ordered to make with the Dead End Kids.
“How could Jack Warner throw me into a hellhole with those juvenile delinquents?” Reagan asked. “Unlike Bogie and Cagney, I’ve been a good boy. I don’t cause trouble like Bette Davis. Why was I being singled out for punishment?”
Pat O’Brien, the male lead, also greeted Jane. Reagan’s close friend was like a father figure to her. In the starring role, O’Brien played Billy Murphy, a fast-talking boxing manager. Blondell was cast as his wily sweetheart, Doris Harvey.
***
Joan Blondell, the female star of The Kid from Kokomo, had been working a week on the movie before Jane Wyman reported to work as one of the supporting players. Blondell was there to greet her on the sound stage and invite her to share her dressing room, sparing her from the cramped communal salon reserved for the supporting female players.
Lewis Seiler, who had directed Jane in He Couldn’t Say No, was also there to welcome her. She had read that he would next be directing Reagan and the Dead End Kids in Hell’s Kitchen.
Pat O’Brien and Joan Blondell, the stars of The Kid from Kokomo. He was a fast-talking boxing manager sharpie, and she was his wily secretary.
Jane’s sometimes lover, Wayne Morris, arrived late on the set that day, since he had not been needed in early scenes. He passionately kissed Jane and invited her to have lunch with him in the Warners’ commissary.
At first, he discussed his career woes, complaining about the script by Jerry Wald and Richard Macaulay. “I play this hayseed boxer who won’t fight in the ring until he finds his mother who abandoned him on a doorstep as a baby. Incidentally, I think mama posed for that painting of Whistler’s Mother’s. I’m made to look like some sissy mama’s boy. I’ll be ridiculed like I was when I was a male cheerleader at Los Angeles High School.”
“You were a cheerleader?” Jane asked in astonishment. “With your build, I thought you’d have gone out for football.”
Usually Morris had a rather carefree personality. But on this day, he appeared worried and a little bit afraid. “I just learned that Warners is not going to renew my contract. Working with Bogie on The Return of Doctor X has done me in, along with this present turkey we’re making. Bogie himself claimed that our Doctor X is a piece of shit. He’s cast as the living dead in search of fresh blood.”
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“I hear Republic, which has combined with Monogram, is searching for a replacement for John Wayne,” he said.
“You’d be perfect for John Wayne roles,” she said.
I’m going over there to try to convince the brass that I can be their guy as soon as I finish making this cheesy farce.”
At the end of the lunch, he saved other important news for last, revealing that he’d just married Leonora Hornblow.
She looked mildly shocked. “I hope the two of you will be very happy,” she said, without trying to show any jealousy.
“It’s not working out,” he said. “We’re only two months into the marriage and we’re already talking divorce. That brings up the subject of you and me.”
She reached for his hand. “Let‘s put you and me on hold for a while, at least until your divorce comes through. Are you okay with that?”
“Hell no!” he said, flashing anger. “But it’s lady’s choice. I’ll predict something. You and me are going to get back together. You’ll miss my kind of loving.”
“That may be true,” she said. “Do you realize this is our fifth picture together?”
“I’ll predict something else,” he said. “I bet we’ll do five more. Fan magazines claim we make a cute couple, and that you should have gone for me in Brother Rat instead of Reagan.”
“I must go,” she said, rising from the table. “I’m sorry you’ve run into trouble so early in your marriage.”
“You’ve had at least one or two husbands, so you know how things often don’t work out.”
“What seems to be the trouble?” she asked. “I know that whatever your problem may be, it’s not in the bedroom. You’re an artist in the boudoir.”
“Of course it’s not that,” he said. “The bitch objects to my sleeping with other women.”
Like Morris, Jane also wasn’t pleased with her role in The Kid from Kokomo. At one point, she talked to Wald, the screenwriter. “I just wrote a film for your boyfriend, Reagan,” he said. “Naughty But Nice. If he invites you out on a movie date to see it, turn him down.”
She expressed her dissatisfaction with her role in The Kid from Kokomo as a girl reporter, the love interest of Morris.
“Eventually, when I’m a big-time producer, I’ll bring stories by D.H. Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway to the screen,” Wald said. “But for the moment, at least, I’m putting bread on the table.”
Blondell’s biographer, Matthew Kennedy, wrote: “If Jack Warner wanted to make Blondell happy again, he had a peculiar way of showing it. The Kid from Kokomo was so bad, in fact, that Warner more likely wished to bully Joan off the lot by giving her a Skid Row assignment. Predictably, Kokomo stunk up theaters for a few days, barely made its cost, then crept away to rightful obscurity.”
Kokomo, Indiana, was never as glam as the implications of this photo by haute photographer George Hurrell, snapped as a publicity photo of Jane Wyman for her role in The Kid from Kokomo.
Blondell, at age thirty-two, saw attention shifting to such younger actresses as Jane and Ann Sheridan. Jane stood with Blondell as she looked out over the empty sound stage at the end of the filming of The Kid from Kokomo. “The same fate awaits me one day,” she said to Blondell.
“Where’s the brass band playing for my send-off?” Blondell asked. She lamented not having campaigned for better roles. “They gave me the roles Carole Lombard turned down. I’ll go down in film history as one of the Depression Blondes in movies of the 30s.”
A messenger boy interrupted her and handed her an envelope. In front of Jane, she opened it. “It’s dated January 7, 1939, my last paycheck from Warners. It totals $2,916.67—and that includes bonuses.”
Then she turned to Jane. “Let’s get the fuck out of here!”
***
The producers of Hell’s Kitchen, Bryan Foy (still “King of the Bs”) and Mark Hellinger, sent Reagan its script, in which he discovered that once again, he had a disappointing role. It was obvious from the beginning that the picture would be stolen by the Dead End Kids.
“They’ll make mince meat out of me,” he complained to co-director Lewis Seiler, who had just completed helming The Kid from Kokomo.
“I don’t think I’ll be able to handle the rowdy scenes by myself,” Seiler said. “I’ve called in E. A. Dupont as my co-director. “He’s a German who’s directed crime stories on film since 1918. He’ll keep these unruly boys in line.”
The underlying concept for the Dead End Kids had originated on Broadway in 1935 as a play, Dead End, which ran for 684 performances based on Sidney Kingsley’s grim look at slum life on the Lower East Side of New York City. Producer Samuel Goldwyn had seen the play and decided to film it, paying $165,000 for the rights. In his film version, in starring roles, he cast six of the original Kids from the Broadway play.
During the filming of Dead End, the young actors ran wild around the studio, vandalizing and destroying property. At one point, they crashed a delivery truc
k into a sound stage while a film was actually being shot.
“I’m too old to put up with shit like this,” Goldwyn had informed director William Wyler. “I’m selling these jerks’ contract to Jack Warner. Let him deal with these aging brats.”
The original film, Dead End (1937), had starred Sylvia Sidney, Joel McCrea, and Humphrey Bogart.
Before reporting to the set, Reagan placed a call to Bogie to learn about his experiences working with this motley crew. That actor told Reagan, “I did something that rubbed those jerks the wrong way. All of a sudden, all of them descended on me and stripped off all of my clothes, including my underwear. There I stood, jaybird naked, before cast and crew. With one hand covering my privates, I rushed to my dressing room listening to the catcalls and the jeers.”
The Dead End Kids: Hollywood’s romanticization of America’s urbanized juvenile delinquents. Although movie audiences found them compelling, none of the actors who worked with them did—especially Reagan.
Upper row, left to right: Huntz Hall, Gabriel Dell and Billy Halop. Bottom row: Leo Gorcey, Bobby Jordan and Bernard Punsley.
Bogie, in 1938, had also been cast in Crime School, with the Dead End Kids playing young hoodlums sentenced to reform school.
“I was miscast in Crime School as a do-gooder,” Bogie said. “Not a role with my name written on it. Actually, Crime School was a rehash of Cagney’s 1933 The Mayor of Hell. And now, Jack Warner is reworking virtually the same script with you in it. That bastard is sure getting his money’s worth out of this old turkey.”
Reagan also contacted Cagney, who had only recently filmed Angels with Dirty Faces(1938), with the Dead End Kids. It had also starred Bogie and his friends, Pat O’Brien and Ann Sheridan.
“You’ve got to watch the gang’s leader, Leo Gorcey,” Cagney warned Reagan. “He tries to throw you off by his constant ad-libbing. One day I snapped. I gave him a stiff arm above his nose and snapped his head back like I was going to break his neck. ‘Now listen, punk,’ I told him. ‘There won’t be any more of this god damn nonsense. You’re going to do it like Michael Curtiz told you to. Or else…’ The next day, the fucking ad-libbing stopped.”
Reagan told Seiler, “If Cagney and Bogie each survived working with the Dead End Kids, I guess I can, too.”
In Hell’s Kitchen, Reagan was cast as a do-gooder, playing the role of lawyer Jim Donohue. He gets his uncle, Buck Caesar (Stanley Fields), a paroled convict with money, to make a contribution to the reform school which houses the Dead End Kids.
Regrettably, the school’s superintendent, Krispan (Grant Mitchell), is a crook, keeping a double set of financial records. Eventually, as could be expected, the Kids expose Krispan’s nefarious deeds, the most horrendous of which involves locking one of the Kids in a deep freeze, where he dies.
In the United Kingdom, because of its violence, the film was given an “H” rating (the equivalent of an “X” rating today).
For the female lead, Margaret Lindsay had been cast as a social worker. Reagan had already escorted her on two studio-sanctioned dates, each involving their attendance at Warners’ premieres.
When he heard that Lindsay would play a role in the film, he told Seiler, “I think I’m losing my sex appeal with her. I didn’t even rate a good night kiss on her doorstep.”
“You’re the wrong gender,” Seiler told him.
“You mean, she’s a lesbian?” Up until that point, Reagan seemed to feel that all lesbians were macho-strutting and butch. His mind had not yet wrapped around the concept of a lipstick lesbian, an archetype exemplified by Lindsay.
During the second week of shooting, it came as a complete shock to Reagan to learn that Seiler had cast Ila Rhodes in a small role in Hell’s Kitchen. He had broken off his engagement to the actress four months before, and she was bitter toward him.
Hell’s Kitchen: Reagan with Margaret Lindsay. “She batted for the other team,” he said.
On the day of his scene with her, both of them were to appear with actors Grant Mitchell and Stanley Fields. For the first time in his life, he faced an actress who denounced him personally. Rhodes came up to him. “You turned out to be a second-rate asshole!”
He said nothing, but waited impatiently for direction from Seiler as a means of getting through the scene. He later told the director, “You didn’t do me any favors. Here I am in this picture, facing an irate former girlfriend, pretending to make love to a lesbian on camera, and putting up with the Dead End Kids to boot.”
Of all the gang members, Reagan held Huntz Hall, another New Yorker, in the deepest contempt. The son of an Irish immigrant, an air-conditioner repairman, Huntz got his nickname because of his “Teutonic-looking nose.” At the age of five, he’d become a performer on radio. In previous films, Hall and Bogie had practically declared war on each other. Bogie had warned Reagan, “Watch out for him.”
Huntz Hall: Bogie defined him as a “god damn psycho.”
Huntz maintained a total disdain for Reagan, referring to him as a square. Along with some of the gang members, Hunt plotted to give Reagan a “hot hat.” On three separate occasions, he rolled newsprint around a hat, setting it on fire, and then slipping forward and shoving the burning headgear down onto Reagan’s head. He would always yell in panic, but remove the burning hat before his hair caught on fire. “The Square was never seriously burned until one day,” Hunt recalled years later.
Eventually growing bored with this prank, Hunt devised a devilish deviation on his arsonist theme: One day, as Reagan sat dozing in a director’s chair, Hunt slipped up behind him and placed a powerful firecracker under the flimsy canvas of the chair’s seat.
The firecracker blasted off, setting Reagan’s trousers on fire. He screamed in panic as the flames engulfed his clothing.
“That fucking firecracker acted like a stick of dynamite,” Huntz said. “Reagan must have jumped ten feet in the air.”
As Hall stood laughing, looking like the dopey-looking kid he played on camera, another Dead End Kid, Bernard Punsley, rushed to Reagan’s aid.
He smothered out the fire on his trousers and got two grips to carry him to Reagan’s dressing room. An ambulance was summoned.
With a pocket knife, Punsley cut away at Reagan’s burnt clothing. With a first aid kit, he applied a soothing salve to Reagan’s burnt buttocks. When the ambulance and its crew arrived, Punsley told them he was a doctor in training, and rode beside his patient.
Even at the hospital, Punsley insisted on staying in Reagan’s room. The actor agreed, because he’d come to his rescue. He visited Reagan every day and seemed to administer to him as if he were Reagan’s doctor. He learned that Punsley, who was always reading medical books on the set of Hell’s Kitchen, planned to become a physician.
Later, when he went into the Army, he received medical training. After the war, he entered the Medical College of the University of Georgia and obtained a degree. In time, he became the Chief of Staff at South Bay Hospital in Redondo Beach, California. When Reagan was Governor of California, he sent a note of thanks for his rescue, years before, along with his congratulations at his successful transition from acting to the medical fields.
A future doctor, Bernard Punsley later claimed, and rightly so, “I saved Reagan’s ass...and I mean that literally.”
In his letter, Reagan jokingly wrote, “You know better than anyone I’ve met how to deal with a hot-assed actor. Like you, I’ve changed professions, me going into politics, and you into medicine. You’ll probably do better in helping people than I will in my new job.”
Years later, Reagan recalled his horrid time working on set with the Dead End Kids. “It was an experience similar to going over Niagara Falls the hard way—upstream. Counting noses and getting them all in one scene was a major chore, but sometimes it was a relief when they did take off and disappear for a few hours. You never knew when a canvas chair would go up in smoke or be blown apart by giant firecrackers they were never without. Having heard lurid tales from other
actors, like Bogie and Cagney, I approached my first picture with them as something of a sweat. I barely survived that to find that Jack Warner had cast me in another picture with these hoodlums. They had graduated beyond juvenile delinquents at that point.”
***
For her third film role of 1939, Jane Wyman was not thrilled to be cast as Torchy Blane, the girl reporter turned amateur detective. Beginning in 1937, Glenda Farrell, Jane’s rival at Warners, had made the role her own in a series of seven movies, including Smart Blonde (1936), in which Jane had had a small part.
The first Torchy Blane movie was a box office hit, and Jack Warner ordered that it be developed into a series. It eventually included such installments as Torchy Gets Her Man and Torchy Runs for Mayor.
After Farrell bowed out of the series, the next Torchy role was awarded to Lola Lane, one of the famous Lane sisters. Lola’s picture bombed at the box office, but Warner decided to give the series a final chance by casting Jane as the star of Torchy Plays With Dynamite.
The second female lead, that of bad girl Jackie Maguire, went to Shelia Bromley, who had made a film with Reagan. From time to time, Jane chatted briefly with her between takes, appearing pleasantly polite, although she didn’t like her co-star. At one point, Bromley told Jane, “I think I’m the only one of Reagan’s leading ladies that he didn’t seduce. Not that he didn’t try.”
“How nice that you so bravely held out,” Jane snapped, sarcastically.
Bromley’s claim about being “a Reagan Virgin” was later disputed by her co-workers.
In the film, Bromley played the girlfriend of the notorious hoodlum, “Denver Eddie,” who escapes a police raid, but Bromley is arrested and sent to jail. Torchy gets herself thrown into jail, too, by turning in eleven false alarms. In prison for eleven months, she befriends Maguire. Torchy’s plan involves trailing Maguire after both of them are released from prison. The amateur detective rightly thinks Maguire will lead her to Denver Eddie—and so she does.
Love Triangle: Ronald Reagan, Jane Wyman, & Nancy Davis (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) Page 28