Three nights later, Reagan entertained a very different, more angry, and more sullen Hayward. Her earlier sense of giddy elation had evaporated. At the end of the filming of Beau Geste, Gary Cooper, who seemed to have been afflicted with the same state of Leadinglady-itis that usually enveloped Reagan during filmings, had dropped Hayward and moved on to his next conquest.
Not only had Hayward lost Cooper, but those big roles she’d dreamed about had not been forthcoming from Paramount. Once again, she had been cast in two B-pictures. One was the lackluster Our Leading Citizen (1939), with Bob Burns, a former radio comic. The other, also from 1939, was $1,000 a Touchdown, co-starring Joe E. Brown and Martha Raye, two loud-mouthed troupers facing faltering screen careers.
Hayward did have some news that concerned him. That afternoon, she had had lunch with columnist Louella Parsons, who had asked her to join her in a vaudeville-inspired publicity tour scheduled for November. “She’ll have a bevy of beautiful starlets, and she plans to ask you to be the sole male performer going with her on the jaunt.”
“Who are the other gals?” he asked.
“She hasn’t made up her mind yet, but I know she’s going to ask Jane Wyman, that ugly little twat who performed so badly with you in Brother Rat. That role should have gone to me. I could have pulled it off.
***
With trepidation, Reagan reported to the Warners studio for his latest film, The Battle of City Hall [Before its release in 1939, the title was changed to Angels Wash Their Faces, the sixth of seven films featuring the Dead End Kids.] Its director was Ray En-right, who had previously helmed Reagan in the disastrous picture he made with Bogart, Swing Your Lady, and also in Naughty But Nice, where Reagan played a distant second fiddle to his friend, Dick Powell.
When Reagan shook Enright’s hand, he was frank, admitting he wasn’t looking forward to appearing once again with the Dead End Kids. He told Enright about the serious burns he had suffered on his buttocks after Huntz Hall had exploded a firecracker under his chair.
Reagan did not condemn all of the Dead End Kids, relaying to Enright the bravery of Bernard Punsley. “This doctor in the making put out the fire and ministered to my burns until the ambulance arrived. I’ll always be grateful to him for that.”
Jack Warner had ordered the film’s title change as a means of cashing in on some of the success of a movie that Warners had released the previous year, Angels with Dirty Faces, a picture that had co-starred James Cagney, Ann Sheridan, Bogart, and the Dead End Kids. Angels Wash Their Faces was not really a sequel, but Warner hoped to trade off the wide visibility of the original title.
Reagan with Ann Sheridan in Angels Wash their Faces.
As the son of the District Attorney, (Henry O’Neill), Reagan was not pleased with his role, even though he shared top billing with Sheridan.
Enright told Reagan that he had conferred with his colleague, Michael Curtiz, the jaded survivor of many previous encounters with The Dead End Kids. [Curtiz had directed Angels With Dirty Faces the year before.] In this heavy Hungarian accent, Curtiz witnessed how the Dead End Kids had thrown a lit firecracker into Bogie’s dressing room, and had painted obscene murals on the office walls of various high-placed Warner executives. They had also set off the fire sprinklers in the wardrobe department, ruining thousands of dollars worth of costumes.
Finally, as a means of policing the unruly delinquents, Curtiz called in a big ex-football player, Russ Saunders, to enforce security.
As Leo Gorcey later recalled about one of Saunder’s disciplinary actions, “Anyone who has ever been hit, point blank—with water from a full-size, high-pressure fire hose can understand why we caused no more trouble.”
As reported by Enright, “The first day Reagan encountered Hall on the set, he did something out of character for him. He punched Hall in the nose, giving him a bloody one. After what he did to Reagan on Hell’s Kitchen, Hall certainly deserved that punch. He picked himself up off the floor and looked like he was going to fight Reagan. But he thought better of it and insulted him instead.
“Forgive me,” Hall said to Reagan. “I know you have to keep those lily-white melons smooth and ready to receive the pricks of Errol Flynn and all the other studs at Warners who want to poke you.”
Enright claimed that when he heard that, a genuinely furious Reagan looked like he wanted to continue beating up Hall, but turned and walked away instead. From then on, Hall and Reagan made it a point to stay out of each other’s way.
Hall procured marijuana for the Dead End Kids. “They’re going up in smoke with this Mexican weed,” Reagan told Enright.
***
“It’s good to work with Ann Sheridan,” Reagan told Enright. “She’s a great gal.” In Angels Wash Their Faces, he falls in love with her.
According to Enright, Sheridan seemed to have a soothing influence on Reagan. “When they weren’t needed on the set, they spent a lot of time together in his dressing room. Ann was very frank with me about their relationship.”
“We’re not in love,” she told Enright. “But we have great sexual chemistry. If you can find a guy in Hollywood who knows how to fuck, you hold onto him.”
For his part, Reagan never discussed his affair with Sheridan. “In spite of his busting Hall in the face, Reagan was a real gentleman,” Enright said. “I knew he was dating Wyman at night. I had directed her pictures as well.”
Once again, Reagan found himself working not only with Hall and Gorcey, but with Gabriel Dell and Bobby Jordan. He had lunch several times with Punsley. In the film, the character he played ended up badly. Trapped in a tenement fire, he is burned to death.
Margaret Hamilton: Have you ever tasted an unripe persimmon?
Punsley introduced Reagan to Frankie Thomas, who played Sheridan’s brother. Reagan found him likable and talented, having worked on Broadway since he was eleven. He’d recently appeared in a hit film, Boys’ Town (1938), starring Spencer Tracy and Mickey Rooney.
Sheridan was cast as the loyal sister of Gabe Ryan (Thomas), who is framed on a charge of arson and sent to prison. His gangland members work to clear his name, and the real arsonist is revealed at the end, as could be predicted.
“Other than being cast with Ann as my leading lady, what made the highlight of the picture for me involved meeting two delightful old broads, Margaret Hamilton and Marjorie Main,” Reagan said.
The same year Reagan met Hamilton, she was also starring as “The Wicked Witch of the West” in The Wizard of Oz with Judy Garland. “Thank God the movies had roles for an actress with a sour-apple expression and a beak-like nose. She was a natural to play the greatest female villain in celluloid history. To my surprise, I learned that before she became the terror of all little kids, she’d been a kindergarten teacher and had, for a while, run a nursery school. In the movies, she virtually cornered the market on playing schoolmarms, backfence gossips, spinsters, and acerbic old buzzards. In private, she was one of the nicest ladies I have ever met.”
He had seen Hamilton in her role in These Three, based on Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour, which had originated as a hit play on Broadway. In the film, Miriam Hopkins and Merle Oberon run a girl’s school. A malicious little brat, played by Bonita Granville, spreads lies about them and endangers their livelihood.
“I loved it in the movie when you hauled off and smacked hell out of the little bitch,” Reagan told her.
“Speaking of Bonita, here she comes,” Hamilton said. “I’ll introduce her. She’s got a crush on you.”
Bonita Granville...a crush on Reagan
At that point, Reagan had not been informed that Granville was also in their movie. Hamilton later said, “Bonita met Reagan, but he seemed immune to the charms of this sharp-nosed, brazen young woman. Later, Bonita got Mickey Rooney to seduce her in those Andy Hardy films, but Reagan was a holdout. Of course, he had Ann Sheridan. What did he need with Bonita?”
Main, who later became famous for her Ma Kettle roles, had appeared in the origina
l Broadway production of Dead End. She was asked to repeat her role. In this movie version, she was cast as the mother of gangster Humphrey Bogart. She delivered a classic line, “Ya yellow dog!” before slapping hell out of Bogie.
She had heard about the trouble the Dead End Kids had caused Reagan. “If any of these hooligans cause you any more grief, send for me and I’ll turn them into sopranos!”
Mom, roasted piglets, and Marjorie Main. She threatened to castrate the Dead End Kids.
During the final week of the shoot, John Garfield came onto the set to retrieve Sheridan. He was introduced to Reagan, who had been told that he’d accompanied Sheridan and Jane Wyman to Dodge City for that film’s premiere.
He informed Reagan that he, along with Sheridan, had been cast as the stars of a new movie, Castle on the Hudson, with Reagan’s good friend, Pat O’Brien.
When Garfield excused himself to go to the toilet, Reagan said to Sheridan, “My dear lady, I hear you and Garfield are becoming quite an item.”
“That’s because with Jane and Susan Hayward lusting after you, you’re not always available. With you, the line forms on the right.”
Dick Foran called Jane Wyman a “go-to-gal.”
“You flatter me,” Reagan responded.
When she asked about his next picture, he said, “I’m back to playing Secret Agent Brass Bancroft chasing after counterfeiters. I’ll end the 30s struggling through another B, heading for oblivion unless something breaks for me soon.”
“Maybe Hollywood will get wise and cast us two heartbreakers together in an A-list picture,” she said. “I feel it in my bones.”
She had spoken like a prophet.
***
After sitting, bored, and watching Jane Wyman emote as Torchy Blane, Jack Warner pulled the plug on the series. To replace it, he immediately ordered the script department to launch a new series about a private woman sleuth that would be fresher and more tantalizing than the stale Glenda Farrell series.
The result involved Jane receiving star billing in Private Detective, where she was cast as Myrna (“Jinx”) Winslow.
The 57-minute film would be screened as the bottom half of double bills throughout the country, opening at the end of 1939 and playing for a few weeks into 1940 when Europe had gone to war.
Screen writers Raymond Schrock and Earle Snell were hired to concoct a crime drama pitting Jane against her boyfriend detective, a role interpreted by Dick Foran in the part previously played by either Barton MacLane or Allen Jenkins.
Jane had never considered Foran a charismatic leading man. She told Noel Smith, the director of Private Detective, “Dick is hardly the type to set a gal’s heart fluttering.” Later, she re-evaluated him when he arrived on the set looking tall and handsome, a clean-cut all-American type like Ronald Reagan, standing six feet two with thick red hair.
She had always associated Foran with singing cowboy roles, where he had been directed by Smith. Occasionally, he had appeared in such A-list pictures as The Petrified Forest (1936), with Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart, or The Sisters (1938), again with Davis. Jane had seen him in Cowboy from Brooklyn (1938), in which he had appeared with Reagan.
Although he was married at the time to Ruth Piper Hollingsworth, Foran signaled to Jane that he’d be interested in dating her. He explained, “My marriage is on the rocks, and I’ll soon be filing for divorce.”
“Welcome to the club,” she said.
“If you’re lucky, I’ll sing my hit recording, ‘My Little Buckaroo,’ to you, something they featured in my film, Cherokee Strip (1937).”
“Thanks, but I’ll skip it for the time being,” she said.
Foran had nothing but praise for Jane, calling her “a real trouper, a good sport, no temperament, always a pleasure to play with.”
In the same year, he’d directed Jane, Smith also helmed Reagan in Secret Service of the Air. “I always felt that Smith was the kind of director who wanted to rush through a movie, bringing it in on time and under budget,” Jane said. “He didn’t believe in giving an actor much guidance. His motto was, ‘Show up on time, know your lines, and don’t bump into the furniture.’”
Gloria Dickson: NOT the luckiest girl in the world.
The plot of Private Detective revolved around Jane, a detective who’s involved in an investigation of a divorcée accused of murdering her ex-husband. A child is involved, as is a sleazy lawyer (Morgan Conway).
Jane and her boyfriend, a police officer, cross and criss-cross paths so often they decide to work together as a means of making more progress on the case. Her most dangerous moment occurs when she barely manages to escape carbon monoxide poisoning.
Jane was already a friend of her co-star, Gloria Dickson, who had made her film debut with Lana Turner in the 1937 They Won’t Forget. She was the wife of Perc Westmore, the leading makeup artist at Warners. The Westmores often double dated with Jane and Reagan.
[“There had been such hope for Gloria when she started out at Warners,” Jane later recalled. “In 1937, she landed on the covers of several magazines, and featured in such articles as ‘The Luckiest Girl in the World.’ She wasn’t lucky at all. I didn’t see much of her after she and Perc divorced in 1941. There were two more husbands before she was burned to death in a fire in her Los Angeles home in 1945.”]
As Jane feared, Private Detective met with lackluster or bad reviews. Variety summed it up like this: “Warners has put the Torchy Blane series into the garage for an overhauling and a repaint job. Private Detective has a new finish, but underneath, it’s plainly the Torchy formula, with wider cruising range than was the case in the girl reporter series with Glenda Farrell.”
When Jack Warner viewed Private Detective, he canceled the proposed follow-up installment that would have featured Jane. “Once again, I was back, along with the other starlets, in the Warners cow corral.”
***
In the third of the Brass Bancroft Secret Service series, Smashing the Money Ring (1939), Reagan once again chased after counterfeiters, except that this time the crooks were already in prison.
The character he was playing had been defined as “an ace treasury operative,” on a mission to bust up the ring, which was printing counterfeit money on the prison printing press and shipping it out into circulation by concealing it within bundles of their newspaper, The Big House Bugle.
Backed up with footage shot at San Quentin, Bancroft poses as a prison inmate so that he can live among the prisoners and learn how their operation works.
After Reagan read the script, mainly by Raymond Schrock, he knew at once that it was filled with all those prison movie clichés from the 1930s. The main villain, “Dice” Matthews, (played by the ratlike actor, Joe Downing), spouts dialogue such as “Don’t forget what happens if you sing to the coppers!”
“A line like that might have worked coming from the mouth of George Raft,” Reagan said.
“Dice” is feuding with the owner of a gambling ship, the SS Kismet, who he claims “double crossed me.” When the investor is sent to prison, Dice goes after him with a shiv. But Reagan intervenes and saves his life, although (amazingly) that doesn’t alienate him from Dice.
The lovely Margot Stevenson.
As the plot thickens, Reagan falls for the film’s only female character, Peggy, the daughter of the owner of the SS Kismet.
Margot Stevenson was cast in the role. This sultry, blonde-haired, and glamorous New Yorker was also a stage and radio actress who was known mainly for her role of Margot Lane opposite Orson Welles in the radio adaptation of The Shadow.
Reagan in jail!! with Eddie Foy, Jr. in
Smashing the Money Ring.
Stevenson is incidental to the story, and appears mainly because Jack Warner wanted some romance in an otherwise all-male prison movie. On screen there was no chemistry between Reagan and the star. Apparently, there was no off-screen combustion, either. While making the movie, Reagan did not come down with his usual “disease” of “Leadinglady-itis.”
Once again, Reagan’s friend and confidant, Eddie Foy, Jr., was cast as his goofy sidekick, Gabby.
Foy gave a good reason about why “Ronnie didn’t pursue Margot, who was a very sexy broad. When she wasn’t working, Jane Wyman was known to pop unexpectedly onto the set.”
Some of Foy’s scenes were bizarre and perhaps suggestive. In one segment, he says, “I’ll never forget the night I played Little Red Riding Hood aboard the USS Arizona. Did they salute me with 26 guns?”
No explanation is given as to why he was referencing this folkloric tale before the rugged seamen sailing the battleship.
Trigger-happy, and very Film Noir: Good Guy Reagan aims a pistol at actor Dick Rich in Smashing the Money Ring.
Joe King played Reagan’s boss, Saxby, although Reagan had wanted the more seasoned John Litel in the part instead.
The director, Terry O. Morse, a Missouri-born film editor since 1927, was new to Reagan. That same year, he was also helming The Adventures of Jane Arden. He complained to Reagan that he did not like to direct, “particularly the shitty material I’m assigned.” In 1956, he did have a moment of glory when he directed the Raymond Burr scenes in Godzilla, King of the Monsters!.
Smashing the Money Ring was the second worst of the Brass Bancroft films, and Reagan felt his character would go the way of the already-canceled Torchy Blane detective serials. He also spent many restless nights fearing that Jack Warner would not pick up his option.
Jane visits Reagan, who’s in prison garb, on the set of his Brass Bancroft movie, Smashing the Money Ring.
Love Triangle: Ronald Reagan, Jane Wyman, & Nancy Davis (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) Page 30