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

by Darwin Porter

  Jane became very fond of Lynn, and would co-star with him in a future movie. She found the New Englander handsome and exceedingly charming.

  “On the screen, and in person, too, you look like the kind of clean-cut fellow you could take home to meet dear ol’ mom,” Jane said.

  “I suffer from always appearing on screen with stronger personalities,” he claimed. “In Four Daughters, John Garfield attracted most of the attention. In The Roaring Twenties, I was up against James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart. Now, I’ve been assigned to film a movie called All This and Heaven Too. What chance do I have when Bette Davis lights up and starts puffing on that god damn cigarette?”

  For the most part, critics dismissed My Love Came Back, one calling it “a fluffy little romantic comedy. It’s like Chinese food. An hour later, you’re hungry. The same holds for this film. An hour later, you’ll have forgotten all about it in your search to sink your teeth into something more substantial. The stellar talents of Olivia De Havilland and Eddie Albert are completely wasted. This movie is more suited to the limited talents of Jeffrey Lynn and Jane Wyman. Actually, the supporting stars such as Cuddles Sakall steal any scene they’re in.”

  ***

  In May of 1940, Reagan was invited to pose in the nude for a sculpture class at the University of Southern California. Gale Page, who had played Knute Rockne’s wife in their recent film, was enrolled in an art class there. She informed Reagan that her fellow classmates had voted him “The Most Nearly Perfect Male Body” among Hollywood’s male stars.

  Page later recalled, “Ronnie appeared extremely flattered, but also embarrassed, especially about posing in the nude.”

  After she cajoled him, he finally agreed to model for the class, but only if they allowed him to wear bathing trunks. “They’ll have to settle for me in the same swimwear I’d appear in on the beach.”

  “I think we can make that work,” she said. “I have a vivid memory of your genitals, and I’m a very good artist. The assignment is to draw a nude male body. The artists can sculpt your body, but they’ll mold a replica of your genitals from my sketch. Of course, regarding those genitals, I would like a refresher course.”

  “We’ll see about that,” he said. “As you know, I’m a married man.”

  “Surely, you wouldn’t be the only married man in Hollywood to have something on the side. That’s virtually mandatory for a male movie star.”

  Dressed in a business suit, Reagan drove with Page to the USC campus the following evening. Outside the classroom, he faced her in the hall. She directed him to the men’s room, telling him he could change into his trunks there.

  A few moments later, he appeared in the classroom, where he was warmly greeted by a group of young women. About five or six young men also crowded around him, asking for his autograph. Some of them wanted him to autograph the publicity picture in which he’d posed in swimwear with Susan Hayward.

  The class instructor called him aside. “I hope you’ll change your mind about posing in the nude. It’s all for art. It has nothing to do with sex. Our students are very sophisticated.”

  “I’m wearing trunks, or else it’s no deal,” Reagan responded. He opened his robe to display his body in a white bathing suit.

  “Many of your greatest fans are here to sculpt your body,” the instructor responded. “Several of them are young men who view you as a dreamboat. They collect pictures of you.”

  “Why aren’t these guys collecting cheesecake pictures of Betty Grable or Carole Landis?”

  Reagan, chaste and modest, modeling in Grannie’s panties.

  “Art students have varying sexual tastes,” the teacher said. “Just imagine that you’re David posing for Michelangelo.”

  “I will feel red-faced just posing for these gals,” Reagan said. “But having all these guys ogling me, too…I don’t know about this.”

  “After five minutes, you’ll be relaxed. I’m sure you’ll take off that bathing suit. I’ve seen you shirtless in movies. In one film, you stripped down to your underwear. Here, you can take the final step.”

  “I think not!”

  “All right,” the teacher responded. “We’ll take you any way we can get you. Perhaps you’ll change your mind and do what comes naturally, so we won’t have to imagine your genitals. Several in my class have told me that they suspect you have beautiful genitals, nothing to be ashamed of.”

  During the session, Reagan had to pose uncomfortably, balancing a football in his right hand. Tiring easily, he had to take several breaks. Never in his life had his body been admired by so many at such close range. “Many young women, and even the men, were lusting for my body,” as he’d later confide to Jane.

  She became angry at him for having agreed to pose in the first place.

  En route back to Page’s apartment, she asked him to drop in for a nightcap. “I really want to see you again completely nude. If I’m going to draw your genitals, I don’t want to rely on a distant encounter, but on a recent memory.”

  “I don’t know how I feel about this,” he said.

  “Please don’t be so square,” she said. “You’re going to be immortalized with thirty nude sculptures. I bet someday they’ll be collectors’ items.”

  “One thing,” he said. “You didn’t warn me that a photographer would arrive to snap my picture as a nude model. I don’t know if I like that kind of body beautiful publicity. My male friends will make fun of me.”

  “Listen, Ronnie, as I’m sure you’ve been told by others, especially directors: You’ve got to start selling yourself as a sex symbol so that you can compete with Clark Gable, Robert Taylor, Tyrone Power, and, most definitely, with Errol Flynn. Flynn would have posed nude for the class, but they voted for you instead.”

  “I hope you’re not giving me bad advice, you cute little vixen,” he said, climbing up the stairs to her apartment.

  ***

  Jane Wyman was reunited with Wayne Morris, her former boyfriend, on the set of their next movie, Gambling on the High Seas (1940). His divorce from Leonora Hornblow had just been finalized, and he was on the prowl again. According to Jane, “Wayne never let a marriage license cramp his romantic pursuits.”

  She also revealed, “He wasn’t interested in the B picture we were making. All he could think and talk about, other than romance, was his fascination with flying. It began when we made Flight Angels together.”

  “War is in the wind,” he told her, “and I’ve joined the Naval Reserve. Any day, I expect the United States will join the Allies in World War II. When I’m not in front of the camera, I’m studying to be a Navy flier.”

  Both of them agreed that their first three movies, Here Comes Carter, Polo Joe, and Smart Blonde, had done absolutely nothing for their careers. Their first Brother Rat movie had done well at the box office, but the sequel didn’t go over. Nor did their two most recent movies, Flight Angels and An Angel from Texas.

  “Whether you like to face it or not, we’re a screen team,” Morris told her. “Think Hepburn and Tracy, William Powell and Myrna Loy, Clark Gable and Joan Crawford, even Garbo and Gilbert.”

  Jane Wyman with Wayne Morris in Gambling on the High Seas.

  Very noir, her performance evoked something akin to a female version of Brass Bancroft.

  “I don’t think we play ball in those leagues,” she cautioned him.

  He bent down and gave her a kiss on her pug nose. “I know you don’t like to admit it, but we’re also a winning team between the sheets.”

  “Is that any way to talk to a married lady?” she asked.

  “I’ll give you a pass for now,” he said. “But on our next picture, I bet you’ll come home to daddy.”

  “You’re assuming we’ll be teamed again.”

  “It’s in the cards,” he accurately predicted.

  The script for Gambling on the High Seas might have been better titled “Mobsters, Mayhem, and Murder.” Its complicated plot revolves around a casino boat operating in international wate
rs off the coast of the United States. Gambling aboard the boat is strictly for suckers who get fleeced. Morris stars as Jim Carver, an investigative reporter accessorized with a big camera and flashbulbs.

  Jane was cast as Laurie Ogden, a rather demure young woman who is Morris’ love interest. She is also the bookkeeper to crime boss Greg Morella (Gilbert Roland), who owns the crooked gambling ship. With Morris’ urging, she agrees to testify against her boss in court, but he learns of her scheme and orders her kidnapped and imprisoned aboard his ship. Morris, eventually and inevitably, comes to her rescue.

  The gimmick aboard the casino ship is a rigged roulette wheel with a concealed camera, one reviewer noting that the director, George Amy, gave the roulette wheel more close-ups than he gave either Morris or Jane.

  Cast as a mobster, Mexican-born Gilbert Roland, dashingly handsome and masculine, was planning to marry screen goddess Constance Bennett, with whom Jane had starred in Tailspin.

  She remembered Roland “as an aggressive Latin Lover type, always feeling that he had to flirt with every pretty gringa he met.”

  “Originally, before I got hooked on acting—and actresses, I might add—I wanted to be a bullfighter,” he told Jane. “I would have been a big attraction in my suit of lights, if you get my drift.”

  “I get your drift,” she shot back. “But let it keep on drifting.”

  Even though she turned down a forward pass, she found him an intriguing character. “Gilbert could make me swoon,” Jane said to director George Amy.

  To put Roland off, she said, in jest, “I’d go to bed with you, but I suspect you’d tell half of Hollywood, including Ronald Reagan. You’re obviously the kiss-and-tell Mexican bandit.”

  After Jane became a major star, Roland recalled working with her, “There was talent written all over her, but she was a late bloomer in movies, struggling for fifteen long years in programmers. She had a surface bravado. She appeared to be very confident, but I think she was plagued with self-doubt. Over the years, she always had this driving determination to be a big star—and she made it. She knew she had this certain flame burning inside her, and she fanned it, increasing its fire.”

  When Gambling on the High Seas was released, Variety wrote: “Could the newspapers of the country but hire the see-all, know-all, tell-all reporters trained in the B-picture corner of the Warner lot, there’d doubtlessly be not even space on page one for news from the war in Europe. They would be too full of underworld inside and cracking wide open crooked gambling joints through the smart work of newspapermen who look like the Boy Scouts of America personified.”

  In spite of the awkward wording of that review, Jane was pleased to read this appraisal of her own involvement in the film: “Miss Wyman makes a very aesthetic vis-à-vis to American Boy Morris.”

  That night, she showed the review to Reagan. He told her, “Don’t worry, hon, you’ll do better in your next picture.”

  She stormed out of the room, heading for the bedroom, where she locked the door from the inside. When he came knocking later, she didn’t open it until it was time for her to report to work early the next morning.

  ***

  Although the previous onscreen pairing of Jane with Reagan, An Angel from Texas, had not generated a lot of excitement at the box office, director Lewis Seiler and producer Bryan Foy decided to take one more chance and re-team them together in Tug-boat Annie Sails Again (1940). The picture was conceived as a sequel to Marie Dressler’s highly successful Tugboat Annie in 1933.

  Based on its success, Dressler had been immediately scheduled to make a sequel, but she died in 1934, a year after the original film’s release. Louis B. Mayer searched for a character actress to follow in her shoes, but found no suitable candidate.

  Finally, Jack Warner acquired the rights, and cast the character actress Marjorie Rambeau as the grizzled old salt.

  In the film’s original version, crusty old Wallace Beery played the role of Annie’s husband. But in the sequel, Annie is a widow, skippering a vessel called the Narcissus from the fictional port of “Secoma,” a combined depiction of both Tacoma, Washington, and the larger port of Seattle. Most of the outdoor shots, however, were filmed on location in the Port of Los Angeles.

  Jane and Reagan worked smoothly with Seiler, who had helmed Jane in He Couldn’t Say No and in Flight Angels, and had directed Reagan in Hell’s Kitchen with the Dead End Kids.

  Appearing with her husband for the fourth and final time, Jane was cast as Peggy Armstrong, a rich young socialite who falls for Reagan, who plays the role of a poor sailor, Eddie King.

  Seiler selected a strong cast of character actors to support his three stars, notably Alan Hale, Sr., who played Annie’s major rival, the scheming Captain Bullwinkle. Others included Clarence Kolb as Joe Armstrong, Paul Hurst as Pete, and Chill Wills as “Shiftless.”

  Reagan also arranged a small role for his brother, Moon, in the film.

  Maureen Reagan, the first child of Reagan and Jane, claimed that she made her film debut in Tugboat Annie Sails Again. Her face doesn’t appear on the screen, as she was still in her mother’s womb. In her memoir, First Father, First Daughter, she wrote: “There’s a scene in the movie in which Mother gets knocked into the water, and I cringe every time I see it, knowing that I took the fall with her.” She later referred to it as her “in utero” performance.

  Reagan setting sail with Rambeau & Wyman.

  Perhaps Maureen didn’t know this, but Jane’s dive from the pier required four takes. “I ruined four dresses and got a thorough drenching. When Ronnie found out, he was furious with Seiler, fearing taking such falls would make me have a miscarriage.”

  In yet another scene, Jane pushes Reagan off the pier as a means of punishing him for giving her a public spanking when she backed her automobile into his, sending his vehicle into the water. In her role as the daughter of a shipping tycoon, before the film’s happy ending, she arranges for it to be dredged up and re-painted, returning it to him in good condition.

  Jane Wyman and Ronald Reagan were feuding and fighting—and eventually loving—in Tugboat Annie Sails Again aboard the Narcissus.

  The script of Tugboat Annie Sails Again involves a “tug” of war Rambeau fights with her arch-rival, Captain Bullwinkle (as played by Hale). Annie faces financial troubles, canceled contracts, fights over salvage laws, and a violent storm at sea.

  Both Reagan and Jane later asserted that they enjoyed working with Rambeau. “Like Tugboat Annie, Marjorie was a tough old broad,” Reagan said. “Born in San Francisco, she was deserted by her father and taken to remote Nome, Alaska, for some reason.”

  Because Nome was a rough town, filled with far more men than women, Rambeau’s mother dressed her as a boy. She sang in and played the banjo in music halls and rowdy saloons. What her mother didn’t realize was that an effeminate, rather pretty young boy might also invite lust in the horny frontiersmen. Reportedly, as an early teenager, Rambeau was raped three times, the men perhaps delighted to find that the boy was actually a girl.

  Eventually landing in New York, Rambeau made her Broadway debut in the spring of 1911. After that, she drifted to Hollywood, where she starred in silent films.

  Ironically, as an early talkie, one of the films she played a role in was Min and Bill (1930), starring Wallace Beery and Marie Dressler, the original stars of Tugboat Annie. Rambeau was cast as a waterfront floozie. Later, one of her best showcases was as the trampy mother of Ginger Rogers in Primrose Path (1940), for which she received an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress.

  Although Jane’s role in Tugboat Annie Sails Again did not particularly challenge her, Seiler praised her nevertheless. “In spite of the nothing assignments she was given, she seemed to me to be always trying to give the banal lines and situations something extra. We had a lot of great character actors in the film, and she studied them like she was taking acting lessons.”

  In a release from Warners’ publicity department, Jane was quoted as saying, “Ram-be
au’s seasoned talent and enormous thespic self-assurance awed me at first, and then I discovered the big heart and the wonderfully supportive nature of this fine woman.”

  Those words reflected Jane’s sentiment but not her exact language. Most of the time, she spoke in vernacular slang, never using words like “thespic”

  Rambeau also appraised Jane: “I think she was the greater talent, far more so than Ronnie. He had more book learning, but she was street smart and had her own kind of intelligence. She could size up people quicker than Ronnie.”

  As shooting progressed, Jane’s pregnancy began to show. Seiler ordered his cameraman to conceal her expanding belly behind items of furniture or other actors. A dressmaker was hired to design costumes to make her look thin.

  When the picture was released, most critics cited Jane and Reagan only in passing. Rambeau attracted most of the attention, and the critics were harsh, stating the obvious: Marjorie Rambeau was no Marie Dressler.

  In the film, Reagan got to show off his athletic physique not once, but twice. As one reviewer said, “His torso looks better than this movie.”

  During the filming of Tugboat Annie Sails Again, Reagan had been so sure that Jane was going to have a son that he printed birth announcements to that effect. “Sperm like mine can only produce a boy,” he bragged to Pat O’Brien.

  “Don’t count on the kid being born with a dick,” the veteran actor warned him. “Mother Nature plays some wicked games.”

  On January 4, 1941, the day before Jane’s 24th birthday, she gave birth to a baby girl weighing five and a half pounds. She was named Maureen Elizabeth Reagan. Following in the footsteps of her father, she would become a screen actress before venturing into politics.

  When Reagan was shown his baby girl, he told the nurse, “She’s a homely little thing, isn’t she?”

  With his usual frugality, he crossed out the word “boy” on his pre-printed birth announcements and wrote in “girl.”