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

by Darwin Porter

  In its place, the editors ran a photo of a woman from an unrelated story.

  Although during the shoot, Reagan never directly confronted Beery, he held him responsible for the December, 1937 death of his friend, Ted Healy. Following a dispute in a tavern, Beery, along with Albert (“Cubby”) Broccoli and Pat DiCicco, had attacked Healy and severely beaten him, kicking him in the head, abdomen, and ribs, knocking his left eye from its socket, delivering major bruises and lacerations to his head, neck and trunk.

  An autopsy and subsequent investigation deemed these men not guilty of (directly) causing his death, but Reagan knew better. He blamed Eddie Mannix [VP and General Manager of MGM] and Howard Strickling [MGM’s Head of Publicity] for covering up the scandal.

  Reagan had always been fascinated by Lionel Barrymore’s screen work, ever since he’d seen A Free Soul (1931), in which he played an alcoholic lawyer alongside Norma Shearer and Clark Gable. For his performance in that film, Lionel, the older brother of the famous siblings, Ethel and John, won an Oscar as Best Actor.

  Lionel had begun his stage career in the 1890s. By 1911, he was making films with D.W. Griffith at Biograph Studios. In 1915, he starred with the legendary Lillian Russell in the movie Wildfire. Like Beery, he had worked with all the big names, including John Gilbert, Gable, Greta Garbo, Spencer Tracy, Jean Harlow, Marie Dressler, Lon Chaney, Sr., and even his sister, Ethel. He’d faced off on the screen with Beery before, appearing with him in Grand Hotel (1932), and with John, his younger brother.

  Thorpe seemed to take delight in telling Reagan about all the rumors swirling around Lionel’s head. Because of the pain from his crippling arthritis, Lionel was said to be a morphine addict. It was also rumored that Louis B. Mayer was purchasing $400 worth of cocaine every day as a means of keeping him out of pain and allowing him to get some sleep.

  In addition to having broken his hip twice, Lionel, again according to rumor, suffered from having contracted syphilis in 1925 during an affair with a young stage actor. Lionel was known for developing crushes on actors, notably Clark Gable when they co-starred together in A Free Soul. It was said that the fellating of young men was his favorite form of sex.

  Reagan later said, “Lionel was theater through and through. An actor such as myself was made better by his great ability—provided you keep from being run over. He was confined to his wheelchair at the time, and he could whip that contrivance around on a dime. It’s hard to smile in a scene when your foot has been run over and your shin is bleeding from a hubcap blow.”

  Lionel Barrymore in December of 1939, performing A Christmas Carol for radio broadcast.

  Originating in Utah, Laraine Day was Reagan’s leading lady. This time, he didn’t fall in love—far from it. She was dating Ray Hendricks at the time, a singer turned airline executive. She’d marry him a year later, but divorce him in 1947. The following year, she married Leo Durocher, manager of the baseball team then known as the New York Giants. Subsequently, she became known as “The First Lady of Baseball.”

  [In 1957, after being sold and moving to California, the team was renamed the San Francisco Giants.]

  Reagan told Thorpe that Laraine, a devout member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (i.e., the Mormons), was the most rigidly puritanical of his many leading ladies. She was so intensely dedicated to the teachings of her faith that she did not smoke, drink, or swear, and refused to even drink tea or coffee. “Nothing tastes better than a glass of cold milk, or ice water, on a hot day,” she told Reagan.

  Onscreen with Laraine Day, Reagan cozied up to his co-star, but didn’t develop any particular case of “Leadinglady-itis.”

  An MGM contract player, she was known as “Nurse Mary Lamont,” the title character she played in a string of seven Dr. Kildare movies, beginning with Calling Dr. Kildare in 1939, where she co-starred with Lew Ayres.

  On occasion, Laraine and Reagan discussed politics. Whereas he was still a liberal Democrat, she was a staunch Republican. She told him, “If your friend, Dick Powell, doesn’t make you see the light politically, I’ll enlist César Romero, Ginger Rogers, Adolphe Menjou, Irene Dunne, even Mary Pickford, to convert you.”

  Like Reagan, she detested Beery, refusing to speak to him except on camera. When she’d played his daughter in Sergeant Madden (1939), she claimed he’d pinched her bottom until the cheeks of her buttocks were black and blue. “He’s nothing but a filthy, dirty old man,” she complained to Reagan.

  One day, when Jane arrived on the set for lunch with her husband, he introduced her to Laraine. Later, Jane told him, “She’s pleasant enough, but she lacks star quality. She’ll never be a front-rank actress. Hollywood is filled with these fluffy bits. I think she’d be passable playing the secretary to some boss.”

  “Meow!” was Reagan’s response.

  He got along better with the film’s supporting actors than he did with the stars. He met Russia-born Tom Conway, the brother of the more famous actor George Sanders. Conway would be remembered in the ‘40s for taking over the role from his brother of the sleuthing “Falcon” in a detective serial.

  When Reagan met Conway, he was already showing signs of alcoholism, which in time would lead to his sad death in a flophouse in Venice, California.

  Over lunch one day, Reagan found him very resentful of his brother, George Sanders. “I love George, but I also hate him, too. I live in his shadow…He takes roles from me that I could have performed better. He is so imperious, so suave, so sure of himself. He looks down on the whole world, including me. His shit stinks just as much as mine. So do his farts. I used to sleep with him.”

  Cast as Red Giddings in The Bad Man, Texas-born Chill Wills was folksy and shaggy-haired, always bringing a dollop of color to any western. “He was the type you’d expect to find sitting around the campfire under a full moon some night in Texas,” Reagan said.

  Actually, Wills had started out as an amateur singer in minstrel and medicine shows, later forming a group called “Chill Wills and His Avalon Boys.”

  After the release of The Bad Man, critics suggested that the picture should have been far better. Beery and Barrymore got most of the attention. Reagan was barely mentioned in most critiques.

  He told Jane, “I don’t think Mayer will be using me again anytime soon.”

  Later he described his experience making that film.

  “I survived the Dead End Kids. And I survived Hollywood’s two curmudgeons, Wallace Beery and Lionel Barrymore. Even so, I probably couldn’t survive playing a leading man to Joan Crawford, even though I’m one tough hombre.”

  “I learned one thing working for Mayer,” Reagan said. “MGM is the Tiffany’s of Hollywood, whereas Warners is a hash house specializing only in meat and potatoes.”

  ***

  Late in April of 1941, Reagan and Jane stopped by the house of Jack and Nelle Reagan. He wanted to say goodbye to his parents before heading to the East Coast on a publicity jaunt, with Jane, to promote The Bad Man. He hugged Jack and kissed his mother goodbye. Then, on an impulse, he exited from his car to wave a final goodbye to them. Standing near their doorstep, his parents waved back. It was the last time he’d ever see his father alive.

  The night of May 17, Jack had been out on an all-night drinking binge with his newly minted friend, Pat O’Brien. “When two Irishmen get together to gab, there is some serious drinking of good ol’ Irish whiskey, the nectar of the gods,” he said.

  Nelle had begged him not to go, citing his ill health. “I’m as robust as an ox,” Jack had boasted.

  During a stopover of his tour in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Reagan received the call from Nelle that he had long anticipated. She informed him that his father, age 57, had died of a heart attack on May 18.

  He had collapsed on the floor of their living room, and she had immediately summoned an ambulance. She had phoned the wrong company, an inadvertent error whose timing might have contributed to Jack’s death.

  It seemed that there was a jurisdictional di
spute between emergency medical teams serving Beverly Hills and West Hollywood. Whereas she should have contacted a service based in West Hollywood, she had phoned one in Beverly Hills instead. When the company researched the Reagans’ street address, they discovered that their home lay outside the city boundaries of Beverly Hills. Therefore, they opted not to answer the call, and failed to ring Nelle back to inform her of that. During all the confusion and delay, Jack had died unattended.

  Nelle fully understood that her son had a fear of flying, despite all his daring aerial exploits in those Brass Bancroft Secret Service movies. “If you and Jane got in a plane to fly back, and something went wrong, I could never forgive myself. The thought of burying my younger son and my husband on the same day would kill me. Take the train. I’ll delay the funeral until you and Jane return.”

  When Jack Warner called Reagan, offering him the use of his personal plane—a TWA DC-21, which happened to have been at Idlewild Airport in New York City at the time—Reagan graciously rejected the offer.

  It would take five days before Reagan, with Jane, could arrive in Los Angeles. Years later, he would recall the moment of their arrival to his daughter Maureen. “It was a grand California day when your mother and I arrived at Union Station. We hadn’t been in the state long enough not to grasp the beauty of a California day. But despite the lovely weather, I was desolate.”

  The funeral was held at St. Victor’s Catholic Church in West Hollywood, which attracted a small group of mourners, the most notable of which was Pat O’Brien. As Reagan recalled, “I’m sure Jack knew that Pat and his new friends were there in that little church off Sunset Boulevard to say goodbye.”

  Before the funeral, Reagan learned that Jack had started attending church—a Catholic one—again. As James Cagney later described it to Reagan, “Your father heard the flutter of wings in heaven.”

  Moon Reagan was at the funeral, and he appeared grief stricken. “Dutch’s older brother had always been closer to Jack than Dutch was to him,” Nelle claimed.

  With a stoic face, Reagan listened to the funeral service for his father, the former shoe salesman, wanderer, binge drinker, and lapsed Catholic. Nelle, in a dress of lavender prints, sat between her son and Jane. The light from the stained-glass windows illuminated her Gothic American face, and in her lap rested a tattered Bible with dogeared pages.

  At the end of the service, she looked over at her son with her gray-blue eyes. “Dutch,” she said, taking his hand and holding it tightly. “You’re all that I have left in the world now. I know you’ll be there for me until the end.”

  Weeks later, Reagan talked to his friends about his feelings during the burial of his father. “I was beyond crying. My soul was desolate, desolate and empty. All of a sudden, I heard somebody talking to me, and I knew it was my father. He was saying, ‘I’m all right. I’m in a place that’s very nice. Please don’t be unhappy and take care of Nelle for me. Give my love to Jane and my new grandchild.’ After I heard that soothing voice, my desolations just went away. The emptiness was all gone.”

  [As a contract player with a steady income, Reagan had been giving Jack and Nelle $175 a month to live on. Since they had almost no house or car expenses, that represented a most adequate income early in 1941.

  During World War II, after Reagan was drafted, he made a deal with Warners’ to provide Nelle with $75 a week to answer his fan mail. Because of the number of movies he’d made in the early 1940s, his fan mail had continued, though not in the volumes before. Jack Warner agreed to deduct all the paychecks sent to Nelle from Reagan’s future services to the studio upon his return from the Army.

  Baby Maureen was only five months old when Jack died, and, of course, she had no memory of him. But she had great and lasting affection for Nelle, whom she called “Gramsie.”

  She later claimed that her grandmother “was something of a clairvoyant. She was absolutely convinced that one of her sons, ‘My beloved Moon or Ronnie,” would one day become President of the United States. One afternoon, she told me, ‘My greatest goal in life is to travel with you and Dutch to Washington for the swearing in of Moon to lead our nation.’”]

  ***

  One night in her living room, Jane turned to Reagan, dropping the latest script she’d received (The Body Disappears; 1941) onto her coffee table. “It’s just a silly little comedy,” she said, “by Erna Lazarus and Scott Darling, whoever the fuck they are.”

  Although Reagan didn’t seem to care too much about the script, he urgently wanted to know who her leading man would be. “Am I in danger of losing my gal to some hot stuff?”

  “I’m going to play opposite that darling Jeffrey Lynn,” she said. “He’s such a gentleman, unlike the other ruffians at Warners.”

  “What a coincidence,” he said. “He’s also the leading man in my next picture, Million Dollar Baby (1941). I resent him. He’s getting star billing over yours truly.”

  In addition to Lynn, Jane’s co-stars included her gay friend, the very prissy Edward Everett Horton; a former New York model, the sultry Marguerite Chapman; David Bruce; Ivan Simpson; and Willie Best. The director, Ross Lederman, was unknown to Jane.

  Two days later, at Warners, she met Lederman. He annoyed her, telling her, “I’m the only prima donna on this lot. Get it right the first time. I don’t go in for retakes.”

  At home that night, she accused Lederman of being “brusque, crude, rude, and a son of a bitch.”

  It was obvious to Jane that the storyline of The Body Disappears had been stolen from James Whale’s The Invisible Man (1933). As she’d later recall, “It was the worst movie I ever appeared in in the 40s.”

  In this daffy comedy, a young millionaire, Peter de Haven (Lynn), is behaving outrageously. His fellow partygoers, each of them studying to be doctors, decide to teach him a lesson. When Lynn passes out drunk, some of the young men kidnap him and place him on a slab of marble in the college dissecting room reserved for cadavers.

  As an outrageous and mad scientist, Horton is working on a serum which will make a person invisible. He injects Lynn with an experimental serum, making him appear headless when he awakens. Jane is cast as Horton’s daughter and as Lynn’s love interest. She, too, receives the serum and loses her head.

  As predictable, both Lynn and Jane get their heads restored before the end of the final reel. Science fiction is combined with romance and what passes as mystery in this cinematic flop.

  In The Body Disappears, Jane maneuvers a face-off with Edward Everett Horton, that champion scene stealer and comic mugger champ.

  Jane enjoyed renewing her friendship with Horton, whom she had met while filming her bit part in All the King’s Horses (1935). He would later invite her to visit his 22-acre tract of land in Encino. Dubbing it “Belly Acres,” (actually Belleigh Acres), he told her. “All it lacks is its own post office.”

  “I brought my Scottish mother to live there,” he said, “although she objects to my acting as a sissy on film. She demands that I attend church more often. When reporters come snooping around, I tell them I’m a confirmed bachelor. I hide my lover [Gavin Gordon] in the closet until the press departs.”

  No, It’s not a prosthesis...It’s Jane’s leg, the only part of her body still visible after ingesting “The Serum.”

  “All the actors, including myself, learned a lot from Edward,” Jane said. “The director offered us no guidance. We more or less had to direct ourselves.”

  “I hold Jane in the highest esteem,” Horton later said. “It took a long time for her big break to come.”

  [In the late 1950s, during one of Jane’s visits to “Belly Acres,” Horton was complaining that the State of California was forcing him to sell a portion of his land to make way for the Ventura Freeway, a major traffic artery that opened in 1960.]

  Jane found her leading man, Jeffrey Lynn, “dreamy. If I didn’t have Ronnie, I would have dated him. The trouble with Jeff was that he was too polite to fight the gang of carpetbaggers who ran the studios. He
didn’t know how to become a star. He did just what they told him to do. He made all those movies with the Lane sisters, including Four Daughters (1938). The year I worked with him, Four Daughters had inspired yet another family melodrama starring Lynn, Four Mothers (1941).”

  “I didn’t see Jeffrey for years after the movie was made,” she said. “I heard from Ronnie that he was in Army Intelligence. He and this blonde starlet, Marilyn Monroe, had small roles in Home Town Story (1951). And he did a little bit better in BUtterfield 8 (1960), with Elizabeth Taylor. But the Hollywood sun never shone bright enough on this leading man. He ended up leaving show-biz to sell real estate. Actually, he never recovered from the loss of the role of Ashley Wilkes in Gone With the Wind (1939). He once confessed to me that he would have been a bigger star were it not for Ronnie, who got the roles most suited for him.”

  Craig Stevens had only a bit role in Jane’s newest film, but he would figure into her future after the war. She found him handsome and charming, noting that he exuded masculinity. Horton admitted to her that although he had a crush on Stevens, “It won’t do me any good. I’m not in his league.”

  Stevens would later marry actress Alexis Smith, who would become Reagan’s leading lady in his first movie role after the war. Reagan would then follow that role by co-starring with Stevens in his next film after that, too.

  By now, Jane was critically inspecting every young beauty appearing in her movies, attempts to evaluate any player who might one day challenge her tenuous position as a Warners’ contract player. It was commonplace for a starlet’s options not to be renewed, and Jane had been lucky to hold onto her contract, such as it was.

  She turned an envious eye on one of the movie’s supporting stars, Marguerite Chapman, a former switchboard operator who evolved into a New York model. She had parlayed her victories into a Hollywood contract, making her film debut in 1940.