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

by Darwin Porter

  Jane was right about sensing future stardom for the lovely young woman. In time, Chapman would appear opposite such stars as Edward G. Robinson and George Sanders. Big stardom never came, however, and Chapman ended up in supporting roles. One of them was a 1955 appearance with Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch.

  Chapman later recalled an unpleasant experience she had with Reagan when dining with three other cast members, including Jane, in the Warner commissary. Reagan had joined his young wife for lunch.

  “He was a real big shot back then,” Chapman said. “Headed for stardom, as everybody thought. I was sitting at table between Jane and Horton. When Reagan joined us, he immediately embarrassed me.”

  Marguerite Chapman—a serious threat to Jane’s sovereignty at Warners, or so she thought at the time.

  “I heard from Jane that you’re Catholic,” Reagan said. “Why are you Catholic?”

  “Because I was born one,” she answered.

  “That doesn’t mean you have to stay one,” Reagan said.

  “I never liked the man after that,” she said, “and I certainly never voted for him in future elections.”

  Other than its silly plot, The Body Disappears sometimes causes additional embarrassments when screened today on such networks as Turner Movie Classics. They revolve around the on-screen behavior of Willie Best, known back then as “Sleep n’ Eat.” An African American actor from Sunflower, Mississippi, he was a rival of the now notorious Stepin Fetchit, an actor who’s reviled today because of his screen portrayals of dark-skinned, stereotypically lazy simpletons. That was exactly the role that Best was called upon to play in The Body Disappears, in which he was filmed as an eyeball-popping illiterate fool.

  Best, who would soon appear in High Sierra (1941) with Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino, had been playing a variation of this role in other films since 1930. As he told Jane, “I don’t mind acting witless. That is, if the paycheck is fat enough. I call it ‘bringing home the bacon.’ It’s better than pickin’ cotton in Mississippi on a dog day in August.”

  Jane talked mostly about the frustration of her new career,” Lynn said. “She seemed ‘put upon’ by her new duties as a wife and mother.”

  “I’m tired of playing a sidekick to a bigger star,” she told him. “I’m always cast in that secondary position, or else as a reporter turned detective or a glasses-wearing bookworm. I should have some of the roles going to Ida Lupino. There’s got to be something better for me—and for Ronnie, too. All the roles I want to play go to either Lupino or to Ann Sheridan, who is my friend, or else to Olivia de Havilland. If you think I’m turning green with envy, you’ve got that right.”

  The release of The Body Disappears ended up as a second-tier programmer, and didn’t even play in some of North America’s major cities. Instead, it was dumped into small town movie houses from Peoria, Illinois, to Pocatelo, Idaho.

  Critic Clive Hirschhorn claimed that, “The only thing not injected with an invisible serum was the film itself—which, in the circumstances, was an oversight and not easily forgiven.”

  ***

  Back at his home studio, after his brief stint for MGM, Reagan was once again cast opposite Priscilla Lane, this time in Million Dollar Baby (1941). Although the ardor which had once blazed between them had dimmed, they remained very friendly and supportive of each other.

  After Reagan read the script of Million Dollar Baby, he told Priscilla that he was delighted to get the girl in the end. “I was afraid that Jeffrey Lynn would walk off with you. After all, he’s billed before me in the credits.”

  It’s somewhat ridiculous plot was based on a Leonard Spigelgass story called “Miss Wheelwright Discovers America.” For some reason, it took three of Warners’ most talented writers—Casey Robinson, Richard Macaulay, and Jerry Wald, to come up with an only mildly entertaining film script.

  As the plot unfolds, a young attorney, James Amory (Lynn), travels to England to meet with an American multi-millionaire, Cornelia Wheelwright (May Robson), who has been living abroad for thirty years. He tells her that her father earned his fortune by defrauding his former business partner. She is also told that the granddaughter, Pam McAllister (Lane), of the defrauded partner is alive and living in a very modest boarding house in New York.

  Feeling guilty, Robson journeys to America and checks into the boarding house herself, where she discovers Pam living across the hall from her pianist boyfriend (Reagan). She anonymously makes a gift of a million dollars to the shocked young woman, who works as a sales clerk in a department store. Elated, Pam immediately buys gifts for her friends in the boarding house—including Reagan, her true love.

  Their reaction is not what she expects—in fact, she finds them resentful. Her new-found wealth threatens her relationship with Reagan, who does not “want to marry money. I prefer to make my own way in the world.”

  In a totally unbelievable development in the plot, Lane ultimately donates her fortune to charity, winning back the heart of her hard-working musician boyfriend. Presumably at the end of the movie, they start out on their life together as poor as they were when they were dating.

  Unusual for him, Reagan had gone to work two weeks in advance of the shooting date, hoping to master some of the visual aspects, at least, of his role as a pianist. He went to Warners’ Music Department, where he engaged a pianist to teach him how to play a piano keyboard, if not musically, at least for how it would appear on camera. Up to then, he had no musical background except for singing with a barbershop quartet in the Middle West. He was taught how to manipulate his fingers on a dummy keyboard, making no sound.

  “A lot of acting is imitation anyway,” he later said, “and I became pretty good, as long as the piano remained silent. For a while, I almost convinced myself I could play.”

  Although his hands seem to be playing the piano in the film, the actual sound came from dubbing by a concert pianist.

  For several days, as Reagan studied the keyboard, David Lewis, the associate producer of Million Dollar Baby, showed up to take him to lunch.

  Reagan had tangled with Lewis before, in his earlier capacity as associate producer of Dark Victory with Bette Davis. He resented Lewis for his continued sexual pursuit of him. “God, you’re aggressive,” he told Lewis. “Why not accept a no as a no?”

  “Don’t hate me because I’m rich!” The Million Dollar Baby, as interpreted by Priscilla Lane, begs her strange-valued fiancé, Reagan.

  “Because I firmly believe that if you spent one night with me, I’d win you over and you’d switch to my side.”

  “That would be the day,” Reagan said, sarcastically.

  “I’m not a studio hack, and if you play along with me, I can really help make you an A-list star by getting the right roles for you. I believe that the producer and the writer account for 80 percent of a film’s success, the director and actor (or actors) only twenty percent. I like emotional dramas like the work I did on Camille with Garbo and Robert Taylor. I did a lot for Taylor, and he was most cooperative with me.”

  “I learned everything from Irving Thalberg at MGM, and he was the best in the business. I found out that the script based on a controversial novel, Kings Row, is in pre-production. It includes themes relating to both incest and homosexuality, but that can be toned down for a movie. I could use my influence to get you one of the screen’s top roles. I could be a breakthrough for you. I see an Oscar in it for you.”

  “Why can’t you help me win the role without turning me into a male whore?” Reagan asked. “C’mon, give me a break.”

  “And you want me to do this for you without anything in return?” Lewis asked. “That’s not how we play the game in Tinseltown.”

  “Are we negotiating?” Reagan asked.

  “Think over my offer,” Lewis said. “I can get the role for you if you’ll cooperate. Jeffrey Lynn on this very picture is practically signing a contract that he’ll do my bidding if I get the role for him. You’re so goddamn stubborn.”

  �
�Listen, I want to cooperate, and I need your help. But I can’t…I just can’t.”

  “Will you meet me halfway?” Lewis asked.

  “Exactly what would that entail?” Reagan asked.

  “Nude massages. You’ve been massaged before in the nude at your golf club. I know that for a fact. The masseurs there working you over are homos. So you’ve already been that route before—and you ended up paying the guys to paw your beautiful body.”

  “But nothing happened with those guys,” he protested. “It was just a massage.”

  “If you’ll let me massage you, nothing will happen either,” Lewis said. “I promise I won’t go all the way.”

  “Well, since you put it that way, and since such a thing has already happened to me at the golf club, I’ll have to consider it. I really want a breakthrough role. I guess we might make some sort of deal.”

  “You’re one hard bargainer,” Lewis said. “Years from now, after you become a big star—with my help—you can omit this sordid detail from your memoirs.”

  “You can count on me doing that,” Reagan vowed.

  [Lewis penned the first draft of a tell-all memoir, devoted in large part to his long relationship with director James Whale (1930-1952), filling it with tantalizing tidbits about his troublesome relationships with Ronald Reagan, Robert Taylor, Bette Davis, Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer (with whom he claimed he had an affair), Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, Irving Thalberg, Spencer Tracy (with whom he also claimed an affair), Jean Harlow, Ingrid Bergman, and Charles Boyer, who he claimed was a closeted homosexual.

  Several of his friends read the manuscript and urged him to destroy it. Later, instead of a tell-all, he wrote a rather vanilla and harmless book, The Creative Producer: A Memoir of the Studio System.]

  On his first day on the set, Reagan met with the film’s German director, Curtis Bernhardt. He discussed not about Reagan’s role in the movie, but about events in Germany, out of which he had escaped from the Nazis. He was morbidly worried about his Jewish family and friends he’d left behind.

  “Bernhardt really filled me in on what was actually going on,” Reagan later said. “The massacre of the Jews and other atrocities. He convinced me that America was asleep at the wheel, claiming that the country should mobilize. He predicted that the Nazis would one day invade the U.S. from the East Coast, the Japs from the West.”

  “He was actually a very talented director,” Reagan said. “He shouldn’t be handling the fluff he’d been given. He’d directed both Jane and Olivia in My Love Came Back and now he was tackling our project, with its stupid plot. In my role, I was virtually insisting my girlfriend give away a million bucks. If Jane brought home a million bucks, I’d be worshipping at her altar.”

  During the shoot, Reagan lunched with Priscilla Lane, his leading lady. Instead of romancing her, as he’d done during his past, he listened to her pour out her career woes. “Even when I was big box office at Warners, I made only $750 a week. I was constantly demanding more money from Jack Warner. I also turned down roles and went on suspension.”

  She showed him a copy of the London publication, Picturegoer. “Even the magazine is asking, ‘Why is Priscilla Lane still knocking on the door of major stardom?’ The magazine got it right. I’ve just been a stooge to John Garfield or Cagney. I deserve much larger and bigger parts.”

  Then she congratulated him on his marriage to Jane.

  “Men are going to be scarce during the war,” Reagan said. “Maybe it’ll last until war’s end.”

  After six decades on the stage and screen, the Australian actress, May Robson, was coming to the end of a distinguished career. As the eccentric lady of wealth and good conscience, she virtually stole the picture, Million Dollar Baby, from its other actors. She would die the following year at the age of eighty-four. During the shoot, she invited Reagan to see a screening of her recent film, Granny Get Your Gun (1940). “An amusing little trifle,” she told him, and he agreed.

  She claimed that there was a certain irony in her appearance in Million Dollar Baby. “I feel I’ve made this movie in reverse. In 1932, I starred in a film called If I Had a Million. I played the resident of an old folks’ home who suddenly gets a new lease on life when I’m given a check for one million big ones from a dying business tycoon. Now, in your movie, I’m playing a dying lady dispensing a million—you figure.”

  Reagan had not gotten to know Johnny Sheffield when he’d played the childhood version of the title character in Knute Rockne—All American the year before. But he made it a point to meet and talk to the ten-year-old on the set of Million Dollar Baby, where he’d been assigned the minor role of Alvie Grayson.

  His father had once read in the Hollywood Reporter an article entitled “Have You a Tarzan Jr. in Your Backyard?” Reginald Sheffield felt that his son, Johnny, fitted the bill, physique and all, and arranged for an interview for him to appear as the adopted son of Tarzan in the next jungle movie, starring Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan.

  During the audition, Weissmuller selected Johnny from among 300 juvenile actors interviewed. He soon appeared as “Boy” in Tarzan Finds a Son (1939). That same year, Sheffield also starred with Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney in Babes in Arms.

  It was bound to happen that a fellow actor would eventually transmit gossip about Jane Wyman to her husband, Ronald Reagan. The comic actor, Walter Catlett, had recently appeared in Bad Men of Missouri with Jane. A heavy drinker, he always carried around a secret flask, although his large consumption of alcohol never seemed to interfere with his work. He was living proof that the art of gossip wasn’t confined to women.

  One day, he cornered Reagan during a break in filming, claiming, “I want to speak to you man to man. I promised Jane I wouldn’t squeal on her, but I was never good at keeping a secret. I think a husband should know what a wife is up to so he can put a stop to it.”

  “And what is this hideous secret?” Reagan asked. “She’s a Nazi spy? A lesbian in the closet?”

  “I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Jane is slipping around seeing John Payne on the side. I know. I arranged a rendezvous between them during our last picture together.”

  Swinging on a vine, Johnny Weissmuller teaches Johnny Sheffield how it’s done.

  In private, they became “Big John” and “Little John,” and developed a strong affection for each other during the decade in which they made eight Tarzan movies together, including Tarzan Finds a Son (1939).

  Reagan looked stunned. “Spare me—I don’t really want to know the details.”

  “I’m sorry I had to tell you that, but I got fed up reading in all those fan magazines about what a perfect couple you guys were,” Catlett said. “If you confront her, don’t let her know that I was the one who let the cat out of the bag.”

  “I won’t,” Reagan said. “Actually, I don’t plan to confront her at all. Jane’s business is her own.”

  “You’re a very understanding husband—far more than I would be,” Catlett said. “If I found out that my wife was cheating on me, I’d beat the shit out of her.”

  “I’m sure you would,” Reagan said before walking away.

  Two days later, when Betty Grable called to confirm a Saturday afternoon date, he went to it, as he’d later confide to Dick Powell, “with less guilt than before.”

  ***

  Over drinks on Betty Grable’s terrace, Reagan laughed at the title of her latest movie, Hot Spot, co-starring Victor Mature and her nemesis, Carole Landis. It was based on a novel, I Wake Up Screaming, by pulp fiction writer Steve Fisher.

  “I can’t believe the Breen Office is letting Fox get away with a title like that. Guys all over the country will be making jokes. Do you play the title role of Hot Spot?”

  [Reagan was right. Producer Darryl F. Zanuck ordered the title of Fisher’s novel restored. Although the posters had already been printed defining the film’s name as Hot Spot, it was retitled I Wake Up Screaming after violent objections from the Legion of Dec
ency.]

  At one point, publicly and on the set, Grable and Landis had become embroiled in a hair pulling catfight until they were separated by Mature. “Not only is the blonde whore my worst enemy,” Grable told Reagan. “She and I are sharing the sexual favors of Victor.”

  “I’m surprised you’re making such a stark drama,” he said. “No song-and-dance numbers?”

  “My mother wants me to take my place up there with the marquee drama queens— Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, and Bette Davis. But Zanuck figures I’d better stick to musicals. In fact, many fans came to see Hot Spot thinking it was a musical.”

  “Landis won’t shut up bad mouthing me,” Grable continued. “She’s played third lead in two of my recent pictures, not only Hot Spot but Moon Over Miami. The hooker is telling everyone that she’s stolen both pictures right out from under me.”

  Grable tossed Reagan a copy of a newspaper with a column by Jimmy Fiddler. I tread: “20th Century biggies are boasting that if any of their singing stars go temperamental, they have an ace in the hole—Carole Landis, who has been improving her fine natural voice by industrious study.”

  Grable also showed him a copy of American Magazine. “Though Carole has appeared in big roles in only four pictures, she has been dubbed by columnists from coast to coast as Hollywood’s top glamour girl with the most gorgeous figure in moviedom.”

  “What does that make me?” Grable demanded to know. “Chopped liver?”

  “You have a unique talent,” Reagan told her, “and you need to concentrate on it and develop it. You can never escape competition. The same is true at Paramount and especially at MGM. At Warners I’ve got plenty of competition. Right now, Jeffrey Lynn is breathing down my neck, wanting parts assigned to me. And I want the roles given to George Brent. That’s how studio politics work.”

  “After divorcing Jackie Coogan, I was looking forward to my new life as a swinging bachelor gal, but it has its dark side. I’m doing a lot better than Jackie. I don’t think he’s worked since we did Million Dollar Legs (1939). We’re still friends. But both of us agreed that ours was just a childhood affair—we were too young to settle down. Unlike me, this former child star isn’t finding any demand for his services. He claims that his fickle public couldn’t stand for him to ever grow up.”