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

by Darwin Porter

  “A seductive bundle of impish charm,” is how Jane described him. Born in 1915 during Mexico’s revolution, Quinn had always claimed that whereas his mother was of almost pure Aztec descent, his father, Francisco (Frank) Quinn, had been the offspring of a Mexican mother and an Irish immigrant father from County Cork. Francisco Quinn had ridden with Pancho Villa, the Mexican revolutionary.

  Quinn became the first Mexican-American actor to win an Oscar—in his case, in 1952 for his supporting role in Viva Zapata!. Marlon Brando, its star, lost the Oscar that year to Gary Cooper for his role in High Noon. Actually, Quinn had originally wanted to play Zapata, but director Elia Kazan preferred Brando.

  On the set of Larceny, Inc., Quinn told Jane he was a master painter, and surprised her with his request to paint her in the nude. She politely refused, but he persisted. He told her that his painting would immortalize her the way Goya’s The Naked Maja had done for the Duchess of Alba. Jane still refused.

  “If you won’t let me paint you in the nude, can I fuck you in the nude?” he asked.

  “I must also turn down your gracious offer, your request put so delicately,” she said.

  In 1937, Quinn had married Katherine DeMille, the adopted daughter of Cecil B. De-Mille. He was never faithful to his wife. When he tangled with Jane, he was also having an affair with Rita Hayworth, his co-star in Blood and Sand (1941). Other recent conquests had included Mae West and Carole Lombard.

  He’d told actress Ruth Warrick, “I want to impregnate every woman in the world.” Years later, to author Darwin Porter, Warrick mused, “I didn’t realize at the time how literally he meant that.”

  Evelyn Keyes, “Scarlett O’Hara’s younger sister,” said “There was simply too much of Tony. Yes, down there, too.”

  At the conclusion of filming of Larceny, Inc., Robinson threw a wrap party, and most of the stars and supporting actors showed up. Broderick Crawford arrived already drunk.

  Quinn appeared to be suffering that evening from a deep depression. Speaking to her privately, he told Jane he’d be leaving the party soon. His two-year-old had drowned in the lily pond of his next door neighbor, W.C. Fields. After having a drink, and greeting the other guests, he quietly departed. She noticed tears running down his cheeks, and she ran out into the yard and embraced him warmly.

  Robinson, the party’s host, pointed out some of his choice paintings. She was very impressed with his knowledge of art, of which she knew virtually nothing.

  Young Jackie Gleason...”How sweet it is!”

  At the party, Jane made the rounds, talking with a Brooklyn-born actor, Jackie C. Gleason, who played a soda shop clerk in their film. “He told me he’d been born a pool hustler and a night club comic before trying to break into the movies,” Jane said. “I found his brief role in our film uninspired, and I told him so. He said he was off to play Bogie’s pal in a picture, All Through the Night (1941). I stupidly predicted he should try some field other than acting. How wrong I was! He did much better when he billed himself as Jackie Gleason.”

  ***

  As Reagan moved into production of the fourteen films he made that were released between 1940 and 1943, a Gallup poll conducted during the summer of 1941 placed him at number 82 in the roster of American box office attractions. The number one spot went to Clark Gable, largely because of the success of his portrayal of Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind (1939), which, in 1940, was still playing in movie houses across America.

  Much to her disappointment, Jane Wyman did not rank among the top one hundred box office draws.

  As far as paychecks went, “The King” (Gable) made $210,000 per picture; Errol Flynn $157,000; and Reagan $52,000 per film.

  A more in-depth survey of movie audiences found that Jack Warner’s attempt to turn Reagan into a romantic lead had largely failed. Reagan’s greatest fans were young men and boys eighteen and under, no doubt stemming from his roles as Secret Service agent, Brass Bancroft.

  Surveys showed that one out of ten movie fans would go see a film if Reagan’s name was on the marquee. In contrast, 30 to 40 percent of Americans asserted that they would go see any film starring Flynn.

  Reagan was slightly more popular with women than with men. Most of them seemed to feel, “He’s a Mr. Average Nice Guy, but he’s no Adonis.” One woman wrote, “I find his crinkly eyes and wide grin a good substitute for glamour.”

  One fan wrote, “My Mom would approve of him if I brought him home.”

  Another commented, “Ronald Reagan suggests home for Christmas, football games, summer jobs at gas stations, junior proms with white carnations, and a fraternity pin worn on a girl’s sweater.”

  Responding to the polls, Reagan admitted, “I know I’m no Errol Flynn or Charles Boyer. A man doesn’t have to stand out from his fellow man to make his mark in the world. Average will do.”

  Flight Patrol (whose name would later be changed to International Squadron; 1941) was Reagan’s 27th film. When he asked its director, Lothar Mendes, the names of his leading ladies, it was confirmed that he’d be working with Joan Perry (Mrs. Harry Cohn) again. This time, she’d been reduced to fifth position in the star lineup. His other two leading ladies included Olympe Bradna and Julie Bishop, actresses unfamiliar to him.

  Reagan was a bit leery of Berlin-born Mendes because he had a negative stereotype of German and Austrian directors, gained in part from the stormy legend of Erichvon Stroheim during the Silent era.

  Mendes’ most famous film was the 1934 Jew Süss. [In the U.S., it was released as Power—Jew Süss. That film, which condemned Nazi atrocities, is not to be confused with the notorious anti-Jewish film, Jud Süss (1940), which was commissioned by Josef Goebbels through the UFA Studios in Berlin.

  Jew Süss was a British historical drama based on Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1925 novel of the same name. It starred the German actor, Conrad Veidt, who later achieved screen immortality in Casablanca (1942).]

  Screenwriters Kenneth Gamet and Barry Truivers met with Reagan to talk over how they had conceived his role of Pilot Jimmy Grant in International Squadron. “Grant is a cocky man, a real son of a bitch,” Trivers said. “His devil-may-care attitude leads to the death of two of his comrades. This experience turns him from a trouble maker and a braggart into an aviator hero.”

  In the early part of the film, Grant appears as a playboy, a loner, full of bravado. Behind the wheel of a plane, he says, “I’m going to get this baby to six hundred (MPH) If I have to get out and push. I can fly any crate they give me.”

  As a Yank in war-torn Britain, he joins fellow pilots from such countries as Nazi-controlled Poland, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia. “Sounds had a Notre Dame back-field,” Grant quips.

  The dreaded Breen office raised objections to the first draft of the script, which depicted Grant (i.e., Reagan) as a fun-loving womanizer. No sweetheart of any pilot was safe from his amorous advances. Facing the objections, one of the producers, Edmund Grainger, ordered the writers to tone down the seductively manipulative aspect of Grant’s character. As Grainger so graphically phrased it in a memo, “Don’t have Reagan’s tongue hanging out to lap pussy every time he sees a broad.”

  In its promotion of Reagan, Warners went to great lengths to portray Reagan as a great aviator, labeled in private and on the screen as an “unconquerable and intrepid pilot.” For the release of International Squadron, the men in Warners’ publicity department pulled out the stops, writing that “Reagan plays an avenging angel hurtling out of the heavens to shoot down Herman Göring’s Luftwaffe pilots before they could bomb London.” Another line associated with the role Reagan had been assigned shouted, “He is a man who lives only for today, because he might be placed in a hole in the ground tomorrow.”

  At the time America entered the war in December of 1941, Reagan was one of only a handful of men associated with valor in the air, even though his only experience in aviation had been faked in a movie studio. After one dreadful experience during a flight, he swore he’d never take another.
Of course, by the time he became President of the United States in the 1980s, he had overcome that fear of flying he’d had as a young man.

  In International Squadron, Reagan (as Jimmy Grant) plays a crack stunt pilot who accepts the job of delivering, transatlantic, a U.S. bomber to the embattled R.A.F. in war-torn Britain. After his successful arrival in England, he meets friends from the States, including squadron commander Charles Watt (James Stephenson) and Reg Wilkins (William Lundigan), another fighter pilot.

  Reagan isn’t interested in joining the R.A.F. until he witnesses a Luftwaffe air raid over London during the Battle of Britain. After he sees a child killed, he changes his mind and joins the Eagle Squadron, a British-sponsored air unit composed entirely of foreign fighters, including Americans, flying for Britain against the Nazis.

  As described in a 1941 critique by The New York Times, “No ace among war films, it is none the less a brisk, brash flier in pulse-quickening entertainment…it is the familiar yarn of the cocky American [as played by Reagan] who joins the squadron, creates romantic havoc among his buddies’ fiancées, and grows up after his breaches of discipline have cost the lives of two companions…Ronald Reagan is excellent as the slaphappy hell-diver who finally pays for his moral failures with his own death in combat.”

  Frank Wead, aviator, screen-writer, and critic of Reagan’s reputation as an aviator.

  A week into the shoot, Reagan learned that International Squadron was “the bastard copycat of an equivalent movie, Ceiling Zero (1935), that had starred two of his friends, James Cagney and Pat O’Brien. That picture had two starring male leads, each cast as a pilot. Originally, Jack Warner had wanted the script of International Squadron to have two male leads, Errol Flynn and John Wayne, each cast as a pilot. But when they weren’t available, the script was refashioned to make Reagan, as a pilot, the sole male star.

  An oddly distorted portrait of Reagan, supposedly windblown during one of his (nonexistent) flights.

  Within ten days from the debut of shooting, Mendes visited Warner and complained to him about Reagan. “He’s supposed to be so sexy that he creates havoc among the girlfriends of his fellow pilots. Flynn could have pulled off a role like that. But try as I might, I can’t find any overpowering sex appeal in this Reagan boy. He’s too clean cut, too American, the kind of guy you’d find coaching a Little League team.”

  The fabled aviator, Frank Wead, a stunt pilot turned screenwriter, had written the script for Ceiling Zero. During one of his visits to California, he visited Reagan on the set of International Squadron to see how this recycled version of his story was coming along. Based on Warners’ flood of advance publicity, he just assumed that Reagan was a daring aviator like himself. With that preconceived notion in mind, he shared several long talks with him, discussing his own former exploits in the air.

  A smiling Ronald Reagan represents the Face of America in International Squadron.

  Like Reagan, Wead was originally from Illinois. But, unlike Reagan, he was a bona-fide American aviation hero. During World War II, he had been promoted to the rank of commander.

  As a screenwriter, Wead, in 1938, had received two Academy Award nominations, one for Best Original Story for Test Pilot, starring Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy, and a second for Best Screenplay for The Citadel with Robert Donat, Rosalind Russell, and Rex Harrison.

  At one point, Wead invited Reagan to drive from Los Angeles south to San Diego with him so he could make a test flight, accompanied by Reagan, of an experimental Naval aircraft.

  Reagan politely refused, claiming that Warners wouldn’t permit him to take such a risk during the shooting of a movie.

  Lovely and patriotic Julie Bishop, as portrayed by YANK magazine as one of their choices for Armed Forces “pinup girl” of 1944

  Wead became very friendly with Reagan, proposing that the young actor should refer to him by his nickname of “Spig.” Reagan later told Pat O’Brien, “Spig’s life story should become the subject of a film, entitled Spig, about his life’s involvement with aviation.”

  In International Squadron, Reagan was surrounded with an array of talented supporting players, including Julie Bishop, a California-born actress who’d begun making films in 1923. As a child, she’d appeared in Laurel and Hardy movies. During her work with Reagan, she would sign for roles in Princess O’Rourke (1943) with Olivia de Havilland, Robert Cummings, and Jane Wyman; and also with Humphrey Bogart in Action in the North Atlantic (also 1943).

  Bishop would appear in a few more movies, including a role in The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) as a down-on-her-luck waitress, with John Wayne, but that dream of a big career faded. In 1944, she married General Clarence A. Shoop, a test pilot for Howard Hughes who later became a vice president of Hughes Aircraft.

  Perry was upset that the film’s lead female role had gone to Olympe Bradna and not to her. The French dancer and actress was born in Paris, and Reagan found her an intriguing personality, the daughter of two world famous bareback riders. At the age of eight, she’d become a professional acrobatic dancer, later joining the Folies Bergère in Paris. After moving to Hollywood, she launched her film career in 1933, appearing over the years with such notables as Gary Cooper and George Raft.

  Ironically, Bradna would pose no further career threat to Perry or to any other actress either. After she completed International Squadron, she retired from acting and settled into a marriage with Douglas Woods Wilhoit, CEO of the Stockton, California, Chamber of Commerce and a political appointee to the Juvenile Parole Board and the local Board of Corrections. After seventy years together, both of them died in 2012.

  French-born Olympe Bradna, a former dancer at the Folies Bergére, being courted by “The Face of America” (Reagan) in International Squadron.

  Before Bradna settled down with Wood, she had a final fling with Anthony Quinn, who had just made a movie with Jane. Although married to Katherine DeMille at the time, Quinn visited the set of International Squadron five times for rendezvous with Bradna. They had become romantically involved when they’d starred together in the 1941 Warners’ movie, Knockout, which had cast Arthur Kennedy as a boxer.

  Reagan had met Quinn at the home of Edward G. Robinson. Although he had only recently recovered from the drowning of his young son, he was back on his familiar circuit of seducing starlets.

  One day, as he was leaving, Quinn spoke to Reagan. “I love my wife, as I know you love Jane—she’s a dear—but speaking man to man, a guy like me has to have something on the side. It’s my hot Latin blood.”

  “I understand,” Reagan assured him.

  ***

  By now, thanks to her wedding to studio autocrat Harry Cohn, Reagan’s friend and third female co-star, Joan Perry, had become one of Hollywood’s most gracious hostesses. Jane and Reagan were often invited to her formal dinners or cocktail parties. Sometimes, Jane would opt out, claiming, “I have to look after Maureen.”

  Reagan actually liked to arrive stag at Joan and Harry’s parties, enjoying the flirtatious attention bestowed on him by such beautiful starlets as Rita Hayworth or the sultry Evelyn Keyes.

  It was at the home of the Cohns that Reagan was introduced to some of the power brokers who would later lend him political and financial support during his bids for governorship of California and President of the United States.

  On the set, Reagan sometimes lunched with Perry. One afternoon, she discussed her honeymoon with Harry Cohn. “I headed for the pool, and he told me he’d join me there. But when I got there, I realized I had forgotten my suntan lotion. I returned to the room to discover Harry fucking our very young Mexican maid.”

  “What did you do?” Reagan asked.

  “I told them to carry on, as I went to the bathroom and retrieved my lotion, then headed back to the pool.”

  “That’s what I call an understanding wife,” he said.

  “I knew about Harry’s reputation before I married him, and I didn’t think he would change after we exchanged our vows. You can’t expect Harry t
o be faithful. I talked it over with Virginia Fox, who married Darryl Zanuck back in 1923. She told me she never expected Zanuck to be faithful, and I couldn’t demand fidelity from Harry, either. We had to enjoy the money, the luxury, the power, and prestige of being married to a studio mogul, and we had to forgive their womanizing. Every day at the studio, Harry, at around noon, has what he calls a ‘fuck break,’ and he summons the starlet of his choice for an afternoon lay.”

  Reagan had worked previously with his co-star, James Stephenson, most recently in the final installment of the Brass Bancroft films, Murder in the Air.

  He learned from Stephenson that he had signed to play the psychotic Dr. Gordon in Kings Row (1942), an upcoming picture in which Reagan also wanted to be cast. But on July 29, 1941, Reagan heard over the radio that Stephenson had died. He later recalled, “He was to have been the doctor who cut off my legs in Kings Row. But instead of him, Charles Coburn had to perform that sadistic act.”

  The handsome, blonde-haired actor, Helmut Dantine, born in Vienna, had a brief role in International Squadron. He’d already been assigned another part in the upcoming film, Casablanca (1942). In it, he’d appear as a desperate Norwegian newlywed gambling as a means of raising money for an exit visa out of Morocco.

  Dantine told Reagan that since 1938, he’d been involved in the anti-Nazi movement in his native Vienna. When the Nazis took over Austria during their Anschlüss, he was arrested and imprisoned in a concentration camp outside Vienna. His father had used his influence to get him released, after which he’d fled to California.

  Helmut Dantine, as a Nazi aviator in Mrs. Miniver.