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

by Darwin Porter

  Jane was quoted as saying, “Now the war is real for us. Now it’s Ronnie’s war, and it’s also my war.”

  Although Jack Warner had powerful political influence in Washington, time had run out on his ability to get any more deferments for Reagan. In his final call to Reagan, Warner held out a titillating promise: “There’s a hell of a lot of buzz going around that you’re a shoo-in for the Oscar for your performance in Kings Row.”

  Northbound on that train, Reagan was saddened to think that the lucrative contract that Lew Wasserman had negotiated with Warners wouldn’t help him now. Household and living expenses would have to come out of Jane’s salary. It was clearly understood that studio paychecks ended whenever an employee entered the Armed Forces.

  Jane Finds “My True Love” in the Arms of John Payne.

  As reported by Screenland magazine, “Just when Reagan’s career and his personal life are rich with fulfillment comes his call to duty. If he is called, the one hindrance may be his deficiency of eyesight. Without his glasses, he can’t see clearly more than five feet from him. Ronnie’s adoring wife, Jane Wyman, isn’t saying a word. But there’s a hurt in her face as she goes gaily around Hollywood these days. Little Maureen Elizabeth, the Baby Reagan, is too young and healthy to realize the scope of the drama.”

  In the spring of 1943, Reagan took his orders like any other man in military service. They included early morning calisthenics. Surely he could not have imagined at the time that one day, he would be Commander-in-Chief.

  Arriving at Fort Mason, Reagan had to submit to another physical, a medical procedure which he continued to define as “jiggling my balls.” He was assigned the job of supervising the loading of convoys heading for Australia. “Our strategy was to build up a force there to prevent Japan from pinning down its flank on Australia and then being able to turn that attack onto the West Coast of the United States.”

  He often chatted with soldiers heading out to the Pacific. “They talked the same lingo,” Reagan said. “They were enraged at the attack on Pearl Harbor. Most of them had the same goal. To quote them, ‘I want to kill as many Japs as I can before they come for us.’ Never in my life have I met so many young Americans seeking revenge— and they’d get it, too.”

  At the time, the somewhat archaic Fort Mason was configured mainly as a Cavalry post, and Reagan felt at home there, as he went horseback riding in his riding breeches, boots, and spurs. Men not in the Cavalry often mocked “these cowboys on horseback,” reminding them that the Polish Army on horses had been “systematically slaughtered by the mechanized might of Nazi tanks.”

  Long after he left Fort Mason, Reagan recalled his most terrifying experience there. “I had to stand in line in my underwear with a long line of guys waiting to get vaccinated. The day before, seven of our men had died from inoculation from a faulty vaccine. I could only pray that the problem had been solved. When that needle was jabbed into my arm, I paused for a silent moment, waiting to see if I were going to drop dead. Obviously, I survived. But now I know what is meant when someone says, ‘I was sweating blood.’”

  On his second day at Fort Mason, Colonel Bob Ferguson came out to greet him. They were friends, from having served together in the 11th Cavalry. Ferguson had worked on Reagan’s movie, Sergeant Murphy, way back in 1938. After warm greetings, Ferguson turned Reagan over to his supervisor, Colonel Philip Booker.

  In his memoirs, Reagan described the colonel as “a small, slim man with the wiry physique of a horseman…blunt, quiet, and all business.” He soon learned that Booker was a fan of his Brass Bancroft films, in which he’d played an agent of the Secret Service. “But just because I’m a fan of yours doesn’t mean that you can give me any shit.”

  One night, Booker invited Reagan and three of his fellow lieutenants to his home for dinner. At table, Reagan learned that Booker was a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, as had been depicted in Reagan’s movie, Brother Rat. Reagan brought this up at table.

  The reaction from the colonel came as a shock to him. “I saw that piece of crap,” Booker raged. “Nothing has made me so god damn mad in my whole life. You guys libeled my Alma Mater.”

  At Fort Mason, Reagan avidly followed the war news from Europe and the Pacific. It was grim—in fact, 1942 was the darkest year of the war for America. Reagan’s fellow officers and enlisted men were despondent over bulletins coming in from the Pacific. Bataan had surrendered “to the Japs,” the papers said, and that stunning defeat was followed by the fall of Corregidor. The Japanese attacked Mandalay [the second-largest city and the last royal capital of the country then known as Burma], forcing the colonial British to flee from Indo-China to India. In Europe, the news was consistently horrible. The Nazis had launched V-2 rockets onto war-torn London, thereby obliterating massive acreage in the British capital’s densely populated East End.

  Among his fellow servicemen, Reagan could not escape the fact that he was a movie star, the only one serving at Fort Mason. Many of his fellow soldiers asked for his autographed picture and posted it on the inside of the door of their locker. When quizzed about the implications of that by Colonel Booker, Reagan said, “I’d feel more comfortable if their pinup was Betty Grable instead of me.”

  “I would, too,” replied the colonel. “I guess it takes all kinds to make up an Army.”

  At night, the horny young men quizzed Reagan endlessly about what they inelegantly termed “Hollywood pussy.” They wanted to know which female stars “put out” and what their bust measurements were. He answered each question with his usual good nature, without giving too many specific details and definitely avoiding insights into any of his own sexual relationships with the stars at Warner Brothers.

  Sometimes the questions were very provocative, even salacious. Larry David of St. Louis said, “I once saw a picture of you in the paper with Lana Turner. I heard this rumor that one night in New York, uptown in a night club in Harlem, she sucked off five big, dark-skinned bucks in the men’s room. Is that true?”

  “That’s a new one on me,” Reagan said. “I know Miss Turner. She’s really a fine lady.”

  On some nights, Reagan—even though he didn’t really seem to belong—went out “on the town” with his fellow servicemen, trying to fit in with their pursuit of hell raising, female flesh, and liquor.

  Back in Los Angeles, he shared some of those memories with Dick Powell, telling him that San Francisco was crawling with prostitutes who’d flocked there to service the military men shipping out. “Any guy could get laid, providing he had at least ten bucks in his pants,” Reagan said.

  He recalled meeting a “dyed blonde vixen” (his words) from his native Des Moines. She tried to pick him up, and when he turned her down, she focused on a handsome young lieutenant instead. “She told a bizarre story that one night, she seduced a man with two penises. I guess when it comes to a man’s body, anything is possible, certainly a freak. She disappeared that night with the lieutenant, although he assured her he had only one dick.”

  “The town was also crawling with homos,” Reagan said. “They, too, were flocking in droves to San Francisco, and they scored plenty. Unlike the prostitutes, they didn‘t charge. Men turned to them when they had spent their monthly stipend from the government.”

  He later said, “I was always opposed to gays in the military, although realizing, of course, that they were already there and had been since the days of Alexander the Great. There was a lot of stuff going on in the Fort Mason barracks at night, but I said nothing. It was a touchy issue, and I didn’t want to get involved. ‘Hear no evil, See no evil’—that’s who I am.”

  [In the closing years of Reagan’s presidency, the nation’s chief executive was challenged for a statement from a journalist about his stand on gays in the military. He had no comment. Later, he told Donald Regan, his chief of staff, “That’s a problem I’ll leave for George Herbert Walker Bush. Let him stick his neck out.”

  In the late 1940s, Reagan recalled another issue associ
ated with his experiences at Fort Mason. One night in a bar, he was approached by a homosexual with a Southern accent who told Reagan he was a playwright and had written a drama for Tallulah Bankhead. “He was drunk and volunteered to give me a blow job,” Reagan said to Powell. “After the guy told me I was the best-looking thing in pants, he reached out and felt me up and I almost punched him, but then, decided not to. He didn’t look like the violent type.”

  “I thought nothing of the matter until I was introduced to Tennessee Williams at a Hollywood party. I was divorcing Jane Wyman, and he told me that she was being considered as the star of the (1950) movie version of his stage play, The Glass Menagerie. Williams claimed we’d met during the war in San Francisco and that he’d unsuccess fully propositioned me in a bar. Then I remembered that nasty little encounter.”

  Tennessee Williams in Key West, Florida, 1947. He once propositioned Reagan.

  “I thought you were very aggressive just reaching out and feeling a man like that,” Reagan told Williams. “For copping that feel, I want you to write a great role for me, the equal of that Stanley Kowalski part you gave to Brando.”

  “Your request is my command,” Williams later quoted himself as having said to his friend, the author Donald Windham. “As a movie star, I’d place Reagan in the same position I put Lana Turner when MGM assigned me to write a movie scenario for her.”

  “I remember that,” Windham said. “You called it ‘a celluloid brassiere.’”

  “In Reagan’s case, let’s change that to a celluloid jock strap,” Williams said.

  Reagan later admitted to Dick Powell and Robert Taylor, “I was sometimes overcome with guilt as I watched these scrawny little boys boarding ships heading for the war in the Pacific while I, robust, virile, and more than six feet tall, stood by, sending at least some of them to their deaths.”

  Sometimes, Reagan’s duties included showing teenage schoolboys around the public areas of Fort Mason. “If the war had lasted long enough, some of these guys with pimples would have been drafted into the Army themselves,” Reagan recalled.

  Entertaining the troops: Marlene Dietrich at a USO show...trying to make the boys happy.

  “I was usually asked three questions: How many Nazis have you mowed down? How many Japs did you kill? Did you ever date Betty Grable?”

  Despite his rank as an Army lieutenant, Reagan never escaped his status as a movie star. His superior officers ordered him to give interviews to the press and to deliver short speeches at local benefits and War Bond rallies. His big night came at the San Francisco premiere of Kings Row. Colonel Booker ordered him to deliver a morale-boosting pep talk before the first-night audience. Seats for the first showing of his proudest cinematic achievement would be reserved for select members of the Armed Forces. From the podium, Reagan faced a sea of combat-ready men in uniform.

  Near the end of his tour of duty at Fort Mason, Reagan was ordered back for three days in Los Angeles to help launch the USO program, spearheaded by, among others, Bette Davis and John Garfield, with such stars as Joan Crawford and Marlene Dietrich lending their support as well.

  Back from her War Bond tour of the Southeast, Jane welcomed him home, but he later expressed concern about her dark mood. “She was polite and loving on the surface, but seemed strangely distant as if her interests were elsewhere,” he said. “Something was on her mind, and I didn’t know what. It seemed that without my presence, she had done just fine on her own. On the train back to San Francisco, I was left feeling rather empty about my homecoming.”

  He confided these concerns to his agents, Lew Wasserman and Jules Stein, and to Dick Powell, who may or may not have known that Jane had fallen deeply, perhaps hopelessly, in love with John Payne.

  Back at Fort Mason, Reagan claimed, “I smelled trouble,” when he was ordered to report at once to Colonel Booker’s office. There, he was told that he’d been summoned to the office of the commanding general of the post. Booker thanked him for his help with the USO program before warning him, “In the presence of the general, you’ll address him in the third person, and you stand at attention and salute.”

  “Yes sir!” Reagan snapped.

  ***

  Reagan recalled that he was very nervous when he was summoned into the office of the Commanding General. When it came time to write his memoirs, the general’s name escaped him.

  “In fairness to you, I’ve heard complaints that you’re sick and tired of being a showhorse for all our starstruck Cavalry brass,” the General said. “You are, after all, our only resident movie star here, eating cauliflower and hot dog stew with the rest of us.”

  “With your permission, sir,” Reagan said. “I only make personal appearances when ordered to do so by my superior officers. In the future, sir, I will refer all such requests to your office for your approval. You can decide whether the request is from some starstruck fan wanting an autographed photo and a look at a movie star. You know best, sir, what is needed for morale and the War Effort.”

  “That sounds about right to me, Reagan,” the General said. “I thought all these appearances were just your attempt to keep your name before the public. A lot of fans will forget a lot of you stars by the end of the war.”

  “I hope not, sir,” Reagan said. “Sir, right now, I’ve been placed in the position of ‘Ronald Reagan, have uniform, will travel.’ I do, sir, what I am ordered to do.”

  “Good to hear that, Reagan,” the General said, “because I have an order of my own. I have a directive from the office of President Roosevelt. He has declared that throughout the country, cities are to celebrate ‘I Am an American Day,’ with military parades, entertainment, and pep rallies with morale-boosting speeches. All of that will be followed by a War Bond sale. It’s all for the War Effort, of course. And we’ll need a major Hollywood star to sing the National Anthem.”

  “Sir, my wife, Jane Wyman, is a singer, and I’m sure she’d love to fly to San Francisco to sing the National Anthem.”

  The General cast his most disapproving look on Reagan. “I’m sorry to deny you a conjugal visit, but I had something else in mind. Frankly, I’m a Jeanette MacDonald fan myself. I never miss one of her pictures with Nelson Eddy, although I find him a piece of fluff. I have no idea what she sees in that silly fart. I understand you’ve bedded most of the Hollywood beauties. I’m sure you know Miss MacDonald.”

  “Sir, she’s an MGM star,” Reagan said. “I worked with the women of Warner Brothers.”

  “I don’t give a flying fuck what studio she works for,” the General said. “All I know is I want Miss MacDonald in San Francisco to sing the National Anthem and to meet me. Otherwise, it’s your ass, Reagan. DISMISSED!”

  After leaving the General’s office, Reagan, as instructed, reported to Colonel Booker. He had already received a report from one of his liaison officers. “Good work, Reagan,” Booker said. “I understand you pulled the General’s stinger before he even got warmed up.”

  Back in his office, Reagan immediately placed a call to Louis B. Mayer in Culver City. Getting his secretary on the phone, he told her that he had an official request from the Commander General of the U.S. Army base in San Francisco. His call was put through to Mayer right away. In the conversation that ensued, Reagan conveyed the General’s request for the services of MacDonald.

  Singing sensation Jeanette MacDonald, shown here with Clark Gable in San Francisco.

  “I’m the wrong man to ask for any favors from Jeanette,” Mayer said. “She hates my guts. I just terminated her contract. But I’ll have a friend of hers convey the request.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Mayer,” Reagan said.

  “Anything for the War Effort,” Mayer answered. “Otherwise, Hitler will be burning Jews on Hollywood Boulevard.”

  Within two days, MacDonald called Reagan, claiming that she would appear. Assuming that she would, he had by then worked out arrangements for her appearance.

  Reagan and members of the press were on hand to greet the singing star
at the San Francisco airfield where her plane landed. In front of reporters, she told Reagan, “You’re far more handsome in person than you are on the screen, and you look good in your movies, too.”

  “Flattery will get you anywhere with me,” he said, jokingly.

  It seemed that half of San Francisco turned out for the holiday celebration. MacDonald gave the grandest rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” he’d ever heard. “Her voice could be heard all the way to Tokyo,” Reagan recalled.

  She agreed to another performance, one that Reagan had arranged just for men in uniform.

  Throughout San Francisco, thousands of men were waiting to be shipped out from temporary housing in, among others, the mammoth Cow Palace and abandoned factory buildings. The soldiers had been confined to these dreary quarters and, in most cases, weren’t allowed off base, based on the government’s fear that they might accidentally reveal classified information. In those days, San Francisco was crawling with spies for the Japanese.

  The venue for MacDonald’s performance, and the 17,000 servicemen slated for attendance, was the infield of San Francisco’s Greyhound racing track.

  When Reagan announced MacDonald, she was received with wild applause. “Maybe you guys would have preferred Betty Grable,” MacDonald said from center stage. “But what you see is what you get.” At that, the servicemen applauded even more loudly, as she launched into a repertoire of hit songs from her movies.

  At first, Reagan had been concerned that the singer would be “too operatic, too high brow” for the audience, but she won them over.

  Of course, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” was mandatory, but she got the most applause when she sang “San Francisco,” the name of the song and the title of her hit 1936 movie with Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy. In the film, MacDonald had belted out her anthem, cheerfully and defiantly, in the dusty, earthquake-ravished ruins of San Francisco, “singing in that hokey but entertaining way,” Reagan said. “Although Judy Garland had mocked Jeanette’s performance in that film, the boys loved the song.”