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

by Darwin Porter

  “The soldiers were so young, so full of hope,” Reagan later said. “For hundreds of them, it would be their last night in America. Jeanette knew that. I knew that. Tears were in our eyes as Jeanette and I embraced at the end of her concert.”

  Without his knowing it, the brass was about to end Reagan’s days as an officer at Fort Mason. One morning, Colonel Booker demanded his appearance in his office. “Kid, we’re shipping you back home to Los Angeles. In your new assignment, you’ll be able to spend most nights in the bed of that beautiful wife of yours, the one the press calls ‘Pug Nose.’”

  “What gives?” Reagan asked. “I got the impression that the Army deliberately likes to assign soldiers to bases away from home.”

  “This is a special case, a whole new Division,” Booker said. “On orders from General George Kenny, you’ve been assigned to the Air Force base in Los Angeles. You’re going to make training and propaganda films for the Army.”

  Booker filled him in on the details: Although Jack Warner, who had been assigned the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, had not succeeded in getting yet another deferment for Reagan, he had nonetheless used his considerable influence to get him transferred to a newly created propaganda division of the Army Air Corps. It was called the First Motion Picture Unit (FMPU). Its task involved the production of morale-boosting films. Lew Wasserman, Reagan’s agent, had also been instrumental in arranging Reagan’s new assignment on his home turf.

  New films!! From a wartime production company whose government-sanctioned, government-funded mission rocked Hollywood. It’s the U.S. Army’s FMPU (First Motion Picture Unit)!

  “At last the Army got something right in your new assignment,” Booker said. “In my thirty-four years in the Army, this is the first time I’ve seen the brass make sense by putting a square peg into a square hole.”

  [Reagan later claimed, “I’ve been called a square several times, but that was never seen as something to be proud of. I just wish the Colonel had used a different image, calling me a round peg fitted into a round hole.”]

  After a final salute, and as Reagan was heading out the door, the Colonel called him back. “I never told you this, kid, but I liked you a hell of a lot more than I ever let on. In my short time with you, I came to think of you as my son. Now get the hell out of my sight before I get too god damn sentimental.”

  ***

  Before departing for San Francisco, Reagan had given Jane a public relations lecture. “Exchange that mink coat for an apron from the kitchen. No more dancing with Van Johnson at the Troc. Hide that costume jewelry, even though it’s fake. Wear sensible clothes and shoes, none of that glamorous stuff that will look whorish to soldiers fighting in the mud. At all times, appear as a dutiful housewife and loving mother. After all, you and I are the poster young man and woman of Hollywood at war.”

  “As much as I dislike what you’re ordering me to do, I think you’re right—god damn it and to hell and back,” she answered.

  For the most part, Jane followed Reagan’s suggestion and toned down her nightclubbing and partying. But she had another boss, too, and that was Jack Warner.

  The call from her mogul boss had come in at ten o’clock on Saturday morning. That was an unusual hour for Warner to call, but he said it was an emergency. She thought some star had fallen ill, and that she was being summoned to replace her on a film set.

  A star had, indeed, fallen ill, and Jane was being summoned to replace her, but not in a film. Warner had been informed by the Victory Committee that Rita Hayworth had become ill just prior to her scheduled departure on a War Bond fund-raising, month-long tour of America’s Southeast. Warner wanted Jane to replace her.

  “You’re to tour with John Payne,” Warner said. “I loved you two together in Kid Nightingale (1939). You both are singers and can both entertain a crowd. You get along with him okay, right?”

  “I admire his talent and found him pleasant to work with,” she said, demurely, concealing the depth of her passion for her upcoming traveling companion. She agreed to the tour and its terms, and Warner gave her the names of the people to contact about transportation and logistics.

  After concluding the call with her boss, bubbling over with enthusiasm, she phoned Joan Blondell. “If there’s any man who can make me forget that Ronnie is away, it’s John Payne,” she said. “For me, that’s like winning Lotto. I could have gotten César Romero for a traveling mate. I’ll really get to know what it’s like to be the wife of John on this tour.”

  “Have fun, kid,” Blondell said.

  Before leaving on her tour, Jane met with actor William Demarest, who had been her agent in the 1930s. He weighed in on his opinion of Reagan’s tour of duty in the Army. “I don’t think he minds it as much as some of the guys like Robert Taylor and Jimmy Stewart. They are leaving booming careers. In spite of Kings Row, Reagan is still mired in B pictures, so he’s not giving up that much. Of course, he’ll miss you and the baby.”

  “I’m not sure Ronnie agrees with you,” she said. “He thought his career was about to blast off like a rocket. Also, he’d just signed a million dollar contract, and now the money’s been cut off.”

  After talking to Demarest, she had only a day to pack and make herself ready for the tour, leaving instructions with Maureen’s nanny. In a call to Payne, she learned that he, too, was eager to depart.

  Help Win the War! Buy a Bond! Wyman with Payne in (top photo) Spartanburg, SC and (lower photo) in Burlington, NC.

  On September 9, 1942, Jane embarked on a month-long tour of the South, beginning in the bluegrass State of Kentucky.

  At many of the rallies, Payne auctioned off his necktie and was forced to keep buying new ones, many of them selected by Jane. One woman offered to pay $1,000 for Payne’s underwear—“or $2,000 if it’s soiled a bit.” He politely declined.

  Unlike Reagan, she did not suffer from a fear of flying. “I flew a few overcrowded crates during that tour,” she recalled, “but I wasn’t afraid. John was by my side, and he gave me security. Occasionally, I had nightmares about my friend, Carole Lombard, going down in that plane. Clark (Gable) was still mourning, despite the tons of mail from women around the world, many of them willing and able to replace Carole as his fourth wife.”

  In every town in which they stopped, there were endless luncheons, usually with the town mayor, the councilmen, and anybody viewed as a local dignitary. “But why must they always serve chicken à la king?” Jane asked Payne.

  From the very beginning, she had been served chicken wings in hot sauce. She found the dish usually made her ill, and she complained later that the food was too greasy. “Southern cooks seem to cook all their vegetables in what they call fatback,” she said. Complaining of stomach troubles, she switched to hot tea, fruit juices, and unbuttered toast, losing fifteen pounds before the end of the tour.

  The question most asked of Payne was, “How’s your love life?” He had a pat response: “How’s yours?” The most frequent question put to Jane was, “What is Ronald Reagan really like?”

  Her pat answer was, “A scholar and a gentleman…in all, a very nice and kind man. Great husband. Great father.”

  Payne usually sang first, followed by a song from Jane, then a duet from their joint appearance in Kid Nightingale.

  Because of hotel room shortages, Jane and Payne were not always able to get a suite, or even adjoining rooms. Sometimes, they were on separate floors. No matter, he planned to slip into her room at night to sleep with her, leaving before dawn and heading back to his own quarters.

  As Jane later told Goddard, “I fell in love with John in Kentucky and even more in love with him when we visited his native Virginia. We did shows in Roanoke. In the South, John reverts to his Southern gentleman accent. They love chittlin’ talk in these parts. The only time he is not a gentleman is when he makes love. Then he becomes Tiger Man.”

  “What a lucky gal you are,” Goddard said. “You get Payne and I’m settling for Burgess Meredith.”

 
At one point, Jane found herself in the same airport with her longtime friend, Lucille Ball. “It took a god damn war for Hollywood to recognize me as a singer,” Jane complained. “Instead of getting cast as the lead in a musical, like Betty Grable, I’m allowed to sing in bond rallies. They’re lining up camp shows for me, too.”

  “Even so, we’re late to the game,” Ball said. “Bob Hope was shaking his butt and Dorothy Lamour was bouncing her twat before servicemen even before Pearl Harbor.”

  “I hear they’re even sending Hedy Lamarr on tour,” Jane said. “She can’t sing, can’t dance, and can’t tell jokes.”

  “All she has to do is stand before an audience and let the guys look at her,” Ball said. “Perhaps she can take off her clothes like she did in Ecstasy. Or, better yet, she might tell the guys what it’s like to get fucked by both Mussolini and Hitler.”

  “My friend, Jack Carson, can tell jokes,” Jane said.

  “Don’t forget Orson Welles,” Ball said. “He can do magic tricks. Astaire can dance, and Veronica Lake, the midget, can show off her peek-a-boo hairdo.”

  Sometimes Jane was asked “Who is taking care of Baby Maureen?” She answered that it was Nelle Reagan, her mother-in-law.

  As the tour progressed, Jane began to part with some of the possessions in her handbag, beginning with a tube of lipstick which she gave to a woman who bought a $1,000 War Bond. Later on, she sold her earrings, telling Payne they were costume jewelry. She even gave away her compact and her gold cigarette case, a gift from Reagan, as an incentive to persuade someone to buy $2,000 worth of War Bonds.

  In Norfolk, Virginia, at their most successful bond rally, she and Payne netted $52,000 worth of War Bond sales.

  [Greer Garson later infuriated Jane when she reminded her that her War Bond rally in Huntington, West Virginia, drew a crowd of 12,000 fans, larger than any of the rallies where Jane and Payne appeared.]

  In North Carolina, one man asked if they had a War Bond worth $15,000.

  “Business must be good for you,” Jane said to him.

  “I’m a gambler,” he told her. “Like marines and doctors, we gamblers also contribute to the War Effort. Therefore, I’m glad to invest some of my profits in War Bonds. By the way, I cheat at cards.”

  “You come up here with that $15,000, and I’ll give you a kiss,” Jane promised.

  Anne Shirley...John Payne’s wife, and Jane Wyman’s competition.

  That promise of a kiss inspired her with an idea: She’d heard that some of the stars were selling mouth-to-mouth kisses on their tours. Hedy Lamarr had once sold a kiss for $25,000. When Jane tried that, there were no bidders.

  Later, she suggested that Payne should try to sell a $25,000 kiss. Amazingly, at one stop, he got a taker—a rather effeminate man. “I’m loaded and I’m buying.”

  The crowd booed him and Payne rejected the offer. “You should have gone for it,” Jane scolded him that night. “As you kissed the guy, you could have said to yourself, ‘I’m doing this for god and country.’”

  After heading a War Bond rally in Spartanburg, South Carolina, Jane retired to her hotel suite, where Payne joined her within the hour. For the first time, he talked to her extensively about his recent divorce from Anne Shirley, with whom he had not been living during the final turbulent months of their marriage.

  Upper photo: A hardworking First Lady (Eleanor Roosevelt) and (lower photo) a First Lady “who might have been”—shown here dressed with a 1940s sense of military chic.

  Throughout the tour, but especially on this evening in Spartanburg, Jane expected a proposal of marriage from Payne, with a recommendation that she divorce Reagan. But, as she’d later confide to Goddard, “He never asked me—not once—even though he told me he couldn’t live without me.”

  “How like a man,” Goddard quipped.

  Throughout the remainder of World War II, Payne enjoyed his life as a bachelor. Shirley’s public image as a sweet, dewy-eyed innocent was beginning to wear thin with the public, and her audience was dwindling. In 1944, she abandoned her screen career.

  For Jane, the highlight of her tour, other than the love-making of one of Hollywood’s greatest studs, was a luncheon at the White House sponsored by Eleanor Roosevelt as a means of thanking the entertainers for their contributions to the War Effort. Years later, Jane remembered the event with a certain irony. “I never became First Lady, but at least I married a future President of the United States.”

  At the end of the tour, Payne revealed his plans. He was only a year younger than Reagan, so he knew he wouldn’t be sent to fight the war in Europe or the Pacific. But he decided he was going to enlist as an Army pilot. He was already an expert aviator. “I’ll teach young guys how to fly planes, at least the mechanics of it. War veterans will teach them how to handle themselves in aerial combat.”

  Three weeks after his return to Hollywood, he showed up to take her dinner in uniform. “He looked like a poster boy for Uncle Sam,” she said.

  He told her that he’d been assigned to the base at Long Beach, California, where, as it turned out, he remained for the next two years. She promised she’d slip away and drive down to see him every chance she got.

  ***

  No sooner had Jane returned from her tour of the South than she received a call from Bette Davis, who informed her that she and John Garfield were opening the Hollywood Canteen in premises that had originally been conceived as a stable. The premiere of “this home away from home” for servicemen was scheduled for October 3, 1942.

  Davis wanted Jane to be there at least one or two nights a week to entertain the servicemen, dance with them, and serve coffee and doughnuts.

  Jane agreed, and Dennis Morgan was often her escort. Singing with him at the canteen provided the perfect cover for their continuing affair.

  One night, Morgan told her about some casting news at Warners that surprised her. “As you know, I was supposed to be the freedom fighter in Casablanca, opposite Reagan and Ann Sheridan. Of course, that didn’t happen. You may remember that I replaced Bogie as Cole Younger when he bolted from our film, Bad Men of Missouri. But did you know that I was the original player slated to appear as the star of The Sea Hawk? But Jack Warner decided that Errol Flynn would play a better swashbuckler. I was also set to play General Custer in Santa Fe Trail opposite Flynn, but that part went to Reagan.”

  “Well, now that Ronnie and a lot of other stars are in the military, you can clean up as Warners’ leading actor,” Jane said.

  She was right. Two years older than Reagan, and therefore not immediately eligible for the draft, Morgan did not enter the service, and continued to make movies throughout the war, beginning with Wings of the Eagle (1942) in which he co-starred with Jack Carson and Ann Sheridan. “It was a real flag-waver,” Morgan told Jane. His last such film was the controversial World War II drama, God Is My Co-Pilot (1945).

  As Jane later said, “Dennis fought the war on the screen, not off it.”

  Only weeks before she departed for her tour with Payne, the Treasury Department in Washington had launched its War Bond tours, calling on Hollywood stars to provide the entertainment. Stars were assigned to seven separate units, each sent to various destinations that included 353 cities and towns during the month of September alone.

  Jane was notified that she’d been assigned to Group 5, whose other players included Veronica Lake, Greer Garson, and Payne. At a launch party, Jane chatted with Garson and Lake and with some of the stars from Unit 6, which comprised her friend, Goddard, along with James Cagney, Reagan’s friend, as well as Hedy Lamarr and Irene Dunne.

  Jane also became a performer at the USO’s Camp Shows. She preferred not to travel too far afield, and she therefore confined her appearances to bases in California, where she was joined by stars who included Lucille Ball, Betty Hutton, Lena Horne, and the Andrew Sisters.

  From 1941 to 1947, the USO sponsored some 400,000 shows with such stars as Bing Crosby, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, and even Hattie McDaniel—“
Mammy” of Gone With the Wind. As Jane remembered it, “Danny Kaye was a tough act to follow.”

  Wayne Broyhill, an enlisted man, had a different point of view. “Danny was okay telling jokes and all. But we were surrounded by guys all day. We wanted female flesh, and that was provided by Jane Wyman. She did a sexy number and showed us her gams. The boys yelled and hooted until they were hoarse. That Ronald Reagan is a lucky bastard.”

  Jane never went overseas for camp shows, although she was often invited to do so by the likes of Edward G. Robinson, her former co-star, or such luminaries as Martha Raye, Merle Oberon, and Al Jolson. Demurring, she said she needed to be near her young daughter.

  Many stars were asked to appear in film clips slated for screening in theaters across the country. A Newsreel Division of the War Activities Committee of the Motion Picture Industry was formed in connection with this War Bond drive. Payne was asked to make one of these clips with Dorothy Lamour. On the day of the shooting, Jane went with him to the studio.

  “My God,” she later told Goddard. “Lamour practically tore John’s pants off him. She was one hot-to-trot bitch, who wouldn’t control her horny paws. He actually seemed to enjoy the attention. He’ll pay for that.”

  Beginning with Carole Lombard in 1942, twenty-eight performers lost their lives during their War Bond and morale-building tours because of illness, diseases, and plane crashes. In 1943, a plane carrying a USO troupe crashed outside Lisbon, Portugal, severely injuring Broadway singer Jane Froman. Despite her confinement at the time to a wheelchair, she fought her way back to the stage to entertain again.

  [Jane later noted that Hollywood was adapting Froman’s story into a Technicolor movie entitled With a Song In My Heart (1952). She lobbied aggressively for the role, only to lose it to Susan Hayward. “I desperately wanted that part, almost more than any other role. But it went to Susan Hayward, that red-haired bitch. At least I managed to tear Ronnie away from her entangling web. Hayward can’t sing. They had to dub her with Froman’s voice.”]