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

by Darwin Porter

  That same year, Morris became a Navy flier, piloting F6F Hellcats off the aircraft carrier USS Essex. A daring pilot, he shot down seven Japanese planes and contributed to the sinking of five large ships in service to the Japanese Empire. For his daring feats, he would be awarded four Distinguished Flying Crosses and two air medals.

  Back at Fort Roach, Reagan met Brooklyn-born Dane Clark and co-starred with him in a wartime propaganda movie. Reagan later told Meredith, “Dane calls himself ‘Joe Average,’ but he really isn’t. He has a law degree, and during the Depression, he was a boxer, baseball player, construction worker, and nude model. He told me as a model he got a lot of propositions, especially from homosexuals.”

  Previously stationed at Fort Roach, Clark had managed to make such war movies as Action in the North Atlantic (1943) with Humphrey Bogart, and Destination Tokyo (1943) with Cary Grant. Reagan arranged for both of these films to be shown at his military base.

  [After the war, as Reagan floundered to find a suitable movie role, he noted that Clark at Warner Brothers shot way ahead of him, playing the surly artist opposite Bette Davis in A Stolen Life (1946). He’d just appeared in God Is My Co-Pilot (1945) with Jane’s good friend, Dennis Morgan. Exhibitors in 1945 named him the 16th most popular star at the box office.

  Clark was one of the first Hollywood actors to appear on television, which in the late 1940s was just emerging. He advised Reagan to do the same, but Reagan told him, “I can’t see myself appearing on that little box.”

  Diminutive Dane Clark, a former nude model and boxer in New York, hit Hollywood in 1943. He tried to promote himself as a sex symbol, but suffered from the stigma of labels defining him as “the poor man’s John Garfield.”

  How wrong he was.]

  Actor Arthur Kennedy, who had played Jane’s boyfriend in Bad Men of Missouri, was assigned to a post in the FMPU’s wardrobe department, but he disliked his sergeant. When he applied for a transfer, he was very polite in describing his plight to Reagan. “Sir, my sergeant isn’t the type to stand on a blood-soaked beach and yell, ‘Onward men!’”

  “I understand,” Reagan said. “I’ll see what I can do.’ He obtained Kennedy a new post as assistant to the gardener at Fort Roach. “He spent a lot of time clipping hedges, but usually sneaked off the base at three o’clock and never got caught. That way, he could keep up with his drinking.”

  Reagan would appear for the first and last time in a movie, made on base, with Burgess Meredith.

  Meredith admitted to Reagan, “I’m not a dashing swain, but in a kind of mongrel way, I chased the foxes.” Over a period of time, that had included a group of A-list stars such as Hedy Lamarr, Ingrid Bergman, Olivia de Havilland, Peggy Ashcroft, Ginger Rogers, and Norma Shearer, plus a ménage à trois with a wealthy German lady and her lesbian lover.

  As a means of avoiding confusion with a certain politician, the actor, John Kennedy of Massachusetts (photo above) opted to bill himself as Arthur Kennedy.

  A talented, brooding actor of great intensity, Kennedy was assigned by Reagan the task of clipping hedges on their Army base.

  Meredith was filled with amusing stories, telling Reagan that during sex with Tallulah Bankhead, she had shrieked, “For god’s sake, don’t come inside me! I’m engaged to Jock Whitney!”

  Meredith was arguably the most accomplished actor Reagan ever appeared with, having starred in some of Hollywood’s biggest movies and also achieving success on Broadway. Before joining the Army, he had scored big in the 1939 film adaptation of the John Steinbeck novel, Of Mice and Men, a story about hope, despair, migrant workers, and marital infidelity during the Great Depression.

  “Most of the time, the guys thought Reagan was a square,” Meredith said. “Very formal, very stiff, a man who obeyed the rules. But he had his ribald moments. His favorite (comedy) routine, believe it or not, involved demonstrating the Seven Stages of a Man’s Life through a pissing routine.”

  Edmund Morris, in his biography of Reagan, described it as follows: “First, Reagan would imitate the Little Boy with bursting bladder, hoisting himself high on tiptoe. Then the furtive adolescent, a copy of Esquire in hand, making vague masturbatory motions. Next came Mr. Regular Fella, who unzipped, peed, zipped, washed, and exited whistling. The pansy followed, mincing up to the wall and ogling to the left and right, while taking as much time as possible in flagrante. He was pushed aside by the Athlete, who unfurled a prodigious member (he used the full length of this tie) and hosed the mahogany with such force that he staggered in recoil. Then the wobbling Drunk, spraying everybody in sight. Finally and pathetically, the Old Man doddered in, fumbling at his fly buttons—here he became cruel.”

  Arthur Kennedy, Burgess Meredith, and Dane Clark weren’t the only actors working at Fort Roach. Reagan became lifelong friends with the strikingly handsome George Montgomery. After he married singer Dinah Shore in 1943, the newlyweds often doubled dated with the Reagans.

  Reagan became aware of an argument percolating its way through Fort Roach, mostly in the makeup department, as to which was the better-looking actor, Reagan or Montgomery. Standing 6’3” and weighing 210 pounds, Montgomery usually won. Much of his well-muscled body had been developed by riding horses and working cattle on his family ranch in northern Montana, where he’d been born the youngest of fifteen children to Ukrainian immigrant parents.

  As he told Reagan, he’d landed a job as a stunt man on an MGM Greta Garbo picture in 1935, only two days after his arrival in Hollywood. That had led to stunt work in cowboy films, and by the early 1940s, he was co-starring with such stars as Ginger Rogers and Gene Tierney. Coincidentally, he’d also co-starred with—and been seduced by—two of Reagan’s girlfriends, Carole Landis and Betty Grable. Just prior to joining the U.S. Army Air force, Montgomery completed a wartime movie, Bomber’s Moon (1943), in which he and Kent Smith escape from a prison camp.

  Tall, rugged, and handsome, George Montgomery wanted to be an interior decorator, but became a boxer instead. Drifting to Hollywood, he became a movie star.

  He frequently went out on romantic dates with Reagan. Don’t get the wrong idea: Singer Dinah Shore and Jane Wyman went along for the fun.

  While at Fort Roach, Reagan made future best friends in the most unlikely of places.

  “I hated the son of a bitch when I first met him,” said William Holden, who, during the war, became a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army Air Force, working in collaboration with the First Motion Picture Unit.

  He recalled an early episode of his involvement in the Armed Services: “My friend, Richard Webb and I, from Paramount, went to Reagan’s office at Fort Roach to present our credentials. He ordered us to stand at rigid attention while the fucker read laboriously all the regulations. I hated his guts. Once freed from this god damn dictator, I called him a son of a bitch when I left his office.”

  Holden had really wanted to join active service, and he resented having to report to the Motion Picture Unit. Its only advantage, he maintained at the time, was that he got to go home every night to his wife, the American actress Ardis Ankerson, who acted under the name of Brenda Marshall.

  He related a memorable incident when, early one morning, Reagan and a camera crew were roughly shuttled into the desert for a training mission. “It must have been 120° F., and our bodies were soaked with sweat,” Holden said. “At noon, we were given a horrible lunch, Spam or something, and some rotting cabbage.”

  It was the beginning of a beautiful, life-long friendship between William Holden and Reagan. But it began under unlikely circumstances.

  “Ronnie and I were sitting on the can, side by side, suffering bouts of diarrhea from rotten Spam.”

  Hours later, back at the base, Holden said, “There must have been something wrong with the Spam. Every guy in the unit got the runs. At the barracks, there was a stampede to the urinals where 18 toilet bowls with no seats were lined up. In a mad dash it was first come, first dump. At one point, the noise sounded like fiesta night in Guadalajara
.”

  “On the seat, I turned to look at the guy unloading next to me. It was Mr. Ronald Reagan, our captain. After that, Ronnie and I became best friends, or more aptly, ‘asshole buddies’ as Southern boys say. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

  Sometimes, Reagan was embarrassed that he had not served on the front, even though his eyesight had prohibited it. That was especially true when he had a reunion with his Brother Rat star, Eddie Albert.

  Albert’s career with the Army had begun long before the United States entered the war, and even before the beginning of his film career. As a clown and high-wire artist with the Escalante Brothers’ Circus, he had performed in Mexico. Privately, he was working for U.S. Army Intelligence, photographing Nazi U-Boats in Mexican harbors.

  On September 9, 1942, he’d enlisted in the U.S. Navy, later becoming a lieutenant in the U.S. Naval Reserve, where he was awarded the Bronze Star for his bravery in the invasion of Tarawa in November of 1943. He rescued some 75 Marines under heavy enemy machine gun fire.

  Back in Hollywood, Albert presented Reagan with an intricately carved fastener [netsuke] removed from the “uniform of a dead Jap.” Reagan accepted the gift with a red face.

  ***

  Reagan immersed himself in his latest gig as a military propagandist.

  “Even when he came home, he talked about nothing but the war, speculating how the world was going to line up politically when victory came,” Jane told her friends. “He detested Josef Stalin, our ally, telling me that politics make strange bedfellows. He hated communists, especially home-grown Reds.”

  At Fort Roach, Reagan found himself making films again. Either in front of the camera, or as a narrator, his film and radio experience was highly valued.

  In his first Army film, he interpreted the title role of Mr. Gardenia Jones (1942), even though he objected to his character’s name. “Somehow, Gardenia doesn’t strike me as a fit name for a man.” Lending their talents was an impressive cast, beginning with Laraine Day, his leading lady from when both of them had starred in The Bad Man (1941).

  Supporting players included Charles Winninger, Fay Bainter, and Chill Wills. The director was George B. Seitz, whose career had begun in the Silents when he’d directed The Perils of Pauline (1914).

  Mr. Gardenia Jones was a documentary depicting the work of the USO, showing how it provided both recreational and morale-boosting services for American troops. In the movie, Gardenia has enlisted before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. When the invasion occurs, Reagan is seen in aerial combat, mowing down Japanese planes, a bit of fantasy for a man afraid to fly.

  In a surprise to both the cast and their director, this flag-waving war propaganda film ran into threatened censorship problems with the War Department. Despite the film’s patriotic overtones, their objections almost prevented MGM from releasing it. The War Department censors objected to scenes that depicted soldiers jumping up with joy at the opportunity of taking a shower in the canteen, or sitting in overstuffed, comfortable chairs. “This Army,” as noted by The New York Times, “feels this is not good for morale, as it implies that there are no showers or other comforts for soldiers in military camps.”

  After expressing its objections, the War Department allowed the film to be released anyway. Eventually, it won a nomination for an Academy Award as the Best Documentary of 1942.

  ***

  Lewis Seiler, who had directed both Jane and Reagan in Tugboat Annie Sails Again, was brought in to helm Reagan and others in Beyond the Line of Duty (1942). Seiler seemed anxious to speed his way through production of this 22-minute film, as he wanted to move on to his next assignment directing Marlene Dietrich and John Wayne in Pittsburgh (1942). Even if it were a rush job, Beyond the Line of Duty would go on to win an Oscar as Best Short Subject (two reel).

  The film is unique in that it cast both a sitting president, Franklin D. Roosevelt (in archive footage), and a future president, Reagan (as narrator).

  The star of the film was a bomber pilot hero from Texas, Captain Hewitt T. Wheless, cast as himself. A week after the raid on Pearl Harbor, Wheless, as the pilot of a B-17, had attacked Japanese warships in the Philippines and shot down seven Japanese fighter planes.

  In his next film, formally entitled Recognition of the Japanese Zero Fighter (1943), but identified around Fort Roach and to thousands of enlisted men as simply Jap Zero, Reagan found himself at the center of an instructional film teaching Allied airmen to correctly distinguish between enemy Japanese aircraft (the Zero) and the American P-14 fighter plane, which resembled it in many ways. Reagan played the role of a pilot who not only recognizes, but then destroys a Zero over the Pacific. He later said, “[In making this film] I relied on my experience filming sequences for International Squadron (1941).”

  Months later, after watching the film, Crump sent out a rather sour memo, stating “Ronald Reagan is too famous a face to use in films involving instructional procedures. Our job is to save lives, not entertain.”

  From then on, Reagan was banned from appearing in equivalent films, although Crump did not issue that mandate to such actors as Van Heflin, George Montgomery, Lee J. Cobb, Arthur Kennedy, and William Holden, whom Crump defined as “boozy and ridiculously charming, a poster boy to get young men to enlist.”

  Reagan (right) teaches, instructs, commands, inspires, and urges his companions and the nation onward in Rear Gunner.

  Reagan would, however, be allowed to work on other “War Effort” films not conceived strictly as “instruction manuals.”

  ***

  Without question, the most ambitious of all of Reagan’s war propaganda shorts was Rear Gunner (1943), with an all-star cast headed by Burgess Meredith as Army Private Pee Wee Williams. Supporting players included Reagan himself, cast as Lieutenant Amers, along with instructor Tom Neal and Dane Clark, playing an enlisted man who likes Coney Island shooting galleries.

  When she heard that her husband was working with Burgess Meredith, Jane was concerned that Reagan might learn some of her sexual secrets. Before leaving for military duty, he’d dated her best friend, Paulette Goddard. He would marry her in 1944. Goddard was Jane’s confidante, and she wondered how much the actress had told Meredith. As she said in a call to Goddard, “Please warn him that discretion is the better part of valor, or however the line goes.”

  The film traces the odyssey of Pee Wee, a shy Kansas farm boy who is transformed into a killing machine, thanks to his assignment as an aerial gunner in the tail turret of a U.S. bomber.

  Ray Enright, who had recently helmed Jane and Reagan in An Angel from Texas (1940), was called in to direct. Reagan had to leave town to shoot the film on location, both in the desert outside Tucson and also at the Las Vegas Gunnery School.

  The film was blatantly patriotic, aimed at encouraging young men to go to gunnery schools in preparation for aerial combat. Most men who enlisted wanted to be pilots, not rear gunners. Gunnery schools frequently advertised with the slogan “We are always on the lookout for men short on height, but long on ambition.” These schools were in the business of training “shorties” to become killers in the sky.

  One of Reagan’s lines proclaimed, “The film is about creating a modern knight of fire.” He defined the position of a rear gunner as “a passport into the vistas of victory.” In one sequence, an instructor tells Meredith, “A rear gunner knows that the fire from your guns is the fire of freedom.”

  After a film sequence demonstrating a rear gunner in action, Reagan asserts, “It’s shooting like this that will knock them on their Axis.”

  In just twenty-six minutes of frenzied aerial combat, the farmboy evolves from a hayseed to a war hero, winning the Distinguished Service Cross.

  One sequence depicts Reagan in the cockpit, evoking one of his Brass Bancroft movies when he played an “Agent in the Air” for the Secret Service.

  Viewed today, the film seems to have emerged from a time machine. Some references evoke a snicker, as when the dialogue includes a
reference to the Air Corps having a “gay day.”

  Unlike most of the films from FMPU, Jack Warner paid for the cost of Rear Gunner’s production and wanted to release it as a commercial feature, with exhibitors paying to show it. The War Department objected, claiming, “Actors such as Ronald Reagan and Burgess Meredith, who have been commissioned into the Army, should not be exploited for commercial gain by any film studio.”

  Consequently, Rear Gunner was released, without charge, to theaters nationwide as part of their regular programming. It was not, however, specifically promoted as a special feature, as Warner would have preferred.

  ***

  With a duration of twenty-two minutes, Target Tokyo (1942) was narrated by Reagan. It was a glorification of the B-29 bomber, a virtual flying fortress created to bomb the Japanese homeland into submission. Before the advent of the B-29, Japanese generals had claimed that their homeland was beyond the reach of any American bomber. The B-29 proved what a false statement that was.

  The film begins on an early dawn in Nebraska, where the B-29s begin their long journey, with stopovers en route

  As narrator, Reagan claims that for the Japs to stop them, their task would be “as hopeless as trying to stop the flow of water at Niagara Falls.”

  At one point during a bombing raid, the B-29 is shown flying over a munitions factory in the environs of Tokyo. Reagan asks the pilot, “Well, bud, what are you waiting for?” Immediately, the bombs rain down, destroying the factory.

  General Douglas MacArthur had to evacuate The Philippines during the epic battle for those islands against the Japanese, vowing, “I shall return!” Reagan became involved in yet another film, Westward Bataan (1944), which paid homage to MacArthur and his island-hopping military strategy. It depicted and dramatized the U.S. campaign to cut off supply routes to Japanese soldiers maintaining beleaguered strongholds in New Ireland and New Britain. Reagan declares, “The Japs can surrender or rot.”