An officer in the movie tells his men that the Japanese should be watched “like you would a deadly rattlesnake.”
The enemy is depicted as a pack of fanatics, willing to fight to the last man, woman, or child, giving up their lives for their emperor. Viewers are told that the Japanese are willing to sacrifice ten million of their people. As narrator, Reagan grimly asserts, “Well, life isn’t cheap in America.” A Japanese mother is shown as she is presented with a box containing the ashes of her son. “We don’t raise our boys to be god in little white boxes,” Reagan assures his viewers.
Tarket Tokyo promoted the technological sophistication of the B-29, a flying Superfortress with Twelve 1/2-inch (12.7 mm) remote controlled M2 Browning machine guns and 20,000 pounds of “Earthquake bombs.”
The atomic bombs that later fell on Japan were delivered by this aircraft.
***
In For God and Country (1944), Reagan had an unusual role. Cast as a Catholic chaplain, he tells his fellow soldiers, “Gunsare not for chaplains.” His two closest friends are a Protestant and a Jew, both of whom are killed trying to save the life of a Native American. “We were trying to cover all religious fronts in this film, all except Moslems and atheists,” Reagan said. “There was a famous saying, ‘There are no atheists in a foxhole.’”
Racial issues in the then-segregated U.S. army were touched upon delicately and lightly, very lightly.
For God and Country is a plea for racial and religious harmony among men allied against a common enemy. As part of the film’s narrative, the chaplain asks, “What better weapons can a soldier carry with him into battle than those of courage, of unswerving devotion to his faith, and to his fellow man? The obvious answer to Reagan’s question is “a gun.”
Very few of these wartime propaganda films depicted African American servicemen, who were referred to as Negroes in most World War II movies. Wings for This Man (1945) was an exception, as it was devoted entirely to black pilots training in Alabama at the Tuskegee Air Base.
The movie begins with Reagan as narrator dramatically depicting an outnumbered U.S. squadron in a dogfight with planes from the Luftwaffe. The Nazi planes are shot down. Back at the base, it is revealed that the American pilots were black. To find their place in the sun, Reagan suggests, “These airmen had to overcome misunderstanding, distrust, and prejudice.”
For the most part, racial issues are not hit upon too heavily. Reagan states: “One thing was proven here: That you can’t judge a man by the color of his eyes or the shape of his nose. These men were pioneers, and pioneers have never had it easy.”
At the film’s end, a white officer is seen decorating a black pilot, giving him “Wings for This Man,” the title of the short.
***
Jimmy Doolittle salutes in Fight for the Sky. When it was released, Reagan said, “We’ve already beat the Krauts and the Japs. We’re just waiting for the Fat Lady to sing.”
The Fight for the Sky (1945) was one of the last of Reagan’s propaganda films. The documentary details the exploits of the American fighter escort pilots during bombing raids of Nazi Germany. They are depicted destroying the Luftwaffe.
Reagan’s co-star was Jimmy Doolittle, the aviation pioneer who earned the Medal of Honor as commander of the famous “Doolittle Raid” over Japan during World War II. In 1942, Doolittle and his fellow pilots shocked the Japanese by flying the first retaliatory air raid unleashed upon the Japanese mainland. The attack force of sixteen B-25s set off from an aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Hornet [now permanently moored as a museum ship in Alameda, California, near San Francisco.]
Targets of the raid included, among others, Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, and Kobe. After the raid, Doolittle’s plane, now out of fuel after twelve hours of fighting, went down in a rice paddy on the Japanese-occupied mainland of China. Rescued by Chinese guerillas, with the assistance of the American missionary, John Birch, Doolittle was smuggled into territory controlled by the Allies. Although Doolittle survived for other heroic missions and flying records, four of his crew members lost their lives as a result of being captured and tortured by the Japanese.
The Fight for the Sky focuses on Thunderbolts (B-47s), Mustangs (P-51s), and Lightnings (P-38s), planes that smashed Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe during its desperate attempts to maintain control of the skies of the Fatherland.
As Reagan asserts during his narration of the film, “Into these three great fighters, America poured its genius. No American fighter ever failed because of enemy odds, however great.”
As bombs fall over Germany, the film ends with praise for heroic Allied pilots “who in the decisive hour smashed the Luftwaffe and gave freedom of the air over Europe.”
The film was released in both a 20-minute version and as a longer feature with a running time of 40 minutes. Reagan narrated only the shorter version. The movies are packed with camera footage of strafing runs and aerial combat. Images of several fighter aces are shown on the screen. Each pilot survived the war, though some were captured when their planes went down and they were held as POWs.
The message sent out to these pilots was “Attack! Attack! Attack!”
One day, Reagan received a call that informed him that the Armed Services were releasing him to make a film at Warner Brothers.
***
The number of Jane Wyman films produced at Warners was greatly reduced during the closing years of World War II. She appeared in only a fraction of the movies she’d rushed through in the 1930s and early 1940s.
A highlight of her film production during World War II had included co-starring with Olivia de Havilland in Princess O’Rourke in 1943. Her schedule was busier in 1944 when she was cast in three B-pictures and made a guest cameo appearance in Hollywood Canteen alongside such stars as Bette Davis and Joan Crawford.
The war did not devastate her small family in the way it did thousands of other American homes. Reagan drove home from Fort Roach most evenings, and Baby Maureen was healthy, except for a tendency to cry hysterically at three o’clock in the morning.
Jane continued to see a lot of her personal friends, usually visiting them at their homes for private dinners or parties. Occasionally, at obscure locations, she went out dancing with Van Johnson.
As the war dragged on, Jane continued her affair with Dennis Morgan, who—because he wasn’t otherwise committed to military service—was still making movies for Warners.
Also, with high anticipation and whenever she could, she drove down to Long Beach, where John Payne was a flight instructor with the Army Air Force.
After his divorce from Anne Shirley in 1942, she had fully expected him to urge her to divorce Reagan and to marry him. When they had gotten together, both of them had expressed their “undying love” for each other. But there was no talk of his eventually marrying her.
One Sunday afternoon, with no warning whatsoever, he told her that they needed to talk. Their weekend, at least in her view, had been glorious, “almost the dearest, yet most passionate, I ever spent with John”
John Payne dumped Jane Wyman so he could marry Gloria DeHaven.
But that afternoon, as they faced a dying sun sinking in the west, Payne delivered news that devastated her. He told her that he was ending their relationship because he’d proposed marriage to the MGM music star, Gloria DeHaven. As Jane later revealed to both Blondell and Goddard, “I was in a state of shock. I had no clue this was about to happen. I guess John wants a wife more than he desires a married off-the-record gal like me hanging on to him.”
Battling Blondes: June Allyson.
At the base, after his kiss-off speech, Payne reached for her hand after opening her car door. “Maybe we’ll meet again, kid, after the war is over. That is, if I grow tired of my bride and you finally get up enough courage to ditch Reagan.”
...and her nemesis, Joan Blondell.
“Maybe,” she said, declining a farewell kiss.
She later told Goddard, “I cried all the way back to Los Angeles. I lost wha
t was never mine in the first place.”
Goddard knew DeHaven, who was the daughter of actor Carter DeHaven. He’d used his influence to get her cast in minor parts in two Charlie Chaplin films—Modern Times (1936) and The Great Dictator (1940)—made during the course of Chaplin’s marriage to Goddard.
Jane had seen DeHaven in the 1943 Best Foot Forward with June Allyson and again with Allyson in Two Girls and a Sailor (1944).
Payne had told her that DeHaven, who was seven years younger than Jane, would retire from the screen after their marriage.
[DeHaven retired from filmmaking, but only briefly, making a return in the lackluster 1948 melodrama, Summer Holiday, in which she played the sweetheart of Mickey Rooney. The picture flopped.]
Blondell and Dick Powell also ended up in the divorce courts, freeing themselves from each other in 1944. Powell soon became involved with Allyson, whom he would marry the following year. Powell and Reagan still continued as friends. But after his marital reshuffling, instead of showing up at the Reagan home for dinner with Blondell, he appeared there with Allyson on his arm.
Jane remembered her first meeting with the short and perky MGM star. As she later told Blondell, “Right in front of Dick and me, June flirted outrageously with Ronnie.”
“I’m not surprised,” Blondell said. “She’s a nympho, in spite of that syrupy personality of hers. The bitch lived with me for a time at my apartment in New York when she was trying to break into show business. I know all about that one.”
“Grab him, darlin’, if he’s in uniform.” Burgess Meredith marries Paulette Goddard.
After her messy divorce from Chaplin, Goddard began dating actor Burgess Meredith, who was making war propaganda films at the time with Reagan at Fort Roach. She married him in 1944, much to the consternation of Jane. “She didn’t marry him for his looks or for his money, of which he had none. Surely, it wasn’t because of his talent as an actor.”
Meredith himself explained to Jane what had attracted him to “P.G.,” as he called her.
“She walks into a room and you feel a sinuousness about her, a sense of danger. On top of that, she produces a nonstop flow of speech that is witty, cunning, and touching.”
After witnessing the marital debris of her closest friends, Jane consoled herself over the loss of Payne, whom she continued to maintain as “the greatest sexual thrill of my life.”
She told Blondell, “I still have the affection of Ronnie and Dennis Morgan, the two handsomest men at Warners. Not bad for a working gal like me. Who knows? In my next film, I may imitate Ronnie and develop Leadingman-itis.”
“Jane, dear, there are those—not me, of course—who claim you came down with that disease back when we made all those silly pictures for Warners in the 30s.”
***
The first picture Jane made in 1944 had the less-than-enticing title of Make Your Own Bed. She was teamed with the robust, 220-pound Jack Carson, who had first appeared on the stage in a college production playing Hercules. “I tripped,” he told her, “and brought down half the set.”
“That’s one way to launch yourself into show business,” Jane said.
Jack Carson sleuths and schemes around Jane Wyman in Make Your Own Bed.
In this, his latest film, Carson told her, “Here I go again, playing the clown, stooge, or whatever befuddled mess I am.”
[The title of the film seemed to stem from a not-very-funny standing joke about a doublebed.]
Once again, her lover, Dennis Morgan, was a frequent visitor to the set, ostensibly to see Carson, his best friend. Secretly, Morgan continued to use Carson as his “beard” to meet with Jane. As Carson later confessed, years later, “I was with them only until we left the studio. Then I scrammed to leave them to tend to business. Maybe Jane was not getting enough from Reagan. How in the hell would I know?”
On the first day of shooting, she met a Londoner, her director, Peter Godfrey. She later concluded, “Peter was a bit too experimental and avant-garde for a pedestrian script like Make your Own Bed. He was very talented and was also at home with the classics, including both Molière and Strindberg.”
The rather weak screenplay of Make Your Own Bed was by Francis Swann and Edmund Joseph. The plot has Walter, a gunpowder manufacturer (Alan Hale, Sr.) and Vivian, his wife (Irene Manning), living in the country and finding it difficult to keep servants. Walter solves the problem by hiring a private detective, Jerry (Jack Carson) who had been fired for arresting the local District Attorney. Walter tells Carson that his life is in danger—“Nazi spies are everywhere.”
In Make Your Own Bed, Jerry, as portrayed by Carson, needs a cover, so he brings in his fiancée, Susan (Jane), to work for the household as a cook. The biggest problem involves the fact that she can’t cook. Consequently, as improbable as it sounds, Walter and Vivian solve their staff problem by agreeing to take turns preparing the meals themselves, all the while keeping Jane employed.
There is another problem, however: Jerry, as a sleuth, can’t even locate the Brooklyn Bridge. But by the final reel, as could be predicted, the Nazi spies are unmasked.
The most fascinating woman on the set was Irene Manning. Though born in Cincinnati, she could be made up to look like a continental femme fatale. She had played the diva, Fay Templeton, in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) opposite James Cagney. Jane was jealous of her, although she tried to conceal it. She’d co-starred with Morgan in Desert Song (1943), and Jane had heard rumors of an affair.
To make matters worse, director David Butler had cast Manning in another 1944 movie, Shine on Harvest Moon. It not only starred Morgan, but two of Jane’s best friends, Jack Carson and Ann Sheridan. Jane lobbied to join Carson, Morgan, and Sheridan as a player within that film, but she was rejected in favor of Manning, which infuriated her and increased her distaste for the singer-actress.
USO darling Irene Manning: Making her own bed, and competing with Jane for the attentions of Dennis Morgan.
Manning didn’t seem jealous of or threatened by Jane, and at one point, invited her to join her on an all-girl USO tour of war-torn England for morale-boosting performances with bandleader Glenn Miller, shortly before his death in 1944.
Although at the time, Jane claimed that she was needed “to take care of Ronnie and Maureen,” she regretted not having been part of that troupe.
She later said, “Had I gone, it would have made a fascinating chapter in my memoirs.”
[Incidentally, those memoirs—although contemplated—would never be written.]
After it was wrapped, Jane sat with Carson and Morgan, watching the final cut of Make Your Own Bed. At the end, and over drinks, she claimed, “This is the worst movie I’ve ever made.”
Perhaps it really wasn’t, but that’s what she said atthe time.
Jane didn’t like her role in Crime by Night, but loved having her name in large letters above the title. She had a scene with Jerome Cowan (left) and with bit player Stuart Crawford.
When Cowan told her he was having sexual fantasies about her, she snapped, “Only in your dreams, pal!”
Bosley Crowther, writing in The New York Times, panned it. “For all the contortions it goes through, the movie is a limp dishrag, a labored but failed endeavor to fetch laughs with a lot of old gags, like kitchen disasters and wrong doors. The humor is feeble and unsustained.”
***
Jerome Cowan, Jane’s new leading man in Crime by Night, may not be a household name, but the appearance of this mustachioed character actor from New York had been immortalized in two film classics, which are forever being shown on TV. One was The Maltese Falcon (1941), in which Cowan was cast as the doomed private eye, the partner of Sam Spade, as played by Humphrey Bogart. The other famous film in which Cowan appeared was the perennial Christmas favorite, Miracle on 34th Street (1947). Jane would eventually see that film more than once, partly because it starred her former lover, John Payne, alongside Maureen O’Hara.
After serving in World War I, Cowan had become a vaudeville
headliner until 1936 when Samuel Goldwyn brought him to Hollywood for a role in Beloved Enemy.
Amazingly, despite his late entry into films, Cowan became one of the most employed actors in Hollywood, appearing in some 120 movies. He was the suitor spurned by Bette Davis who consequently ended up onscreen with him as The Old Maid (1939). After completing his role with Jane, Cowan prepared for another face-off with Davis in her star role in Mr. Skeffington (1944).
During the filming of Crime By Night, Cowan downplayed not only his role, but that of Jane’s. “It’s just another Warner Brothers’ private eye caper—nothing more, nothing less. The only thing it’s got going for it is a trio of very beautiful actresses, beginning with you but also including Eleanor Parker and Faye Emerson.”
“When I heard that you three beauties were in the movie, I had a wet dream,” Cowan said. “Although I’m faithful to my wife, Helen Dodge, I dreamed that all three of you were the chief girls in my Harem.”
“How flattering,” Jane said, not quite disguising her sarcasm.
After dinner with Cowan, Jane shared her impression of him with Morgan. “My god, couldn’t Jack Warner have come up with a younger actor to appear as my boyfriend? I looked it up. Cowan was born in the final year [1897] of Grover Cleveland’s presidency. He’s forty-seven right now and looks older. I’m twenty-seven and look like a girl out of college.”
“How true,” Morgan responded.
Jane also complained to the film’s director, William Clemens, about his choice of her leading man, and her role. “Basically, it seems that all I have to do is feed Cowan his lines.”
“But you get to kiss him in the final reel,” Clemens said.
“Thanks a hell of a lot!” she snapped. “That would be like kissing my father if I had one. With Cowan as my boyfriend, he could get arrested for child molestation. Where is John Payne now that I need him in more ways than one?”
Love Triangle: Ronald Reagan, Jane Wyman, & Nancy Davis (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) Page 58