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

by Darwin Porter

  During the shooting of Shadow on the Wall, the homosexual Latino, César Romero, was a frequent visitor to the set. After he’d been locked away with Scott in his dressing room for more than an hour, Sothern loudly remarked, “César is helping Scott mend a broken heart by offering his own special physical comfort. The use of his expert mouth.”

  On the set, Nancy befriended Perreau. A few years before, as a four-year-old, she had played the daughter of Claude Rains and Bette Davis in Mr. Skeffington (1944).

  Nancy seemed aware that Perreau’s career as a child actress was suffering from comparisons to a far more talented juvenile, Natalie Wood, who was three years her senior.

  Jackson predicted that Nancy and one of the movie’s supporting players, Barbara Billingsley, could usually be interchanged “as the same housewifey types.”

  [Barbara later hit it big when she was cast as June Cleaver in the long-running (1957-1963) sitcom, Leave It to Beaver. Nancy, who would probably have been adept at portraying an American mom from the 1950s, might also have been ideal as Beaver’s mother.]

  The New York Times praised Nancy’s performance in Shadow on the Wall, finding it “beautiful and convincing.” It could not, however, accept Sothern’s radical change of screen image, suggesting that she was better suited for musicals or light comedies. Newsweek claimed that both Sothern and Scott handled their “high-voltage roles with effective restraint.”

  Tyrone Power (left) with César Romero.

  Carmen Miranda, friends to both men, said, “These two guys committed what the public might call acts of unspeakable perversion, but what I might view as just having a wild party.”

  Nancy got her best review from Variety, which defined her performance as a standout, claiming “This actress is definitely a comer.”

  MGM brass, however, interpreted Shadow on the Wall as “just another cheap B-picture thriller.”

  Thau would later tell Nancy that it was just as well that the release of Shadow on the Wall had been delayed, because he believed that her two other films, The Doctor and the Girl (1949) and East Side, West Side (also 1949), were, in the long run, better showcases for her talent.

  ***

  “The Doctor” (Glenn Ford) and “The Girl” (Janet Leigh). Nancy, to her regret, was NOT the romantic lead. “Off screen, Janet got Glenn—not me,” Nancy said.

  As evidence of how small a town Hollywood was in the late 1940s, MGM designated, as director for Nancy’s next film (The Doctor and the Girl), Curtis Bernhardt.

  [Coincidentally, in 1940, he had helmed Jane Wyman in My Love Came Back. A year later, he had directed Reagan in Million Dollar Baby. Now, it was his turn to work with Nancy in a minor role.]

  The stars included Glenn Ford and Janet Leigh, with Gloria DeHaven appearing in a supporting role. At the time, she was married to John Payne, Wyman’s “true love” from earlier in the decade.

  But as the daughter of a real-life doctor, she knew how to play it. Here, with a sense of gritty realism, is Nancy with Glenn Ford, “The Man Who Got Away” from her.

  Originally entitled Bodies and Soul, the movie had an array of talented supporting players, most notably Charles Coburn, cast as a famous doctor and the father of the screen characters played by Ford, DeHaven, and Nancy. Other players included Bruce Bennett, Warner Anderson, and Arthur Franz. Nancy was typecast, playing the daughter of a famous neurosurgeon (Coburn), which—as the daughter of Loyal Davis—she was in real life.

  Like Nancy, Leigh would also write an autobiography. Entitled There Really Was a Hollywood, it was published by Doubleday in 1984 when Nancy was one of the most famous and powerful women in the world. Many fans wondered why, within its pages, Leigh deliberately eliminated any mention of Nancy, with whom she’d played pivotal scenes.

  “The choice was deliberate,” Leigh in later years revealed to reporter George Hills. “I detested Nancy Davis. Not only did she make a play for my then beau, Glenn (Ford), but she went after most of my roles at MGM.”

  “Alfred Hitchcock claimed that Nancy’s name was submitted for my landmark role in Psycho (1960),” Leigh continued. “After all, I received an Oscar nod—and should have won instead of Shirley Jones—for that terrifying scream, the most famous in film history. Demure little Nancy would have fucked up that scene for sure. Hitch told me, ‘I turned Miss Davis down, of course. The idea of casting her was absurd.’”

  “She went after my roles, regardless of what they were—everything from an ingénue to a tragic heroine. Perhaps a widow romanced by Robert Mitchum, a Russian spy opposite John Wayne, a naïve Southern girl, Gene Kelly’s girlfriend, Carleton Carpenter’s love interest (can you imagine such a thing?) or even Robert Ryan’s gun moll,” Leigh claimed.

  In her own memoirs, Nancy wasn’t as petty as Leigh. She did at least mention her as a member of the cast, but it wasn’t even a case of damning by faint praise. All that she wrote was, “Janet played Glenn’s wife.” Privately, she was said to have thought that Leigh’s role would have been better suited for her.

  Actually, Bernhardt cast their respective roles correctly. Leigh was seven years younger than Nancy, and as such was physically better suited for the role of “The Girl” in the film.

  Ford was cast as a young doctor who suffers from a difficult relationship with his father (Coburn), and pursues a romance with a young female patient (Leigh) in all her dewy freshness, [Leigh had been “discovered” by Norma Shearer, the former Queen of MGM.]

  Dore Schary wanted gritty realism and consequently, he ordered Bernhardt to shoot the scenes “on the fly” in New York City. That involved setting up cameras on the actual streets and sidewalks “to film the natives,” as Bernhardt defined them.

  Years later, although Ford hardly remembered being in the movie with Nancy, he had nothing but praise for Leigh. “She had ability, brains, and ambition. I got to know her.”

  Bernhardt described their relationship in more cynical terms. “Ford got to know her all right, like David knew Bathsheba. Janet Leigh ingratiated herself with Ford by launching their romance one afternoon when she pissed all over him.”

  He was referring to a scene where Ford and Leigh played a newly married couple. On their wedding night, he has to carry her up two flights of stairs. As he does, he whispers to her, “I don’t think I can make it.”

  “The more he struggled, the more I laughed,” Leigh wrote, “until finally, I passed the threshold of restraint and wet my pants, which only made me laugh harder—and it kept coming (I swear). I could see a spot on my skirt in the actual film.”

  Ford, at the time, was married to singer-dancer Eleanor Powell, who had retired from the screen to marry an unfaithful husband. Like Reagan, Ford came down with “Leadinglady-itis," as provoked by Rita Hayworth. Along the way, he managed to seduce Eva Gabor, Joan Crawford, Judy Garland, Margaret Sullavan, and Barbara Stanwyck. He even had a one-night stand (surprise!) with Marilyn Monroe, as he confessed to his son, Peter Ford. The question is still out as to whether Bette Davis seduced him when they co-starred together in A Stolen Life (1946).

  After meeting Ford, playwright Clifford Odets, the lover of Cary Grant, issued a strange pronouncement. “It is an easily won bet that in a few years, Ford will get just like the other movie people: Bored, sprawling, careless, an overly relaxed fallen angel— They are all affable boys out here, almost tramps.”

  In The Doctor and the Girl, DeHaven was cast as the most rebellious of Coburn’s three daughters, running off to live in Greenwich Village. Her character was described as “flouncy and indiscreet.” After falling ill from an illegal, back alley abortion, she arrives, near death, on her brother’s doorstep. She has lost much blood and dies shortly afterward, in spite of what one critic called “the desperate ding-dong struggle on the table to save her.”

  [In another of the ironies of Hollywood, Nancy found herself working closely with DeHaven, who was the ‘blood enemy” of Jane Wyman, having stolen John Payne from her.]

  It has been said that Nancy Davi
s, as a lonely young girl, learned the power of fantasy and self-creation from her actress mother and theatrical godmother, each of them larger-than-life actresses who ate up the scenery.

  In somewhat nerdy contrast, Nancy played Coburn’s dutiful daughter, who marries a successful pediatrician (Warner Anderson). Bernhardt ordered that one of her scenes be reshot: After Nancy greeted Ford, cast as her brother, with unseemly emotion, the director admonished her with, “Please remember that you’re playing Glenn’s sister, not his lover.”

  In another memorable scene, Nancy, clad in mink, arrives one wintry day at her brother’s dingy third-floor walkup. Before leaving, she gives Leigh (playing her sister-in-law) her mink coat. After she’s gone, Ford tells his wife, “She has plenty more mink coats at home.”

  Also cast as a doctor, Arthur Franz was introduced to Nancy. He would co-star with her again in Hellcats of the Navy (1957), the only movie she ever made with Reagan.

  Bernhardt claimed, “Janet had Glenn tied up, so Nancy went after Bruce [Bennett], or so it seemed to me. I think she struck out, but who knows? I know that Virginia Mayo fell for Bruce big time when they made Smart Girls Don’t Talk in ’48.”

  Although the film contained ”two male beauties,” Bennett and Ford, neither of them gave Nancy a tumble, so it was alleged. Off screen, she was pursued by Coburn, then in his seventies, perhaps rehearsing for his role in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), when, as a millionaire, he lecherously chased after Marilyn Monroe.

  Nancy later claimed, “Charles invited me to dinner, and I spent the rest of the evening fighting him off.”

  The 98-minute film made a profit of $184,000 on a budget of slightly more than a million dollars. It opened on September 29, 1949 in theaters around the country. Nearly all critics ignored Nancy’s performance, the focus being on Ford, Leigh, and Coburn. Variety was an exception, faintly praising it with the evaluation: “Nancy Davis is to be favorably noted.”

  The New York Times critiqued The Doctor and the Girl as “a nice little bedside tear-jerker—slightly gruesome, of course, but full of hope. In the role of the noble young doctor, who shuns a Park Avenue practice to help the working poor, Ford does a satisfactory job of solemnly carrying the torch flung by Dr. Kildare in that film series. Suture! Suture tie! Sponge!”

  ***

  Director Gottfried Reinhardt later claimed, “With all the talent on tap, I didn’t want to cast Nancy Davis in a picture, so I palmed her off on Dore Schary.”

  Consequently, it was Schary who ordered the producer, Voldemar Vetluguin, to cast Nancy in East Side, West Side, an A-list picture top heavy with stars—Barbara Stan-wyck, James Mason, Ava Gardner, Van Heflin, and Cyd Charisse.

  The MGM film was set for a Christmas (1949) release and came in on schedule.

  East Side, West Side: Nancy Davis in a “one-take” scene with Barbara Stanwyck, who, according to director Curtis Bernhardt, “had the hots for little Miss Nancy.”

  Nancy joined an array of very talented supporting players, including the communist sympathizer Gale Sondergaard, William Conrad, Douglas Kennedy, and William Frawley. Cast as a supporting figure was Beverly Michaels, the sexpot of sexpots. “If it has blonde floozy written on it, I got the part,” Michaels said. She also captured the producer, Vetluguin, who married her that year.

  Mervyn LeRoy, the film’s director, always claimed that he had “discovered” Jane Wyman when he’d cast her in a very minor role in Elmer the Great (1933). “Ironically, I was the same director who helmed Reagan’s other wife, Nancy, in her first A-list picture,” as he bragged in later years.

  East Side, West Side was a melodramatic mystery thriller about a high society couple, the Bournes, (as portrayed by Stanwyck and Mason) on the verge of breaking up their marriage. The interloping mistress in the film is Ava Gardner, cast as Isabel Lorrison, who is eventually murdered.

  Van Heflin and Barbara Stanwyck appeared together in East Side, West Side. He told her, “If you’d like to know me better and get acquainted with all my body parts, and I yours, all you have to do is invite me over tonight. I take loving a woman as seriously as I do sailing the high seas, and I view love-making as an art form. I like to make a woman feel as if she’d been loved from the tip of her brow to her big toe.”

  “An enchanting offer,” Stanwyck said. “You should pitch those lines to Ava Gardner.”

  As a femme fatale, Gardner undulates across the screen, claiming that with the crook of a finger, she can lure Mason away from Stanwyck. Gardner later said that her performance was inspired by Joan Crawford’s attempt to steal Norma Shearer’s husband in The Women (1939).

  [In a touch of irony, whereas in 1949 Gardner played a home wrecker on the screen, she was defined as a home wrecker offscreen because of her well-publicized affair with Frank Sinatra. At the time, he was still famously married to his high school sweetheart, Nancy Sinatra.

  During the film’s conception, Gardner had been slated to play the lead role of Mason’s wife. But when Stanwyck became available, Gardner was demoted to the role of Mason’s mistress. Later, Gardner said, “At the time, I was seriously pissed off. But it turned out to be the better role, and certainly the more flamboyant one.”]

  Mason is the primary murder suspect. After many complications and mixed alliances, Heflin finds a woman’s broken fingernail, a clue that eventually sets Mason free.

  Nancy was cast in the film as Hazel Lee, the best friend of the character played by Stanwyck, who remains elegantly attired throughout the film, evoking a model for Christian Dior’s 1949 “New Look.”

  Her portrayal as a meddlesome tattle-tale wasn’t designed to populate any Nancy Davis fan clubs. Fully aware of Mason’s philandering, she deviously asks Stanwyck, “Is everything all right between you and Brandon?” She then reveals a string of details associated with her husband’s infidelities.

  In another scene, Nancy hosts a party for the character played by Heflin, a foreign correspondent launching his first book. It is he who will eventually crack the mystery of who murdered the character played by Gardner.

  LeRoy remembered Nancy as having two things on her mind, “Snaring a famous husband and having a big career. Gable had eluded her and she could only let her mouth water when Sinatra came after work to pick up Ava. Nancy told me she wanted to be bigger than both Stanwyck and Gardner. She didn’t have the talent of Stanwyck or the beauty of Gardner, so I suggested she’d set her goalpost too high.”

  Nancy and other cast members could not help but notice that Sinatra showed up most evenings to haul Gardner away for the night. It is not known for sure, but this may have been Nancy’s first encounter with Ol’ Blue Eyes. She developed a crush on him that would endure for decades. When she was First Lady, she frequently invited the singer to gala affairs at the White House.

  Nancy admired Mason from afar, especially his “languid but impassioned” speech patterns. The Yorkshire-born actor was married at the time to actress Pamela Mason, who sometimes visited the set with her friend, Zsa Zsa Gabor.

  During a chat with Mason, Nancy learned that he was a devoted cat lover. The year he made the film with Nancy, he and Pamela had published a book, The Cats in Our Lives.

  Nancy had heard rumors that Mason had a gay streak in him. During the shoot, two of the handsomest and most well-built young men on the film crew made extended visits to his dressing room. The DO NOT DISTURB sign was exhibited during each of their visits.

  In her memoirs, Nancy recalled that her one big scene was with Stanwyck. “I was nervous working with a star of her reputation and especially because I had to give a long speech. But when I got it right on the first take, she applauded and congratulated me, which, of course, made me feel marvelous.”

  One day, Stanwyck’s husband, Robert Taylor, was scheduled for an arrival on the set. Stanwyck told Nancy that she and Taylor had been invited to dinner at the home of Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman. “They are our close friends,” Stanwyck asserted.

  When Taylor appeared, Gardner, no
tified in advance of his arrival, retreated to her dressing room. “Watch the bitch go,” Stanwyck muttered to Nancy. “In this film, I’m playing the cuckolded wife. It happened to me in real life. Bob was fucking Gardner when they made The Bribe (1949) together. Now Gardner is getting murdered in our movie. It couldn’t happen to a more deserving person.”

  Two closeted bisexuals, Barbara Stanwyck and James Mason, cozy up to each other in East Side, West Side. But it was just make-believe.

  When Gardner heard that Stanwyck was badmouthing her on the set, she told LeRoy, “I notice that Bloody Babs is being nice to that Davis girl. She’ll be lucky if Stanwyck doesn’t seduce her. The little thing is Stanwyck’s type, just like Nancy Sinatra. Stanwyck adores Frankie’s wife, and he suspects something…”

  “Maybe Stanwyck just likes gals named Nancy?” LeRoy said.

  Ava, beautiful Ava Gardner, with James Mason in East Side, West Side.

  Faced with such female pulchritude, and the acting talent of Stanwyck, Nancy (cheesecake photo, below) simply faded into the background.

  In a memoir, Nancy described Gardner as “…so beautiful, she took my breath away.” She met her at the MGM newsstand when Gardner wore no makeup. The actress complimented Nancy on her performance in The Doctor and the Girl. Those were the last kind words Gardner would ever say about Nancy. Soon after that, someone told Gardner that Nancy was lusting after her man, Sinatra.

  Ironically, Nancy eventually found herself emotionally involved with two of Gardner’s boyfriends, actors Robert Walker and Peter Lawford. Gardner had co-starred with Walker in One Touch of Venus (1948). That had led to Gardner’s involvement with Walker’s best friend, Lawford. As he explained it, “Bob and I like to share.”