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

by Darwin Porter

  After being dumped by Nancy, Krasna fell into the arms of Erle Chennault Galbraith, the former wife of Al Jolson, marrying her in 1951, the union lasting until his death in 1984. When he met Nancy years later at a party, he told her, with modesty and humor, “Any man would look great in my wife’s eyes after having been married to Al Jolson!”

  ***

  Rumor has it that when actor comedian Milton Berle, once known as “Uncle Miltie,” or “Mr. Television,” first submitted his memoirs, Milton Berle, An Autobiography in 1974 to Delacorte Press, it contained a lengthy section devoted to Nancy Davis.

  At that time, there was talk that Reagan might have a good chance of winning the presidency in 1976, and that Nancy might become First Lady. Either Berle’s agent or his editor apparently asked him to remove the section on Nancy, which was labeled “tasteless and vulgar.”

  When Nancy dated Berle, he was just emerging from two marriages to actress Joyce Compton (1941-1948 and, after a divorce and remarriage, 1949-1950).

  He may have dated Nancy three times. “Any more than that, and my mother figured out some way to put a stop to it,” Berle said. “She didn’t want me to get serious over just one woman. She wanted me to play the field.”

  “Here I am, dancing with Marilyn Monroe, butt to butt,” Milton Berle said.

  He also claimed, “I seduced a future First Lady (an obvious reference to Nancy) and a First Lady wannabee. Marilyn told me that JFK had promised to divorce Jackie and marry her, thereby making MM First Lady. God, what a story that would have been!”

  On his first date with Nancy, he told her, “I am both a Jew and a Christian Scientist.”

  Long before meeting Nancy, he had generated a notorious past loaded with sexual exploits. He even claimed to have seduced evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. If true, he would be following in the footsteps of Reagan.

  In addition to encounters with anonymous starlets and chorines, he often dated from the A-list. His partners had included Reagan’s girlfriend, Ann Sheridan, Lucille Ball, Linda Darnell, and Betty Hutton.

  In Miami, during conversations with Darwin Porter, Veronica Lake was very graphic about her seduction by Berle: “It was at least a foot long and became at least two inches more when erect. I’d never seen anything like it, and I had once been seduced by Porfirio Rubirosa.”

  Berle often boasted about it, even in public settings: “I’ve got the biggest schlong in Hollywood. I’ve got Forrest Tucker and John Ireland beat by two or three inches, maybe more.”

  Standing beside him at a urinal, fellow comedian Phil Silvers quipped, “You’d better feed that thing or it’s liable to turn on you.”

  The comedian’s adopted son, Bill Berle, once shopped a Mommie Dearest type memoir about his father, a tell-all inspired by Christina Crawford’s exposé of her mother, Joan Crawford. Entitled Near You, it relayed tales about his notoriously well-endowed father, calling him a “domestic tyrant, a habitual gambler, and a physically gifted ladies’ man with an aberrant sex life.” In it, he claimed that Berle, invited to a function at the White House, was overheard telling a group of men, “I fucked Nancy Davis back in the Stone Age.”

  Merv Griffin in 1945, just after he began working as an announcer at KFRC Radio in San Francisco.

  Merv later became one of Nancy Reagan’s best friends and a defender of her reputation “against the vile, tasteless attacks of Uncle Miltie.”

  Overhearing him, Merv Griffin, one of Nancy’s closest friends, approached Berle and cautioned him to “Cool it—Nancy might hear you.”

  Berle turned on him in fury: “Shut your cocksucking mouth, faggot.” Then he grabbed his crotch, as he did so often, “or else I’ll choke you with this club of mine.”

  Griffin turned and walked away.

  Bill Berle also wrote, “I wasn’t there to see my father put his 14-inch thing of his to use on Rita Hay-worth, Marilyn Monroe, even Nancy Davis, but I hoped they had a good time.”

  He also wrote, “In time, my father went from being the biggest celebrity in the world to a ‘couldn’t-get-arrested’ has been.”

  ***

  Although a Jew who knew about prejudice, legendary broadcaster Mike Wallace, who dated Nancy, was accused at one time of being “a homo-phobe, a racist, and anti-Mexican.”

  One of Nancy’s suitors was Mike Wallace, the journalist, game show host, actor, and media personality remembered chiefly today for appearing as the host of CBS’s 60 Minutes, which had its debut on television in 1968. In the years that followed, he interviewed some of the most prominent people in the world.

  His origins with the Davis family go back to when he was a freelance radio announcer in Chicago in the early 1940s before he enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1943.

  It is not clear when Nancy dated Wallace, perhaps after his divorce from his first wife, Norma Kaplan in 1948 and before his marriage to his second wife, Buff Cobb, in 1949.

  Wallace first encountered Edith Davis in Chicago in 1941 when he was broadcasting the evening news on Chicago’s WBBM, and she was performing live, on radio, as an actress. After their broadcasts, they often went to the Wrigley Building for drinks.

  He became a guest at the Davis home, where he met both Loyal and Nancy. “I got to know Edith and her child,” he later said. He was interviewed by author Bob Colacello. “Her child was very ladylike, a Smith girl with a Peter Pan collar and the black patent leather shoes and the white gloves and pearls. Nancy was her father’s darling. Utterly unlike her mother, who could drink and be very bawdy in a funny way.”

  When Nancy matured into an attractive young starlet during her MGM days, Wallace recalled, “She wanted to be rich and famous, but things weren’t happening fast enough for her.”

  Nancy reportedly found Wallace one of the most informed and intelligent men she’d ever dated. They didn’t always agree, although their friendship lasted until he died, as did his loyalty to Edith and Loyal. “I’m the son of Russian Jews,” Wallace said. “Loyal and Edith were called anti-Semitic, but I never saw any sign of that.”

  Wallace had his own prejudices, as revealed in 1967 during his documentary, CBS Reports; The Homosexuals. During the now notorious broadcast, he asserted, “The average homosexual, if there be such, is promiscuous. He is not interested or capable of a lasting relationship like that of a heterosexual marriage. His sex life, his love life, consists of a series of chance encounters at the clubs and bars he inhabits. And even on the streets of the city—the pick-up, one-night stand, and these are the characteristics of the homosexual relationship.”

  Reportedly, Nancy saw the broadcast, watching in horror. There were some subjects on which she was more informed and sophisticated.

  By 1992, Wallace said, “Of all my broadcasts, I have come to regret that one most of all. I’m far better informed today. I was just parroting what I heard from doctors and psychiatrists. They were wrong, and I was wrong to fall for their shit. I know differently today. Gay people by the millions have long-lasting relationships and even raise loving families.”

  Although she continued to maintain respect for Wallace, as she did for her anti-Semitic, racist parents, he did cause her more embarrassment. During the first year of the Reagan presidency in 1981, he had to apologize for a racial slur he made against blacks and Hispanics. At a break in 60 Minutes, he was caught on tape during his delivery of a broadcast about how a bank duped low-income workers in California. He said, “You bet your ass their contracts are hard for them to read over watermelon or tacos.”

  He later apologized, saying, “We Jews felt a kind of kinship with blacks, but, Lord knows, we weren’t riding the same slave ship.”

  Wallace went to visit Edith and Loyal at Scottdale’s Biltmore Estates. Loyal was 84 at the time, Edith 92. A CBS-TV co-worker who was with Wallace at the time reported on how their reunion went. Loyal and Edith were standing in their doorway.

  Edith called out, “Mike, how in the fuck are you?”

  After exchanging greetings, she is alleged to hav
e pulled her dress up over her head to show him her recent surgical scars. “Look what those fucking cocksuckers did to me.”

  Later, she revealed that whenever a doctor was examining her, “I always grab his crotch to see what kind of man he is.”

  When Nancy became First Lady, Wallace interviewed her. He ungallantly asked her to confirm her birth year—either 1921 or 1923. “Your son, Ron Junior, said it was 1921.”

  “He wasn’t there,” she snapped.

  “Well, which year was it?” Wallace asked again.

  “I haven’t made up my mind yet,” she said.

  Months later, Wallace attended a gala dinner on Martha’s Vineyard thrown by Katharine Graham of The Washington Post. He was seated between a former First Lady (Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis) and Nancy, the current First Lady. He recalled Nancy inviting her to revisit the White House.

  “Jackie was very polite,” Wallace later said, “but it was obvious to me that she didn’t want to go back again.”

  “I’ll think about it and get back to you,” Jackie said.

  ***

  Late in 1948, before Nancy arrived in Hollywood, her actress friend, Colleen Moore, gave her a letter of introduction to a handsome young actor, Robert Stack. She’d seen him in his screen debut in 1939 when he gave Deanna Durbin, the teenage singing sensation, her first smooch on camera in First Love, a charming, Cinderella-like tale. The cinematic event made frontpage news and heralded Stack into stardom.

  Millionairess Colleen Moore: Robert Stack’s matchmaker and a flapper-star from the Silent Era.

  “If you play your cards right,” Moore told Nancy, “you might learn what caused Durbin to swoon.”

  In a phone call to Stack, Nancy heard a warm, inviting voice: “Colleen is a great friend of my family. If she says you’re adorable, that’s good enough for me. Let’s go out on a date and test the waters.”

  Reportedly, Nancy was “awed by Robert’s male beauty.” In 1980, when Reagan was running for President, Stack published his autobiography, Straight Shooting. He was more subdued about Nancy, calling her “attractive and well-mannered. She had this little laugh that was quite enchanting. She even had a sense of humor about herself…and everybody else. My family invited some of the Hollywood elite to their parties. Because of Nancy’s background and social graces, she glided through the parties like the most graceful swan in the room, with her hair in place and always tastefully dressed, even one night when a drunken Veronica Lake almost threw up on her.”

  In 1940, Robert Stack, once known for having “the most perfect male physique in Hollywood,” shared the same bed with a future President, JFK. They were rarely alone in this bed.

  Reportedly, he also got a future First Lady under the sheets, too.

  Although they weren’t offensive to Nancy in any way, Stack’s editor at Macmillan reportedly chose to remove all references to Nancy. In a curt note, he (or she) wrote: “In the Davis revelations, let’s remove Nancy and stick with two other Davis names—Bette and Sammy.”

  Because Nancy was viewed as such hot copy at the time, with Reagan running for President, the editor made Xerox copies of Stack’s comments, and circulated them through the Macmillan offices.

  Stack’s mother had been a dazzling Hollywood socialite who had attended the 1923 wedding of Rudolph Valentino to Natasha Rambova. His father was an advertising executive who created the slogan, “The beer that made Milwaukee famous.” The family regularly entertained such celebrities as Frank Sinatra, Enzio Pinza, Edward G. Robinson, Nelson Eddy, Clark Gable, and Robert Taylor.

  In the late 1930s, the seventeen-year-old Stack, with his golden blonde hair, was called an Adonis. He captivated the attention of Howard Hughes, the billionaire bisexual, studio mogul, and aviator.

  Stack was always awed by power and money, but he really preferred women, and the list of his conquests is long: Elizabeth Taylor, Betty Grable, Diana Barrymore, Yvonne De Carlo, and Lana Turner, plus a treasure trove of starlets. After World War II, when Anne Frank’s attic [where she’d hidden from the Nazis] was searched, Allied soldiers found a romantic photograph of Stack among her treasured possessions.

  During the summer of 1940 in his bachelor apartment in the Hollywood Hills, Stack and John F. Kennedy, newly arrived in town and seeking sexual adventures, entertained a bevy of starlets but also big name stars on occasion. “I’ve known many of the great male stars of Hollywood, including Clark Gable,” Stack said. “But none of them compared to Jack. He literally could charm the pants off a gal.”

  It was through Stack that Nancy first heard of JFK. “He was the only man in Hollywood better looking than me,” he immodestly proclaimed. “All the hot tamales on the West Coast took notice. He really needed a date book. I’ve known him to have sex in the afternoon, sex at cocktail time, sex after dinner, and even a sleepover after midnight—all with a different woman.”

  Stack and his socially connected parents once took over the former home of Colleen Moore, a Mediterranean style house, vintage 1928, at 345 St. Pierre Road in Bel Air. It had been built with money earned when Moore was number one at the box office during the peak of the Jazz Age in the 1920s. At one point, when he was dating Nancy, he took her there. There were pictures in the hall of the star with her Dutchboy haircut and shapeless dresses, taken when she was the personification of the flapper.

  Stack told Nancy, “This is a lovely house with terrible memories—attempted murder, rape, and just about every sexual deviation in the book.”

  He showed her the blue-painted room which had been his bedroom. “This is the bedroom where Errol Flynn was accused of the rape of Betty Hansen. For a time,” Stack told Nancy, “the police sealed off the room to ensure that no one disturbed the evidence, which they hoped would incriminate Flynn.” [With the help of fabled attorney, Jerry Giesler, Flynn was eventually judged not guilty.]

  Two horny bachelors, Robert Stack and a young John F. Kennedy, on the prowl in postwar Hollywood. JFK told his pal, Stack, “I’ve come to Hollywood on a poontang hunt.”

  As a couple, Stack and Nancy soon drifted apart, in spite of finding each other “congenial company.”

  When a group of fan clubs voted Stack as “The Sexiest Man in the World,” he moved on to virtually dozens of beautiful women who were throwing themselves in his pathway.

  As for Nancy, she became involved in the tormented life of actor Robert Walker and, by extension, his best friend, Peter Lawford.

  ***

  One of Nancy’s favorite wartime movies was Since You Went Away (1944), starring Claudette Colbert, Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotten, and Shirley Temple. Nancy had been moved by the brief performance of Robert Walker in the film. His heartbreaking smile signaled “to all those little people sitting out there in the dark” that the character he was playing, that of a very young soldier, was inescapably doomed.

  In the movie, he was earnest, lean, and likable as the boyfriend of the character played by Jennifer Jones. Ironically, although the scenes between this married-in-real-life couple were effective, their relationship was collapsing. Producer David O. Selznick had already begun his affair with Jones, and, after her divorce from Walker, he would marry her. There are those who say that Walker never recovered from his loss of his wife.

  Love Lost: Then-newlyweds Jennifer Jones with Robert Walker.

  While he was mourning the loss of Jennifer to Hollywood kingpin David O. Selznick, Nancy caught Walker on the rebound.

  Complicating Walker’s life, even though he claimed that he hated himself for doing so, he often indulged in homosexual affairs. Perhaps in a misguided attempt to wreak revenge on Jones during the filming of Since You Went Away, he had sexual liaisons with two of the handsomest young men, each in a minor role, who ever graced the movie screens of the 1940s. They were Guy Madison (making his film debut) and John Derek.

  During the closing months of World War II, Walker used his quiet charm, good looks, and sincere voice to convince audiences that he really was the boy next door. He was m
ost endearing in pictures as a young soldier at war. His main competitor for that title was another handsome actor, Tom Drake, who became Judy Garland’s “boy next door” in the 1944 Meet Me in St. Louis, a role originally cast with Walker in the part.

  In another instance that illustrates the extreme complications of Hollywood relationships, Walker became involved with Peter Lawford. In the throes of his affair with Lana Turner, he had taken up with Walker when not dating Drake and Reagan’s estranged wife, Jane Wyman.

  After filming One Touch of Venus (1948) with Ava Gardner, Walker and the Tarheel beauty had a brief fling. Lawford also had a fling with Gardner. The plot thickens. At the same time, both Walker and Lawford also began to date Nancy.

  After the collapse of his marriage to Jones (“the love of my life”), Walker had entered into a disastrous marriage to Barbara Ford, the daughter of the well-known director, John Ford. Its annulment after only five weeks intensified his depression and heavy drinking.

  On October 22, 1948, Walker was arrested in Los Angeles on a charge of drunken driving. A candid snapshot of him at the time of his arrest was flashed around the world, even appearing in Life magazine. In the photograph, the actor is obviously intoxicated, his suit rumpled, his right hand balled into a threatening fist, his face contorted with rage.

  “I feel Bob is crying out to the world to save him,” his friend, Katharine Hepburn, told Irene Mayer Selznick when she saw the photograph.

  According to Irene, “Kate had a protective feeling whenever she encountered a lost soul”—Spencer Tracy was an example of that. She’d befriended Walker during the filming of The Sea of Grass (1947) when he’d played the nasty offspring of Tracy and herself. Their friendship had deepened in their next picture together, Song of Love (also 1947) when, as Johannes Brahms, Walker had pined for her.

  After Walker’s arrest on the drunk and disorderly charge, Dore Schary at MGM warned the actor that he had two choices—either quit films or else undergo psychiatric treatment at the Menninger Clinic in Kansas, where stars often went to “dry out.”