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

by Darwin Porter

  She claimed that her next movie, Night Into Morning (1951), was her favorite film, in spite of the similarity of its title to Night Unto Night, a film made in 1949 by Reagan. She was hoping that her latest film would salvage her dimly flickering career. Her fantasy was that by starring with Ray Milland, it would lead to a breakthrough equivalent to that of Jane Wyman when she co-starred with him in The Lost Weekend (1945). That film had propelled Wyman into an A-list career and had brought Milland an Oscar for his portrayal of a tormented alcoholic.

  Milland expressed his hope that with his appearance once again as an alcoholic, he would score another triumph, this time as a college professor who becomes a drunk and a possible suicide after his wife and ten-year-old son are burned to death in a freak fire.

  A Canadian, Fletcher Markle (the director), would praise Nancy’s performance. “If only the critics had taken notice,” he said. “She is a gifted actress, although typecast as a nice, steadfast war widow. In her one big scene, where she tries to prevent Milland from committing suicide by jumping out of a hotel window, she was superb. She had one page of dialogue, and she pulled off this difficult scene in just one shot. After that, I called her ‘One Take Nancy.’”

  Lightning did not strike twice. Ray Milland (left), shown above with Nancy and John Hodiak, had immortalized himself opposite Jane Wyman by playing an alcoholic in The Lost Weekend.

  Six years later, now cast with Nancy Davis as his leading lady, he hoped for his second Oscar. Alas, his performance, and the picture, failed.

  In the film, John Hodiak played an academic, a junior colleague of Milland’s at his college. Engaged to be married to the widowed character played by Nancy, he becomes jealous of the attention she pays to Mil-land.

  Nancy would recall, “This was one of the few times I played a fiancée and not a wife.”

  Markle had emigrated to the land of sunshine and palm trees from the cold winds of Winnipeg, Manitoba. He was multi-talented: Actor, screenwriter, TV producer, and director. He had contributed to the screenplay of Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai (1947), starring Rita Hayworth as a blonde.

  McCambridge on the verge of shooting Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar.

  One day Markle’s lover, Mercedes McCambridge, appeared on the set. Having divorced his first wife, the former Helen Blanche Willis, in 1949, Markle was rushing into a marriage to McCambridge. She met Nancy, later asking Markle, “Where did you find that little mouse?”

  In November of 1950, McCambridge triumphed over Nancy when she was designated as number four in Photoplay’s Choose Your Stars contest. In spite of her sagging career, Nancy came in fifth. McCambridge seemed delighted that fans favored her over Nancy. Topping both of them was starlet Piper Laurie, who had just had a fling with Reagan, as she later confessed in her autobiography.

  Nancy, emoting with John Hodiak in Night Into Morning.

  Born in Wales, Milland, to Nancy, at least, seemed rather cynical, having appeared on the screen since 1929. She suspected that he might have interpreted a co-performance with her as a comedown. During his long career, he would star opposite Gene Tierney, Lana Turner, Marlene Dietrich, Ginger Rogers, Loretta Young, and Veronica Lake, sometimes seducing his leading ladies, as he did with Jane Wyman in The Lost Weekend and later as the murder-plotting husband in Dial M for Murder (1954), co-starring Grace Kelly, with whom he fell in love. That threatened one of the most enduring marriages in Hollywood, that of Milland to the former Muriel Weber.

  He told Nancy, “From now on, acting to me is just taking home a paycheck. I think it’s downhill for me from now on.”

  Nancy with John Hodiak: Is he barring her entrance? Or signaling that it’s OK to enter?

  John Hodiak, involved at the time in a disintegrating marriage to Anne Baxter, laughed as rarely as Greta Garbo. In one scene within Night Into Morning, Nancy was called upon to make this stoic Ukrainian laugh. In take after take, his laugh—to the director, at least— sounded fake. The scene took place when they were mounting a flight of stairs. During Nancy’s final take, she spontaneously whispered, “belly button,” in response to which Hodiak laughed uproariously. His cackles met with the director’s approval.

  Nancy’s friend, Jean Hagen, was also in the picture. She and Nancy bonded more than ever and had lunch together. Hagen had seduced Ralph Meeker during the filming of their previous picture, and now she turned her seductive charms onto Hodiak. She later told Nancy, “Getting fucked by Johnny is like getting plowed with a beer bottle.”

  While making the film, Hodiak seemed very depressed. Not only was his marriage failing, but the year before, he had been voted “box office poison” by movie exhibitors across the country.

  [At the age of 41, Hodiak would suffer a fatal heart attack in his bathroom and die.]

  That curmudgeon of The New York Times, Bosley Crowther, attacked Night Into Morning, appraising it as “a morbid swirl of sentiment and self-pity” Variety, however, cited Nancy’s performance as showing “warmth and understanding.”

  [Nancy appreciated the kind words, but told Hagen, “those words doth not a star make.”

  ***

  Nancy made only a brief appearance with Fredric March in the 1952 It’s a Big Country, Dore Schary’s flag-waving salute to America. An all-star cast, a glittering roster, was assembled by MGM, including personalities already familiar to Nancy—Ethel Barrymore, Gary Cooper, Van Johnson, Gene Kelly, Janet Leigh, Marjorie Main, George Murphy, Lewis Stone, and James Whitmore. An anthology of vignettes, it depicted scenes from American lives. It was directed by a committee whose members included Richard Thorpe, Charles Vidor, Don Weiss, Clarence Brown, John Sturges, and William A. Wellman.

  In Nancy’s segment, “Four Eyes,” she plays a schoolteacher who becomes aware that one of her pupils cannot see very well. She tries to persuade his father (March), improbably cast as an Italian immigrant, to purchase of pair of eyeglasses for the boy— hence the title, “Four Eyes.” She meets passionate resistance from a father who thinks it’s unmanly for his son to wear glasses. She triumphs in the end. She later said, “I wish my segment with March could have been a whole picture. I’m sure I could have learned a lot from him.”

  At first, Nancy had been leery of working with March because of the reputation that had preceded him. He had already seduced many of his costars, including Tallulah Bankhead, Clara Bow, Olivia de Havilland, Ann Harding, and Miriam Hopkins. He was notorious as “the most lecherous fanny-grabber in Hollywood.”

  Back when she was still speaking to Nancy, Katharine Hepburn told of her experience with March when he’d been cast opposite her as her tartan-wearing lover, the Earl of Bothwell, in Mary of Scotland (1936). Knowing that he was going to glide his hand up her 16th-century costume, she was prepared for him. “When he came to my dressing room, I had taken the largest banana in my fruit bowl and put it into my bloomers. When his hand went up my dress, he discovered a very large phallic object and retreated. Case closed.”

  A much older and not-so-horny March encountered Nancy when they worked together in 1952. “He treated me like a lady and was a perfect gentleman in every way.”

  In spite of Schary’s high expectations for It’s a Big Country, audiences stayed away in droves. Ultimately, it lost $677,000 for MGM.

  Despite Nancy’s praise for March, most critics found his performance as a Papa Italiano hammy, a caricature. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times thought it a role that J. Carroll Naish might have pulled off. In his autobiography, Schary never even mentioned his once pet project. Nancy also cut mention of it when she penned her second memoir.

  It seemed that both MGM and its stars wanted to forget the film as a fiscally disastrous embarrassment.

  ***

  For some strange reason, Nancy, in her memoirs, remembered appearing in The Frogmen, co-starring Gary Merrill.

  Although Merrill had indeed been in the movie, Nancy had not. The film’s two major stars were Richard Widmark (left) and Dana Andrews.

  In neit
her the script nor the final footage, not a single female was waiting for them after their succesful demolition of underwater obstacles for the U.S. Navy in the Sea of Japan during World War II.

  In her first memoir, Nancy, she made an astonishing claim: “I also did Rescue at Sea, which may have appeared as The Frogmen in 1955, if it came out at all. I played opposite Gary Merrill, and it’s another picture I’d just as soon forget. Every performer has a few of these in the closet.”

  Everybody is entitled to a lapse of memory, but it’s surprising that Nancy didn’t compose her memoirs with a scrapbook of newspaper clippings and memorabilia about her movies on her desk. It’s true that she appeared in a movie originally entitled Rescue at Sea, but its title was later changed—that particular film was never called The Frog-men.

  There was a movie released n 1951 called The Frogmen, and it did star Gary Merrill (at the time, Mr. Bette Davis) in third billing. The two big-name stars involved with the project were Richard Widmark and Dana Andrews, but no women ever appeared in The Frogmen. It was the story of the U.S. Navy’s Underwater Demolition teams battling the Japanese Army and Naval forces in the Sea of Japan during World War II.

  Why would Nancy connect herself with this all-male underwater adventure film? The mystery may have been solved when director Henry Hathaway was tracked down. He had been the original director of The Frogmen, and a major director in Golden Age Hollywood, helming such stars as Clara Bow, Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, and Nancy’s friend, Walter Huston. Its original script had called for some women’s roles, the type who waited on the shore for their lovers to return from the dangers of The Deep.

  “I vaguely remember—and I could be wrong about this—but I think I called Nancy in for a reading for one of the female roles,” Hathaway said. “Instead of Merrill, Richard Conte was to have been her leading man. Later, both Conte and I dropped out, and the script was rewritten with no roles for women at all.”

  Lloyd Bacon was called in to direct The Frogmen. He had helmed Reagan in Knute Rockne—All American (1940).

  Even though she wasn’t in it, Nancy said she was ashamed of The Frogmen. She need not have been. It was the first A-list movie to depict SCUBA diving and clandestine underwater demolition activities during wartime, and it became a big cultural hit. Many young men cited this movie as their inspiration for becoming Navy SEALS.

  ***

  Often missing from the list of Nancy’s movies was the 1952 release of Shadow in the Sky, a financial disaster that cost MGM $644,000, in spite of its relatively low production costs. Her co-stars were James Whitmore, her close friend Jean Hagen, and a self-styled “sex bomb” and bad boy, Ralph Meeker.

  A decision was made by the studio to sell Shadow in the Sky as a sexy movie. Publicity did not think Nancy, or even Jean Hagen, should be the focus of the ad. Instead, it was decided that Ralph Meeker, clad in skinny bathing attire, would attract a wider audience.

  The film was directed by Fred M. Wilcox, a Virginian better known for his two dog movies, Lassie Come Home (1943), and Courage of Lassie (1946). He’d also had a hit directing Margaret O’Brien in The Secret Garden (1949).

  Nancy’s work with him went smoothly for both of them.

  Its plot centers around Burt (Meeker), who is in a mental institution after having undergone traumatic experiences while serving as a Marine in the South Pacific during World War II. His girlfriend, Stella, is played by Hagen. Wilcox couldn’t help but see that Hagen was Meeker’s girlfriend offscreen as well. “She was seen coming and going from Meeker’s dressing room” he recalled.

  Nancy was cast as Betty, Burt’s sister, married to Lou (Whitmore). The suspense of the movie, if it could be called that, derives from whether Burt, as a mentally wounded warrior, can be stabilized enough to return to a normal life outside the asylum.

  Ralph Meeker might have added Nancy to his impressive roster of A-list seductions.

  Actually, he spent more time applying his “magnificent woman-killing weapon” (as he immodestly described it) to Jean Hagen.

  Whitmore often lunched with Nancy and she came to consider him “a good family man.” Before he divorced his wife, the former Nancy Mygatt, in 1971, the couple had three sons. After that, he married three more times. His final marriage, launched when he was a senior citizen, lasted until his death in 2009.

  Nancy seemed to have no memory of making that movie, devoting only sixteen lines to it in her memoirs, Nancy. Maybe she blanked it out because while working on the film, she received very distressing news.

  She learned that Reagan had proposed marriage to actress Christine Larson, and he was said to be deeply in love with the beautiful starlet.

  “Lightning struck twice for Nancy,” Wilcox later said. “While filming our movie, she learned that Metro didn’t plan to renew her contract.”

  Although Meeker was unmarried at the time, he was out of the running because of his affair with Hagen,” Wilcox said. “At any rate, he’d soon be off to Broadway to star in William Inge’s Picnic, where he was said to have taught his understudy, Paul Newman, ‘Who’s the Man,’ if you get my drift.”

  ***

  Talk About a Stranger (1952) was Nancy’s last film for MGM, which, as she had predicted, soon after dropped her from its roster of contract players. That was hardly surprising. Faced with the loss of revenue as audiences stayed home to watch TV, the once-fabled studio was releasing hordes of its stars and staff. The Golden Age of Hollywood had come to a whimpering end. Once big name stars like Bette Davis were advertising for jobs.

  After George Murphy (right), one of Reagan’s closest friends, co-starred with Nancy in Talk About a Stranger, he gave Reagan some advice: “Dump Nancy, and marry Doris Day.”

  The star of Talk About a Stranger was George Murphy, who called himself Reagan’s best friend, an honor also claimed by both Robert Taylor and William Holden.

  Playing the son of Nancy and Murphy was the rumor-spreading child actor, Billy Gray. The Vienna-born actor, Kurt Kasznar, one of Hollywood’s closeted gays, was cast as the mysterious stranger.

  Directed by David Bradley, Talk About a Stranger tells the story of Bud Fontaine, Jr. (as interpreted by Gray), who suspects a strange new neighbor (Kasznar) of poisoning his dog. The boy launches a smear campaign and spreads vicious rumors about the man, which turn out to be based on false impressions. In time, Bud comes to realize that people are not always what they appear to be, learning one of life’s lessons, but not before he endangers crops in the valley by his vandalism of the neighbor’s oil tank. Murphy and Nancy cope as best they can with their irrepressible son.

  Bradley seemed an odd choice as a director. He was an actor, a collector of vintage films, and a university lecturer. At the Art Institute of Chicago, he’d cast a 17-year-old wannabee actor, Charlton Heston, in his feature length 16mm version of Peer Gynt.

  In 1963, he would direct Madmen of Mandoras, a short feature film that was expanded, in 1969, into the notorious made-for-television movie, They Saved Hitler’s Brain, a scifi romp that some critics define as one of the most absurdly campy (but un-funny) films ever made.

  Evil neighbors who turn out to be benign and innocent: gay actor Kurt Kasznar.

  Producer Richard Goldstone shared his memories of working with Nancy: “At MGM, she was on her way out the door, yet at the commissary she was table-hopping, talking to all the big names, sitting at one point with Clark Gable before hopping over to share a drink with Spencer Tracy and to give him a big kiss. I had never seen a starlet dare do that before.”

  All that Nancy remembered about Gray was that he had a fascination with motorcycles. The year she’d met him, he had appeared as the boy version of the Native American athlete and protagonist of Jim Thorpe—All American. Burt Lancaster had been cast as the adult version of Jim Thorpe. Later that year (1951), Gray would make a science fiction film, The Day the Earth Stood Still, starring Michael Rennie and Patricia Neal, a future girlfriend of Reagan’s.

  Talk About a Stranger: G
eorge Murphy, Billy Gray (center) and again, another “worried mother” role for Nancy.

  Gray went on to achieve fame in the long-running (1954-1960) TV series, Father Knows Best. He later denounced the plots and characters of this sitcom as “totally false,” blaming the series for “a lot of problems between men and women today.”

  Talk About a Stranger was advertised as a film that would send “chills down your spine.” It did not. Nancy was later reported to have said, “George and I both agreed: Talk About a Stranger was MGM’s way of giving us the pink slip.”

  Murphy himself later quipped: “Every year since then, around Christmastime, I have promised Nancy that I would get a print and run it—but thus far, she has been spared that pleasure. I do hope that the Democrats don’t get hold of the film and run it on The Late, Late Show during my 1970 campaign for the Senate. It might be more than I could overcome.”

  Murphy also wrote, “Nancy met Ronnie about the time we were making Talk About a Stranger. He had succeeded me as President of the Screen Actors Guild and in that capacity, Nancy paid him a visit. She was repeatedly being embarrassed by the fact that the name ‘Nancy Davis’ kept popping up on Communist Front lists, and she was receiving invitations to attend radical meetings. That was difficult to bear, since Nancy was decidedly anti-communist. At director Mervyn LeRoy’s suggestion, she sought out Reagan for his counsel. He not only straightened out the matter, but a year later, he married the girl.”

  What Murphy did not put into his memoir was a final line, “against my wishes.”

  ***

  After her sagas at MGM, Nancy wanted to bow out of films, particularly after her marriage to Reagan in 1952, but “I had some bills to pay, so I hung in there a little longer. I made Donovan’s Brain (1953), a low-budget sci-fi picture, but it was not a class act.”