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

by Darwin Porter

  Based on a novel by Curt Siodmak, it was released by United Artists in 1953. The screenplay was both written and directed by Felix E. Feist, an MGM executive who had directed both Deanna Durbin and her younger rival, Judy Garland, in Every Sunday (1936).

  Nancy recalled that Donovan’s Brain “was silly but popular, and must have been particularly amusing to my father.” [She was referring to her stepfather, Dr. Loyal Davis.]

  She recalled the first morning she reported to work, driving at 4:30am through the deserted streets of Beverly Hills one wintry, pre-dawn day. Suddenly, the flashing dome lights of a police squad car signaled for her to pull over. Two officers were suddenly flanking her car. One of them demanded her license, the other searched the back seat with his flashlight. They demanded answers: “Where are you going? Where have you come from? How much money do you have in your purse?”

  That night, after she returned home from the studio, she told Reagan what had happened to her. He laughed at her encounter. “Honey, the cops saw a good-looking woman driving a convertible at that time of the morning. They thought you were returning from a hard night’s work.”

  For Ayres, it was a humiliating come-down. For Nancy, it was a final (doomed) opportunity for stardom:

  Photo above shows Nancy with her co-star, Lew Ayres (Jane Wyman’s former love fantasy from Johnny Belinda) in Donovan’s Brain, a weak but campy scifi thriller that caused embarrassment during her tenure as First Lady

  “What kind of work?” she asked.

  “Those cops thought you were a prostitute.”

  Nancy’s co-star in Donovan’s Brain was Lew Ayres, who by now had descended to the nadir of his career. He was no longer the beautiful young German soldier depicted in the classic All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).

  Ironically, he had starred with Jane Wyman in her Oscar-winning portrayal in Johnny Belinda (1948). When she had divorced Reagan, it was with the belief that Ayres would marry her. He had dumped her instead.

  Donovan’s Brain, like The Next Voice You Hear, is regarded today as high camp. When Nancy was First Lady, it was sometimes shown at midnight. Audiences, nearly always composed of young people, would “hoot and holler” at the screen.

  Its plot spins around an attempt by Dr. Patrick Cory (as played by Ayres) to keep alive the brain of a multi-millionaire megalomaniac, “the man you love to hate,” W.H. Donovan. He had gone down in a fatal plane crash, and his body had been removed temporarily for safekeeping to the nearby home of Dr. Cory. Cory, surgically and illegally, removes his brain and attempts to keep it alive. His long-suffering wife, Janice, is played by Nancy. The brain eventually takes possession of Cory and transforms him into an evil blackmailer.

  In her memoirs, Nancy recalled her upcoming film, Hellcats of the Navy (1956), as her final film and the only one in which she ever co-starred with Reagan. By the time of its production, they had been married for four years.

  She was wrong. She made one more film after Hellcats of the Navy.

  ***

  Her last film, Crash Landing (1958), was made for Columbia. It was the one that Nancy had confused with The Frogmen. Originally, Crash Landing was entitled Rescue at Sea. [Nancy had recalled it as the original title of The Frogmen.]

  She had remembered Gary Merrill as her co-star in The Frogmen. Actually, he became her co-star in Rescue at Sea, whose title was eventually altered to the more dramatic Crash Landing.

  The 76-minute film was one of the first major aerial disaster films. Nancy was cast as Merrill’s devoted wife. He plays a pilot crossing the Atlantic with a plane full of passengers. Midway across the ocean, he is forced to make an emergency landing. Fortunately, a U.S. Navy vessel is nearby to rescue the crash victims.

  For Nancy, it was another “Home and Hearth, Postwar U.S. Mom” role, an image that would serve her well during her husband’s later campaigns.

  She’s shown here in Crash Landing with her man in uniform (Gary Merrill) and their onscreen son, Kim Charney.

  The film was a forerunner of Airport (1970), the hit movie that starred Burt Lancaster and Dean Martin, bringing a Best Supporting Actress Oscar to Nancy’s friend, veteran Helen Hayes, cast as a stowaway.

  As in all subsequent aerial disaster films, Crash Landing focused on a diverse group of passengers making true confessions as they prepare to die. The film was created by Fred Freiberger (aka Charles Woodgrove), the future producer of the third season (1968-69) of Star Trek.

  Merrill spent most of his time complaining about his marriage to Bette Davis, which at the time was on the rocks.

  [Movie trivia: Merrill had replaced José Ferrer in the Broadway hit, Brother Rat (1937), the play that inspired the subsequent movie starring Jane Wyman and Ronald Reagan. Merrill told Nancy that he had appeared as one of the soldiers in This Is the Army, also starring her husband, Reagan. Reagan had also co-starred with Merrill’s estranged wife (Bette Davis), playing her gay suitor in Dark Victory (1939).]

  Nancy met the second female lead, Irene Harvey, sizing her up as competition, as she frequently did. Harvey had made her screen debut in The Stanger’s Return in 1933, starring Lionel Barrymore. After divorcing her first husband, William Fenderson, she had fallen in love with matinée heartthrob Robert Taylor, who had broken from Thelma Ryan after taking her virginity. Thelma later became First Lady, Patricia Nixon.

  Taylor moved on to the bisexual aviator, Howard Hughes, and Errol Flynn, even Greta Garbo, before settling in to marry Barbara Stanwyck. (“Her balls are bigger than mine,” he’d told Reagan).

  The fourth lead was played by Roger Smith, a handsome, debonair leading man from California. His greatest film exposure was yet to come, when he’d play Patrick Dennis, the nephew of Auntie Mame (1958), starring Rosalind Russell in her classic, lighthearted hit.

  He would go on “to do what a million other men only dreamed about,” and that was marrying sexpot Ann-Margret in 1967. He became not only her husband, but her manager.

  Fred F. Sears, a Bostonian, directed Nancy’s final film. He was about the same age as Reagan and had made the Durango Kid series of westerns, starring Charles Starrett. At the time he helmed Nancy, he was known as a quickie director, always bringing a picture in way before deadline. He was also called “the fast buck director,” turning out juvenile crime films, action thrillers, rock musicals, and sci-fi “epics.”

  He would later become notorious for making one of the worst movies of all time, The Giant Claw (1957), “a clunky mishmash of hideous special effects. The giant claw turns out to be a spectacularly inept marionette that looks like a mutant turkey and sounds like a crow choking to death,” in the words of one critic.

  Merrill, boorish and frequently drunk, was a man with a personal and onscreen past. Here he is with Bette Davis, in mink, during filming of All About Eve.

  Nancy, whose screen image was to an increasing degree that of the kind of girl an American ex-GI would want to marry, simply didn’t project an onscreen image with as much fun or drama.

  Most movies seem to have some kind of sexual relations going on between and among the cast and crew. But, from all reports, Crash Landing was rather pristine. There was an attempt at sex on the part of a drunken Merrill. He sent a messenger to Nancy’s dressing room, requesting her to come to his trailer to go over some scenes with her.

  He later said, “I’d heard from my buddies that she gave great head. That was her reputation in Hollywood. I knew she was married, but I hoped she still played around. I was married to Bette, but I let the bitch know she didn’t own my dick. Bette used to go down on Howard Hughes, and I wanted to see how my wife, as a cock-sucker, stacked up against Reagan’s wife. I stood jaybird naked in my trailer waiting about twenty minutes for Nancy. She didn’t show up.”

  When it came to sex talk, the gutsy New Englander, with his dour demeanor and dark brow, wasn’t known for his subtlety.

  ***

  During her involvement in those many B-pictures, Nancy had had only one role in mind, and that was t
o become the wife of a successful and presentable man. At the time, it was inconceivable that such a role would morph her one of the world’s most famous women.

  She once said, “I was following in some big, big footsteps—Martha Washington, Dolley Madison. For great humanitarian achievement, there was no lady who ever came close to Eleanor Roosevelt. For style, Jackie Kennedy won all honors. But in movie terms, my role of First Lady would be like remaking Gone With the Wind and casting me in the Vivien Leigh role of Scarlett O’Hara.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “I’m In Love with Lew Ayres—and He Wants to Marry Me.”

  The Weekend Wasn’t Entirely Lost.

  Her road to stardom began with scenes like this from Lost Weekend, where glam Jane, accessorized with (now endangered) Somalian leopardskin, emotes with an alcohol-blocked novelist, as played by Ray Milland.

  Can a Girl Really Have It All?

  With Johnny Belinda came stardom and a wrenching emotional resonance with a former army chaplain bruised from the horrors of active duty on the blood-soaked Pacific front. Here, plain Jane as the reclusive deaf-mute, Belinda, with one of her true loves, Lew Ayres.

  Throughout the war years, Joan Blondell and Paulette Goddard had remained Jane’s steadfast confidantes. Alexis Smith was a newer friend, and also devoted to Jane, just as her new husband, Craig Stevens, seemed to hang on Reagan’s every utterance.

  One morning, Jane, in tears, called Goddard. “Ronnie and I had a big fight last night, and he stormed out of the house. The fan magazines still call us ‘The Constant Honeymooners,’ but nothing could be farther from the truth. We’re at odds over something all the time.”

  Like many couples trying to pick up their threads of marital bliss in the aftermath of the many changes brought on by WW2, Reagan and his then-wife present an illusion of compatibility at the California State Military Guard Ball of 1945.

  Their latest conflict involved Reagan’s desire to have another child. A very precocious four-year-old Maureen was virtually demanding a little brother as a playmate.

  “Unless Billy Wilder has misled me, The Lost Weekend will be my breakthrough role,” Jane said. “As you know, I’ve waited fifteen years for something like this. I don’t want to fuck it up now, get pregnant, and let my career fade away.”

  “Tell that fucker of yours that if he wants a baby, adopt one,” Goddard advised.

  “I might do just that,” Jane said. “Maybe tonight, if he ever stops talking about politics and the menace of communism, and reverts to his demand that we have a child, I’ll bring up the adoption idea. As for dirty diapers, the nanny can change them.”

  Expensive Accessories for an A-list Celebrity: Satin and very good mink...What else would a movie star wear?

  Jane arrives at the premiere of Johnny Belinda, the film that would eventually win her an Oscar.

  “You’re in luck working with Ray as your leading man,” Goddard said. “I seduced him on the set of Reap the Wild Wind (1942). He was ten times better than our co-star, Johnny boy [a reference to John Wayne]. Ray and I have just filmed Kitty (1945). It’s a sort of Eliza Doolittle costume drama set in the 1780s. I’m this guttersnipe walking the sidewalks of London. Ray discovers me, coaches me, and turns me into a duchess.”

  “Sounds like fun,” Jane said.

  “On the set, we resumed our affair, and he’s hotter and better looking than ever,” Goddard said. “He’s the best kisser in Hollywood. Ever notice those luscious lips of his? His Welsh dick is in good working order, and he never pulls out until a woman is completely satisfied.”

  “What about his wife?” Jane asked. She was referring to the former Muriel Weber, whom Milland had wed back in 1932.

  “Every girl deserves the chance to spend one night of her life with Gregory Peck.” —Jane Wyman

  Ray Milland was filled with emotional intensity when he filmed this scene with Jane Wyman in The Lost Weekend.

  “It wasn’t the script,” he later said. “It was my anger at that bitch, Hedda Hopper. When I refused to go on her Hedda Hopper Show, she called me ‘a limey son-of-a-bitch, the worst kind of ingrate.’ She also threatened to spread the word about what she called ‘My true sexual proclivities.’”

  “Oh, her!” Goddard said, contemptuously. “She’s that long-suffering dishrag who knows Milland seduces his leading ladies like your Ronnie used to. But Ray told me he long ago became bored pumping the same old piece night after night.”

  “How you talk, gal,” Jane said. “I wish Ronnie wasn’t such a gentleman, and could get lowdown and dirty once in a while. Put some steam into our sex life. Are you through with Ray for the moment? Can I move in?”

  “Full speed ahead,” Goddard said. “That fucking husband of mine [Burgess Meredith] is so horny, he demands it once or twice a day. I’ve got plenty of action on the side, even with Clark Gable, now that he’s no longer in the service. I think you told me you’ve had him, too. He’s nothing to write home to mother about. But I’ll soon be making another 18th-century costume drama, this time with that divine Gary Cooper. [Her reference was to The Unconquered (1947).] Coop and I shacked up together when we made Northwest Mounted Police (1940). Yes, he indeed deserves his nickname, ‘The Montana Mule.’”

  “I’m still young and life has got to offer more than Ronnie and babies,” Jane said. I’ve still got Dennis [Morgan] and thank God for that. I call him always reliable and dependable. My nickname for him is EverReady.”

  “Say no more, doll,” Goddard said.

  “I still long for John Payne,” Jane said.

  “Honey, a sexual thrill like him comes to a girl only once in a lifetime, if that. But get over it. Ever onward. Maybe one day you’ll make a movie with David Niven. I’ve had him. Ever had a dick that’s six inches thick? Try it. You’ll like it.”

  “Before I ring off,” Jane said, “I’ve been dying to ask you a question. Why in hell did you ever marry a guy like Burgess Meredith?”

  “Darling, I’ve always wanted to ask you a big question,” Goddard said. “What in fuck were you thinking when you married Ronald Reagan?”

  ***

  Jane received a phone call from Billy Wilder. “The Breen office is fighting every aspect of The Lost Weekend project. Fucking bluenoses. But Warner, the son of a bitch, said we’ll make the film anyway. Report Monday morning to wardrobe.”

  That Monday, Jane stopped at Warners to retrieve some possessions from her dressing room before driving over to Paramount.

  By coincidence, she encountered Jack Warner, who still called her “Little Janie.” He had given the OK to lend her to Paramount. “So, you’re off to make that drunk movie. Don’t get your hopes up, gal. I’m an old showman. I always believed that drunks on film should be for comic relief. Depicting an alcoholic as a serious character will mean a big bomb at the box office. But it will be Paramount’s loss, not mine. By the way, give my luck to Ronnie. When he gets back, come over and dine with us like you guys used to do.”

  To effectively portray these scenes of progressive drunkenness, Mil-land said, “I knew that when the camera came close, nothing could be hidden or faked.”

  He praised Wilder for his help, citing his “prying, probing, intuitive touch of genius,” and Brackett for his “kindly calm and sociological insight.”

  When Jane reported to Paramount to co-star in The Lost Weekend (1945) with Ray Milland, its director, the Austria-born and deeply respected Billy Wilder, came out to greet her. That represented “star treatment” that he usually bequeathed to the more established actresses he’d directed, such as Barbara Stanwyck during her collaboration with him on Double Idemnity (1944).

  She’d heard a lot about Wilder and was anxious to be directed by him. She knew that he was Jewish and had fled the Nazis in 1933, emigrating to Hollywood, where he’d had a successful career. He’d coauthored the script for the screwball comedy, Ninotchka (1939) with Great Garbo, as directed by Ernst Lubitsch. It had been widely advertised as GARBO LAUGHS.

&nbs
p; Over coffee in the Paramount commissary with Wilder and his co-writer (Charles Brackett), while discussing their Lost Weekend, Jane learned from Wilder that “You were not our first choice. We offered the part to Stanwyck, but she turned it down, thinking it was Milland’s movie. Then we decided to ask another friend of yours, Paulette Goddard, but we decided she was too sexy.”

  “I didn’t know any of this,” a distressed Jane said. “Neither of them said anything to me about it.”

  “Actually, Milland was not our first choice either,” Brackett said. “To play the stressed-out and alcoholic writer, Don Birnam, we went first to José Ferrer. But he was just too ugly, and we became convinced that to win the sympathy of movie audiences, we had to go for someone handsome. Then, at first, Milland didn’t want to appear in a movie of such human degradation.”

  Wilder and Brackett informed Jane that the location scenes on the streets of post-war New York had already been filmed. “Even scenes of an unshaven Milland rattling the doors of a pawn shop to get a loan,” Brackett said. “We even captured the grit and grime of Bellevue Hospital.” She was told this with the understanding that her scenes in the movie would be filmed in a studio.

  Brackett assured her that she would get co-star billing, her name appearing in the same size letters as Milland’s.

  “It took Billy and me two months to write the screenplay,” Brackett said. “We wrote it with our blood. Enormous changes had to be made from the novel.”

  He was referring to Charles R. Jackson’s bestseller with the same title. In distinct contrast to what had been portrayed in the novel, Don Birnam’s repressed homosexuality was trivialized into a case of writer’s block. To provide more of a love interest than what had appeared within the novel, Jane’s character of Helen St. James was virtually invented for the film.