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

by Darwin Porter

  During their second cup of coffee, Jane learned that MGM, Fox, and Columbia had each rejected the script, defining it as “too downbeat, too grim.”

  She quickly summed up both Brackett and Wilder as being widely different personalities. She later said, “Charles was the classy façade, Billy the guts.”

  [In Hollywood, the frequent and usually inspired collaborators, Wilder and Brackett, were known as “the Gold Dust Twins,” “the Katzenjammer Kids,” or “Hansel and Gretel.”]

  “It’s good working with Billy, although we fight a lot,” Brackett said. “We’re from completely different backgrounds. My roots go back to 1629 and the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Billy was conceived one night when his prostitute mother was raped behind a sleazy beerhall in some back alley. I appeal to the better side of human nature. He prefers the dark side of man.”

  Finally, perhaps with a sense that its noir theme of repressed anguish and alcoholism was very avant garde for a nation recovering, often with the assistance of alcohol, from the ravages of war, Wilder handed her the latest revisions to the script. Then he suggested that she spend the rest of the morning reading them, since she wouldn’t be called onto the set until after lunch.

  Before noon, a leopardskin coat was delivered to her dressing room, with instructions to wear it when called for, as it configured into the plot. [It was the prop that brought Helen and Don together at the beginning of the movie. Toward the end, Don pawns it in a pawn shop in exchange for a gun, with which he plans to commit suicide.]

  Talking him out of his death wish would be the focal point of Jane’s big scene. Her character would succeed in that awesome task. She would convince him to give up liquor and return to writing his novel, The Bottle. At the end of the film, Milland drops a lit cigarette into a glass of whiskey, as a means of making it undrinkable and as proof that he is cured.

  Wilder had arranged for her to have lunch in the commissary with Milland, presumably to discuss the nuances of their respective roles. In person, the Welshman was far handsomer and more charming than he was on the screen in any of his light comedies. “Paulette has told me wonderful things about you,” Jane gushed.

  “Why take her word for it?” Milland answered. Then he raised an eyebrow. “Why not investigate for yourself?”

  Almost from the beginning, he established the tone of their relationship by openly flirting with her. She no doubt had heard the many rumors associated with his prowess at seducing his leading ladies.

  He confessed to her, “My character is unsettling—so unlike me—and personally, I find the subject of alcoholism distasteful. I’m afraid that as a drunk, I’ll dip into caricature and be laughed off the screen.”

  “Fortunately, my character stays sober throughout the run of the film. I think I can pull it off unless Billy starts screaming and cursing me,” she said.

  “Filming on the streets of New York was a nightmare,” he said. “I spent a night in the ward at Bellevue where patients were delirious during their withdrawal from alcohol. Many of them were having these hideous hallucinations like the one I have to have in this damn movie. I fled at three o’clock that morning. I couldn’t stay there all night. At times like now, I feel I was not psychologically cut out to be an actor,” he confessed.

  “Neither was I,” she said. “But I had no choices—either be a showgirl or a prostitute.”

  “But my dear, they’re the same profession,” he said.

  He amused her with stories of his life, beginning when he was in the Household Cavalry of the British Army and became an expert marksman, horse rider, and airplane pilot. “I’d like to go riding with you one Sunday afternoon.”

  “Maybe Ronnie could join us,” she said. “He’s an expert rider.”

  “How nice, but that’s not exactly what I had in mind,” he said. “I prefer to go riding with just you.”

  “Oh, I see,” she said.

  “I have nothing but fond memories of the horse stables,” he said. “When I was fifteen, I lost my virginity one evening in an empty stable stall. I surrendered it to a very determined blonde two years older than me.”

  Before luncheon was over, he reached over, took her hand, and kissed it. “I have always believed that an actor and an actress, playing lovers on the screen, should rehearse that love in private. What do you think?”

  “I completely agree,” she said. “I’ve always become intimate with and demonstrated my affection for my leading men. That’s except for Joe E. Brown and Phil Silvers.”

  Milland looked mildly surprised until he realized that she might be joking. But in the days ahead, he came to know that she had been serious. In a call to Goddard, after about four days of working with Milland, she confessed, “We did the dirty deed. You were right about him. What a contrast to Ronnie, who comes to bed smelling like a bar of soap. Ray gives off a real he-man scent. A true male aroma, and that’s a turn-on.”

  As Milland admitted in his memoirs, Wide-Eyed in Babylon, “There had been a few previous peccadilloes, nothing serious, just the normal male revolt against his convenient chains. It was very easy to succumb to in those days.”

  He also said that whenever his homelife was deteriorating, he would pack a suitcase and check into the Sunset Towers. “My wife thought my depression was a dramatically staged excuse to shack up with some blonde Hollywood dame, and not without reason.” While making The Lost Weekend, that statement perhaps reflected his involvement with Jane.

  During the filming of The Lost Weekend, Jane had a sad experience during her brief reunion with Craig Reynolds. He had been “my dream man, my Adonis” when they had appeared together in movies in the 1930s. Both of them were dreaming of stardom, and at the time, there was talk of marriage.

  At an afterparty celebrating the Oscar victories of The Lost Weekend, Jane embraces director Billy Wilder. Ronald Reagan looks on, indulgently, from the left, while Ray Milland, on right, appears inebriated.

  She learned that he was appearing in an un-credited role in her film. “I’m afraid that the stardom I dreamed about isn’t going to happen for me,” he told her. He’d joined the Army during the war and had won a Purple Heart. “But now that I’m back in Hollywood, the phone isn’t ringing.”

  She seemed rather embarrassed to have run into Reynolds in such reduced circumstances. His star had flickered out, and hers was just beginning to shine brightly. She kissed him on the cheek and moved on after wishing him good luck. She was deeply saddened to learn of his death in 1949 in a motorcycle accident.

  Right before Christmas in 1944, Jane received a call from Wilder, who had obviously been drinking. “The shitheads over at Paramount have decided not to release The Lost Weekend. ‘It’s too god-damned depressing,’ the assholes said. But I know the real reason. The liquor industry is willing to part with $5 million for the negative of this film. They want to destroy it, claiming that showing it will cut into their profits.”

  But in the weeks ahead, the president of Paramount, Barney Balaban, overruled his executives. “I don’t make pictures to flush them down the toilet,” he said. “Open the god damn film across the country, and to hell with the liquor industry. Bogie’s baby [Lauren Bacall] is called ‘The Look.’ After The Lost Weekend, Milland will be known as ‘The Kidney.’”

  The Lost Weekend was eventually nominated for seven Academy Awards, winning four of them: Best Picture, Best Director (Wilder), Best Actor (Milland), and Best Writing of an Adapted Screenplay (won jointly by Brackett and Wilder).

  After his win, Milland reached the pinnacle of his career, becoming the highest paid star at Paramount.

  When shooting was finished on The Lost Weekend, Milland told Jane goodbye. He headed north for a two-week vacation with his wife, Muriel. As a farewell to Jane, he told her, “Maybe we’ll meet again.”

  ***

  As World War II was coming to an end, Reagan faced an uncertain future in films. In contrast, based on the acclaim heaped on her performance in The Lost Weekend, Jane’s career had skyrock
eted.

  To her friends, Joan Blondell, June Allyson, and Paulette Goddard, Jane complained constantly. She had always wanted a father figure to compensate for the dad she never had. For a time in the early 1940s, Reagan was that to her, plus also a lover. “Now I’m the breadwinner,” she proclaimed. “Do you gals know what an Army captain’s pay is?”

  The general public remained under the impression that Reagan and Jane were the happiest married couple in Hollywood, although “Ray and Muriel” were also cited as an equivalent example of marital bliss. Ironically, all of this publicity was happening at the time Jane and Milland were conducting an illicit affair.

  But occasionally, a reporter was more realistic, as was a wartime writer for Modern Screen. “If things at the studio upset Jane Wyman, she gripes about them at home. And she is upset a lot. She flies off the handle. When Ronald Reagan is around, he tries to calm her down. But she doesn’t want to be calm, she wants to storm. ‘You don’t know what things are like,’ she tells her husband. ‘You’ve been away too long.’ When she cools off, she realizes that Reagan has his own problems and that it can’t be fun to come home on a weekend pass and listen to her beef.”

  Months later, Modern Screen filed another report, suggesting that there was trouble in paradise and hinting that Jane may have a secret lover. Rumors were rampant at the time in Hollywood, many believing that Jane and Van Johnson were having an affair, as had been hinted before in the past. At the time, the world did not know that the handsome, freckle-faced, blonde-haired actor was a homosexual. And only the most deeply entrenched insiders knew that Jane’s secret lover was actually Dennis Morgan.

  As the Reagan/Wyman marriage crumbled, a beaming Reagan, with a smiling Jane, posed for this “happy home” shot with blonde-haired Maureen and a new member of the family, an adopted son they named Michael Edward Reagan.

  Reagan was infuriated when he read Modern Screen. He threatened to hunt down the reporter who had written the article, and “throttle” him if he didn’t retract the statements printed about Jane. As it happened, the accusations were never retracted, and Reagan did not attack the reporter.

  Jane did not want another baby, but Reagan and Baby Maureen did. On a shopping trip with her mother at Saks Fifth Avenue, Maureen placed an order for a baby brother with the store clerk.

  Within a few days, the issue was finally resolved: Jane and Reagan would adopt a baby boy.

  In his arguments for adoption, Reagan issued a statement to the press, citing that because of the disruption of World War II, thousands of unwanted children were homeless and desperately in need of loving parents.

  On March 21, 1945, shortly after he was born, Michael Edward Reagan was brought to the Reagans’ home. At last, Maureen had a baby brother. Reagan welcomed the newcomer to the household, calling him “our real child.”

  Jane later said, “I never thought of Michael as an adopted child, and as he grew up, I never thought of myself as an adoptive mother, but as his own mother. The way I see it, we’re blood. I have no more to say, except that he is my baby boy.”

  A few fan magazines ran pictures of Reagan, Jane, and Michael, but many devoted photos to just Reagan and the baby.

  Despite the presence of two small, demanding children within their home, Reagan and Jane, after the war, became fixtures on the Hollywood party circuit. As columnist Hedda Hopper wrote, “At parties, Ronnie talks politics while Jane perches atop the piano and makes like Helen Morgan.”

  Her role as a fixture, with her husband, on the party circuit lasted no more than a few months before Jane grew bored. She wanted her old life back, but with newer escorts. By this time, Reagan had given up partying and was devoting his nights instead to the politics associated with the Screen Actors Guild. In 1947, he was elected as the organization’s President.

  June Allyson, married to Dick Powell at the time, was a close observer of the Reagan marriage. She hid her own attraction to him from Jane, but she told other friends, “One day, I’ll get my man, Ronnie. Probably when he leaves Janie. I want him. And Lola gets what Lola wants.”

  An older, more mature man, Powell had begun overlooking his errant wife’s many indiscretions, including her love affair with Alan Ladd and, later, her off-the-record weekends in Las Vegas with Dean Martin.

  Allyson predicted that the Wyman/Reagan marriage would end in the divorce courts. “Her career is on the rise. His is going to hell.”

  After completing One More Tomorrow, Jane said, “It’s a picture I’m ashamed of—and I don’t shame easily.”

  Jack Warner agreed. He delayed its release until it could benefit from all the favorable publicity Jane received for The Lost Weekend.

  Although it wasn’t her fault, Dennis Morgan, her co-star, became angered when marquees across the country took down his name and displayed hers instead. “Oh, my god,” she told Joan Blondell. “I’m experiencing with Dennis what I’m going through with Ronnie. Dennis was the hottest male star on the lot, and now he’s falling. His star is dimming. Ronnie’s star is also dimming. I’m shining brighter than ever, and I think they resent me.”

  “Of course they do, darling,” Blondell said. “How like a man. They’re all no good!”

  ***

  Jane was delighted to learn from the British director, Peter Godfrey, that she’d be starring once again in the 1946 release of One More Tomorrow. Her passion for Dennis Morgan had continued unabated, although here were long periods of separation. As she and Reagan had grown farther and farther apart, she welcomed the tenderness and love that Morgan provided, though he was still married and kept telling her he did not plan to divorce his wife.

  Godfrey would soon be directing Reagan in two of his movies, That Hagen Girl (1947) and The Girl from Jones Beach (1949).

  Jane was pleased to hear that she’d also be co-starring with two of her girlfriends, Alexis Smith and Ann Sheridan. Morgan would also be working once again with “my best pal,” Jack Carson. Ironically, Carson’s character in the movie was named “Regan.”

  Hollywood insiders always wondered if Jane Wyman (left) ever found out about Ann Sheridan’s long-enduring affair with her husband.

  It was a romantic liaison that began long before Reagan’s marriage to Wyman.

  One More Tomorrow was a reincarnation of Philip Barry’s socially conscious play, The Animal Kingdom, which had been filmed in 1932 with three A-list stars, Ann Harding, Leslie Howard, and Myrna Loy.

  In this latest version, Sheridan was cast in the star role as Christie Sage, a photographer for The Bantam, a publication going bankrupt. Once again, Jane played Sheridan’s ‘sidekick.

  Morgan played Tom Collier, a rich playboy pursuing Sheridan. When she turns him down, he is ensnared by Cecilia Henry (Smith), a scheming gold-digger who eventually marries him. Still pining for Christie (Sheridan), it’s clear that he doesn’t really love Cecilia.

  On the set, reunited with Morgan, Jane discovered a more mature actor, one more self-assured. He had become the leading man at Warner Brothers, a position Reagan coveted but never achieved. Morgan’s peak years were from 1943 to 1949. Later, he fell out of favor with 1950s audiences.

  During the shoot of One More Tomorrow, she got to know him better than ever, learning more about his background. Unlike her, he’d had a normal childhood as the son of a baker. His mother had studied music before her marriage and had transmitted her love of singing to her son. They often sang duets together. As a teenager, he took singing lessons, and he often sang at solo recitals and church socials. In high school, he’d played the trombone in the school band.

  At Carroll College in Waukesha, Wisconsin, he’d fallen in love with Lillian Vedder, later marrying her, but not abandoning his pursuit of some of his leading ladies.

  When One More Tomorrow was released, the critics, if they noticed Jane at all, claimed she was “sadly wasted in another sidekick role.” One reviewer wrote, “The original version of The Animal Kingdom with Leslie Howard was oversexed and heavy handed, while the one w
ith Dennis Morgan is simply flat. Although the cast is likable, they couldn’t save a dull script.”

  Ginger Rogers, who would appear in movies starring both Reagan and Morgan, later commented on these two being afflicted with “Leadinglady-it is.”

  “In most cases, Ronnie and Dennis moved on once the picture was over,” Rogers said. “From the grapevine, I heard that the one exception to their fickle wars is their continuing fascination with Jane Wyman. Her particular appeal has always eluded me. But she must send out some siren call, because both Dennis and Ronnie keep coming back to her charms.”

  “As for Jane herself, I was fairly neutral about the dame,” Rogers said. “That is, until she decided to dig her greedy claws into Lew Ayres. He was my ex, but I still resented the bitch for moving in on him.”

  ***

  During the months after the war, Alexis Smith and her husband, Craig Stevens, were spending a lot of their free time with Jane and Reagan, now that he was no longer in the Army.

  A vanilla, and unconvincing, portrayal of a “marriage of convenience” inspired by the life of Cole Porter. Despite the film’s shortcomings, the casting department at least got something right: Like Porter himself, both of the film’s stars, Cary Grant and Alexis Smith, were bisexuals.

  Alexis’ career at Warners seemed on a quick rise to stardom. “I’m no longer window dressing,” the actress from British Columbia told the Reagans. She had made Gentleman Jim (1942) with Errol Flynn; The Constant Nymph (1943), with Joan Fontaine and Charles Boyer; and she’d played an unsympathetic part in Humphrey Bogart misfire, Conflict (1945). She was set to make yet another film with Bogart, The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947). She had previously appeared with Jane in The Doughgirls (1944) and now, in the buoyant aftermath of the Allied victories in Europe and the Pacific, she was on the screen with Jane once again in One More Tomorrow (1946).