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

by Darwin Porter

  “June and I finally had to cool it because Louis B. Mayer found out about us and threatened our careers,” Peter said.

  Allyson later recalled, “I sort of presented Peter as a present to Jane when we broke off. She was so frustrated in her marriage to Ronnie. I had been fond of Peter in a very romantic way. I loved his devil-may-care attitude, and his British accent fascinated me.”

  According to Allyson, “Jane and Peter became intimate on their first date.”

  In Malibu, Lawford invited her to a little tavern that on Friday nights featured an open mike. “I’m having to sing and dance in Good News,” Lawford said. “I’m neither a singer or dancer. Tonight, I’d like to sing a few songs with you to get over my shyness about singing in public. I know you’re a singer. We can do the familiar favorites that both of us know, like ‘Bye, Bye Blackbird.’ If I can sing before strangers, I’ll be better prepared to do so on camera.”

  He and Jane sang five songs, and the crowd in the tavern cheered, demanding more. Jane called out to the audience, “We have so many requests, we’ll stay here all night and sing them all!” That brought even more cheers.

  Later, she told Allyson that after midnight that evening, Lawford brought her back to his living quarters. “I think Lady May Lawford lived in another part of the house. He calls his mother ‘The Bitch.’ Peter is very oral.”

  After only five dates, as Jane was about to start filming Johnny Belinda with Lew Ayres, both Lawford and Jane were ready to move on to other conquests. She told Allyson the real reason she broke from Lawford: “I heard that he goes to whorehouses since his regular dates won’t do all the oral stuff he demands. He’s also said to patronize male hustlers that he pick up in toilets. I’m afraid that if I keep dating him, I’ll catch something.”

  About a month after they broke off from one another, Jane received a call from Lawford. Apparently, he’d given a blow-by-blow description of their affair to his newly minted and very gossipy friend, Frank Sinatra. “Frank wants a date with you,” Lawford said. “Are you game?”

  “Let me get back to you on that,” she told him. Then she hung up the phone, never to use it again to call Lawford.

  ***

  June of 1947 represented one of the darkest moments in Reagan and Jane’s troubled marriage. During the course of that month, Reagan was stricken with pneumonia. When he began gasping, “I can’t breathe,” he was rushed to the emergency ward of Los Angeles’ Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. There, he was diagnosed with a fever of 104°. When Jane was allowed to visit him the following morning, his doctors told her that he had a rare strain of pneumonia that resisted so-called miracle drugs. They suggested that he might die.

  Coming as it did on top of her mounting woes, she worked herself into a state of hysteria. Months before, her own doctor had told her that she was pregnant again. That was about the last news she wanted to hear, as she’d been cast as the star of Johnny Belinda, her most important role to date.

  During a talk with Joan Blondell, she accused Reagan of tricking her and getting her pregnant. “He thinks that by knocking me up, he can save our marriage,” Jane said. “All he’s done is make me hate him.” Before ringing off, she told Blondell that she’d had sex with Reagan for the last time. “We’re going to separate.”

  Early on the morning of June 26, Maureen’s nanny summoned an ambulance to rush Jane to the Queen of Angels Hospital. There, at 11:26AM, she gave premature birth to a pathetically frail and undersized wraith, a baby girl, whom she’d already named Christine Reagan. Days later, when Reagan recovered from his pneumonia, he incorrectly informed the press that Jane had had a miscarriage. She had not. The girl was born, but had died of cardiac arrest at 8:45PM on the evening of her birth.

  Reagan did not console Jane on their loss. Neither did she offer him any comfort.

  On her orders, the authorities cremated the body six days after Christine’s death.

  ***

  When Reagan, after a prolonged fight for his life, was released from the hospital, he was seventeen pounds lighter. And whereas he resumed work on the filming of That Hagen Girl with Shirley Temple, Jane began to train for the role of the deaf mute in Johnny Belinda.

  To master sign language, Jane hired Elizabeth Gessner, an expert, who spent weeks teaching her how. She had a hard time mastering it, but finally, she realized what her problem was. The fact that she could hear was reflected in her reactive timing and in the expression on her face. She solved that problem by stuffing wax into her ear canals during rehearsals, a technique she’d continue during the actual shooting of the film. Using that device, and by remaining silent for hours at a time, she gave the illusion of being lost within a context of total deafness.

  Reagan was still occupying the same home with her, Maureen, and Michael. At first, he didn’t know that her ears were plugged, thinking she was refusing to speak to him.

  As she remembered, “We often passed each other in the hallway. He came and went, usually involved in SAG business at night. He had moved out of our bedroom and slept in the guest room. Under the same roof, we lived in separate worlds.”

  ***

  During pre-production, before Jane’s casting as Belinda, there had been many intense debates, all of them stressful, with various stars considered for the role. Joan Crawford called producer Jerry Wald, who was responsible for the green-lighting of Johnny Belinda. “I need another Oscar to match the one I won for Mildred Pierce,” she asserted.

  Wald was impressed with the way Jean Negulesco had helmed Crawford in Humoresque (1946). Of course, Wald knew she was too old for the role, as was Bette Davis, who was also in the running.

  “The new girl on the block,” Eleanor Parker, was deemed most suitable, but she had already signed to appear in other pictures, Escape Me Never with Errol Flynn, and The Voice of the Turtle with Reagan, both in 1947.

  Finally, after all the Warner executives had seen a screening of The Yearling, Jane emerged as the final selection. Somewhere along the way, two of Jane’s closest friends, Alexis Smith and Ann Sheridan, had also been discussed as possible candidates.

  A sensitive movie brilliantly acted, and marketed with lurid overlays from MGM’s publicity department.

  Despite condemnations from censors, audiences were drawn to it.

  Yet even after Jane signed for the role, the casting debates continued. Samuel Goldwyn, presumably meddling in the affairs of a competing studio, called Wald, telling him, “You know in your heart that there’s only one actress who’d be the ideal choice for Be-linda—and that’s my little Teresa Wright. Even though you’ve already cast Wyman, you know I’m right. With her, it might be a stretch. With Wright, it’s a natural.”

  An abused deaf-mute, as portrayed by Jane, emerging—with the help of Lew Ayres, seen here from behind—from her prison and shell.

  Wright had already won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in Mrs. Miniver (1942), and had delivered a brilliant performance in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). For a very brief time, Wald considered removing Jane from the project and signing Wright instead, but Goldwyn demanded too much money for a loan-out.

  Bringing Johnny Belinda to the screen had required a long period of gestation. In 1940, it had opened on Broadway as a play starring Helen Craig, the wife of actor John Beal, who had been Katharine Hepburn’s co-star in the film, The Little Minister (1934).

  At the time, Jane had attended a performance of the play with Reagan and Louella Parsons during one of their cross-country promotional tours. Parsons predicted “This play will never be made into a film because the plot centers on a rape. That is forbidden for display on screen.”

  Parsons opinion reflected a conservative application of the values and standards of her era, but Johnny Belinda would defy the Code and become the first A-list picture of its kind to feature rape since 1934, when the Production Code had begun strict enforcement of its self-defined moral imperatives.

  World War came and went before Wald unearthed the property and to
ld Warner, “It’ll make a hell of a movie.” It took a lot of persuading before Warner purchased the rights for $50,000. Even then, the studio faced the major task of rewriting and reconfiguring it. To that effect, Warner hired two screenwriters of minor importance. One of them was Irma von Cube, a German-American who, after an early career working on films in Berlin, had penned the script for Song of Love (1947), starring Katharine Hepburn, Paul Henreid, and Robert Walker. Her partner in the scriptwriting of Johnny Belinda was a writer/actor, Allen Vincent, who had starred in minor films in the 1930s. As a scriptwriting team, they went through eight versions before one of them was finally deemed acceptable.

  Johnny Belinda had originated as a play by Elmer Blaney Harris, who based it on an incident that had occurred at his summer home on Prince Edward Island off the eastern coast of Canada. Lydia Dingwell (1852-1931), a deaf mute, had been brutally raped and impregnated, with dire consequences, including murder. The story not only dramatized the horror of rape, but the consequences of spreading rumors and lies in a small town of fishermen and their families.

  Jane was cast as Belinda McDonald, the victim of the rape, who is befriended by a new doctor, Robert Richardson. He realizes that Belinda, though treated like a dummy by the townspeople, is very intelligent. Her father is Black McDonald, and she lives with him and her Aunt Aggie. Belinda rarely ventures into town, where she is likely to be mocked.

  The doctor’s secretary is in love with him, but when he spurns her advances, she marries a local lout, Locky McCormick, the villain of the piece. He gets drunk at a dance, goes to the farm where Belinda is alone, and rapes her, which causes her to become pregnant.

  As a 1930s “Pretty Boy on Celluloid,” Lew Ayres had a certain androgynous appeal, attracting the hearts of such diverse personalities as Spencer Tracy or Ginger Rogers, and ultimately, Jane Wyman herself.

  When news of her pregnancy spreads through the town, the doctor is suspected as the father. The baby boy is named Johnny.

  When Locky, now married to Richardson’s secretary, decides he wants to claim (and kidnap) the baby, he is shot (and killed) by Belinda after a struggle. Subsequently, she’s put on trial for murder, but eventually, news of who actually committed the rape is aired in the open light of day. Richardson saves the day, taking Belinda and Johnny to their new home and a new life.

  As director of this controversial screenplay, Jean Negulesco became available when Errol Flynn refused to accept him as director on the set of The Adventures of Don Juan (1948).

  Negulesco proposed to Wald that Brian Aherne should be shoehorned into the role of the doctor. “If not Brian, how about Robert Donat or Ronald Colman?”

  Wald, however, had a different vision: He had seen Marlon Brando interpret the brutish role of Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, and as the doctor, he wanted the handsome, talented young actor. Warner, however, adamantly disagreed. He, too, had seen Streetcar. “I understand Brando is a secret faggot. Besides that, he mumbles. I didn’t understand a god damn word he said except ‘STELLA! STELLA! STELLA!’”

  Finally, the name of Lew Ayres was put forth, based on his having played a doctor in a series that included nine Dr. Kildare movies from 1938 to 1942.

  Although his fame had derived from roles he had played before the war, Ayre’s career was far from over. He had already made a successful post-war comeback playing an empathetic doctor in The Dark Mirror (1946).

  When Ayres was first contacted about the role, he said. “Although I hear you signed Jane Wyman, who is all wrong for the part, I hope you cast Teresa Wright as my leading lady.”

  Wald responded, “You leave the casting to us, okay?”

  At the time Ayres made that statement, he had seen neither The Yearling nor The Lost Weekend. He remembered Jane, if at all, as the wisecracking “Hey-Hey Girl” of the 1930s. He didn’t learn until later that she didn’t want him for her leading man either, preferring Joseph Cotten.

  The studio’s first choice for the rapist was sexy, stoically handsome Rory Calhoun, who had served a three-year jail term for several incidences of armed robbery before he was twenty-one. His gay agent, Henry Willson, was heavily promoting him and taking sexual advantage of his new discovery. Calhoun would go on to become a star, making two pictures with Marilyn Monroe, How To Marry a Millionaire in 1953, and River of No Return in 1954, which also co-starred Robert Mitchum.

  Warner ruled against Calhoun. A newly emerging, malevolent-looking “menace” on the screen, Stephen McNally, was selected instead. [Ironically, when the actor was billed as “Horace McNally,” he had played the kindly doctor, Robert Richardson, on Broadway in the stage version. He kept the name of Horace until he was cast in Johnny Belinda. Henceforth, he would be billed as Stephen McNally.] Wald had been impressed when he’d played the villain in Judy Garland’s The Harvey Girls (1946).

  When McNally first met Jane on the set, he asked her, “Can we go somewhere private and rehearse the rape scene?”

  She denied his request.

  A New Yorker, like McNally, Jan Sterling would become one of the best known of the cinematic blondes of the 1950s. She’d be nominated for an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress for her performance in The High and the Mighty (1954).

  At the time Jane met her, she was married to the British actor, John Merivale, who would later become famously associated with Vivien Leigh, becoming her lover after her divorce in 1960 from Lord Laurence Olivier. Sterling herself would become married to the likable lug, the “character leading man,” Paul Douglas.

  Originally, Janis Paige, a singer/actress, was selected for the role of the doctor’s jealous secretary, Locky’s wife, but Wald interpreted her screen test as unacceptable.

  Agnes Moorehead was cast in the role of Belinda’s aunt and flinty guardian. Moorehead had made her debut in Citizen Kane (1941), one of the greatest films ever made. Before that, she’d worked in The Mercury Theatre with Orson Welles. Moorehead’s performance in Johnny Belinda was eventually nominated for an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress.

  Charles Bickford was offered the role of Belinda’s father. Wald later said, “He held me up. It was highway robbery. But we finally hired him for $5,000 a week.” At the time, Bickford was among the hottest character actors in Hollywood, and there was talk that he might win the Oscar for his recent appearance in The Farmer’s Daughter (1947), co-starring Loretta Young and Ethel Barrymore.

  ***

  Cast and crew of Johnny Belinda were moved to the village of Mendocino, some 42 miles north of San Francisco, along the 42-mile-long Big River. This rustic setting had been selected by Wald with the understanding that more than any other village in California, it matched the terrain of a fishing hamlet in the Maritime Provinces of Canada.

  On the set, Jane came face to face with her leading man, Lew Ayres.

  She had first seen him on the screen in 1929 when he’d starred opposite Greta Garbo in The Kiss and she’d “thrilled at his male beauty” when he played the young soldier on All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).

  Ever since, he’d been a media event, and she followed his life and career in the fan magazines. They had reviewed his marriages, first to Lola Lane and later to Ginger Rogers.

  From the first night, Jane and Ayres became almost inseparable. “I’m not saying that Lew drove the nails into the coffin of my marriage to Ronnie,” she later told June Allyson. “Lew was not to blame. But he moved into my heart. I would probably have divorced Ronnie anyway. There is no way I wanted to become the wife of a politician.”

  In record time, both Ayres and Jane became confidants. Reagan had offered her no comfort following the cremation of their infant daughter, but Ayres did. At first, he came on to her like a priest, which he had wanted to be at one time in his life. But by the third night, her “father confessor” had become her lover.

  As she later claimed, “he became almost overnight the love of my life.”

  Jane had to tell someone, and she chose Agnes
Moorehead, who, based on their work on the same movie set every day, became an eyewitness to Jane’s fast-developing love affair. Jane told her, “John Payne thrilled me sexually, Dennis Morgan is a darling. But Lew is something else. I have an actual glow when I’m around him. I know I sound like a silly schoolgirl, but he touches my heart in a way no man has ever done before.”

  During their time off, they would wander off together. Sometimes, they shared a picnic along the banks of the Big River, finding a secluded spot. She took up painting, with a preference for landscapes. He drove her around in a battered pickup truck rented from a local farmer with funds provided by the studio.

  They found an escapist retreat in the fern-banked canyons of Russian Gulch, amid copses of redwood trees. Sometimes, they explored the rocky coastline around Fort Bragg, finding a hidden cove where he made love to her. She painted scenes of the Noyo River, with its small fishing craft, while he read the theology-based existentialism of Søren Kierkegaard.

  “Often, we would sit for hours at a time, when we weren’t needed for a scene,” she told Moorehead. “Like Belinda in our picture, I could communicate silently with Lew.”

  He told her of his much-publicized experiences during World War II. In March of 1942, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he had refused to bear arms and consequently, registered as a conscientious objector. In reaction, many theaters boycotted his films, especially films in his Dr. Kildare series. Along with other conscientious objectors, he was sent to Cascade Locks, an internment center in Oregon. “I believe in praising the Lord, but not passing the ammunition,” he said at the time.

  He left the internment camp by volunteering as a medical corpsman and chaplain’s assistant serving on the front lines in the South Pacific. Once there, he earned the respect of his fellow servicemen, exposing himself to danger, aiding the wounded, and comforting the dying.

  He told Jane, “The horrors of war were worse than I’d imagined. I held little children in my arms as they were bleeding to death, with only a minute or so to live. I saw other children standing by to watch their parents be buried in a mass grave. I held soldiers whose intestines had been ripped out by a bomb. I listened to their dying word. Often it was, ‘Tell my mother that I will always love her from Heaven.’”