Ayres showed her a column written by right winger Hedda Hopper shortly after his return to Hollywood. She commended him for his service during the war, the terms of which had originally inspired frontpage ridicule. “Ayres faced professional suicide, but to crucify a man who stands up to his own convictions is un-Christian and un-American,” Hopper wrote.
He kept his body in good shape at the age of thirty-eight, two years older than Reagan. Often, Jane and Ayres swam nude together in the waters of Big River. He told her he liked the role he was playing. “I stand up against a bigoted, self-righteous town. The role was made for me.”
“Ronnie is pragmatic,” Jane told Moorehead. “Lew is idealistic. Ronnie reads about politics, Lew devours books on religion and philosophy.”
On Sunday afternoons, on a riverbank, Ayres would play his jazz banjo for Jane. She didn’t know that he’d been trained as a musician in his native Minnesota. His father had played the cello.
Jane also said, “He doesn’t indulge in Hollywood gossip like I love to do. In addition to being a brilliant actor, he can also whittle, sculpt, write anti-war plays, and compose a symphony—he’s a true Renaissance man. I find him a wonderful companion and a great and most satisfying lover. When he seduces a woman, he makes her feel like a goddess. He also has a good sense of humor, very much like my own.”
“His eyes convey a sadness,” she told Moorehead. “He’s very quiet. When he does speak, it’s with a warm, caring voice that I find very soothing. He’s a vegetarian. I haven’t had a steak since I met him. At night, he holds me in his arms.”
“Girl, you sound like you’re in love,” Moorehead answered.
***
When Jack Warner saw the first rushes of Johnny Belinda, he exploded in fury. “What is this? Some fucking mood piece about fog and seagulls from Sweden?” He had just returned from a vacation in France. When Jane came on the screen, he was even more horrified. “I can’t stand the sight of her. She’s ugly. People don’t buy tickets to see an ugly woman on the screen. Put some makeup on her. You’ve got too much of this deaf-and-dumb shit. Have a voice over to narrate and let us know what she’s thinking. Silent pictures went out, already. In fact, Warners invented the talking picture.”
Negulesco did not listen to the demands of his boss and went on shooting the picture as he’d conceived it.
Late one afternoon, Reagan arrived unexpectedly in Mendocino. He hadn’t informed Jane that he was coming. Was he on the scene because he’d heard rumors that she was having an affair with Ayres? Moorehead and Negulesco noticed that Reagan got a chilly reception from Jane. She did not allow him to sleep in her cabin, claiming that it would break her concentration for the role. Ironically, he ended up bedding down in Ayres’ cabin, because it was the only place with an available bed.
As Negulesco later said, “I would love to have been a fly on the wall to hear what those two guys had to say about each other.”
Reagan left early the next morning, but the director noticed that Jane did not kiss him goodbye. However, Reagan shook Ayres’ hand and thanked him for putting him up for the night.
Within two days, another unexpected visitor arrived on the scene to confront Ayres. It was his girlfriend, the blonde-haired actress, Audrey Totter. Unknown to Jane, she and Ayres had been engaged in an affair.
Unlike Reagan, who had been discreet and had caused no trouble, Totter was “itching for a fight,” as she told Negulesco.
Their confrontation took place in Jane’s cabin in the presence of Ayres. “The screams between the two jealous women could be heard across the river,” Negulesco said.
In a rage, Totter left Mendocino, vowing never to speak to Ayres again.
“Totter got kicked out on her ass,” Negulesco recalled. “I had a member of my crew drive her to San Francisco and put her on a plane back to Los Angeles. Her fling with Lew was over. Obviously, he’d found a new gal, a married one at that. I figured that if Totter knew that, then the word had already spread across Hollywood. America’s ideal couple of World War II was that no more. The title had passed.”
***
After their completion of Johnny Belinda, Jane told the cast and crew goodbye, hugging and kissing Moorehead. She told her newly made friend that she was going for a short vacation in New York. After telling Negulesco farewell, Ayres drove Jane to San Francisco, where they boarded a plane together to New York.
Once in Manhattan, they booked a suite together at The Plaza, but for the most part avoided the usual celebrity haunts, such as the Stork Club. However, Harrison Carroll, the Hollywood reporter for the Herald-Express, caught up with the romantic couple one night.
Perhaps he came upon Jane in an unguarded moment. She almost never made comments about Reagan to the press. But on this afternoon in December of 1947, she did. “There is no use lying. I am not the happiest girl in the world. It’s nothing that happened recently. It’s an accumulation of things that have been coming down for a long time. When I return to Los Angeles, I will talk things over with Ronnie. I hope and believe that we will solve our problems and avoid a separation.”
Later, when columnist Gladys Hall cornered her, she had been drinking and was even more indiscreet, delivering a far more candid appraisal of her marriage. “Ronnie and I are through. We’re finished! It’s all my fault.”
When she read these statements, Louella Parsons called Reagan at once. These two former residents of Dixon, Illinois, had long been allies and friends. He told her, “I love Jane and I know she loves me. I don’t know what this is all about, and I don’t know why Jane has done it. For my part, I hope to live with her for the rest of my life.”
Then he uttered a shocker, “Jane very much needs to have a fling, and I intend to let her have it.”
Hedda Hopper managed to reach Reagan for brief statement. He said, “If it comes to divorce, I’ll name Johnny Belinda as my co-respondent.”
Back in Hollywood, Jane asked Reagan to move out, and he took his luggage to a hotel. Even so, she seemed to realize how indiscreet her comments in New York had been.
She wrote an “open letter” to him, which was sent to and then published in a movie magazine.
“Dear Ronnie,
You and I have been married for seven years. During this period, at least once a week, you’ve reminded me (kiddingly), how lucky I am to have you for a husband. I thing I am lucky. All kidding aside, there isn’t a single thing about you I’d want to change. You’ve been wonderful to me in many ways.”
Apparently, she didn’t mean a word of what she’d written.
To squelch rumors about an affair with Ayres, Jane called Reagan and invited him to be her escort at the premiere of Johnny Belinda. He told George Murphy, “I think this means a reconciliation. I’ll be sleeping in my own bed tonight.”
It was a glittering affair. In contrast to her drab appearance in the film, Jane showed up in a satin gown and a mink coat, looking almost as glamorous as she’d ever appeared.
Although the lavish event went smoothly, and she was smothered in congratulations, the evening ended in disaster. After he’d taken her to dinner at Chasen’s, a fight erupted between Reagan and her on the sidewalk when the valet was retrieving Reagan’s car.
Jane was heard shouting at Reagan, “I got along without you, and I damn well can get along without you now, you fucking has-been.”
Also waiting for her car, actress Jane Greer overheard the altercation.
Wyman asked the doorman to hail a taxi for her. As she was getting into the cab, Greer also heard Reagan call after her, “Who are you fucking tonight?”
Johnny Belinda opened across the country to rave reviews. Warners, however, decided to take out full page ads emphasizing the rape. A drawing pictured a menacing man moving toward a frightened young woman. Headlines blared “SHAME CAME OUT OF THE SHADOWS AND CHANGED A YOUNG GIRL’S LIFE” Some of the ads suggested that Ayres, as the doctor, was the culprit who raped her. “HER DOCTOR WAS THE FIRST TO SHARE HER SHAME.”
/> In spite of Jack Warner delaying the film for months, he relished its success when it became the studio’s biggest money-maker of the year. “Sometimes, it’s great to be wrong. I’m laughing all the way to the bank.”
Seen together at the Oscar Ceremony, waiting for an announcement about Johnny Belinda: Lew Ayres and “no longer plain” Jane Wyman.
Reagan was noticeably absent.
In Hollywood, Parsons reviewed Johnny Belinda for Cosmopolitan, “If stardom is what Jane Wyman wants most, Johnny Belinda will guarantee her this eminence. Jane as the deaf mute is real and very touching. She rises to every demand of tenderness and warmth.”
Jane expected to be on the list of Best Actress Academy Award nominations, although she didn’t expect to win. On Oscar night, Ayres, not Reagan, was her escort. Irene Dunne was nominated for I Remember Mama; Olivia de Havilland for The Snake Pit; Ingrid Bergman for Joan of Arc; and Jane’s friend, Barbara Stanwyck, for Sorry, Wrong Number.
Lovemaking on Oscar Night.
With Ayres in the seat beside her, she listened as Ronald Colman came forward to read off their names. “I slumped in my seat,” Jane later said. “Two rows in front of me, I could see the neck of Dunne. She was preening, probably already mouthing her acceptance speech. Then I heard the name of JANE WYMAN ring out in the hall. I was speechless. I nearly fainted. I couldn’t believe it. Lew gave me a big kiss and hug in front of the world, and urged me to get up on my feet and go forward. I dropped my handbag, and everything, including my lipstick, went rolling out on the floor. On the way to the stage, I thought of the damnest things, like ‘did I remember to wear my girdle?’”
Accepting the Oscar, she gave one of the shortest speeches in the history of the Academy. “I accept this award very gracefully for keeping my mouth shut. I think I’ll do that again.”
Backstage, she was congratulated by Ayres, who hugged and kissed her again. She consoled him for his own loss. He had been nominated as Best Actor of the Year, but lost to Laurence Olivier for Hamlet.
An hour later, Jane showed up for a gala celebration honoring her in the Champagne Room of the Mocambo. On one of her arms was Jack Warner himself; on the other, Lew Ayres.
Warner took the occasion to announce that Jane was being considered for two upcoming pictures. The first was the film version of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire that at the time, on Broadway with Marlon Brando, was eliciting raves throughout the theatrical world.
[The film role ultimately went to Vivien Leigh, bringing her her second Oscar.]
The second movie Warner announced at Jane’s Oscar Night party was the filming of Ethan Frome, the 1911 novel by Edith Wharton, a story about tragedy, irony, and repression set in rural New England.
[Bette Davis for years had urged Warners to film the Wharton novel. But she’d left the studio. Warner briefly considered co-starring Joan Crawford with Humphrey Bogart, but the project was eventually shelved.
In 1922, it would finally reach the screen with Liam Neeson and Patricia Arquette as co-stars.
Reagan got his own silent revenge for being left out of the festivities surrounding Johnny Belinda. When he published, in 1964, his autobiography of his years in Hollywood, he didn’t even mention the film or his estranged wife’s Oscar win.]
That night, with her Oscar beside her bed, Ayres made love to her “until the cock crowed,” as she remembered it to June Allyson.
She received yet another prize before morning. Somewhere in the middle of the night, in the pre-dawn hours, he proposed marriage. “I can’t think of living apart from you.”
She remembered his exact words, as she later relayed them to Allyson. Holding her close, Ayres told her, “I want you to be my bride for the next fifty years. And then we’ll talk about it.”
Chapter Twelve
Ronald Reagan and Diana Lynn stand on their heads as part of a training exercise for their pet chimp in the notorious Bedtime for Bonzo.
“Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant raised a feisty leopard in Bringing Up Baby; James Stewart had an invisible six-foot rabbit named Harvey, and Donald O’Connor had Francis, the Talking Mule. I thought I could get away with raising Bonzo. But my enemies used my performance against me politically in the years ahead, and I was forever ridiculed and haunted by the memory of appearing in that farce. Bonzo sure made a monkey out of me.”
In 1947, when he testified before HUAC about communists in the film industry, Reagan wore his glasses so he’d “look more academic.”
“I will defend the right of any American to openly practice and preach any political philosophy from monarchy to anarchy. But this is not the case with regard to the communist. He is bound by subversion and stealthy to impose on an unwilling people the rule of the International Communist Party, which is, in fact, the government of Soviet Russia.”
Reagan had spent nearly four years in the U.S. Army Air Force making war propaganda films. No longer drawing a captain’s pay, he was finally back on the payroll at Warner Brothers, with a salary of $3,500 a week, an large amount in 1945 currency. There was no immediate role for him, so he spent most of his days working on the construction of an unfinished ranch house surrounded by eight acres in North-bridge in the San Fernando Valley, which he and Jane had recently purchased.
Postwar Reagan: He’s no longer the newest, hottest, or youngest actor in town.
“In my absence from the screen, a lot of new faces had emerged,” he said. “Roles were going to Peter Lawford, Tom Drake, Robert Walker, Cornel Wilde, and there was talk that my friend, William Holden, and Burt Lancaster were going to become super stars.”
According to George Murphy and Dick Powell, Reagan viewed Gregory Peck “as the hottest new kid on the block.” Ironically, Peck was co-starring with his wife, Jane Wyman, in what would become a classic, The Yearling.
Although he had not yet found “the proper comeback picture for Ronnie,” Jack Warner invited him to dinner. He later said at a dinner party, “A very different looking Ronald Reagan arrived at my door. He’d lost that pretty boy look he had when all the hot little starlets at my studio were chasing him. He’d become a man, with broader shoulders. He was also heavier. That boyish air he’d had was completely gone. After the war, Robert Taylor, Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, and Tyrone Power just weren’t the pretty boys that caused women and teenage girls to swoon in the 1930s. Ronnie now numbered in that old group. The word handsome could still be used to describe these men, however.”
Actually, in the ensuing years, Reagan became more interested in politics than he did in filmmaking, since the great roles he’d anticipated had eluded him, the ones he had expected after his appearance in Kings Row. He told actor Robert Montgomery, “The super stardom I’d dreamed about is not going to happen—and I know that.”
“I can say the same thing about myself,” Montgomery answered.
Despite his falling popularity, he could still point to a hefty paycheck. In 1946, he earned $150,000 a year as opposed to Humphrey Bogart who brought home “to my Betty” (Bacall) $432,000. Also at Warners, Errol Flynn earned just one dollar under $200,000, with Bette Davis, still queen of the lot, hauling away $328,000.
Pistol-Packin’ Reagan Faces Death Threats from Union Brass, Then Outs Hollywood “Commies” to the FBI.
***
“I set about joining “every organization I could find that would guarantee to save the world, although later, to my great regret and shame, I learned that many of these were nothing but communist front groups.” Reagan wrote in a memoir.
“At the time, my aim was to save the world from Neo-Fascists. I overlooked the on-coming world nightmare of communist takeovers. Actually, in the beginning, I viewed many communists as liberals like myself. Some communists I considered misguided; others, of course, were far more dangerous. At the time, I was trying to separate a good communist from a bad communist, but I soon learned there was no good communist.”
On the homefront, Reagan had a lot to overcome. He’d later write, “I
was a bit introverted. I’ve been inclined to hold back a little of myself. In some ways, I think this reluctance to get close to people never left me completely.”
Jane Wyman would certainly agree with that assessment, as would his children, Maureen and Michael, and later, even his future children with Nancy Davis: Patti Davis (who didn’t want to use his last name as her own) and Ron Reagan, Jr. His son would eventually become a liberal like his father had been in the 1930s and 40s.
Reagan still defined himself as a “hemophiliac liberal,” but the blood flow of his “bleeding heart” had been slowed down somewhat by the waste and greed he’d witnessed firsthand in government spending in World War II.
***
In the immediate post-war years, as he saw how corrupt Hollywood was, Reagan lost many of his idealistic beliefs. To an increasing degree, he began to express his fear that Communists were trying to take over the film industry for use as a propaganda vehicle, worldwide. At the time, 95% of the movies shown worldwide were conceived, scripted, and produced the United States. American films were drawing a weekly audience, worldwide, of 500,000,000, a staggering figure that’s especially impressive, considering the population at the time.
Years later, Reagan recalled his own political shift to the right, “The light went on in some obscure region of my head. It took me a long time, but reality dawned. I came to condemn liberals, [one of which I had been], as lost in their own ideological myopia.”
***
Reagan received a mysterious midnight visit at his home from three agents of the FBI. He’d been an informant to the FBI on a very casual basis since 1941, reporting on wartime conditions in Hollywood when he was making propaganda films for the government.
Love Triangle: Ronald Reagan, Jane Wyman, & Nancy Davis (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) Page 76