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

by Darwin Porter

  Until that late night meeting, Reagan’s role had been only casual. But since the end of the war, J. Edgar Hoover had noticed the actor’s increased political power and wanted him to become a weekly informant for information about—in the director’s words—“Who’s Red in Hollywood, and who’s taking his marching orders from old Joe Stalin.”

  Middle Aged, but Still a “Babe Magnet,” Reagan Sees the Decline of His Movie Career Before Warner Brothers Boots Him.

  The two most dangerous and deeply closeted homosexuals in America: FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (left) and his protégé and long time companion, Clyde Tolson.

  Reagan later asserted that his four-hour early dawn meeting with the FBI “opened my eyes about Moscow’s attempt to take over the film industry and to use it for their own propaganda purposes.”

  In the months to come, during the “witch hunt” of communists in the film industry, Reagan—now identified internally, within the F.B.I. as “Agent T-10”— filed weekly reports with Hoover.

  SAG reunion (left to right): Jane Wyman, Henry Fonda, Ronald Reagan, Boris Karloff, and Gene Kelly.

  Under the Freedom of Information Act, his role was eventually made public, although not a lot was ever learned. Many pages, perhaps vital for understanding exactly what he did, were missing from the mass of documents As for those people in the industry whom Reagan had cited as communists, their names were blacked out.

  As regards his role as a domestic spy for the FBI, he told Powell and Murphy, “I felt like I was acting out my Brass Bancroft Secret Service roles in the movies.”

  ***

  Before the war, Reagan had served on the Board of Directors of the Screen Actors Guild. After his discharge from the Army, Jane Wyman was influential in getting him reinstated. He would devote much of his time and energy during the next few years to the political activities of SAG, putting more energy into them than he did into his film career.

  More drama as SAG’s administration grows increasingly hostile to anything associated with socialism: (Left to right) George Murphy, Gene Kelly, Ronald Reagan, and William Holden.

  Reagan became its third vice president in 1946. In 1947, Robert Montgomery resigned as president, because subsequent to becoming a film producer hiring actors, he viewed his duties at SAG as a conflict of interest. A special election awarded Reagan with the organization’s presidency. Later, he was formally elected as SAG’s full-time president, serving terms from 1947 to 1952, and again in 1959 to 1960, eventually serving an unprecedented six terms.

  Director John Huston delivered a harsh appraisal of Reagan’s presidency of SAG. “I think he hooked up with SAG for purely selfish reasons. He used it as a road to power and political influence. He only went into politics because he was washed up as an actor, appearing in horrible B pictures.”

  Reagan later confessed, “Although Jane was helpful in getting me back on the board, I didn’t pay much attention to her suggestions. Perhaps I also ignored Anne Revere (“too radical”); Louise Beavers (“a champion of civil rights”); and Agnes Moorehead (“I never took to lesbians very much”).

  He paid more attention to the men, “even Frankenstein” (i.e., Boris Karloff), Edward Arnold, Walter Pidgeon, Pat O’Brien, and Dick Powell. “They made a lot of sense, but James Cagney, Henry Fonda, and John Garfield were leaning too far to the left,” Reagan said.

  “Of course, I listened to old friends, Robert Taylor and George Murphy, who were very conservative Republicans, as was Dick Powell.”

  A series of crippling strikes loomed in the film industry. In an emergency meeting, the SAG board, and later the membership, voted by a vast majority to adopt a no-strike policy, which Reagan endorsed. But the issues that would later divide Hollywood into warring camps were just beginning.

  Since Reagan appeared to be anti-union, and had enormous influence within SAG, he developed powerful enemies, placing himself at risk of bodily harm.

  When his positions became known, he was viewed as “anti-labor.” This led to a series of threats against him, He received anonymous calls late at night, pressuring him to publicize the riots as a working class protest about wages, benefits, and hours, and not just an intra-mural battle between two competing unions, the CSU (Conference of Studio Unions) and IATSE (International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees). One caller shouted at him, “If you don’t play ball, we’ll throw acid in your face, and unless it’s a remake of Frankenstein, you won’t be able to make any more of your rotten movies.”

  The morning after receiving what he viewed as a very serious threat, Reagan drove to the security office at Warner Brothers. There, the staff issued him a .32 Smith & Wesson handgun. He mounted it in a holster strapped to his chest, inside his jacket.

  From then on, during a period of seven months, he never went anywhere without it. Every night, a Burbank police officer stood outside his house until dawn. “If approached and threatened by a would-be assassin, I was prepared to shoot to kill,” Reagan said.

  He was later credited as one of the major forces that ended the labor strife. Jack Warner said, “Ronnie turned out to be a tower of strength, not only for the actors, but for the whole industry. He is to be praised by anyone working in the film industry.”

  “Ronnie was a worthy successor to Bob Montgomery and me as president of SAG,” Murphy said. “He was well aware of the strange creatures crawling out from under make-believe rocks in our make-believe town. He was on the front line in exposing those in the industry who are as Red as a May Day Parade in Moscow.”

  The strikes slowly came to an end in 1947. “The communist-dominated unions dissolved, in Reagan’s words, “like sugar in a hot cup of coffee.”

  Jack Warner loudly proclaimed, “I will fire anyone suspected of being a communist.”

  In all, Reagan calculated that the post-war strikes had cost the studios $150,000,000, with a loss of wages set at $28,000,000.

  ***

  A week after reporting for work again at Warner Brothers, Reagan was summoned to the office of Jack Warner to discuss his future career.

  “I’ve been mulling over what kind of movies you should make. Movie audiences have changed since your Brass Bancroft days.”

  “What do you think I’m best at?” Reagan asked. “I’ve got my own ideas, but you’re the bossman.”

  “You’re not romantic enough to step into Errol Flynn’s shoes,” Warner said. “I see you as Warners’ answer to Cary Grant, in film scripts of parlor, bedroom, and bath.”

  “Personally, I like Westerns and outdoor pictures like what you’ve assigned for me in Stallion Road,” Reagan said. “I’d like to appear in historical Civil War dramas. I’m a U.S. Cavalry/Indian buff, that kind of stuff. John Wayne will be rattling his saber as a Yankee soldier, I’m sure. I hear Ray Milland is getting in on the act, and you can bet your ass that Gregory Peck will do adventure stories, riding off into the setting sun, the wind blowing the cavalry guidons.”

  “Well, I’m not one to talk to so much about Civil War dramas,” Warner said. “I turned down Gone With the Wind.”

  “What about putting me in baseball or football pictures?” Reagan asked. “I like films about sportsmanship, America’s pioneering spirit, courage under fire. I’m for depicting the violence needed to settle the West with all those redskins wanting our scalps. I’m sure your boy, Errol Flynn, will be making those kind of adventure films.”

  “Speaking of Flynn, he was set to star in Stallion Road, but I heard that he was drunk that day and the following night of his first appearance on the set. Some boys from the studio are trying to sober him up so I can bring him back to work on some other picture. I decided to drop Flynn when I heard that Bogart and Bacall each wanted to star in Stallion Road. They’re almost guaranteed box office these days. With them in the movie, you can make a comeback in a hit.”

  To his chagrin, Reagan left Warner’s office with no clear guidance or insight into what his film future held. That afternoon, he met the director of Stallion Road. A N
ew Yorker, James V. Kern seemed “an odd choice to direct a hoss opera” (Reagan’s words). He was known as a singer, songwriter, screenwriter, and actor. He’d previously helmed Jane Wyman, Ann Sheridan, and Alexis Smith in The Doughgirls (1944). He’d later achieve far greater success as one of the resident directors of the hit TV series of the 1950s, I Love Lucy.

  Right before he left the studio, Kern introduced Reagan to the acclaimed Southern novelist, William Faulkner, who had been hired to write the script for Stallion Road.

  Later, when Reagan was alone with Faulkner, the novelist told him, “I hate this god damn script based on that Stephen Longstreet novel. I’m working on this piece of shit for only one reason. I’m dead broke. I’m always dead broke. Why not lend me two-hundred dollars? But I’m warning you: I’ll forget to pay you back.”

  Ten days before shooting began, Reagan received an emergency call from Kern. “Bogie and Bacall have dropped out of the picture.”

  In this publicity photo, the film’s male leads Zachory Scott (left) and Reagan, are standing on either side of “Baby,” Reagan’s own horse. The men are each reading the original novel from which the movie script had derived.

  “Any reason given?” Reagan asked.

  “Bogie told Jack Warner he doesn’t like Westerns, and also that he didn’t want to work with you. He said he doesn’t like your witch hunt politics. I’ve replaced them with Zachory Scott and your friend, Alexis Smith. I worked smoothly with Jane and her in The Doughgirls.”

  Within the week, Warner bluntly rejected Faulkner’s script and brought in Longstreet to try to write the screenplay from his own novel.

  “It seemed that Longstreet had a lot of pokers in the fire,” Reagan said. “Before he left Warners that day, he gave me a copy of an unpublished novel of his. He told me it would make a great movie with me in the lead. I promised to read it over the weekend.”

  Reagan with Alexis Smith, with whom he used to socialize as part of a double-dating ritual with his then-wife, Jane. After a misunderstanding with just the four of them together in Palm Springs, their friendship ended.

  During his first week of work, Reagan was disappointed that Warner had cut the budget in half and would shoot Stallion Road not in Technicolor, as originally announced, but in black and white. “The loss of color was a pain in the ass,” Reagan told Kern. “Color would have given the crew a chance to shoot the beautiful scenery of the Sierra Madre Range, north of Los Angeles, with its lush setting of alpine meadows sweeping down to the waters of the Pacific.”

  Reagan talked privately with Kern about the loss of Bogie and the subsequent casting of Scott. “I was hoping to ride Bogie’s shirttails to a big box office success to tell the world—REAGAN IS BACK!”

  “At least you’re getting star billing,” Kern said. “With Bogie and Bacall, you’d have been reduced to the third lead.”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Reagan said. “Zach is a fine actor and, I’m sure, a pleasure to work with, even though he’s a homo.”

  In the latest conception for Stallion Road, Reagan was cast as Larry Hanrahan, a horse breeder and a veterinarian, with Alexis interpreting the role of a rancher, Rory Teller, who visits Larry hoping that he can cure her ailing prize mare. He falls for her. So does his arriving friend, Stephen (as played by Scott), who is visiting the ranch as a setting for his next novel.

  Along the way, Stephen and Rory have a falling out. Subsequently, Stephen steps in to form the third leg of a love triangle.

  Stephen comes down with life-threatening anthrax. Rory to the rescue. She injects him with an untested serum, and he miraculously recovers. So does her love for him.

  Nelle Reagan visited the set for three days in a row. She later told her son, “From what I’ve seen, Stallion Road will be a bigger picture than Gone With the Wind.”

  “Ronnie and I both decided that the horrible old Production Code would work against luring people into movie theaters after the war,” Alexis said. “The reality of war increased the sophistication of audiences who wanted more realism in the movies. All over America, women were having children out of wedlock, for example. Also, segregation was breaking down.”

  One scene Reagan remembered called for Alexis and him to get down from their horses, lie down under a tree, and kiss. She was lying beside him on the grass as his lips came down over hers.

  Suddenly, Kern called out, “CUT! You look like you’re fucking her! Raise yourself up a bit and rest yourself on one elbow!”

  “We reshot the scene,” Reagan said. “I had to make love to Alexis on one elbow.”

  During the filming of Stallion Road, Reagan was introduced to Count Nino Pepitone by Dan Dailey, the singer/actor. Pepitone had been an officer and expert equestrian in the very stylish Italian Cavalry during World War II. The two men bonded. Reagan eventually hired Pepitone as his riding coach and later as manager of his eight-acre ranch in the San Fernando Valley. He’d named the place “Yearling Row” after Jane’s successful movie with Gregory Peck.

  He and Pepitone constructed paddock fences and a quarter-mile racetrack. “Every post hole for the inner rail posts was dug by me,” Reagan said.

  In the future, Pepitone would also manage Reagan’s second ranch, which lay in the more distant Malibu Hills.

  Pepitone sold Reagan his alltime favorite horse, a black thoroughbred which Reagan named Baby. “I fell in love with that horse,” Reagan said. “It was that horse I used in Stallion Road.” At the ranch, he and Pepitone began to breed thoroughbreds, selling them at yearling sales.

  Stallion Road took only 109 days to shoot, a record for Reagan. It was wrapped in March of 1947.

  The box office was poor. In Mississippi, Faulkner went to see the movie, and later wrote Reagan a note: “The horses stole the picture from you guys.”

  ***

  In a direct confrontational style usually associated with Bette Davis in her dealings with Warner Brothers, Reagan, instead of passively waiting for his next role, entered a meeting with Jack Warner armed with two script proposals of his own. He had never been this bold before.

  Still hoping to make him a big star, Warner listened patiently. Reagan had read the script of Bogie’s next movie, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), a Warner project slated for direction by John Huston, who had also written its screenplay. It wasn’t the lead, but Reagan wanted to play a character named Cody, who tries—with an evil coven—to find gold in the mountains. In the film, he dies during his efforts to do so.

  One morning over coffee at his breakfast table, Reagan read that the role had gone to Bruce Bennett, who, billing himself as Herman Brix, had played Tarzan. Reagan had last seen him on screen as Joan Crawford’s discarded husband in her Oscar-winning Mildred Pierce.

  At a glittering Hollywood gala, Jane Wyman presented a united front, disguising her alienation from her then-husband, Ronald Reagan.

  [Years later, during their co-starring gigs as competitive brothers in The Last Outpost (1951), Reagan and Bennett would laugh about their having competed for the role.]

  Reagan also had read Stephen Longstreet’s latest script and pitched it to Warner, claiming that it would be ideal as a Western for him. It was the Civil War drama that Reagan had mentioned he’d like to film one day. Warner had promised to review the script.

  Once again, to his disappointment, Reagan read in Variety that the picture, based on the Longstreet project, was scheduled for filming and direction by two men well known to him, Raoul Walsh and his wartime Army boss, Owen Crump. Warner had decided that the role, with its exciting Civil War scenes, would go to none other than Errol Flynn, the star he’d previously rejected for Stallion Road.

  Had Reagan succeeded in getting the role, he would have co-starred with Ann Sheridan, with whom he’d had a long-enduring affair and with whom he was still on friendly terms.

  Reagan would never get cast in a Western at Warners. After he was dumped by his boss, he starred in Westerns made by other studios during his declining years in the movies.<
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  ***

  During the filming of Stallion Road, Reagan had many long talks with Alexis Smith. She was not only his friend, but Jane’s confidante, and one of the few people in Hollywood who knew about his disintegrating marriage to Jane.

  At one point, he pleaded with her, asking her for some guidance, with the purpose of “getting Jane to come back to me. As you know, we’re secretly separated, although she comes around to see our kids.”

  Alexis warned him not to pressure Jane. “She and Lew Ayres have this thing going, and you’ve got to let it play out, for better or worse. Her affair with him may lead to your divorce, but, again, it may not. It may peter out—forgive the pun—and she’ll come back to you.”

  “You mean, I’ve got to wait and see, since it seems our future is entirely in her hands.”

  Jane did not want the press to learn about her marital difficulties. While Reagan was filming Stallion Road, she was queried about a dual-career marriage. When America’s young men were returning from the war, the questions most often being asked was, “Will women become wives and mothers, leaving business to the male breadwinners?”

  Jane defended working women: “Thousands of nice young couples all over the country have two jobs in one family, and they do all right. They adjust to it and to one another because they want to get along. There’s no reason why two actors can’t do the same thing if they’re in love and don’t start thinking themselves big. Our marriage is working for us.”

  Obviously, she didn’t believe in being truthful. She also claimed, “Having children is not a reason for a woman to give up work.”

  Reagan faced a lonely time in his life, although he had support from his friends, Robert Taylor, William Holden, George Murphy, and Dick Powell, all of whom found him depressed and defeated. “He was a builder-upper, not a tearer-downer,” Murphy said. “He’d put his heart into his marriage to Jane. She was the bedrock of his family, which had included Michael and Maureen growing up. Both of them still mourned the loss of Christine, the infant who died.”