***
At one of the lowest points in his life, “an English Rose,” actress Patricia Roc, entered Reagan’s life. Beautiful and alluring, she was hailed by producer J. Arthur Rank as “the archetypal British Beauty, the Goddess of the Odeons, a blue-eyed brunette with porcelain skin.”
Some of her fans defined Patricia Roc as “the most beautiful woman in England, our answer to Hedy Lamarr.” Her notorious affairs earned her the nickname “Bed Roc.”
Reagan was among her conquests. She later claimed that she prevented him from committing suicide.
Before meeting Reagan, Roc, in London, was referred to as “Bed Roc,” because of her numerous affairs. One of them was with actor Michael Wilding, with whom she’d filmed The Farmer’s Wife in 1941. As Roc recalled, “I had him long before Elizabeth Taylor.”
Roc later said, “I was surprised that a man of Ronnie’s dignity would stoop so low as to marry such a little, loud, brassy blonde like Jane Wyman. He deserved a woman of more finesse and dignity, with more sophistication. He found me warm, earthy, and sexually inviting.”
On her second day in Hollywood, Roc dined with Walter Wanger, producer of Canyon Passage (1946), at the celebrity-haunted Brown Derby. Two tables away she spotted Reagan talking with Adolphe Menjou. Throughout the meal, Reagan kept looking at her. When Wanger noticed, he warned her, “Don’t bother. He’s a bore. I’m sure he and that Right Winger Menjou are talking about Reds under the bed.”
Finally, Menjou left and so did Wanger, but Roc chose to remain behind. So did Reagan. After their respective dining companions left, he got up and came over to her table, asking if he could join her.
“It’s about time,” she said. “You looked at me like a Tyrannosaurus rex hungry for his next meal.”
He told her that during the war, when he’d worked in propaganda films, his staff had been sent some of the patriotic movies she’d made in Britain, including Let the People Sing (1941) and We’ll Meet Again (1943), co-starring Vera Lynn, the title based on her biggest World War II hit when she was “the most beloved songbird in Britain.” He congratulated her for her contribution to the war effort.
He asked for her phone number. She told him, “I’ll give that to you and a lot more. But why don’t we drop by your place, and you may get more than my phone number.”
She later admitted, “He seemed shy, and I made it easy for him. He didn’t seem happy cheating on his wife, but a man’s desire won out. I left the next morning.”
Roc was not only beautiful, but a femme fatale who specialized in seducing married men. She was always the epitome of elegance, style, and fashion.
In 1945, the year Reagan met her, she’d scored hits in two English-made studio melodramas about Thomas Gainsborough, the 18th-century English portrait and landscape painter. They included Madonna of the Seven Moons, and the aptly named The Wicked Lady.
After that, she came to Hollywood to film Canyon Passage (1946), the only movie she’d make there. The stars of that picture were Dana Andrews, Susan Hayward (Reagan’s former girlfriend), Ward Bond, Andy Devine, and Lloyd Bridges.
“I found Ronnie very personable, good looking, but depressed,” Roc later said in an interview. “He was still very much in love with his wife, yet became fascinated with me. We went to bed on our first date together, and after that, he wanted to monopolize me. But I was dating others.”
“If I went to dinner with another man, Ronnie would tip the waiter to get a table next to mine, where he would sit alone and just stare at me.”
“I became deeply fond of him, but rather as one becomes fond of a lost child. We became lovers because, quite frankly, I was scared and lonely on my arrival in Hollywood, and sex seemed the only thing to alleviate his utter misery. I was seriously concerned that he might do something to himself if I didn’t make him feel that somebody wanted him, because his wife sure as hell didn’t.”
“Of course, we had to be extremely careful how and where we met, especially as he was still locked into one of the highest profile marriages in Hollywood. We could both have lost our contracts had we been caught. He really fell in love with me, even though expressing his deep love for Wyman. He even followed me on location where I was making Canyon Passage. I couldn’t turn around without falling all over him.”
While waiting for Roc to finish her scene for the day, Reagan accidentally came face to face with the film’s star, Susan Hayward, whom he had not seen since their torrid affair of the late 1930s. According to the film’s director, Jacques Tourneur, “Susan walked right past Reagan and didn’t speak to him. Later, I found out why. He’d dumped her for Jane Wyman back in 1940.”
Unknown to Reagan on the afternoon of his visit, Roc had just spent two hours in the dressing room of the male star of the picture, Dana Andrews.
A “fair damsel” as “sex crazed” as Roc did not want to confine her amorous pursuits just to Reagan. She was also seen dating Lloyd Bridges, Cary Grant, Errol Flynn, and Brian Donlevy. Character actor Ward Bond developed a powerful crush on her, but she tried, perhaps unsuccessfully, to keep “Uncle Ward” at bay.
As her biographer, Michael Hodgson, noted, “In real life, Patricia’s effect on men was to prove devastating. Had things gone differently, Nancy Davis might never have become Reagan’s wife, and he might not have survived to enter the White House.”
Reagan told Dick Powell, “Patricia Roc has instant sex appeal, I don’t know what it is. This stunning, blue-eyed brunette has put a spell over me. At least she can make me forget about Jane for a while.”
It was during his affair with Roc that Reagan suffered a nervous breakdown, which led to thoughts of suicide. He conveyed to Roc that at times in the middle of the night, he thought about killing himself, leaving Nelle and Jane to take care of Maureen and Michael.
“I found him just wretched and miserable,” she said. “He adored Wyman and his family, and just couldn’t understand why or how she had completely lost interest in him. She was bored with his political interests and his intense involvement in the Screen Actors Guild. She resented what she called ‘his obsession with the threat of communism.’”
“If I had been older and more experienced, I would have realized how deeply he was suffering and would have urged him to seek psychiatric help. He told me, ‘Life just isn’t worth living anymore. I don’t see the point of going on.’ Night after night, I tried to talk him out of suicide. His depression affected our love life. On many a night, he was unable to perform like a man should.”
“I hate to say this, but when Ronnie is in love, he looks like a sick parrot,” Roc later told her biographer, Michael Hodgson.
“Sometimes, after he left my place, Ronnie told me he would drive over to Lew Ayres’ home, park his car across the street from his doorway, and just sit there until three or four o’clock in the morning. Just waiting and looking, either watching the lights go on or off in the house or Wyman and Ayres returning home late from some nightclub.”
“When I left him in Hollywood, he seemed heartbroken,” Roc claimed. “He begged me to stay. He had taken up heavy drinking, often in the company of his friend, William Holden. I don’t know how good a friend Bill was. He was very charming, very sexy. Once, when Ronnie was called away for a night shoot, he asked Bill to pick me up and escort me to a premiere. Behind Ronnie’s back, he propositioned me after taking me to dinner and the show. Did I go to bed with Bill Holden? I’ll never tell!”
For the premiere of the British film, Scott of the Antarctic, Reagan had a reunion with Roc at the film’s Royal Command Film Performance at the Odeon on London’s Leicester Square in November of 1948. Both he and Roc appeared on the stage. [Reagan was in London at the time filming The Hasty Heart with Patricia Neal, whom he was also dating.]
Britannia Rules!
Ultimately Reagan lost the battle for the affections of Patricia Roc to Anthony Steel, England’s “Mr. Beefcake,” depicted above.
That night, he presented Roc with a beautiful ruby ring. Back
stage at the Royal Film Performance with her, Christine Norden, the British sex symbol, overheard Roc claim, “I love rubies. They are so hot. Just like sex!”
“Reagan came back to live with me at my London flat on Hallam Street, where he repeatedly asked me—begged me, really—to marry him.” Roc said. “He told me that before leaving America, Wyman had denounced him. ‘She called me a bore and told me she wanted a divorce.’ Ronnie looked utterly damaged. I had to have a lot of sex, and, as was the case with him in Hollywood, he often could not perform.”
“We said our goodbyes and it was obvious that he was suffering during his departure from London. I felt sorry for him, but I didn’t love him. A new man had entered my life.”
He turned out to be André Thomas, a French cameraman, who became her second husband in 1949.
Despite the bonds of her recent marriage, Roc soon fell under the spell of Anthony Steel, England’s “Mr. Beefcake,” during their making of the film, Something Money Can’t Buy (1952). “Tony had this animal magnetism that Ronnie didn’t possess, and he was very, very very good in bed, unlike Ronnie. We didn’t always use protection, which led to the birth of my son. André forgave me for my indiscretion, but I suspect that he always believed that Ronald Reagan was the father of my son.”
When Roc was interviewed shortly before her death, a reporter noted a “wicked twinkle in her eye” at the mention of Reagan’s name. “I think I saved his life. And you know, had I accepted his proposal, I would have made a rather good First Lady, would-n’t I? But the thought of living the rest of my life in America was more than I could bear.”
At her home in Minusio, overlooking Lake Maggiore in Switzerland, Roc always kept a photograph of Reagan and herself, each of them gazing deeply into the other’s eyes. It was still resting on her piano right after Christmas in 2003, when she died at the age of 88.
Today, Patricia Roc is defined by British film historians as “The Fairest of the Fair, the most beautiful girl ever to appear in British cinema.”
***
“I was ashamed of my next picture,” Reagan told Dick Powell. “I could not bear to sit through it.”
He was referring to That Hagen Girl (1947), whose co-star had been Shirley Temple, the most famous child star of the 1930s.
“From the moment I first read the script, I did not like my role of Tom Bates, a man in love with a girl half his age. Jack Warner insisted I do it. So did the director Peter Godfrey. I didn’t want to lose that weekly paycheck, which was keeping me going, so I went for it.”
“The picture didn’t help Shirley either,” Reagan said. “She was transitioning from a beloved child actress to a teenager in love, and the public didn’t quite accept her. To them, she was still sailing on The Good Ship Lollipop.”
David O. Selznick, who held Temple’s contract, later met Reagan at a party. “I lent her to Jack Warner because, quite frankly, I didn’t know what in hell to do with her anymore now that she’d filled out.”
Warner was hoping to achieve the success of Irving Reis’ The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer (1947), which had teamed Temple with Cary Grant. But in that movie, Temple merely had a puppy crush on Grant. His real romantic interest centered on (the fully adult) Myrna Loy.
Charles Hoffman had to draft three separate scripts before Godfrey agreed to green-light the movie.
In the film, Mary Hagen was rumored to be the illegitimate offspring of a union between a demented heiress and a local war hero. She finds friendship in a teacher (Lois Maxwell) and with a young would-be suitor (Rory Calhoun). Mostly, she is shunned by the judgmental, gossipy townspeople.
As released in Holland, the film was retitled “Scandale!” a prophetically apt name.
After the war, lawyer Tom Bates (Reagan) returns to town a decorated war hero. Slowly he falls in love with the very young Mary in spite of the circulating rumors that he was her father. Predictably, a scandal ensues.
The first day he met Temple, Reagan joked with her: “I hope you’re no longer a communist.” He was referring to a ridiculous report back in 1938 when at the age of ten she was called to testify before HUAC. It was all a mistake, and she was exonerated and later became a friend of J. Edgar Hoover, at one time sitting on his knee within F.B.I. headquarters.
Temple’s opinion of Reagan? “If only he looked younger, or I older.”
At one point near the end of the film, Reagan had to jump into cold water eight different times to rescue the character being played by Temple from a suicide attempt. By the time the scene finally pleased the British director, Reagan had caught viral pneumonia and was hospitalized. He nearly died. It was at this same time that Jane gave birth to Christine, their daughter who died a few hours later.
An unlikely, and ultimately disastrous, screen duo: A post-adolescent Shirley Temple, shown here with her middle-aged romantic interest, Ronald Reagan.
Reagan’s hospitalization caused serious delays in the film’s production. Matters became more complicated when Shirley announced that she was pregnant, her condition growing more obvious by the day. [She had recently, and impetuously, married a philandering heartthrob, John Agar.] As a means of viewers looking too closely at her thickening frame, her scenes and the delivery of her lines had to be rushed, often ruining the shreds of dramatic flair they might have conveyed. In faraway shots, her (non-pregnant) double was used.
When he was finally able to return to work, Reagan strenuously objected to the ending, in which he leaves town, with Temple, aboard a train, presumably with the intention of marrying her. Reagan would have preferred that his character board the train alone, with the understanding that she’d then be free to marry her young lover, as played by Calhoun.
Ex-con and serial seducer, Rory Calhoun, with “that horny eternal virgin,” Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.
“At least,” censors noted, “he was closer to her age than that lecherous character played by Reagan.”
Godfrey, however, saw nothing wrong with the original script’s ending. “After all,” Reagan said, “he was married to jail bait himself. His wife was young enough to be his daughter.”
An audience’s reaction at a sneak preview proved that Reagan was right. When he appeared in a scene with Temple near the end of the film and said, “I love you,” some viewers walked out; others booed. “I sank down in my seat and waited for the audience to file out before I dared show my face outside,” he recalled.
Based on that informal survey, Godfrey ordered that the offending scene be deleted from the film’s final version. Its deletion re duced an already confusing movie into something almost incomprehensible.
“Of all my leading ladies, I had the least chemistry with Shirley than I ever had with any actress in the past.” Reagan claimed. “Elizabeth Taylor might have pulled it off. In spite of all those years in front of a camera, Shirley could not act.”
Temple ultimately had the last word about That Hagen Girl: “As movie kissers go, Reagan is not bad at all. In fact, he was very, very good.”
The reviews generated by the film were so devastating that they hastened the end of Temple’s screen career. That Hagen Girl was defined as “a foamy dud” and “an uninspired soap opera.” Temple’s acting was dismissed as “wooden,” and Reagan was cited as “hopelessly miscast.”
Time magazine, in its November 10, 1947 issue, lacerated the picture. “Moviegoers with very strong stomachs may be able to view an appearance of rebated incest as a romantic situation.”
In Moscow, The Daily Worker wrote: “Shirley is just Shirley. But Reagan! A philosophic father and sweetheart to the same girl. Odd.”
One critic wrote: “In one scene, Shirley Temple attempts suicide. Too bad she did not succeed.”
The New York Times wrote, “Poor, put-upon Shirley looks most ridiculous through it all. She acts with the mopish dejection of a school child who has just been robbed of a two-scoop ice cream cone.”
That Hagen Girl was featured in the 1978 anthology The Fifty Worst Films of All Time. When
Reagan ran for political office, all prints of the film mysteriously disappeared, but a few of them re-emerged in 1990 and were subsequently shown on Turner Classic Movies. Its resurrection vastly amused Reagan’s political enemies, who subsequently mocked him as a “child molester.”
As a footnote, during the filming of That Hagen Girl, Reagan had dated Lois Maxwell, who was cast in the movie as a sympathetic teacher, Julia Kane, a figure who might have made a more suitable romantic choice for Reagan, as Tom Bates, to romance.
Instead, Reagan dated her off screen, going out with her on about four dates during the course of the filming. On their first date, she told him that her original name had been Lois Ruth Hooker.
“No wonder you changed it,” he said.
During one of their outings, he escorted her to a Life magazine photo shoot in which she posed with an up-and-coming actress. Reagan found himself shaking the hand of a striking blonde. He held her hand for an extended time, and seemed mesmerized by her allure.
He would remember her long after the photo shoot. He and Marilyn Monroe would meet again many times in his future.
***
The outdoor adventure film that Reagan had been promised never happened. Jack Warner called him and told him that his attempt to hire Cary Grant had failed, and that Reagan was needed at once to report to London-born director Irving Rapper for a role as an army sergeant on leave during World War II in New York.
The script was based on one of the most successful of Broadway plays in the 1940s, The Voice of the Turtle. “It was written by that British fag, John Van Druten,” Warner told Reagan.
Love Triangle: Ronald Reagan, Jane Wyman, & Nancy Davis (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) Page 78