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

by Darwin Porter

  Reagan didn’t think it was believable that “a hick from Tennessee would be hailed as a new Garbo.”

  On June 28, 1948, the inevitable happened: Jane filed a petition for divorce. Reagan did not show up in court, but was represented by an attorney, William Berger. Jane’s lawyer was Lloyd Wright, who had represented some of the biggest names in Hollywood at the time of their divorces, ranging from Mary Pickford to Charlie Chaplin, even Mae West. (Yes, the diva had once been married.)

  Child support, alimony, and a property settlement were determined. Reagan was ordered to pay $500 a month in child support for Maureen and Michael, for whom Jane retained custody. As long as Jane continued to work in films, she would get no alimony. However, should she not be able to work, he was to pay her an additional $500 a month in support. The value of their communal property, totaling $75,000, was to be divided half and half, following the sale of their house on Cordell Drive. She later moved into a house in Malibu.

  As a side note, she was given all the furniture, and he kept the horses, including his favorite, “Baby.”

  Her only comment, upon leaving the courthouse was to a reporter, “There is nothing between us anymore. Case closed.”

  When he came by to visit the kids, Jane said, “You’re welcome at any time. But call first and warn me. I might not be here. Thanks for the memory. We had some good times.”

  “And two children,” he reminded her. “Don’t forget them.”

  At the time of their parents’ separation, Maureen was seven years old, Michael only three. “Daddy told me the sad news, but promised to always be around for me when I needed him,” Maureen later wrote in a memoir.

  Although Jane had been such an important part of Reagan’s life, in his autobiography, An American Life, he mentioned her as only a terse abbreviation: “I married Jane Wyman but it didn’t work out, and in 1948, we were divorced.”

  One of his old friends recalled, “There had been warning signs, but I think the divorce horrified and shocked him. He didn’t think he’d ever be divorced. His mother had put up with an awful lot from her husband, but they had remained married even though he repeatedly came home drunk.”

  “Small town boys grow up thinking only other people get divorced,” Reagan later wrote. “The plain truth was that such a thing was so far from even being imagined by me that I had no resources to call upon.”

  “As soon as news of his divorce was published, Reagan’s phone began to ring, the way it had when his picture was first published in the Hollywood press as Warners’ new young star.

  He later said, “I was still mourning Jane, but to compensate, some of the world’s most beautiful women were calling me for dates.”

  Still proclaiming grief over the loss of Jane, Reagan entered what Dick Powell defined as his “second horndog period,” the first having occurred in the late 1930s when he’d arrived at the gates of Warner Brothers. “I think he set out to fuck everything in sight.”

  ***

  Producer Jerry Wald called Reagan to inform him that Jack Warner had approved the casting of Jane Wyman and him in John Loves Mary, based on the hit Broadway play of the same name written by Norman Krasna. “I’ll have the scriptwriters, Phoebe and Henry Ephron, write in love scenes between Jane and you. Your kissing—and I hear from the gals that you’re good at that—will win Jane’s heart all over again.”

  Reagan was stunned at the news and expressed his concern: “What will Jane think of working with me?”

  He had other concerns as well. He’d already seen the Broadway stage version of John Loves Mary, starring William Prince as John, with the elegant Nina Foch as Mary.

  “From what I saw in New York, the play is too much like The Voice of the Turtle. I’ll be in my Army uniform again. But this time, instead of an Army sergeant on leave, I’ll be a returning veteran. Don’t you think, as a plot device, that this ‘Returning Soldier from the War’ schtick is wearing a bit thin as a plot device? Dana Andrews already delivered, in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), the best take ever about a veteran’s return to the homefront.”

  “Jack Warner insists that you do it,” Wald answered. “And, as everybody on the lot knows, Jack knows best. David Butler will be your director. He did all right with Hope, Crosby, and Lamour in Road to Morocco (1942).”

  Reagan learned that his supporting cast would include names familiar to him: Jack Carson, Wayne Morris, Edward Arnold, Virginia Field, Katherine Alexander, and Irving Bacon.

  Two weeks later, near the time he was to report to work, Wald called him with a sense of last-minute panic. “I’ve just got the news from Jack. I don’t know what happened. Wyman’s out, Patricia Neal is in.”

  “Who in hell is Patricia Neal?” Reagan asked.

  “You’ll meet her soon,” Wald answered.

  That night, Reagan found an article in Variety, reporting that Neal had achieved success on Broadway in the Lillian Hellman play from 1946, Another Part of the Forest.

  The play had been Hellman’s prequel to The Little Foxes that had, in 1939, been such a successful Broadway play, with Tallulah Bankhead playing the mature Regina. The Broadway play had evolved into a 1941 movie with Bette Davis starring as Regina.

  When the film script of John Loves Mary arrived, Reagan read it avidly in moments when he wasn’t worrying about his marriage to Jane and coping with the union wars among the movie guilds.

  Its farcical plot was based on the premise that the character played by Reagan would marry, “in name only,” a Cockney war bride so that he could bring her to America and get her U.S. citizenship. Then, according to the plot, she would divorce Reagan and marry his war buddy (Jack Carson). Virginia Field had already been cast in the role of Reagan’s English bride who arrives in New York to discover that her love interest, Carson, is already married, with a child on the way.

  Reagan, as the returning veteran, comes back to the girl he left behind, Neal. She’s been expecting him to marry her until she learns he’s already wed. Edward Arnold, cast as Senator McKinley, her father, has plenty to say about his daughter’s dilemma. The supposed setting is the senator’s apartment at the St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan.

  Patricia Neal recalled this scene with Ronald Reagan: “It was a trouser-challenged moment for him. He was kidded by the cameramen, who wondered how he could possibly wear such shorty-short panties without something hanging out. Ronnie defended his masculinity by claiming he wore a heavy-duty jockstrap to protect his modesty.”

  Before the beginning of shooting, Reagan was introduced to Neal at Jack Warner’s New Year’s Eve party. “Reagan walked over to me across a crowded room and shook my hand, telling me what wonderful things he’d heard about me. Then he went away. Shortly before midnight, I spotted him on the terrace weeping uncontrollably with some older woman. I’d heard he was all broken up over his marital difficulties with Jane Wyman.”

  Butler gathered the entire cast of players together for a read-through. Reagan renewed his acquaintance with this Brother Rat co-star, Wayne Morris. He and Morris had always viewed themselves as rivals. “I called Jane Wyman, my old girlfriend, and asked her out the other night,” Morris said.

  “Did she accept?”

  “Hell, no!” Morris said, “But you can’t put a guy down for trying.”

  Arnold, the burly and engaging actor “with the big gut,” the intimidating stare, and the deep voice, had been president of SAG from 1940 to 1942. During this tense period with the unions, Reagan spoke to him two or three times a week, viewing him as an experienced and politically seasoned “comrade-in-arms.”

  After the first day’s shoot, Neal told Reagan, “You knew exactly what to do. Everybody seems to. I was too excited to be afraid on my first day in front of a camera.”

  Three days later, he attended the first rushes with her. After they had sat through them, she said, “It was purgatory. I thought I looked bad. I didn’t realize that the camera adds twenty pounds. I was a caricature in those false eyelashes and that overly painte
d mouth. As for my voice, it was pure molasses.”

  Neal’s sexy, seductive voice, however, recorded beautifully, Reagan comparing it to “an organ concert.” Less diplomatically, Carson likened it to “a musically inclined dripping rain pipe playing the scales.”

  In one of his scenes with Neal, Reagan was ordered to appear in a pair of underwear assigned by the wardrobe department.

  During his enactment of the scene, as the cameras rolled, and Arnold, as an irate father, walked in on a romantic interlude between Reagan and Neal, Reagan was hurriedly zipping up his pants—without a jockstrap. He yelped in pain before yelling out, “I’ve got my dick caught in the zipper.”

  The cameras kept rolling.

  In his first memoir, Where’s the Rest of Me?, published in 1965, Reagan reported on this incident, but edited out most of the graphic details. Nonetheless, that film clip entered the Warner files as “one of the most hilarious behind-the-scenes bloopers in film history.”

  Back in his dressing room, a pantless Reagan complained to Butler. “Look at me! These underpants are cut so short my dick hangs out. Just look!”

  “I see!” Butler said. “You’re uncut just like me. For God’s sake, man, this is not a blue movie we’re making. All actors appearing in underwear scenes should wear a jock strap. I thought you knew that.”

  As the new girl on the block, Neal was swamped with invitations to parties, perhaps with the assumption that many of Hollywood’s more established actresses wanted to check out the latest competition. She told Reagan, “Even Bette Davis has invited me for tea. Do you know Miss Davis?”

  “I’ve had the pleasure,” Reagan said, sarcastically.

  In the beginning, Wayne Morris, the fading blonde screen Adonis of the 30s, was Neal’s frequent escort to these parties. There, he reportedly drank too much and fretted, publicly, about his falling star.

  Eventually, Neal found Carson a lot more fun, and she began to go out with him. The press seized on this dating, and practically had the two of them walking down the aisle. In her memoirs, Neal admitted that one night, she and Carson went to bed together, but she claimed, “We were too wasted to have sex.”

  She also went out on three dates with Reagan, but, according to her, “I drew a blank, like I did with Carson. He spent most of our evening lamenting the loss of Jane. When it came time to go to bed, I couldn’t get a rise out of him. That would have to wait until we co-starred together in The Hasty Heart (1949) in London.”

  One morning on the set, over coffee, Neal confided to Reagan that she’d met Cooper the night before. For some reason, he was accompanied by Errol Flynn. “Gary shook my hand, said he’d be glad to work with me, and walked away. Flynn—no longer the sexy Robin Hood in green tights—pursued me. Being a helpless girl, I was forced to give in to his demands. But I was still dreaming of Gary.”

  When Wald saw the rushes of John Loves Mary, he sent a memo, dated January 19, 1948, to Reagan. “The idea that you get paid for all those kissing scenes with Pat Neal is beyond my comprehension. In the new contract between producers and actors, I’m planning to have a clause inserted regarding kissing scenes, that a refund be made by the actors to the studio. You certainly put everything into your so-called ‘work.’”

  Unlike its Broadway predecessor, the film version of John Loves Mary quietly slipped in and out of movie theaters across the country without any stampedes at the box office. It did nothing for Reagan’s career. Any good reviews went to “that emerging new star, the ravishing Patricia Neal.”

  Of course, she also came in for her share of negative reviews. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, wrote, “There is little to recommend her for future comedy jobs. Her way with a gag line is painful.”

  ***

  In June of 1949, Jack Warner ordered the release of Night Unto Night, a film that Reagan had made in 1946, but whose exposure had been delayed. “I don’t expect to make a profit with this turkey,” the studio mogul said, “but I’m hoping to at least get back my production costs.”

  Night Unto Night was the second movie Reagan shot after his discharge from the Army. It was promoted as the American debut of the Swedish-born Viveca Lindfors. Warners hoped that she would be the studio’s answer to Greta Garbo or Ingrid Bergman. As it turned out, more Americans saw Lindfors’ debut in To the Victor (1948), wherein she was cast as a woman with a past who falls in love with Dennis Morgan; or in the same year, in The Adventures of Don Juan, in which—in period costumes opposite Errol Flynn, she looked ravishing. Finally, with the much-delayed release of Night Unto Night, movie-goers could see her co-starring with Reagan. The only problem was, no one seemed to actually want to see the movie.

  Right after his release from the Army, Reagan managed to look rather boyish in a swimsuit on a beach with his co-star, Swedish-born Viveca Lindfors, another Scandinavian femme fatale with hopes of becoming “the next Greta Garbo.”

  Night Unto Night was made during one of the most troubled periods in Reagan’s life, with Jane threatening to end their marriage. Reagan found a “lot of comfort” (his words) in the friendship of his co-star Craig Stevens, back when he and Jane, along with Stevens and Alexis Smith, often comprised a quartet for dinner and dancing.

  But by the time the movie was released, Reagan had broken off his friendship with the bisexual actor after Stevens had revealed the depth of his romantic attraction.

  As a director, Chicago-born Don Siegel had been unknown to Reagan. So was his leading lady.

  When Siegel introduced Reagan to Lindfors, she said, “Forgive me, but I’ve never heard of you.”

  “Miss Lindfors,” he answered, “I can return the compliment. I have never heard of you, either.”

  “I was a film star in Sweden,” she said.

  “Well, I’ve heard of Greta Garbo and Ingrid Bergman, two other film stars from Sweden. But I’ve missed your movies.”

  She walked away, no doubt insulted.

  Lindfors was detested by the film’s second female lead, Osa Massen. She had been born in Denmark, as opposed to Lindfors’ Sweden. Reagan referred to their conflicts as “The Battle of the Vikings.” Massen complained to him that Siegel was favoring Lindfors in all their scenes and giving her extra close-ups. “I think he’s in love with her.”

  “I wish he’d fall in love with me and give me preferential treatment,” Reagan said. “God knows I need it to get through this stinker.”

  Once alerted by Massen, Reagan came to notice that Siegel and Lindfors were indeed having an affair. They disappeared every day at around noon into her dressing room. The director married his star in 1948.

  ***

  Drawn from the pages of the Philip Wylie novel, the plot of Night Unto Night casts Reagan as John Gaylord, a biochemist who retreats to a rented beachfront home on the Gulf Coast of Florida. [The movie was actually shot in California, a lot of the action (suchas it was) taking place in the beachfront house that had been used in the production of Joan Crawford’s Mildred Pierce.]

  When this movie was shot, Reagan was still very close friends with Craig Stevens (left), one of the co-stars, along with Osa Massen (center) in Night Unto Night.

  It turns out that the house he’s rented from Ann (Lindfors) is haunted. When he asks her about strange noises in the building, Ann admits that she sometimes heard the voice of her dead husband, killed during World War II, echoing through the house. As a scientist [he’s a biochemist], he tries to convince her that the dead do not return to Earth.

  He has a dark secret: He has epilepsy. The film seems to treat epilepsy as if it’s contagious. Complications arise when Ann’s sister, Lisa (Massen), arrives and shows a romantic interest in Reagan. At this point, Lindfors, as Ann, has already fallen in love with him.

  Secondary roles were played by Rosemary DeCamp and Broderick Crawford, a married couple who live nearby.

  Although Reagan and Lindfors did not particularly like each other, they maintained a surface politeness and even had a few conversations together. Once, w
hen the topic of sex came up, he told her, “It’s always best in the afternoon, when you’ve emerged fresh from the shower.”

  She told him, “I’m glad I met Don [i.e., Siegel]. Before coming here, I had not had sex with a man for several months. I was hot and hungry.”

  During the filming of Night Unto Night, Reagan, along with most of the other cast members, had to ride a bus through the gates at Warners in Burbank, where picket lines had formed. Rocks and bottles were thrown at the windows of their bus.

  Both Stevens and DeCamp were sympathetic to the strains Reagan endured at the time. “He was dealing with the ugly strike through his position at SAG,” DeCamp said. “He was working 18 to 20 hours a day, but he remained cheerful and loquacious when he showed up with three or four hours sleep. In contrast, Jane Wyman was seen out almost every night dancing like a son of a son. Yet the North Hollywood Women’s Professional Club named her its ‘Ideal Working Mother’ for 1946.”

  Near the end of the film, when the epilepsy of Reagan’s character is disclosed, he goes upstairs to commit suicide with a revolver. This is his big scene with Lindfors. He tells her, “Death isn’t the worst thing in a man’s life—it’s only the last.”

  She counters, “I don’t know the reason for death, but I do know that life has its own reasons—and it isn’t ours to end.”

  Before the end of the film, she convinces him not to shoot himself.

  In that, the movie’s plot is different from that within Wylie’s novel. In the book, John kills himself by deliberately walking into the path of an oncoming truck.

  In a memoir, Reagan wrote, “If you think this was a hard story to bring to life on the screen, you’re right.”

  Shooting the various scenes of Night Unto Night ended on December 29, 1946. Reagan remembered Christmas Eve on the set. “Eggnog was served and by two o’clock that afternoon, we were drunk. We needed the sun, but got threatening gray skies. I went home to the most depressing Christmas of my life.” As predicted, Night Unto Night was an utter flop. One reviewer asserted that, “Jack Warner should have left it collecting dust in some archive.” Another reviewer, in pointing out the inadequacies of Reagan’s performance, asked, “Where is John Garfield, even Dane Clark, now that we need him?”