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

by Darwin Porter

  In 1950, Reagan (on the right) returned to his hometown of Dixon, where he’d been a lifeguard.

  At a dedication ceremony for the town’s new swimming pool, he stripped off his clothes, except for a scarlet bathing suit, and showed off a trim, fit physique, still holding up after all these years.

  ***

  A daughter of Detroit, the beautiful teenager, Piper Laurie, was making her film debut in Louisa with Reagan and other members of the cast. She had signed a contract with Universal, and was getting a big buildup by that studio’s publicity department. The staff claimed that she bathed in milk and ate flower petals to protect her luminous skin. Her ancestors were Jewish immigrants from both Poland and Russia.

  Reagan was the first big star to be captivated by Laurie’s beauty, or at least he was the first to date her. But other handsome male stars lay in her future, including Paul Newman and Tony Curtis. Howard Hughes had also cast his eye on her.

  One night at a premiere, Ann Sheridan introduced her to Clark Gable. As Gable later told Sheridan, “That is a very, very pretty gal. Too bad I’m such an old man.”

  Upper photos: Piper Laurie, teenaged sex symbol, gets “cutsie patriotic.”

  Lower photo: Piper Laurie, having lost her virginity to Ronald Reagan, is escorted by him to a premiere of Francis (1949), starring Donald O’Connor with a “Talking Mule.”

  As Reagan turned forty, he was just at the age that many men think of seducing younger girls, even teenagers. Such was the case with Reagan and Laurie. When he had been introduced to her on the set of Louisa, where she played his sixteen-year-old daughter, she noted that he held her hand for an extra long time.

  During the filming, Reagan chatted with the teenager, listening to her complaints about the script and the character she was playing. To live up to Universal’s publicity, which had hyped her as “The Girl Who Eats Orchids,” she was served flower petals for lunch in the commissary, even though she found them distasteful.

  At his invitation, she became a frequent visitor to his dressing room.

  One day, the film’s producer, Robert Arthur, approached her, telling her it wasn’t proper for such a young girl to be seen going in and out of Reagan’s dressing room. Arthur reminded her, “Reagan is old enough to be your daddy.”

  After that, she started turning down invitations to visit Reagan in his dressing room, but he was persistent, inviting her to the Hollywood premiere of Francis (1949), the picture starring Donald O’Connor in the story of a talking mule. It launched a series of Francis sequels. Both Laurie and Reagan were photographed with the mule. At the event, members of the Universal staff (in theory, at least) served as their chaperones.

  There was no seduction during the shooting of Louisa. All that Laurie got from Reagan was a kiss on the cheek.

  However, the cast was asked several months later to perform Louisa on the Lux Radio Theater. At the end of the broadcast, Reagan invited Laurie to dinner, promising he’d serve hamburger steak instead of “those god damn orchids they force you to eat.”

  He had to ask permission from Laurie’s mother, Charlotte Alperin. The woman seemed apprehensive, but reluctantly agreed, perhaps because Reagan was such an important figure in Hollywood.

  In the car, heading to his home, Laurie noticed him looking at her. But surely, she asked herself, it wasn’t in that way.

  In his apartment, with its panoramic view, he offered her a glass of wine, turned on some romantic music, and retreated to the kitchen.

  She later wrote in her autobiography, Learning to Live Out Loud, “I didn’t know if Ronnie knew I was a virgin. I knew I wanted to make love with him. I wanted to be completed by this wonderful man who clearly desired me. He would know what to do.”

  The revelations she made in that memoir later made headlines. Susannah Cahalan of The New York Post wrote. “Ronald Reagan wasn’t ‘the great communicator’ in the sack.”

  Laurie described the bedroom romp as “without grace. Ronnie was more than competent sexually. He was also a bit of a show-off. He made sure I was aware of the length of time he had been ‘ardent.’ It was forty minutes. And he told me how much the condom cost.”

  However, she claimed that he’d ruined the romantic experience she’d envisioned by telling her, “There’s something wrong with you” during their drawn out intercourse. “You should have had many orgasms by now—after all this time. You’ve got to see a doctor about your abnormality, and maybe that doctor can find out why it hurt you so at first. There’s something wrong with you that you should fix.”

  She later lamented, “His words to me were cold and just plain stupid. And in a moment in my life when I might have benefitted from it the most, he offered not the slightest trace of humor or kindness.”

  Months later, she was sent on a publicity tour with Reagan to Chicago.

  A Universal executive, Charles Simonelli, who was on the tour with them, told Laurie, “He is good at making all those speeches. Do you think he’s running for president or promoting Louisa?”

  Later that night, he followed her back to her suite at the Ambassador East Hotel and asked if he could come in. She refused, but suggested a walk in the night air instead. The question of age came up, and he seemed troubled that she was only nine years older than his daughter, Maureen.

  He kissed her passionately, and told her he wanted to be with her again. She said she had another beau, the singer, Vic Damone. “The truth was, I no longer found Ronnie to be someone I wanted to be close to. His insensitivity had been wounding, and, in retrospect, even cruel.”

  During the walk back to the hotel, she told him that she had been honored that such a famous movie star “had been the first.” As she looked at his face, he appeared shocked. She later wondered, “Did he know I was a virgin? Didn’t the stain on the sheet send him a signal?”

  During the final year of Reagan’s presidency, Laurie was invited to the White House for the “goodbye gala” of all of his old friends, mostly from his Hollywood days.

  She cabled her regrets and later explained why she did so: “I told myself it was because I didn’t agree with him at all, politically, but that wasn’t the complete truth. I hadn’t seen him since before he’d become Governor of California. After all those years, it seemed odd to be invited. I assume the guest list had been put together without his input, and that I would simply be among a large group of actors with whom he’d worked. That would have made me uncomfortable. As disappointing as it was, the relationship had been more important to me than that. I wished to save myself embarrassment. Who knows? I might already have been wiped from his memory.”

  ***

  Before he shot Louisa, Reagan had made a far more serious film, Storm Warning (1951), an anti-Ku Klux Klan “message picture.” The last such movie Warners had made was the 1937 anti-Klan film, Black Legion, starring Humphrey Bogart.

  Pain, betrayal, and strife in this scene from Storm Warning as Steve Cochran, playing a bigoted brute, gets physical with his wife (Doris Day), and her sister (Ginger Rogers).

  But despite the fact that technically, it was an older film, Louisa was released before Storm Warning.

  Jerry Wald, Reagan’s long-time friend and a former screen writer, was the producer of Storm Warning, and he ran into trouble casting the four leads—that of a crusading district attorney, Burt Rainey, and two sisters, Marsha Mitchele (a fashion model), the other, Lucy Rice, a pregnant waitress living in a small Southern town with her brute of a husband, Hank Rice.

  During the film’s development, it had been tentatively entitled Storm Center. Wald had considered casting Bette Davis as the older sister, with Jane Wyman playing the married waitress.

  Wald sent the script to Lauren Bacall, who studied it with Bogie, the star of Black Legion (1937), the first anti-KKK film at Warners. Bogie recommended that she reject the role. She didn’t feel she was right for the part, so he cabled Jack Warner. Enraged, Warner ordered that his contract player go on her sixth suspension.

  He t
hen sent the role to Joan Crawford, who had recently heated up the screen in The Damned Don’t Cry with Steve Cochran, a story about a gangster and his moll. Crawford heard that Doris Day was about to be signed as the younger sister. Consequently, she, too, rejected Storm Warning, sending a memo to Wald. “Who in hell would ever believe I was the sister of Doris Day?”

  Ginger Rogers was called, and she immediately accepted the role. After winning 1940’s Best Actress Oscar for Kitty Foyle, she had long ago proved that she was a dramatic actress—and not just the dancing partner of Fred Astaire.

  When Wald presented the script to Doris Day, she felt that the role of the younger sister would be a challenge, a non-singing part. She declared that “I’m not up to it.” Wald had heard that her first husband, the trombone player, Al Jorden, had been abusive to her, and that she might draw upon her own horrible memories to portray the battered woman. She wanted to work with Rogers, whom she claimed had been “my idol since I was just a girl going to the movies.”

  “You and Ginger are both Christian Scientists,” Wald said, “so when you’re not due on the set, you can talk religion with each other.”

  Since Wald had liked Cochran so much as the gangster in The Damned Don’t Cry, it was surprising that he did not immediately consider him for the role of Hank. He kept referring to the part as a “Stanley Kowalski type character.” He’d seen Marlon Brando on Broadway and decided to offer him the role. Within a week, he’d heard from Brando. “You must be joking,” was all he wrote.

  Two movie veterans, Ronald Reagan and Ginger Rogers, posed for a publicity still for Storm Warning, their pose suggesting the film was about a benign romance.

  Far from it. The film dealt with the effect of the Ku Klux Klan and the terror it generated in a small Southern town.

  Surprisingly, Wald next considered José Ferrer, who was a very different type of actor and would have been horribly miscast. Finally, he went back to what was obvious all along, and cast Cochran as the handsome, hirsute, sexual menace.

  A former cowpuncher, Cochran had drifted into the theater, appearing as Mae West’s co-star in the stage production of Diamond Lil. At night, he kept her bed warm. As West proclaimed, “It takes a big man to satisfy a big gal like me.”

  When Cochran learned that Wald had offered the role to Ferrer, he told the producer, “What a mistake that would have been. The role calls for a male sexpot, which Ferrer just ain’t. As for me, the gals of Hollywood, and some of the cocksuckers, too, call me ‘Steve the Schvantz.’”

  Wald signed Stuart Heisler (The Glass Key/Dallas/Tulsa) to direct Storm Warning, with the stars billed as Ginger Rogers in the lead, followed by Ronald Reagan, Doris Day, and Steve Cochran. The casting of Rogers and Day would later confuse some fans, who went to see Storm Warning thinking that it was a lighthearted musical.

  Reagan had met Heisler when he’d made the 1944 wartime propaganda movie, The Negro Soldier, a documentary-style recruitment piece targeting African-American men. Coincidentally, Heisler had been the film editor on Jane Wyman’s first movie, The Kid from Spain (1932). “Her part was so brief, I hardly noticed her,” Heisler told Reagan.

  In his casting of Reagan, Wald told him, “I’m considering various other titles—The Violent Friends!, Cause for Alarm!, The Outraged City!, Outcry!, The Fallen!, Winner Take Nothing!, Thunder in the Night!, and End of the Line!, always with an exclamation point at the end of each title.”

  After rejecting each of those titles, he devised the title, Ku Klux Klan, Storm Warning, eventually dropping the reference, within the title at least, to the KKK.

  The film begins on a bizarre film noir note, with Marsha (as played by Rogers) arriving on a rickety bus late at night in a little town that is shutting down fast. She witnesses a man being dragged from his jail cell and murdered. Two Klansmen then remove their hoods, revealing themselves as Charlie Barr (Hugh Sanders) and Hank (Cochran).

  By the time she reaches her sister’s home, she learns that Lucy (Doris Day) is married to Hank, whom she’d just witnessed help murder a man.

  Ironically, although the KKK is known for its anti-black stance, the two people murdered during the course of the movie included a white man and, later, a white woman.

  Marsh faces a dilemma when she finds that her sister is madly in love with Hank and expecting his baby. The plot thickens when Rainey, the town’s District Attorney (Reagan) learns that she actually witnessed the murder. He wants her to testify against her brother-in-law, Hank, and other members of the Klan.

  The movie ends in violence, with Day getting fatally shot, the only film in which one of her characters ever dies on the screen.

  Each of the principal stars had already seen the Broadway version of A Streetcar Named Desire, the controversial 1947 Broadway play by Tennessee Williams for which Warners had acquired the screen rights. In the filmed version—eventually released in 1951—Brando would repeat the role he had made famous on the stage, and Vivien Leigh would play Blanche DuBois.

  All four of the stars of Storm Warning noted its similarity—with the exception of the KKK subplot—to A Streetcar Named Desire.

  When Williams saw the movie, he accused the scriptwriters of plagiarism, although he never pressed any legal action against writers Daniel Fuchs and Richard Brooks. Brooks would go on to write and direct Elmer Gantry (1960) with Burt Lancaster in a classic performance.

  Doris Day’s biographer, Tom Santopietro, would certainly agree with Williams’ assertion. He wrote: “When fashion model Marsha Mitchell arrives in town with her ‘high-fallutin’ ways,’ she interrupts the blissfully ignorant blue-collar marriage of her younger sister Lucy and Hank Rice. Just as in Streetcar, Blanche DuBois’ arrival intrudes upon her younger sister’s marriage to Stanley Kowalski. Hank Rice is, like Kowalski, presented as a crude, bigoted roughneck, and Cochran is here outfitted like Brando’s Kowalski, right down to the tight-fitting T-shirt. Most striking of all is the long-simmering sexual tension between Stanley and Blanche here mirrored in the quick-to-boil sexual attraction between Hank and Marsha, an attraction that end in an explosion of violence and death.”

  District Attorney Rainey (i.e., Reagan) is eager “to rid the town of a bunch of hoodlums dressed up in sheets.” When Marsha confronts Lucy with what her husband has done, she claims, “I don’t care what he’s done. I’m not gonna leave him.” Her dedication evokes Stella’s devotion to Brando in Streetcar.

  In the footsteps of Kowalski, Hank tries to rape Lucy’s older sister, as Brando did to Blanche DuBois.

  Storm Warning’s outdoor scenes were shot in the small California town of Corona, in Riverside County, southwest of Hollywood, which the set designers had defined as the community most closely resembling a town in America’s Deep South. As Reagan said in his memoirs, “It was rumored to be the center of Klan activity here on the West Coast.”

  Storm Warning ends violently, as Doris Day is fatally shot, the only film in which a character she plays dies. Reagan and Rogers look on in grief.

  He recalled that one morning, shooting a street scene at 3AM, he was approached by “a little character who sidled up to me and whispered out of the corner of his mouth, ‘I hear this movie is about the Klan. I’m in the local outfit, and if you need to rent some robes, let me know.’”

  In Corona, Reagan staked out “two nests for myself.” One was a jailcell in which he could nap between takes. Another was the stockroom of a women’s ready-to-wear shop on Main Street, where he could be made up and changed into his drab wardrobe as a small town district attorney. Wald had instructed the wardrobe department, “Don’t dress him up— just off-the-rack garments that don’t really fit right. He’s not posing for some men’s fashion magazine.”

  When it was released, no one registered any laughs from members of the audience, but when it’s viewed today, some politically savvy viewers guffaw at the words expressed by a character who (rather awkwardly) says to Reagan’s, “Everything would be okay if nobody interfered with us from Washington.�
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  On the final day of shooting, Rogers had lunch with Reagan. “Wald told me I can’t help but win another Oscar for this.”

  “I wish you luck—Oh, just to have one Oscar!” he lamented.

  During the filming of Storm Warning, gossip columnists published items about Day dating Reagan. Apparently, he never actually proposed marriage to her, but discussed the possibility with George Murphy. “If you want to run for high office one day,” Murphy advised, “Doris would make a great choice—what a personality! She can sing, too. Even if you bore your audience with one of your long-winded speeches, they’ll still show up to hear her sing ‘Sentimental Journey.’”

  If Reagan ever actually decided to propose marriage to Day, he waited too long. She was also dating someone else and would, in fact, marry Martin Melcher on April 3, 1951. Both were practicing Christian Scientists.

  Melcher would be an unfortunate choice. When he died in 1968, Day discovered, to her horror, that he had squandered her lifetime earnings in poor investments.

  Wald decided to launch Storm Warning in the South, but soon perceived that towns such as Atlanta and Birmingham were, in his view, “too racist.” He decided on the more neutral city of Miami (Florida) where Storm Warning was screened in a public theater on January 17, 1951.

  Wald had approved an ad that depicted a Klansman beating Rogers below a blaring headline that read—“UNDER THE HOOD, HE WAS PURE YELLOW.”

  Day came down with the flu and canceled her scheduled appearance at the film’s premiere in Miami. Reagan had planned to continue his affair with her, but when she dropped out, he called another blonde and invited her down to Miami instead. Her name was Marilyn Monroe.

  Reagan had flown Marilyn to Miami once before, stashing her on Miami Beach. Once again, he booked her into the relatively cost-conscious Helen Mar Hotel. This “second time around” ended their relationship when he refused to escort her to the premiere. “I wanted to make a grand entrance with flashbulbs popping, with you and Ginger. She’s always been one of my idols.”