Another critic nailed it more accurately: “Here Comes the Groom is pure Capra-corn!”
Capra later recalled, “Jane traded her crying towel for the glamour girl’s raiment and became a dish to behold.”
***
While Jane was still married to Reagan, Evelyn Keyes, “Scarlett O’Hara’s Younger Sister” in Gone with the wind, decided to throw a big bash to celebrate the first anniversary of her marriage to director John Huston. The co-hosts were directors Lewis Milestone (all Quiet on the western Front) and Jean Negulesco (Three Coins in the Fountain).
Keyes wanted to hire a band to entertain her 200 guests, among whom were some of the stellar members of tout Hollywood.
Keyes had worked with musician Fred Karger on The Jolson Story (1946) and suggested that he pull together a band for the night to entertain her guests. He hurriedly agreed and knew just which of his fellow musicians was best for which instrument. After only two days of rehearsals, they were “ready for showtime,” as he told Keyes.
Reagan had always wanted to work with Huston, but never got the chance after failing to nab the role he wanted in the director’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), starring Humphrey Bogart.
Huston and Keyes soon became very good friends of Reagan and Jane. They frequently visited each other’s homes, and also went double-dating together at various clubs.
When Karger and his band took a 30-minute break, Keyes introduced him around to Hollywood hostesses.
In fact, Karger and “my boys” were such a smash success at the party that some of these show-biz hostesses, that very night, began plans to book him for their own special events.
At one point, it was not Keyes, but Judy Garland who introduced Karger to Reagan and Jane. Garland grabbed Jane’s arm. “Come with me to the can. I need to take a crap!” Reagan was left talking with Karger, of whom he later said, “What a nice young man.”
In the large ground floor bathroom of the Huston ranch, hawk-eyed Garland, though a bit drunk, picked up on Jane’s interest in the handsome young band leader.
“Privately, I’ve hired Freddie for duties other than music. But he’s a great musician. He’s worked with me on some numbers. He’s one of the music directors over at Columbia.”
“Is he married?” Jane asked.
“He’s divorced. Sounds like you’re interested, girl! If you’re like me, I never got enough when I married Vincente Minnelli. I guess he was saving it up for Gene Kelly.”
“Mr. Karger is awfully handsome, even charismatic,” Jane said.
“Not only that, but Freddie’s hung like there’s no tomorrow,” Garland said. “I’ll arrange for you guys to get together late one afternoon for drinks at my place.”
“He’s available, now that Rita has dumped him,” Garland said.
[Garland was referring to the involvement of Rita Hayworth with Karger, who had worked privately with her, coaching her for scenes in Gilda (1946) and The Loves of Carmen (1948).]
After taking her self-styled “crap,” Garland grabbed Jane’s arm again. “C’mon, I’m going to sing over the Rainbow for these drunken slobs.”
Although Keyes had hired Karger and his band, the hostess had also persuaded some of the most famous entertainers in the world to sing free for her guests, including not only Garland, but Frank Sinatra. After they performed, Jane herself asked if she could sing two numbers, going into a whispered conference with Karger.
This huddle would be the first of many a tête-à-tête that would continue on and off until Karger’s death. Or, as Jane put it to Garland on another night, “Our huddle that night at the Hustons led to a cuddle..and beyond.”
In a memoir, Keyes wrote, “It was the best goddamned party I ever attended.”
The next weekend, on a Sunday afternoon, Reagan and Jane arrived unannounced at the Huston ranch. It was not unusual for friends to just drop in for the weekend at the Hustons. Invitations were not necessary.
Their living room was in shambles. Upon seeing them, a hung over Huston said, “Evelyn, it’s time for Bloody Marys—and don’t be stingy with the vodka, darling.”
Sipping drinks with her guests, Keyes related what had happened the previous night. They had invited Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Ida Lupino, and Collier Young to join them for dinner.
“At around one o’clock this morning, John here decided he wanted to play football with the boys,” Keyes said. “Bogie was barefoot at the time. For a football, he used my $1,000 ceramic vase. Bogie dropped it, and it shattered into pieces. He cut his foot on the sharp pieces. Betty [Bacall] while scolding him all the while picked out the slivers with tweezers.”
Throughout the afternoon, Huston revealed to Jane and Reagan that he was a world class drinker. Despite becoming increasingly intoxicated, he told one fascinating story after another.
As dusk descended, when everyone agreed that they were hungry, Huston invited all four of them down to Olvera Street, the Mexican section of Los Angeles, for tacos and beer. “Jane and John had had quite a few, but Ronnie and I were restrained,” Keyes recalled. “At the end of the fest, Ronnie put a giddily drunken John and Jane into the back seat and took the wheel, with me sitting up front beside him.”
“We’ll be the policemen, and I’ll drive,” Reagan announced.
In her memoir, Keyes wrote, “Ronnie was a sober-minded, responsible citizen even then. A nice Democrat. I wonder where he went wrong.”
The Blue veil: Jane with Richard Carlson...The love that might have been.
***
Jane was seen around town dating Curtis Bernhardt, a director far older than she was. It may or may not have been a romance. He’d helmed her during the war in My love Came Back (1940), and they had remained friends. Now he had a new picture for her called The Blue veil (1951). He wanted her to play a nun-like nursemaid.
“Me? A nun? You’ve got to be kidding!”
She was perplexed, but over just one night’s dinner, he sold her on the role.
She told him, “Bring it on. I’ll play anything except lesbians, hookers, and gun molls.”
She was called back to the studio for some retakes on Here Comes the Groom. During the course of those touch-ups, she had lunch with Bing Crosby. When he was informed of her newest film offer, he urged her to go for it.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s been such fun working with you in a musical. After Johnny Belinda and The Glass Menagerie, my nerves are frayed. I’m ready for the recuperation ward. The Blue veil is one tough role.”
“But at least, unlike Johnny Belinda, you’ll get to talk,” Crosby answered.
A week went by before Bernhardt called again from an office at RKO. “I’ve got bad news. Garbo saw the French version of The Blue veil. She wants to use it as a vehicle for her comeback picture.”
The Blue veil: Jane with her actor/mentor, Charles Laughton.
[Bernhardt was referring to a French picture, directed by Jean Stelli, Le voile bleu. it had been released in German-controlled Paris in 1942 and became one of the biggest film successes during the nazi occupation of France, an era when Germans heavily censored any film shown in their captured territories.
But soon after her initial enthusiasm, Garbo notified Bernhardt that she was not going to accept the role.
[In the late 1940s and early 50s, Garbo occasionally accepted a script, making it known that she was contemplating a comeback, and then rejecting the roles, perhaps based on fear of facing the cameras after such a long absence from the screen. Such was the case with The Blue Veil.]
The Blue veil: Matronly Jane with the then ingénue Natalie Wood.
After Garbo’s departure, Bernhardt sent the script to Ingrid Bergman, who responded, “After all those condemnations based on my love affair with Roberto [Rossellini, whom she later married], I’ve become persona non grata in Hollywood. I’ll have to turn it down. The public will probably mock me in a nun’s role.”
Only then did Bernhardt once again appeal to Jane. “You’re
our gal,” he said. “Garbo has bolted.”
The script arrived, an adaptation by Norman Corwin from a story by the French author François Campaux. Norman Krasna and Jerry Wald, Jane’s old friends, were co-producers. Wald cabled, “I’ve been serarching for another Wyman picture after Johnny Be-linda. I assure you, The Blue veil is it. It has your second Oscar written on every page. Not only that, but I’ve cast your buddy, Joan Blondell, as a supporting role.”
The title of the film came from the blue veil that French nursemaids commonly wore. The melodramatic plot centered on LouLou Mason, a war widow (played by Jane) who, after the death of her newborn baby, devotes her life to raising other people’s children. The film is a series of vignettes about the families and children Jane becomes involved with as a nursemaid.
In the wake of the death of her newborn, Jane takes a job caring for the infant son of Frederick K. Begley (Charles Laughton), a corset manufacturer who lost his wife in childbirth. He proposes marriage, but she rejects his offer. Instead, he marries a woman named Fleur (Agnes Moorehead), who immediately fires Jane.
That leads her into a series of adventures in various homes, none more notable than when she begins the care and supervision of Stephanie (as played by the then-juvenile actress, Natalie Wood), the daughter of a fading musical actress Annie Rawlins (Joan Blondell).
As the teardrops fall, LouLou experiences one heartbreak after another within the various homes, even fleeing with one boy, Tony, to Florida. When his mother, Helen Williams (Audrey Totter), decides she wants him back. Jane’s character is arrested.
She ends her days as a janitor working in a children’s school. There, she is spotted by one of her former charges, Dr. Robert Palfrey (Don Taylor). When he finds her, lonely and nearly destitute, he takes her home with him to raise his own children.
During the first week on the set of The Blue veil, Bernhardt introduced her to a strong supporting cast who included not just Blondell, Laughton, and Moorehead, but Richard Carlson, Carleton Young, Audrey Totter, Cyril Cusack, Dan O’Herlihy, and Don Taylor, fresh from having played Elizabeth Taylor’s husband in Father of the Bride (1950) and Father’s little dividend (1951).
Lunching with Blondell, Jane said, “My God, I’ve got to go from twenty to seventy. Only Perc Westmore, my old makeup artist, can pull that one off.”
[whereas Perc defined the pattern for her makeup, he had to be hospitalized during the shoot.]
“No actor ever impressed her as much as Laughton, a towering and portly thespian known in both America and England. He was also a notorious homosexual, his status well known within London’s theater circles. “He taught me how to act, walk, and talk like an old person. I learned more in two weeks from him than I did from any director. He made me feel old, and I mean that as a compliment. But I was only thirty-seven at the time, and in the prime of my life, with hormones raging. It was a big leap from that to old lady, but I finally got there.”
The Blue veil: Jane, decrepid but dignified.
Jane chatted with Natalie Wood, who told her she wanted to escape the curse of such child stars as Shirley Temple, whose career ended when she turned adolescent. “Right now, I’m playing daughters to such parents as Fred MacMurray, Margaret Sullavan, and James Stewart, and I’m slated to be Bette Davis’ daughter in The Star. As you know, I’m calling your friend, Blondell, ‘mom’.”
“If The Blue veil flops, we’ll all pick our whistlestops,” Wald told her. “If not, we’ll take our bows. It’s a challenge for you, but you have the talent to pull it off. Better than Garbo ever could.”
Jane detested the invasive press, but granted one interview during the shoot. As the statement indicates, no one ever accused her of being “The Great Communicator,” as they would Reagan in later years.
“We’re put into this world. No one knows why. Sometimes I don’t like it. Sometimes, I’d rather be in heaven. Meanwhile, I’m here for a certain number of years. Nothing adds up for me except how much good you can show people during that span. Without a goal, you don’t live, you drift. I’ve set myself quite a few. This is the only one that’s ever made sense.”
Writing in The new York Times, Bosley Crowther defined The Blue veil “a whoppingly banal tear jerker that will lure multitudes of moviegoers who like nothing better than a good cry. Curtis Bernhardt’s soupy direction stretches Wyman into a series of parchedly sunlit episodes contrived to squeeze the heart and present this lady as a quivering-lipped saint. Wyman has little to do herself except age daintily. Since, like the rest of The Blue veil, Wyman is so far removed from flesh and blood, we can only leave her and it to heaven.”
At awards time, for her performance, Jane won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress and also nominated for an Oscar.
The Blue veil grossed nearly $4 million, the most financially successful picture RKO released that year. For the first time in her long career, Jane was named one of the film industry’s “Top Ten” box office draws.
Jane wouldn’t take Maureen Reagan to see Johnny Belinda because it involved a rape, but she made it a point to escort her to a screening of The Blue veil. In her memoirs, Maureen recalled the experience. “The Blue veil was that movie where she loses a baby and then becomes a governess; she spends the rest of her life saying goodbye to one child after another. What a depressing movie! And she had to live with this character every day. No wonder it was sometimes difficult to get a smile out of her.”
Maureen later told her friends at school, “My mother sat through the entire movie and didn’t shed a tear. She has no sense of drama.”
Jane’s competitors for the Oscar that year (1951) included Katharine Hepburn for her role in The african Queen; Eleanor Parker for detective Story; and Shelley Winters for a Place in the Sun.
All of them lost to Vivien Leigh, taking home her second Oscar for her memorable performance as Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’ a Streetcar named desire.
Blondell was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, but lost to Kim Hunter as Stella in a Streetcar named desire. variety defined Blondell’s performance as her best since a Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945). In The Blue veil, she played a neglectful show business mother of a twelve year old. One writer said, “Blondell added vinegar to a movie drowning in molasses.”
It was a year of honors. Very briefly, Jane was reunited with her co-star in The Year-ling. As he’d matured a bit, Gregory Peck looked handsomer than ever. She surely recalled her romantic nights with him. Both of them had been given Photoplay’s Golden Award of 1951 for Favorite Actor and Favorite Actress of the year.
After the Awards Ceremony, she asked him, “If we’re so goddamned popular, why not do a picture together?”
“Great idea,” he said. “I’ll lobby for the right script.”
Their dual roles never materialized.
***
After Reagan’s separation from Jane, he got to know Fred Karger before she did. When he was flirting around with the idea of marrying Adele Jergens, he often picked her up during the early evening night after she’d finished work her day’s work on ladies of the Chorus. In it, she played Marilyn Monroe’s mother, even though she looked like her sister.
Fred Karger: Babe magnet.
On the set of that movie, Karger was responsible for the staging of Marilyn’s big number, “Every Baby Needs a Da-Da Daddy.”
On three different occasions, Reagan and Jergens double dated with Marilyn and Karger. Reagan was surprised to learn that Marilyn was living with Karger’s mother, Anne, and his daughter, Terry.
Karger told Reagan, “I brought Marilyn home and asked mother to take care of her, because she was lost, broke, and lonely. Anne just adores her. So does my daughter.”
When Reagan started secretly seeing Marilyn, especially when he was convalescing with a broken leg, Marilyn complained to him, “Freddie does-n’t love me. A man can’t love a woman and feel contempt for her. He’s ashamed of me and wants to change me. He says he can’t take me out because I dress like a tro
llop.”
MM as she looked when Karger first dated her.
Her biographer, Fred Lawrence Guiles, wrote: “When Marilyn realized she was in love with Karger soon after their first dinner, she felt she must persuade him to marry her. That he didn’t seem about to do so was a reality to which she finally would resign herself. Fred Karger was to have the singular distinction of being the only human being Marilyn attempted to disarm and yet who was resistant up to the end.”
Once, after she hadn’t visited for quite a while, she showed up “slightly altered.”
“Freddie told me I had this small blemish, a fleshy tip, that made my nose appear too long. He arranged for me to go to a plastic surgeon to take care of it. The surgeon also removed some cartilage and inserted it into my jaw to make my chin stronger. Before that, Freddie was calling me ‘chinless’.”
“You look more gorgeous than ever,” Reagan assured her.
Later, when Marilyn became the roommate of Shelley Winters, she told her, “Freddie is so neat, he even keeps his pubic hair trimmed. He thought my upper teeth protruded, so he set up an appointment with an orthodontist, sending me to this Dr. Walter Taylor, who is a specialist in cosmetic surgery.”
Later, when Marilyn took up with agent Johnny Hyde, she told him that, “Freddie makes me feel inadequate. After a night with him, I’m churning in frustration. He won’t do certain things in bed I like.”
“I’ll bet he’s a secret homo,” Hyde said.
“He also told me that he can never marry me because I would not make a fit stepmother for his daughter, Terry. She adores me.”
Maurice Zolotow, one of Marilyn’s early biographers, wrote that Karger was “the epitome of courtliness. But when Marilyn fell for him, he was sour on women. When he talked of love, it was to express a world-weary hopelessness about the honor of women. He claimed that women were not capable of genuine love. He believed that no one could give herself honestly and entirely to one man for whom she cared. He said women ‘were too shrewd, too practical.’”
Love Triangle: Ronald Reagan, Jane Wyman, & Nancy Davis (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) Page 92