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

by Darwin Porter

  When Oscar Saul, the producer of let’s do it again, arrived at the set that morning, he found a party underway. “I asked my assistant director, ‘What in hell is going on?’” Saul asked. “He told me that the cast and crew were giving a surprise party for Fred and Jane. They had eloped that weekend.”

  At lunch in the commissary, screenwriter Nunnally Johnson stopped by to congratulate Jane and Karger. Later that night, he wrote to his friend, Claudette Colbert, who was at her home in Barbados. “Met Jane Wyman’s new husband—and that’s all there is to that!”

  After Jane and Karger had been back in Hollywood for just two nights, her friends decided to throw a private party at Chasen’s, since there had been nothing festive for their actual wedding.

  Ironically, also dining at Chasen’s that night was Marilyn Monroe with her chief supporter, the columnist Sidney Skolsky. He had done more to promote her career than any other writer in Hollywood, performing many of the kind of PR stunts for her that Louella Parsons had crafted for Reagan.

  “When Marilyn heard of the private party for Jane and Freddie, she decided to crash it,” Skolsky said. “I urged her not to. That was the only bitchy thing I ever saw her do.”

  She jumped up from the banquette and headed for the entrance to the private party. The usher there was a fan of hers and just assumed that she was among the invited guests.

  Parsons was there that night, and witnessed Marilyn slinking into the party. Hedda Hopper was also there, accompanied by her son, William, and his companion, the designer, Stanley Mills Haggart.

  Haggart later said, “I had known Marilyn since the days she’d first arrived in Hollywood. I knew she was up to no good. She glided into the room in a form-fitting pink dress and headed straight for Freddie. Jane was on the other side of the room, but she, like the rest of the guests, almost came to a standstill, gazing upon Marilyn and wondering what she was up to.”

  “She sidled right up to Freddie and gave him one of her gooey wet ones, no doubt sticking her skilled tongue down his throat. Freddie looked completely flabbergasted, actually shocked. I looked over at Jane. She was bubbling over in fury.”

  “Congratulations, Freddie,” Marilyn said, loud enough for the room to hear.

  “That voice wasn’t Marilyn’s usual coo,” Haggart said. “It was strident, obviously she wanted Jane to hear every word. After giving the groom another gooey one, she fluttered away, blowing kisses to Freddie as she departed.”

  Again, she called out in a loud voice, “Just because you’re married doesn’t mean you have to be a stranger. You can come knocking on my door any rainy night. I’m sure we can find something to do that will amuse you.”

  Then she returned to Chasen’s main dining room to rejoin Skolsky.

  Three weeks later, Marilyn had another run-in with Jane. Earlier, she had told Shelley Winters, “Even though Joe DiMaggio is in my life, Fred Karger is the only man I’ve ever loved. To hell with marriage licenses. I’ll still go after him from time to time. I know he’ll always give in to me. He didn’t want to marry me, but he’s still turned on by me. As for Wyman, that bitch will get hers.”

  Her revenge on Jane was enacted through a chance encounter. The event, which became notorious in Hollywood history, also occurred at Chasen’s, this time in the ladies’ room.

  “Doing it Again?” Or was it the first time? Jane with Aldo Ray.

  When Marilyn entered the lounge, she spotted Jane in front of a mirror, applying fresh lipstick. Details are missing. They obviously had words, and another woman in the lounge later reported that she heard Jane call Marilyn “a cheap little bleach blonde trollop.”

  At that point, Marilyn lunged at Jane, and ripped off her wig. Because of a scalp irritation, Jane had worn a wig that night to conceal her condition.

  Jane screamed as Marilyn quickly exited from the ladies’ room.

  Within the week, the novelist, Jacqueline Susann, heard of the incident, which later became the most dramatic scene in her best-sell ing novel, valley of the dolls. The encounter was also depicted on the screen in 1967, with the real-life Susan Hayward cast as the diva who gets her wig ripped off.

  Incidentally, that movie featured the doomed Sharon Tate, whose fate it was to be brutally murdered by a psychotic gang under the influence of Charles Manson.

  Many years later, at a party in New York, a hostess introduced Jane to Susann. Jane glared at her hostess. “I’m a lady. Why should I want to meet this piece of trash?” Then she turned her back on Susann and walked away.

  “If that’s a lady, I’m the Queen of Sheba,” Susann told her hostess.

  ***

  Just at the point when Ray Milland had become a distant memory—like that Ellen Drew movie, night Plane from Chungking, you saw back in 1943—the handsome actor came back into her life. To Jane’s surprise, she was told that her upcoming film with Mil-land would be a remake of The awful Truth. Adapted from a Broadway comedy, it had already been filmed three times, as silent movies in 1924 and 1929, and—in its most successful version, in 1937, starring Irene Dunne and Cary Grant.

  Teamed with Milland for the first time since The lost weekend, Jane got star billing over him. Milland’s career was in steep decline, but Jane was at her peak. The tired old script was given fresh, modern overtones. let’s do it again was the story of a composer’s wife (played by Jane) who tries to make her husband jealous. Her plan backfires and catalyzes her divorce from Milland.

  Directed by Alexander Hall, let’s do it again was produced by Oscar Saul, who had barged into Harry Cohn’s office at Columbia saying, “Just think, Harry, we’ve got two Oscar winners, Wyman and Milland, in a picture together once again.”

  “Big fucking deal!” Cohn said. “I won’t get excited until I see the box office receipts.”

  After greeting Hall and Saul on the set, Jane braced herself for a reunion with Mil-land in her dressing room, where she had already changed her outfit and adjusted her makeup three times. When he came in to greet her, she was taken aback. He had aged considerably, blaming his increasing loss of hair on the branding irons used to curl his locks when he’d co-starred in Reap the wild wind (1942) with John Wayne and Paulette Goddard.

  As before, as he had back in 1944, he flirted with her. “Shall we take the advice in the title of our movie and do it again?” he asked.

  “I think not,” she said, politely, kissing him on the lips. “I prefer to keep the old memory intact.”

  As for Aldo Ray, the second male lead of let’s do it again, Jane didn’t give in to him, but he relentlessly pursued her anyway, making propositions in his “gargle voice.” She remembered him as “very masculine, a bit rough around the edges but kind of sexy.”

  Ray had been a Navy frogman and had played football in college. He had a sizable endowment and had posed nude in a widely circulated underground photograph.

  As he confessed, “I dropped trou for George Cukor, who helped me in my career.” Ray also climbed the lavender ladder when he was cast with Spencer Tracy in Pat and Mike (1952). That movie also featured a particularly macho performance from Tracy’s platonic friend, Katharine Hepburn.

  After his performance with Jane, Ray fell into the arms of Rita Hayworth when they co-starred in Miss Sadie Thompson (1953).

  Jane later recalled, “Every woman needs an Aldo Ray in her life, but never for more than six weeks. And then he has to go.”

  Let’s do it again grossed $1.25 million at the box office. It was widely promoted with the advertising slogan, “Go Girl, Go!” That is what Jane did, letting loose in the role, even doing a wicked mambo, which was all the dance rage that year, and performing in such sultry song and dance numbers as “I’m Takin’ a Slow Burn Over a Fast Man.” Her performance brought out her farcical side, and her acting was compared favorably to that of Irene Dunne’s in the film’s 1937 predecessor. As for Milland’s “serviceable” performance, critics pointed out that “He is no Cary Grant.”

  ***

  While Jane was
still filming let’s do it again, representatives from Warners arrived to ask her to pose for advance publicity photographs for her upcoming film, So Big (1953). Her two male co-stars, Sterling Hayden and Steve Forrest, had already been announced, as had its director, Robert Wise. Of course, Wise’s two greatest triumphs lay in his future—west Side Story (1961) and The Sound of Music (1965).

  The “soaper/saga,” a novel written by Edna Ferber, was reaching the screen for the third time. As a silent, it had starred Colleen Moore, Nancy Davis’ close friend. Jane’s own friend, Barbara Stanwyck, had made it into a talkie in a 1932 version.

  One night at dinner, after Jane announced to Stanwyck that she’d signed to reprise her role as the noble, valiant woman toiling in the soil, the diva stormed out of the room. She went two weeks before speaking to Jane again. “Sorry, Jane, but I get pissed off when I hear that another actress is reprising a role for which I’ve given my original interpretation.”

  When Jane called Paulette Goddard to tell her about her next two leading men, Goddard was excited. “My God, you’re getting two of the handsomest, most masculine, hot, horny, and hung actors in Hollywood—all the girls say so. Steve, you know, is the brother of Dana Andrews, and all of us have had him, at least those of us who got him when he was sober. Forrest, during the war, fought in the Battle of the Bulge against the Nazis in their last big drive into the West. I hear that the Battle of the Bulge was named after Steve.”

  “Since Steve plays my son in the film—a kid I’ve named So Big—would that be committing incest?” Jane facetiously asked.

  “Follow the advice of your latest movie ad,” Goddard said. “Go, Girl, Go!”

  The Literary Voice of the Great American Plain: Edna Ferber.

  Both Goddard and June Allyson constantly advised Jane to play around. “It actually saves a marriage and keeps it from getting boring,” Goddard claimed.

  At the time, Jane was indulging in what she called “the revenge fuck.” In 1952, although she had entered into the first of what would be two separate marriages to band-leader Fred Karger, she had heard rumors that he was still slipping around for trysts with his former girlfriend, Marilyn Monroe, who had also wanted to marry him.

  When Hayden posed with Jane for the ads for So Big, she was immediately attracted to him.

  In the early 1940s, during his marriage to blonde goddess Madeleine Carroll, Hayden had been billed as “the Beautiful Viking God.” He was known for seducing his leading ladies—Anne Baxter in Blaze of noon (1947); Dorothy Lamour in Manhandled (1949), and Marilyn Monroe in The asphalt Jungle (1950). Apparently, he managed to elude Bette Davis when they’d appeared together in The Star (1952).

  Vintage Americana: Abandoning all vestiges of glamor, Jane portrays a pioneer woman sod-busting with her husband (Sterling Hayden) and raising a son in So Big.

  After Jane posed for publicity photographs with Hayden, she told Wise, “Sterling, without a doubt, belongs among the gods of Valhalla. What a man! What a god! After being with him, how can I go home at night to Fred [Karger] and be satisfied?”

  Steve Forrest was “another blonde god” [Jane’s words] but completely different in personality. He was a tall Texan, born to a Baptist minister in a family of thirteen, one member of which included his older brother, Dana Andrews. Enlisting in the Army at age eighteen, he’d returned to America and benefitted from the G.I. Bill, eventu ally receiving his Bachelor’s degree, with honors, from UCLA. He’d majored in theater and soon was working at the La Jolla Playhouse outside San Diego, where Gregory Peck discovered him and arranged for a screen test at MGM, which led to a contract.

  Jane flew to New York to see Steve Forrest perform on Broadway in the aptly named The Body Beautiful.

  Jane and he sometimes went nightclubbing together. One night at a tavern north of Santa Monica, they sang a duet together, the quality of which benefitted from his status as a trained vocalist.

  She raved about him so much to June Allyson, that she, too, “sampled the wares” [allyson’s words] when they starred together on TV in The duPont Show with June allyson, a series that was launched in 1959. Although Forrest had married Christine Carilas in 1948 and would still be married to her at the time of his death in 2013, he still played around.

  In a moment of intimacy, Jane Wyman shows her screen husband, Sterling Hayden, a new outfit for their son, who is becoming “So Big.”

  “Women found him irresistible,” Jane claimed, “beginning with a seduction of Lana Turner when he’d appeared in her 1952 picture, The Bad and the Beautiful.”

  As an actor trying to make it in Hollywood, Forrest was rumored to have “put out” for Reagan’s friend, Robert Taylor, when they co-starred together in Rogue Cop in 1954. That same year, he was second billed to Reagan in Prisoner of war as one of the incarcerated G.I.s tortured by the North Koreans.

  Jane is depicted with her “son” in the movie, So Big.

  Once again, as in The Yearling, she played a frontier woman who bravely ekes out a living in an often cruel climate, triumphing against powerful odds.

  When Jane saw the publicity photographs in which she’d posed with Hayden for So Big, she was enraged. She personally called Jack Warner to denounce them. “This is a tender story of Selina and her love for her son, her dreams that sustained her through years of rugged farm toil.”

  “Sex sells, Janie,” the mogul answered. “Now I’ve got to go. Joan Crawford’s on the phone.”

  She later denounced the ads as the “work of a pack of vulgarians.” The ads depicted her being grasped by a lustful, brutish Hayden. The copy read:

  HE STOOD THERE SO BIG—LOVE HAD COME. INTENSE. UNASHAMED.

  For the rest of his life, Hayden would be kidded about those ads. Gossipy Hollywood already knew about his endowment, the size of which was almost legendary.

  Literary fans of Edna Ferber protested the advertising, but it nonetheless succeeded in herd ing TV-crazed audiences of the 1950s into movie houses. Instead of listening to Jane’s protests, Warner approved an equivalent ad with equivalently lurid photos, this one with the headline:

  SHE WAS READY TO FORGET SHE’D EVER BEEN A LADY.

  ***

  As a married woman, Jane felt it was her duty to move Karger out of that little bungalow he shared with his mother and daughter, Anne and Terry. “I don’t trust grown-up men who still live with their mothers. Don’t tell me you’re another Clifton Webb who even attends parties with his mother?”

  “You know I’m not that type,” he answered. “Webb can’t make you scream in ecstasy at night.”

  She found a home for them on Beverly Glen Boulevard, with small, separate bedrooms for Maureen, Michael, and Terry. Anne was left alone in her bungalow. Jane’s living room was big enough to accommodate his two pianos and her one piano.

  From the first, she found that their career demands often had them living in separate worlds. Sometimes, as he was staggering in from a late night gig, she was leaving to report to make-up on a film set.

  When she wed Karger, whereas Jane was at the peak of her earning power, he drew a modest weekly wage and often picked up one or two hundred dollars for a gig at night. Nearly all of his money went either for alimony payments to his first wife or for the upkeep of his daughter, Terry, or to his mother, Anne.

  Joan Blondell said, “Freddie in essence is a kept boy. That is not unusual in Hollywood. Many big stars like Jane support their husbands or else pay the bills of their boyfriends.”

  Karger enjoyed living in his new wife’s luxurious world with two or three servants, including a nanny to look after their children when they were home and not away at boarding schools. On weekends, he liked to be served breakfast in bed.

  After three weeks of married life with Karger, Jane got a call from June Allyson. “How’s married life, kid?”

  “Freddie is a man of intellect, talent, and sophistication,” Jane said. “Except for the conflicts in our working schedules, I have only one complaint about him in the bedroom.�
�

  “Don’t tell me he’s the type of guy you have to ask, ‘Is it in now?’”

  “Quite the contrary,” Jane said. “You have to warn him not to put in those final inches or he’ll split me open. No, it’s not that. He has this habit of spending thirty minutes every morning deciding on which pair of underwear he wants. I don’t know why it matters, unless he’s modeling his drawers for someone.”

  “Unlike my life with Ronnie, Freddie just can’t get enough,” Jane claimed to Allyson. “Sometimes he wakes me up in the middle of the night ready and raring to go. After all, I did get to know him on my aptly named film, let’s do it again.”

  “Oh, if that were only true with Richard and me.” She was referring, of course, to her husband, Dick Powell.

  Modern Screen wrote, “Fred Karger might have had a better chance if he’d married Sarah Jane Fulks and not the great movie star, Jane Wyman. But Sarah Jane disappeared a long time ago. Wyman is said to boss him around, and Karger, from all reports, is imbued with a manly pride and not used to taking orders from a woman. Also, he wants to become a bigtime musician like Harry James, and he resents it terribly when the press refers to him as Mr. Jane Wyman.”

  In less than a month of marriage, Jane began to find flaws in her husband’s character. She admitted to Joan Blondell, “When he’s drunk, he’s dangerous to be around. When he found out I’d had a fling with Bing Crosby, he became violent and started breaking things in the living room. I explain my thing with Bing was before I met him, but that didn’t cool him off. I think he’s jealous because Bing, as a musician, is wildly successful and Freddie is still struggling.”

  “As you know, I like to paint on Sunday afternoon. I had seven of my paintings decorating the walls of our living room. He was so mad, he broke a bottle of Scotch and slashed my art work.”