Her friends felt that Jane’s recent conversion to Roman Catholicism had influenced her acceptance of the role.
In Hecht’s original story, Jane’s character dies (presumably in a state of ecstasy) in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. But Warner didn’t want that to be made clear. In the wide screen version, the audience is left guessing: Did Jane’s character die, or did she recover and go on with her life?
No longer flying high as Hollywood’s Golden Boy, Johnson was nonetheless paid $150,000 for starring in the picture, Jane taking home $120,000.
Evocative of Reagan’s departure from Warner Brothers, Jane’s farewell was equally dismal. She called Jack Warner’s office to tell him goodbye. She later said, “I didn’t expect him to walk me to the gate. but he refused to take my call. So much for that. Hollywood has always been cruel on its aging dames. Perhaps Paramound will remake Gloria Swanson’s Sunset Blvd. and cast me in the role of that aging screen diva, Norma Desmond.”
At the gate, one man came out to greet her. An aging janitor, Hebnry Dolland, in his seventies, kissed her farewell. He’d remembered her when she was a Warners’ chorus girl in the 1930s, and he told her he’d be retiring soon, too. “Not much to retire on, though.”
“That’s what we get for working for that tightwad, Jack Warner for all these years,” she said, waving Dolland goodbye. It was her adieu to the studio that had employed her, sometimes traumatically, for such a long time.
***
Weeks after leaving Warners, Jane accused Jack Warner of sinking all his promotional budget into Giant, leaving Miracle in the Rain to open with relatively little advertising and almost no promotion. “It could have been a hit,” she told Johnson. “It could have brought us Oscars. Instead, we were screened in front of empty houses.”
The Academy ignored it at Oscar time. “At least I didn’t catch pneumonia after having to act all those scenes in a god damn rain pour,” Jane said.
The new York Herald Tribune joined dozens of other newspaper critics in lam-basting the movie. “Miss Wyman’s typist is a glum portrait unrelieved by any sense of depth of character or humor. She is sad even when she realizes she is in love. There is hardly a change of expression when she learns of the death of her soldier boyfriend, played by Van Johnson. Miracle in the Rain is straight-faced and uncompromisingly dull.”
Hecht came under fire for his “hankie grabber, which is not typical of this tough-talking former newshound.” His Miracle was called “a tough lump of goo to swallow.”
The new York Times was gentler in its condemnation, claiming, “Miracle in the Rain hits high, lovely notes on occasion, but too often lapses into soap opera.”
The St. louis Post-dispatch labeled Miracle “a tearjerker that is as unabashed as any we’ve encountered.”
“My future belongs on that little black box,” Jane said. “Maybe there’ll be a film role every now and then, no doubt playing a mother.”
***
Offers for big screen roles were few and far between. Those that came in were for what Jane called “monster pictures.” When she’d gone to a screening of what ever Happened to Baby Jane (1962), she was horrified, later claiming that “Bette Davis and Joan Crawford have disgraced themselves. They must have needed the money awfully bad.”
Journalist Vernon Scott wrote, “Fortunately, Jane is economically independent and can afford to sit on the sidelines rather than accept distasteful pictures.”
To Van Johnson, Jane said, “I refuse to play a dope addict, an aging prostitute, or, as I’ve told producers many times before, a lesbian. I turned down the role of a lesbian in walk on the wild Side (1962). It’s going to my friend, Barbara Stanwyck.”
“Takes one to play one,” Johnson said.
“Now Van, be kind,” she cautioned.
“Her former husband, His Lordship, Bob Taylor, once propositioned me at MGM,” Johnson claimed.
“That doesn’t surprise me at all,” she said. “I always suspected something was going on between Ronnie and Bob. All those weekends alone together in the wilderness.”
To cheer her up, Johnson invited Jane to a party he was hosting that Saturday night, promising her that there would be a surprise guest.
On the day of the event, she began dressing and working on her makeup at three that afternoon, arriving alone at the party at eight o’clock.
There were some thirty guests there, mostly male. After making the rounds and hearing endless compliments, Fred Karger emerged from Johnson’s bedroom dressed in his usual dark suit.
She was mildly shocked at seeing him again, because they had not contacted each other in months. He explained that he was staying temporarily with Johnson. “We’re roommates,” he said.
“Roommates?” She was skeptical. “Is that what they’re calling them this year?”
For part of the night, they talked about their less-than-bright careers and the problems generated by their children, Terry, Maureen, and Michael.
During the weeks ahead, she began to encounter Karger at other parties and, on occasion, when his band was hired for a gig. One night, she agreed to meet with him for dinner, and they began to see each other more regularly after that.
She later told Joan Blondell, “Our Catholic faith is bringing us together again. We spend a lot of time discussing Catholicism. I’ve been trying to lure Freddie back into the church again. We’re both at loose ends, not knowing where to go. The other night, when he brought me home, we kissed on my doorstep. I invited him in for a nightcap. He never left. It was wonderful having him make love to me again. I’m even considering re-marrying him.”
“Never a good idea,” Blondell warned. “If it didn’t work out the first time, chances are it won’t the second time on the merry-go-round either. I bet you’d face the same problems. And then there is the gay thing, hiding in the closet.”
“I can’t truly blame Freddie for turning elsewhere for that which I can’t give him,” Jane said.
***
The day Jane decided to remarry Karger, she phoned June Allyson to tell her the news. Unlike Blondell, Allyson seemed delighted. “I always thought Freddie was a living doll,” she said.
“And after all,” Jane continued. “He’s not the only man in Hollywood who has slept with both Rock Hudson and Marilyn Monroe—take the late, lamented James Dean, for example.”
Jane remarried Karger on March 11, 1961. Attending the ceremony were such dear friends as Allyson, Blondell, Paulette Goddard, Loretta Young, Irene Dunne, and Claudette Colbert. As Colbert later said to Jane, “What are we old bags to do now that movie roles are almost disappearing? I find that, unlike today, I attend more funerals than weddings.”
As Colbert had noted, it was a time for burying old friends and acquaintances. Reagan’s mother, Nelle, died in 1962, and Jane, accompanied by Karger, attended the funeral.
She offered her sympathies to Reagan, who looked grief stricken. “Welcome to the 1960s, Ronnie,” she said. “The Hollywood we used to know is Gone with the wind. I sure miss it. I know you’ll also miss Nelle something awful.”
When she looked into his eyes, she saw the tears welling up. He said nothing.
“Nelle was such a good woman,” Jane said, in parting. “They don’t make them like her any more. She belonged to an America that is fast fading, and we belong to a Hollywood that is now making all these sick movies.”
Maureen Reagan summed up her family situation at that time. “Mother was re-married to Fred Karger, and the two of them shared a small apartment in Beverly Hills. Dad and Nancy were living at the house in Pacific Palisades. Michael had moved in with them to finish up high school. Ron [i.e, Reagan, Jr.] was in kindergarten, and Patti was eleven years old and full of resentment for a twenty-two year old woman nicknamed ‘Mermie” [i.e., Maureen herself] who sat next to her father on the sofa.”
After remaining safely at home every night during the first three months of his re-marriage, Karger got an occasional gig, but not like he’d done in his heyday. Dis
co had come to Hollywood, and he was no longer in such demand. But sometimes, he didn’t return home until three or four o’clock in the morning. She no longer asked where he’d been.
***
Throughout the course of most of her marriage to Karger, Jane managed to star in an occasional film or teleplay. But as her marriage entered its final months, she received no offers for either the big screen or for “the little black box,” as she continued to call it.
She and Karger began to argue and fight a lot. He continued to have violent outbursts of temper.
They were also having problems with their children. Michael had dropped out of Arizona State University after only one semester. Like Reagan, she had cut him off financially.
Maureen was having marital problems. She’d wed John Filippone, a police officer, in 1961 but divorced him the following year. In 1964, she married David G. Sills, an attorney and Marine Corps officer. He moved her to San Clemente while he was stationed at Camp Pendleton, demanding that she abandon her acting ambitions. She later admitted, “I was a perfectly wretched housewife.”
Out of boredom, she joined her father as a Republican volunteer during the 1964 presidential race of Barry Goldwater against Lyndon B. Johnson.
By 1967, she’d divorced Sills.
Long before that, however, Jane also faced the divorce judge.
***
Other than the usual charges aired before a divorce court, Jane never spoke about the reasons for the collapse of her second marriage to Karger. But two reasons have emerged over the years, mainly gleaned from friends like Blondell.
Karger had escorted Jane to the funeral of her friend, Dick Powell, who had died on January 3, 1963. Jane offered Allyson what sympathy she could, even though she knew that her friend had never been faithful to her actor/director husband. [Privately, Jane and many of her friends referred to allyson as “a nympho.]
Jane told Karger about Allyson’s numerous affairs, including one with John F. Kennedy, who was later assassinated in November of the year of Powell’s death.
“She sometimes seduces her leading men, including Peter Lawford,” Jane claimed. “For years, Alan Ladd was the passion of her life, and later, Jimmy Stewart. She also has this thing for Dean Martin.”
At first, Jane wasn’t suspicious when June began to call Karger to “help me with some arrangements.” She paid him $200 per consultation, and he told her, “It’s about what I get for a gig.”
A few times, when Karger returned home at four o’clock in the morning, Jane snapped sarcastically, “some gig.” She told Blondell that she’d found lipstick on Karger’s collar on more than one occasion.
Blondell said, “I’m not surprised. I’ve known that Allyson bitch for years, beginning in New York. She was known as ‘Miss Hot to Trot.’”
What may have finally turned Jane off Karger was when he hired a twenty-two year old saxophone player, Terry Nelson, from Chicago, for his band.
Whenever Karger, with his band, went out of town on a gig, Nelson always roomed with him. In Los Angeles, Karger often spent long nights with the sexy young blonde, later informing Jane, “We had to rehearse some new numbers.”
“I can imagine what those numbers were,” she said. “Sixty-nine, for example.”
Whenever she made accusations like that, he’d storm out the door, usually after breaking some objects.
She told Blondell, “I can’t go on with him. I’ve got to end it, sooner than later.”
One day, Nelson, through a family connection, arranged for Karger and his band to appear at a small club in his native Chicago. Bidding Jane goodbye, he and Nelson flew away.
Before the end of the gig, and before he’d flown back to Los Angeles with Nelson, Jane had moved out of their apartment. She left a brief note: “From now on, Buster, you pay the damn rent. Better yet, why not move in with Nelson? You’re practically living with him anyway.”
[Nelson outlived Karger, dying of AIDS in Chicago in 1984.]
In court on March 9, 1965, Karger charged Jane with desertion. Three weeks later, she countercharged, claiming “grievous mental cruelty.” She also revealed that she’d been the victim of “Karger’s uncontrollable temper.”
***
Reagan must have been dismayed when he picked up the papers that March. He had been approached by powerful monied interests to become the Republican candidate for Governor of California in the next election. His close friend, the song-and-dance man, George Murphy, had just been elected to the U.S. Senate from California.
Although the primary wasn’t until the spring of 1966, he would spend all of 1965 “gladhanding my way across the state.”
He was horrified when his name was brought up and his divorce from Jane spread all over newspapers in their rehash of her divorce from him. But Murphy told him not to worry about his status as a divorcé. “This isn’t fucking Alabama or Georgia in the Bible belt. This is California!”
After her (second) divorce from Karger was finalized, Jane told Blondell, “I guess I have no talent for marriage. That’s the last time for me.”
“Well, Reagan seems to have found his mate for life,” Blondell said.
“Ronnie is the marrying kind. I’m not,” Jane said. “He’s found his clinging vine, the one he always wanted, but he didn’t find an independent woman like me. This little former starlet creature is the kind of wife I never was.”
Despite the embarrassing charges that were aired in divorce court, Jane felt no hostility to Karger. In fact, far from the prying eyes of gossips, they sporadically got together “to catch up on things,” as she put it. Once, they were spotted together in San Francisco, provoking an item in a local newspaper column about the possibility of a third marriage of her to Karger.
[Jane and Karger remained friendly until the end. Three years after their divorce, he remarried. But, like his father, he had continuing heart trouble, and once had a heart attack. She visited him whenever she could.
When she heard that he was dying of leukemia, she claimed that she “went to the church every day, asking God to save Freddie.”
Despite her prayers, Karger died of leukemia in 1979 at the age of sixty-three.]
Jane would outlive her “two-time” and “two-timing” husband by twenty-eight years.
She would never marry again.
***
After appearing with her in some of Jane’s favorite movies, Agnes Moorehead— Jane called her “Aggie”—offered an interviewer some insights into Jane’s life.
“In some ways, I think Jane has entered the most contented period of her life. The intense careerism has mellowed and lessened; she has her good friendships, her rewarding sessions with the paintbrush and canvas, her pleasure in her developing children.”
“I think she has given up her illusions about men and the kind of life she had hoped to live with one. She has come to realize, in a sense, that she was her own best company—and she understands herself better than any other human being. At last, she is free of the foibles and assorted demands of a mate.”
Seven years of relative seclusion would pass before Jane returned to the screen, although during the interval, she would occasionally accept a role in a teleplay.
***
“I thought I’d spend the rest of my days hanging out paining landscapes in Carmel,” she told Paulette Goddard. “But then came November of 1980. All hell broke loose.”
She was referring, of course, to the election of her former husband, Ronald Reagan, to the office of President of the United States.
Stories about the ins and outs of their previous marriage were making headlines around the world.
As she told Goddard, “I was getting calls from Finland, Egypt, even Patagonia. Where the hell is Patagonia?”
She refused every request for interviews about her life with Reagan. She did make one statement, however: “I have no regrets about not becoming First Lady. Oh, no, the glare of the White House, with its fish-bowl existence for a First Lady, is not for
me. I have perfectly wonderful memories of my years with the President. We are good friends, and we will always remain good friends.”
Reagan also refused to discuss his first marriage, except for one remark: “I was divorced in the sense that the decision was made by somebody else—not by me.”
An adept survivor in a fast-changing Hollywood, Jane managed, with skill and style, to revamping her image and her “look” with every decade.
Here’s Jane in the early 70s, sporting a look that enhanced her appeal to golden-age fans as well as to the casting directors of made-for-TV movies, daytime TV, and sitcoms.
A Special Feature
A young executive at Lorimar, one of the leading producers of TV programs, spoke to his board of directors: “If an old dame like Jane Wyman can still hobble around, and doesn’t look like Phyllis Diller’s grandmother, I see some real show biz marketability for her, having been married to Reagan and all that shit.”
“Let’s bring her back. Makeup can do wonders these days, or we could photograph her through gauze. Didn’t the bitch once win an Oscar or something? Who cares? The big thing is that she was married to the President of the United States. I’m told that no one in American history ever divorced a man who went on to become President.”
“We have the perfect series coming up,” he continued. “Of course, the Hollywood Hills is filled with has-beens who could play the role, but there’s no one who was once married to Ronald Reagan. Wasn’t Hitler still alive when they got married?”
The young executive was told that in 1940, the United States had not yet entered World War II.
“My god!” he answered. “Way back then! She must have told Reagan when he walked in the door to wipe the dinosaur shit off his shoes.”
***
Originally, Jane’s friend, Barbara Stanwyck, had been offered the role of Angela Channing, the tyrannical matriarch of the Falcon Crest Winery in a TV soap tentatively entitled The vintage Years. Flush with success from his hit series, The waltons, Earl Hamner later changed the title to Falcon Crest, fearing that the first tag would indicate the soap was about old people.
Love Triangle: Ronald Reagan, Jane Wyman, & Nancy Davis (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) Page 98