The Mansions of Limbo

by Dominick Dunne

  After Johnny Belinda, her career totally dominated her life. “She told me she could never even cook a hamburger. She taught her kids early that she wasn’t going to be there,” said an actor friend of hers. She had made the long and difficult transition from contract player to leading lady to star, and she hung on to that position through the forties and into the mid-fifties, playing what she has called four-handkerchief roles in such classic films of the genre as Magnificent Obsession and The Blue Veil, which remains her favorite. “I was in the middle of the woman’s cycle in picture making,” she said. She talked about her contemporaries. “Greer, Irene, Olivia, Joan, Bette, Loretta, Barbara, and don’t forget Ginger … I never really knew Ava.” She was talking about Greer Garson, Irene Dunne, Olivia de Havilland, Joan Fontaine, Bette Davis, Loretta Young, Barbara Stanwyck, Ginger Rogers, and Ava Gardner. “The thing was, we were all different,” she said. The New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther wrote about her in 1953, “Her acting of drudges has become a virtual standard on the screen.” But then the cycle of women’s films ended. She decided to retire in 1962.

  Several seasons ago Lana Turner, who was one of the queens of MGM when Jane was one of the queens of Warner Brothers, came on “Falcon Crest” as a semiregular. From the beginning, there was a coolness between the two stars. Lana, according to one source, took five or six hours to get ready, and Jane, for whom promptness is a passion, could never tolerate that. Someone closely connected with the show told me that Jane watched Lana on a talk show one night and felt that she was taking credit for “Falcon Crest” ’s coming in number two in the ratings. “Imagine her taking credit for the show’s success,” said Jane at the time. Lana did not appear on the show again.

  In the old days of the studios and contract players, the young actors were taught how to conduct themselves in interviews. They never said anything negative about anyone, and that training is still evident today.

  “Was there a difficulty between you and Lana Turner?” I asked.

  “Enough said, right there,” answered Jane Wyman. She looked at me in a way that said very clearly that Miss Turner was a topic she had finished discussing. Her praise for her fellow actors on the series is unqualified, however. “I love to work with David Selby.” “Lorenzo Lamas can do almost anything. He’s a wonderful dramatic actor.” “I said, ‘I want Rod Taylor in the show.’ He was occupied doing something else. I said, ‘We’ll wait.’ ”

  “I never asked anything about her children. I have never approached that relationship with her,” said an actor on the series. “I think she was hurt by Michael’s book, but she has never said one harsh word about them. The only time I ever heard her mention the name of the president, she said something kind.”

  Both of her children have written books in which they announced things to their parents that they had not told them before. Maureen wrote that she had been a severely battered wife in her first marriage, and Michael confessed that he had been sexually molested by a man when he was a child. Since Joan Crawford’s daughter Christina wrote Mommie Dearest, it has become the vogue among the adult children of the famous to cash in on their privileged un-happiness by spilling the beans on their celebrity dad or mom. Maureen wrote that Jane had not come to her first wedding. Michael wrote that Jane had sent him away to boarding school when he was six. Even the siblings did not seem to get along. Michael, in his book, recounts an incident that happened when he was four years old. He told Maureen that he knew a secret. “What?” she asked. He told her that she was getting a new blue dress for Christmas. Infuriated that he had ruined her Christmas surprise, she snapped, “I know a secret too. You’re adopted.”

  “Do you see your grandchildren?” I asked. Maureen has no children, but Michael has two, Cameron and Ashley.

  “Once in a while,” she replied slowly. The subject was approaching the danger area. “They’re in school when I’m working. They’re adorable kids, Cameron and Ashley. Cameron’s always saying to me, ‘Gramma, how old are you?’ And I say, ‘I’m as old as my little finger.’ And he says, ‘How old is that?’ and I say, ‘As old as I am.’ ”

  “Have you always been so reluctant to be interviewed?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “My life’s an open book. Everyone knows everything about me. There are all those magazines with lies in them.” She had ordered a Diet Coke, and she took a sip. “I used to be interviewed a lot. But the last time I was, I had what seemed to be a very nice interview with the reporter, and then the piece came out. The first line was something like ‘This is the president’s ex-wife.’ That’s when the guillotine fell. I don’t have to be known as that. I’ve been in this business longer than he has. It’s such bad taste. They wouldn’t say it if I was Joe Blow’s ex-wife. It wouldn’t even be mentioned.”

  With that said—and it was the closest she got to the unmentionable subject, the former president of the United States—she shifted topics abruptly. “We’re going to have fun this year on the series. We have such a good producer, and the writers are wonderful. I feel like I’m doing the first show. The enthusiasm is just wonderful. The ‘Falcon Crest’ that I want is going on this year.”

  However reluctant she may be to discuss it, how can her relationship with Ronald Reagan not be discussed? She is the only former wife of a United States president in the history of the country. It is certainly true that if she had been married to Joe Blow it would never be mentioned. Her marriages to Myron Futterman, who manufactured dresses, and to Freddie Karger, who led the dance band on the roof of the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, are never mentioned. But between those two marriages was her longest marriage, to a movie star of the period, with whom she had two children and who later became the governor of the state of California and then the president of the United States. It is part of her history. It will be the lead in her obituary when she dies.

  It is a curious coincidence of fate that the eight years of her emergence as the First Lady of television should almost exactly parallel the eight years of her former husband’s second wife’s emergence as the First Lady of the land. The relationship between the two women is, has always been, and ever will be poisonous, although Jane Wyman has never uttered a single word in public about or against Nancy Reagan. Apparently Mrs. Reagan has not returned the courtesy. There are publishing rumors that her forthcoming book, My Turn, contains several obliquely critical allusions to Jane Wyman in reference to the bringing up of the two children Jane had during her marriage to Ronald Reagan. “Jane was a star. Nancy never was,” a Los Angeles socialite acquainted with both said to explain the bad blood between the two women. “For seventeen years, Jane has kept her mouth shut. Nancy hates Jane with such a passion because it’s the only part of Ronnie that she doesn’t control. If you had mentioned Ronnie to Jane, she would have gotten up and walked out.” A person friendly with Nancy Reagan told me that in the scrapbooks she keeps of newspaper clippings about her romance and marriage to Ronald Reagan, all mentions of Jane Wyman have been blacked out. In turn, a person friendly with Jane Wyman told me in private Jane sometimes refers to Nancy Reagan as Nancyvita.

  Until recently, Jane was a regular and favored patron of the famed Hollywood restaurant Chasen’s, as well as a close personal friend of Maude Chasen, the widow of David Chasen, who founded the restaurant fifty-three years ago. Although her friendship with Maude continues, she is, by unstated mutual agreement, almost never seen there these days. Chasen’s has become the more or less official restaurant of the recent president and his wife, and Jane Wyman’s absence from the premises averts the possibility of a chance encounter.

  A journalist friend told me about interviewing the former president in the private quarters of the White House. He had been warned in advance that the name Jane Wyman was never mentioned in the presence of the First Lady. But since Miss Wyman had been married to the president for eight years, the journalist ventured very cautiously, when they were deep into the conversation, to bring up her name. To his surprise, the presi
dent began to tell a friendly anecdote about his first wife. Midway through the story, Nancy Reagan walked into the room. Without a second’s hesitation, the president shifted to another topic right in the middle of a sentence, and the subject of Miss Wyman did not come up again.

  Every star of Jane Wyman’s caliber pays a price for fame, and she has endured for over fifty years. Although she is husbandless and vaguely estranged from her children, her splendid isolation must not be confused with loneliness. Where she is is where she has always wanted to be from her early contract days.

  Like all success-oriented people, she is not without her detractors. Robert Raison was Jane Wyman’s agent for nearly thirty years, as well as her friend and sometime escort to social functions in the television industry. He was also the agent of Dennis Hopper, Michelle Phillips, and all of the Bottoms brothers. He had a reputation for developing close friendships with his clients. He negotiated the seven-year deal for Jane when she decided to play the role of Angela Channing on “Falcon Crest.” At the end of the seventh year of the series, Raison heard from Jane’s lawyer that he was through. “When she fired me, she never told me herself. I heard it from her lawyer,” said Raison. When he asked why, the lawyer told him to call Jane and discuss it with her. “I did,” said Raison. “I told her I wanted to hear it from her mouth. You know what she said?”

  “No.”

  “She said, ‘You and me, Bobby, we’ve run out of gas.’ I was going to sue her, but the lawyers settled it for a given amount of money. I can’t discuss that amount.”

  Raison is now writing a book about his years with Jane Wyman. It is tentatively titled Jane Wyman, Less than a Legend: A Memoir in Close-Up. Although angry and hurt, Raison still expresses residual tenderness for his former client. “Two days after the assassination attempt on the president, Jane sent him flowers to the hospital in Washington. Several days later, the president personally called to say thank you for the flowers,” Raison recalled recently. He answered the telephone when the president called. “He said to me, ‘Thank you for taking care of her, Bobby,’ ” said Raison.

  The check came. In an interview situation like this one, the interviewer always picks up the check. As I reached for it, Jane Wyman tapped my hand and shook her head. “This is on Lorimar,” she said.

  We walked outside into the brilliant sunlight. Her red Jaguar was parked in the number-one space of the Bob Burns parking lot. We shook hands. “Where else can you meet such fascinating people and go to such places as people in our business do?” she said. “It’s a fabulous life.”

  In an era of tell-all, Jane Wyman has made the decision to tell nothing. No confessions. No revelations. It’s her life, and it’s private. There are those who say it is her duty to inform historians of the eight years she shared with a man who later became the president of the United States, years that encompassed the peak of his minor movie stardom, his presidency of the Screen Actors Guild, and his role in the ignoble House Un-American Activities Committee hearings. But she sees it differently, and that’s the way it is.

  “She’s one tough lady,” said one of the cast members of “Falcon Crest.” Yeah, but a lady.

  November 1989

  IT’S A FAMILY AFFAIR

  It was a family affair. The father, the mother, the three sons, the two daughters, the estranged wife of one of the sons, a grandchild, boyfriends and girlfriends of all the children. And there were the father’s half-sister and the mother’s sisters and almost all their husbands, and a good many of their children. And cousins, lots of cousins, city cousins and country cousins, including, in the host’s own words, “masses of Guinnesses.” And friends, but only close friends, hardly a jet-setter in the whole bunch. This was, remember, a family affair.

  But what a family and what an affair. Lord Glenconner, of England, Scotland, and the islands of Mustique and Saint Lucia in the British West Indies, who used to be called Colin Tennant before he inherited his father’s title, was celebrating his sixtieth birthday in very grand style. For openers, he had chartered a brand-new 440-foot four-masted sailing vessel called the Wind Star, possibly the prettiest ship afloat, with a crew of eighty-seven, and had installed 130 of his nearest and dearest in its seventy-five staterooms, complete with VCRs and mini-bars, for a week-long cruise from Saint Lucia to Martinique to Bequia to Mustique, with parties all along the way, every noon and every night, culminating in a costume ball called the Peacock Ball at the Glenconners’ place, which some people call a palace, on the beach in Mustique. And should there have been any question of the financial burden imposed by such an adventure, Lord Glenconner had taken care of that too, by paying the fares of all his guests from London to Saint Lucia, where he owns a second estate, called the Jalousie Plantation, which he plans, in time, to turn into a hotel and health spa. And should there have been any problem about rounding up a suitable costume for the lavish India-theme ball, Lord Glenconner had even anticipated that. In his travels to India over the past year, while he was preparing for his birthday celebration, he had purchased a variety of kurtas and Aligarh trousers and turbans and ghagra/cholis and harem dresses in a whole range of sizes and styles and had had them transported to the Wind Star so that his guests could pick out what they liked. There were even two seamstresses on board to make any necessary alterations. The only thing you had to provide was your own jewelry. He drew the line at that. But he did have a hairdresser for the ladies, who doubled as a barber for the men, and a masseuse and a masseur. And 360 movies to choose from for the VCRs, including 58 pornographic ones. And all taxi rides on the various islands were to be paid for by Lord Glenconner. And there was to be absolutely no tipping. Lord Glenconner had taken care of all that. It was, all the way around, a class act.

  I arrived in Saint Lucial the day before the planne from London arrived, and was met at Hewanorra airport by Lord Glenconner and his estate manager, Lyton Lamontagne, at whose house I spent the first night. Lyton Lamontagne, a native of Saint Lucia in his late twenties, and his wife, Eroline, went to school together in the town of Soufrière. He is handsome and she is beautiful. A trusted confidant of Lord Glenconner’s, Lamontagne traveled to India with him last year and was instrumental in carrying out the far-sighted and sometimes seemingly impossible plans of the eccentric lord. Glenconner feels, as do others I saw in Saint Lucia, that in time Lyton Lamontagne could become the prime minister of the island. The Lamontagnes refer to Lord Glenconner as Papa, as do many of the natives on both Saint Lucia and Mustique, and there is a sense in their relationship of the nineteenth-century British Empire builder and his devoted overseer. In Soufrière, Glenconner lives in an old wooden house on the town square, so primitive that it has no electricity or running water, although it will have at some point in the future. He has to go to the nearby Texaco station to use the bathroom or wash, and this sort of inconvenience seems to appeal to him, although it is at variance with his elegance of manner, which is sometimes almost effete. He wears large straw hats, and for his birthday week he always dressed in white or black.

  Lord Glenconner talked briefly about several last-minute drop-outs from the party. Mick Jagger could not take the time out to attend, although Jerry Hall would be joining the group when the boat docked in Mustique. David Bowie could not come. Lord Dufferin and Ava were ill. Carolina Herrera had to finalize a perfume deal in New York. Glenconner rolled his eyes in disappointment. He rolls his eyes a great deal, in exasperation, or wonder, or over lapses of taste. His own lapses, however, take on a sort of aristocratic whimsy, at least in his mind. He once allowed himself to be photographed defecating by the side of the road in India and sent the pictures to Vanity Fair.

  We sailed in a small open boat to the Jalousie Plantation, where one of the main events of the week-long celebration was going to take place several days hence. His plantation lies between two peaks called the Pitons. The original house, on what was once a sugar plantation built by the French in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, is long gone, but stone walls from the or
iginal waterwheel are still standing. The principal house now is a small wooden bungalow, onto which had just been added a covered porch for the picnic party. The bungalow, which has gingerbread trimmings, was painted pink with yellow shutters, green floors, and blue interior walls, and looked like a set from the musical House of Flowers. Gamboling happily around the scene of preparations was a frisky young elephant called Bupa, which Glenconner had bought from the Dublin zoo and had sent out to his plantation. A native painter was finishing a mural on one side of the house, and Lord Glenconner examined the lavender leaves and red and orange flowers closely. “No, no, no, I don’t like that color red at all,” he said to the painter. “There’s far too much brown in that red. I want a red red.” They found a red red.

  Then we went for the first of two trips to the airport, to meet Lady Glenconner, known as Lady Anne, who was arriving from Mustique with the eldest of her three sons, Charles, as well as her daughter-in-law, Tessa Tennant, the wife of her second son, Henry, and Viscount Linley, the son of Princess Margaret by the Earl of Snowdon. The contingent from London, which included the Glenconners twin teenage daughters, Amy and May, was arriving on a second plane several hours later. Another son, Christopher, was arriving from Mexico. On the way to the airport Glenconner had the driver stop the car several times so that he could cut wild lilies growing by the side of the road to present to his wife. Lady Anne is a lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret. Such close friends are the Glenconners of the princess that they have been living at Kensington Palace as her houseguests for nearly a year while their new London house has been undergoing extensive renovations and decoration. “I sleep in what was Tony Snowdon’s dressing room, just this far from Princess Margaret,” Lord Glenconner told me. He said when they were moving out of their old house, Princess Margaret came to help them pack; she donned a working smock borrowed from a maid and wrapped china in newspapers.