Ronnie and Nancy (18 page)

Love Is on the Air
was released in September 1937, to generally good reviews.
Variety
called Reagan a “find.” The
Hollywood Reporter,
the other major trade paper, called him a “natural.” “Bill Meiklejohn assured me it was safe to send for Nelle and Jack,” Reagan recalled, and that same month he sent his parents train fare.18 He rented them an apartment at 1842 North Cherokee Avenue in Hollywood, a few blocks from his own in the Montecito Apartments at 6650 Franklin Avenue, a ten-story Art Deco building constructed in 1931. Not long after, Neil and Bess Reagan joined the rest of the family, and Neil was hired as an announcer at the Warner Bros. radio station, WFWB.19

Three of Reagan’s Drake friends from Des Moines also followed him west that fall; three more moved to Los Angeles a few months later.20 For a while Reagan was “the group’s sole support,” in his words, but he was only too happy to be surrounded by familiar faces. After a long day at the studio, he would drive out to Santa Monica to join his buddies for body-surfing or volleyball on the beach, followed by onion soup, chili, and beer at Barney’s Beanery, a West Hollywood bar that became their hangout.21

Reagan frequently took Joy Hodges—another Iowan—out to dinner, though they were never romantically involved. “We discussed politics more than any other subject,” she recalled. “I was so fond of him, but he was a passionate Democrat and I a Republican and we used to go round and round about that. . . . He loved anything and everything about government, history and politics. So did I, and I loved hearing him relate accounts of Indian battles.”22

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On December 1, 1937, Warner Bros. picked up his option, raising his salary to $250 a week. He bought his parents a small house in West Hollywood, at 9031 Phyllis Avenue, just over the Beverly Hills line, the only piece of real estate they would ever own. Its small yard was filled with rosebushes, which Jack discovered he liked to tend. After his heart attack, Jack had finally given up drinking, but not chain-smoking. He was fifty-four and in failing health. “Every morning he would take the slow, careful walk his doctor had prescribed,” his son later wrote. According to Reagan, Jack always joked about the new neighborhood, “There’s nothing, by God, but real estate offices and hot dog stands.”23 For Christmas, Reagan gave his father a club chair with an ottoman so that he could put his feet up and listen to sports—and FDR—on the radio, which was also a gift from him. When Reagan’s option came up again in June 1938, he persuaded the studio to give his father a $25-a-week job helping with his fan mail.24

On Sunday mornings, Reagan usually accompanied his mother to the Hollywood-Beverly Christian Church on Sunset Boulevard, and Nelle often fixed dinner for his Iowa friends on Sunday nights. “They were in and out more than I was,” he later recalled, “and I think Nelle would have given someone an argument if he pointed out she hadn’t really given birth to the whole gang.”25 The fact that they all came from a Disciples of Christ college no doubt pleased Nelle, whose life in Los Angeles, as in Dixon, revolved around her church and lay missionary work. She made regular trips to the Olive View Sanitarium in the San Fernando Valley, where she entertained the tuberculosis patients with dramatic readings, and Christmastime 1938 found her wrapping five hundred presents her church had collected for “needy folks.”26

In a letter Nelle wrote to an Illinois friend that year, she gives a sense of the new life the Reagan family had in Hollywood. “Ronald said he was very glad to get your letter. Although he was so small when he left Tampico he still holds a soft spot for the home of his birth. I am acting as Ronald’s secretary and open all the mail, and there is a lot to open. Of course, all the mail from former friends from the old hometown is turned over for him to read, so you can rest assured that he read yours. Last month he received mail from forty-two states and three foreign countries, so you see if he had to answer his mail he would have not much time for work. . . . Ronald has finished three pictures now that he has taken the lead in, and is very well thought of at the studio. But really I don’t yet 1 0 0

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House know how to act with these people. I don’t just fit in somehow—I get my fork in the wrong hand but I don’t care, just so the boy gets along.”27

By the end of the year, Reagan’s salary was up to $350 a week, and he had rented a cottage at 1128 Cory Avenue, a block north of Sunset Boulevard and three or four blocks from Jack and Nelle’s.28 He was a seeing a recently divorced actress from the studio named Jane Wyman. When their engagement was announced by Louella Parsons eleven months later, Nelle wrote a friend in Dixon, “I hope my Ronald has made the right choice. I was in hopes he would fall in love with some sweet girl who is not in the movies.”29

Jane Wyman, “a little, loud, brassy blonde,” according to Hedda Hopper,30

was not the sort of girl most mothers would choose for their son: a high school dropout, a former chorus girl, a divorcee twice over at twenty-one, beautiful to be sure and eager to please, but also touchy and tough, impulsive and needy. Nelle probably didn’t know most of this; for one thing, it is highly unlikely that Wyman told Reagan about her first marriage, which she kept a secret, as she did so much about her past. This was not uncommon in Hollywood, where studio biographies were masterpieces of ellipsis and embellishment, but Wyman seemed to take things a step further. A decade later, when Nancy Davis signed with MGM, she would take two years off her age and erase the existence of her real father; Jane Wyman erased
both
her real parents, upgraded the professional status of the man she claimed was her father, and
added
three years to her age, just in case her teenage marriage to Ernest Eugene Wyman, the mysterious first husband, from whom she took her screen name, ever came out.31

Jane Wyman was born Sarah Jane Mayfield in St. Joseph, Missouri, on January 5, 1917, to Manning and Gladys Hope Mayfield, seven and a half months after they were married. Her parents separated in late 1921, and her father took a job with a shipping company in San Francisco. Her mother filed for divorce and moved to Cleveland, leaving Sarah Jane, not quite five, with friends named Richard and Emma Fulks. Manning Mayfield died of pneumonia the following year; a trip Emma Fulks made to California with Sarah Jane that winter may have been to see him on his deathbed and to arrange for the girl’s guardianship. According to a neighbor of the Fulkses’, although Gladys Mayfield occasionally visited her daughter in St. Joseph, the child went by the name of Sarah Jane Fulks, and she maintained that Richard and Emma Fulks were her real parents.32

In the 1986 authorized biography,
Jane Wyman: The Actress and the Woman
,
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1 0 1

author Lawrence J. Quirk makes no mention of the Mayfields and states that she was “christened” Sarah Jane Fulks,33 choosing that word perhaps because he knew the truth but was not allowed to print it. In contrast to Nancy Reagan’s eagerness to substitute Loyal Davis for Kenneth Robbins as her one and true father, Jane Wyman’s embrace of the Fulkses, and theirs of her, seemed to be based more on necessity than devotion. The prominent neurosurgeon took his time in making Anne Frances Robbins his legal daughter, but there is no record of Richard and Emma Fulks having adopted Sarah Jane Mayfield.

The Fulkses were both in their fifties when Gladys Mayfield left her little girl with them. Both had been previously married: Richard had a son from his first marriage; Emma, a daughter and a son; all three offspring were a generation older than Sarah Jane and living away from home when she was taken in. According to Quirk, “the Fulks house was a Victorian gingerbread horror, the furnishings lank and forlorn.”34 Richard Fulks was said to be a remote and tyrannical figure; the German-born Emma was more approachable, but equally demanding and strict.35 Warners would later claim Wyman’s “father” had been mayor of St. Joseph; in reality he was a frustrated politician who had been elected county collector for one term (as a Democrat) in 1916, and then joined the police department, where he rapidly rose from patrolman to chief of detectives.36

Emma Fulks dressed her charge in “drab, utilitarian clothes,” Quirk writes. “Bows or furbelows of any kind were
verboten.
”37 Strangely, she waited until September 1923 to register Sarah Jane in first grade, when she was nearly seven. Very occasionally, she would take the girl downtown for lunch and a Saturday matinee.38 In interviews Wyman gave after she became famous, she mostly remembered feeling inferior, isolated, unwanted. When she was eight, a neighbor woman “hurt her deeply” by announcing loudly enough for her to hear, “With that turned-up nose and those bug eyes, no one will ever take that child seriously.” She told Quirk, “Shyness is not a small problem; it can cripple the whole personality. It crippled mine for many years. As a child, my only solution to the problem of shyness was to hide, to make myself as small and insignificant as possible. All through grade school I was a well-mannered little shadow who never spoke above a whisper.” But somehow she persuaded the Fulkses to let her take dance classes at 50 cents a throw with a local hoofer known as Dad Prinz.39 Not surprisingly, this gloomy little girl had dreams of becoming a movie star.

On March 25, 1928, after a long, unspecified illness, Richard Fulks died 1 0 2

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House at age sixty-three, leaving his widow little more than their house. Emma decided to rent it out and move to Los Angeles, where her children by her first marriage lived. She took Sarah Jane, then eleven, with her. They moved in with Emma’s daughter, Elsie Weymann; her son, Morie Weymann, an eye-and-throat doctor, helped them out financially. No doubt motivated by the need for an income, Emma turned into a full-fledged stage mother, taking her “daughter” to singing and dancing lessons, scrimping to buy her pretty clothes, sending her photographs to talent agencies and movie studios, all without evident success.40

By 1932, Sarah Jane, then fifteen, had left Los Angeles High School without graduating, started working as a coffee shop waitress to pay for her lessons, and bleached her hair platinum blond à la Jean Harlow. That year she appeared in her first film,
The Kid from Spain
, a Samuel Goldwyn musical starring Eddie Cantor, kicking her legs in the air alongside two other young hopefuls named Betty Grable, then sixteen, and Paulette Goddard, then twenty-one. Between 1933 and 1935, she worked as a model, a switchboard operator, a manicurist, and a secretary, as well as a waitress, and had bit parts in six more movies, mostly at Paramount, mostly in the chorus line.41

“It was work when the family badly needed the money,” she later said of her chorus line days, “but for a girl who had grown up in terror of being looked at, it was also agony. Then I made a discovery: a good shield for shyness is a bold exterior. Did my heart turn over when the man with the megaphone bellowed out my name? Were all the other dancers prettier?

Never mind. I covered up by becoming the cockiest of all, by talking the loudest, laughing the longest, and wearing the curliest, most blatantly false eyelashes in Hollywood.”42

On April 8, 1933, she married Ernest Eugene Wyman, whom she may or may not have met in 1931, when they were both high school students, and who may or may not have been a salesman. She said she was nineteen on the marriage certificate, the beginning of the lie about her age. According to a 1957
Movie Life
story, “Still in her teens, she impulsively entered marriage. Jane never talks about her first heartbreak, but in less than a month she knew it was a terrible mistake and the marriage was dissolved.”43 Other sources say she wasn’t divorced until 1935. Much confusion surrounds this period of her life. In the summer of 1933, according to one report, she returned to St. Joseph, where she stayed with a woman named Gladys H. Johnson, who may or may not have been her real mother
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with a new surname. A neighbor remembered her having been married then and sitting in the yard trying to write.44 Another version, in the 1949

Current Biography
, which usually relies heavily on the subject’s word, had her returning home in 1935, very briefly enrolling at the University of Missouri, then touring the Midwest and South as a radio vocalist, using the name Jane Durrell. Lawrence Quirk says she never went back to St.

Joseph, a place which she disparaged as “oppressive, strait-laced, hypo-critical.”45

All sources agree that in May 1936, on the recommendation of William Demarest, an older actor who was also an agent, she was given a standard contract by Warner Bros. She was in the chorus line in her first film there,
Stage Struck
, a Busby Berkeley musical featuring two of Warners’ biggest stars, Dick Powell and Joan Blondell, and didn’t get a leading role until a year later, in her tenth film for the studio,
Mr. Dodd Takes the Air
, opposite the crooner Kenny Baker. Still, she was thrilled to be at Warners, and when asked “What is your long-range ambition?” in a 1937 studio questionnaire, she answered, “To be not just
an
actress but
the
actress at the studio.”46 (No wonder Bette Davis, then queen of Warners, wasn’t that friendly.) In the meantime, Jane was willing to take on such starlet tasks as showing up at parties for potential investors and wealthy cronies of the studio brass. It was at one of these parties that she reportedly met Myron Futterman, a middle-aged businessman from New Orleans who owned a dress company in Los Angeles. Futterman was divorced and had a teenage daughter a few years younger than Wyman, but that seemed to make little difference to either of them, because on June 29, 1937, they were married—Quirk calls it an elopement—in New Orleans.47 The strange thing is that only six days before a story had appeared in the daily
Variety
under the headline jane wyman hospitalized for nervous breakdown.48

June 1937 happened to be Ronald Reagan’s first month at Warners, and in one version of events he and Wyman were introduced in the commissary soon after his arrival on the lot. In another, they met in the publicity department while having their pictures taken. Wyman later said that from the first moment she saw him, she thought to herself, “That’s for me.”