Ronnie and Nancy (39 page)

“dope” in a
Photoplay
article titled “I’m No Communist.”102 Reagan, it
Divorce: 1947–1948

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seemed, had been wise to avoid the Committee for the First Amendment from the beginning. He would later write that “it was for suckers only.”103

New York Governor Herbert Lehman, Broadway’s George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, publishing executives Bennett Cerf and Clifton Fadiman, and composer Leonard Bernstein lent their voices to a second
Hollywood
Fights Back
broadcast in early November, all to no avail. The American Legion threatened to organize a boycott of movies on which the Hollywood 10

worked, and a Gallup Poll showed that Americans favored punishing the uncooperative witnesses by a margin of 46 to 29 percent (though only 30

percent approved of the way the investigation had been handled).104 On November 24, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to uphold the contempt citations against the Hollywood 10.105

The next day a conclave of film industry chieftains, including Mayer, Jack and Harry Warner, Joseph Schenck of 20th Century Fox, Barney Balaban of Paramount, and Harry Cohn of Columbia, met at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York and unanimously agreed to dismiss the ten without compensation. “We do not desire to prejudge their legal rights,” the studio heads maintained in a press release that came to be known as the Waldorf Declaration, “but their actions have been a disservice to their employ-ers and have impaired their usefulness to the industry.”106

The moguls didn’t stop with the Hollywood 10. Prodded by Eric Johnston, the president of the Motion Picture Producers Association, who had sworn at the hearings that the industry would never institute a blacklist, they now put the beginnings of one in place. “On the broader issue of alleged subversive and disloyal elements in Hollywood,” the producers’

statement continued, “our members are likewise prepared to take positive action. We will not knowingly employ a Communist or a member of any party or group which advocates the overthrow of the government of the United States by force or by any illegal or unconstitutional methods.”107

The New York Times
called the producers’ decision “an action unprecedented in American industrial fields.”108 RKO fired Scott and Dmytryk the next day, Fox let Lardner go the day after that, and Trumbo and Cole were banished from MGM the following week; the other five were not under contract to a studio. All ten were subsequently indicted by a federal grand jury, tried, convicted of contempt, and, after the Supreme Court refused to take up their case in April 1950, imprisoned for up to one year.

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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House

“Hollywood is going to clear up its back yard,” Mayer announced upon his return from New York.109 At two meetings, in late November and early December, Mayer and other top executives urged the leaders of the directors, writers, and actors guilds, including Reagan, to endorse the Waldorf Declaration, arguing that their harsh new policy was necessary to mollify public opinion and protect the industry from more government interference. “It was generally agreed that Louis B. Mayer, at the second of these sessions, hit on the most graphic way of expressing the official point of view,” screenwriter Gordon Kahn recalled sarcastically in his 1948 memoir,
Hollywood
on Trial
. “The British people, he said, had their Royal Family, in veneration of which a certain deep human impulse was satisfied. American democracy had to have a similar object of worship, and it had found it in the personalities of the motion picture business. That was why any word or act from Hollywood which shook the loyalty of even a fraction of the royal subjects was a matter for grave alarm and a potential contribution to national disintegration.”110

Reagan had been reelected SAG president in mid-November; in that same vote his fellow actors backed his policy of requiring Guild officers to sign loyalty oaths. Still, he had serious misgivings about denying anyone employment because of his or her political affiliation, as the producers were setting out to do. He made this clear in the pointed questions he asked Mayer and his cohorts at the December 3 meeting—Why had they suddenly reversed their policy? How could they prove someone was a Communist? What about members of Communist fronts who were not Communists themselves?111—and in a statement he prepared for the December 8 meeting of SAG’s board, in which he wrote, “We have no desire to protect communists. However, liberty cannot be held in water tight compartments. Once suppression, backed by the pressure of fear, breaks down one bulkhead, the other compartments are soon flooded.”112 Mayer responded by saying that he knew a Commie when he saw one, and the SAG board rejected Reagan’s proposed statement as not tough enough.113

By December 19, when Reagan met with the FBI for the second time that month, he had apparently come around to the producers’ point of view: T-10 advised Special Agent [blacked out] that he has been made a member of a committee headed by L.B. MAYER, the purpose of which allegedly is to “purge” the motion picture industry of Communist Party members, which committee was an outgrowth of the
Divorce: 1947–1948

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THOMAS committee hearings in Washington and the subsequent meeting of motion picture producers in New York City.114

Reagan was not the only would-be liberal floundering ideologically; nor was he alone in giving in to the rising tide of reaction. Shortly after the HUAC hearings, the Directors Guild followed SAG in adopting a loyalty oath, with only a furious John Huston and a hesitant Billy Wilder, among the 150 or 200 directors present, voting against it. Even William Wyler, who had founded the Committee for the First Amendment with Huston, raised his hand in support.115 Dore Schary, then vice president of RKO, and the prominent independent producer Walter Wanger, both longtime liberal activists, had reluctantly gone along with the Waldorf Declaration, had then helped Mayer sell it to the guilds, and now took an active role in setting up Mayer’s purge–cum–public relations committee, officially called the Motion Picture Industry Council (MPIC). Reagan represented SAG at the council’s first meeting in early 1948; six months later, he was made co-chairman of this increasingly powerful group, which brought together the leaders of the studios, the guilds, and the unions under a single anti-Communist banner.116

“You bore me! Get out!” Those were the words with which Jane Wyman greeted Ronald Reagan upon his return home from the Washington hearings in late October 1947. Reagan was accustomed to his wife’s moodiness, but this was the first time she told him—in no uncertain terms—that she wanted a divorce.117 “Jane wasn’t interested in what Ronnie was interested in,” Nancy Reagan told me, “and she wasn’t about to try to become interested.”118

“It just horrified him and shocked him,” said their old friend Leonora Hornblow. “He just didn’t think he’d ever be divorced. His mother had put up with an awful lot from the father, and they remained married.”119

“I suppose there had been warning signs, if only I hadn’t been so busy,”

Reagan later wrote, “but small-town boys grow up thinking only other people get divorced. The plain truth was that such a thing was so far from even being imagined by me that I had no resources to call upon.”120

Ronnie’s first reaction was to talk Jane out of it. “We’ll lead an ideal life if you’ll avoid doing just one thing,” he told her. “Don’t think.”121 But it was just that dismissive attitude, all the more demeaning because it was so unconscious, that exasperated her. She had had it with his endless debates 2 2 2

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House over politics with their friends, his late nights at SAG meetings, his foreign policy lectures at the breakfast table when all she wanted to do was get ready for work. “I got along without you before,” she shouted at him outside the Beverly Club as they waited for their car, “and I certainly can get along without you now!”122 When California’s then lieutenant governor, Goodwin Knight, stopped by their table at Ciro’s one night and started talking politics, Wyman practically yawned in his face.123

As soon as shooting on
Johnny Belinda
was finished in mid-November, she took off for “a long rest” in New York. On December 5, while Christmas shopping in Beverly Hills, Ronnie was stopped cold by a headline in the
Los Angeles Examiner
: jane wyman, mate in rift124 “There is no use in lying,” Jane was quoted as saying. “I am not the happiest girl in the world.

It’s nothing that’s happened recently, it’s an accumulation of things that have been coming on for a long time. . . . We will talk things over and I hope and believe that we will solve our problems and avoid a separation.”125 A
Photoplay
article titled “Those Fightin’ Reagans” soon followed, reporting that Wyman had confided to a friend in New York, “We’re through. We’re finished. And it’s all my fault.”126

Louella Parsons was the first to reach Ronnie after the news broke.

“Right now, Louella, Jane needs very much to have a fling and I intend to let her have it,” he told the columnist who had given them their wedding reception. “She is sick and nervous and not herself. . . . Jane says she loves me, but is no longer ‘in love’ with me, and points out that this is a fine distinction. That, I don’t believe. I think she is nervous, despondent, and because of this she feels our life together has become humdrum.”127 “I love Jane, and I know she loves me,” he insisted to Hedda Hopper. “I don’t know what this is all about, and I don’t know why Jane has done it. For my part, I hope to live with her for the rest of my life.”128 He reminded movie reporter Gladys Hall that Jane had lost a baby only six months earlier and almost immediately after had taken on “a taxing, difficult role” in
Johnny Belinda
. “Perhaps, too,” he added, “my seriousness about public affairs has bored Jane.”129

On December 14, back in Los Angeles, Jane Wyman announced that she was separating from her husband. Reagan moved into the Garden of Allah. “If this comes to divorce, I think I’ll name Johnny Belinda as co-respondent,” he joked to Hedda Hopper, fueling the rumors that Lew Ayres was the real reason Wyman had left him, which Reagan then vehemently denied, insisting that no other man was involved.130

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Warner Bros. announced that Wyman would not co-star with Reagan in
John Loves Mary,
a Jerry Wald production scheduled to begin shooting in January. Wyman’s replacement, Patricia Neal, then a twenty-one-year-old ingénue, was introduced to Reagan at a party on New Year’s Eve. “He said, ‘Well, we’re going to do a film together.’ And I thought, Good, good, good,” the actress told me. “Then midnight came and we all went outside, and he wept and wept on an older woman’s arm. He was heartbroken. He really was.”131

“Hollywood sympathy in this case is one hundred percent with Ronnie, who is a prince,”
Silver Screen
magazine’s Fredda Dudley informed her readers in early 1948. “Jane is a moody person, temperamental, ambitious, restless and seeking; furthermore, she is not now and hasn’t been well for some time. It is to be hoped, that as her health improves, Jane’s other problems will vanish, and two of the town’s favorite people will resume their marriage.”132

Friends, including Bill Holden and his wife, Ardis (who acted under the name Brenda Marshall), tried to coax the couple back together at small, tense dinner parties, but Jane refused to waver. On Ronnie’s thirty-seventh birthday, February 6, 1948, she gave him a turquoise Cadillac convertible that she had ordered months earlier as a surprise, but she signed the gift card with Maureen’s and Michael’s names. Later that month, she checked into the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas to establish residency for the divorce. After a few days, however, she returned to Los Angeles and asked Ronnie to move back in with her and the children. In May she asked him to move out again, and filed for divorce in California on the grounds of extreme mental cruelty.133 At the divorce trial the following month, which Reagan did not attend, the
Los Angeles Times
reported,

“Miss Wyman told the court that she and Reagan engaged in continual arguments on his political views. Despite her lack of interest in his political activities, Miss Wyman continued, Reagan insisted that she attend meetings with him and be present during discussions among his friends. But her own ideas, she complained, ‘were never considered important.’ ‘Finally, there was nothing between us,’ Miss Wyman said.”134

A divorce decree was granted on June 28, 1948. Wyman received custody of the children, $500 a month in child support, a $25,000 life insurance policy paid for by Reagan, and horseback-riding privileges at their Northridge ranch; the house on Cordell Drive was to be sold and the pro-2 2 4

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House ceeds evenly split.135 Jane left it to Ronnie to break the news to seven-year-old Maureen; Michael, then three, was too young to understand. “I can still hear Dad saying,” Maureen later wrote, “ ‘Just remember, Mermie, I still love you. I will always love you.’ His voice was cracking a little as he spoke.”136

“No marital separation since I broke the story that Mary Pickford, America’s sweetheart, was leaving Douglas Fairbanks, has had the effect of the parting of the Reagans,” wrote a crushed Louella Parsons. “Just as Mary and Doug stood for all that is best in this town, so have Ronnie and Jane. . . . For eight years they have shared a beautiful life that has earned them the respect and admiration even of people who did not know them personally. To those of us who are close friends, they were an ideal Mr. and Mrs. That’s why this hurts so much.”137

“They would not have gotten a divorce had their careers not been going in opposite directions,” said their good friend Dick Powell. “Hers up, his down.”138

“Perhaps I should have let someone else save the world and have saved my own home,” said Reagan.139