Killing Reagan (4 page)

Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman with baby Maureen

In 1941, Wyman gives birth to a beautiful daughter whom they name Maureen.

*   *   *

World War II is raging. But Ronald Reagan's poor eyesight exempts him from fighting overseas. He stays in California but is eager to contribute to the war effort. Long before moving to Los Angeles, Reagan had joined Iowa's Army Reserve, serving in the cavalry. In May 1937, before making his first motion picture, he was offered a commission as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Cavalry Officer Reserve Corps.

He begins active duty as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army in April 1942, assigned to making training films and selling war bonds. He secures a top secret clearance, meaning he is often privy to classified information about upcoming American bombing raids. In the process, he learns how such attacks are planned and conducted. Reagan's career up until now has seen him in a series of jobs that do not require leadership or organization. But the army teaches him about taking charge and motivating the men he commands. These are lessons he will use for the rest of his life.

The duties of Reagan's U.S. Army First Motion Picture Unit shift in the waning days of the war. In June 1945, he sends a photographer to a local aircraft factory to take pictures of women working in war production. Pvt. David Conover shoots using color film, a rarity at the time, snapping the indelible image of an eighteen-year-old brunette holding a small propeller. The wife of a young merchant seaman, the fetching girl earns twenty dollars a week inspecting parachutes at a company named Radioplane, which also makes some of the world's first drone aircraft.
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She has a wholesome smile, wears a modest green blouse, and has clipped her factory ID badge to the waistband of her pleated gray skirt. Her name is Norma Jeane Dougherty, and these photographs will soon open the doors of Hollywood to her. Eventually, Norma Jeane will divorce her sailor husband and change her name, as she becomes one of the most famous women in the world. As his own career is on the verge of combusting, Ronald Reagan is directly responsible for initiating the fame of Marilyn Monroe.

*   *   *

At war's end, Reagan makes a triumphant return to Hollywood. Warner Bros. gives him a new long-term contract worth a million dollars, with a guarantee of fifty-two thousand dollars per movie. Reagan and the petite Wyman live in a five-thousand-square-foot custom home on a knoll overlooking Los Angeles. He spends his off time playing golf with comedians Jack Benny and George Burns, and enjoys steak dinners with Wyman at the exclusive Beverly Club. Also in 1945, Reagan and Jane Wyman adopt a baby boy, whom they name Michael.

Reagan's first movie of the new contract is
Stallion Road
, in which he plays a horseback-riding veterinarian. Reagan's on-screen mount is a midnight black thoroughbred mare named Tar Baby. Reagan likes “Baby” so much that he buys her before filming is completed. To give her a place to gallop, he fulfills a lifelong dream and buys a small ranch in the San Fernando Valley, which he will keep for a couple of years before buying a larger property in Malibu.

Then tragedy strikes. In June 1947, Jane Wyman gives birth prematurely to a young daughter. Reagan is ill in the hospital with pneumonia at the time and cannot be at Wyman's side when Christine Reagan comes into the world. She lives just nine hours. The loss deeply affects his marriage to Wyman.
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Trying to put their lives back together, Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman pour themselves into their work. Yet, despite all the trappings of success, Ronald Reagan's glory days in Hollywood are numbered. Warner Bros. soon casts him in a series of forgettable pictures that make little money and are scorned by critics. Reagan is perplexed. His Hollywood fairy tale is in danger of coming to an end—and he is powerless to do anything about it.

Reagan is a hardworking, restless man who craves physical activity. He is the son of an all-too-often-drunk Irish shoe salesman and a Bible-thumping mother. Their parenting methods taught young Ron to avoid extremes in behavior, leading him, at times, to appear clueless and shut off. Also, it is true: Ronald Reagan is not a great intellect, having struggled to maintain a C average in college. Yet he can memorize paragraphs of script with ease and then recite them again and again on cue. Reagan also is a thinker, craving long periods of solitary meditation—preferably on horseback. He believes that “as you rock along a trail to the sound of the hooves and the squeak of the leather, with the sun on your head and the smell of the horse and the saddle and trees around you, things just begin to straighten themselves out.”

Reagan first learned to ride while working as a teenage lifeguard back at Lowell Park in Dixon, Illinois, and lives by the saying “Nothing is so good for the inside of a man as the outside of a horse.”

But no long gallop aboard Baby can hide the fact that Ronald Reagan's personal and professional lives are now veering in new and disastrous directions.

*   *   *

Jane Wyman is growing bored with her husband, though he is oblivious to her dissatisfaction. Reagan can often be self-centered and callous. He has a habit of talking down to his wife because he possesses a college degree and she does not. He also likes to be the center of attention; sometimes screening his personal print of the 1942 movie
Kings Row
when guests come over for dinner.
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Jane Wyman is not impressed when friends suggest that Reagan, who is developing a fondness for political activism, run for Congress. “He's very politically minded. I'm not very bright,” she answers coolly, when asked if she supports the idea.

Ronald Reagan has also become fond of lecturing. Any topic will do. “Don't ask Ronnie what time it is,” Wyman warns fellow actress June Allyson, “because he will tell you how a watch is made.”

Ann Sheridan and Ronald Reagan in
Kings Row
, Reagan's personal favorite of all his performances

When a baseball game comes on the radio, Reagan often ignores his wife and children, turning up the volume and drowning out their words by pretending to be the broadcaster and calling the game. In that way, he shuts out his family for hours.

To make matters worse, Reagan resents Wyman's growing level of celebrity. Her movies, such as
The Yearling
, are earning money, critical praise, and Academy Award nominations. No longer the star when the two go out, Reagan must hover at his wife's elbow as
she
basks in the public's applause.

So it is that Ronald Reagan's newfound political activism, his wife's growing fame, and the death of their baby daughter combine to drive a wedge into their marriage. In 1947, Wyman cruelly mocks him during a lengthy speech he delivers before the Screen Actors Guild membership, foreshadowing the marital split that is soon to come. “Oh, for God's sake, Ronnie,” she shouts to actress Rosemary DeCamp, “shut up and go shit in your hat.”

The end comes while Wyman is filming
Johnny Belinda
on location in Pebble Beach, California. She begins an affair with costar Lew Ayres. In May 1948, Jane Wyman files for divorce from Ronald Reagan, citing mental cruelty.

“I just couldn't stand to watch that damn
Kings Row
one more time,” she explains when the marriage is finally over.

*   *   *

The divorce traumatizes Reagan. He is shattered and sometimes weeps openly, telling friends that the end of his marriage has left him “ashamed.” He clings to hope that the relationship can one day be salvaged and still drives the green Cadillac convertible Wyman gave him as a gift before the divorce. But when she publicly declares, “Lew Ayres is the love of my life,” it becomes clear that there will be no reconciliation.

Embittered, Reagan begins to behave in a callow fashion. He spends lavishly at Hollywood nightclubs such as Ciro's, the Coconut Grove, and Slapsy Maxie's, drinking too much and conducting a series of sexual affairs with women decades younger than he. His actions do not go unnoticed by the press.
Silver Screen
magazine writes, “Never thought we'd come right out and call Ronnie Reagan a wolf, but leave us face it. Suddenly every glamour gal considers him a super-sexy escort for the evening. Even he admits he's missed a lot of fun and frolic and is out to make up for it.”

*   *   *

One of Reagan's liaisons is with actress Penny Edwards, who is just twenty, and another is with the twenty-two-year-old actress Patricia Neal. During a memorable one-night stand in his apartment, Reagan takes the virginity of eighteen-year-old Piper Laurie after first barbecuing her a hamburger. Ironically, at the time of their liaison, Reagan was playing the role of Laurie's father in
Louisa
. The actress will later remember Reagan as a “show-off” in the bedroom, a self-absorbed lover who bragged about his sexual stamina during the act and became impatient when she did not climax. “You should have had many orgasms by now,” Reagan scolded Laurie after what she claims was about forty minutes of sex. “You've got to see a doctor about your abnormality.”
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Reagan reaches bottom when he wakes up one morning at the Garden of Allah Hotel on Sunset Boulevard and does not know the name of the woman lying next to him. After that, he vows to rein in his behavior.

But he does not. Three years after his divorce, when he proposes marriage to twenty-six-year-old actress Christine Larson by offering her a diamond wristwatch, Reagan is also having relationships with six other women. Larson turns him down.
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*   *   *

Now living on his own in an apartment above the Sunset Strip, Ronald Reagan soon grows apart from his young son and daughter. Three-year-old Michael and seven-year-old Maureen Reagan will long remember their father as loving but also absent from their lives for long periods of time—as was their mother. Both children are sent away to boarding schools by the time they enter the second grade. “There's a distinct difference between the care provided by a parent and the care provided by a paid caretaker,” Maureen will say years later. “It was simply one of the prices all of us had to pay for their success.”

During this playboy period, Reagan's success has flatlined. He is no longer viewed as a bankable star by Hollywood standards. To add insult to injury, as his movie career is clearly in its death throes, Wyman wins her first Academy Award and arrives at the ceremony with Lew Ayres as her date, which only makes Reagan's career seem more marginal.
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By 1949, Warner Bros. terminates his long-term contract, leaving him without income to pay the bills for the high-flying Hollywood lifestyle to which he has grown accustomed.

Desperate, Reagan accepts the offer to work on
Bedtime for Bonzo
. Animal movies are all the rage in Hollywood in 1950, thanks to the success of the February release
Francis the Talking Mule
. Jimmy Stewart has just finished
Harvey
, about a man and his invisible rabbit companion, on a set just one block down from where Reagan now films
Bonzo
.
Harvey
will open in October and earn Stewart his fourth Academy Award nomination.

As Ronald Reagan now clambers up into the tree after the chimp Peggy (Bonzo), he still believes his career will rebound. The film's other star, Diana Lynn, awaits him in the branches, adding to the comedy's madcap narrative. Meanwhile, Bonzo has jumped off a branch and is now inside the house, somehow managing to call the police. Soon there will be cop cars and fire trucks screaming down Colonial Street, all in a scripted attempt to get everyone down from the tree. This is a far cry from Reagan's days making movies such as
Dark Victory
with major stars such as Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis, or
Sante Fe Trail
with Errol Flynn. In that movie, Reagan played General George Armstrong Custer, whom he considers a great American hero.