The Mansions of Limbo (24 page)

“The reason I enjoy TV more than pictures now is that I like the pace better. You’ve got so many hours to do so much, and you have to get it done. I was on
The Yearling
for eleven and a half months! Sometimes we only did two pages of dialogue in four days,” she said. She shook her head in wonderment at the difference in the two media. She was ready to order lunch. “Are the sand dabs breaded?” she asked the waitress. “Why don’t we have a Caesar salad first?” she suggested.

For several years before “Falcon Crest” went on the air, she was in a state of semiretirement, spending most of her time painting. Although I have not seen any of her pictures, I have heard from her friends that she is an extremely talented landscape artist. In 1979 her work was exhibited in a gallery in Carmel, California, and so many of the pictures were sold that she now has none of her own work in her apartment. During those years, she said, she was always being sent film and television scripts, “like
Baby Jane
, or playing a lesbian, and I didn’t want to do that. But when I was sent the pilot script for ‘Falcon Crest,’ I could see so many facets to the character of Angela Channing. I said, ‘I’ll give it two years.’ It’s now nine.”

“People say that you control ‘Falcon Crest’,” I said.

“I am a creative consultant only. They run things by me, or I run things by them. I just want to keep up the quality of the show,” she replied. “I usually have my chair at an odd place on the set where no one can bother me.
And I do help the young actors on the show. I hold a riding crop out, saying ‘Don’t do that!’ ”

“Is it true that actors on the show are told not to speak to you?”

“I hope not,” she answered.

An actor who had appeared in a part that ran for three episodes told me that he had been informed by his agent, who in turn had heard it from the assistant director, that he was not to approach Miss Wyman on the set, as she did not like to be disturbed. He was also told never to go to her dressing room. He was also told that President Reagan was not to be discussed on the set, ever. The surprise to this particular actor was that Miss Wyman “could not have been more delightful, or friendly. She came right up and introduced herself. One time I did knock on the door of her dressing room. I told her that I didn’t think that the scene that we were to do together worked, and she asked me in, and we went over it and made some changes.

Susan Sullivan, who played her daughter-in-law on the series for eight years, said, “Jane is the most professional person I have ever worked with. I have seen her battle through illnesses and fatigue and still keep working. She says, ‘Let’s get this done. We have a job to do,’ and everyone gets behind her. She is always willing to help younger actors. She gives instructions nicely and with humor. She once told me, ‘You can tell anybody anything if you do it with humor.’ She ruled the set with a kind and intelligent hand.”

Rod Taylor, who plays her current husband in the series, agreed. “Sure, she rules the set, but everybody expects that. I adore her.”

David Selby, who plays her son and has developed the closest friendship of any of the cast members with her, said, “Never once has she asked to be excused from standing in
while the other actors in the scene are having their close-ups. She would be upset if you did your close-up without her. She has never once been late. If we go out to dinner, we go to her favorite little spot. I’ve never been to her apartment.”

Another cast member said, “I’ve spent years working with her, and I still don’t know her. She does not let herself be known.”

An insider on the show had told me that an attempt would be made on Angela Channing’s life in the new season of the series. “Is it true that you are going to be smothered with a pillow in the third episode and that the audience won’t know whether you’re dead or alive?”

Her eyes became very large. She was surprised that I knew that. She thought for a moment how to answer. “I
am
going into a coma for a while,” she said. She has a way of letting you know when she is finished with a topic, without actually telling you that she is.

“Do you have a social life?” I asked.

“Not really. When you’re on a series, it, the series, becomes your life. I don’t go out.” She gets up at 4:30 each morning the series is in production. “I can’t drive in the dark, so I’m picked up by a studio driver. I leave my apartment at exactly 5:50. It’s a long drive to the studio. I do my own makeup when I get there.

“I’m a great reader. And I have some close friends. We do a lot of telephoning. My friends understand me when I say, ‘Everything is on hold until the series is finished.’ ” Among her closest friends are the two great film and television stars Loretta Young and Barbara Stanwyck, both of whom have had careers and led lives similar to Jane Wyman’s. “Jane is a good girl. She’s also a very determined woman,” Barbara Stanwyck told me. “She has worked very hard for her successful career. I do mean hard, and she
deserves all her success because she earned it.” She then added, “I know this is a story about Jane, so be very good and very kind. She would be to you.”

In an interview with Jane Wyman from the forties, published in a movie magazine of the period and discovered in the Warner Brothers archives at the University of Southern California, the writer noted, “Talking to her, one gets the impression she’s wound up like a tight spring.” Approximately forty years later, the same line could still be written about her, except for when she is talking about her career. Then she relaxes. She is a virtual oral historian of the decades she spent at Warner Brothers. She was under contract to Warner’s for years, beginning in 1936 at $166 a week. She had been at Fox and Paramount before that. Somewhere along the line, her name was changed from Sarah Jane Fulks to Jane Wyman. “I stayed at Warner’s until I went into television,” she said. She started out as a wisecracking comedienne and singer, with no interest whatever in dramatic roles. “Jane Wyman has no yen for drama,” read one of her early press releases. “Leave that to other people,” she was quoted as saying. Her studio biography described her as “pert, vivacious, with plenty of pep. Jane Wyman is a human tornado.” Not all of her films were distinguished, but her memory is as astonishingly sharp for details of the making of middling and less-than-middling films as it is for those of such classics as Billy Wilder’s
The Lost Weekend
. “We were in a three shot,” she said, remembering one B-picture incident. “I was in the middle. Jack Carson was on one side, and Dennis Morgan on the other.”

The star names flew from her lips. She calls James Cagney Cagney and Bob Hope Hope. “Cagney was my dream man,” she said. “Hope wanted me to do this picture with him. You know Hope.” Ann Sheridan. Humphrey
Bogart. Joan Blondell. Bette Davis. “Bette Davis’s dressing room was right next to mine, but we were never friends.” Olivia de Havilland. Errol Flynn. “Jack Warner would never put me into any of their costume epics. He said I had the wrong looks. I think Jack was probably right.”

She had an early marriage to Myron Futterman, a New Orleans dress manufacturer, about whom almost nothing is known. In 1940 she married Ronald Reagan, a fellow contract player at Warner Brothers, with whom she made four films. Their wedding reception was held at the home of the most famous of all Hollywood gossip columnists, Louella Parsons, who was raised in Dixon, Illinois, where Reagan grew up. Every movie magazine of the period recorded the idyll of the young stars’ marriage, in the approved, studio-orchestrated publicity jargon. When Jane became pregnant, the studio announced that she was expecting a bundle from heaven. The bundle from heaven was Maureen Reagan, now forty-eight, who was born in 1941. Four years later the young couple adopted a son, Michael. They were promoted by Warner’s as the dream Hollywood couple, and every fan magazine monitored their lives. “Ronnie and I are perfect counterparts for each other. I blow up, and Ronnie just laughs at me. We’ve never had a quarrel, because he’s just too good-natured,” said Jane in one interview. Several years after that, the lovebirds became known in the press as “Those Fightin’ Reagans,” and rumors of a rift in the marriage were rampant. Louella Parsons, who thrived on such matters, told Jane in a column, “I want to write a story and settle all this talk once and for all.” Jane was quoted by Louella as replying, “Believe me, I’m going to find out who has started all this talk.… Can’t gossips let us keep our happiness?”

In 1947 the marriage did break up. “We’re through,” Jane said to a columnist during a trip to New York. “We’re
finished, and it’s all my fault.” Reagan found out about the termination of his marriage when he read it in the column. He gave long interviews to Louella and to her archrival, Hedda Hopper, both of whom took his side. “If this comes to a divorce, I’ll name
Johnny Belinda
as co-respondent,” Hedda Hopper quoted him as saying. Jane had become so immersed in her new career as a dramatic actress that she wore pellets wrapped in wax in her ears so that she would not be able to hear during the filming of the deaf-mute movie. Hedda Hopper had more to say on the subject: “I can’t really believe it yet. I don’t think Ronald Reagan does either. It caught him so flatfooted, so pathetically by surprise. I talked to Ronnie the day he read in the newspapers what Jane should have told her husband first.”

They were divorced in 1948, the same year she won the Academy Award. Jane got custody of the two children, and Reagan got weekend visitation rights. Jane testified that her husband’s overriding interest in filmland union and political activity had driven them apart. Friends speculated at the time that Jane’s emergence as a bona fide star and Reagan’s concurrent slide from box-office favor contributed to the breakup. Others felt that Jane was simply bored with him. Before the governorship and his truly remarkable rise as a recognized world leader, friends from that period remember, he did indeed engage in long, ponderous, yawn-producing discourses on a variety of subjects. An ongoing joke in Hollywood during his campaign for the governorship of California was a remark attributed to Jane Wyman about her former husband. When asked what he was like, she allegedly said, “If you asked Ronnie the time, he’d tell you how to make a watch.”

In 1954 Reagan married the actress Nancy Davis, who had been a contract player at MGM. Not long afterward, Jane married the bandleader and musical arranger Freddie
Karger, a popular and handsome man-about-town in Hollywood. She divorced him a year later. Karger is often mentioned in Marilyn Monroe biographies as one of her lovers. Years later Wyman married Karger again, and then divorced him again. She has not married since.

In 1954 Jane was converted to Catholicism through the intervention of her great friend Loretta Young. Her Catholicism is a mainstay in her life. In fact, when asked her age, according to friends, she very often replies, “I’m thirty-five.” She is counting from the year of her conversion to Catholicism. “She goes to Mass all the time,” said a member of the cast of “Falcon Crest.” “Sometimes she even has Mass said in her room.” One of the ongoing characters in the series is a Catholic priest. “We need a lot of advice, because some of the characters are Catholic in the show,” said Jane. The priest character is played by a real priest, Father Bob Curtis, a Paulist.

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.”