Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [100]
You can hear every minute of eight and a half hours of agonizing labor, and a minute and a half about me. That’s my mother.”64
Reagan’s new contract, guaranteeing him $3,500 a week whether he worked or not, went into effect on September 12, and Jack Warner told him, “Just relax until we find a good property for you.”65 He spent his first weeks out of uniform in a rented house at nearby Lake Arrowhead, where Jane, on loan to MGM, was filming The Yearling. Her career was about to ignite: Lost Weekend opened that fall to rave reviews, and The Yearling, a big-budget Technicolor drama co-starring Gregory Peck, would win her an Oscar nomination the following year. While “Nanny” Banner, their Scottish governess, took care of the children, Ronnie spent his days speed-boating around the lake and building models of ships.66
Decades later, Neil Reagan would complain that he, and not his former lifeguard brother, had to teach little Maureen how to swim.67 Maureen, however, recalled her father as an attentive parent: telling her stories about growing up in Illinois and reading her fairy tales at bedtime; acting out her favorite poem, Robert Service’s “The Shooting of Dan McGrew”; doing vaudeville routines with her when they had company. Both parents, noted Maureen, “encouraged me to be independent. One of [my mother’s] favorite expressions was, ‘If I get hit by a Mack truck tomorrow, you’ll have to take care of yourself.’ At four I had the dubious distinction of being the only kid on the block who knew what a Mack truck was.” She also noticed that her mother tended to become more involved in her roles than her father did in his: “When she was doing Ma Baxter in The Yearling, we hardly saw her smile for six months. No exaggeration. She was this earth-mother-dirt-farmer-starving-to-death-type person every hour of the day.”68
Jane “would come through the door thinking about her part,” Reagan Ronnie and Jane: 1941–1946
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later said of his wife at this time, “and not even notice I was in the room.”69
Jane Wyman explained to a reporter in 1948, “It was my biggest chance yet, and I was determined to make the most of it. I determined to act from the inside out, to disregard all surface effects, and delve into the character of a sturdy woman who endured hardship stoically and who concealed a deeply emotional nature under a frosty, pragmatic exterior. I meditated on the role at great length; I wanted to get to the bottom of this woman’s psyche. And in doing so, I dredged up all the early hardship and disappointments in my own life, looking constantly for some points of reference that would link our respective inner schemes.”70
By the time Jane finished shooting The Yearling, in January 1946, Warner Bros. still hadn’t put her husband to work, and Ronnie could not have been happy to read in Photoplay: “Will there be room for both the male wartime and male peacetime stars in movies, Hollywood is asking? During the war an amazing number of men stars burst into being: Van Johnson, Peter Lawford, Robert Walker, Tom Drake, Cornel Wilde, Gregory Peck, John Hodiak, and many more. But already out of uniform or soon to don mufti again are such peacetime favorites as: Jimmy Stewart, Tyrone Power, Robert Montgomery, Henry Fonda, Clark Gable, Ronald Reagan, Lon McCallister, Donald O’Connor, Gene Kelly, Victor Mature, Wayne Morris, and many other golden boys.”71
Reagan’s first postwar picture, Stallion Road, did not begin shooting until April. A black-and-white melodrama co-starring Alexis Smith, this tale of a selfless veterinarian who gets the girl but contracts anthrax would prove noteworthy only for the fact that it led to the purchase of the first of four Reagan ranches. “I’d been a long time away from horses,” Reagan recalled, “and I desperately wanted to do my own riding and jumping.”72 An army friend, Oleg Cassini, the designer who would dress Jacqueline Kennedy in the White House, introduced Reagan to