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By Root 3080 0

Powell, Dart was a passionate aviator; he frequently flew company planes, with Jane as his co-pilot, to inspect United-Rexall stores around the country. He was said to breeze through his daily office appointments in four hours, and his 1946 Current Biography entry noted, “President Dart concerned himself only with the establishment of broad policies, leaving their execution entirely to his associates.” This left time for a full plate of civic activities; Dart was active in the Chamber of Commerce, the Community Chest, the Boy Scouts, and the Republican Party. He was invited to join the Los Angeles and Bel Air Country Clubs, as well as the California Club, the bastion of L.A.’s downtown Protestant elite, and the Rancheros Vistadores, a Santa Barbara–based group of wealthy businessmen who spent weekends riding, roping cattle, and sleeping under the stars on members’ ranches.

Jane Dart was the “exact personality opposite from her husband”—shy, reserved, self-effacing.41 A dark-haired Irish beauty, she had been born Jane O’Brien in Los Angeles, and was renamed Jane Bryan when she went to Warners in 1936. Bette Davis took her under her wing, and Jane was cast in four of Davis’s films— Marked Woman, Kid Galahad, The Sisters, and The Old Maid. She happily gave up her promising career to devote herself entirely to her husband and the three children they had in short order, and she liked being called by the nickname Dart gave her, Punky. In some ways, she was also the opposite of Jane Wyman, but they became good friends at Warners and stayed close after they both married.

Divorce: 1947–1948

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Two other future Kitchen Cabinet figures—Holmes Tuttle and Jack Wrather—also came into Reagan’s life at this time. Tuttle, a wealthy automobile dealer, sold Reagan a Ford coupé in 1946, and he and his wife, Virginia, occasionally dined with Ronnie and Jane. Wrather, a Texas oilman, moved to California in 1946 to go into the entertainment business and married the actress Bonita “Bunny” Granville the following year; Bunny and Ronnie had been friends since working together in the 1939 Dead End Kids vehicle Angels Wash Their Faces. Like Punky Dart, Bunny Wrather put acting aside after her marriage.

Holmes Tuttle, who was already active in local Republican politics, and Jack Wrather, who was then a conservative Southern Democrat, later recalled arguing politics with Ronnie. “He was quite outspoken in his beliefs,”

said Tuttle, “and several times when we were together we had—I’ll put it this way—some spirited discussions.”42 It seems that Reagan talked politics wherever he went and with whomever he met. But where a Robert Stack or a Justin Dart saw charisma and confidence, others detected insecurity and detachment. “He was a boring liberal,” said actress Marsha Hunt, a leftist actress—later blacklisted for suspected but unproven Communist ties—

who went on the SAG board in 1947. “He would buttonhole you at a party and talk liberalism at you. You’d look for an escape.”43

Robin Duke, the widow of diplomat Angier Biddle Duke and later President Clinton’s ambassador to Norway, came to know Reagan and Wyman fairly well while she was married to actor Jeffrey Lynn in the 1940s. “Jane was outgoing and fun,” Duke told me. “Ronnie was always perfectly nice, but you could never get close to him. He put up this barrier, which I thought was based on fear.” Talking politics, she felt, was his way of avoiding more personal subjects, and she found it hard to take his views seriously, even when she agreed with him. “He was an airhead,” she said.

“No one would have ever dreamed that he could become president.”44

One of the things that aggravated Jane Wyman most was her husband’s insistence on screening Kings Row when they had dinner guests. “Jane had a violent aversion to . . . Kings Row,” fan magazine writer Jerry Asher told a biographer. “It wasn’t that she envied Ronnie his one serious success in films.

It was just that the morbid, repressed, baleful ambience of the picture brought back her Missouri past much too vividly. [She] knew the picture itself