Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [127]
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House was a hell of a bright guy, but he lacked, I’m afraid, the sensitivity to discern that he was opening old wounds in Jane by rubbing that picture into her.”45
Others felt it was Jane who was insensitive and self-centered. Leonora Hornblow, who liked talking politics with Ronnie, recalled visiting her one afternoon around this time. “I remember saying, ‘Jane, could I have a cup of coffee? I’m dying for a cup of coffee.’ She said, ‘No, there’s no coffee in the house. I’m allergic to coffee.’ Imagine! I’m sure Ronnie drank coffee—I know he did. But she didn’t want coffee, so why should there be coffee in the house? I always thought that was so typical of Jane.”46
In early June 1947, Reagan started shooting That Hagen Girl with Shirley Temple, a film he considered beneath him creatively and morally. It was the famous child actress’s first adult role, playing a sultry small-town teenager who is rumored to be the illegitimate daughter of Reagan’s character, a lawyer returning from the war. Reagan hated the fact that the script called for them to fall in love, and tried to have their romance written out of it. He succeeded only in winning an “oddball finish in which we climb on a train—Shirley carrying a bouquet—and leave town. You are left to guess as to whether we are married, just traveling together, or did I adopt her.”47
In one scene, Maureen Reagan later wrote, Temple “tries to commit suicide by jumping into a lake, and Dad, playing her older suitor, had to jump into the lake to rescue her. Over and over again. They shot take after take, until the director was grudgingly satisfied . . . the water was freezing. The numerous retakes took their toll on Dad; he woke up feverish the next morning, and within a few days, as he was leaving a premiere, he doubled over with a pain he described as ‘being stabbed in the chest.’ It turned out he had a serious case of viral pneumonia; in fact, it almost claimed him. I vividly remember the night later that week when an ambulance came to take him to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital.”48
Ronnie was admitted to the hospital on June 19, and Jane, six months pregnant, kept a bedside vigil for five days and nights as his fever rose to 104. By the time the fever broke, on June 25, Jane had gone into labor. She was taken to the Queen of Angels Hospital, where at 11:26 the next morning she gave birth to a girl they named Christine, who died nine hours later.
Reagan was released from Cedars of Lebanon that day, seventeen pounds lighter, overwhelmingly exhausted, but grateful for life: “The ambulance ride home made quite an impression on me. I couldn’t get enough of look-Divorce: 1947–1948
2 0 7
ing at the world as it went by, and even the most ordinary, everyday things seemed strangely beautiful.”49
Christine Reagan was cremated on July 2. One might say that her parents’ marriage perished with her, as the broken couple pursued their separate obsessions: his with politics, hers with acting. Ronnie went back to work on That Hagen Girl, while continuing to devote five nights a week to SAG, immersed in the contract negotiations with the Motion Picture Producers Association that had begun in April and would extend into September. He also found time for yet another cause, the International Rescue and Relief Committee, which was helping refugees from the recently installed Communist regimes in Eastern Europe. Robert Montgomery chaired the IRRC’s Hollywood branch, and Dick Powell was on its founding committee. For Reagan, this was another small step rightward.50
A depressed Jane Wyman started preparing for her role as a deaf-mute teenager in Johnny Belinda, which was scheduled to start shooting in Northern California after Labor Day. She spent the summer practicing sign language and lip-reading with a deaf Mexican girl who came