Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [137]
“It just horrified him and shocked him,” said their old friend Leonora Hornblow. “He just didn’t think he’d ever be divorced. His mother had put up with an awful lot from the father, and they remained married.”119
“I suppose there had been warning signs, if only I hadn’t been so busy,”
Reagan later wrote, “but small-town boys grow up thinking only other people get divorced. The plain truth was that such a thing was so far from even being imagined by me that I had no resources to call upon.”120
Ronnie’s first reaction was to talk Jane out of it. “We’ll lead an ideal life if you’ll avoid doing just one thing,” he told her. “Don’t think.”121 But it was just that dismissive attitude, all the more demeaning because it was so unconscious, that exasperated her. She had had it with his endless debates 2 2 2
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House over politics with their friends, his late nights at SAG meetings, his foreign policy lectures at the breakfast table when all she wanted to do was get ready for work. “I got along without you before,” she shouted at him outside the Beverly Club as they waited for their car, “and I certainly can get along without you now!”122 When California’s then lieutenant governor, Goodwin Knight, stopped by their table at Ciro’s one night and started talking politics, Wyman practically yawned in his face.123
As soon as shooting on Johnny Belinda was finished in mid-November, she took off for “a long rest” in New York. On December 5, while Christmas shopping in Beverly Hills, Ronnie was stopped cold by a headline in the Los Angeles Examiner: jane wyman, mate in rift124 “There is no use in lying,” Jane was quoted as saying. “I am not the happiest girl in the world.
It’s nothing that’s happened recently, it’s an accumulation of things that have been coming on for a long time. . . . We will talk things over and I hope and believe that we will solve our problems and avoid a separation.”125 A Photoplay article titled “Those Fightin’ Reagans” soon followed, reporting that Wyman had confided to a friend in New York, “We’re through. We’re finished. And it’s all my fault.”126
Louella Parsons was the first to reach Ronnie after the news broke.
“Right now, Louella, Jane needs very much to have a fling and I intend to let her have it,” he told the columnist who had given them their wedding reception. “She is sick and nervous and not herself. . . . Jane says she loves me, but is no longer ‘in love’ with me, and points out that this is a fine distinction. That, I don’t believe. I think she is nervous, despondent, and because of this she feels our life together has become humdrum.”127 “I love Jane, and I know she loves me,” he insisted to Hedda Hopper. “I don’t know what this is all about, and I don’t know why Jane has done it. For my part, I hope to live with her for the rest of my life.”128 He reminded movie reporter Gladys Hall that Jane had lost a baby only six months earlier and almost immediately after had taken on “a taxing, difficult role” in Johnny Belinda. “Perhaps, too,” he added, “my seriousness about public affairs has bored Jane.”129
On December 14, back in Los Angeles, Jane Wyman announced that she was separating from her husband. Reagan moved into the Garden of Allah. “If this comes to divorce, I think I’ll name Johnny Belinda as co-respondent,” he joked to Hedda Hopper, fueling the rumors that Lew Ayres was the real reason Wyman had left him, which Reagan then vehemently denied, insisting that no other man was involved.130
Divorce: 1947–1948
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Warner Bros. announced that Wyman would not co-star with Reagan in John Loves Mary, a Jerry Wald production scheduled to begin shooting in January. Wyman’s replacement, Patricia Neal, then a twenty-one-year-old ingénue, was introduced to Reagan at a party on New Year’s Eve. “He said, ‘Well, we’re going to do a film together.’ And I thought, Good, good, good,” the actress told me. “Then midnight came and we all went outside, and he wept and wept on an older woman’s arm. He was heartbroken. He really was.