Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [138]
“Hollywood sympathy in this case is one hundred percent with Ronnie, who is a prince,” Silver Screen magazine’s Fredda Dudley informed her readers in early 1948. “Jane is a moody person, temperamental, ambitious, restless and seeking; furthermore, she is not now and hasn’t been well for some time. It is to be hoped, that as her health improves, Jane’s other problems will vanish, and two of the town’s favorite people will resume their marriage.”132
Friends, including Bill Holden and his wife, Ardis (who acted under the name Brenda Marshall), tried to coax the couple back together at small, tense dinner parties, but Jane refused to waver. On Ronnie’s thirty-seventh birthday, February 6, 1948, she gave him a turquoise Cadillac convertible that she had ordered months earlier as a surprise, but she signed the gift card with Maureen’s and Michael’s names. Later that month, she checked into the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas to establish residency for the divorce. After a few days, however, she returned to Los Angeles and asked Ronnie to move back in with her and the children. In May she asked him to move out again, and filed for divorce in California on the grounds of extreme mental cruelty.133 At the divorce trial the following month, which Reagan did not attend, the Los Angeles Times reported,
“Miss Wyman told the court that she and Reagan engaged in continual arguments on his political views. Despite her lack of interest in his political activities, Miss Wyman continued, Reagan insisted that she attend meetings with him and be present during discussions among his friends. But her own ideas, she complained, ‘were never considered important.’ ‘Finally, there was nothing between us,’ Miss Wyman said.”134
A divorce decree was granted on June 28, 1948. Wyman received custody of the children, $500 a month in child support, a $25,000 life insurance policy paid for by Reagan, and horseback-riding privileges at their Northridge ranch; the house on Cordell Drive was to be sold and the pro-2 2 4
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House ceeds evenly split.135 Jane left it to Ronnie to break the news to seven-year-old Maureen; Michael, then three, was too young to understand. “I can still hear Dad saying,” Maureen later wrote, “ ‘Just remember, Mermie, I still love you. I will always love you.’ His voice was cracking a little as he spoke.”136
“No marital separation since I broke the story that Mary Pickford, America’s sweetheart, was leaving Douglas Fairbanks, has had the effect of the parting of the Reagans,” wrote a crushed Louella Parsons. “Just as Mary and Doug stood for all that is best in this town, so have Ronnie and Jane. . . . For eight years they have shared a beautiful life that has earned them the respect and admiration even of people who did not know them personally. To those of us who are close friends, they were an ideal Mr. and Mrs. That’s why this hurts so much.”137
“They would not have gotten a divorce had their careers not been going in opposite directions,” said their good friend Dick Powell. “Hers up, his down.”138
“Perhaps I should have let someone else save the world and have saved my own home,” said Reagan.139
Ronald Reagan and his brother, Neil,
at a Warner Bros. radio broadcast, 1943.
(The Everett Collection)
Nelle Reagan visiting her son Ronald
on the set of Stallion Road, 1947.
(©Underwood & Underwood/Corbis)
A publicity photo of Ronald Reagan
shortly after his arrival
in Hollywood in 1937.
(Imageworks/Time Life
Picture Collection/Getty Images)
Dr. Loyal Davis and Edith Luckett
on the SS New York in 1927,
two years before their marriage.
(Collection of Richard Davis)
Nancy with her stepbrother,
Richard Davis, circa 1930.
(Reagan Family Photo Collection)
Nancy with her father, Kenneth Robbins,
who visited her in Chicago in 1929.
(Camera Press/Retna)
Nancy Davis
onstage with
ZaSu Pitts,
a friend of her
mother’s and
her theatrical
mentor,
circa 1946.
(Reagan Family
Photo
Collection)
Colleen Moore
Hargrave, the
silent screen star
turned Chicago
socialite,