Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [148]
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Wyman. Reagan would later brag to a buddy that he was sleeping with so many different women that he woke up one morning at the Garden of Allah and “couldn’t remember the name of the gal I was in bed with. I said,
‘Hey, I gotta get a grip here.’”64 But, according to Kitty Kelley, some of the women he was linked with in 1948 and 1949 described him as sexually
“passive” and sometimes so drunk and heartbroken over Jane that he couldn’t perform.65
“Reagan was a lonely guy because of his divorce,” said Eddie Bracken, a co-star in The Girl from Jones Beach, which was filmed during the summer of 1948, “but a very level-headed guy. He was never for the sexpots. He was never a guy looking for the bed. He was a guy looking for companionship more than anything else. But I wouldn’t say he was strait-laced.”66
“I just can’t get it right,” Reagan told Doris Lilly, a tall, fetching blonde who later became well known as the author of How to Meet a Millionaire.
“I’m no good alone.” According to Lilly, Reagan proposed to her a few months after they met, but she turned him down because she knew he wasn’t in love—just desperate for someone who “was willing to make the big moves, push, be there, encourage him, never leave him alone for a moment.
. . . I couldn’t do it.”67
Reagan continued to drive the Cadillac convertible Jane had given him before they split, and he moved back into the Londonderry Terrace apartment they had shared as newlyweds, claiming he couldn’t find anything else because of the postwar housing shortage.68 He and Jane dined together regularly to discuss the children, and she seemed to play with his hopes of reconciliation, telling reporters at the October 1948 opening of Johnny Belinda that she was wearing a dress he had given her, then announcing at a big Hollywood dinner party the following month that “Lew Ayres is the love of my life,” setting off speculation about an eventual marriage.69 Such behavior did little for Reagan’s self-confidence, and one can only wonder how he felt when his ex-wife, with Ayers at her side, won the best actress Oscar in March 1949. By then she had signed a new, ten-year contract with Warners.70
Reagan’s own situation at Warners was going from bad to worse. He had no films in release in 1948, and two of his three 1949 releases— John Loves Mary and Night Unto Night (which had been held back for three years)—were flops, with only The Girl from Jones Beach, a cotton-candy comedy designed to show off shapely Virginia Mayo in a variety of bathing suits, scoring at the box office.71 “Ronnie wasn’t considered a big 2 4 0
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House leading man then,” recalled Connie Wald, the widow of Jerry Wald. “We used to see him after he broke up with Jane. He’d come over to the house, we’d go out to dinner, and the girls were after him like mad. I don’t think he was ever with anybody—seriously—until he went with Nancy. He was such a sweet man. We always liked him so much. But as far as his career went, it was really going downhill. . . . Who knows what he felt inside. As warm as he was, he was always a very distant person. Charming, but very private—that was Ronnie.”72
Reagan was convinced that if only he could star in the kind of Western that had made John Wayne a top box office draw his popularity would rebound. To please Jack Warner, he agreed to take the second male lead in The Hasty Heart, a wartime drama set in a military hospital, on the condition that his next movie would be Ghost Mountain, a Western based on a short story he had persuaded the studio to buy. He spent four cold months filming in London—it was his first trip abroad, and he complained inces-santly about the weather, the food, and the austerity policies of Britain’s Labour Party government—only to read in Variety on the day he returned that Ghost Mountain was being assigned to Errol Flynn.73