Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [61]
By the end of the year, Reagan’s salary was up to $350 a week, and he had rented a cottage at 1128 Cory Avenue, a block north of Sunset Boulevard and three or four blocks from Jack and Nelle’s.28 He was a seeing a recently divorced actress from the studio named Jane Wyman. When their engagement was announced by Louella Parsons eleven months later, Nelle wrote a friend in Dixon, “I hope my Ronald has made the right choice. I was in hopes he would fall in love with some sweet girl who is not in the movies.”29
Jane Wyman, “a little, loud, brassy blonde,” according to Hedda Hopper,30
was not the sort of girl most mothers would choose for their son: a high school dropout, a former chorus girl, a divorcee twice over at twenty-one, beautiful to be sure and eager to please, but also touchy and tough, impulsive and needy. Nelle probably didn’t know most of this; for one thing, it is highly unlikely that Wyman told Reagan about her first marriage, which she kept a secret, as she did so much about her past. This was not uncommon in Hollywood, where studio biographies were masterpieces of ellipsis and embellishment, but Wyman seemed to take things a step further. A decade later, when Nancy Davis signed with MGM, she would take two years off her age and erase the existence of her real father; Jane Wyman erased both her real parents, upgraded the professional status of the man she claimed was her father, and added three years to her age, just in case her teenage marriage to Ernest Eugene Wyman, the mysterious first husband, from whom she took her screen name, ever came out.31
Jane Wyman was born Sarah Jane Mayfield in St. Joseph, Missouri, on January 5, 1917, to Manning and Gladys Hope Mayfield, seven and a half months after they were married. Her parents separated in late 1921, and her father took a job with a shipping company in San Francisco. Her mother filed for divorce and moved to Cleveland, leaving Sarah Jane, not quite five, with friends named Richard and Emma Fulks. Manning Mayfield died of pneumonia the following year; a trip Emma Fulks made to California with Sarah Jane that winter may have been to see him on his deathbed and to arrange for the girl’s guardianship. According to a neighbor of the Fulkses’, although Gladys Mayfield occasionally visited her daughter in St. Joseph, the child went by the name of Sarah Jane Fulks, and she maintained that Richard and Emma Fulks were her real parents.32
In the 1986 authorized biography, Jane Wyman: The Actress and the Woman, Warner Bros.: 1937–1941
1 0 1
author Lawrence J. Quirk makes no mention of the Mayfields and states that she was “christened” Sarah Jane Fulks,33 choosing that word perhaps because he knew the truth but was not allowed to print it. In contrast to Nancy Reagan’s eagerness to substitute Loyal Davis for Kenneth Robbins as her one and true father, Jane Wyman’s embrace of the Fulkses, and theirs of her, seemed to be based more on necessity than devotion. The prominent neurosurgeon took his time in making Anne Frances Robbins his legal daughter, but there is no record of Richard and Emma Fulks having adopted Sarah Jane Mayfield.
The Fulkses were both in their fifties when Gladys Mayfield left her little girl with them. Both had been previously married: Richard had a son from his first marriage; Emma, a daughter and a son; all three offspring were a generation older than Sarah Jane and living away from home when she was taken in. According to Quirk, “the Fulks house was a Victorian gingerbread horror, the furnishings lank and forlorn.”34 Richard Fulks was said to be a remote and tyrannical figure; the German-born Emma was more approachable, but equally demanding and strict.35 Warners would later claim Wyman’s “father” had been mayor of St. Joseph; in reality he was a frustrated politician who had been elected county collector for one term (as a Democrat) in 1916, and then joined the police department, where he rapidly rose from patrolman to chief of detectives.36
Emma Fulks dressed