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her charge in “drab, utilitarian clothes,” Quirk writes. “Bows or furbelows of any kind were verboten. ”37 Strangely, she waited until September 1923 to register Sarah Jane in first grade, when she was nearly seven. Very occasionally, she would take the girl downtown for lunch and a Saturday matinee.38 In interviews Wyman gave after she became famous, she mostly remembered feeling inferior, isolated, unwanted. When she was eight, a neighbor woman “hurt her deeply” by announcing loudly enough for her to hear, “With that turned-up nose and those bug eyes, no one will ever take that child seriously.” She told Quirk, “Shyness is not a small problem; it can cripple the whole personality. It crippled mine for many years. As a child, my only solution to the problem of shyness was to hide, to make myself as small and insignificant as possible. All through grade school I was a well-mannered little shadow who never spoke above a whisper.” But somehow she persuaded the Fulkses to let her take dance classes at 50 cents a throw with a local hoofer known as Dad Prinz.39 Not surprisingly, this gloomy little girl had dreams of becoming a movie star.

On March 25, 1928, after a long, unspecified illness, Richard Fulks died 1 0 2

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House at age sixty-three, leaving his widow little more than their house. Emma decided to rent it out and move to Los Angeles, where her children by her first marriage lived. She took Sarah Jane, then eleven, with her. They moved in with Emma’s daughter, Elsie Weymann; her son, Morie Weymann, an eye-and-throat doctor, helped them out financially. No doubt motivated by the need for an income, Emma turned into a full-fledged stage mother, taking her “daughter” to singing and dancing lessons, scrimping to buy her pretty clothes, sending her photographs to talent agencies and movie studios, all without evident success.40

By 1932, Sarah Jane, then fifteen, had left Los Angeles High School without graduating, started working as a coffee shop waitress to pay for her lessons, and bleached her hair platinum blond à la Jean Harlow. That year she appeared in her first film, The Kid from Spain, a Samuel Goldwyn musical starring Eddie Cantor, kicking her legs in the air alongside two other young hopefuls named Betty Grable, then sixteen, and Paulette Goddard, then twenty-one. Between 1933 and 1935, she worked as a model, a switchboard operator, a manicurist, and a secretary, as well as a waitress, and had bit parts in six more movies, mostly at Paramount, mostly in the chorus line.41

“It was work when the family badly needed the money,” she later said of her chorus line days, “but for a girl who had grown up in terror of being looked at, it was also agony. Then I made a discovery: a good shield for shyness is a bold exterior. Did my heart turn over when the man with the megaphone bellowed out my name? Were all the other dancers prettier?

Never mind. I covered up by becoming the cockiest of all, by talking the loudest, laughing the longest, and wearing the curliest, most blatantly false eyelashes in Hollywood.”42

On April 8, 1933, she married Ernest Eugene Wyman, whom she may or may not have met in 1931, when they were both high school students, and who may or may not have been a salesman. She said she was nineteen on the marriage certificate, the beginning of the lie about her age. According to a 1957 Movie Life story, “Still in her teens, she impulsively entered marriage. Jane never talks about her first heartbreak, but in less than a month she knew it was a terrible mistake and the marriage was dissolved.”43 Other sources say she wasn’t divorced until 1935. Much confusion surrounds this period of her life. In the summer of 1933, according to one report, she returned to St. Joseph, where she stayed with a woman named Gladys H. Johnson, who may or may not have been her real mother Warner Bros.: 1937–1941

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with a new surname. A neighbor remembered her having been married then and sitting in the yard trying to write.44 Another version, in the 1949

Current Biography, which usually