Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [63]
Joseph, a place which she disparaged as “oppressive, strait-laced, hypo-critical.”45
All sources agree that in May 1936, on the recommendation of William Demarest, an older actor who was also an agent, she was given a standard contract by Warner Bros. She was in the chorus line in her first film there, Stage Struck, a Busby Berkeley musical featuring two of Warners’ biggest stars, Dick Powell and Joan Blondell, and didn’t get a leading role until a year later, in her tenth film for the studio, Mr. Dodd Takes the Air, opposite the crooner Kenny Baker. Still, she was thrilled to be at Warners, and when asked “What is your long-range ambition?” in a 1937 studio questionnaire, she answered, “To be not just an actress but the actress at the studio.”46 (No wonder Bette Davis, then queen of Warners, wasn’t that friendly.) In the meantime, Jane was willing to take on such starlet tasks as showing up at parties for potential investors and wealthy cronies of the studio brass. It was at one of these parties that she reportedly met Myron Futterman, a middle-aged businessman from New Orleans who owned a dress company in Los Angeles. Futterman was divorced and had a teenage daughter a few years younger than Wyman, but that seemed to make little difference to either of them, because on June 29, 1937, they were married—Quirk calls it an elopement—in New Orleans.47 The strange thing is that only six days before a story had appeared in the daily Variety under the headline jane wyman hospitalized for nervous breakdown.48
June 1937 happened to be Ronald Reagan’s first month at Warners, and in one version of events he and Wyman were introduced in the commissary soon after his arrival on the lot. In another, they met in the publicity department while having their pictures taken. Wyman later said that from the first moment she saw him, she thought to herself, “That’s for me.”
“The knight on a white charger had finally showed up,” William Demarest said. “Ronnie was the dream of true, perfect manhood personified that this little girl had always held in her heart through thick and thin. She was the aggressor, the intent pursuer, from the start. . . . I think Ronnie at 1 0 4
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House first was somewhat bewildered by her fast come-on; then he started to like it, then her, and then he fell in love.”49
Futterman and Wyman separated sometime between October 1937 and January 1938—he wanted her to tone down her look, give up acting, and play hostess for his business associates, none of which she had any intention of doing.50 Reagan and Wyman started discreetly dating sometime during those months, though both would later insist that they hadn’t started going out with each other until 1939, after she had divorced Futterman.
They definitely drew closer to each other during the filming of Brother Rat, from July 5 to August 11, 1938. It was the first of five films they would appear in together at Warners, and the first A movie in which either had a principal role. Reagan, Wayne Morris, and Eddie Albert played cadets at the Virginia Military Academy, known as the West Point of the South; Wyman, Priscilla Lane, and Jane Bryan were their respective love interests.
The plot line reflected the state of the emerging Reagan-Wyman relationship: because she is the commandant’s daughter, he has to proceed with caution, and when they finally kiss for the first time in the boys’ dormitory, the heat seems to be coming more from her than from him. Their reported behavior on the set was more indicative of where the relationship would eventually go: while a loquacious Reagan held forth on New Deal policies and Hitler’s demands on Czechoslovakia for fellow liberal Eddie Albert, a moody Wyman made lumpy clay models of other Warners actresses and stuck pins in their eyes.51
Leonora