Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [65]
Wyman herself explained, “It was Ronnie’s easy friendship which attracted me to him first. Everyone liked him and it seemed to me that he liked nearly everyone. I began to analyze what it was in me that he liked
. . . and to try and have more of it!”61 She also said, “For the first time in my life I truly trusted someone.”62
Brother Rat, released that fall, was “a top picture and a big money maker,” according to Reagan, but it didn’t do for his career what he had hoped. “My part was enough to provide a steppingstone to stardom,” he wrote. “Unhappily I learned another lesson. There is room for only one discovery in a picture. Eddie Albert stole all the honors, and deservedly so.”63
Nor did it do much for Wyman’s career. Warners gave her the lead in four B movies after Brother Rat, playing boxers’ girlfriends in two and Torchy Blane, girl reporter, in the other two. Reagan, meanwhile, in 1939 blew his one big chance, Dark Victory, starring Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart;
“wooden” is the adjective most frequently used to describe his performance as a rich young lush. In the fall of 1939, Warners reassembled the Brother Rat cast for a sequel, Brother Rat and a Baby, which in retrospect is most memorable for a line Wyman delivers to Reagan: “You might as well back down, because I’m gonna get you.”64
On October 4, 1939, as they were about to begin shooting the picture, Wyman was taken to the Hollywood Receiving Hospital with what was officially recorded as a stomach disorder. Years later Nancy Reagan told Edmund Morris that it was an overdose of pills, that Jane had sent Ronnie a suicide note, and that he rushed to the hospital and gave in to her demand that he marry her.65 According to a previous version told by Anne Edwards, “Jane suffered a recurrence of an old stomach disorder,” and when Ronnie went to the hospital, her sister—Emma Fulks’s daughter, Warner Bros.: 1937–1941
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whose married name was Elsie Wyatt— told him that Jane didn’t want to see him. The next day, “he refused to be barred from her room. When he left, they were engaged to be married.”66
Louella Parsons announced the engagement of “two of Hollywood’s very nicest young people” in early November, adding that Reagan had given Wyman a ring with a 52-carat amethyst—his semiprecious birth-stone.67 To make sure the deal stuck, Parsons took them on a nine-week, cross-country “Stars of Tomorrow” tour, along with six other young actors, including Susan Hayward and Joy Hodges. After a tryout in Santa Barbara, Louella’s troupe opened at the Golden Gate Theater in San Francisco, where their forty-minute variety show, with Reagan as master of ceremonies, played to full houses as many as five times a day. They then flew east on a chartered TWA DC-2, refueling in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where Louella was made an honorary member of the Pueblo Indian tribe and given the name Ba-Ku-Lu, which means starmaker. The plane was forced to land in a snowstorm in Chicago, and Reagan once more swore he would never fly again—and didn’t for twenty-five years. From there they traveled by train to Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, New York, and Washington—all cities that Reagan and Wyman were seeing for the first time. It was also the first time that Reagan found himself pursued by clamoring young female fans, screaming his name and pulling at his clothes. On New Year’s Eve morning, their one day off in Washington, he persuaded Wyman and Hodges to drive out to Mount Vernon, George Washington’s house in Virginia. Hodges later recalled how fascinated Reagan was, “especially with Washington’s personal writing desk.” Wyman took note, and bought him a replica for his study.68
On January 26, 1940, three weeks after they returned to Los Angeles,