On The Prowl In Hollywood

Yet his local cavalry commanding officer asserted that Lieutenant Reagan was a “greater ‘swordsman’ " than Errol Flynn–a remark I gathered was meant metaphorically. If so, Dutch was shy about communicating it. We guffawed over a magazine spread of suggestive “swimming lesson” cheesecakes that showed him intertwining limbs with a buxom starlet (RONALD REAGAN SHOWS SUSAN HAYWARD THE PROPER POSITION). Their couplings reminded me of nothing so much as Greek sculpture: a cold choreography of elbows, knees, and clenched buttocks. Dutch exuded no hint of musk. His skin shone with clean health, his eyes with clean thoughts.

Warners publicists sought to pair him off with somebody more midwestern than Miss Hayward, an ingenue equally curvy yet tougher, more seasoned in her sexuality. Twenty-one-year-old Jane Wyman not only looked the part (that button nose was definitely trans-Mississippi), she was eager to play it. In her case, however, a considerable degree of “acting” was necessary.

Not that she didn’t find Reagan attractive: she had been unable to repress a squeal of delight when she first saw him. Her challenge was to hide the fact that although she was six years his junior, she was far ahead of him in adult experience, both professional and emotional. She had come to Hollywood when he was still in high school. His idea of trauma was being benched; Jane had a couple of previous husbands to keep quiet about, and dark memories of being given away in childhood.

She had been born Sarah Jane Mayfield in Saint Joseph, Missouri, on January 5, 1917. Her father had decamped for San Francisco when she was five years old, and her mother, desperate for money, made what seems to have been an unofficial “adoption” deal with some middle-aged neighbors. So little Miss Mayfield became “Jane Fulks,” and, after Mrs. Fulks was widowed in 1928, moved with her to Southern California. She attended Los Angeles High School under that name, and, when barely sixteen, married a young salesman named Ernest Wyman. The marriage did not last more than a year or two. Meanwhile, Jane sang and hoofed her way onto the sets of various Fox and Paramount musicals, winning a Warner Bros. contract on May 6, 1936.

A nervous breakdown around the time she first laid eyes on Ronald Reagan might have had something to do with the fact that she was about to become Mrs. Myron T. Futterman. But Jane was not the type to let another marriage get in her way. Within three months, the wealthy Mr. Futterman (who had something to do with the rag trade) was history. When I first saw Jane on the sand with Dutch, she was suing for divorce.

I gathered that their affair was older than Warners would allow–officially, they were supposed to have met on the set of “Brother Rat” in July 1938. Whatever the case, there was no question about their mutual attraction. He saw the small, fine bones, the easy smile, and wide-eyed brown gaze that had always been his ideal of female beauty. And Jane?

An undated interview clip preserved in the State Historical Society of Wisconsin gives a hint of what, besides simple desire, drew her to Ronald Reagan in 1938, and transformed her. She admitted to being unable to “trust or confide” in anyone until she met him:

“Marrying Ronnie worked a miracle for me. It changed a dull, suspicious, anxious woman [into] someone at ease…. I was drawn to him at once…. He was such a sunny person… genuinely and spontaneously nice.”

So far this chapter has been largely about sex. How could it not be? We were, all of us, actors and writers and musicians and dancers, so young, healthy, and hedonistic in one of the most sensual cities since Sodom. In any case, our sensuality went beyond sex into a general celebration of the life physical. We exercised hard (in the surf, I was as lithe as the next man) and later, driving off to cocktails somewhere in loose pale clothes, we felt proud of our lean, tanned bodies. God, how good we felt there!

“Make that good-looking,” one of my friends from that time amends, with a sad jangle of oversized earrings. (To me, she will always be a sleek teenage half-Turk, “Bubbles” Schinasi, but she answers now to Mrs. Arthur Hornblow, Jr.) “And predatory. When Clark Gable or Errol or Ty Power came into the room, you could just feel the heat waves shimmering.”

“What about Reagan?”

“Oh no, never Ronnie.”

“Why? He was as attractive as any of those guys.”

“Yes, but female desire is attuned to male desire. Clark, Errol, obviously were crazy about women. Ronnie just–wasn’t. I don’t think he ever looked at Ann Sheridan, and she was luscious.”

Perhaps not. He certainly admired a lot of other girls, though, and was admired right back. I remember a class of Los Angeles art students voting his “the most nearly perfect male body” in Hollywood, and at least two women told me that his voice was irresistible, particularly the way he had of “breathing around words.” I also recall him sitting on the sand with a bunch of guys ogling some pouter pigeon–it may have been Jane–as she breasted her way into the sea. He must have been under orders not to wear spectacles in public, because he peered painfully at the retreating figure. Then he jabbed at the sides of his eyes, pulling the flesh tight, and stared long and hard through sloed slits. The effect was of almost oriental lechery.