The Triumph of Nancy Reagan by Karen Tumulty (best books under 200 pages .txt) 📗

I am inclosing [

sic

] some clippings regarding Ronald, I hardly know how to explain “our feelings,” but when people ask me if I am not afraid to have him go to such a wicked place as Hollywood, all I can answer is, that I feel I can trust him anywhere, he has never lost his high ideals in life.… Friends, he does love God and he never forgets to thank Him for all his many blessings, and when we visited him, he told me of all the nice things he would be able to do now for Eureka College if he won the seven-year contract with Warner Brothers.

Nelle told the Cleavers that shortly after the offer arrived from Warner, a colleague at the Iowa radio station where Ronnie worked “discovered Dutch in one of the smaller studio rooms on his knees, praying.”

His mother also saw the possibility that Ronnie’s success could be the salvation for her and Jack. “You know he has been a wonderful son to us, his father hasn’t had any work since the 15th of June, last year, and during all that tyme [sic], I have rec’d a $60.00 check the first of each month, and another one of the same amt the 15th of each month,” Nelle confided, “and if he signs the seven-year contract then he is going to send for us that is the thing that makes me so happy, to think I can live my last days, making a home for him, it’s almost more happiness than I ever expected in this life.”

Ronnie arrived in California in June to begin shooting his first picture, Love Is on the Air. It was a murder mystery filmed on a frantic three-week schedule, a “B movie” meant to be the second feature on a double bill. Ronnie played the lead, which was a bit of typecasting given that the character was a radio broadcaster. The Boston Globe wrote of him in its review: “He has a pleasant, boyish appearance and an attractive film personality.” A headline in the New York Daily News declared: “Treat for Ladies in Ronald Reagan.” During his first year with the studio, Ronnie would do eight pictures in eleven months.

With his movie earnings, Reagan bought his parents a small house at 9031 Phyllis Avenue, just below the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood. Presenting his father with the deed to the first piece of real estate Jack ever owned, Ronnie recalled, “was the most satisfying gift of my life.” He hired his mother and father to answer his fan mail. Jack cut back on his drinking. Nelle found an outlet for her charitable energy doing good work among the prisoners at Lincoln Heights Jail and the tuberculosis patients at Olive View Sanitarium. Some of the newly released went to job interviews unaware they were wearing movie star Ronald Reagan’s old clothes. Still, Nelle did not feel quite at home among her son’s new set. “Ronald has finished three pictures now that he has taken the lead in and is very well thought of at the studio, but really I don’t just know how to act with these people. I don’t just fit in somehow—I get my fork in the wrong hand but I don’t care just so the boy gets along,” she wrote a friend in Tampico in 1938.

That same year, Ronnie’s romantic life picked up again when he became acquainted with brassy actress Jane Wyman during the making of a movie called Brother Rat. He played a cadet at Virginia Military Institute; her character was his love interest, the commandant’s daughter. In real life, they seemed an odd match. She had a tough shell, the product of a rocky start in life as Sarah Jane Mayfield. Her father split when she was a small child; shortly afterward, her mother abandoned her to the care of severe, fiftysomething neighbors in Saint Joseph, Missouri. Jane had been on her own since the age of fifteen, trying to catch a break as a dancer in Hollywood musicals. She wed the first time at sixteen to salesman Ernest Wyman. Then came another quick marriage to a much older dress manufacturer named Myron Futterman.

Ronnie was a totally different kind of partner for a woman like Jane, who was worldly beyond her twenty-one years. “She was so experienced, hard-boiled, intense, and passionate, and he was so pragmatic, down-to-earth,” said Jerry Asher, one acquaintance. “He was—well, rather a square. Serious, respectful of women, steady of mind and manners. In short, predictable and dull. He was a very sexy-looking man, of course—looked wonderful in swimming trunks, great body and all that, but he was a little earthbound for someone like Jane.” Nonetheless, she pursued him aggressively. Nancy claimed later to Edmund Morris that Jane had forced Ronnie’s hand in marriage by threatening suicide and downing pills. In the second wife’s version of events, Ronnie proposed as the hospital was pumping Jane’s stomach.

He gave Jane an engagement ring set with a fifty-two-carat amethyst, his birthstone. Their January 26, 1940, wedding reception took place at the home of Louella Parsons. The gossip columnist, like Ronnie, hailed from Dixon and had appointed herself a sort of unofficial stage mother to him. “Theirs is the perfect marriage,” she wrote. “Jane always seemed so nervous and tense before she found Ronnie. She was a girl on the make—for life, for love. I think she wanted—well, everything. But steady, solid, decent young Ronnie has slowed down her pace, and it’s all for the best. Yes, it was an ‘opposites-attract’ thing, but I’m predicting here and now that these opposites will celebrate their twenty-fifth and fiftieth wedding anniversaries—together.”

Nelle, who had been so close to Margaret and the devout Cleaver family back in Dixon, had misgivings from the moment she met Jane. “I wonder if my Ronald has made the right choice,” she wrote one friend. “I was in hopes he would fall in