Ronnie and Nancy (36 page)

He answered me carefully, methodically. When Ronnie got through explaining something to me, Jane Wyman leaned over and said, “Don’t ask Ronnie what time it is because he will tell you how a watch is made.”. . .

Jane Wyman seemed more upset with her husband’s obsession with politics than I. I tried to make her laugh. “He’ll outgrow it,” I told her. To her it wasn’t funny. But even more annoying to her was the fact that it took Ronnie so long to make up his mind about anything she asked him.31

The Reagans and the Murphys, Allyson recalled, were among a half-dozen “important and affable” couples who entertained one another regularly. This close-knit group included the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his wife, Frances, a former Powers model; tire heir Leonard Firestone and his wife, Polly; and drugstore tycoon Justin Dart and his wife, Jane Bryan, a co-star of Ronnie and Jane’s in
Brother Rat
and its sequel, who had retired from acting after marrying Dart on New Year’s Eve 1939. Bridge and square-dancing were among the group’s favorite pastimes.

Except for Reagan, the men were all Republicans. Firestone and Dart would later be members of Reagan’s Kitchen Cabinet, but back then Dart tried to avoid talking politics with the future Governor and President.

“When we’d go out with Jane Wyman and Ronald Reagan, my wife would say, ‘For God’s sake, no politics, please!,’ ” Dart said years later. “The night we first met we fought like cats and dogs.”32

Dart, who was forty in 1947 and a millionaire several times over, did not suffer fools—or those who disagreed with him—lightly. A nationally recognized business leader who had been profiled in
Time
,
Life
, and
Business Week
the year before, he ran the giant United-Rexall Drug Company and sat on the boards of ABC and United Airlines. While he would later say of Reagan, “I don’t think he’s the most brilliant man I ever met,” he sized him up from the first as a “real leader” and exceptional communica-Divorce: 1947–1948

2 0 3

tor who could “get on his feet and influence people.” Reagan, he observed,

“can sell people on what’s good for them, not just what they want.”33

*

*

*

Like Reagan, Justin Whitlock Dart was Illinois-born, but he had grown up in Chicago’s expensive North Shore suburbs. His father was a successful shirt salesman. “He worked a circuit, going from store to store,” Dart recalled. “And he worked like hell. When I was eight years old—in 1915, or whenever it was—he was making $15,000 a year! In those days, that was upper, upper,
upper
middle class.”34

In the late 1920s, while Reagan was caddieing for Charles Walgreen, Dart was courting the chain drugstore king’s daughter at Northwestern University, where he played tackle on the football team and was twice selected All-Big-Ten. He was senior-class president, president of his fraternity, and already something of a “kingmaker,” as he later put it. “Every year, four or five of us would sit down and decide who the class presidents were going to be,” he told a
Los Angeles Times
reporter in 1982. “And then we’d start campaigning. Our guys always won.”35

He married Ruth Walgreen in October 1929, the month the stock market crashed, and went to work in the stockroom of one of her father’s stores.

Three years later he was head of operations for the entire 345-store chain, and he kept the company profitable during the Depression by streamlining its purchasing and distribution systems and ruthlessly closing laggard stores.

He also took credit for such marketing innovations as moving the prescription counter to the back of the store so that customers had to pass display shelves holding Walgreen’s 25,000 products, ranging from pots and pans to golf balls. “Make money,” he exhorted employees, “but have fun doing it!”36

His grateful father-in-law gave him shares in the company, put him on its board, and in 1939 appointed him general manager. Dart was already flying out to Los Angeles to woo Jane Bryan by then, and that April he divorced Ruth Walgreen, with whom he had had two sons. On Christmas Day, Charles Walgreen died suddenly at age sixty-six, and control of the company passed to Ruth and her brother, Charles Walgreen Jr. It took them almost two years to force Dart out, but in 1941 they fired him. According to Dart, Walgreen senior had been closer to him than to his own children, and left him with “quite a little nest egg.”37 Dart also claimed to have cornered the bourbon market before the repeal of Prohibition and made $1

2 0 4

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House million in a few months by selling it as prescription whiskey for medicinal purposes. “It was borderline, but it was legal,” he explained.38 Dart himself was a teetotaler, and discouraged drinking among his subordinates.39

In November 1941, Jane and Justin Dart left Chicago for Boston, where he took charge of the Liggett Drug Company, a subsidiary of United Drug, Inc., a sprawling, inefficient conglomerate, which also licensed the Rexall name to more than twelve thousand independent druggists in the U.S., Canada, England, and Ireland. In April 1943, he was made president of the parent company, which he renamed United-Rexall. In 1945 he persuaded the board to move the headquarters to Los Angeles—“I thought it was the promised land”—and started construction on a $2 million headquarters at the intersection of Beverly and La Cienega Boulevards with “the world’s largest drugstore” on its ground floor.40

The Darts built a house, which they named Winds Aloft, at 944 Airole Way in Bel Air, not far from Dick Powell and June Allyson’s new mansion.

Like Powell, Dart was a passionate aviator; he frequently flew company planes, with Jane as his co-pilot, to inspect United-Rexall stores around the country. He was said to breeze through his daily office appointments in four hours, and his 1946
Current Biography
entry noted, “President Dart concerned himself only with the establishment of broad policies, leaving their execution entirely to his associates.” This left time for a full plate of civic activities; Dart was active in the Chamber of Commerce, the Community Chest, the Boy Scouts, and the Republican Party. He was invited to join the Los Angeles and Bel Air Country Clubs, as well as the California Club, the bastion of L.A.’s downtown Protestant elite, and the Rancheros Vistadores, a Santa Barbara–based group of wealthy businessmen who spent weekends riding, roping cattle, and sleeping under the stars on members’ ranches.

Jane Dart was the “exact personality opposite from her husband”—shy, reserved, self-effacing.41 A dark-haired Irish beauty, she had been born Jane O’Brien in Los Angeles, and was renamed Jane Bryan when she went to Warners in 1936. Bette Davis took her under her wing, and Jane was cast in four of Davis’s films—
Marked Woman, Kid Galahad, The Sisters,
and
The
Old Maid.
She happily gave up her promising career to devote herself entirely to her husband and the three children they had in short order, and she liked being called by the nickname Dart gave her, Punky. In some ways, she was also the opposite of Jane Wyman, but they became good friends at Warners and stayed close after they both married.

Divorce: 1947–1948

2 0 5

Two other future Kitchen Cabinet figures—Holmes Tuttle and Jack Wrather—also came into Reagan’s life at this time. Tuttle, a wealthy automobile dealer, sold Reagan a Ford coupé in 1946, and he and his wife, Virginia, occasionally dined with Ronnie and Jane. Wrather, a Texas oilman, moved to California in 1946 to go into the entertainment business and married the actress Bonita “Bunny” Granville the following year; Bunny and Ronnie had been friends since working together in the 1939 Dead End Kids vehicle
Angels Wash Their Faces
. Like Punky Dart, Bunny Wrather put acting aside after her marriage.

Holmes Tuttle, who was already active in local Republican politics, and Jack Wrather, who was then a conservative Southern Democrat, later recalled arguing politics with Ronnie. “He was quite outspoken in his beliefs,”

said Tuttle, “and several times when we were together we had—I’ll put it this way—some spirited discussions.”42 It seems that Reagan talked politics wherever he went and with whomever he met. But where a Robert Stack or a Justin Dart saw charisma and confidence, others detected insecurity and detachment. “He was a boring liberal,” said actress Marsha Hunt, a leftist actress—later blacklisted for suspected but unproven Communist ties—

who went on the SAG board in 1947. “He would buttonhole you at a party and talk liberalism at you. You’d look for an escape.”43

Robin Duke, the widow of diplomat Angier Biddle Duke and later President Clinton’s ambassador to Norway, came to know Reagan and Wyman fairly well while she was married to actor Jeffrey Lynn in the 1940s. “Jane was outgoing and fun,” Duke told me. “Ronnie was always perfectly nice, but you could never get close to him. He put up this barrier, which I thought was based on fear.” Talking politics, she felt, was his way of avoiding more personal subjects, and she found it hard to take his views seriously, even when she agreed with him. “He was an airhead,” she said.

“No one would have ever dreamed that he could become president.”44

One of the things that aggravated Jane Wyman most was her husband’s insistence on screening
Kings Row
when they had dinner guests. “Jane had a violent aversion to . . .
Kings Row
,” fan magazine writer Jerry Asher told a biographer. “It wasn’t that she envied Ronnie his one serious success in films.

It was just that the morbid, repressed, baleful ambience of the picture brought back her Missouri past much too vividly. [She] knew the picture itself to be a fine one, but Ronnie’s compulsive efforts to foist continued screenings on his guests to underline his pride in one of the few pictures he thought showcased him decently, drove her wild, and depressed her. Ronnie 2 0 6

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House was a hell of a bright guy, but he lacked, I’m afraid, the sensitivity to discern that he was opening old wounds in Jane by rubbing that picture into her.”45

Others felt it was Jane who was insensitive and self-centered. Leonora Hornblow, who
liked
talking politics with Ronnie, recalled visiting her one afternoon around this time. “I remember saying, ‘Jane, could I have a cup of coffee? I’m dying for a cup of coffee.’ She said, ‘No, there’s no coffee in the house. I’m allergic to coffee.’ Imagine! I’m sure Ronnie drank coffee—I know he did. But she didn’t want coffee, so why should there be coffee in the house? I always thought that was so typical of Jane.”46

In early June 1947, Reagan started shooting
That Hagen Girl
with Shirley Temple, a film he considered beneath him creatively and morally. It was the famous child actress’s first adult role, playing a sultry small-town teenager who is rumored to be the illegitimate daughter of Reagan’s character, a lawyer returning from the war. Reagan hated the fact that the script called for them to fall in love, and tried to have their romance written out of it. He succeeded only in winning an “oddball finish in which we climb on a train—Shirley carrying a bouquet—and leave town. You are left to guess as to whether we are married, just traveling together, or did I adopt her.”47

In one scene, Maureen Reagan later wrote, Temple “tries to commit suicide by jumping into a lake, and Dad, playing her older suitor, had to jump into the lake to rescue her. Over and over again. They shot take after take, until the director was grudgingly satisfied . . . the water was freezing. The numerous retakes took their toll on Dad; he woke up feverish the next morning, and within a few days, as he was leaving a premiere, he doubled over with a pain he described as ‘being stabbed in the chest.’ It turned out he had a serious case of viral pneumonia; in fact, it almost claimed him. I vividly remember the night later that week when an ambulance came to take him to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital.”48

Ronnie was admitted to the hospital on June 19, and Jane, six months pregnant, kept a bedside vigil for five days and nights as his fever rose to 104. By the time the fever broke, on June 25, Jane had gone into labor. She was taken to the Queen of Angels Hospital, where at 11:26 the next morning she gave birth to a girl they named Christine, who died nine hours later.

Reagan was released from Cedars of Lebanon that day, seventeen pounds lighter, overwhelmingly exhausted, but grateful for life: “The ambulance ride home made quite an impression on me. I couldn’t get enough of look-Divorce: 1947–1948

2 0 7

ing at the world as it went by, and even the most ordinary, everyday things seemed strangely beautiful.”49

Christine Reagan was cremated on July 2. One might say that her parents’ marriage perished with her, as the broken couple pursued their separate obsessions: his with politics, hers with acting. Ronnie went back to work on
That Hagen Girl
, while continuing to devote five nights a week to SAG, immersed in the contract negotiations with the Motion Picture Producers Association that had begun in April and would extend into September. He also found time for yet another cause, the International Rescue and Relief Committee, which was helping refugees from the recently installed Communist regimes in Eastern Europe. Robert Montgomery chaired the IRRC’s Hollywood branch, and Dick Powell was on its founding committee. For Reagan, this was another small step rightward.50

A depressed Jane Wyman started preparing for her role as a deaf-mute teenager in
Johnny Belinda
, which was scheduled to start shooting in Northern California after Labor Day. She spent the summer practicing sign language and lip-reading with a deaf Mexican girl who came to the house several times a week. For days on end, she would stuff her ears with wax to block all sound, and refuse to speak a word to her husband and children.

Six-year-old Maureen was sent off to summer boarding school for several weeks, and upon her return learned a bit of sign language to communicate with her mother. Two-year-old Michael was left in the hands of Nanny Banner. On Saturday nights Ronnie dropped the children off at his mother’s, and he picked them up on Sunday after Nelle had taken them to church.