Part 6 (2/2)

”Is it true that actors on the show are told not to speak to you?”

”I hope not,” she answered.

An actor who had appeared in a part that ran for three episodes told me that he had been informed by his agent, who in turn had heard it from the a.s.sistant director, that he was not to approach Miss Wyman on the set, as she did not like to be disturbed. He was also told never to go to her dressing room. He was also told that President Reagan was not to be discussed on the set, ever. The surprise to this particular actor was that Miss Wyman ”could not have been more delightful, or friendly. She came right up and introduced herself. One time I did knock on the door of her dressing room. I told her that I didn't think that the scene that we were to do together worked, and she asked me in, and we went over it and made some changes.

Susan Sullivan, who played her daughter-in-law on the series for eight years, said, ”Jane is the most professional person I have ever worked with. I have seen her battle through illnesses and fatigue and still keep working. She says, 'Let's get this done. We have a job to do,' and everyone gets behind her. She is always willing to help younger actors. She gives instructions nicely and with humor. She once told me, 'You can tell anybody anything if you do it with humor.' She ruled the set with a kind and intelligent hand.”

Rod Taylor, who plays her current husband in the series, agreed. ”Sure, she rules the set, but everybody expects that. I adore her.”

David Selby, who plays her son and has developed the closest friends.h.i.+p of any of the cast members with her, said, ”Never once has she asked to be excused from standing in while the other actors in the scene are having their close-ups. She would be upset if you did your close-up without her. She has never once been late. If we go out to dinner, we go to her favorite little spot. I've never been to her apartment.”

Another cast member said, ”I've spent years working with her, and I still don't know her. She does not let herself be known.”

An insider on the show had told me that an attempt would be made on Angela Channing's life in the new season of the series. ”Is it true that you are going to be smothered with a pillow in the third episode and that the audience won't know whether you're dead or alive?”

Her eyes became very large. She was surprised that I knew that. She thought for a moment how to answer. ”I am going into a coma for a while,” she said. She has a way of letting you know when she is finished with a topic, without actually telling you that she is.

”Do you have a social life?” I asked.

”Not really. When you're on a series, it, the series, becomes your life. I don't go out.” She gets up at 4:30 each morning the series is in production. ”I can't drive in the dark, so I'm picked up by a studio driver. I leave my apartment at exactly 5:50. It's a long drive to the studio. I do my own makeup when I get there.

”I'm a great reader. And I have some close friends. We do a lot of telephoning. My friends understand me when I say, 'Everything is on hold until the series is finished.' ” Among her closest friends are the two great film and television stars Loretta Young and Barbara Stanwyck, both of whom have had careers and led lives similar to Jane Wyman's. ”Jane is a good girl. She's also a very determined woman,” Barbara Stanwyck told me. ”She has worked very hard for her successful career. I do mean hard, and she deserves all her success because she earned it.” She then added, ”I know this is a story about Jane, so be very good and very kind. She would be to you.”

In an interview with Jane Wyman from the forties, published in a movie magazine of the period and discovered in the Warner Brothers archives at the University of Southern California, the writer noted, ”Talking to her, one gets the impression she's wound up like a tight spring.” Approximately forty years later, the same line could still be written about her, except for when she is talking about her career. Then she relaxes. She is a virtual oral historian of the decades she spent at Warner Brothers. She was under contract to Warner's for years, beginning in 1936 at $166 a week. She had been at Fox and Paramount before that. Somewhere along the line, her name was changed from Sarah Jane Fulks to Jane Wyman. ”I stayed at Warner's until I went into television,” she said. She started out as a wisecracking comedienne and singer, with no interest whatever in dramatic roles. ”Jane Wyman has no yen for drama,” read one of her early press releases. ”Leave that to other people,” she was quoted as saying. Her studio biography described her as ”pert, vivacious, with plenty of pep. Jane Wyman is a human tornado.” Not all of her films were distinguished, but her memory is as astonis.h.i.+ngly sharp for details of the making of middling and less-than-middling films as it is for those of such cla.s.sics as Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend. ”We were in a three shot,” she said, remembering one B-picture incident. ”I was in the middle. Jack Carson was on one side, and Dennis Morgan on the other.”

The star names flew from her lips. She calls James Cagney Cagney and Bob Hope Hope. ”Cagney was my dream man,” she said. ”Hope wanted me to do this picture with him. You know Hope.” Ann Sheridan. Humphrey Bogart. Joan Blondell. Bette Davis. ”Bette Davis's dressing room was right next to mine, but we were never friends.” Olivia de Havilland. Errol Flynn. ”Jack Warner would never put me into any of their costume epics. He said I had the wrong looks. I think Jack was probably right.”

She had an early marriage to Myron Futterman, a New Orleans dress manufacturer, about whom almost nothing is known. In 1940 she married Ronald Reagan, a fellow contract player at Warner Brothers, with whom she made four films. Their wedding reception was held at the home of the most famous of all Hollywood gossip columnists, Louella Parsons, who was raised in Dixon, Illinois, where Reagan grew up. Every movie magazine of the period recorded the idyll of the young stars' marriage, in the approved, studio-orchestrated publicity jargon. When Jane became pregnant, the studio announced that she was expecting a bundle from heaven. The bundle from heaven was Maureen Reagan, now forty-eight, who was born in 1941. Four years later the young couple adopted a son, Michael. They were promoted by Warner's as the dream Hollywood couple, and every fan magazine monitored their lives. ”Ronnie and I are perfect counterparts for each other. I blow up, and Ronnie just laughs at me. We've never had a quarrel, because he's just too good-natured,” said Jane in one interview. Several years after that, the lovebirds became known in the press as ”Those Fightin' Reagans,” and rumors of a rift in the marriage were rampant. Louella Parsons, who thrived on such matters, told Jane in a column, ”I want to write a story and settle all this talk once and for all.” Jane was quoted by Louella as replying, ”Believe me, I'm going to find out who has started all this talk.... Can't gossips let us keep our happiness?”

In 1947 the marriage did break up. ”We're through,” Jane said to a columnist during a trip to New York. ”We're finished, and it's all my fault.” Reagan found out about the termination of his marriage when he read it in the column. He gave long interviews to Louella and to her archrival, Hedda Hopper, both of whom took his side. ”If this comes to a divorce, I'll name Johnny Belinda as co-respondent,” Hedda Hopper quoted him as saying. Jane had become so immersed in her new career as a dramatic actress that she wore pellets wrapped in wax in her ears so that she would not be able to hear during the filming of the deaf-mute movie. Hedda Hopper had more to say on the subject: ”I can't really believe it yet. I don't think Ronald Reagan does either. It caught him so flatfooted, so pathetically by surprise. I talked to Ronnie the day he read in the newspapers what Jane should have told her husband first.”

They were divorced in 1948, the same year she won the Academy Award. Jane got custody of the two children, and Reagan got weekend visitation rights. Jane testified that her husband's overriding interest in filmland union and political activity had driven them apart. Friends speculated at the time that Jane's emergence as a bona fide star and Reagan's concurrent slide from box-office favor contributed to the breakup. Others felt that Jane was simply bored with him. Before the governors.h.i.+p and his truly remarkable rise as a recognized world leader, friends from that period remember, he did indeed engage in long, ponderous, yawn-producing discourses on a variety of subjects. An ongoing joke in Hollywood during his campaign for the governors.h.i.+p of California was a remark attributed to Jane Wyman about her former husband. When asked what he was like, she allegedly said, ”If you asked Ronnie the time, he'd tell you how to make a watch.”

In 1954 Reagan married the actress Nancy Davis, who had been a contract player at MGM. Not long afterward, Jane married the bandleader and musical arranger Freddie Karger, a popular and handsome man-about-town in Hollywood. She divorced him a year later. Karger is often mentioned in Marilyn Monroe biographies as one of her lovers. Years later Wyman married Karger again, and then divorced him again. She has not married since.

In 1954 Jane was converted to Catholicism through the intervention of her great friend Loretta Young. Her Catholicism is a mainstay in her life. In fact, when asked her age, according to friends, she very often replies, ”I'm thirty-five.” She is counting from the year of her conversion to Catholicism. ”She goes to Ma.s.s all the time,” said a member of the cast of ”Falcon Crest.” ”Sometimes she even has Ma.s.s said in her room.” One of the ongoing characters in the series is a Catholic priest. ”We need a lot of advice, because some of the characters are Catholic in the show,” said Jane. The priest character is played by a real priest, Father Bob Curtis, a Paulist.

After Johnny Belinda, her career totally dominated her life. ”She told me she could never even cook a hamburger. She taught her kids early that she wasn't going to be there,” said an actor friend of hers. She had made the long and difficult transition from contract player to leading lady to star, and she hung on to that position through the forties and into the mid-fifties, playing what she has called four-handkerchief roles in such cla.s.sic films of the genre as Magnificent Obsession and The Blue Veil, which remains her favorite. ”I was in the middle of the woman's cycle in picture making,” she said. She talked about her contemporaries. ”Greer, Irene, Olivia, Joan, Bette, Loretta, Barbara, and don't forget Ginger ... I never really knew Ava.” She was talking about Greer Garson, Irene Dunne, Olivia de Havilland, Joan Fontaine, Bette Davis, Loretta Young, Barbara Stanwyck, Ginger Rogers, and Ava Gardner. ”The thing was, we were all different,” she said. The New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther wrote about her in 1953, ”Her acting of drudges has become a virtual standard on the screen.” But then the cycle of women's films ended. She decided to retire in 1962.

Several seasons ago Lana Turner, who was one of the queens of MGM when Jane was one of the queens of Warner Brothers, came on ”Falcon Crest” as a semiregular. From the beginning, there was a coolness between the two stars. Lana, according to one source, took five or six hours to get ready, and Jane, for whom promptness is a pa.s.sion, could never tolerate that. Someone closely connected with the show told me that Jane watched Lana on a talk show one night and felt that she was taking credit for ”Falcon Crest” 's coming in number two in the ratings. ”Imagine her taking credit for the show's success,” said Jane at the time. Lana did not appear on the show again.

In the old days of the studios and contract players, the young actors were taught how to conduct themselves in interviews. They never said anything negative about anyone, and that training is still evident today.

”Was there a difficulty between you and Lana Turner?” I asked.

”Enough said, right there,” answered Jane Wyman. She looked at me in a way that said very clearly that Miss Turner was a topic she had finished discussing. Her praise for her fellow actors on the series is unqualified, however. ”I love to work with David Selby.” ”Lorenzo Lamas can do almost anything. He's a wonderful dramatic actor.” ”I said, 'I want Rod Taylor in the show.' He was occupied doing something else. I said, 'We'll wait.' ”

”I never asked anything about her children. I have never approached that relations.h.i.+p with her,” said an actor on the series. ”I think she was hurt by Michael's book, but she has never said one harsh word about them. The only time I ever heard her mention the name of the president, she said something kind.”

Both of her children have written books in which they announced things to their parents that they had not told them before. Maureen wrote that she had been a severely battered wife in her first marriage, and Michael confessed that he had been s.e.xually molested by a man when he was a child. Since Joan Crawford's daughter Christina wrote Mommie Dearest, it has become the vogue among the adult children of the famous to cash in on their privileged un-happiness by spilling the beans on their celebrity dad or mom. Maureen wrote that Jane had not come to her first wedding. Michael wrote that Jane had sent him away to boarding school when he was six. Even the siblings did not seem to get along. Michael, in his book, recounts an incident that happened when he was four years old. He told Maureen that he knew a secret. ”What?” she asked. He told her that she was getting a new blue dress for Christmas. Infuriated that he had ruined her Christmas surprise, she snapped, ”I know a secret too. You're adopted.”

”Do you see your grandchildren?” I asked. Maureen has no children, but Michael has two, Cameron and Ashley.

”Once in a while,” she replied slowly. The subject was approaching the danger area. ”They're in school when I'm working. They're adorable kids, Cameron and Ashley. Cameron's always saying to me, 'Gramma, how old are you?' And I say, 'I'm as old as my little finger.' And he says, 'How old is that?' and I say, 'As old as I am.' ”

”Have you always been so reluctant to be interviewed?” I asked.

”No,” she said. ”My life's an open book. Everyone knows everything about me. There are all those magazines with lies in them.” She had ordered a Diet c.o.ke, and she took a sip. ”I used to be interviewed a lot. But the last time I was, I had what seemed to be a very nice interview with the reporter, and then the piece came out. The first line was something like 'This is the president's ex-wife.' That's when the guillotine fell. I don't have to be known as that. I've been in this business longer than he has. It's such bad taste. They wouldn't say it if I was Joe Blow's ex-wife. It wouldn't even be mentioned.”

With that said-and it was the closest she got to the unmentionable subject, the former president of the United States-she s.h.i.+fted topics abruptly. ”We're going to have fun this year on the series. We have such a good producer, and the writers are wonderful. I feel like I'm doing the first show. The enthusiasm is just wonderful. The 'Falcon Crest' that I want is going on this year.”

However reluctant she may be to discuss it, how can her relations.h.i.+p with Ronald Reagan not be discussed? She is the only former wife of a United States president in the history of the country. It is certainly true that if she had been married to Joe Blow it would never be mentioned. Her marriages to Myron Futterman, who manufactured dresses, and to Freddie Karger, who led the dance band on the roof of the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, are never mentioned. But between those two marriages was her longest marriage, to a movie star of the period, with whom she had two children and who later became the governor of the state of California and then the president of the United States. It is part of her history. It will be the lead in her obituary when she dies.

It is a curious coincidence of fate that the eight years of her emergence as the First Lady of television should almost exactly parallel the eight years of her former husband's second wife's emergence as the First Lady of the land. The relations.h.i.+p between the two women is, has always been, and ever will be poisonous, although Jane Wyman has never uttered a single word in public about or against Nancy Reagan. Apparently Mrs. Reagan has not returned the courtesy. There are publis.h.i.+ng rumors that her forthcoming book, My Turn, contains several obliquely critical allusions to Jane Wyman in reference to the bringing up of the two children Jane had during her marriage to Ronald Reagan. ”Jane was a star. Nancy never was,” a Los Angeles socialite acquainted with both said to explain the bad blood between the two women. ”For seventeen years, Jane has kept her mouth shut. Nancy hates Jane with such a pa.s.sion because it's the only part of Ronnie that she doesn't control. If you had mentioned Ronnie to Jane, she would have gotten up and walked out.” A person friendly with Nancy Reagan told me that in the sc.r.a.pbooks she keeps of newspaper clippings about her romance and marriage to Ronald Reagan, all mentions of Jane Wyman have been blacked out. In turn, a person friendly with Jane Wyman told me in private Jane sometimes refers to Nancy Reagan as Nancyvita.

Until recently, Jane was a regular and favored patron of the famed Hollywood restaurant Chasen's, as well as a close personal friend of Maude Chasen, the widow of David Chasen, who founded the restaurant fifty-three years ago. Although her friends.h.i.+p with Maude continues, she is, by unstated mutual agreement, almost never seen there these days. Chasen's has become the more or less official restaurant of the recent president and his wife, and Jane Wyman's absence from the premises averts the possibility of a chance encounter.

A journalist friend told me about interviewing the former president in the private quarters of the White House. He had been warned in advance that the name Jane Wyman was never mentioned in the presence of the First Lady. But since Miss Wyman had been married to the president for eight years, the journalist ventured very cautiously, when they were deep into the conversation, to bring up her name. To his surprise, the president began to tell a friendly anecdote about his first wife. Midway through the story, Nancy Reagan walked into the room. Without a second's hesitation, the president s.h.i.+fted to another topic right in the middle of a sentence, and the subject of Miss Wyman did not come up again.

Every star of Jane Wyman's caliber pays a price for fame, and she has endured for over fifty years. Although she is husbandless and vaguely estranged from her children, her splendid isolation must not be confused with loneliness. Where she is is where she has always wanted to be from her early contract days.

Like all success-oriented people, she is not without her detractors. Robert Raison was Jane Wyman's agent for nearly thirty years, as well as her friend and sometime escort to social functions in the television industry. He was also the agent of Dennis Hopper, Mich.e.l.le Phillips, and all of the Bottoms brothers. He had a reputation for developing close friends.h.i.+ps with his clients. He negotiated the seven-year deal for Jane when she decided to play the role of Angela Channing on ”Falcon Crest.” At the end of the seventh year of the series, Raison heard from Jane's lawyer that he was through. ”When she fired me, she never told me herself. I heard it from her lawyer,” said Raison. When he asked why, the lawyer told him to call Jane and discuss it with her. ”I did,” said Raison. ”I told her I wanted to hear it from her mouth. You know what she said?”

”No.”

”She said, 'You and me, Bobby, we've run out of gas.' I was going to sue her, but the lawyers settled it for a given amount of money. I can't discuss that amount.”

Raison is now writing a book about his years with Jane Wyman. It is tentatively t.i.tled Jane Wyman, Less than a Legend: A Memoir in Close-Up. Although angry and hurt, Raison still expresses residual tenderness for his former client. ”Two days after the a.s.sa.s.sination attempt on the president, Jane sent him flowers to the hospital in Was.h.i.+ngton. Several days later, the president personally called to say thank you for the flowers,” Raison recalled recently. He answered the telephone when the president called. ”He said to me, 'Thank you for taking care of her, Bobby,' ” said Raison.

The check came. In an interview situation like this one, the interviewer always picks up the check. As I reached for it, Jane Wyman tapped my hand and shook her head. ”This is on Lorimar,” she said.

We walked outside into the brilliant sunlight. Her red Jaguar was parked in the number-one s.p.a.ce of the Bob Burns parking lot. We shook hands. ”Where else can you meet such fascinating people and go to such places as people in our business do?” she said. ”It's a fabulous life.”

In an era of tell-all, Jane Wyman has made the decision to tell nothing. No confessions. No revelations. It's her life, and it's private. There are those who say it is her duty to inform historians of the eight years she shared with a man who later became the president of the United States, years that encompa.s.sed the peak of his minor movie stardom, his presidency of the Screen Actors Guild, and his role in the ign.o.ble House Un-American Activities Committee hearings. But she sees it differently, and that's the way it is.

”She's one tough lady,” said one of the cast members of ”Falcon Crest.” Yeah, but a lady.

November 1989

IT'S A FAMILY AFFAIR

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