The President's Ladies

Jane Wyman and Nancy Davis

Bernard F. Dick

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781626741089
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Histoire et critique du cinéma

Ronald Reagan, a former actor and one of America's most popular presidents, married not one but two Hollywood actresses. This book is three biographies in one, discovering fascinating connections among Jane Wyman (1917–2007), Ronald Reagan (1911–2004), and Nancy Davis (b. 1921–2016). Jane Wyman, who married Reagan in 1940 and divorced him seven years later, knew an early life of privation. She gravitated to the movies and made her debut at fifteen as an unbilled member of the chorus, then toiled as an extra for four years until she finally received billing. She proved herself as a dramatic actress in The Lost Weekend, and the following year, she was nominated for an Oscar for The Yearling and soon won for her performance in Johnny Belinda, in which she did not speak a single line. Other Oscar nominations followed, along with a Golden Globe for her portrayal of Angela Channing in Falcon Crest. Conversely, Nancy Davis led a relatively charmed life, the daughter of an actress and the stepdaughter of a neurosurgeon. Surrounded by her mother's friends—Walter Huston, Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Lillian Gish, and Alla Nazimova, her godmother—Davis started in the theater, then moved on to Hollywood, where she enjoyed modest success, and finally began working in television. When she married Reagan in 1952, she unwittingly married into politics, eventually leaving acting to concentrate on being the wife of the governor of California, and then the wife of the president of the United States. In her way, Davis played her greatest role as Reagan's friend, confidante, and adviser in life and in politics. This book considers three actors who left an indelible mark on both popular and political culture for more than fifty years.

Chapter 1

The Abandoned Child

DURING HOLLYWOOD’S HEYDAY, THE STAR MACHINE PROCESSED FODDER for the fan magazines, ingested by readers who believed what they read. To say that an actor was adopted posed questions that studios preferred not to answer and certainly would not include in their hagiographic bios. Mention of adoption meant disclosing a star’s past, which could include implications of illegitimacy or abandonment, neither of which was good copy. And so, Jane Wyman was not adopted. But she was.

On 27 May 1916, Manning Jeffries Mayfield and Gladys Hope Christian were married by a justice of the peace in Kansas City, Missouri. The bride and groom were the same age, twenty-one, although Gladys was five months younger. They returned to the groom’s birth place, St. Joseph, Missouri, about sixty miles from St. Louis, moving into the home of his parents, Pulaski and Mamie Mayfield, at 3121 Mitchell Avenue. Manning’s two sisters, Martha and Sarah—the latter, a public school teacher—also resided there. Living with in-laws was not the most auspicious beginning for a marriage, and four years later, the marriage was over.

The Mitchell Avenue house was spacious enough. It was a large, two-story house on a residential street. There were only seven homes on the block, with neighbors ranging from an Aunt Jemima Mills employee, a carpenter, and a contractor, to a chauffeur and the deputy county treasurer. Residents had their choice of grocers and were within walking distance of an auto repair shop, a lumber and coal company, a doctor, an engine house, and Barlett Park with its distinctive pavilion. This was small-town America, not much different from the rotogravure Indianapolis of Booth Tarkington’s Seventeen.

For Gladys, the problem was not St. Joseph, it was living in a house with her husband’s parents and sisters—a house in which she felt like an intruder. Gladys’s father-in-law, Pulaski Mayfield, then in his sixties, had held positions in various mercantile companies. Unlike his own father, Manning finished high school at St. Joseph Central and spent his brief life working for the railroad. Gladys, a former secretary, was a homemaker—except that she was in her in-laws’ home when she gave birth to her and Manning’s only child. Sarah Jane, the future Jane Wyman, was born on 5 January 1917, less than eight months after her parents’ marriage.

Sarah Jane was either premature or the result of premarital sex. If the latter—given his short-lived marriage—Manning may have had second thoughts about “doing the honorable thing.” Gladys, for her part, may have wondered about ever becoming involved with Manning in the first place.

Names had special significance for the Mayfields, who were originally Southerners. Pulaski was born in Georgia; his father, Manning, in Alabama. Jane’s birth father, Manning Jeffries Mayfield, was given his grandfather’s first name, Manning, and Jeffries, his mother’s maiden name. Mayfield’s sister and grandmother were both christened Sarah. His great-great-great-grandmother was named Jane. The idea of inclusion seemed alien to the Mayfields. That Gladys was not consulted about her own daughter’s name may also have contributed to the brevity of her marriage to Manning. But there were other reasons, too. In addition to Gladys’s sense of being an outsider, Manning seemed indifferent to fatherhood and was more devoted to his job than to his wife and daughter. Gladys realized that their marriage was based more on expediency than love—particularly if conception occurred prior to marriage. But once Gladys gave birth, expediency was no longer an issue.

The marriage ended in 1920, followed by divorce a year later. In 1920, Manning Jeffries Mayfield left St. Joseph to become secretary of the shipping company, the Southern Pacific Westbound Conference. He had no qualms about relocating in California, eventually settling in San Francisco, where he died unexpectedly of pneumonia on 21 January 1922 at the age of twenty-seven. His body was shipped to St. Joseph, where he was buried on 28 January. Obituaries stated that Manning was unmarried, mentioning only his parents and sisters as survivors.

Gladys may not have had a husband, but she did have a five-year-old daughter. However, Sarah Jane did not figure in Gladys’s plans, sketchy though they were. One thing, however, was certain: Gladys did not want the responsibility of taking care of a five-year-old. She put her daughter up for adoption. Mother and daughter may have reconnected in the summer of 1933, but for all practical purposes, Gladys had disappeared from Sarah Jane’s life, ending her days in New York, where she died in 1960 at sixty-five, outliving her former husband by almost forty years. Pulaski Mayfield outlived his son by seven.

Sarah Jane was adopted unofficially by Richard and Emma Fulks, both then in their sixties (Emma was sixty, Richard, sixty-five) and living at 1209 North 38th Street in a quiet, upper-middle class neighborhood that was a slight improvement over 3121 Mitchell Avenue. There were the usual businesses: grocers, tailor, cleaner, druggist, post office, gas station, and hospital. A block and a half away was Frederick Street, where trolleys ran downtown to the shopping district. Lake Contrary, with its amusement park, was accessible by trolley, as was Krug Park. It was the kind of neighborhood that was ideal for raising children, and, between them, the Fulkses had already raised four before Sarah Jane came into their lives.

Emma, born in Saarbrucken, Germany, had three children by her first marriage to Dr. Morris F. Weyman: a son, also named Morris, and two daughters, Elsie and Mora. Richard Fulks, a widower, had a son, Ray, by a previous marriage. Emma was also on her second marriage, having divorced Weyman before emigrating from Germany. By 1922, when Sarah Jane joined the Fulks household, Morris and Elsie, then in their twenties, had already relocated in Los Angeles, where Morris followed in his father’s profession, specializing in eye and throat disorders. Ray, the oldest, had moved to Texas. Mora, twenty-two, was probably not living at home, but even if she were, she would not have been much of a companion to the five-year-old Sarah Jane.

The adoption was Emma’s idea. At sixty, with grown children, Emma yearned to experience motherhood again, however vicariously. She had no children by her second marriage, and, despite its idyllic location, 1209 North 38th Street, was a lonely place—in part because her husband did little to make Sarah Jane feel welcome.

Studio bios usually described Richard Fulks as a local politician—sometimes even a major one. Actually, he started as a law enforcement officer with the St. Joseph police force, graduated to chief detective, and resigned in 1909 at the age of forty-six. Seven years later, Fulks was elected county collector, a position he held until 1918. A picture of Fulks as chief detective reveals a dour, semi-bald man with a bushy moustache and the half-closed eyes of someone either bored or sleep-deprived. It was not a friendly face.

Emma was quite the opposite. She wanted the best for Sarah Jane. In 1923, she enrolled the little girl in the first grade at the Noyes School, which was within walking distance of the Fulks home. Emma was a devotee of the performing arts, particularly theatre and ballet. Since she never pursued her dream of becoming an actress, she prepared Sarah Jane for the profession that might have been hers, taking her downtown for plays and movies. It was the movies that captivated Sarah Jane. Emma, believing that dance lessons would not hurt, enrolled her at the Edward A. Prinz Dancing Academy, at Tenth and Robidoux, where Sarah Jane was introduced to a world that offered a refuge from everyday life—particularly school, which held little interest for her. But Emma had already determined Sarah Jane’s future.

According to Ronald Reagan’s biographer, Anne Edwards, Emma brought Sarah Jane to Los Angeles in 1922, presumably to visit her children—but, more importantly, to continue on to San Francisco, where she hoped to persuade Mayfield to legalize Sarah Jane’s adoption. There is no way of knowing when Emma and Sarah Jane left for the West Coast. Supposedly, they did so after Sarah Jane’s fifth birthday. But that was less than a week before Mayfield died.

What took precedence over a visit with her children was Emma’s obsession with making Sarah Jane into a star. If Baby Peggy could become a star at five, why not Sarah Jane? It was not to happen in 1922, but Emma tried again seven years later. In 1929, Baby Peggy’s reign was over; Shirley Temple was not even on the cusp of stardom; Richard Fulks was dead; and Sarah Jane was twelve. There might be a market for tweens who could dance and act. Perhaps this time it would work out. But it didn’t. Hollywood was not interested. To Emma, this rejection was a setback but not a defeat. Sarah Jane’s time would come in a few years—as it did. Meanwhile, it was back to St. Joseph, where she finished grade school and perhaps received a diploma from the Edward A. Prinz Dancing Academy.

Sarah Jane’s second exposure to Hollywood made her determined to succeed in the only profession that appealed to her. Prinz understood his student’s desire to excel. Once Emma learned that his son, LeRoy, was working in Hollywood as a choreographer, she and Sarah Jane headed for Los Angeles. LeRoy proved an invaluable contact. He managed to get Sarah Jane into the chorus of The Kid from Spain (1932), a Samuel Goldwyn production starring Eddie Cantor, with Jane as one of the Goldwyn Girls, the producer’s name for a chorus line that included future stars Betty Grable and Paulette Goddard. They were both older than Jane, but not by much—Goddard by six years, Grable by one. But none of this mattered. They were all Goldwyn, and eventually golden, girls.

Sarah Jane languished in extras’ limbo for four years until she finally received billing as Jane Wyman. Then she was fed into the star machine.

…

MYTH: Jane Wyman was born in 1914.

FACT: January 5, 1914 is often given as Sarah Jane’s birthday, but there is enough documentation at the Northwest Missouri Genealogical Society to prove that this date is off by three years. Anne Edwards, one of the first to solve the mystery of Jane’s birth, found it odd that Jane would add three years to her age, since subtraction is more common with movie stars. Once Sarah Jane Fulks became Jane Wyman, Jane and the studios may have preferred the earlier date, since it would have meant that she entered the movies at eighteen, rather than fifteen, when she should have been in school. She was fifteen when she made her first (unbilled) appearance in The Kid from Spain (1932). By 1935, when she turned eighteen, she had been an extra in at least eight pictures.

MYTH: Emma envisioned Sarah Jane as the next Shirley Temple.

FACT: Hardly. In 1929, when Emma and Sarah Jane made their second trip to Los Angeles, Temple was one year old and Sarah Jane twelve.

MYTH: Sara Jane Fulks reinvented herself as Jane Durrell, an “itinerant radio singer,” working the Middle West-South circuit and performing in such cities as Denver, Chicago, and New Orleans.

FACT: Jane had an attractive singing voice, as she revealed in such films as Kid Nightingale, Hollywood Canteen, Night and Day, Here Comes the Groom, Just for You, and Let’s Do It Again. After the Lux Radio Theatre broadcast of Nobody Lives Forever (17 November 1947), in which she costarred with her then husband Ronald Reagan, Jane admitted that she was no stranger to the microphone, having sung on local radio as a teenager, but not specifying where. “Jane Durrell” was a wise choice, evoking the image of a chanteuse rather than a kid in gingham.

MYTH: Jane’s mother was an actress, who appeared under the surname Pechelle in Paris.

FACT: The press kit for The Kid from Kokomo (1939) contained more than the usual amount of fabrication, as did the kit for Torchy Plays with Dynamite (1939), which described Jane as “part French, her mother having been an actress in Paris.” Gladys Hope Christian was a doctor’s secretary who never set foot on a stage. The Kid from Kokomo press kit included a news release, “She’s from Missouri,” which had Jane playing soccer, tennis, basketball, and volleyball in school—and nicknamed “Just Folks” because of her real name, “Sarah Jane Folks” [sic].

MYTH: In summer 1933, Jane returned to St. Joseph and enrolled at the University of Missouri.

FACT: In summer 1933, Jane did return to St. Joseph, where she “shared a house on 913 North Second Street with Mrs. Gladys H. and Myrtle Johnson.” Actually, it was the home of Gladys and Myrle Johnson, and the address was 913 1/2 North Second Street, which was owned by a bookkeeper, Charles Hauck. North Second Street was not that different from the other places Jane had lived, except that it was more working class, a mix of residences and businesses such as milling, packing, and glassworks. It was a neighborhood of accountants, salespersons, candy company workers, carpenters, teamsters, and grocers—the simple folk with whom Jane had lost touch.

The Johnsons seem to have been husband and wife, although they were not married in Buchanan Country. Most likely, Gladys H. was Gladys Hope Christian, Jane’s birth mother—which would explain Jane’s decision to spend the summer at the Johnson home. It is tempting to invoke the Stella Dallas/White Banners/To Each His Own syndrome: birth mother desiring some contact, even visual, with child—or the reverse: child seeking contact with birth mother either physically (Our Very Own) or preternaturally (The Uninvited). But at sixteen, Jane was hardly a romantic. It is one thing to visit Hollywood, another to work there as a bit player along with countless others dreaming of stardom. Jane needed time to reflect, and Hollywood was no place for introspection. Perhaps she believed St. Joseph held the “answers for personal roots, personal happiness, [and] the right man.” But it didn’t, and Jane returned to Los Angeles and the only life she knew: that of an extra.

There is no record of Jane having studied at the University of Missouri. Given her antipathy to the classroom, it is hard to imagine her embracing higher ed.

MYTH: While Sarah Jane Fulks (not yet Jane Wyman) was lunching at Sardi’s with the wife of character actor Vince Barnett, William Demarest, “then in the agency business,” joined them. Convinced that she had movie potential, Demarest handed her his card, offering to represent her.

FACT: The venerable Sardi’s is on West 44th Street in the heart of New York’s theatre district. Sarah Jane in New York at the age of seventeen or eighteen and lunching at Sardi’s?

It is true that William Demarest had been an agent, but he had also worked in the theatre, coming to Hollywood in 1926 when the silent era was waning, and the following year appearing in ten Warner Bros. releases, the most important of which was The Jazz Singer (1927). Demarest took time off to appear on Broadway in Earl Carroll’s Vanities, which ended an eight-month run in April 1932. When The Kid from Spain was released that November, he was back in Hollywood, where Sarah Jane Fulks was adjusting to the lot of the unbilled. Since she was shuttling from one film to another, it is hard to imagine her having the time or money to visit New York.

Demarest was, however, instrumental in Jane Wyman’s career. He was then represented by a minor agency, Small and Landow, at 8272 Sunset Boulevard. Through some fast talking (at which he excelled), Demarest convinced the agency to take on Jane. Jane received billing in Smart Blonde (1936). The part was inconsequential, but she made the credits. Small and Landow was just the beginning. Soon Jane would switch to a more powerful agency.

LeRoy Prinz, a St. Joseph native like Jane and a friend of Demarest, was equally instrumental. In 1929, Prinz choreographed Earl Carroll’s Sketch Book (1929), which enjoyed a run of 392 performances, and in which Demarest appeared as a member of the ensemble. That same year, Prinz made his film debut as the choreographer for Paramount’s Innocents of Paris.

Prinz found Jane work as an extra in Paramount’s All the King’s Horses and College Rhythm (both 1934), w...