native Missourian, she, too, had gottenher showbiz start in radio, as a singer.She’d also been twice married by the time she walked down the aisle with Reagan.
But by 1948, when they divorced, she was the bigger star of the two.She’d been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1946, for The Yearling, and in 1948 won it for Johnny Belinda . Given the couple’s high profile,the Hollywood gossip mills went to town avidly recycling all the cruel remarks she’d allegedly made about her spouse and the father of her two children. For his part, Reagan seemed to be in denial and still deeply devoted to his marriage.
Wyman was said to have confided in a friend one night at a cocktail party:“Don’t ask Ronnie what time it is because he will tell you how a watch is made.” As far as she was concerned, her soon-to-be ex-husband number three was “America’s number one goody two shoes.” She on the other hand had recently taken a lover—Lew Ayres, her Johnny Belinda costar. Her cruelest line may well have been delivered to Reagan face-to-face when he returned home one day from work:“You bore me,” she said. “Leave!”
• • •
Long before his divorce from Wyman, and even their marriage itself, Reagan had developed an obsessive passion of his own: politics.By his own account, it had begun back in 1928, the year he entered Eureka College. There, he and his fellow students, angered by the administration’s decision to eliminate a number of courses—which also meant laying off the professors who taught them—decided to call a strike. Such a protestwould shut down the campus. But the stand was worth making, the student leaders felt, and, despite his freshman status, DutchReagan was the one picked, at the meeting of the entire student body, to make the motion to strike.
Here’s how he recalled the impact the speech had on the audience, but most of all on him:“When I came to actually presenting the motion . . . they came to their feet with a roar—even the faculty members present voted by acclamation. It was heady wine. Hell, with two more lines, I could have had them riding through ‘every Middlesex village and farm’—without horses yet.”
When it came to Hollywood actors, the truth was there was something about Ronald Reagan that set him apart. Soon after he’d arrived on the Warner lot a decade earlier, colleagues noticed he paid as much attention to actual news headlines as the ones in DailyVariety .Robert Cummings, his Kings Row costar, recalled Reagan holding forth frequently on the set. “All the cast used to sit around waiting for the cameramen to light the scene—sometimes it was long, tedious hours, because almost all of the entire outdoor scenes were shot indoors. So we’d listen to Ronnie talk about foreign affairs and the economy and things like that. . . . Whether he knew what he was doing at the time or not, I don’t know—it wasn’t a lecture—but he took the center of the stage.”
Ron Reagan, the president’s son—by his second wife,Nancy, whom Ronald married in 1952—later would describe his father as having had two selves.One, he wrote, was the “public” Reagan who “wanted and needed acclaim and recognition” but would “disavow ambition.” Alongside this visible Reagan, he believed, existed another “private” one, within whom the drive to get ahead “burned with a cold but steady flame.” According to the younger Reagan, the Ronald Reagan whom the world assumed it knew “could not have existed without the Ronald Reagan he rarely let anyone see.” In the years following World War II, as Reagan faced setbacks, that hidden, private self seems to have been the main engine of the changes and choices he faced and made. It was also the part of Ronald Reagan that was deeply driven by his political thinking.
In the late 1940s, he realizedhe wasn’t being considered for parts that would have been offered to him after Kings Row and Desperate
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