Read Online Reagan: The Life by H. W. Brands - Free Book Online

loved in California and his job at the studio may have helped him finally lick the curse that had hounded him so long. I was in the East on an errand for the motion picture industry when my mother called and told me that he had died,” he said. “During the call, she told of finding Jack one night standing in the house, looking out the window, and he began talking about his drinking and wondering how their lives might have been different if he hadn’t been a drinker. Then he told my mother that he had decided he was never going to take another drink, and she said, ‘Jack, how many times have I heard you say that?’ ‘Yes,’ Jack said, ‘but you’ve never seen me do this before,’ and he disappeared and came back with a big jug of wine he’d hidden from my mother. Then he dumped the wine into the sink and smashed the jug.”
    His mother went on to say that Jack had started going to church, and that he was proud of his son’s success. Jack had closely followed the filming of theKnute Rockne movie, and when it was ready for its premiere atNotre Dame, the emotional alma mater of every Irishman in America, he wanted to attend. But he didn’t want to ask his son. Nelle quietly passed the word along, and Reagan made the arrangements. “I invited him to join us on theWarner Brothers train that took us to South Bend for the ceremonies and premiere,” Reagan recalled. “Before he died, Nelle told me, Jack told her what the trip had meant to him: ‘I was there,’ he said, ‘when our son became a star.’ ”
    H E BECAME A husband about the same time. The end of college had ended Reagan’s romance withMargaret Cleaver, in the manner often effected by such life transitions. Physically separated by their need to find jobs, they drifted apart emotionally. Margaret went off to France, where she met a young man in the American consular service whom she eventually married. Reagan went to Iowa and then Hollywood, where he met young women as suddenly detached from their roots as he was.
    The studios understandably emphasized the romantic appeal of their actors, and the movie press sold papers relating which actor was dating which actress, where they dined, and what clubs they haunted. Reagan received his share of coverage, much of it courtesy ofLouella Parsons, the doyenne of the gossip columnists, who happened to be from Dixon, Illinois. She took a liking to Reagan, with whom she had a minor role in one of his first films,
Hollywood Hotel
.
    Parsons considered matchmaking part of the mythmaking of Hollywood, and when Reagan and a young actress named Jane Wyman appeared together in the 1938 B comedy
Brother Rat
, about three cadets at the Virginia Military Institute, Parsons publicized a budding romance. Wyman’s childhood and youth had been even more challenging than Reagan’s. She had been born Sarah Jane Mayfield in St. Joseph, Missouri, in 1917. Her father left the family when she was five, and her overwhelmed, or distracted, mother farmed her out to some neighbors. Her foster mother lost her husband when Jane was eleven, and the two relocated to Los Angeles, where Jane found independence of a sort in marriage, at sixteen, to a salesman named Wyman. The marriage didn’t last, but the name did, and as Jane Wyman she made her way to Hollywood, where she signed a contract with Warner Brothers a year before Reagan arrived. She married again, but this marriage failed even more quickly than the first, and by the time she and Reagan encountered each other on the set of
Brother Rat
, she was again in the mood for romance.
    Or perhaps for security. Wyman guarded her innermost feelings, but a few years later she told an interviewer that until she met Reagan, she had never been able to entrust her feelings to anyone. She had hardly known her father and had scant experience of a stable home. Reagan, tall and strong, six years her elder, offered emotional assurance that warmed her from within. “He was such a sunny