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The Times (11/Sep/2007) - Obituary: Jane Wyman

(c) The Times (11/Sep/2007)

Jane Wyman

Oscar-winning actress and first wife of Ronald Reagan who specialised in playing the long-suffering victim

Jane Wyman was a former dancer and bit-part player, who graduated from “dumb blonde” roles to portray a series of characters who faced everything life could throw at them with courage and resilience. She won an Oscar for her performance as a young deaf-mute woman who is abused and raped in Johnny Belinda (1948).

In 1979 the film historian Ken Wlaschin wrote that she had been “one of Hollywood’s great suffering actresses ... remembered for being tearful, noble and plucky, with a face like a worried baby squirrel”. She was never one of Hollywood’s great beauties, but what she lacked in looks she made up for in ambition, and there was often a hard edge to her performance. Little did Wlaschin know that Wyman was about to prove her resilience once more and reach a new audience as the matriarch in the American soap opera Falcon Crest, a role she played throughout the 1980s.

Wyman is probably best known, however, asthe first wife of President Ronald Reagan, whom she met when they were young actors at Warner Brothers in the late 1930s. They shared a kiss in the romantic comedy Brother Rat (1938), and life was soon imitating art, though she was still married to her previous husband at the time.

They married in 1940, had two children, though one died at birth, and adopted another. The marriage lasted eight years, and it has been variously suggested it ended because of her involvement with the actor Lew Ayres or because of her husband’s growing involvement in politics.

Reagan went on to become Governor of California in 1966 and President of the United States in 1981, serving two terms in the post. While Reagan ran the country, Wyman was running the fictitious Falcon Crest winery in California. And, while her profile was not quite as high as that of her exhusband, she too was an internationally familiar figure.

Surprisingly for a woman who was married to an American president, there has been considerable doubt and discrepancy over the details of her early life, the year of her birth, her birthday and even her name.

Reference books normally give her date of birth as January 5, 1914. It was common for actresses to knock a couple of years off their real age, but Reagan’s biographers have latterly produced evidence suggesting that Wyman was actually three years younger than commonly supposed and was born in January 1917. It seems her age was falsified at the time of her first, short-lived marriage, a union that was later wiped from official versions of her life story, along with any mention of her real parents.

She was born Sarah Jane Mayfield in St Joseph, Missouri. Her parents split up when she was 4, her father died a year later and she was informally adopted by family friends and took their name Fulks. Warner Brothers publicity would later claim Richard Fulks was city mayor – in reality he had been elected “county collector” for one term and was a career police officer. He died when Wyman was 11.

Considered a plain child, she was painfully shy and lacked self-confidence, though she took dance classes, and her “mother” Emma encouraged dreams of a career in showbusiness. They moved to Los Angeles; Wyman bleached her hair and she worked as a waitress, secretary, model and manicurist while awaiting her big break. In 1932 she made her film debut in a tiny part in the Goldwyn musical The Kid from Spain, alongside a young Paulette Goddard and the teenaged Betty Grable. The following year she married for the first time, to Ernest Wyman, when she was just 16.

By the mid-1930s she was getting regular work singing and dancing in chorus lines. Auditioning for Dick Powell in Stage Struck (1936) she claimed to be able to play the trombone and imitate birds, and there was a small role in Busby Berkeley’s Gold Diggers of 1937.

“I made a discovery: a good shield for shyness is a bold exterior,” she said. “Were all the other dancers prettier? Never mind. I covered up by becoming the cockiest of all, by talking the loudest, laughing the longest, and wearing the curliest, most blatantly false eye-lashes in Hollywood.”

Initially, she used the name Sarah Jane Fulks, though most of her early roles are uncredited. In 1937 she had a starring role in the comedy Public Wedding and she married for the second time, to a businessman old enough to be her father.

Wyman and Reagan had started on contract at much the same time at Warners, and by all accounts she ruthlessly pursued him, along with stardom. In a 1937 interview she said she was not content with being a contract actress at Warners, she wanted to be “the actress” at Warners, a comment which did not endear her to Bette Davis.

Brother Rat (1938) was the first of five films Wyman and Reagan made together. Officially, she began dating Reagan in 1939, after her second divorce, though there seems no doubt the relationship began before that.

Gossip columnist Louella Parsons promoted them as the perfect couple and hosted their reception at her Beverly Hills home. Her deadly rival, Hedda Hopper, however, maintained Wyman was “a little, loud, brassy blonde”, even after Wyman’s career took an unexpectedly radical turn and her acting stock rocketed when she played the girlfriend of an alcoholic Ray Milland in Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend (1945).

It was the first in a series of roles that were to define her screen image as the long-suffering but resilient victim. She won her first Oscar nomination in 1947 as the wife and mother in The Yearling. The Reagans went through a tough time with illness and the loss of their second daughter, but Wyman was absolutely determined to go ahead with one of her most challenging roles in Johnny Belinda, for which she plugged up her ears and learnt sign language.

As well as being deaf and mute, the character was half her age. She was determined to win the Oscar, and in due course amused the awards-night audience with her short acceptance speech, saying: “I won this award for keeping my mouth shut, so I think I’ll do it again now.”

By that time she and Reagan had divorced. There were rumours of an affair with co-star Lew Ayres, but the principal reason for the split may have been that she simply found Reagan (and his political activities) boring. While her film career was in the ascendent, Reagan’s was in decline, many contemporaries did not take his politics seriously and he was widely regarded as an amiable chump. Reagan was heartbroken at the split.

Wyman continued playing women in adversity, including the clubfooted heroine of The Glass Menagerie (1950), and there were further Oscar nominations for her self-sacrificing nanny in The Blue Veil (1951) and a blind woman, whose husband dies, in Magnificent Obsession (1954). But she also returned to her roots in the musical, duetting with Bing Crosby on In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening in Here Comes the Groom (1951).

She had top billing in Hitchcock’s Stage Fright (1950), in a cast that included Marlene Dietrich, and Alastair Sim and Sybil Thorndike as Wyman’s parents. It was not one of the director’s best, but she showed emotional depth as a woman unwittingly in love with a murderer. And she was memorable as a wealthy widow who fell for a young Rock Hudson in Douglas Sirk’s romantic melodrama All That Heaven Allows (1955).

Her own love life proved as unpredictable as ever when she eloped with Marilyn Monroe’s erstwhile boyfriend, the film composer Fred Karger. They married in 1952, divorced in 1954, remarried in 1961 and divorced for a second time in 1965.

In 1955-58 she hosted her own TV drama series. In the early 1960s she appeared in two Disney films, Pollyanna and Bon Voyage! Thereafter she returned to the big screen only once, for the comedy How to Commit Marriage (1969) with Bob Hope.

Falcon Crest unexpectedly returned her to the spotlight in the role of winery boss Angela Channing, and she was a mainstay of the show throughout its run from 1981 to 1990. It was full of the same sort of intrigues as Dallas, and the rivalries and rows of the plotlines were mirrored in real life.

Wyman, who had always had her fair share of detractors and enemies in Hollywood, reputedly measured her trailer against that of co-star Robert Foxworth to make sure hers was at least as big, and she enthusiastically resumed a feud with Lana Turner that dated back to their days as starlets and rivals for Reagan’s attentions.

Dialogue scenes were filmed in two instalments and edited together, so that the women did not have to work together or speak to each other. Turner believed Wyman could never reconcile herself to her position as “The Almost First Lady”.

Wyman’s career on Falcon Crest seemed to mirror that of Reagan’s in the White House. She refused to relinquish her position, despite declining popularity and health problems. In 1989 she was hospitalised with diabetes and a liver ailment, and her character spent much of the final season in a coma. Against medical advice however Wyman returned for the show’s last few episodes in 1990.

Despite her difficulties with some co-stars, Wyman enjoyed a long friendship with another Hollywood contemporary, Loretta Young, and remained on good terms with Reagan. She was consistently reluctant to discuss him in interviews, saying simply that she was not suited to marriage. She broke her silence when he died in 2004 to say: “America has lost a great president and a great, kind gentleman.”

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