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1914-2007 AN APPRECIATION
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Wyman lived in shadow
of Reagan for last 30 years
of TheColumnists.com
In the summer of 1981, I met actress Jane Wyman for the first and last time. It was a memorable meeting for me because I think she started out wanting to find some way to dump me into a crocodile pit, but actually may have ended up kind of liking me.
I'm sure the hour we spent sitting side by side at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles meant absolutely nothing to her the minute it was over. But now that Wyman, who died last week at age 93, has finally slipped away into screen history, that hour resonates in my mind as a genuinely meaningful one.
The occasion was Wyman's first meeting with the press since her former husband, Ronald Reagan, had been elected president of the United States. The event was a meeting with TV editors in Los Angeles to answer questions about her new CBS series called "Falcon Crest."
Before Wyman arrived to take her seat at the round table, a CBS spokesman stopped by to let us all know that Miss Wyman would take no questions regarding President Reagan. He didn't tell us not to ask any. That would have not played well in that room full of reporters, all proud of their professionalism. He just said she wouldn't answer any questions on that topic and suggested she might not be too happy if we even asked one.
Naturally, as soon as the press rep left, we editors fell into an intense debate. "Who's going to ask her?" someone inquired. "Not me," said one old pro. "She might clam up and that would finish any chance of getting a good story." A younger, fresher guy said, "She has no business telling us what questions we can't ask!" Another veteran replied: "Maybe not, but it's her business which questions she answers, right?"
I was amused. Of course everybody wanted to know how Jane Wyman felt knowing she might have been First Lady if she'd just put up with Reagan for another couple of decades. But I figured if she had anything interesting to say about Reagan, she'd probably put it in a book and get big bucks for it. Still, as the debate raged on, I feared that un-asked question might hang over the whole press conference, intimidating everybody. I saw my duty clearly.
"Okay, I'll ask the goddamn question," I said. "And I'll ask it first, before any other question, so let the chips fall where they may."
I knew the potential conequences. In 1979, we all gathered at another roundtable for the press conference for CBS' "Working Stiffs," a short-lived situation comedy starrting Michael Keaton and Jim Belushi. CBS warned us Belushi wouldn't take any questions about the recent death of his more famous brother, John Belushi. But someone persisted in asking him about it and others joined in. So Jim Belushi got up and walked out of the press conference, leaving Keaton to do it alone. Might Wyman do the same thing? I'd soon find out.
As luck would have it, Jane Wyman came into the room and sat down in the empty seat right next to me. I guess I looked swollen with THE question because she said, "You look like you're about to pop. Did you want to ask me something?"
Trying desperately to behave like the official diplomat for the TV press, I told her we all knew that the election of her former husband to the presidency had created "certain problems" for her, but it was only logical to expect our readers to want to hear about her feelings on the topic, so, would she be so kind as to...
"No," she said. "I won't. I've refused to discuss that issue ever since he entered politics, so why should I start now?"
Then she proceeded to say, "Some pretty
classy people have tried to get me to talk about it, too!"
Somehow I got the feeling she meant "a lot classier than
you, buddy!"
She said she wouldn't be writing anything about him or helping
anybody else write anything about him. Then she added, "Besides,
he knows everything I know so they can go ask him."
At that point, she proclaimed, "I'm just going to live my life and have fun!"
And, while uttering those words, she also fixed me with a gaze that I can only describe as Gorgon-like. Had she turned that gaze on the grapevines at the Falcon Crest vineyards, she would have withered them all and ruined the 1981 vintage for good. I believe that look was intended to turn me to stone.
It didn't. I kept asking questions, so she moved her chair so that her back was to me. Obviously, she didn't need to turn me to stone. She was just going to pretend she had turned me to stone. Though I couldn't see her face, I imagine it had a look on it as if she were thinking: "Did that statue just ask me a question? What important star would ever answer a question from a statue?" It was very effective. I'm just glad pigeons didn't come and roost on my shoulders.
After 15 minutes or so of questions from the others about "Falcon Crest," a soap opera program created by Earl Hamner, Jr., the creator of "The Waltons," I was losing interest anyway. I knew I would never watch another episode beyond the pilot. It just wasn't my thing. So, I started asking her questions about her movie career, which seemed to blow by her like an insignificant breeze of no consequence.
Then, in a nice little lull in the goings-on, I believe I wedged in an arcane question about an inane little 1941 comedy I'd just seen on the late show, one she made while under contract to Warner Bros. called "The Body Disappears." All I could remember about it was what a cute, sexy little beauty she was back then--with a real flair for comedy. I believe I may have said something to that effect in whatever question I asked.
Suddenly, Wyman turned her chair around and fixed me with what I remember as a most beguiling smile. She winked at me! I may be wrong, but I always thought that meant, "OK, wiseguy. Your probation is over. Join the party!"
Which I did with renewed vigor. For the rest of the hour, I kept dragging her back from "Falcon Crest" to her studio days, with the help, I should say, of a precious few TV editors who were as bored with "Falcon Crest" as I was. The impression I got was that Jane Wyman loved those crazy, fabulous days at Warners and the other studios before that. Sure, she'd been a chorus girl to start, but so had Ginger Rogers and Lucille Ball and all three had come out of it as screen immortals.
Wyman even gleefully recalled her first
line of dialogue ever spoken on screen. It came when Dick Powell
was inspecting the chorus line, spotted her and said, "What
do you do?"
"I swim, ride, dive, imitate wild birds and play the trombone,
" she chirped back.
Wyman broke into pictures in the early 1930s as a "Goldwyn Girl" in musicals produced by Samuel Goldwyn, then made her way to Warners where she tap-danced with the hordes of girls Busby Berkeley put through their paces in the "Golddiggers" pictures and others.
"I didn't even think I was going to be an actress," she said. "You see, I was such a good dancer that I was making $66 a week and that was a lot in 1934. So I wasn't really interested in all this other stuff."
Warners directors liked her and kept moving her into other non-musical pictures in featured parts. Eventually, she was getting all the parts Joan Blondell and Glenda Farrell didn't have time to do.
"Let's face it," she said. "I
was the Joan Blondell of the B's."
Meanwhile, she was getting lots of experience and moving up to
leading roles in all but the studio's "A" pictures.
If you look back over her credits, you may wonder if getting
all that experience was always so pleasant. Wyman conceded some
of her "experience" came in some pretty awful pictures.
She remembered going to a sneak preview of one turkey and deciding
it was so bad that she actually sneaked out the back way to avoid
the crowds out front. But two fans spotted her and tracked her
down.
"They looked me in the eye and said, 'Shame on you!'" she recalled.
in "Brother Rat" (1937), she met Ronald Reagan, who was one of her co-stars. He was also a newcomer on the lot and they hit it off after co-starring in the sequel, "Brother Rat and A Baby" (1940). His career took off a little faster than hers and, by the early 1940s, he was landing major roles in "A" films like "Santa Fe Trail" (1940), in which he played George Armstrong Custer, and "Kings Row" (1942).
Meanwhile, Wyman was doing "B" pictures and speaking lines like, "Stop the presses! I've got something that will break this town wide open!"
"Jack Carson, Dennis Morgan and I did so many pictures together that most people thought we were glued at the hips," she said.
Then Wyman did one semi-dramatic scene in "Princess O'Rourke," a comedy directed by Norman Krasna, that attracted the attention of writers Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder. They thought Wyman might be just right for the part of the long-suffering wife of alcoholic Ray Milland in Wilder's next picture as a director, "The Lost Weekend."
In that 1945 Oscar-winning best picture, Wyman's performance was--and still is--absolutely incandescent. All the lessons she had learned in the studio's "B" pictrures had prepared her to stay right in there with the very best actors in the business. Milland, who won the Best Actor Oscar, for "Lost Weekend" is quite evenly matched for emotional power by Wyman in their best scenes.
Director Clarence Brown was preparing "The Yearling" at MGM and saw Wyman in "Lost Weekend." He needed someone of special character to play the mother of Claude Jarman Jr. opposite Gregory Peck,. who played the father. She got the part and went on loanout. She won her first Oscar nomination for that role in the category of Best Actress of 1946. (Olivia DeHavilland won for "To Each His Own"). Suddenly she had two top box office pictures to her credit as a dramatic actress.
That led to the film that finally lodged her securely among Hollywood's highest ranks of dramatic actresses--"Johnny Belinda." In that heart-rending 1948 drama, she played a deaf mute girl who's a rape victim, but can't tell anyone about it. In my opinion, that performance is one of the all-time great examples of film acting in cinema history.
Wyman was then married to Reagan. She had been pregnant when cast in "Johnny Belinda," but the baby lived only 12 hours. Production was held up while Wyman recovered from the tragic loss. She was under great stress while making the picture, not only because of her grief, but because she wore plugs in her ears, making her virtually deaf all the time she was playing the deaf heroine. She wore no makeup in the film and the luminous quality she projects on screen was just plain her.
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poster for JOHNNY BELINDA. Next to it the DVD cover for the 1951 THREE GUYS NAMED MIKE, in which Wyman played a zany flight attendant. |
When the 1948 Oscars were handed out in March of 1949, Wyman was named Best Actress, beating out Barbara Stanwyck ("Sorry, Wrong Number"), Olivia DeHavilland ("The Snake Pit"), Ingrid Bergman ("Joan of Arc") and Irene Dunne ("I Remember Mama").
Ronald Reagan always blamed that terrible time during the filming of "Johnny Belinda" for the breakup of thier marriage and, in fact, he even cracked, after deciding on divorce, "I think I'll name Johnny Belinda as correspondent."
Still other things were making the marriage unstable. Reagan's career was sliding while his wife's was soaring. Many think he couldn't take being second banana as his Oscar-winning wife was offered plum roles and he was scraping for leading parts. He also had begun his political career by winning the presidency of the Screen Actors Guild. He grew more and more conservative while Wyman didn't. They had grown apart.
For the remainder of her screen career, Wyman insisted on doing a balanced schedule of pictures, avoiding being typecast as a "heavy drama" leading lady. She'd been through type-casting before and didn't want to go there again. That's why you saw her doing a romantic comedy ("A Kiss in the Dark" in 1949 with David Niven), followed by a thriller (Alfred Hitchcock's "Stage Fright" in 1950), followed by a Tennessee Williams drama, "The Glass Menagerie," in 1950) and a musical with Bing Crosby, Frank Capra's 1951 "Here Comes the Groom," in which she and Crosby sang the Oscar-winning song, "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening.")
She earned two more Best Actress Oscar nominations--for "The Blue Veil" (1952) and "Magnificent Obsession" (1954). But, sadly, I'm afraid more people remember her for her long run on "Falcon Crest" than for all the rest of her career combined.
"Falcon Crest" ran on CBS from Dec. 4, 1981 through May 17, 1990. In TV terms, that's forever. Wyman played Angela Channing, power-wielding and mean-spirited owner of the Falcon Crest winery in the mythical Tuscany Valley in northern California. If J. R. Ewing, the evil oil baron villain of CBS' "Dallas," had undergone a sex change operation, he would have been Angela Channing.
Wyman seemed to enjoy being this nasty old lady, but I suspect she'd have been just as happy playing a fairy godmother as long as the show was built around her. Out of the limelight since she sort of gave up movies in the 1960s, she relished being back in the public eye--and not because she was the former wife of the first divorced U.S. president.
Wish I could tell you how grand she was in "Falcon Crest," but it just wasn't my kind of show and I never watched it after reviewing the opening episode. As far as I'm concerned, Jane Wyman remains a movie star in my memories, even though she did quite a bit of quality TV work after the aged too much for the movies to be interested in her.
Though I admire Wyman's screen work in her great dramatic period between "The Lost Weekend" and "Magnificent Obsession," I'd almost rather catch one of her many, many silly comedies or romantic dramas of the 1940s like "You're in the Army Now," "Larceny, Inc." or "Magic Town." I've become quite addicted to her girlish personality of those years and personally think she must have been quite a bit of fun before her life became so serious.
And even though she gave me a first-class workover at that one-time meeting in 1981, I now would like to believe she wasn't really being nasty. That wink she gave me when she let me back into the questioning process told me a lot. I think she won my heart that day, which is probably why I've had a tear or two in my eyes all the while I've been writing this farewell to a great screen lady.
©2007 by Ron Miller.This column first posted Sept. 17, 2007.
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