Ronald Reagan rarely speechified about moral issues — it was considered unseemly for presidents back then (imagine that), and the issue of gay marriage hadn’t yet become a guaranteed vote-getter for the GOP. He was nonetheless the first politician to benefit from the Republicans’ cynical pretense of moral superiority in order to win votes. His was the first presidential campaign to actively court Christian nationalists, who were organized back then as the “Moral Majority,” under the leadership of the late Jerry Falwell.
Several readers of last year’s list suggested that we should have included Reagan in our list of GOP adulterers because Nancy Davis was pregnant when she and Ronnie married. But our research had already shown that the Reagans were both unmarried (Ronnie was divorced and Nancy had never been married) when they engaged in premarital sex in February 1952.
It turns out, however, that earlier in his Hollywood career St. Ronnie did engage in adultery at least once — with Jane Wyman, the woman who would become his first wife. Reagan met Wyman on the set of the film “Brother Rat” in 1938, when he was a B-list actor with a promising career and she was a relative unknown.
They started dating even though Wyman was very much married at the time, to Martin Futterman, a dress manufacturer. who was her second husband. After the relationship between Wyman and Reagan developed in early 1938, she divorced Futterman that December. But after Wyman was free, Reagan developed cold feet, so much so that Wyman threatened to commit suicide if he refused to propose. This ploy worked, and Reagan and Wyman were married at the Wee Kirk o’ the Heather chapel at the Forest Lawn cemetery in Glendale, Calif., in January 1940.
Over the next few years, Wyman’s film career took off. She was nominated for an Oscar in 1946 for “The Yearling,” and won in 1948 for “Johnny Belinda.” But Reagan’s care began the slide in 1942 after he received bad reviews in “Kings Row” that would eventually lead to his playing opposite a chimpanzee in “Bedtime for Bonzo” a decade or so later.
After Reagan’s marriage to Wyman marriage turned rocky, he moved into the Garden of Allah Hotel on the Sunset Strip, which was notorious as the sort of place where stars behaved badly. As Kitty Kelley wrote in “Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography” in 1991:
A series of women passed through Ronald Reagan’s bedroom in those years, so many, in fact, that he later told Joe Santley, a publicist, that he once found himself in the Garden of Allah Hotel with a woman he didn’t know. “I woke up one morning and I couldn’t remember the name of the gal I was in bed with. I said, ‘Hey, I gotta get a grip here.’”
Reagan continued to “play the field,” as he called it, even after he commenced an affair with Nancy Davis in 1949. Kelley also claims that after Nancy became pregnant Reagan proposed marriage to another woman, Christine Larson, who turned him down.
The Reagans were married on March 4, 1952. Their daughter Patti was born seven months later, on Oct. 21, 1952.
One small irony: Nancy Reagan’s godmother was Alla Nazimova, the Silent film superstar (and open lesbian), who was the original owner and namesake of the Garden of Allah Hotel.
Good catch. It amazes me how often the Republicans that court voters based on morals - broke most of those “morals” in their own personal life.
[…] Republican Pantheon, and wormlike wife of that world famous pagan,Nancy The Necromancer, having an extra-marital affair with Jane Wyman before he obviously took a fancy to boys and married titless, straight-up-and-down, anorexic Nancy. […]