JANE WYMAN
DESPITE HER PERSONAL STRUGGLES, THE ACTRESS ALWAYS FOUND COMFORT IN HER CAREER
The Falcon Crest star and ex-wife of Ronald Reagan never gave up despite personal hardships.
Jane Wyman was never one to settle, and her reaction to the first pilot of Falcon Crest proved no different. “I had to sport a white fright wig, which I positively hated. It was dreadful,” she once revealed of her ’80s and early ’90s series. She soldiered on, she added, until she could flex some creative control. “I virtually produced the second pilot. I remade my character, Angie Channing.
She now wore only the best. Storylines were hardened.”
Once the show was picked up, she stayed driven. “She was a no-nonsense taskmaster,” co-star Robert Foxworth tells Closer. “Always early to the stage, dressed and in makeup, ready to go.” It was a work ethic born from years of striving to succeed. “She was a survivor of the Hollywood system,” Edward Epstein, co-author of Jane Wyman: A Biography, tells Closer of the actress. “Jane was tough, and nobody’s fool,” he adds of the fortitude that saved her from years of hardships and ill-fated loves, including her marriage to Ronald Reagan.
Jane wed Ronald in 1940 (after two brief previous marriages) and they quickly became America’s darlings. “They were fan-magazine favorites,” Epstein says, noting Ronald was called into active military duty in 1942. “He appeared on magazine covers in uniform. She was a housewife and a working woman.”
And a hardworking woman at that, motivated by her desire to escape her bleak Missouri childhood. After her father died at 27 when she was just 5, Jane’s mother moved to Cleveland and left her in the care of foster parents. “I was raised with such strict discipline,” she said, “that it was years before I could reason myself out of the bitterness I brought from my childhood.”
HARD ROAD TO FAME
As a teen, she dropped out of school and headed to Hollywood for a better life, landing a contract deal at Warner Bros. “Every six months I was petrified I’d get dropped,” Jane recalled. “I never turned down an assignment. From 11 movies in 1936, I was only in nine in 1937. Almost had time on my hands,” she joked.
Her career exploded with her Oscarwinning role in 1948’s Johnny Belinda, in which she played a woman who was deaf and unable to speak. At the time, Ronald’s star wasn’t exactly rising. “It’s the old A Star Is Born thing, when the husband’s career is failing and the wife’s is skyrocketing,” Epstein says.
The couple, who had daughter Maureen in 1941 and adopted son Michael in 1945 (a third child, Christine, died the day after she was born prematurely in 1947), divorced in 1949. “She was the one who left,” Epstein says. “He was devastated.”
Jane found love again in 1952 with
“Before I was Ronald Reagan’s son, I was Jane Wyman’s son,” Michael, here with sister Maureen, once said of his mom’s success.
bandleader Fred Karger. They’d wed and divorced twice. “Some women just aren’t the marrying kind. Or, anyway, not the permanent marrying kind. I’m one of them,” she admitted. “I guess I just don’t have a talent for it.”
She did have a talent for her craft, though. In addition to her Oscar win, she earned three other nominations. When Falcon Crest came along, “She was down to playing bit parts in series like The Love Boat,” Epstein explains, “but once Reagan was elected president, she shot back to the top and was the highest-paid actress on TV.”
A personal low, however, would follow: In 2001, daughter Maureen lost her five-year battle with cancer at age 60. Her death devastated Jane, who died six years later at age 90. Still, her legacy of hard work and resilience lives on.
Jane, Epstein says, “followed the rules and she survived,” working into her 70s. “I’ve been in this business 54 years,” she said late in her career. “I made 86 pictures and 350 TV shows. I have not been idle.” — Ron Kelly, with reporting by Amanda Champagne
Meadows and Ilyssa Panitz
Jane and Ronald
“were the personification of the American couple during
World War II,” author Edward Epstein tells Closer. “I never go into anything except with both feet and a lot of enthusiasm.”
— Jane Fred Karger, the last man Jane married, chose her over Marilyn Monroe, who “pulled every trick in the book to get him,” Epstein says.