The Mansions Of Limbo Part 6

Rappetti kept saying over and over, "They're after me. They want me dead. If anyone asks for me, say I am not here." In the next hour, he tried several times to telephone someone in Switzerland, but he could not get through. There were also several calls for him, supposedly from Paris, but Sclauzero sensed that they were local calls and said that he was not there. Rappetti had left his watch in Paris, and asked to borrow one of Tucci's watches and a T-shirt. He used the bathroom and went into one of the two bedrooms of the apartment to rest. Mariarosa remained in the living room, reading. When the police knocked on her door, after leaving Rossellini's apartment, and asked if she had a guest, she followed Rappetti's instructions and said no. Realizing, however, that something was wrong, she went into the bedroom and found the window wide open. Franco Rappetti was not there. On a table by the window were the watch he had borrowed and the T-shirt, folded. She admits it was a mistake to lie to the police. Later she was grilled for six hours.

"Franco Rappetti was pushed, but not physically," Sclauzero told me as we sat in Apartment 11-J of the Meurice. "Other people brought him to this despair. What he never said was who or why." She said that Rappetti was convinced that he was being poisoned by a servant in Rome, who was being paid by "other people," and that he was being pursued. She denied reports that he had money problems, arguing that he was worth about $5 million in art at the time of his death. She also said that after his death all the paintings in his apartment in Rome disappeared overnight.

The death was declared a suicide. Several well-heeled friends who were approached to lend their private planes to fly Rappetti's body back to Italy refused, on the ground that it would be unlucky to fly the body of a suicide. The day following the death, Heini Thyssen arrived at the Waldorf Towers. An oft-repeated story in these circles is that, on his arrival, Heini asked, "Does Denise blame me?" It is generally acknowledged that he arranged for the broken corpse to be shipped back to Genoa, Rappetti's birthplace, in a chartered plane. The body was accompanied by the grief-stricken Denise Thyssen and her sister Penny, who is married to Jamie Granger, the son of film star Stewart Granger. There are those who say the body was shipped before an autopsy could be performed. There are others who believe that Rappetti was already dead when he was thrown from the window. The man who made the arrangements to ship the body for Thyssen was another art dealer he did business with. His name was Andrew Crispo.

Many people who once moved in the orbit of this charismatic art dealer now seek to distance themselves as widely as possible from him. To the baron's great distress, his name has frequently been a.s.sociated in recent times with that of Crispo, who figured prominently and salaciously in the 1985 sadom.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic murder of a Norwegian fashion student named Eigil Vesti. Crispo was a prime suspect in the murder, but his young a.s.sistant Bernard LeGeros was tried and sentenced for the crime. This past October, Crispo, who is currently in prison for tax evasion, was tried on a forcible-sodomy charge and acquitted.

Thyssen and Crispo originally met at Crispo's gallery during an exhibition called "Pioneers of American Abstraction." Thyssen had lent one of his pictures, a watercolor by Charles Demuth, for the show. He complained that on the loan card beneath the picture the name Thyssen-Bornemisza had been misspelled. "How do you know?" asked Crispo. "Because I am Baron Thyssen," was the reply. Thereafter, Thyssen began buying pictures from Crispo.

Franco Rappetti, trying to hold on to his business relationship with Thyssen at the same time that he was conducting an affair with Thyssen's wife, had once told Crispo that he would have to pay him a commission on any pictures he sold to the baron. Crispo had refused. After Rappetti's death, Cris...o...b..came firmly entrenched as Baron Thyssen's New York art dealer. In one month Thyssen spent $3 million on paintings, and the two men developed a close bond that has been the subject of endless speculation. Some people believe that the immensely rich baron financed Andrew Crispo's Fifty-seventh Street gallery. Others believe that there was a deep friendship between Crispo and the baron's oldest son, Georg-Heinrich, now thirty-seven. Georg-Heinrich, also called Heini, is the baron's child by his first wife, a German Princess of Lippe, who is now the Princess Teresa von Frstenberg. "Teresa and Heini should have stayed married," said a grand European lady recently while lunching at Le Cirque. "She wouldn't have cared about his peccadilloes. Ridiculous, all those divorces." Young Heini lives in Monte Carlo and runs the vast family empire so that his father can devote himself entirely to the art collection. The Thyssen fortune, no longer connected with the original iron-and-steel business in Germany, is now derived from shipbuilding in Holland, sheep farms in Australia, gla.s.s, plastics, and automobile parts in America, and a.s.sorted interests in Canada and j.a.pan. Whatever relationship or relationships once existed among father, son, and Andrew Crispo no longer do.

t.i.ta Thyssen told a curious story about an American magazine which sent a crew to photograph her and her husband at their house in Jamaica and then used only a small picture of them, "Like a snapshot." "There was something funny about it," she said, shaking her head at the memory. "They stayed too long for a photography shoot-five days. I felt they were after something. Then we found out that the photographer was the boyfriend of Crispo's boyfriend."

The baron now joined the conversation. "Crispo sold pictures to other people and then declared on the books that I had bought them so his buyers could avoid paying the New York City tax. Two-thirds of the pictures he said that I bought he actually sold to other people."

The baroness nodded her head in agreement.

"What do you call those films where people are killed?" he asked.

"Snuff?" I said. A snuff film is one in which a person is murdered, usually ritualistically, on-camera.

"Snuff, yes. One of the newspapers in New York tried to say that I financed snuff films for Andrew Crispo." He shuddered in disgust.

"Why didn't you sue?" I asked.

He waved my question away with a dismissive gesture. "This is such bad coffee," he said, putting his cup on the table and standing. "These people do not know how to make coffee. You can get better coffee in an airplane." The conversation was over. Neither Rappetti nor Crispo was mentioned again. Back to art.

"The baron is a man in love with his collection. Everything for him is his collection. He loves it. He is in love with it," said the Duke de Badajoz, who is not only the great good friend of both the baron and baroness but also the man who has been, after t.i.ta, the prime influence in guiding the baron's decision to allow the collection to go to Spain. "After all the effort of his father and him to collect and ama.s.s 1,400 pictures, half of which are quite unique, it was more than natural that he was worried for a long time as to what would happen to the collection when he dies. He did not want it dispersed and auctioned. He has been looking around for some years for what could be a solution for the princ.i.p.al part of his collection, the A pictures."

Clearly, the pictures are the focus of the baron's life. "I'm a lucky fellow. These pictures of my father's I have known for fifty years, and I've been collecting for thirty-five years so I know them all." Walking through the graceful galleries that his father built to house the early part of the collection and that he opened to the public after his father's death in 1947, Thyssen was drawing more interest from the browsing tourists and art lovers than the paintings themselves. He moved with the a.s.surance of a celebrity, knowing he was being looked at and talked about. When people came up to ask him to autograph their Thyssen-Bornemisza catalogs, he was completely charming. As he signed the books, he would say a few words or make a joke. He was dressed, as he almost always is, in a blue blazer with double vents, which his London tailor makes for him a dozen at a time, gray flannels, and a striped tie. In his hand he carried a large, old-fashioned key ring, unlocking certain rooms as we entered them and then locking them again as we left.

"I bought this yesterday," the baron said, looking at a Brueghel painting of animals. "I bought it from my sister. It's not in the catalog. It belonged to my father, and my sister inherited it." He moved on. "Now, this picture I bought from my other sister." Although the baron inherited the major part of the collection when his father died, he has spent years buying back the pictures that his two sisters inherited. It is for this reason that he is determined that his collection be kept intact when he dies. Thyssen also had an older brother, whose story remains somewhat vague. "He lived in Cuba," said the baron. "Then he moved to New York and lived at the Plaza Hotel. He lived completely on vitamins. He ODed on vitamins."

"ODed?"

"Hmm, dead," he said. He walked into another room.

"This is my favorite picture," he said, peering as if for the first time at a Ghirlandaio portrait of Giovanna Tornabuoni, a Florentine n.o.blewoman, painted in 1488. "She died very young, in childbirth. We have never known if the picture was painted before or after her death. It was in the Morgan Library in New York. They had to buy some books, so they sold it." He continued to make comments as he pa.s.sed from one painting to the next: "A t.i.tian, very late. He was almost ninety when he painted that ... Who was that man who gave the big ball in Venice after the war? Beistegui, wasn't it? That pair of Tintorettos comes from him ... Everything in this room was bought by me and not by my father. I call it the Rothschild room. All the pictures in this room I bought from different members of the Rothschild family ... My father bought this Hans Holbein of Henry VIII from the grandfather of Princess Di, the Earl of Spencer. The Earl bought a Bugatti with the money. When the picture was shown in England, Princess Margaret said to me, 'Harry is one up on you.' She was talking about his six wives, and my five. I said, 'He didn't have to go through all these tedious legal proceedings I do.' "

Of course, only a fraction of the baron's pictures were on view. Several of his Degas were in New York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Some of his old masters had been lent to the U.S.S.R. and were at that moment in Siberia. Still others were on loan to exhibitions around the world. He shook his head at the complexity of owning such a large collection.

The baron unlocked a door, and we entered a part of his private museum called the Reserve. It is here that pictures for which there is no room in the galleries hang on both sides of movable floor-to-ceiling racks twenty to twenty-five feet high. In one room a restorer with a broken arm, on loan from the J. Paul Getty Museum in California, was cleaning a fifteenth-century Italian portrait. "We have no room for this Edward Hopper," the baron said of a picture of a naked woman sitting on a bed, "and there's no place for that Monet." He rolled the racks back. There was also no place for a Georgia O'Keeffe and an Andrew Wyeth and what seemed like several hundred others.

"That's a fake Mondrian there," he said, approaching it and squinting at it. "I bought it by mistake. An expert told me he saw Mondrian paint it, and I believed him."

"Why do you keep it?"

"I prefer to keep a small fake to a big fake," he said, smiling.

Behind a door, almost out of sight, hung a picture of the baron himself. He made no comment about the portrait until I mentioned it. "That's me by Lucian Freud," he said. The picture, which I had seen at the Lucian Freud exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington, is chilling; it suggests that there is a dark side to this billionaire. "I was getting a divorce at the time," he said, as if explaining Freud's unflattering rendition. People who know the baron well say that it is an extraordinarily accurate portrait. "That is Heini totally," said an American woman who had apparently known the baron extremely well for a short time between marriages and asked not to be identified. "He went into unbelievable mood swings."

Helmut Newton asked the baron to pose next to the Lucian Freud portrait. He did. "Your chin up a bit," said Newton. The baron raised his chin. "Maybe that's how I will look someday, but it's not how I look now." As we were leaving the room, he said, "There's another Greco."

Once the Spanish government agreed to put up the necessary capital to house the paintings, and figured out what compensation should be made to the heirs of Baron Thyssen for renouncing their claim to his pictures, the deal was more or less in order. The baron has five children, starting with Georg-Heinrich from his first marriage. He has two children by his third wife, the former Fiona Campbell-Walter: Francesca, known as Chessy, who is an actress, and Lorne, an aspiring actor. After their divorce, Fiona, a beautiful English model, fell madly in love with Alexander Ona.s.sis, Aristotle's son by his first wife, Tina Livanos. Although Fiona was acknowledged to be a positive influence on Alexander, who was younger than she, Aristotle Ona.s.sis despised her. In 1973, Alexander Ona.s.sis was killed in a plane crash. Thyssen also has a child, Alexander, by his fourth wife, Denise, as well as his adopted son, Borja, brought by t.i.ta to the fifth marriage.

"All the paintings legally belong to a Bermuda foundation, a trust, made by Baron Thyssen," the Duke de Badajoz explained to me in his office in Madrid. "After all the proposals from all the countries were together, the Bermuda foundation met and decided the ideal solution would be to make a temporary arrangement and, if it worked out, to make the final solution."

The Spanish government will provide a palace known as the Villahermosa to house the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection. When the old d.u.c.h.ess of Villahermosa died almost sixteen years ago, the time of block-long palaces for private living was at an end, and her daughters, two d.u.c.h.esses and a marquesa, sought to sell it. The enormous pink brick palace was first offered to the Spanish government for a relatively modest amount of money. For whatever reasons, the government turned down the offer, and a bank purchased the palace. In order to make the building work as a commercial inst.i.tution, the inside was stripped, so all architectural details of the once-elegant structure have been obliterated, including what many people told me was one of the most beautiful staircases in Madrid. Then the bank went bankrupt, and the palace was bought by the Ministry of Culture, for more than five times what the government would originally have had to pay.

The palace is huge. There are two floors below ground level which will be made over for restaurants, an auditorium for lectures, and parking s.p.a.ce. There will be three complete floors of galleries, and the top floor will be used for offices. Several hundred of the A and B pictures from the Thyssen collection will hang in the Villahermosa Palace. A convent in Barcelona is being refitted to hang seventy-five of the religious paintings in the collection. The rest will continue to hang in the private galleries of the Villa Favorita in Lugano.

The estimated time for the reconstruction of the palace is between eighteen months and two years. The ten-year loan period for the collection will not begin until the pictures are actually hung in the Villahermosa. In bottom-line terms, the loan of the pictures is in reality a rental for a ten-year period. "There is an annual fee of $5 million paid as a rent to the Bermuda foundation," said the Duke de Badajoz. Spain also has to provide insurance and security.

Critics of what has come to be known as the baron's Spanish decision say that he coyly received proposals from a host of suitors, playing one off against the other, when all the time he knew he was going to defer to his wife's wishes and send the collection to Spain, at least for a decade. Prince Charles flew to Lugano to lunch at the Villa Favorita in an effort to get the collection for England, and Helmut Kohl, the chancellor of West Germany, made a similar foray, offering a Baroque palace or a brand-new museum to house the collection. It is not out of the question that one or the other of these countries will be so favored when the baron's permanent decision is made. A London newspaper stated at the time of his last divorce that he had a tendency to ask for his gifts back, although the journalist was referring to jewels and not paintings. An interesting observation made to me by a prominent woman in Madrid was that, whatever decision is made, the Spanish pictures in the collection-the Velzquezes, the Goyas, the El Grecos-will never be allowed to leave the country. All the reports over the last year about the agreement have included the added attraction of t.i.ta Thyssen getting the t.i.tle of d.u.c.h.ess. "It has never been part of the negotiation," said the Duke de Badajoz. "It is the king's privilege to grant such a thing." In fact, Baron Thyssen will be offered a dukedom, which would elevate the baroness to d.u.c.h.ess. "Of course, you cannot make a duke for ten years," said the Duke de Badajoz, which means, in practical terms, that the baron and baroness would not be elevated to duke and d.u.c.h.ess if at the end of the ten-year loan period they decided to remove the pictures to England, or France, or West Germany, or j.a.pan, or the United States. In the meantime, the Spanish government has already decorated Baron Thyssen with the Grand Cross of Carlos III, one of Spain's highest honors, for outstanding service to the Spanish government, and has decorated the baroness with an Isabel la Catlica medal, for outstanding civil merit.

For the present, Baron and Baroness Thyssen will be spending more and more time in Madrid to be near the Villahermosa during the reconstruction period and to take part in deciding how the collection will be hung. Their new house on the outskirts of Madrid, in an area that is reminiscent of the Bel-Air section of Los Angeles, is the kind of house that Californians talk about in terms of square feet. It is immense, with an indoor swimming pool next to the gymnasium, and an outdoor pool which may be one of the largest private swimming pools in the world. The decor is pure movie star: beige marble, beige terrazzo, beige travertine, indoor waterfalls, plate gla.s.s in all directions, and a security system that defies unwanted entry. "I want to get rid of all this," said the baroness after her first night there, waving her hands with a sweeping gesture at the custom-made beige leather sofa and chairs. "And all that in there," she continued, waving at the furniture in another of the many rooms, shaking her head at its lack of beauty. They bought the almost new house furnished. She said that she would give all this "modern furniture" to a benefit for the poor that the aristocratic ladies of Madrid were putting on and that she would furnish the new house with the antique furniture from Daylesford, which has been in storage since that estate was sold.

The Thyssens were scheduled to leave the following morning in their private plane for Barcelona, where the baroness and the Spanish opera singer Jose Carreras were to receive awards from the city of Barcelona. "It will be nice to settle down and decorate this new house. We are having the gardens all done over too. We've also bought the lot next door so there will be privacy. And there's the new house in Paris that I have to do over. All this traveling. It gets so tiring."

As we walked through her new gardens, she said, "When I die, I am going to leave all my jewelry to a museum. I hate auctions, when it says that the jewelry belonged to the late Mrs. So-and-so."

January 1989

JANE'S TURN

Remember, I've been in this business fifty-four years. I made eighty-six pictures and 350 television shows. I have not been idle." As she spoke, she leaned forward and her forefinger tapped the table to emphasize her accomplishment. The speaker was Jane Wyman, a no-nonsense star in her mid-seventies, who is one of the highest-paid ladies in show business. Her immensely successful television series for Lorimar, "Falcon Crest," is in its ninth year, and it is she, everyone agrees, in the centerpiece role of Angela Channing, that the public tunes in to see. She got an Academy Award in 1948 for Johnny Belinda, in which she played a deaf-mute who gets raped. She was nominated for Oscars on four other occasions, and she has also been nominated twice for Emmys. She has behind her what can well be called a distinguished career.

We met in a perfectly nice but certainly not fashionable restaurant called Bob Burns, at Second Street and Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica, California, not far from where she lives. Bob Burns is her favorite restaurant, where she has her regular table, a tufted-leather booth. It is one of those fifties-style California restaurants that are so dark inside that when you step in from the blazing sunlight you are momentarily blinded and pause in the entrance, not sure which way to go. When she arrived, I was already at the table. My eyes had become accustomed to the dark, and I was able to watch her getting her bearings in the doorway. It was twelve noon on the dot, and we were the first two customers in the restaurant. Even to an empty house, though, she played it like a star. She is taller than I had expected. Her posture is superb. Her back is ramrod-straight. She is rail-thin, too thin, giving credence to the speculation that she is not in good health. She walks slowly and carefully. Some people say she is seventy-two, some say seventy-five, others say older. What's the difference? She looks great. Her hairdo, bangs over her forehead, is the trademark style she has worn for years. "Is that you?" she asked, peering.

"Yes." I rose and walked toward her.

She held out her hand, strong and positive. The darkness of the restaurant was flattering to a handsome woman of a certain age, but that is not her reason for liking the place. "The three people who own it went to school with my kids," she said. The words "my kids" were said in the easy manner any parent uses when talking about his or her children. She happens not to be close to either of hers, but we didn't talk about that.

She is private in the extreme, almost mysterious in her privacy, a rich recluse who chooses to live alone, without servants even, in an apartment in Santa Monica overlooking the Pacific Ocean. She is a woman in control at all times. There is not a moment off guard. What you see is the persona she wants you to see, and she reveals nothing further. Any aspect of her career is available for discussion, but don't tread beyond. And for G.o.d's sake, I was told, don't mention you-know-who or she'll get up and walk out. Simply put, it pains her that a marriage that ended forty-one years ago seems to interest the press and public more than her career.

"The reason I enjoy TV more than pictures now is that I like the pace better. You've got so many hours to do so much, and you have to get it done. I was on The Yearling for eleven and a half months! Sometimes we only did two pages of dialogue in four days," she said. She shook her head in wonderment at the difference in the two media. She was ready to order lunch. "Are the sand dabs breaded?" she asked the waitress. "Why don't we have a Caesar salad first?" she suggested.

For several years before "Falcon Crest" went on the air, she was in a state of semiretirement, spending most of her time painting. Although I have not seen any of her pictures, I have heard from her friends that she is an extremely talented landscape artist. In 1979 her work was exhibited in a gallery in Carmel, California, and so many of the pictures were sold that she now has none of her own work in her apartment. During those years, she said, she was always being sent film and television scripts, "like Baby Jane, or playing a lesbian, and I didn't want to do that. But when I was sent the pilot script for 'Falcon Crest,' I could see so many facets to the character of Angela Channing. I said, 'I'll give it two years.' It's now nine."

"People say that you control 'Falcon Crest'," I said.

"I am a creative consultant only. They run things by me, or I run things by them. I just want to keep up the quality of the show," she replied. "I usually have my chair at an odd place on the set where no one can bother me. And I do help the young actors on the show. I hold a riding crop out, saying 'Don't do that!' "

"Is it true that actors on the show are told not to speak to you?"

"I hope not," she answered.

An actor who had appeared in a part that ran for three episodes told me that he had been informed by his agent, who in turn had heard it from the a.s.sistant director, that he was not to approach Miss Wyman on the set, as she did not like to be disturbed. He was also told never to go to her dressing room. He was also told that President Reagan was not to be discussed on the set, ever. The surprise to this particular actor was that Miss Wyman "could not have been more delightful, or friendly. She came right up and introduced herself. One time I did knock on the door of her dressing room. I told her that I didn't think that the scene that we were to do together worked, and she asked me in, and we went over it and made some changes.

Susan Sullivan, who played her daughter-in-law on the series for eight years, said, "Jane is the most professional person I have ever worked with. I have seen her battle through illnesses and fatigue and still keep working. She says, 'Let's get this done. We have a job to do,' and everyone gets behind her. She is always willing to help younger actors. She gives instructions nicely and with humor. She once told me, 'You can tell anybody anything if you do it with humor.' She ruled the set with a kind and intelligent hand."

Rod Taylor, who plays her current husband in the series, agreed. "Sure, she rules the set, but everybody expects that. I adore her."

David Selby, who plays her son and has developed the closest friendship of any of the cast members with her, said, "Never once has she asked to be excused from standing in while the other actors in the scene are having their close-ups. She would be upset if you did your close-up without her. She has never once been late. If we go out to dinner, we go to her favorite little spot. I've never been to her apartment."

Another cast member said, "I've spent years working with her, and I still don't know her. She does not let herself be known."

An insider on the show had told me that an attempt would be made on Angela Channing's life in the new season of the series. "Is it true that you are going to be smothered with a pillow in the third episode and that the audience won't know whether you're dead or alive?"

Her eyes became very large. She was surprised that I knew that. She thought for a moment how to answer. "I am going into a coma for a while," she said. She has a way of letting you know when she is finished with a topic, without actually telling you that she is.

"Do you have a social life?" I asked.

"Not really. When you're on a series, it, the series, becomes your life. I don't go out." She gets up at 4:30 each morning the series is in production. "I can't drive in the dark, so I'm picked up by a studio driver. I leave my apartment at exactly 5:50. It's a long drive to the studio. I do my own makeup when I get there.

"I'm a great reader. And I have some close friends. We do a lot of telephoning. My friends understand me when I say, 'Everything is on hold until the series is finished.' " Among her closest friends are the two great film and television stars Loretta Young and Barbara Stanwyck, both of whom have had careers and led lives similar to Jane Wyman's. "Jane is a good girl. She's also a very determined woman," Barbara Stanwyck told me. "She has worked very hard for her successful career. I do mean hard, and she deserves all her success because she earned it." She then added, "I know this is a story about Jane, so be very good and very kind. She would be to you."

In an interview with Jane Wyman from the forties, published in a movie magazine of the period and discovered in the Warner Brothers archives at the University of Southern California, the writer noted, "Talking to her, one gets the impression she's wound up like a tight spring." Approximately forty years later, the same line could still be written about her, except for when she is talking about her career. Then she relaxes. She is a virtual oral historian of the decades she spent at Warner Brothers. She was under contract to Warner's for years, beginning in 1936 at $166 a week. She had been at Fox and Paramount before that. Somewhere along the line, her name was changed from Sarah Jane Fulks to Jane Wyman. "I stayed at Warner's until I went into television," she said. She started out as a wisecracking comedienne and singer, with no interest whatever in dramatic roles. "Jane Wyman has no yen for drama," read one of her early press releases. "Leave that to other people," she was quoted as saying. Her studio biography described her as "pert, vivacious, with plenty of pep. Jane Wyman is a human tornado." Not all of her films were distinguished, but her memory is as astonishingly sharp for details of the making of middling and less-than-middling films as it is for those of such cla.s.sics as Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend. "We were in a three shot," she said, remembering one B-picture incident. "I was in the middle. Jack Carson was on one side, and Dennis Morgan on the other."

The star names flew from her lips. She calls James Cagney Cagney and Bob Hope Hope. "Cagney was my dream man," she said. "Hope wanted me to do this picture with him. You know Hope." Ann Sheridan. Humphrey Bogart. Joan Blondell. Bette Davis. "Bette Davis's dressing room was right next to mine, but we were never friends." Olivia de Havilland. Errol Flynn. "Jack Warner would never put me into any of their costume epics. He said I had the wrong looks. I think Jack was probably right."

She had an early marriage to Myron Futterman, a New Orleans dress manufacturer, about whom almost nothing is known. In 1940 she married Ronald Reagan, a fellow contract player at Warner Brothers, with whom she made four films. Their wedding reception was held at the home of the most famous of all Hollywood gossip columnists, Louella Parsons, who was raised in Dixon, Illinois, where Reagan grew up. Every movie magazine of the period recorded the idyll of the young stars' marriage, in the approved, studio-orchestrated publicity jargon. When Jane became pregnant, the studio announced that she was expecting a bundle from heaven. The bundle from heaven was Maureen Reagan, now forty-eight, who was born in 1941. Four years later the young couple adopted a son, Michael. They were promoted by Warner's as the dream Hollywood couple, and every fan magazine monitored their lives. "Ronnie and I are perfect counterparts for each other. I blow up, and Ronnie just laughs at me. We've never had a quarrel, because he's just too good-natured," said Jane in one interview. Several years after that, the lovebirds became known in the press as "Those Fightin' Reagans," and rumors of a rift in the marriage were rampant. Louella Parsons, who thrived on such matters, told Jane in a column, "I want to write a story and settle all this talk once and for all." Jane was quoted by Louella as replying, "Believe me, I'm going to find out who has started all this talk.... Can't gossips let us keep our happiness?"

In 1947 the marriage did break up. "We're through," Jane said to a columnist during a trip to New York. "We're finished, and it's all my fault." Reagan found out about the termination of his marriage when he read it in the column. He gave long interviews to Louella and to her archrival, Hedda Hopper, both of whom took his side. "If this comes to a divorce, I'll name Johnny Belinda as co-respondent," Hedda Hopper quoted him as saying. Jane had become so immersed in her new career as a dramatic actress that she wore pellets wrapped in wax in her ears so that she would not be able to hear during the filming of the deaf-mute movie. Hedda Hopper had more to say on the subject: "I can't really believe it yet. I don't think Ronald Reagan does either. It caught him so flatfooted, so pathetically by surprise. I talked to Ronnie the day he read in the newspapers what Jane should have told her husband first."

They were divorced in 1948, the same year she won the Academy Award. Jane got custody of the two children, and Reagan got weekend visitation rights. Jane testified that her husband's overriding interest in filmland union and political activity had driven them apart. Friends speculated at the time that Jane's emergence as a bona fide star and Reagan's concurrent slide from box-office favor contributed to the breakup. Others felt that Jane was simply bored with him. Before the governorship and his truly remarkable rise as a recognized world leader, friends from that period remember, he did indeed engage in long, ponderous, yawn-producing discourses on a variety of subjects. An ongoing joke in Hollywood during his campaign for the governorship of California was a remark attributed to Jane Wyman about her former husband. When asked what he was like, she allegedly said, "If you asked Ronnie the time, he'd tell you how to make a watch."

In 1954 Reagan married the actress Nancy Davis, who had been a contract player at MGM. Not long afterward, Jane married the bandleader and musical arranger Freddie Karger, a popular and handsome man-about-town in Hollywood. She divorced him a year later. Karger is often mentioned in Marilyn Monroe biographies as one of her lovers. Years later Wyman married Karger again, and then divorced him again. She has not married since.

In 1954 Jane was converted to Catholicism through the intervention of her great friend Loretta Young. Her Catholicism is a mainstay in her life. In fact, when asked her age, according to friends, she very often replies, "I'm thirty-five." She is counting from the year of her conversion to Catholicism. "She goes to Ma.s.s all the time," said a member of the cast of "Falcon Crest." "Sometimes she even has Ma.s.s said in her room." One of the ongoing characters in the series is a Catholic priest. "We need a lot of advice, because some of the characters are Catholic in the show," said Jane. The priest character is played by a real priest, Father Bob Curtis, a Paulist.

After Johnny Belinda, her career totally dominated her life. "She told me she could never even cook a hamburger. She taught her kids early that she wasn't going to be there," said an actor friend of hers. She had made the long and difficult transition from contract player to leading lady to star, and she hung on to that position through the forties and into the mid-fifties, playing what she has called four-handkerchief roles in such cla.s.sic films of the genre as Magnificent Obsession and The Blue Veil, which remains her favorite. "I was in the middle of the woman's cycle in picture making," she said. She talked about her contemporaries. "Greer, Irene, Olivia, Joan, Bette, Loretta, Barbara, and don't forget Ginger ... I never really knew Ava." She was talking about Greer Garson, Irene Dunne, Olivia de Havilland, Joan Fontaine, Bette Davis, Loretta Young, Barbara Stanwyck, Ginger Rogers, and Ava Gardner. "The thing was, we were all different," she said. The New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther wrote about her in 1953, "Her acting of drudges has become a virtual standard on the screen." But then the cycle of women's films ended. She decided to retire in 1962.

Several seasons ago Lana Turner, who was one of the queens of MGM when Jane was one of the queens of Warner Brothers, came on "Falcon Crest" as a semiregular. From the beginning, there was a coolness between the two stars. Lana, according to one source, took five or six hours to get ready, and Jane, for whom promptness is a pa.s.sion, could never tolerate that. Someone closely connected with the show told me that Jane watched Lana on a talk show one night and felt that she was taking credit for "Falcon Crest" 's coming in number two in the ratings. "Imagine her taking credit for the show's success," said Jane at the time. Lana did not appear on the show again.

In the old days of the studios and contract players, the young actors were taught how to conduct themselves in interviews. They never said anything negative about anyone, and that training is still evident today.

"Was there a difficulty between you and Lana Turner?" I asked.

"Enough said, right there," answered Jane Wyman. She looked at me in a way that said very clearly that Miss Turner was a topic she had finished discussing. Her praise for her fellow actors on the series is unqualified, however. "I love to work with David Selby." "Lorenzo Lamas can do almost anything. He's a wonderful dramatic actor." "I said, 'I want Rod Taylor in the show.' He was occupied doing something else. I said, 'We'll wait.' "

"I never asked anything about her children. I have never approached that relationship with her," said an actor on the series. "I think she was hurt by Michael's book, but she has never said one harsh word about them. The only time I ever heard her mention the name of the president, she said something kind."

Both of her children have written books in which they announced things to their parents that they had not told them before. Maureen wrote that she had been a severely battered wife in her first marriage, and Michael confessed that he had been s.e.xually molested by a man when he was a child. Since Joan Crawford's daughter Christina wrote Mommie Dearest, it has become the vogue among the adult children of the famous to cash in on their privileged un-happiness by spilling the beans on their celebrity dad or mom. Maureen wrote that Jane had not come to her first wedding. Michael wrote that Jane had sent him away to boarding school when he was six. Even the siblings did not seem to get along. Michael, in his book, recounts an incident that happened when he was four years old. He told Maureen that he knew a secret. "What?" she asked. He told her that she was getting a new blue dress for Christmas. Infuriated that he had ruined her Christmas surprise, she snapped, "I know a secret too. You're adopted."

"Do you see your grandchildren?" I asked. Maureen has no children, but Michael has two, Cameron and Ashley.

"Once in a while," she replied slowly. The subject was approaching the danger area. "They're in school when I'm working. They're adorable kids, Cameron and Ashley. Cameron's always saying to me, 'Gramma, how old are you?' And I say, 'I'm as old as my little finger.' And he says, 'How old is that?' and I say, 'As old as I am.' "

"Have you always been so reluctant to be interviewed?" I asked.

"No," she said. "My life's an open book. Everyone knows everything about me. There are all those magazines with lies in them." She had ordered a Diet c.o.ke, and she took a sip. "I used to be interviewed a lot. But the last time I was, I had what seemed to be a very nice interview with the reporter, and then the piece came out. The first line was something like 'This is the president's ex-wife.' That's when the guillotine fell. I don't have to be known as that. I've been in this business longer than he has. It's such bad taste. They wouldn't say it if I was Joe Blow's ex-wife. It wouldn't even be mentioned."

With that said-and it was the closest she got to the unmentionable subject, the former president of the United States-she shifted topics abruptly. "We're going to have fun this year on the series. We have such a good producer, and the writers are wonderful. I feel like I'm doing the first show. The enthusiasm is just wonderful. The 'Falcon Crest' that I want is going on this year."

However reluctant she may be to discuss it, how can her relationship with Ronald Reagan not be discussed? She is the only former wife of a United States president in the history of the country. It is certainly true that if she had been married to Joe Blow it would never be mentioned. Her marriages to Myron Futterman, who manufactured dresses, and to Freddie Karger, who led the dance band on the roof of the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, are never mentioned. But between those two marriages was her longest marriage, to a movie star of the period, with whom she had two children and who later became the governor of the state of California and then the president of the United States. It is part of her history. It will be the lead in her obituary when she dies.

It is a curious coincidence of fate that the eight years of her emergence as the First Lady of television should almost exactly parallel the eight years of her former husband's second wife's emergence as the First Lady of the land. The relationship between the two women is, has always been, and ever will be poisonous, although Jane Wyman has never uttered a single word in public about or against Nancy Reagan. Apparently Mrs. Reagan has not returned the courtesy. There are publishing rumors that her forthcoming book, My Turn, contains several obliquely critical allusions to Jane Wyman in reference to the bringing up of the two children Jane had during her marriage to Ronald Reagan. "Jane was a star. Nancy never was," a Los Angeles socialite acquainted with both said to explain the bad blood between the two women. "For seventeen years, Jane has kept her mouth shut. Nancy hates Jane with such a pa.s.sion because it's the only part of Ronnie that she doesn't control. If you had mentioned Ronnie to Jane, she would have gotten up and walked out." A person friendly with Nancy Reagan told me that in the sc.r.a.pbooks she keeps of newspaper clippings about her romance and marriage to Ronald Reagan, all mentions of Jane Wyman have been blacked out. In turn, a person friendly with Jane Wyman told me in private Jane sometimes refers to Nancy Reagan as Nancyvita.

Until recently, Jane was a regular and favored patron of the famed Hollywood restaurant Chasen's, as well as a close personal friend of Maude Chasen, the widow of David Chasen, who founded the restaurant fifty-three years ago. Although her friendship with Maude continues, she is, by unstated mutual agreement, almost never seen there these days. Chasen's has become the more or less official restaurant of the recent president and his wife, and Jane Wyman's absence from the premises averts the possibility of a chance encounter.

A journalist friend told me about interviewing the former president in the private quarters of the White House. He had been warned in advance that the name Jane Wyman was never mentioned in the presence of the First Lady. But since Miss Wyman had been married to the president for eight years, the journalist ventured very cautiously, when they were deep into the conversation, to bring up her name. To his surprise, the president began to tell a friendly anecdote about his first wife. Midway through the story, Nancy Reagan walked into the room. Without a second's hesitation, the president shifted to another topic right in the middle of a sentence, and the subject of Miss Wyman did not come up again.

Every star of Jane Wyman's caliber pays a price for fame, and she has endured for over fifty years. Although she is husbandless and vaguely estranged from her children, her splendid isolation must not be confused with loneliness. Where she is is where she has always wanted to be from her early contract days.

Like all success-oriented people, she is not without her detractors. Robert Raison was Jane Wyman's agent for nearly thirty years, as well as her friend and sometime escort to social functions in the television industry. He was also the agent of Dennis Hopper, Mich.e.l.le Phillips, and all of the Bottoms brothers. He had a reputation for developing close friendships with his clients. He negotiated the seven-year deal for Jane when she decided to play the role of Angela Channing on "Falcon Crest." At the end of the seventh year of the series, Raison heard from Jane's lawyer that he was through. "When she fired me, she never told me herself. I heard it from her lawyer," said Raison. When he asked why, the lawyer told him to call Jane and discuss it with her. "I did," said Raison. "I told her I wanted to hear it from her mouth. You know what she said?"

"No."

"She said, 'You and me, Bobby, we've run out of gas.' I was going to sue her, but the lawyers settled it for a given amount of money. I can't discuss that amount."

Raison is now writing a book about his years with Jane Wyman. It is tentatively t.i.tled Jane Wyman, Less than a Legend: A Memoir in Close-Up. Although angry and hurt, Raison still expresses residual tenderness for his former client. "Two days after the a.s.sa.s.sination attempt on the president, Jane sent him flowers to the hospital in Washington. Several days later, the president personally called to say thank you for the flowers," Raison recalled recently. He answered the telephone when the president called. "He said to me, 'Thank you for taking care of her, Bobby,' " said Raison.

The check came. In an interview situation like this one, the interviewer always picks up the check. As I reached for it, Jane Wyman tapped my hand and shook her head. "This is on Lorimar," she said.

We walked outside into the brilliant sunlight. Her red Jaguar was parked in the number-one s.p.a.ce of the Bob Burns parking lot. We shook hands. "Where else can you meet such fascinating people and go to such places as people in our business do?" she said. "It's a fabulous life."

In an era of tell-all, Jane Wyman has made the decision to tell nothing. No confessions. No revelations. It's her life, and it's private. There are those who say it is her duty to inform historians of the eight years she shared with a man who later became the president of the United States, years that encompa.s.sed the peak of his minor movie stardom, his presidency of the Screen Actors Guild, and his role in the ign.o.ble House Un-American Activities Committee hearings. But she sees it differently, and that's the way it is.

"She's one tough lady," said one of the cast members of "Falcon Crest." Yeah, but a lady.

November 1989

IT'S A FAMILY AFFAIR