I dunno...read this and tell me it wasn't because his first wife was a total bitch.
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 rumours of a rift in the marriage were rampan. Louella Parson, who trived 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 ot 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 druing 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 have long interviews to Louella and to her archrival, Hedda Hoper, both of whom took his side. "If this comes to a divorce, I'll name Johnny Belinda as a co-espondent," 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 fliming of the deaf-mute movie. Hedda Hopper had more to say ont he subjec: "I can't really believe it yet. I don't think Ronald Reagan does either. It caught him so flatfooted, so patheically by surprise. I talked ot Ronnie the day he read int he 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 favour contributed to the breakup. Others felt that Jane was simply bored with him. Before th egovernorship and his truly remarkable rise as a recognized world leader, friends from that periode remember, he did indeed engage in long, ponderous, yawn-producing discourses on a variety of subjects. AN ongoing joke in Hollywood druing his campaing 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."
Originally posted by Bollocks:
]
Wasn't Nancy his second wife...wonder if he was loving and faithful to his first wife?
