Jane Wyman: The Hollywood Icon Who Built Men, Not Boys

A Tough Love Approach to Parenting

Let me tell you a story about a woman who truly understood the value of hard work and discipline. Jane Wyman, an Oscar-winning actress and TV host, wasn’t just another Hollywood starlet. She had everything—a best actress Oscar sitting proudly on her shelf and a lucrative deal as the host of TV’s Fireside Theatre. But here’s the thing: money didn’t spoil her. In fact, in 1955, when her 10-year-old son Michael Reagan asked for a bicycle, she didn’t just rush out and buy it for him. Nope. She had a different plan entirely.

“She said, ‘Do you love it enough to get a job?’” Michael recalls to Closer Weekly, adding that his mom only agreed to buy the Schwinn if he used it to deliver newspapers and paid her back with his earnings. She wasn’t just being stingy—she was teaching him a valuable lesson. “She said, ‘I build men. I don’t build boys,’” Michael shares with a chuckle. And that’s exactly what she did.

Building Strong Foundations

For Michael, this story isn’t just about a bike—it’s about his mom. He describes Jane as a tough but incredibly loving woman who knew the importance of self-reliance. “She was very strict with both Maureen and me,” says Michael, now 76, who was adopted by Jane and her then-husband Ronald Reagan four years after they welcomed their biological daughter. “She taught us to appreciate what we had but to also earn those things.” Jane’s lessons weren’t just random advice—they were rooted in her own life experiences.

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Overcoming Adversity

Born Sarah Jane Mayfield in Saint Joseph, Missouri, Jane faced challenges early in life. At the tender age of four, her world was turned upside down when her parents divorced and her father passed away unexpectedly. Raised by foster parents, she grew up feeling both personally and financially insecure. “It was years before I could reason myself out of the bitterness I brought from my childhood,” Jane once said. But instead of letting her past define her, she used it as fuel to create a better future—not just for herself, but for her children.

From Struggles to Stardom

Despite her tough beginnings, Jane didn’t let her circumstances keep her down. In her teens, she changed her name to Jane Durell and found work as a bit player in Hollywood. After a brief marriage to salesman Ernest Wyman, she signed a contract with Warner Bros. in 1936, finally starting to feel some stability. Four years later, she married Ronald Reagan and welcomed Maureen and Michael into her life. Her breakthrough roles in the 1946 film The Yearling and, two years later, Johnny Belinda, where she won the Oscar, solidified her status as a Hollywood legend.

A Legacy of Tough Love

Through it all, Jane remained grounded. She divorced Ronald in 1949, married and later split with bandleader Fred Karger twice, and embraced Catholicism in 1954 at the urging of her close friend Loretta Young. She raised her children with an old-fashioned work ethic that stayed with them into adulthood. “When I started my talk show in the early '90s, I was driving from L.A. to San Diego, and I called her and said, ‘I need some help. … There’s no money coming in,’” Michael recalls. “I said, ‘Can you help me?’ And she said, ‘Yes, I can.’ I said, ‘Great, Mom. What can you do?’ And she said, ‘I can tell you this. Shut up and keep driving.’”

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As it turned out, her tough love worked wonders. Michael’s show became a success, and he was forever grateful for her unique approach to parenting. “She made people better actors being on the same set as her, and made her family better by following her lead,” Michael says of Jane, who passed away at 90 in 2007. “Her legacy is that she made everybody better.”

—Alison Gaylin, with reporting by Fortune Benatar

For more on this story, pick up the latest issue of Closer magazine, on newsstands now.