SAO PAULO, Brazil -- A former Hollywood actress said Wednesday she was engaged to President-elect Ronald Reagan in the early 1940s until movie moguls decided their romance was bad for the box office.
The former actress, Ila Rhodes, widow of a Brazilian industrialist, now lives in Sao Paulo. But in 1939 and 1940, she said, she was in Hollywood, under contract to Warner Bros and dating the man who years later would be elected president.
'I was 21 and he was around 30, tall and cute. Ronnie was very attractive, and I didn't take any antidote to ward off this attraction,' Ms. Rhodes told the newsweekly Mamchete.
Asked if Reagan could confirm or comment on Ms. Rhodes' recollections, Joe Holmes, his West Coast press spokesman, replied: 'I'm not going to bother the president-elect of the United States with something as ludicrous as that.'
Ms. Rhodes said her romance with Reagan started to blossom when they worked together as two young contract stars on the films 'Murder Plane' and 'Secret Service in the Air' in 1939 and 1940. The 1941-42 Motion Picture Almanac lists Ms. Rhodes as part of the cast in 'Secret Service in the Air.'
'They were B films. We made them in four weeks apiece,' Ms. Rhodes told UPI.
But the short time they filmed together led to lunch-break trysts and weekends out together, snatched from a hectic Hollywood schedule, she said.
'I became engaged, with a ring on my finger, when fame started to affect us. The fans started to multiply,' she said.
In all the engagement lasted 8 or 9 months, she said, when movie moguls decided romance between their stars was bad for box-office business.
Arthur Lyons, the Warner producer who had discovered Ms. Rhodes, started taking her to celebrity get-togethers and fashionable night-clubs.
It was a far cry from the simple hot-dogs preferred by the no-smoking, no-drinking, no-dancing young Reagan, Ms. Rhodes said, and it led to the break-up.
'But it was elegantly done,' she said. 'He grew distant, withdrew a little, giving me plenty of room to take any kind of decisive step. And then we decided to face facts.'
Shortly after the couple split they both married, Reagan to actress Jane Wyman and Ms. Rhodes to Lyons.
It was the first of three marriages for Ms. Rhodes. She later married a U.S. Air Force general before finally settling down in Brazil with her third husband businessman Paulo Franco, who died nine years ago.
Looking back, Ms. Rhodes remembers Reagan even in the early days as being more of a politician than an actor.
'To tell the truth, Ronnie didn't go to Hollywood to be a cinema actor: he was sports reporter, a kind of country American, healthy, happy, and open. Because he was handsome, with a good figure and a good voice he just ended up in the star system. But even then, he could hardly conceal his political inclinations,' she said.
At 62, Ms. Rhodes said she had no plans to return to the United States beyond her regular trips home to see family and friends, and she has yet to send her former fiance a congratulatory telegram for landing the biggest part of his life.
'I just don't know where he is these days,' she said. 'But once he's in the White House I'll write him and I'm sure he'll reply. And I'll certainly go and visit him next time I'm in America -- if Nancy will let me, that is.'
