Ronnie and Nancy (42 page)

“You can say I helped her” was how Thau later summed up his role.

“Stars like Norma Shearer, Elizabeth Taylor—she couldn’t compete with that. She was attractive, but not what you’d call beautiful. She [was] a very nice behaved girl.”16

Nancy Davis’s screen test was like few others in the history of Hollywood.

Ordinarily, tests were directed and filmed by whatever studio technicians were available. Nancy’s was directed by George Cukor, one of MGM’s most important directors, and filmed by George Folsey, the prestigious cinematographer. Both were known for flattering female stars, Cukor so much that he was dubbed “the women’s director.” Over the years, he had elicited exceptional performances from Jean Harlow in
Dinner at Eight
, Greta Garbo in
Camille
, Katharine Hepburn in
The Philadelphia Story
, and Norma Shearer, Rosalind Russell, and Joan Crawford in
The Women
.

Fortunately for Nancy, he was extremely close to both Hepburn and Tracy, whose long-term love affair was conducted in a guesthouse Tracy occupied on the director’s Hollywood Hills estate. When Tracy asked him to direct Nancy’s test, Cukor found it hard to say no.17

On Thau’s instructions, the studio’s drama coach, Lillian Burns, spent three weeks working with Nancy on her acting, voice, dancing, deportment, and appearance. As Lucille Ryman, the head of MGM’s talent department, explained, “I had told Lillian to give her extra special care because Benny had asked me to do the best I could with her.”18 Despite all her advantages, Nancy was so nervous on the day of the test that she had a friend of her mother’s, Nathalie Moorhead Dunham, a retired actress, accompany her to the studio. “I remember Nathalie standing there,”

Nancy told MGM’s “hairdresser to the stars,” Sydney Guilaroff, years later,

“while you were doing my hair, the two of you talking and her making suggestions and you saying what you thought and me just sitting there. I was terrified.”19

Nancy read a scene from
East Side, West Side
, a high-society melodrama that was scheduled to begin shooting that summer. Howard Keel, a handsome newcomer who would soon become a star in
Annie Get Your
Gun,
played opposite her. As Nancy remembered it, Cukor was “kind and
Ronnie and Nancy in Hollywood: 1949–1952

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understanding.”20 According to his biographer Emanuel Levy, Cukor “told the studio Nancy had no talent,” and he would make nasty remarks about her for the rest of his life.21

Mayer reportedly agreed with Cukor’s assessment, but the combination of Thau and Schary prevailed. On March 2, 1949, MGM signed Nancy Davis to a seven-year contract starting at $250 a week, with forty weeks a year guaranteed; if the studio renewed her option every six months, by the last year she would be making $1,250 a week. “I grabbed it,” she later wrote. “I was finally earning a regular paycheck, which meant I would no longer have to accept money from my parents.”22

Shortly after being signed, Nancy was asked to fill out a four-page biographical questionnaire for MGM’s publicity department. Dated March 15, 1949, it offers a glimpse into her personality at a moment that, in her words, “marked the end of one period of life and the beginning of another.”23 She stated her height as five-feet-four, her weight as 117 pounds, and shaved two years off her age, making herself twenty-five instead of twenty-seven, a fib she would stick to even as First Lady. She listed knit-ting as her hobby, tennis and swimming as her sports, “dancing and anything that gets me into the sun” as her favorite forms of recreation, and said she liked to sleep in “tailored nightgowns” with the “windows wide open.” Her most treasured possessions: “Two baby pictures of my mother and father—never am without them—and a locket of my great-grandmother’s with a baby picture of my mother inside. Why? Because I’m a sentimentalist, I guess.”

She named as her favorite actors Walter Huston and Spencer Tracy.

Her favorite actresses: Nazimova and, in keeping with her serious-actress image, Laurette Taylor. She admitted to believing in hunches and superstitions (“All of them and then some”), and produced a list of her phobias:

“Superficiality, vulgarity, esp. in women, untidiness of mind and person—

and cigars!” One can hear echoes of her stepfather in her answer to the question “Do you govern your life by any rule or rules?” “Do unto others,” she typed, “as you would have them do unto you. I believe strongly in the law of retribution—you get back what you give.”

She left several questions unanswered, including “Your favorite childhood memory?” Her childhood ambition was “to be an actress.”

Any ambitions outside present career? “Sure.”

Greatest ambition? “To have a successful happy marriage.”24

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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House

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“I arrived in the Last Days of the Glamorous Empire,” wrote the screenwriter and playwright Arthur Laurents, who was signed by MGM not long before Nancy was and whose description of Hollywood in the late 1940s captures both its insularity and seductiveness: “Everybody in town was in pictures or wanted to be in pictures. The aircraft industry was booming and paid well but nobody knew anybody in airplanes except Howard Hughes—who owned a movie studio. The oil wells on Signal Hill pumped day and night, there was even one pumping away smack in the middle of LaBrea Boulevard in West Hollywood but nobody knew anybody in oil, either. There was no smog, everybody played tennis, and everybody drove everywhere in convertibles to get a tan and flirt at stoplights.”25

Until she found Mr. Right, Nancy was thrilled to be at MGM, which was not only the biggest and most important studio but also the most glamorous and the most social—and the most protective of its stars. Ann Rutherford, who was under contract there at the time, compared it to the White House, a place where everything was taken care of for you. “I had no ambition when I was there,” she told me. “All I wanted was to make it last as long as I possibly could. I would carry a tray for someone—I didn’t give a rip—so long as I could stay forever. It was just the most wonderful life on earth. If I wanted to go to New York between pictures, all I had to do was go see [publicity chief ] Howard Strickling and say, ‘Would you arrange some interviews for me in New York?’ And he’d say, ‘What shows do you want to see?’ And they’d come up with house tickets to anything.

. . . I
loved
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. . . . And they really had more stars than there are in heaven.”26

In 1949 the MGM roster included Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly, June Allyson, Deborah Kerr, Gary Cooper, Mickey Rooney, Esther Williams, Elizabeth Taylor, and Lassie. Louis B. Mayer, who had opened the studio twenty-five years earlier with a ceremony that included Army and Navy planes dropping roses from the sky, saw these stars as his children, who needed to be shaped and coddled, reprimanded and controlled by “their stern but loving father.”27 (Dore Schary may have been more liberal politically, but he was just as paternalistic.) Some found this atmosphere oppressive, but it suited Nancy. She was accustomed to being disciplined and sheltered, and with Uncle Walter Huston and Spence
Ronnie and Nancy in Hollywood: 1949–1952

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and Aunt Kate all making movies at Metro in 1949, it felt very much like the “home” that Mayer insisted it was.

“In those days, if you were under contract to a studio, the studio was your life, six days a week,” Nancy later wrote. “If you weren’t making a movie . . . you were doing publicity for one you
had
made. . . . When I was making a movie, I’d have to be on the lot at 7:30 a.m.—women always had early calls for hair and makeup—which meant that I had to be up extra early to drive myself to work. . . . I’d stay on the lot until five or six every evening. And then, even on the days when I wasn’t working, I’d come in and visit other sets.”28

Of course, she was off to a late start—Lana Turner and Ava Gardner, who were more or less her age, had started out as teenagers; Elizabeth Taylor was
still
in her teens. “Mysterious indeed are the ramifications of Hollywood,” wrote Inez Wallace, the first reporter to interview Nancy after she arrived at MGM. “Certain actors are pointed out to writers as ‘comers.’ This means that the studio is putting everything it has behind an actor to make him or her a star. When Nancy Davis was pointed out to me on the MGM

lot I couldn’t believe they intended to build her up. She looks more like a character actress than a leading lady.”29

Nancy’s publicity was personally overseen by Ann Straus, Howard Strickling’s elegant and low-key deputy. “Ann was one of the old-timers in the PR department,” said Bill Fine, who ran the West Coast office of
McCall’s
magazine. “She was very much a lady, and she would be very careful to make sure that the ten or twelve people she was sort of nanny for got good mannerly press. She wasn’t married, so she could always go out and have dinner with you. She had a very deep voice, very soothing, and you could tell her anything. I think the reason Nancy felt strongly about having her as a friend is she never blabbed about anything. She always kept her counsel.”30

Straus introduced Nancy to Amelia Gray, a former department store buyer from Baltimore, who had recently opened an exclusive dress shop in Beverly Hills. Gray, a soigné woman in her late thirties who always wore her jet-black hair swept back in a chignon, attracted both fashion-conscious movie stars such as Rosalind Russell and up-and-coming Los Angeles socialites such as Betsy Bloomingdale. “I was new out here and I didn’t know where to go,” Nancy Reagan told me, “so Ann took me to Amelia, and we became friends. She was a wonderful woman. I never went anyplace else.

I’d go there and sit in Amelia’s little office or the fitting room and we’d have a sandwich. That’s how I met Jimmy—through Amelia.”31

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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House James Galanos, who would become California’s leading designer, was a Greek-American in his twenties, just starting his own business after having apprenticed at a couture house in Paris. “Amelia discovered me,” Galanos told me. “She had heard about me, and she propositioned me: if I would sell to her exclusively, she would make it worth my while. So I decided to go with her. It was unbelievable—every day she’d reorder. And I’d deliver the things—I was still delivering on my own. We’d sit in the back in her office.

I’d sit up on the table, and Nancy was always there. Amelia just loved her, and took her on like a daughter. At the end of every season, Amelia would want all my samples. And that was when Nancy started buying Galanos, because they were a terrific price that she could afford. She
loved
clothes.” How expensive were his dresses then? “When I first started with my little cotton dresses, they retailed for $89 to $125. Cocktail dresses were $275 to $395, which was a lot of money in the fifties.”32

“I remember the first dress of Jimmy’s that I got,” said Nancy Reagan. “I was so excited about it. It was black with a high neck. I remember Amelia turning to one of the salesgirls and saying, ‘See, that’s the way it should be.

Those other dames come in here, and they’re so blasé and bored.’”33

Nancy was almost immediately cast in
Shadow on the Wall
(originally titled
Death in the Doll’s House
), a murder mystery starring Ann Sothern and Zachary Scott. It was a B movie, and they were B stars, but Nancy was given a featured role, playing a child psychiatrist. Before shooting began in late March, the studio allowed her to fly to Phoenix to get some “authentic pointers” on how to play a doctor from her stepfather, who was still vacationing at the Biltmore. For one of her scenes, the costume designer chose an antique gold locket that still had a tag on it from the last time it had been used: by Nazimova in
Escape
, in 1940. Nancy saw that as a positive sign; she was already carrying a gold watch from her late godmother in her purse for good luck.34

The film’s plot revolved around a six-year-old girl who has witnessed her mother’s murder but blocked out all memory of it. The role of Dr. Caroline Canford was a good fit for Nancy, requiring her to be caring, patient, and inquisitive as she coaxed the truth out of the child through play ther-apy and free association. “There is a fine line in acting, and I’ve never heard of a textbook that can define that line,” Nancy later remarked. “You play the character the writer has created, but you also play the role partly the way you yourself would react in a given situation.”35

Ronnie and Nancy in Hollywood: 1949–1952

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She barely had a day off before starting
The Doctor and the Girl
, in which she was typecast as the daughter of a prominent Park Avenue neurosurgeon.

Once again Nancy’s role called for her to be patient, understanding, and smart as she tries to make peace between her domineering father, played by Charles Coburn, and her rebellious younger siblings, played by Glenn Ford and Gloria DeHaven. Apparently her diplomatic skills came in handy off the set when Coburn, who was in his seventies and wore a monocle, asked her to dinner. “It seems he was a lecherous old fellow,” said her Chicago friend Bruce McFarland, who called Nancy once a week during her first year in Hollywood. “She indicated that she spent the entire evening keeping him away from her. She thought it was hysterical.”36

Life seemed to fall into place fairly easily for Nancy in her newly adopted city. She found a nicely furnished two-bedroom bungalow with a flower-filled garden in Santa Monica. Nancy told Inez Wallace she had “a girl who comes in three days a week, cleans up the place and cooks my dinner. At night I study my script for the next day, or read or listen to the radio. I’m never lonely.”37

Van Johnson, who had become one of MGM’s top leading men during the war, and his wife, Evie, lived next door, and kept an eye on her. Clark Gable took her to lunch at the studio, and John Huston, at his father’s behest, gave a dinner party at Chasen’s to welcome her to town. “That was the first time I met Nancy,” recalled Leonora Hornblow. “She was very nice.