Ronnie and Nancy (45 page)

Edith organized the first annual Passavant Cotillion and Christmas Ball that season—another rung up the Windy City social ladder for her and a mon-eymaker for Loyal’s hospital. Nancy attended with her old standby Bruce McFarland, who was about to get married to a Chicago girl.92

Upon her return to Hollywood, she, too, started playing the field, dating the actors Robert Walker and Robert Stack and the playwright-producer Norman Krasna. Perhaps coincidentally, but probably not, Stack and Krasna were friends of Reagan’s. Nancy had met Stack—who would later play Eliot Ness in
The Untouchables
on TV—when she first arrived in town, with a letter of introduction from Colleen Moore to his mother, a grande dame of old Los Angeles society who had bought Moore’s Bel Air mansion.93 They didn’t really click, and even now he bored her a bit, but she was pleased when he called and asked her out.

She was more amused by Norman Krasna, who had a production deal at Warners with Jerry Wald and was bright, Jewish, and twelve years her senior. For his part, Krasna was crazy about her, and started proposing marriage soon after they started dating.94

She became quite involved with Robert Walker, one of the most talented leading men on the MGM lot—and definitely the most troubled.

Three years older than Nancy, Walker had been married twice, to the movie star Jennifer Jones, who left him for producer David O. Selznick in 1945, and then to director John Ford’s daughter, Barbara, who asked for a
Ronnie and Nancy in Hollywood: 1949–1952

2 4 5

divorce after five weeks in 1948, reportedly because he beat her up when he drank too much. When Nancy met him, he was putting his life back together after spending nearly a year, on Dore Schary’s orders, at the Men-ninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, where he was treated for what
The New
York Times
called “a severe psychological crackup.”95 He was still under psy-chiatric care and prohibited from drinking, and Nancy made it her mission to make sure he stayed sober. She also helped him furnish his house in Pacific Palisades and look after his two young sons by Jones when they visited on weekends.96 By April 1950, one Hollywood columnist was reporting,

“Someone close to Bob tells me he is happier with Nancy than he has been at any time since his parting from Jennifer Jones.”97

Nancy’s best shot at stardom came that winter, when she was cast in Schary’s pet project,
The Next Voice You Hear
, which was based on a magazine story that imagined how people would react if the voice of God suddenly came over the radio. The script focused on an American Everyman named Joe Smith, who works in a Los Angeles aircraft factory, his wife, Mary, who is about to have a baby, and their eleven-year-old son, Johnny. Schary saw the picture as an experiment in a new way of moviemaking, a low-budget, high-concept antidote to the bloated, schmaltzy period pieces that Mayer favored.

Both Schary and the director, William Wellman, a veteran realist, felt strongly that the principal roles should be played by unfamiliar faces, not well-known stars who they thought would be less believable as such utterly average types. James Whitmore, whose second movie had been directed by Wellman the previous year and won him a nomination as best supporting actor, was quickly cast as Joe Smith. Miriam Schary suggested Nancy for Mary. “This idea took a bit of getting used to,” Dore Schary wrote in
Case History of a Movie
. “This would be an exacting star role and Nancy had had only three small parts in pictures, and all of them had been on the ‘society’ side rather than a middle-class housewife and mother. But in her favor was the fact that her looks and manner and inner self were

‘nice’ rather than cover-girl glamorous.”98

Schary asked her to read for the part with Whitmore: “I remember . . .

her waiting next to Jim on one of the straight chairs in the anteroom, her fingers clasped tight in her lap to conceal the turbulent emotions which her enormous brown eyes betrayed.” He feared he might have to tell her

“she wouldn’t do.” But he and Wellman were so impressed by “the way 2 4 6

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House these two superb young people began making the story live and breathe”

that they gave her the part without further ado.99 On the first day of shooting Nancy found a note in her trailer from Schary: “If ‘Mary’ turns out to be as real and as sincere and as sweet as you are, then everybody is going to be happy and we’re going to have the kind of picture we’re hoping for.

All the best to you, darling.”100

The Next Voice You Hear
was shot in fourteen days in late February and early March, and came in under budget at $460,000, less than half the standard cost of MGM films at the time.101 It was a demanding regime, but Nancy proved herself up to the challenge. “It was the first starring role for both of us, and we worked intensely because [we] were very serious about our careers,” James Whitmore recalled. “Nancy was definitely not a frivolous person. When it came to her career, she was deadly earnest. She was delightful to work with, very affable, and had a good, hearty laugh.

She’d throw her head back and just let loose from somewhere in the center of her being. But we didn’t socialize off the set, and there was never any personal conversation about her boyfriends or anything like that. I do recall, though, that she held very strong political opinions which weren’t exactly mine.”102

Nancy’s role required great subtlety: although Joe Smith comes across as capable and good-natured, it is Mary who quietly holds the family together and gently directs her husband when he stumbles. On Wellman’s instructions, Nancy wore no makeup, combed her own hair, and was fitted with a wire-framed pregnancy pad under her $12.95 maternity smocks. “He wanted everything to be as natural as possible. I did what he wanted, and he helped me make the most of my part. . . . I’d heard he was strictly a man’s director and hated directing women. But he was a tiger who turned out to be a pussycat, even though he was known as ‘Wild Bill Wellman.’ ”103

“Nancy Davis is considered a new ‘perfect wife’ type on the strength of her portrayal of James Whitmore’s spouse in
The Next Voice You Hear
,” the
New
York Herald Tribune
’s Hollywood correspondent reported on April 5.

“MGM feels that she can be groomed to follow Myrna Loy, who first earned the title as Nora Charles in the Thin Man series. Studio head Dore Schary has instructed MGM producers to be on the lookout for likely material for the young actress.”104

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Schary himself immediately cast her as a small-town schoolteacher opposite Fredric March in
It’s a Big Country
, which he had co-written and was personally overseeing. He also pushed her for the role of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s wife in
The Magnificent Yankee
, a part that would have required her to age from sixty to ninety during the course of the film.

Ardie Deutsch was the producer, and he gladly tested Nancy in mid-April.

She also had the support of Louis Calhern—Edith’s old friend and a patient of Loyal’s—who was set for the title role. But that was before John Sturges was assigned to direct, and he apparently decided Nancy wasn’t up to the demands of the role.105

Later in April, Walter Huston suddenly fell ill on the night of his sixty-sixth birthday. “It was an aneurysm of the abdominal aorta,” Richard Davis recalled. “He was in god-awful pain and kept calling Dad. Of course, there wasn’t anything you could do about it.”106 Loyal, after sending a Los Angeles colleague to see Huston, flew in the next morning, but he arrived a few hours too late to bid his friend farewell. Nancy remembers going with him to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Walter had been staying, and comforting Nan Huston. More than six hundred people, including the Davises, attended the memorial service at the Academy Award Theater. Spencer Tracy gave the eulogy. “Professionally, he’s easy to rate,”

Tracy said. “He was the best.”107

In May, Nancy’s first movie,
Shadow on the Wall
, was released after nearly a year’s delay, with some very good notices for her. A few days later, Mayer and his new wife, Lorena, hosted the first screening of
The Next
Voice You Hear
at their Benedict Canyon home. Nancy was so anxious she broke her string of pearls and spilled coffee all over Bill Wellman’s wife.108

Happily, the early reviews in the trades were glowing. “The screen has never had a better example of husband-wife affection and understanding than that which Wellman builds between James Whitmore and Nancy Davis,” said the
Hollywood Reporter
. “And they play it to boff results.”109

Variety
added, “Nancy Davis gives her role high realism and full polish.”110

The studio flew Nancy to New York for ten days of interviews and personal appearances before the June 29 opening at Radio City Music Hall. She was thrilled to see her name above the title on the marquee of Manhattan’s most prestigious movie house.
The New York Times
’s Bosley Crowther found Nancy “delightful,” and
Time
praised her for “a fine, attractive piece of well-balanced acting.”111 The critics were less enthusiastic about the film itself—

“a naïve theological hodgepodge,” sniffed
Time
—and it did not do as well 2 4 8

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House as Schary had hoped. Still, because he pushed it so hard,
The Next Voice You
Hear
received tremendous coverage, and Nancy was highlighted in national publications ranging from
Look
and
Seventeen
to
The American Magazine
, which titled its profile of her “Silver-spooned starlet.”112

Nancy frequently mentioned how much she missed major league baseball in Los Angeles, sometimes adding that she rooted for the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox because she had crushes on Joe DiMag-gio and Ted Williams. “Although she’s a bachelor girl,” one interviewer said, “Nancy states emphatically that she doesn’t wish to remain so. . . .

Her role of the wife and mother in
The Next Voice You Hear
. . . made family life so appealing that she’s eager to try it in real life!”113

On July 6, 1950, wearing a black dress, a white hat, and a big corsage, Nancy was photographed celebrating her twenty-ninth birthday with Benny Thau and the Mayers at the Cocoanut Grove. Although she looked pleased to be seen with the head of the studio—one wonders if Mayer gave her the advice he always gave his daughters, “Be smart, but don’t show it”—all was not well between her and Thau. Despite his coldhearted reputation, the jaded old roué had fallen in love with his proper young protégée and was pressing her to marry him. This became increasingly problematic, especially after she started going out with other men, who were much closer to her in age. When I asked if her dates with Reagan, Walker, and Stack made Thau jealous, she snapped, “I don’t know. I was not
his
. . . . He would have liked to have married me. I did not want to marry him. . . . He was a strange little man, really. He gambled a lot. I think he gambled all his money away. I finally got through to him that the answer was no. And that was it.”114

Before his death in 1983, Thau was asked if he had wanted to marry Nancy. “I was friendly with her folks, and me being Jewish, I don’t know,”

he answered. “I thought about it, but that’s all I did.”115

According to Richard Davis, it was Loyal who insisted that Nancy bring the Thau situation to a head. “Dr. Loyal laid down the law,” Davis told me. “Nancy talked to Dr. Loyal very, very frequently, and he was very negative in terms of this man. It was for Nancy’s own good.”116

Nancy saw a lot of her family that summer. In early July, she flew to San Francisco, where her parents were attending a medical convention. Later that month Richard Davis visited Nancy in her new two-bedroom duplex on Hilgard Avenue in Westwood. The highlight of that trip for him, he
Ronnie and Nancy in Hollywood: 1949–1952

2 4 9

said, was accompanying her to a dinner party at Dinah Shore’s house, where he met Groucho Marx and golf champion Ben Hogan.117 In August, Nancy traveled to Chicago for Richard’s wedding to Shirley Hull, a socialite from suburban Wheaton. According to clippings in her scrapbook, she had been “quite ill” before leaving Los Angeles, and “on reaching Chicago, collapsed of nervous exhaustion and had to be hospitalized.” She missed a private screening of
The Next Voice You Hear
that Edith had organized, but after being treated for a “vitamin deficiency,” she was released in time for the August 25 wedding. The studio said Nancy “wore herself to a frazzle plugging her film in New York recently,” but surely breaking with Benny Thau while juggling the fragile Robert Walker, the irrepressible Norman Krasna, and the elusive Ronald Reagan added to the strain.118

Ronnie and Nancy had seen each other infrequently since that first rush of dates in late 1949, but the relationship took off again in the fall of 1950. In a photograph taken at the Ice Capades in September, Nancy looks wan and thin, and Reagan has his arm reassuringly around her shoulder: maybe he needed to feel she was weak as well as strong, in need of support as well as capable of giving it.119 In an interview a few days later, Louella Parsons asked Nancy, “Any one man in your life?” The gossip queen expected her to name Walker, but Nancy was noncommittal. “Not yet,” she answered.

“I won’t be trite and say I’m married to my career, but that’s pretty much the truth.”120

On October 2, Nancy started shooting
Night into Morning
with John Hodiak and Ray Milland—she played a “sturdy war widow” whose big scene involves talking Milland out of committing suicide—and later that month Reagan left for Tucson, where
The Last Outpost
was being filmed.

He wrote her while he was on location—“Just a quick line. . . . I’m balancing this on my knee while I wait to ride gallantly over another hill”—

the first of hundreds of letters, postcards, and telegrams he would lavish on her over the years.121 After he returned, there were more nights out—a cocktail party, a Friars Club roast, supper at the Sportsmen’s Lodge.122