Early Reagan

by Anne Edwards

  When Lute Song closed five months after it had opened, Zasu Pitts once more came to the rescue. Nancy was cast in the minor role of Millicent in Cordelia, which was to star Miss Pitts. George Batson, the playwright (also the author of Ramshackle Inn), had tailored the comedy to the star’s talents. The show opened in New Haven on August 23, 1946 (“a road jaunt might survive on [the] strength of the Pitts name, but as a Broadway enterprise the venture looks as futile as some of [Zasu Pitts’s] well-known limp-wristed gestures”). Nancy toured with the show for its short existence and then returned to New York.

  In October 1947, a revival of The Late Christopher Bean, again starring Zasu Pitts and film’s lovable comedian Guy Kibbee, opened out of town with Nancy playing Kibbee’s younger daughter (“nicely sweetened without saccharin”). But the material was hopelessly outdated and characters that had once been good, serviceable stock dummies had become “blighting bores.” Ramshackle Inn was being adapted for television and Zasu Pitts once again asked Nancy to play Alice. The camera did not flatter her, but she enjoyed the experience.

  By early fall 1948, Nancy was unemployed, twenty-seven, and with no steady beau. Edith made one more call—this time to Spencer Tracy in Hollywood, and he seemed genuinely glad to hear from her. They had kept in touch through the years. Recently, when he had been in a place near Chicago resting after one of his severe bouts with alcoholism, Edith had been gracious to both him and Katharine Hepburn, though he knew she preferred his wife, Louise, to Hepburn. “Sure, I’ll see what I can do for Nancy,” he agreed. A few days later, he was on his way to England to film Edward, My Son (Hepburn was to join him a week later), and he had a stopover in New York. He called Nancy and met her for dinner.

  Nancy was fascinated by film stars and films. Tracy promised he would see what he could do to get her a screen test. Although this was a difficult time in Tracy’s life, he did, before his departure for London, call his old buddy Clark Gable, then a bachelor, and give him Nancy Davis’s telephone number. Gable was in worse shape than Tracy. Since Carole Lombard’s tragic death in 1942, he had gone into a steady decline. By 1948, he had gained considerable weight, made several successive money-losing films,* and was dropping in popularity. Alcohol had become a serious problem. His nerves were so shattered that he frequently was unable to face the cameras. More than happy to meet a young woman unconnected to his world and with Tracy’s word that she was attractive, he telephoned Nancy on a trip to New York. They had several dates, but shortly thereafter he met Lady Sylvia Ashley, whom he married in 1949.

  Nothing had changed in Nancy Davis’s life. Although she had met and dated two of Hollywood’s greatest stars, she remained unemployed. Then Benjamin Thau, vice-president of Loews (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer),† called her to have dinner and see a show with him. Gable had passed on her telephone number. Thau might have lacked Tracy’s and Gable’s glamour, but in 1948 and 1949 he wielded a great deal more power at Metro than either of them. At fifty-one he appeared to be Hollywood’s most confirmed bachelor, but his casting-couch exploits were legendary. At the end of the evening, he suggested the possibility of a screen test. Nancy picked up on this idea. Skeptical that Thau would carry through his promise, she called Edith, who in turn reached Tracy, just returned from England. Tracy agreed to speak to Thau. The test was set in motion when Tracy told Dore Schary that New York actress Nancy Davis might be a good bet for one of his upcoming intellectual films. “The girl knows how to look like she’s really thinking when she’s onstage,” Tracy told Schary (although when Tracy saw Davis onstage is in question). With Schary’s interest piqued, a test was arranged and Tracy asked George Cukor, his and Hepburn’s good friend as well as his landlord (the actor lived in the guest house on Cukor’s estate), to direct the test. All lights were go for Nancy. She was going to have to deal with Benny Thau, who might feel she owed him something in return, but as Edith Davis has insisted, “Nancy was a lady—always—always… people thanked me for my daughter’s dignity onstage… never once did Nancy ever cross her legs or do anything… she was a lady.…”

  Rumors about her association with Benny Thau shadowed Nancy’s happiness during her first months at the studio. She was unmarried and living alone, and Hollywood assumed no woman in their business under those circumstances had not “been around.” Marriage was the answer. Most of her life it had been her one true ambition anyway. She had seen how marriage to Loyal Davis had transformed her mother’s life, and she wanted a man with the potential stature of her father, a man who might need a dedicated wife as much as she needed a successful and respected husband. She knew she would gladly give up her career for such a partnership.

  According to a co-worker at Metro, one day Nancy jokingly displayed a list of names that she had compiled of Hollywood’s most eligible bachelors. The list contained directors, producers, agents and lawyers as well as actors. Ronald Reagan’s name occupied the top spot.

  Dore Schary’s wife, Miriam, was not one of Hollywood’s most social wives. Several factors entered into this. Miriam exhibited the usual snobbism of the New York intellectual forced to live in vulgar Hollywood. She pursued her own interests—art, her family, her home. A facial disfigurement, caused by some paralyzed nerves, discomfited certain people. Therefore, she had to feel right with a person before she extended herself. Nancy Davis had been sincere and straightforward with her from the first time they had met. And so, when Nancy mentioned to Dore that she would like to meet Ronald Reagan, Miriam arranged a small dinner party to which they both were invited. As with most dinners at the Scharys’, the children were present, and their daughter, author Jill Robinson, recalled the evening clearly. “There was a lot of political talk and some arguments. Reagan made his [anti-Communist] views very clear. He was terribly articulate. Nancy listened to him attentively. She was sitting opposite him at the dinner table and she kept smiling at him in agreement.” Schary considered Red-baiting a serious danger and the evening had an edge to it.

  Miriam had planned for Reagan to drive Nancy home. But since he was scheduled to leave for New York early the next morning, he was the first to leave. For the hostess to suggest that Nancy depart with Reagan and he escort her home would have been a breach of etiquette, so she said nothing and he left unaccompanied.

  * Davis most probably is referring to Dr. Loyal Davis, her adoptive father,

  † Dore Schary had begun his career as an actor, had made his Broadway debut in support of Spencer Tracy in The Last Mile, and had gone on to co-author the story and screenplay of one of Tracy’s most successful films, Boys Town.

  ‡ Mayer was dethroned as studio head less than two years later (1951), and was engaged for the next six years (until his death) in a bitter and futile attempt to regain his position.

  * East Side, West Side was released after Davis’s second film, although made first. She received no mention in the major reviews of the film.

  * Gary Gray was a child actor at Metro. His career went down, not up, after The Next Voice You Hear.

  † Petersburg and Richmond, Virginia, are neighboring cities. Edith Luckett Davis has claimed 1896 as her birth year. However, Washington, D.C, census records for 1890 list her birth as the previous year. Succeeding records disclose five Luckett children born to Sarah and Charles Luckett: Joseph, 1871; Charles W., 1874 (died 1884); Raleigh, 1880; Virginia, 1882, and Edith, 1889.

  * One book states that Nancy visited Anna Robbins at “the family estate in Verona, New Jersey… in the evenings they sat on the porch of the big old house, or walked around the tennis courts.” Though Anna Robbins had purchased the house in 1928, she and her son Kenneth (and his new wife, Patricia) did not move into the large house until 1935. It had never been a family estate, and there were no tennis courts. Between 1928 and 1935, the Robbins family lived in a modest house at 93 Baldwin Avenue in Glen Ridge, New Jersey.

  † Nancy wrote that “[Edith] came to Bethesda to tell me that she’d met this wonderful man and she wanted to marry him, but she wouldn’t marry him
unless it was all right with me. And I often think, what in the world would have happened if I had said no? I think she would have gotten around it somehow, but I said yes, of course…”

  ‡ In his autobiography, A Surgeon’s Odyssey, Dr. Davis writes of his first marriage to Pearl McElroy: “… my driving urge to be successful as a doctor… was too much for my immaturity to combine successfully with our marriage.”

  * Dr. Davis was an attending surgeon at Chicago’s Passavant Memorial Hospital from 1929 to 1963. He was also associate professor of surgery (1923), progressing to chairman of the department of surgery at the Northwestern University Medical School in Evanston, Illinois, until his retirement in 1963.

  * In the summer of 1941, Davis joined the regular company of the Bass Rocks Theatre, Gloucester, Massachusetts. She was a member of the Coach House Players at Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, the summer of 1942.

  * Three of the four plays in which Davis appeared during the six years between her graduation from Smith and her contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer starred Zasu Pitts. Pitts had built up a large audience who enjoyed her many humorous, addled-lady performances in films during the 1930s, and her plays did well out of New York on the basis of her screen successes.

  * Any Number Can Play, To Please a Lady and Key to the City.

  † Thau was administrative head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer or a relatively short span in 1956. He married St. Louis socialite Elizabeth Jane White in 1955.

  19

  REAGAN HAD COME TO THE SCHARYS’ DINNER PARTY the night he met Nancy leaning on a cane. An accident at the charity baseball game—caused when his nemesis Eddie Bracken tripped him as he was sliding into first base—had resulted in a triple fracture of the leg and was to cause him pain and to need medical attention for many years. He was more concerned about the loss in revenues it had caused ($150,000 he claimed—the salary for two films he had not been able to make) and the time it had taken away from his SAG activities.

  The SAG had hit serious stumbling blocks in its negotiations with other artists’ guilds and unions for the organization and administration of filmed television under a joint-venture agreement.* There were many complicated issues involved. The main split was caused by regional divisions. The eastern unions wanted a merger with the SAG. This meant that all television matters dealing with SAG members would be governed by the East by paid executives, not by working actors. Reagan, Dana Andrews, Lee Bowman and Richard Carlson, representing the SAG along with Jack Dales and Buck Harris, arrived in New York for the meeting on October 4, 1949, hoping they could evolve some sort of partnership in the solution of the giant bugaboo called television.

  Reagan led the SAG team. “He was an aggressive man,” Jack Dales observed. “Depending upon the situation he was two men… aggressive fighter across the table, then in conference among ourselves in our caucuses… most realistic—’Look, what are we going to get, what do we need? If we can go this far with A maybe we can go that far and then we can get a hunk of B’—most reasonable, realistic in conference, but aggressive to the point of temper in negotiations, of losing his temper.”

  The SAG team ended up believing that the other unions were intent on blocking any solution to the problem. “It was like trying to sit down and in theory create a U.S. Steel industry without first building even one blast furnace,” Lee Bowman commented. The New York unions were fighting to keep control in their hands. “You don’t seem to understand,” one of the East Coast union leaders told Bowman. “When we call a strike we’ve got to be able to pull you guys out with us—and if we haven’t control how do we know you’ll go out when we say?”

  Reagan returned to Los Angeles and to another kind of controversy. He did not feel Warner Brothers was doing right by him. He remained particularly unhappy about his role in The Hasty Heart, which he considered had been subordinate to Richard Todd’s. His contract had three years to go, but Lew Wasserman went in and renegotiated it so that Reagan could do outside pictures. In exchange, Warners was to reduce Reagan’s salary to half his yearly income, although he now had to make only one film a year at the studio. Wasserman then went to Universal and made a five-year deal for him for seventy-five thousand dollars a film. Reagan “felt rich” and had visions of two or three films a year at that figure added to his yearly Warners stipend. However, it was now October and he had not been before the cameras since March (The Hasty Heart) because of his injury, forcing Reagan, in order to meet his family commitments, to take a personal advance on his 1950 earnings from Jack Warner. Immediately thereafter he was cast in a film that Jerry Wald had been developing (eventually titled Storm Warning) about mob violence and the Ku Klux Klan in a small town.

  Another controversy arose when Wald could not get an actress to play opposite Reagan. Lauren Bacall had risked suspension rather than take a role “for which I consider myself unsuited.”* Ginger Rogers felt otherwise and was signed. Actually, Wald had written Warner four months earlier: “Rogers… will be happy to do ‘Storm Center’ [the working title] if you want her.” Rogers had read Richard Brooks’s script and liked it, but Steve Trilling wasn’t too keen on her.

  Reagan’s leg presented a problem until Wald decided to give the character a limp. But it looked as though the injury might have time to heal with all the delays that were placed in Wald’s way. A director was not easy to find, nor was the required smalltown location.

  To prepare Reagan for the realistic role he was to play, Wald inundated him with background material (dozens of articles and books). A note was attached to one titled Blue Ridge Country Story: “This is the kind of background [Rainey, the character Reagan would play] should come from.” A picture of Marlon Brando in the stage version of Streetcar Named Desire was accompanied by the suggestion, “Note outfit Brando wears for this role.”†

  On November 3, with Reagan and Rogers poised to go, Wald was working on a second draft of the script with Daniel Fuchs, to whom he wrote: “We have seen the Rainey character act the way he does in so many pictures whether it be played by Dana Andrews or John Wayne or Ronald Reagan. But why shouldn’t this D.A. have problems too? Wouldn’t it be more interesting if he were a man who after years of trying to get the Klan is discouraged, also wants to rush things through, knowing it is hopeless. I would like to see him much less firm, heroic & fearless. Then we would see how really powerful the Klan is, and get away from the pattern of the new sheriff cleaned up the town… at times the script strikes me as being a trifle B-picture-ish.”

  Whatever its final alphabetical rating—A or B—in Storm Warning, Reagan was going to “lick the KKK.… I’m braver than Errol Flynn or Vic Mature,” he wrote a friend back in Dixon. “Wouldn’t Jack have been pleased!” (“They’re all bums [the KKK],” Jack Reagan had once told him.)

  The articles kept coming from Wald—”South Chicago, Memorial Day Riot,” “Scottsboro Boys,” “The Crooked Cross,” “Prelude to American Fascism,” “Who Killed Huey Long?” The list was impressive. Serious stuff. Doris Day was signed for the second female lead, the role of Ginger Rogers’s sister, and Reagan, who had met her previously, dated her.

  “There were two things about Ronnie that impressed me,” Day said later, “how much he liked to dance and how much he liked to talk.… There was a little place on La Cienega that had a small dance floor where he often took me.… When he wasn’t dancing, he was talking. It really wasn’t conversation, it was rather talking at you, sort of long discourses on subjects that interested him. I remember telling him that he should be touring the country making speeches. He was very good at it. He believed, or at least he made you think he believed.

  “One night we went up to his apartment [Londonderry View], and it was the first time I had seen the view from high up there in the Hollywood hills, with the lights of the city spread out below… high above the city lights with that celestial view.…”*

  Day had recently completed a supporting role in another Wald production, Young Man with a Horn.† Brought to Hollywood as a singer, Day had score
d in this film both musically and dramatically. But, given the totally nonmusical content of Storm Warning, she had been skeptical about playing in it. She went to see Jack Warner. “[It was] the only time I can remember being in his cavernous, rococo office.… ‘So you’re a big star already,’ he shouted in that gruff voice of his. ‘She’s made a coupla pictures and already she’s telling the front office how to run the studio.… I’ve got people here I pay five times what you’re getting and they’ve okayed this script and you’re coming in here and telling me how to run my business.… You just do what you’re told to do and let those who know the movie business take care of things, you understand?’“

  Storm Warning went into production in the town of Corona, California (population approximately ten thousand), on November 15, 1949, the date pushed up to accommodate Ginger Rogers, who had had another commitment. The screenplay was still in the process of being rewritten when the company arrived. Immediately this community of rich citrus ranches thirteen miles from the larger city of Riverside and once called South Riverside was transformed into a red-necked small Southern town. Leo Kuter, the film’s art director, claimed they had chosen Corona because on the four corners of its main street were the courthouse, the library, a combined church and undertaking parlor and a service station. “That’s what turned the trick for Corona,” Kuter said. Stuart Heisler, who had finally been assigned director, explained their “idealistic” choice. “There before you—law and order, education, religion, death, and gas and oil.” He did not mention their impatience to start the cameras rolling, which precluded a longer location search, or the fact that Corona was conveniently less than a two-hour drive from the studio.*

  The town took to the invasion of a film company with good humor. Fans fought for autographs and handshakes. The local newspapers ran daily accounts of the stars and the film’s progress. The police force went on twenty-four-hour duty as Coronians learned to live by night, for most of the shooting took place on city streets after sundown, lasting until the early-morning hours.