Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House slim, a big star at thirty—turned up with the director Joshua Logan, who wanted to feature Huston in the Maxwell Anderson and Kurt Weill musical Knickerbocker Holiday on Broadway.

  “Walter was the best American actor on the stage, no question about it,” Logan later said. “I flew out to California and then I rented a car and drove to Lake Arrowhead. . . . He had visitors staying with him: a young girl named Nancy Davis and her mother and father. [Walter] arranged immediately for me to read them the play aloud. So I put on a big show. And Nancy Davis sat there and howled and laughed, she was the best audience I ever had.”84 Nancy later wrote that when Uncle Walter asked her opinion, she advised him against taking the part. He ignored her counsel, and would be remembered long after his death for his recording of “September Song” from Knickerbocker Holiday. 85

  Another day, when Nan Huston took Edith off to Los Angeles on a shopping excursion, Uncle Walter suggested making a “radio broadcast”

  of a scene from Othello. He played the title role, as he had on Broadway the year before, Loyal played Iago, and Nancy was Desdemona. When the women returned that evening, Huston played the record for them. “They were easy on me,” Nancy said, “but teased Father unmercifully. Mother told him, ‘You just got hammier and hammier.’ He took it with good nature. He was used to it.”86

  Nancy later said that she had always wanted to be actress, “like my mother,”87 but surely being exposed to the top of the profession at such an early age and in such a special way made it seem almost predestined. “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t interested in the theater, and in school my main interest was drama,” she wrote in My Turn. “I was only an average student . . . [but] I acted in all the school plays. In my senior year, I played the lead in First Lady, by George S. Kaufman. I don’t recall much about the story, but I do remember that I wore a black dress with a white collar, and that when my classmates forgot their lines, I was able to jump in and start talking until we got back on track. Everyone was terribly impressed—including me.”88

  In First Lady, a comedy by Katharine Dayton and George S. Kaufman, Nancy played the wife of one of two candidates running for the presidency. With lots of behind-the-scenes help from her, her man wins. Vita Scholae, the school yearbook, described a rehearsal: “In one corner of the gym two or three girls are desperately trying to learn their lines, but in the other corner, Nancy, with by far the longest role, is perched gaily on top East Lake Shore Drive: 1933–1939

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  of the radiator, apparently telling a grand story to judge by the vigorous gestures and the hilarity of her appreciative classmates. The group has broken up, Miss Magowan having pleaded at length with the uproarious cast.

  For the moment Nancy is not ‘on.’ She sits on the gym floor, her books spread around her, doing her homework with the amazing concentration that is hers. Nothing seems to bother her, neither the chatter of her friends, the frantic coaching of Miss Magowan, nor even Jimmy Stewart’s handsome face grinning up at her from her notebook cover.”89

  Homer Hargrave Jr., who was a freshman at Boys Latin that year, told me that he had a crush on Nancy. “I remember when I first fell in love with Nancy,” he said. “We had a dance club that was just for freshmen in high school. It was called Miss Pratt’s Dancing Class, and they had it in the gym at Girls Latin. Nancy just sort of crashed the dance. I still remember the young man she was with, who I think died during the war.

  But anyway, she sang ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy.’ It was really great.”90

  Nancy may have molded herself to Loyal’s demanding specifications, but there was obviously a lot of Edith in her. An anecdote told by Hargrave shows how bossy she could be. “One Saturday,” he said, “I went to the movie house, and they had changed the prices and I didn’t have enough money. The Davises lived only a block and a half from that theater, so I went to see Mrs. Davis to borrow a dollar. She wasn’t home, but Nancy was. And Nancy wanted to know first who my date was. When I told her it was Joanie Johnson, she approved and gave me a dollar. But that night at dinner, my father asked, ‘What did you do all day?’ And I told this story.

  My father got furious. I had to get up from the dinner table. And it was a cold winter night, and we lived about six or eight blocks from the Davises.

  I had to walk over there and give that dollar back. With the admonition,

  ‘Don’t you ever, ever borrow any money from friends of mine again!’”91

  Nancy Davis graduated from Girls Latin in June 1939, with a B average.

  The text under her photograph in the yearbook read: “Nancy’s social perfection is a constant source of amazement. She is invariably becomingly and suitably dressed. She can talk, and even better listen intelligently, to anyone from her little kindergarten partner of the Halloween party, to the grandmother of one of her friends. Even in the seventh grade, when we first began to mingle with the male of the species, Nancy was completely poised. While the rest of us huddled self-consciously on one side of the room, casting surreptitious glances at the men, aged thirteen, opposite us, 9 2

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Nancy actually crossed the yawning emptiness separating the two groups and serenely began a conversation—with a boy.”92

  That September she entered Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts—just days after Hitler invaded Poland, beginning World War II in Europe. On December 28, 1939, while home for Christmas vacation, she made her debut at the Casino Club, the exclusive dining club in which the Davises had recently been accepted as members. Despite the Depression, this was the era of famous debutantes—Barbara Hutton, Doris Duke, Brenda Frazier—when high-society families spent tens of thousands on lavish coming-out parties for their eighteen-year-old daughters.

  In Chicago there were balls every night during the holiday season, and all kinds of lunches, cocktail parties, and dinners in honor of that season’s debs. Edith had arranged for one of the city’s grande dames, Mrs. Patrick A. Valentine, an Armour heiress, to give a dinner for Nancy at her Gold Coast mansion. The biggest bash of the week, at the Blackstone Hotel with the Glenn Miller Orchestra, was for Priscilla Blackett, the daughter of an advertising tycoon. The night before Nancy’s debut, Jean Wescott’s parents gave their daughter a ball at the Casino.93

  Nancy’s late-afternoon tea dance was a simpler affair, though the attendance of thirty Princeton boys assured its social success. (One of those young men, Frank Birney Jr., the son of a Chicago banker, would soon become Nancy’s first college beau.) To mark the occasion of their daughter’s introduction to society, Edith and Loyal gave Nancy a single strand of pearls, which she wore with her silver-trimmed white gown.94 The trunk baby had become a debutante, the near orphan a near princess.

  C H A P T E R F I V E

  WARNER BROS.

  1937–1941

  In those days at the studios, which governed everything we did, we generally saw the people who were at the same studio. Joe Mankiewicz, the screenwriter, said it was like living in a duchy, in a moated castle. From 1938 to 1941, I was in the Warner Bros. duchy, because my first husband, Wayne Morris, was an actor at Warners. He and Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman acted in the same movies, so we saw them all the time. They were not married when I first met them. Jane, as a matter of fact, was married to a man called Myron Futterman, and it used to send me into fits of laughter. He was a perfectly nice man. I don’t know why, the name tickled me. What were Jane and Ronnie like then? They were adorable. But what did I know? I was eighteen years old. They were young and beautiful. But everybody was beautiful.

  Leonora Hornblow to author,

  February 10, 2000

  LOS ANGELES IN 1937—THE YEAR RONALD REAGAN ARRIVED—WAS A PLACE

  apart, a paradise some would say, far away from the rest of the world and its problems. Its leading industry—moviemaking—employed nearly forty thousand people in the manufacture of fantasies, illusions, and myths for a nation still
struggling with the grim reality of the ongoing Depression.

  The hard times had only increased the public’s appetite for Busby Berkeley musicals, high-society comedies starring Carole Lombard and Myrna Loy, and Saturday-matinee Westerns with Gene Autry and William Boyd as Hopalong Cassidy. The Spanish Civil War, with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy backing one side and the Soviet Union the other, had started the year before, Japan invaded China in July 1937, and a nervous Franklin Roosevelt was beginning to rearm America. But that meant stepped-up orders for Southern California’s burgeoning oil, rubber, and 9 3

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  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House aircraft industries. Bad news was good news, it seemed, in this upside-down Shangri-la.

  The landscape itself was a mirage come true, semidesert transformed into semitropics by sheer human willpower and the massive importation of water from the Owens Valley in Central California, carried over the world’s longest aqueduct, a 233-mile marvel of engineering built between 1906 and 1913 by an itinerant knife sharpener turned municipal water czar named William Mulholland.1 Where there was once sagebrush and mesquite, there was now jasmine and oleander, hibiscus and bougainvillea, and acre upon acre of perfectly manicured and constantly watered lawns surrounding mile upon mile of mock Spanish, Tudor, Italian, and New England mansions, from Pasadena to Palos Verdes, from Hancock Park to Beverly Hills. Even the palms that lined the boulevards to the beaches were imported, and every two-bedroom bungalow in the most modest neighborhoods seemed to come with a flowering orange or lemon tree in its tiny front yard. If New York was the ultimate vertical metropolis, Los Angeles was the ultimate hor-izontal one, sprawling, spacious, languid, preternaturally pretty. The newest city in the world, they called it, the city without a past.

  This was the city of upward mobility and self-invention, hedonism and fundamentalism; the mecca of beauty queens and musclemen, swamis, psychics, evangelists, and astrologers, asthmatics and arthritics, rich retirees fleeing the boredom of Peoria and Omaha, poor Okies fleeing the desperation of the Dust Bowl, Jewish intellectuals and artists fleeing Hitler; the land of the white picket fence and the kidney-shaped swimming pool, of the open shop and the gated community, where the myth of the American Dream was invented by the Eastern European moguls who ran Hollywood.

  Between 1900 and 1940 the population of Los Angeles grew from barely 100,000 to almost 1.5 million,2 making it the fifth-biggest city in the country, after New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.3 A relentless campaign of annexation—the only way for neighboring towns to tap into the city’s water supply was to be annexed—had made it the largest city in area in the country, encompassing 442 square miles from the San Fernando Valley in the north to Venice, San Pedro, and the man-made Port of Los Angeles in the south. This was also the city of the car (one for every 1.6 residents by 1926, a ratio the rest of the country would not match until 1950),4

  the single-family home (a remarkable 94 percent of all dwellings in 1930),5

  and the feverishly promoted residential subdivision (at the height of the 1920s boom, there were 43,000 real estate agents).6

  Warner Bros.: 1937–1941

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  Unlike the older, industrialized cities of the East and Midwest, whose growth was fueled by European immigration, Los Angeles was the result of a great internal migration from the heartland of America. As Mike Davis noted in City of Quartz, the railroad magnates, real estate developers, bankers, and boosters who took over the seedy cattle town in the 1880s “set out to sell Los Angeles—as no city had ever been sold—to the restless but affluent babbitry of the Middle West.”7 The newcomers, in John Gregory Dunne’s words, were “already thoroughly Americanized, with roots going back several generations—hardworking, white, English-speaking Midwestern smalltowners seeking a Protestant Eldorado with a temperate climate and no foreigners fresh from the boat.”8 Until well after World War II, Los Angeles was the most homogeneous large city in America—90 percent white and two-thirds Protestant9—and had been kept that way by the Chinese exclusion acts of the 1890s, the periodic repatriation of Mexican nationals, and the widespread deed covenants and block restrictions excluding blacks and Asians that took hold in the 1920s.10

  Yet set within this WASP utopia was the most ostentatiously powerful Jewish community in the nation, led by the self-made moguls who founded and ran the Hollywood studios. The two most important men in prewar Los Angeles were probably Harry Chandler, the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, the city’s dominant newspaper, and Louis B. Mayer, vice president and head of production of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the largest and grandest of the five major and three minor studios. Chandler, the de facto dictator of the downtown oligarchy that ran Los Angeles, used his newspaper as a promotional vehicle for his vast real estate ventures, and was by far the city’s richest citizen, leaving an estimated $500 million fortune at his death in 1944. Mayer, the undisputed king of the movie industry, owned stock in 20th Century Fox and Columbia Pictures as well as MGM;11 he was the highest-paid individual in the country in 1937, earning $1.3 million in salary and bonuses, and would remain so until 1946. Though they were hardly friends, both men were union-hating, moralistic, conservative Republicans—Mayer was actually chairman of the California Republican Party’s central committee in the 1930s.12

  On matters of politics and industry standards the other studio heads kowtowed to Mayer—except for his great rival, Jack Warner, vice president and head of production at Warner Bros., the second-largest studio. If Mayer and his family were Herbert Hoover’s first dinner guests at the White House in 1929, Jack Warner would brag in his autobiography that he “virtually 9 6

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House commuted” to the Roosevelt White House—“court jester, I was, and proud of it.”13 If Metro was the Tiffany’s of the studios, Warners was the Ford, an efficient assembly line known for its low budgets and long hours. The Warners—Jack’s older brother Harry was the studio’s New York–based president—saw themselves as upstarts, outsiders, innovators, whose movies made up in realism and relevance what they lacked in gloss and sophistication. They had made the first talkie, The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson, in 1927, and pioneered the gangster movie, the headline movie based on news stories, and movies about such controversial subjects as labor disputes and race relations. The studio motto was “Combining good citizenship with good movie-making.” “The motion picture,” Harry Warner told Fortune magazine in December 1937, “presents right and wrong, as the Bible says. By showing both right and wrong we teach the right.”14

  Although Harry and Jack Warner were not really liberals—they counted FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and the jingoistic newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst among their closest friends—many of the studio’s producers, directors, and writers definitely leaned to the left, including Hal Wallis, the executive producer responsible for most of the studio’s A movies, and Jerry Wald, its most important writer (and later producer). With the exception of Dick Powell, a dedicated Republican, most of the studio’s major stars—Edward G. Robinson, Paul Muni, James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis—were also prominent liberal Democrats.

  One can see why an idealistic FDR fan from a working-class background like Ronald Reagan would fit in at Warner Bros. One can also see why an optimistic Disciple of Christ from Illinois by way of Iowa would feel at home in Los Angeles.

  On May 24, 1937, as night fell over the glittering coastal metropolis, twenty-six-year-old Dutch Reagan drove into town in his open-topped Nash. The first thing he did, after checking into the Biltmore, was to thank Joy Hodges, who had made the introduction that led to his contract and who was still working in the hotel’s nightclub. The next day, wearing a new white sports coat and blue trousers, he presented himself at Warner Bros. in Burbank—a week early. “Where in hell did you get that coat?” was the way Max Arnow greeted him. Summoning a young assistant, the casting director ordered, “Take him over to Wardrobe and see what the tailor can do with this outfi
t. He looks like a Filipino.”15

  Over the next few days he was put through the studio makeover mill.

  Warner Bros.: 1937–1941

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  The makeup department told him his head was too small and gave him a new hairstyle. The wardrobe department said his shoulders were too wide and his neck too short and sent him to Jimmy Cagney’s shirtmaker for custom-made shirts with trick collars (which he would continue having made for the rest of his life). The publicity department hated the name Dutch Reagan, even though he insisted it was known throughout the Midwest. When he told them his real name was Ronald, they said they loved it—Ronald Reagan!—and acted as if they had thought it up themselves. In an industry where most of the stars had their names changed, the name Ronald Reagan had the alliterative symmetry the studios considered classy and commercial. And so he came to be called by his proper name for the first time in his twenty-six years.16

  In his first six months at Warners, he had the lead in two B movies and supporting roles in two A movies, a pattern that would prevail over the next four years. He played a radio announcer in Love Is on the Air, a sports reporter in Swing Your Lady, a cavalryman in Sergeant Murphy, and an assistant to Louella Parsons in Hollywood Hotel, which was based on the gossip queen’s CBS radio show of the same name. Meeting Parsons, one of the two dominant columnists in Hollywood—the other being her bitter rival, Hedda Hopper—would prove to be a boon to Reagan’s career. She took an immediate liking to him when she learned that he was from Dixon, Illinois, her beloved hometown, and from then on seized every opportunity to promote him in her daily column in the Hearst-owned Los Angeles Examiner, which was syndicated in six hundred newspapers worldwide.

  Among the Warners stars he worked with in these early movies were Humphrey Bogart and Dick Powell, who would become a close friend.