One of the most heartfelt—and nurselike—stories in her autobiography concerns a visit she had from Spencer Tracy’s handicapped son while she was living in New York. John Tracy had been born deaf, was nearly blind, and had been stricken with polio as a youth—“so much affliction for one boy,” Nancy wrote. Despite his disabilities, he had graduated from college and wanted to visit New York. Louise Tracy, who stuck with her marriage despite her husband’s relationship with Katharine Hepburn, called Nancy and asked if John could stay with her. Nancy put him up on the sofa-bed in her living room and took time to guide him around town, accompanying him to the theater and museums. (“He enjoyed musicals,” she noted. “Somehow, he sensed the music through the vibrations he felt.”) The highlight of his trip was to be a date with a girl he had met in California. Without telling him, Nancy called the restaurant in advance to advise the maître d’ of John’s “difficulty in communicating.” But the girl canceled the morning of the date, and an infuriated Nancy told her off: “I took the telephone call, turned away from Johnny so he couldn’t read my lips, and told her what I thought of her leading him on. . . . I could tell she wasn’t ill, she just did not want to go out with Johnny. It had been one thing to meet Spencer Tracy’s son and therefore meet Spence in Hollywood; it was another thing to date his handicapped son in New York.
Well, she was a lot more handicapped than he was as far as I was concerned. . . . I tried to soften the blow, but he was hurt. I went out to dinner and dancing with him as his date, and we had a good time. He was a marvelous young man, and I admired his courage enormously. . . . I remember the night he left me in New York. A representative from MGM
came to take him to the airport. The man took one of his two bags, and I started to take the other to help him down to the car. He said, ‘Oh, no, Nancy in New York: 1944–1949
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you’re my princess, and I’m your slave,’ and took his own bag. I kissed him good-bye and dissolved into tears.”26
Nancy did not want for dates in New York—her suitors included assistant directors and producers, as well as a young Navy doctor based at the Brooklyn Naval Yard27—but, as she recalled in Nancy, “I had no serious romances.”28 She loved being taken to the Stork Club, where the Duke and Duchess of Windsor held court and Walter Winchell recorded the goings and comings of showgirls and playboys. She would always slip a dinner roll or two into her evening bag for breakfast the next morning, and one night the owner, Sherman Billingsley, who didn’t miss a trick, decided to have a little fun. “On the way out,” Nancy recalled, “the captain handed me a little package. I opened it right in front of my date. There was a card from Mr.
Billingsley which said: ‘For the rolls,’ and inside was a pound of butter.”29
“Nancy was very charming, very outgoing, very friendly,” recalled retired publisher Kenneth Giniger, who started dating her while she was in Lute Song. “She was a very nice-looking girl. I didn’t think of her as a great beauty.” At the time, Giniger, a graduate of the University of Virginia and New York University Law School fresh out of the Army, was publicity director of Prentice Hall. “I knew her mother, who in those days had a radio show in Chicago on which I placed authors,” he explained. “And her mother mentioned to me that she had a daughter in a show in New York, and I ought to look her up, which I did. She was very close to all her mother’s friends. She sort of flowed with the tide, I think. Of course, she had a very social mother and stepfather, and they helped her a great deal.”
Nancy, he said, “was quieter than Edith, more reserved, I would say. Edith was somewhat effusive.” He took her to “the Stork Club a great deal, or El Morocco,” and placed the occasional item about her in the columns. Although he was actively involved in New York’s Republican Party, they rarely discussed politics. “She wasn’t particularly interested,” Giniger said.30
In August 1946, shortly after Lute Song closed, ZaSu Pitts offered Nancy a supporting role in her new play, Cordelia. Though it was scheduled to open on Broadway that fall, the old-fashioned comedy didn’t make it beyond tryouts in New England, and Nancy did not get another theater part for almost a year. She started a scrapbook of her press clippings at that time, meticulously dating each clipping and underlining all mentions of her. The first were a pair of reviews of Cordelia from New Haven and Boston, the 1 8 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House latter dismissing the play as “hoked-up” and “amateurish” but praising her as “unusually talented and attractive.”31 These were followed by a flurry of items from Chicago society columns noting her attendance at various parties and charity events during an extended visit home for Thanksgiving 1946. “Enjoying the music of two bands against a backdrop of red velvet,”
a typical item read, “Nancy Davis here from New York, wearing Kelly green brocaded satin with a large red cabbage rose on her matching purse.
Her dancing partner was Warner [sic] G. Baird Jr.”32 She also pasted in clippings—sent to her by her mother, no doubt—charting her parents’ social and professional progress: Edith, “with orchids pinned to her mink coat,”
arriving at a Chicago theater opening in December 1946; Loyal, now president of the Society of Neurological Surgeons, lined up with his colleagues at a Vanderbilt University medical conference that April.33
In the spring of 1947, Nancy’s agent, Max Richard, persuaded RKO
Pathé, which was based in New York, to use her in several short documentaries for its “This Is America” news series, including one about the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis—not exactly the most glamorous of movie debuts. Her SAG application, dated May 20, 1947, notes her memberships in the Actors Equity Association and the American Federation of Radio Artists. Where it asks for a reference, Nancy put Walter Huston.34
She was still seeing Walter and Nan Huston quite frequently, but not under the happiest of circumstances. The Hustons’ marriage, like the Tracys’, was a case of misery wrapped in tinsel: tense, complicated, fundamentally unhappy. While Walter’s career continued to thrive, his third wife’s had withered away, and she fell into frequent and severe depressions, often requiring hospitalization. “Their marriage got to be very rough,”
said John Huston, Walter’s son by his first wife. “I think Nan was very jealous of my father and his popularity. She wanted to be a star.”35 Since suffering a nervous breakdown in 1942, Nan had been treated by a psychiatrist recommended by Loyal Davis. In February 1947, however, she was so unstable that, on Loyal’s advice, Walter agreed to have her undergo a series of electroshock treatments at Passavant Hospital. He spent the next two months by her side in their New York apartment,36 and then left for Mexico to film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which was directed by John and would win Oscars for both father and son. Nancy visited them during this New York stay, and her sympathy went mostly to Uncle Walter. “Nan was a very difficult woman,” she said. “Very difficult. She Nancy in New York: 1944–1949
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wanted parts in plays that she couldn’t possibly get. But he was so darling.
Just darling.”37
That summer ZaSu Pitts found another job for Nancy, a supporting role in George Abbott’s revival of The Late Christopher Bean, which was touring the stock circuit. For three months the comedy warhorse and her protégée spent each week in a different town, working with actors from the local theater company—a learning experience for Nancy, but a step down for Pitts. As James Karen, who played opposite Nancy at the Olney Theater, in suburban Maryland, pointed out, the largely older audiences were mainly there to see how stars who were popular in the 1920s and 1930s had aged. “Some were happy, beautiful, and well-off financially,” he recalled, “others were old, beaten up, and broke, defeated by a hard profession. I was never sure about ZaSu’s status, because she complained a lot publicly about Roosevelt’s New Deal robbing her, but she seemed to be well-off. Nancy was very much under ZaSu’s control. They lived together and dressed together and ate together. The
y never socialized with us or with any of the locals. They came to the theater, did their job, and then went back to their hotel in Washington.”38
The tour began in Ogunquit, Maine, on July 7, the day after Nancy’s twenty-sixth birthday, and she was showered with telegrams—all saved in her scrapbook—wishing her happy birthday and good luck, from “Mother and Pops” and Richard at Princeton, from Colleen Moore Hargrave and Louise and Spencer Tracy, from her Chicago dancing partner, Warren Baird Jr., and even her former fiancé, James Platt White. (The most intriguing was sent from La Guardia Airfield and signed Tommy: “A birthday message between we two to let you know I’m thinking of you.”)39 The following week, at the Olney Theater, Nancy received a card backstage from General and Mrs. Omar Nelson Bradley saying, “We are in seats F7 and 8. If you have time, we’d love to say hello. We met your mother in Chicago last month.”40 General Bradley had led the American army at Normandy and would soon be named chairman of the joint chiefs of staff by President Truman; this was one more example of Edith’s ability to charm powerful figures and enlist them in her daughter’s cause.
That same week, the American Newspaper Women’s Club gave a tea honoring ZaSu and Nancy at its Washington headquarters, which drew a mix of reporters, socialites, and government wives, including those of Florida senator Claude Pepper and Montana congressman Mike Mansfield 1 9 0
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House (the future Senate majority leader and ambassador to Japan under Presidents Carter and Reagan). “Conversation hummed about politics, the theater and press,” The Washington Post reported. “Miss Pitts told a small group, ‘I’m definitely ’agin communism. I’d like to get on a soap box and warn everybody against supporting it or any other isms.’”41
Nancy had a fairly substantial role in The Late Christopher Bean, playing the younger and nicer of a greedy country doctor’s two daughters, and she got several good reviews. “Nancy Davis, the likeable sister, is spirited and good-looking,” wrote one critic. “She manages to make what might have been a sappy, cloying girl into a real person.” “Nancy Davis does a splendid job,” declared another. “She has lots of charm and grace as well as ability.”42
When the summer season ended, Pitts decided to take the show on a fall tour of regional theaters in larger cities, including Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, and Milwaukee. The Late Christopher Bean opened at Chicago’s Civic Theater on October 20, 1947, and once again Nancy’s dressing room was papered in congratulatory telegrams from family friends and assorted beaus, including the Tracys, the Hustons, Lillian Gish, Louis Calhern, Mary Martin, and Illinois governor Dwight Green. There were flowers from Mr.
and Mrs. Philip Knight Wrigley, of the super-rich chewing gum clan, with a card reading “Chicago is proud of you, Nancy,” and from Orville Taylor, the lawyer who had arranged Nancy’s adoption a decade earlier, who wrote,
“For my adorable Nancy from your general counsel and greatest admirer.”43
Loyal and Edith gave an opening night party, with a guest list that included the governor’s wife, the Hargraves, Narcissa Thorne, Mrs. Alden Swift, and millionaire retailer Leon Mandel and his wife, Carola, who was considered Chicago’s best-dressed woman. The party was noted in the next day’s papers, as was the performance of “a sleek brunette named Nancy Davis, who plays the love interest with an appealing dash of wistful charm.”44
Nancy had been on the road with ZaSu Pitts for nearly six months when The Late Christopher Bean tour came to an end, in December 1947 in Detroit, and from there she returned to Chicago for the holidays. The Davises had moved from 199 to 209 East Lake Shore Drive earlier that year. The eighteen-story limestone fortress built in 1925 by Benjamin Marshall, the architect of the Drake Hotel, was considered the city’s premier apartment building and counted the Davises’ good friend Mayor Kelly among its residents. Their new place was also a duplex, but it had only two bedrooms, and the main rooms were on the ground floor; according to Richard Davis, “it Nancy in New York: 1944–1949
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was the cheapest apartment in the building.”45 Bruce McFarland, Nancy’s old Latin School friend, who was now working at a Chicago radio station, recalled going to the apartment to take Nancy out and finding her in her usual good spirits. “I could hear Dr. Davis upstairs reading the riot act to his son, Dick—he was really ticked off and letting him have it. Nancy and I just looked at each other and smiled and got the hell out of there.” On a second occasion, Loyal and Edith were “playing charades using medical terms” with a couple of other doctors and their wives when McFarland arrived.46
Nancy returned to New York in January 1948. She next appeared on the stage that July, for a two-week run in Detroit, where her pal Robert Fryer was producing a revival of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes. Nancy played the demure daughter of the venomously evil Southern Gothic matriarch Regina Hubbard, a character made famous by Tallulah Bankhead on Broadway and by Bette Davis in the 1941 movie. Ruth Chatterton, one of the great leading ladies of the stage in the 1920s and 1930s, took the part in Detroit. Nancy Reagan told me that she didn’t remember having been in this play,47 and it is not listed among her stage credits in her memoirs or in books and articles about her. But her scrapbook contains seven clippings about it, as well as a sheaf of telegrams—from her parents, the Mandels, Bruce McFarland—she received at the Shubert Lafayette Theater opening night, July 5, 1948, the day before her twenty-seventh birthday. Perhaps she had a falling out with Fryer. A telegram sent from him in Detroit to Nancy in New York on August 5 sounds both conciliatory and foreboding: “Hoping a new future opens for you and you know what’s happening to you. Best luck to my best girl. Love Bobby.”48
The Detroit engagement marked the end of Nancy’s stage career. Meanwhile, her romantic life seemed stymied as well. She still went out once a week or so with Kenneth Giniger, but he told me, “I wouldn’t call it a romance. We were just good friends and that was it.”49 According to Kitty Kelley, she had a “short affair” with Alfred Drake, the married star of Oklahoma! , in early 1948, and subsequently pursued Max Allentuck, the general manager for Kermit Bloomgarden, an important Broadway producer.
Giniger, who knew Drake fairly well, doubted that he and Nancy ever met.
A clipping from March 1948 in Nancy’s scrapbook may confirm her link to Allentuck, noting that he and “Norma Davies [sic], actress, have joined the steady set at Sardi’s.” An unnamed secretary of Allentuck’s told Kelley that he would sometimes slip out a back door when Nancy—“lovely looking and beautifully dressed in her suits and fur coats”—dropped by his office. “Let’s 1 9 2
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House put it this way,” the secretary said. “She liked Max much more than he liked her.”50
One night in September 1948, Nancy got a call from Edith telling her that Spencer Tracy had given her number to Clark Gable. “The King,” as Gable was universally known—he had actually been “crowned” in a ceremony at the MGM commissary in 1938—was planning a trip to New York and would be calling Nancy to ask her out for dinner. “Be sure not to say,”
Edith warned Nancy, “‘Sure, and I’m Greta Garbo.’”51
Gable’s visit was the highlight of Nancy’s New York years, an experience she would still be talking about at dinner parties in her seventies and eighties. Gable spent a week in New York, and after their first dinner date, he took Nancy out every day and every night. Gable was a big baseball fan, so in the afternoons he and Nancy would be driven uptown to Yankee Stadium, where the crowd got so excited by his presence that the police had to escort them to and from their seats. On the days when the Yankees weren’t playing, they lunched at “21.” Then it was dinner at the Colony (the Le Cirque of its day), followed by a stop at the Stork Club. “When we got up to dance,” Nancy recalled, “I never knew I had so many friends. ‘Nancy!
How nice to see you!’ And then, of course, I had to introduce them to my date.”52
Gable, a bachelor since the death of hi
s beloved third wife, Carole Lombard, five years earlier, was forty-six when Nancy met him and not quite the swashbuckling he-man who had carried Vivien Leigh up the stairs in Gone With the Wind. He had put on weight, drank heavily—according to Gore Vidal, “after a few drinks [he] would loosen his false teeth, which were on some sort of peg and then shake his head until they rattled like dice”53—smoked three packs of cigarettes a day, and admitted to being a so-so lover. His postwar pictures had flopped at the box office, but when he took Nancy to see Phil Silvers and Nanette Fabray in the hit musical High Button Shoes, the audience stood and applauded him and would not sit
“until he waved his hand.”54
Nancy was enchanted by him and thrilled with the attention she received simply by being at his side. “I knew all sorts of stars as family friends,” she later wrote, but this “was my first experience going anywhere with a star of that magnitude.” One night he took her to a fancy showbiz party at the Waldorf Towers: “I was sure I would be forgotten and left in a corner somewhere when some of the gorgeous and famous glamour girls got to him. They were certainly aware of his presence! But nothing like Nancy in New York: 1944–1949
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that happened. When he was with you, he was with you and only you, and never looked over your shoulder to see who else was in the room. I think the secret of his charm was that he made whoever he was with feel important. He made me feel important, and I must say it gave my ego a boost.”55
In My Turn, she describes Gable’s attentiveness as “a quality that good courtesans also have,” but she makes it clear that things went only so far between them. “Clark was sexy, handsome, and affectionate, but I found him less the seducer he was reputed to be than a kind, romantic, and fun-loving man. He sent me flowers and we held hands, but I think that in his case the lover image had been so built up that it was a relief for him to be with someone like me, who made no demands on him.”56
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