Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  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�
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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.

  Un-actressy. Very simple, very good manners, cheerful, bright, charming.”38

  “It was a very clubby feeling at Metro,” recalled Armand “Ardie”

  Deutsch, who met Nancy soon after she signed with the studio. “I don’t believe I ever took Nancy out on a quote-unquote date. But hosts would call and see if I could pick her up to come to dinner. And we got to be good friends. I developed an ability to make her laugh by just looking at her. One day we were going into a big soundstage—L. B. Mayer was going to lecture us on the evils of Communism or something of that sort—

  and Nancy and I happened to meet at the entrance. I said, ‘Nancy, don’t laugh. We could get fired.’ She said, ‘Why would I laugh?’ Well, she sat a few seats from me, and I called, ‘Nancy, Nancy.’ And she looked at me and I said, ‘Don’t laugh.’ Well, she was gone. She had to take out her handkerchief and hide her laughter.”39

  Ardie Deutsch had come to Hollywood the same way Nancy had: via the social route. A grandson of Julius Rosenwald, an early partner in Sears, Roebuck, he had gone from private schools in Chicago and New York to 2 3 4

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Dartmouth and the University of Chicago, and from radio to the Navy to Wall Street, never quite sure what he really wanted to do. He met Dore Schary at a dinner party in New York in 1946 and formed a fast friendship that led to a job as Schary’s assistant at RKO and a brief marriage to nightclub singer Benay Venuta. When Schary jumped to MGM two years later, Deutsch jumped with him and became a producer; he was producing his first film, Ambush, a Western starring Robert Taylor, when he and Nancy met. Within three years’ time, Ardie would marry a stylish young widow named Harriet Simon, Nancy would marry Ronald Reagan, and the Deutsches would become charter members of what eventually would be known as the Reagan Group.40

  One of the hostesses who sometimes asked Deutsch to pick up Nancy was Dore Schary’s wife, Miriam. Although the Scharys saw themselves as bohemians—Miriam was a dedicated artist who showed her paintings in a New York gallery—they were quite snobbish about their guest lists, and not every newly signed actress was asked to dinner at their home in Brentwood.

  As Esther Williams wrote in her memoir, The Million Dollar Mermaid, “You didn’t just hang out with people like that. You bore their scrutiny. ‘Were you from a good family?’ ‘Did you come from money?’ ‘Was your talent intellectual or even avant-garde?’”41 Miriam Schary, a difficult woman whose face was partially disfigured from a childhood accident and whom some of the town’s more fashionable hostesses considered “a bit batty,” was won over by Nancy’s deferential manner.42

  Nancy was also taken up by Kitty LeRoy, the very social wife of the director Mervyn LeRoy—and the complete opposite of Miriam Schary. Petite and beautiful, Kitty was from Chicago, and one of her three previous husbands was the owner of the Pump Room, where she came to know Edith Davis and Colleen Moore. Coincidentally, Mervyn owed his first directing job, back in 1927, to Moore, and they had remained close friends after she retired and he went on to make countless hits at Warners and then at MGM, including Little Caesar and The Wizard of Oz. He had been married to Harry Warner’s daughter and was thought to be one the richest men in the business. The LeRoys entertained in the grand manner at their house in Bel Air, and the guests almost always included MCA chairman Jules Stein and his wife, Doris, who was Kitty’s best friend. “Kitty saw herself as Nancy’s duenna,” said her stepdaughter, Linda LeRoy Janklow. “She tried to protect her and make sure she had a good life in California.”43

  Ronnie and Nancy in Hollywood: 1949–1952

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  When Mary Astor dropped out of LeRoy’s next movie, East Side, West Side, he decided to offer her part to Nancy, and Dore Schary gave his okay.

  Two weeks later, at the beginning of September, the studio picked up her first six-month option, and she finally felt secure enough to move into an unfurnished apartment closer to work and have her belongings shipped out from New York.

  Richard Davis came to visit Nancy at the end of that summer, just before she moved out of the Santa Monica bungalow. He had graduated from Princeton in June and taken summer courses at Northwestern University Medical School, so Loyal and Edith rewarded him with a ticket on the Super Chief. He told me he remembered two things about his stay: Katharine Hepburn lent him her beat-up old Ford so that he could drive to Santa Barbara to see a girlfriend, and one night he and Nancy had dinner at Benny Thau’s house in the Hollywood Hills.

  “It was all very much on the up and up,” Davis said. A butler served dinner, and Thau “didn’t paw Nancy or fawn over her. . . . But you could see he was a controller—sort of reminiscent of a Mafioso type.”44 During dinner Thau told a story about growing up in New York. “He said he was very, very poor,” Davis recalled, “and it was Thanksgiving and he had just enough money to buy dinner. The floor of the restaurant was covered in sawdust, and apparently his dinner spilled. There was a good-looking girl sitting next to him, alone, and he was just too embarrassed to pick the dinner up out of the sawdust and eat it. I didn’t have a soft spot in my heart for Benny Thau, but it was a very touching story. Whether it was a ploy to get Nancy’s sympathy, I don’t know.”45

  Nancy was seeing a lot of Benny Thau, and rumors about their relationship were so widespread that the studio put out stories suggesting that Clark Gable had been the hidden hand behind her “gilt-edged” screen test.46

  Nothing was written about her evenings out with Thau—the studio made sure of that—but according to MGM talent chief Lucille Ryman, “Benny took her to premieres and benefits and parties.”47 “People said he was her beau,” said Leonora Hornblow, noting the general perception at the time. “I don’t think this was a great passion on her part. It couldn’t have been. But as far as her career went, it didn’t hurt.”48 Thau’s receptionist later claimed that Nancy would visit his office every Saturday morning, presumably for a quick tryst.49 Nancy Reagan vehemently denied this—“I did not!”—and her brother backed her up: “I think Nancy would only go to bed with someone 2 3 6

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House she was in love with,” he told me.50 As far as her family could tell, it was a classic case of a powerful older man falling for a younger woman who finds him interesting and supportive but is not attracted to him romantically.

  Such relationships can go on for only so long before something gives, and theirs would not be an exception. In the meantime, Nancy continued to enjoy the benefits of Thau’s patronage w
hile trying not to hurt his feelings.

  Along with her princess upbringing (which the publicity department played up to the hilt), her famous family friends, and her instant A-list social life, Nancy’s closeness to Thau stirred up a certain amount of envy.

  What’s more, her reputation as Thau’s paramour scared off younger, less powerful suitors. Amid all the studio-inspired fluff in her scrapbook there is not a single item about her dating anyone until November 1949, eight months after she arrived in Hollywood. And then her date was Ronald Reagan, a power in his own right as president of SAG and chairman of MPIC, the alliance of studio, guild, and union chiefs that had been formed in the wake of the 1947 HUAC hearings to restore Hollywood’s image and cleanse the industry of Communist influence.

  Production on East Side, West Side began in September. Once again, Nancy was cast close to type as the socialite wife of a New York press baron. She appeared in only two scenes, but they were with the film’s star, Barbara Stanwyck, and Mervyn LeRoy made sure Nancy had her fair share of close-ups.

  The big-budget, high-gloss film also starred James Mason as Stanwyck’s un-faithful husband, Ava Gardner as his mistress, who is murdered, and Van Heflin as the reporter who solves the crime.

  On October 28, 1949, the Hollywood Reporter, which was owned by the ultra-right-wing nightclub impresario Billy Wilkerson, published a list of

  “Communist sympathizers” who had signed an amicus curiae brief urging the Supreme Court to overturn the convictions of John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo. To Nancy’s horror, her name was on the list.51 Since she had also been receiving unsolicited mail from left-wing organizations, she called LeRoy in a panic. “She drove over that evening to show me some of the propaganda that was being slipped under her door,” the director wrote in his memoir, Take One. “We were both anti-Communist, and strongly so, so the whole business was annoying.”52