Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  Nancy’s concern was not unreasonable. Behind the facade of klieg-lit premieres and glittery dinner parties, Hollywood was an increasingly divided and frightened community in late 1949: the right saw a Red under Ronnie and Nancy in Hollywood: 1949–1952

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  every bed, the left an FBI agent; according to Arthur Laurents, people even suspected their analysts of being government informers.53 The Los Angeles Times was running as many as twenty anti-Communist articles a day, and California state senator John Tenney, who chaired a mini-HUAC

  in Sacramento, had launched investigations into the political activities of Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Gene Kelly, Gregory Peck, Frank Sinatra, and Nancy’s friend Katharine Hepburn.54

  The American Legion threatened to boycott studios that employed Communists, and freshly sprouted newsletters such as Red Channels and Counter-Attack printed lists of suspected Party members, friends of suspected Party members, and friends of friends of suspected Party members.

  (“We don’t care whether an individual cannot be proved to be an outright Communist,” asserted Myron Fagan, whose Cinema Educational Guild distributed hundreds of thousands of pamphlets with titles such as Red Stars in Hollywood. “As far as we are concerned any man or woman who is a fellow traveler, or belongs to a Red front organization, or has supported Communism with financial or moral support, a la Charlie Chaplin, or has come out in open support of the ten branded men who defied the Parnell Thomas investigation, or associates with known Communists, openly or in secret, is just as guilty of treason, and is just as much an enemy of America as any outright Communist.”)55 Although the studios continued to deny that they were blacklisting anyone, some of those whose names appeared on such lists suddenly found auditions were canceled, or parts were cut from movies in which they had already been cast, or their agents stopped returning their calls.

  At MGM, Louis B. Mayer, clinging to power in his all-white office lined with framed photographs of Herbert Hoover, J. Edgar Hoover, and New York’s Cardinal Francis Spellman, sometimes whispered that he wondered if Dore Schary was a Communist, and Schary threatened to sue Hedda Hopper for referring to the studio as “Metro-Goldwyn-Moscow” because it employed him. Schary was one of the few studio executives who tried to resist the rising tide of guilt-by-association blacklisting.56 Gale Sondergaard, a well-regarded character actress who had a supporting role in East Side, West Side, was married to one of the Hollywood 10, director Herbert Biberman, and under investigation by both the FBI and HUAC while the film was being shot. Not surprisingly, Sondergaard had signed the amicus curiae brief.

  Seeing a fellow cast member’s name on the Hollywood Reporter’s list made Nancy all the more nervous.57

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  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House LeRoy tried to reassure Nancy by telling her that the studio would take care of her problem, and on November 7, Louella Parsons ran an item declaring her “100 percent American” and pointing out that there was another Nancy Davis, who supported “leftist theater” and “Henry Wallace’s politics.”58 The Hollywood Reporter also ran an item clarifying the matter, but Nancy was still not satisfied. LeRoy told her he would talk to his old friend from Warners, SAG president Ronald Reagan, and ask him to call her. As she later wrote, she sat up all night waiting for the phone to ring. “I had seen him in films and, frankly, I had liked what I had seen.” She continued, “On the set the next day, a beaming Mervyn reported that Ronnie had checked me out . . . and the Guild would defend my name if it ever became necessary. I told Mervyn that was fine, but I was so worried I’d feel better if the Guild president would call me and explain it all to me.”59

  “She had her heart set on meeting Ronnie,” LeRoy told a reporter years later. “I knew they’d make a great pair, so I went along with it and fixed them up.”60

  The phone rang soon after Nancy got home that afternoon. Reagan said he had an early call the next morning, but if she was free they could have a quick dinner to discuss her concerns. She told him it was awfully short notice and added that she, too, had an early call. “I didn’t, of course, but a girl has to have some pride,” she would write. “Two hours later, my first thought when I opened the door was, This is wonderful. He looks as good in person as he does on the screen!”61

  “The door opened,” Reagan wrote in describing the same scene, “not on the expected fan magazine version of a starlet, but on a small, slender young lady with dark hair and a wide-spaced pair of hazel eyes that looked right at you and made you look back. Don’t get ahead of me: bells didn’t ring or skyrockets explode, although I think perhaps they did. It was just that I had buried the part of me where such things happened so deep, I couldn’t hear them.”62

  A year and a half had passed since Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman were divorced, in June 1948, and although he put on his usual cheerful face, bachelorhood did not agree with him. To cope with his loneliness, he was going out too much, drinking too much, and spending too much—his nightclub bills alone were running $750 a month.63 And while he dated a succession of actresses, singers, and models, including Ann Sothern and Ruth Roman, the word around town was that he was still obsessed with Ronnie and Nancy in Hollywood: 1949–1952

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  Wyman. Reagan would later brag to a buddy that he was sleeping with so many different women that he woke up one morning at the Garden of Allah and “couldn’t remember the name of the gal I was in bed with. I said,

  ‘Hey, I gotta get a grip here.’”64 But, according to Kitty Kelley, some of the women he was linked with in 1948 and 1949 described him as sexually

  “passive” and sometimes so drunk and heartbroken over Jane that he couldn’t perform.65

  “Reagan was a lonely guy because of his divorce,” said Eddie Bracken, a co-star in The Girl from Jones Beach, which was filmed during the summer of 1948, “but a very level-headed guy. He was never for the sexpots. He was never a guy looking for the bed. He was a guy looking for companionship more than anything else. But I wouldn’t say he was strait-laced.”66

  “I just can’t get it right,” Reagan told Doris Lilly, a tall, fetching blonde who later became well known as the author of How to Meet a Millionaire.

  “I’m no good alone.” According to Lilly, Reagan proposed to her a few months after they met, but she turned him down because she knew he wasn’t in love—just desperate for someone who “was willing to make the big moves, push, be there, encourage him, never leave him alone for a moment.

  . . . I couldn’t do it.”67

  Reagan continued to drive the Cadillac convertible Jane had given him before they split, and he moved back into the Londonderry Terrace apartment they had shared as newlyweds, claiming he couldn’t find anything else because of the postwar housing shortage.68 He and Jane dined together regularly to discuss the children, and she seemed to play with his hopes of reconciliation, telling reporters at the October 1948 opening of Johnny Belinda that she was wearing a dress he had given her, then announcing at a big Hollywood dinner party the following month that “Lew Ayres is the love of my life,” setting off speculation about an eventual marriage.69 Such behavior did little for Reagan’s self-confidence, and one can only wonder how he felt when his ex-wife, with Ayers at her side, won the best actress Oscar in March 1949. By then she had signed a new, ten-year contract with Warners.70

  Reagan’s own situation at Warners was going from bad to worse. He had no films in release in 1948, and two of his three 1949 releases— John Loves Mary and Night Unto Night (which had been held back for three years)—were flops, with only The Girl from Jones Beach, a cotton-candy comedy designed to show off shapely Virginia Mayo in a variety of bathing suits, scoring at the box office.71 “Ronnie wasn’t considered a big 2 4 0

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House leading man then,” recalled Connie Wald, the widow of Jerry Wald. “We used to see him after he broke up with Jane. He’d come over to the house, we’d go out to dinner, and the girls were after him like mad. I don’
t think he was ever with anybody—seriously—until he went with Nancy. He was such a sweet man. We always liked him so much. But as far as his career went, it was really going downhill. . . . Who knows what he felt inside. As warm as he was, he was always a very distant person. Charming, but very private—that was Ronnie.”72

  Reagan was convinced that if only he could star in the kind of Western that had made John Wayne a top box office draw his popularity would rebound. To please Jack Warner, he agreed to take the second male lead in The Hasty Heart, a wartime drama set in a military hospital, on the condition that his next movie would be Ghost Mountain, a Western based on a short story he had persuaded the studio to buy. He spent four cold months filming in London—it was his first trip abroad, and he complained inces-santly about the weather, the food, and the austerity policies of Britain’s Labour Party government—only to read in Variety on the day he returned that Ghost Mountain was being assigned to Errol Flynn.73

  Hurt and angry, Reagan refused to take his next assignment, a loan-out to Columbia—a big step for someone who had always been one of the studio’s most accommodating stars.74 Lew Wasserman let his client sulk for a month, then persuaded him to accept a compromise: Reagan would make one picture a year for Warner Bros. for the remaining three years of his contract, his $150,000 annual salary would be cut in half, and he would be free to work for other studios. Indeed, even before the Warners deal was finalized in May 1949, Wasserman announced that Universal had signed Reagan to a five-year, five-picture deal at $75,000 per picture.75

  As bad luck would have it, Reagan broke his right thigh in six places in a charity baseball game three days before he was to start shooting his first film for Universal, and was hospitalized for seven weeks. He had a hard time getting around on crutches when he was released in early August, so Jane let him stay in her fully staffed new house in Holmby Hills with the children while she was in London filming Stage Fright for Alfred Hitch-cock. When she returned, he moved into his mother’s house, on Phyllis Avenue, for a few weeks. If anyone could make him feel better about himself, it was Nelle, who in her late sixties was still driving her old Studebaker to the Olive View Sanitarium, where she now showed patients movies her son got for her from the studio. After he moved back into his apartment, Ronnie and Nancy in Hollywood: 1949–1952

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  he continued to stop by her place every Sunday for brunch and spiritual support.76

  By November things were looking up. Jerry Wald came through with a part in what promised to be a good film, Storm Warning, the story of a courageous district attorney who busts the Ku Klux Klan in a Southern town. On November 13, two days before his first date with Nancy, Reagan won his third full term as SAG president by an overwhelming majority.

  There is a conflicting version of how Ronnie and Nancy met. According to Miriam Schary, several weeks before the Hollywood Reporter printed its list, Nancy told her that she would like to meet Ronald Reagan, and Miriam invited them both to a small dinner party at the Scharys’ house. The dinner, as described by the Scharys’ daughter, writer Jill Robinson, bordered on the disastrous: Miriam, an outspoken liberal, and Ronnie argued about the seriousness of the Communist threat to the film industry; Dore tried to mediate, and Nancy, who was seated opposite Ronnie, “kept smiling at him in agreement.” “I don’t recall his saying much to Nancy,” Miriam said, adding that she had asked Ronnie to pick Nancy up, but he said he would be coming directly from a SAG meeting. She had then hoped he would offer her a ride home, but he was the first to leave, explaining that he had to depart for New York early the next morning.77

  Reagan did indeed travel to New York in early October on SAG business.78 However, Nancy consistently maintained that the Schary dinner never took place, and Mervyn LeRoy always told the story more or less her way. So did her husband in his two books. No matter: if she wasn’t introduced to Reagan at the Scharys’, she seemed determined to meet him that fall. In mid-October, according to SAG records, she called the Guild and

  “indicated her willingness and desire to run for the Board, but due to some confusion in membership records (two Nancy Davises) her name was not included on the ballot.”79 In addition, one of Nancy’s MGM acquaintances remembered her “jokingly” making a list of Hollywood’s most eligible bachelors, including producers, directors, agents, lawyers, and actors, and putting Ronald Reagan’s name on top.80

  In any event, there is little doubt that they hit if off on their first date.

  Ronnie arrived at Nancy’s apartment on the dot at 7:30, still using a pair of canes. She greeted him in a trim black dress with a crisp white collar, the kind of always-right, good-taste classic she had favored ever since she graduated from her Girls Latin uniform. He took her to LaRue’s, on the Sunset 2 4 2

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Strip. On the way, he came up with what he thought was an ideal solution for her name problem.

  “Have the studio change your name,” he said. “You would hardly be the first.”

  “He had no way of knowing,” she later wrote, “how long I had waited to be called Nancy Davis, and how much that name meant to me. ‘I can’t do that,’ I told him. ‘Nancy Davis is my name.’”81

  “Without her amplifying the statement by a single word,” he later wrote, “I knew that whether there were three or thirty Nancy Davises, they could do any name-changing that was going to be done.”82

  Reading their separate accounts of that first dinner, it is clear that he was impressed and she was mesmerized. “One of the things I liked about Ronnie right away was that he didn’t talk only about himself. . . . He told me about the Guild, and why the actors’ union meant so much to him. He talked about his small ranch in the San Fernando Valley, about horses and their bloodlines; he was also a Civil War buff, and he knew a lot about wine. When he did talk about himself, he was personal without being too personal. The whole world knew that he had recently been divorced from Jane Wyman, but he didn’t go into details, and I wouldn’t have liked him if he had.”83

  He was fascinated to learn that her mother had been on Broadway, that Nazimova was her godmother, and that Walter Huston had been staying with her parents in Chicago when his son, John, called to offer him a part in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. He told her that he had been offered a part in that picture, but Warners had made him turn it down for The Voice of the Turtle. He then segued into his miserable time in London, turning his misadventure into an extended comedy routine about too little sunshine and too many Brussels sprouts.

  She laughed at his stories, and he was so enchanted by her laugh that he asked if she’d like to catch Sophie Tucker’s act at Ciro’s, which was just down the Strip, so that he could hear her laugh some more. They ended up staying for the second show—they even managed to dance despite his injured leg. It was almost three in the morning when he took her home, both of them a little giddy perhaps, because, as he told Edmund Morris, the usually abstemious Nancy had helped him consume two bottles of champagne during the course of evening.84

  “Why do people fall in love? It’s almost impossible to say,” she reflected in the introduction to a book of his love letters that was published on their Ronnie and Nancy in Hollywood: 1949–1952

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  fiftieth wedding anniversary. “If you’re not a teenager or in your early twenties, you’ve gone on a lot of dates and met a lot of people. When the real thing comes along, you just know it. At least I did. . . . I loved to listen to him talk. I loved his sense of humor. I saw it clearly that very first night: He was everything that I wanted.”85

  Yet after a spate of dates over the next few weeks—“Ronald Reagan and Nancy Davis together again at Kings,” “Ronnie Reagan doing Mocambo with Nancy Davis,” “Newest telephone number in Ronald Reagan’s book is Nancy Davis, attractive M-G-M actress,” “Ronnie Reagan’s romancing Nancy like mad”—Reagan pulled back.86 During most of 1950, the couple saw each other now and then, and both dated other people. “Ronnie was in no hurry
to make a commitment,” Nancy later explained. “He had been burned in his first marriage, and the pain went deep. . . . My mother reminded me that Loyal Davis had been badly burned in his first marriage. He had been terrified of making another mistake, and she had had to wait until he was ready.”87

  Eager to make up for lost time and income after being incapacitated for months, Reagan completed four films that year: Storm Warning at Warners, Louisa and the infamous Bedtime for Bonzo at Universal, and finally a Western, The Last Outpost, at Paramount. With the exception of Bonzo the chimpanzee, the Hollywood press linked him with every one of his co-stars—including the flame-haired Rhonda Fleming in The Last Outpost and even the nineteen-year-old Piper Laurie in Louisa—but these

  “romances” lasted only as long as the shooting schedules. “He danced well and he had a pleasant personality,” Doris Day, who played opposite him in Storm Warning, said of their dates. “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.”88

  If any woman had a hold on him in 1950, it was still Jane Wyman. Although one of the columns had Wyman and Lew Ayres “ga-ga” over each other as late as November 1949,89 by early 1950 he had decided not to marry her, and Jane once again focused her attentions on her ex-husband.

  For his thirty-ninth birthday in February, Reagan was honored by the Friars Club at a black-tie dinner in the ballroom of the Beverly Hills Hotel, and Wyman was among the six hundred attendees. It was a big night for Reagan—Cecil B. DeMille and Pat O’Brien made speeches extolling his virtues; 2 4 4

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Al Jolson sang “Sonny Boy” and said he hoped his son would grow up

  “to be the kind of man Ronnie is.”90 Jane sat at a table close to the dais, beaming. A few nights later, when she received Photoplay’s Gold Medal in the same ballroom, Reagan had a ringside seat, and “clapped louder than any other person in the audience,” according to the magazine’s reporter, who added, “So many in town are still hoping that these two will reconcile.”91