Nancy saw in the New Year with her family in Chicago. She must have been happy to get away: not only had Ronnie stopped calling, but a few days before she left, the studio announced that the part she saw as her big chance and was sure she had—the female lead opposite Cary Grant in Crisis—was going to Paula Raymond. Another disappointment came as she arrived in Chicago: East Side, West Side opened in New York to generally favorable reviews but with nary a mention of her. Her mother was waiting at Dearborn Station, along with several photographers from the Chicago papers, which treated Nancy’s arrivals and departures as major celebrity events.
Edith organized the first annual Passavant Cotillion and Christmas Ball that season—another rung up the Windy City social ladder for her and a mon-eymaker for Loyal’s hospital. Nancy attended with her old standby Bruce McFarland, who was about to get married to a Chicago girl.92
Upon her return to Hollywood, she, too, started playing the field, dating the actors Robert Walker and Robert Stack and the playwright-producer Norman Krasna. Perhaps coincidentally, but probably not, Stack and Krasna were friends of Reagan’s. Nancy had met Stack—who would later play Eliot Ness in The Untouchables on TV—when she first arrived in town, with a letter of introduction from Colleen Moore to his mother, a grande dame of old Los Angeles society who had bought Moore’s Bel Air mansion.93 They didn’t really click, and even now he bored her a bit, but she was pleased when he called and asked her out.
She was more amused by Norman Krasna, who had a production deal at Warners with Jerry Wald and was bright, Jewish, and twelve years her senior. For his part, Krasna was crazy about her, and started proposing marriage soon after they started dating.94
She became quite involved with Robert Walker, one of the most talented leading men on the MGM lot—and definitely the most troubled.
Three years older than Nancy, Walker had been married twice, to the movie star Jennifer Jones, who left him for producer David O. Selznick in 1945, and then to director John Ford’s daughter, Barbara, who asked for a Ronnie and Nancy in Hollywood: 1949–1952
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divorce after five weeks in 1948, reportedly because he beat her up when he drank too much. When Nancy met him, he was putting his life back together after spending nearly a year, on Dore Schary’s orders, at the Men-ninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, where he was treated for what The New York Times called “a severe psychological crackup.”95 He was still under psy-chiatric care and prohibited from drinking, and Nancy made it her mission to make sure he stayed sober. She also helped him furnish his house in Pacific Palisades and look after his two young sons by Jones when they visited on weekends.96 By April 1950, one Hollywood columnist was reporting,
“Someone close to Bob tells me he is happier with Nancy than he has been at any time since his parting from Jennifer Jones.”97
Nancy’s best shot at stardom came that winter, when she was cast in Schary’s pet project, The Next Voice You Hear, which was based on a magazine story that imagined how people would react if the voice of God suddenly came over the radio. The script focused on an American Everyman named Joe Smith, who works in a Los Angeles aircraft factory, his wife, Mary, who is about to have a baby, and their eleven-year-old son, Johnny. Schary saw the picture as an experiment in a new way of moviemaking, a low-budget, high-concept antidote to the bloated, schmaltzy period pieces that Mayer favored.
Both Schary and the director, William Wellman, a veteran realist, felt strongly that the principal roles should be played by unfamiliar faces, not well-known stars who they thought would be less believable as such utterly average types. James Whitmore, whose second movie had been directed by Wellman the previous year and won him a nomination as best supporting actor, was quickly cast as Joe Smith. Miriam Schary suggested Nancy for Mary. “This idea took a bit of getting used to,” Dore Schary wrote in Case History of a Movie. “This would be an exacting star role and Nancy had had only three small parts in pictures, and all of them had been on the ‘society’ side rather than a middle-class housewife and mother. But in her favor was the fact that her looks and manner and inner self were
‘nice’ rather than cover-girl glamorous.”98
Schary asked her to read for the part with Whitmore: “I remember . . .
her waiting next to Jim on one of the straight chairs in the anteroom, her fingers clasped tight in her lap to conceal the turbulent emotions which her enormous brown eyes betrayed.” He feared he might have to tell her
“she wouldn’t do.” But he and Wellman were so impressed by “the way 2 4 6
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House these two superb young people began making the story live and breathe”
that they gave her the part without further ado.99 On the first day of shooting Nancy found a note in her trailer from Schary: “If ‘Mary’ turns out to be as real and as sincere and as sweet as you are, then everybody is going to be happy and we’re going to have the kind of picture we’re hoping for.
All the best to you, darling.”100
The Next Voice You Hear was shot in fourteen days in late February and early March, and came in under budget at $460,000, less than half the standard cost of MGM films at the time.101 It was a demanding regime, but Nancy proved herself up to the challenge. “It was the first starring role for both of us, and we worked intensely because [we] were very serious about our careers,” James Whitmore recalled. “Nancy was definitely not a frivolous person. When it came to her career, she was deadly earnest. She was delightful to work with, very affable, and had a good, hearty laugh.
She’d throw her head back and just let loose from somewhere in the center of her being. But we didn’t socialize off the set, and there was never any personal conversation about her boyfriends or anything like that. I do recall, though, that she held very strong political opinions which weren’t exactly mine.”102
Nancy’s role required great subtlety: although Joe Smith comes across as capable and good-natured, it is Mary who quietly holds the family together and gently directs her husband when he stumbles. On Wellman’s instructions, Nancy wore no makeup, combed her own hair, and was fitted with a wire-framed pregnancy pad under her $12.95 maternity smocks. “He wanted everything to be as natural as possible. I did what he wanted, and he helped me make the most of my part. . . . I’d heard he was strictly a man’s director and hated directing women. But he was a tiger who turned out to be a pussycat, even though he was known as ‘Wild Bill Wellman.’ ”103
“Nancy Davis is considered a new ‘perfect wife’ type on the strength of her portrayal of James Whitmore’s spouse in The Next Voice You Hear,” the New York Herald Tribune’s Hollywood correspondent reported on April 5.
“MGM feels that she can be groomed to follow Myrna Loy, who first earned the title as Nora Charles in the Thin Man series. Studio head Dore Schary has instructed MGM producers to be on the lookout for likely material for the young actress.”104
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Schary himself immediately cast her as a small-town schoolteacher opposite Fredric March in It’s a Big Country, which he had co-written and was personally overseeing. He also pushed her for the role of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s wife in The Magnificent Yankee, a part that would have required her to age from sixty to ninety during the course of the film.
Ardie Deutsch was the producer, and he gladly tested Nancy in mid-April.
She also had the support of Louis Calhern—Edith’s old friend and a patient of Loyal’s—who was set for the title role. But that was before John Sturges was assigned to direct, and he apparently decided Nancy wasn’t up to the demands of the role.105
Later in April, Walter Huston suddenly fell ill on the night of his sixty-sixth birthday. “It was an aneurysm of the abdominal aorta,” Richard Davis recalled. “He was in god-awful pain and kept calling Dad. Of course, there wasn’t anything you could do about it.”106 Loyal, after sending a Los Angeles colleague to see Huston, flew in the nex
t morning, but he arrived a few hours too late to bid his friend farewell. Nancy remembers going with him to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Walter had been staying, and comforting Nan Huston. More than six hundred people, including the Davises, attended the memorial service at the Academy Award Theater. Spencer Tracy gave the eulogy. “Professionally, he’s easy to rate,”
Tracy said. “He was the best.”107
In May, Nancy’s first movie, Shadow on the Wall, was released after nearly a year’s delay, with some very good notices for her. A few days later, Mayer and his new wife, Lorena, hosted the first screening of The Next Voice You Hear at their Benedict Canyon home. Nancy was so anxious she broke her string of pearls and spilled coffee all over Bill Wellman’s wife.108
Happily, the early reviews in the trades were glowing. “The screen has never had a better example of husband-wife affection and understanding than that which Wellman builds between James Whitmore and Nancy Davis,” said the Hollywood Reporter. “And they play it to boff results.”109
Variety added, “Nancy Davis gives her role high realism and full polish.”110
The studio flew Nancy to New York for ten days of interviews and personal appearances before the June 29 opening at Radio City Music Hall. She was thrilled to see her name above the title on the marquee of Manhattan’s most prestigious movie house. The New York Times’s Bosley Crowther found Nancy “delightful,” and Time praised her for “a fine, attractive piece of well-balanced acting.”111 The critics were less enthusiastic about the film itself—
“a naïve theological hodgepodge,” sniffed Time—and it did not do as well 2 4 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House as Schary had hoped. Still, because he pushed it so hard, The Next Voice You Hear received tremendous coverage, and Nancy was highlighted in national publications ranging from Look and Seventeen to The American Magazine, which titled its profile of her “Silver-spooned starlet.”112
Nancy frequently mentioned how much she missed major league baseball in Los Angeles, sometimes adding that she rooted for the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox because she had crushes on Joe DiMag-gio and Ted Williams. “Although she’s a bachelor girl,” one interviewer said, “Nancy states emphatically that she doesn’t wish to remain so. . . .
Her role of the wife and mother in The Next Voice You Hear . . . made family life so appealing that she’s eager to try it in real life!”113
On July 6, 1950, wearing a black dress, a white hat, and a big corsage, Nancy was photographed celebrating her twenty-ninth birthday with Benny Thau and the Mayers at the Cocoanut Grove. Although she looked pleased to be seen with the head of the studio—one wonders if Mayer gave her the advice he always gave his daughters, “Be smart, but don’t show it”—all was not well between her and Thau. Despite his coldhearted reputation, the jaded old roué had fallen in love with his proper young protégée and was pressing her to marry him. This became increasingly problematic, especially after she started going out with other men, who were much closer to her in age. When I asked if her dates with Reagan, Walker, and Stack made Thau jealous, she snapped, “I don’t know. I was not his. . . . He would have liked to have married me. I did not want to marry him. . . . He was a strange little man, really. He gambled a lot. I think he gambled all his money away. I finally got through to him that the answer was no. And that was it.”114
Before his death in 1983, Thau was asked if he had wanted to marry Nancy. “I was friendly with her folks, and me being Jewish, I don’t know,”
he answered. “I thought about it, but that’s all I did.”115
According to Richard Davis, it was Loyal who insisted that Nancy bring the Thau situation to a head. “Dr. Loyal laid down the law,” Davis told me. “Nancy talked to Dr. Loyal very, very frequently, and he was very negative in terms of this man. It was for Nancy’s own good.”116
Nancy saw a lot of her family that summer. In early July, she flew to San Francisco, where her parents were attending a medical convention. Later that month Richard Davis visited Nancy in her new two-bedroom duplex on Hilgard Avenue in Westwood. The highlight of that trip for him, he Ronnie and Nancy in Hollywood: 1949–1952
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said, was accompanying her to a dinner party at Dinah Shore’s house, where he met Groucho Marx and golf champion Ben Hogan.117 In August, Nancy traveled to Chicago for Richard’s wedding to Shirley Hull, a socialite from suburban Wheaton. According to clippings in her scrapbook, she had been “quite ill” before leaving Los Angeles, and “on reaching Chicago, collapsed of nervous exhaustion and had to be hospitalized.” She missed a private screening of The Next Voice You Hear that Edith had organized, but after being treated for a “vitamin deficiency,” she was released in time for the August 25 wedding. The studio said Nancy “wore herself to a frazzle plugging her film in New York recently,” but surely breaking with Benny Thau while juggling the fragile Robert Walker, the irrepressible Norman Krasna, and the elusive Ronald Reagan added to the strain.118
Ronnie and Nancy had seen each other infrequently since that first rush of dates in late 1949, but the relationship took off again in the fall of 1950. In a photograph taken at the Ice Capades in September, Nancy looks wan and thin, and Reagan has his arm reassuringly around her shoulder: maybe he needed to feel she was weak as well as strong, in need of support as well as capable of giving it.119 In an interview a few days later, Louella Parsons asked Nancy, “Any one man in your life?” The gossip queen expected her to name Walker, but Nancy was noncommittal. “Not yet,” she answered.
“I won’t be trite and say I’m married to my career, but that’s pretty much the truth.”120
On October 2, Nancy started shooting Night into Morning with John Hodiak and Ray Milland—she played a “sturdy war widow” whose big scene involves talking Milland out of committing suicide—and later that month Reagan left for Tucson, where The Last Outpost was being filmed.
He wrote her while he was on location—“Just a quick line. . . . I’m balancing this on my knee while I wait to ride gallantly over another hill”—
the first of hundreds of letters, postcards, and telegrams he would lavish on her over the years.121 After he returned, there were more nights out—a cocktail party, a Friars Club roast, supper at the Sportsmen’s Lodge.122
Yet, she continued to entertain proposals of marriage from Krasna—
“Norman Krasna, alter ego of producer Jerry Wald, is so currazy about Nancy Davis that he’s already popped the all-important question,” Hollywood columnist Edith Gwynn reported on October 13. “Nancy and her whole family are thinking it over at the moment.”123 Maybe the Davises were just being practical: Krasna and Wald had recently signed a $50 mil-2 5 0
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House lion deal with Howard Hughes to produce twelve movies a year for five years at RKO.124 Or maybe Nancy was trying to make Ronnie jealous. By mid-December, she had turned Krasna down, and for Christmas Ronnie gave her a gold key from Ruser Jewelers in Beverly Hills to congratulate her on getting her own dressing room at MGM.125
Nancy worked to get closer to Ronnie in other ways as well. She took a few riding lessons from Peter Lawford, the handsome British-born Metro actor and future brother-in-law of John F. Kennedy. She put aside her distaste for alcohol and let herself have a weak cocktail or two when Ronnie took her out to dinner. “I’d drink a little,” she told me. “Nothing very strong like a martini—that would taste like gasoline to me. But some orange juice and vodka I would drink.”126
Perhaps the most important factor in drawing Ronnie and Nancy together was her appointment to fill a vacancy on the SAG board, a goal she had been pursuing for almost a year. The minutes for October 9, 1950, open with, “President Reagan welcomed Nancy Davis to her first Board meeting.” The following November she was elected to a full three-year term.127 Although the SAG board was deeply involved in such controversial issues as loyalty oaths, Nancy Reagan told me, “I don’t remember any tension. Maybe it’s my memory, o
r maybe it’s that I was falling in love.”128
Going on the board meant that Nancy now saw Ronnie every Monday night. “After the meetings,” she said, “we’d all go—Ronnie and I and whoever else—to this little place nearby and sit and visit.”129 It also meant that Nancy witnessed firsthand and over an extended period of time how Reagan functioned as a leader: how he took advice, how he could be influenced, how he dealt with opposition, how he achieved a consensus, how he reached a decision. She may have ended up with a clearer understanding of Reagan’s decision-making process and leadership style than he had.
For Reagan, the SAG presidency, which he held until 1952, was half of
“my double life.”130 Yet he clearly relished every moment, from traveling to New York for meetings with the American Federation of Radio Artists about which union would represent the growing numbers of television performers to wrangling with the studio bosses to get actors a five-day week. (“Thanks to Ronnie, we had Saturdays off,” exclaimed Ann Rutherford. “We could go away for a weekend.”)131 On nights when he didn’t have a date, Reagan worked late at SAG headquarters, and was often seen din-Ronnie and Nancy in Hollywood: 1949–1952
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ing alone at Chasen’s, sipping a glass of wine while reviewing Guild papers.132 At a time when his movie career was faltering, running the Guild kept his profile high and boosted the ego he hid so well.
Closely related to Reagan’s SAG duties were his activities as “a leader in the industry drive against Communists and their sympathizers,” in Nancy’s words.133 Although his term as chairman of MPIC had expired in July, he remained on its executive board and met with State Department officials that fall to discuss ways in which the industry could help the government fight Communism overseas.134 He had also become heavily involved in the Crusade for Freedom, a new national organization supported by the recently created CIA and headed by General Lucius Clay, the Army commander who had organized the 1948–49 Berlin Airlift.135
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