by Anne Edwards
The test was not as bad as Cukor expected it to be (he had been extremely negative about her potential). When Dore Schary, head of production at the studio, viewed it, he thought Davis showed enough ability to sign her to a term contract. Louis B. Mayer did not agree, but he had given his new “fair-haired boy” a free hand and did not veto the decision. Outside circumstances were involved. Davis had been brought to the attention of Schary and the studio by two top box-office stars—Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable—who had met and dated her in New York. And both Cukor and Schary were Tracy’s good pals.† Additionally, Schary thought Davis had a bright look, a quality that could be put to good use in the more intellectual films he hoped to make for the studio.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had not made a successful transition from wartime entertainment films. Audiences now wanted more substantial stories with strong themes. At a time when Metro’s stock was at its lowest ebb, Mayer’s yearly salary was the highest paid an individual in the United States ($1,250,000).‡ The studio’s board of directors was chomping at his heels. He had hired Senary in 1948 in the desperate hope that the younger man could bring to Metro the same flash of brilliance he had shown as head of production at RKO. Almost immediately, a clash of personalities developed. Mayer was a staunch conservative, active in politics, and had been the California state chairman for the Republican party. Schary was a liberal who actively supported numerous civil-liberty causes. Most of the stories he chose inevitably became message pictures conveying a liberal philosophy Mayer did not support.
Schary cast Davis first in a minor part in the film she had originally tested for, East Side, West Side, which had Barbara Stanwyck, Ava Gardner and James Mason in the starring roles. Davis had tested for the Gardner role, that of the other woman in businessman Mason’s life, but ended as the obsequious secretary who guards his privacy.* Schary decided she handled herself well but needed experience, and gave her a larger supporting role in another film, The Doctor and the Girl, which starred Glenn Ford as a young doctor who renounces an attractive offer for a private practice to help the poor. The girl in the title was Janet Leigh. Gloria DeHaven appeared as Ford’s emotionally unbalanced sister, Davis as “the less rebellious sister.” One critic commented, “Nancy Davis is to be favorably noted.”
Schary now had sufficient footage to judge her potential. Despite the talent of the Metro technical staff—makeup, lighting and camera—onscreen, Davis projected what Spencer Tracy called “all the passion of a Good Humor ice cream—frozen, on a stick, and all vanilla.” Offscreen she was “a straightforward, honest young woman with a fine sense of humor whom almost every man including most writers, attached and unattached [at Metro], were fond of and tried to date,” former MGM writer Edward Chodorov remarked. Nonetheless, Schary saw a future for her in portraying sincere, unglamorized types—the faithful wife, the dedicated nurse, sister, daughter. As luck had it, he was working on a screenplay that contained exactly this kind of character.
Shadow on the Wall had no particular message, but it was a slick psychological murder story, albeit a poor spin-off of the far superior Hitchcock film Spellbound. Davis supported Zachary Scott, Ann Sothern and child actress Gigi Perreau. “Nancy Davis is convincing as the psychiatrist,” Variety noted.
With writer Charles Schnee, Schary had developed a kind of modern morality play into an unusual film script titled The Next Voice You Hear. The original story was by George Sumner Albee, who claimed the idea had come to him while lunching with a friend in New York and discussing world affairs. The topic so distressed him that he exclaimed, “Only a second coming of Christ can save the world now.” His companion commented that the idea would make a good basis for a story and Albee acted immediately upon this suggestion.
Published first in the Saturday Evening Post, The Next Voice You Hear dealt with the voice of God coming over the radios of the world and proving itself divine by a series of miracles such as sinking the Australian continent under water for some minutes, making the Russian war machinery disappear and transforming parading atheists into winged angels. Schary thought a dramatic yet deeply spiritual picture would appeal to the mood of a cold war generation, but he could not go along with the interplanetary atmosphere in Albee’s original story. The adaptation dealt with an average American family, Mr. and Mrs. Joe Smith, their son, an aunt, Joe’s boss in a factory and some of his fellow workers. God’s voice was not heard but referred to as having been heard, and there were no spectacular miracles, just everyday miracles “which are climaxed by the greatest miracle of all,” life itself in the birth of Mrs. Smith’s child.
The Next Voice You Hear was the archetype of the message films Schary made in this period of his career. He handled the story with deadly reverence and was so sincere in his belief that he had a great spiritual movie in the script that he became obsessively protective about it. He cast Davis and another newcomer, craggy-faced James Whitmore, as Mr. and Mrs. Smith because he wanted unfamiliar faces so that the characters would seem more real. William Wellman was the director.
Wellman (whom actor James Mason once called “a tough little bastard”) rehearsed his cast for four days and then shot the film in eighteen, as much in sequence as possible—at Metro a miracle worthy of the picture’s theme. Davis, as the very pregnant Mrs. Smith, was made up with pounds of cotton and gauze placed in the proper position. So realistic was her costuming that the cast and crew treated her with a certain deference. Wellman ordered austere makeup, no rouge or lipstick, hair neat but unglamorously coiffed. She had one big scene where she becomes hysterical, and it may be her best moment on-camera.
Wellman’s touch was delicate, always in good taste, and the film has a benign charm. The reviews were raves. “A once in a lifetime film fare that seems destined to raise hosannas wherever shown,” wrote Variety. “A star maker for James Whitmore, Nancy Davis and Gary Gray.”* Another reviewer wrote, ‘“The Next Voice You Hear’ seems to me one of the finest motion pictures of the year—and it is quite possible that it will turn out to be one of the most popular.” He was wrong. The film was a dismal failure at the box office, perhaps because audiences felt uncomfortable with the premise. The role that had been publicized as Nancy Davis’s ticket to stardom was to place cement blocks on her film career. Her performance was adequate and handled with a great deal of dignity, but there was never any genuine chemistry between her and the camera.
Looking back about fifteen years later, she was to admit publicly, “I never was really a career girl. I just didn’t want to be a post-deb in Chicago.” This was not entirely the truth, because there had been a time when being a post-deb in Chicago would not have been the least distasteful to her if she had been confronted with the prospect of marriage to a man who could give her the name and status that Loyal Davis had bestowed on her mother, the actress Edith Luckett.
Edith Luckett was born in Petersburg, Virginia, in 1889, the youngest child of Charles Edward and Sarah Frances Whitlock Luckett, but she grew up in Washington, D.C. The Lucketts and the Whitlocks were old Virginia families and the South and being Virginians meant a great deal to them. To their distress, Charles was transferred from the Adams Express Railway office in Richmond to the company’s D.C. offices in 1872 before his first child, Thomas, was born. (“I’m Southern and that’s the cute thing about it,” Edith confided at the age of ninety-three. “My father and mother had to move up to [Washington, D.C] but my mother went back to Petersburg to have all [five] of her children born so they wouldn’t be born damn Yankees! Don’t you love that?”)†
Sarah Luckett would never make peace with the life she was forced to live. The wounds from the Civil War were not healed and her soft-voweled speech immediately identified her Confederate background. She missed her family and mourned the lost beauty of her youth. The Whitlocks had once owned vast land and a house that was the equal of any other comfortable plantation in the county. But on Charles’s modest salary, the Lucketts could not afford to live in the fashionable section of D.C. and had
to settle for one closer to the railroad yards. The neighborhood, with its similar houses all in a row, was depressing. The Lucketts’ house had a small yard and a vegetable garden, hardly compensation for the warmth of Petersburg, the gentleness of speech and manner. And in Virginia, no matter how small her husband’s weekly wages, Sarah would have been able to hire a black servant to do her menial work.
As it was, she saved furniture advertisements and planned rooms for the house they would have one day when they moved back to Petersburg. Often she would share with Edith her dream of bright warm rooms, of broad steps and white columns beside a gracious door. She was closer to Edith than to her other daughter, Virginia, perhaps because Edith was the baby, or because she reminded her more of herself. Edith was pretty and feminine with blue eyes as dense as a Petersburg summer sky and a flawless rose-pink complexion. She had the sound of sweet wisteria in her voice and a generous passion in her feelings. From the time her daughter began to mature, Sarah was certain Edith would one day marry some particularly important Southern gentleman. Edith had other ideas. She wanted to be an actress.
Edith’s oldest brother, Joseph Luckett, was a co-owner of the Columbia Stock Company in Washington, D.C. Once, when Edith was about six, the child performer in a play took ill. The part required the young actress to remain in bed languishing, and finally to die at the curtain. Edith substituted in the role. “I had no lines to say. I just laid there in the bed looking sad. When the curtain went down I was supposed to die. I could hear people in the audience crying. I hopped out of bed and I said, ‘Don’t cry, I’m alive!’ I talked to the audience!”
In 1904, at age fifteen, she joined her brother’s stock company where she played everything from little girls to ingenue leads. A year later she had the opportunity to audition for the Irish tenor Chauncey Olcott—then at the height of his fame. “He asked me if I could play the piano and I said I could, but I couldn’t do a damn thing. So I went out and hired a piano and put it in my hotel room and all that night I picked out a tune from a piece of music—’My Wild Irish Rose’—and the next day I played it and of course Chauncey thought that was wonderful… and he said, Til hire you.’
“I was fond of Chauncey Olcott and his wife. People said to me, ‘Don’t go with Olcott, his wife is a bitch. She wasn’t at all. She was a darling and she was very sweet to me and anywhere they went they used to take me with them. [Not long after I joined his company,] Mrs. Olcott and Mr. Olcott came to my mother and father and wanted to adopt me [she was sixteen] because they didn’t have any children. My mother said, ‘Oh no! I don’t mind her working with you, I think that’s fine,’ because they were good Christian people. They were Catholics. I wasn’t a Catholic. I was Presbyterian, but who cares.”
Olcott then went off the road to appear in a Broadway show, and for a number of years Edith worked with various touring companies. In 1910, she came to the attention of George M. Cohan, who, besides writing and composing several Broadway shows a year, kept up his trouping. The four Cohans were now three—Cohan and his parents, Jerry J. and Helen F., his sister Josephine having gone out on her own. The Cohans would tour the principal cities from New York to Chicago with about sixty others in the ensemble. When Cohan left to return to Broadway, his father would headline the tour. Edith was considered a supporting player and had more or less replaced Josephine.
“You do the damnedest things when you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t you?” she laughingly reminisced. “I used to work with George all the time—duets, just the two of us—song and dance. His father had a little lisp kinda—and couldn’t hear very good either. I would wait right directly off stage for him to give me the cue to come on with George—who was always bouncing around [backstage] attending to something until the very moment of our entrance.
“I remember we were in Cleveland and I was leaning forward so I could hear old Mr. Cohan’s cue to come on with George. I was listening very carefully—and George and the manager passed in back of me and the manager goosed me. I didn’t know what the hell a goose meant. I had no idea. And I went right flat on the stage—right on my fanny—took the scenery with me.
“George called for the curtain and he said, ‘Luckett, what the hell’s the matter with you, can’t you stand on your feet?’ I said, ‘Mr. Cohan, I apologize to you. I slipped and fell and I’m sorry and I apologize,’ and I walked away from him, and I went into his mother, and I said, ‘Aunt Nellie, I don’t have to take this crap. I’m going to New York.’
“My brother’s daughter was Nellie Cohan’s dresser. And she roomed with me because it was cheaper for us. We always had our dinner together at night. We’d have a chicken sandwich and if it was hot weather we had a chocolate milk shake. If it was cold weather we had a hot chocolate. Well, that night we went to a nearby restaurant to eat and George passed the table with the manager and he said, ‘Luckett, will you girls have dinner with me?’ (My niece was only a year or two younger than me.) And I said, ‘No, thank you.’ And with that I turned my back on him. My niece then leaned in close and whispered, ‘Don’t talk like that to him. He’s the money in the family.’ And then she spoke up and said, ‘Yes, we’d be very glad to have dinner with you tonight.’ And then she said to me, ‘Be nice to him, do you hear me?’ and I said, ‘Yes, dear, I will.’ So we went over [to his table]. In the meantime the manager had told him how he had goosed me and that was why I had fallen flat on my fanny. George was furious with him and made him apologize. He was very nice to me—very nice—he used to do nice little things for me, and so did the whole family. I loved them.”
In the time that Edith Luckett toured with George M. Cohan, she had developed into a competent, reliable trouper. But Cohan did not have enough faith in her to cast her in one of his New York shows. Edith had a pleasant voice, a pretty face and a well-turned ankle. Cohan’s act required little more of her. She spoke the straight lines that set up his gags, and stepped back as his dance partner when he executed his nimble solos. Her work with the Cohans ended on January 31, 1914, Jerry J. Cohan’s sixty-fifth birthday, when George M.’s parents retired from the stage. For the next three summers she worked with a stock company in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and it was here that she met Kenneth Seymour Robbins, a young man five years her junior, slim, natty and having a way with words. Ken was the son of Anna A. and John M. Robbins, a conservative New England family who did not think a traveling actress a proper person for their son to be seeing. Despite the touch of old Virginia that clung to her speech, Edith had a gritty way of phrasing things that the New England Rob-binses found common. And there was the question of what a young unmarried woman was doing living away from home.
John Robbins’s family had been well respected for years. Rob-bins was the vice-president of a prosperous local mill and he had plans that his son would go into real estate and banking. Ken had other ideas. He and Edith married in July 1916, and when her summer-stock season ended, they went to New York, where Edith had the promise of a small role in a play starring Alia Nazimova. Ken tried his hand as a booking agent, but a few months later America entered World War I and he enlisted in the army, leaving Edith alone for the duration. Edith managed quite well, and when he returned in January 1919, the two set up housekeeping in New York City once again.
Ken Robbins could not thrive in a metropolis, nor was the theater of particular interest to him. He found it difficult to make a living as a booking agent. What he liked to do was tinker with cars. In 1917 his father had died and left him a small inheritance. His mother was alone and she had been willed the greater share. Robbins wanted to return to Pittsfield, and when Edith refused to go, he left without her. She was several months pregnant.
On July 6, 1921, Anne Frances Robbins was born, but Edith called her daughter Nancy, almost from the beginning. Ken laid down an ultimatum: Either she and the child join him in Pittsfield or the marriage was over. Edith took a job with a touring company.
She moved from one stock company to another. As each season ende
d, she would return to New York, make the rounds of theater managements, and then, having landed a spot in a company, go back out on the road again. Within two years she had performed in forty-two plays (everything from Dearest in Little Lord Fauntlerqy to Raina in Arms and the Man), shuttling back and forth from St. Paul to Washington, D.C, to Chicago. With Nancy out of the cradle, her care became more difficult. Edith decided to leave the child with her sister and brother-in-law, Virginia and Audley Galbraith, who lived in Bethesda, Maryland. The Galbraiths had a daughter named Charlotte who was two and a half years older than Nancy, promising good companionship for both girls.
Edith went back on the road. As Pat O’Brien once recalled, “In those days actors playing in stock companies were doing four things simultaneously. They were playing the play, forgetting a play, studying a play, and rehearsing a play. All because each week we did a different production, and in many of the companies around the nation, they did two plays a week. It was hard, braintormenting, bone-breaking work, but gratifying.” For Luckett, the best part of this treadmill was meeting other young actors and actresses, most of whom approached their work with an enthusiasm and dedication that, except for Cohan, she had not previously known. She appeared with Alia Nazimova, Zasu Pitts, Spring By-ington, Pat O’Brien, and Louise and Spencer Tracy.