Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  By a ten-to-one margin this time, SAG members voted to support their board.146 Without the actors, the CSU’s days were numbered. SAG executive director Jack Dales congratulated Reagan on a brilliant performance, and Jack Warner announced, “Ronnie Reagan . . . has turned out to be a tower of strength, not only for the actors but for the whole industry, and he is to be highly complimented for his efforts on behalf of everyone working in our business.”147 Others thought he was an opportunist, a bastard, a scab.

  One actor called him a Fascist to his face. Both the compliments and the insults testified to the crucial role Reagan had played in isolating Sorrell and the CSU.

  And all the while he was acting as a labor leader by night, he was playing an epileptic biochemist by day. Shooting on the abysmal Night Unto Night dragged on through the Christmas holidays. Reagan didn’t get along with either his director or his co-star, the young Swedish sex-pot Viveca Lindfors, who found him bland and untalented. “I don’t remember a single conversation with him of any substance,” she later wrote. “I do remember some chitchat about sex, which was up my alley. . . . ‘It’s best in the afternoon, after coming out of the shower,’ he said, and then he laughed.”148

  Supporting actress Rosemary DeCamp was more sympathetic. “He worked 18 to 20 hours a day,” she remembered, “at night trying to resolve an ugly industry strike . . . then all day on that baffling film about a man with epilepsy. But he remained cheerful and loquacious with three or four Ronnie and Jane: 1941–1946

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  hours of sleep a night. This went on for months and may have been the cause of his divorce from Jane Wyman, who must have had a difficult and lonely time as Mike and Maureen were very young.”149

  At the end of the year, the North Hollywood Women’s Professional Club named Jane Wyman its “Ideal Working Mother.”150 But according to the wife of a Hollywood personality who saw a lot of Ronnie and Jane in those days, it was clear that all was not well in the marriage. “Ronnie used to sit around with Adolphe Menjou and George Murphy and talk about Communism—at parties, when it was boring to talk about this evil force that was penetrating our society. People would say, ‘There go Adolphe and George and Ronnie talking the Red Menace.’ Don’t you think Jane was bored by all that talk? She wasn’t interested in politics. Jane was a very pert, fresh-faced little thing who wanted to dance with George Burns at parties—she didn’t want to hear about Communist infiltration. She could dance like a son of a son, let me tell you.”

  “Jane was restless and bored,” said Leonora Hornblow. “Ronnie talked all the time. All his life he talked all the time. In the beginning she had been so stuck on him it didn’t matter, although she never hung on his every word. She said to me, ‘I’m so bored with him. I don’t know what’s going to happen—whether I’ll die from boredom or I’ll kill him.’ ”151

  C H A P T E R E I G H T

  NANCY IN NEW YORK

  1944–1949

  I lived at 34 Beekman Place, on the corner of 51st Street, and Nancy was just around the corner in a brownstone. I can see her now in my mind’s eye, walking down the steps all ready to go make the rounds. She was a charming, wholesome, lovely girl, very pleasant to be with. A little overweight.

  And an extremely pretty face.

  Anne Washburn to author,

  May 7, 2003

  NANCY PICKED A PARTICULARLY EXCITING MOMENT TO SETTLE IN MAN-hattan. The war was still on, but victory was a few months away, and the city was full of footloose young soldiers and sailors returning from Europe, as well as rich and glamorous European exiles, including almost the entire Surrealist pantheon, who had sat out the war in New York and gave the town a high-style, Continental air. The expensive nightclubs and restaurants—El Morocco, the Stork Club, Toots Shor’s, Sardi’s, “21”—

  were packed every night with café society, Hollywood stars between pictures, debutantes, gigolos, and gossip columnists.

  Broadway was booming. The 1944–45 season was the best—financially and creatively—in nearly twenty years, with eighty-three new plays and twenty-four hits, including John Van Druten’s I Remember Mama, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel, Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (starring the incomparable Laurette Taylor), and Jerome Robbins’s On the Town, which had a book by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and music by Leonard Bernstein. Held over from the previous season, Oklahoma! approached its 1,000th performance, Tallulah Bankhead drew crowds to Philip Barry’s Foolish Notion, and Mae West reigned in the risqué Catherine Was Great. (Prudery was not entirely extinguished, however: the city’s 1 8 0

  Nancy in New York: 1944–1949

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  license commissioner refused to renew the Belasco Theater’s license until it ceased performances of Trio, a drama about “the unhealthy subject of Lesbianism.”)1

  On December 7, 1944—just about the time Nancy arrived in New York—the impresario Billy Rose unveiled his handsomely refurbished Ziegfeld Theater, with a $350,000 extravaganza titled Seven Lively Arts, featuring the combined talents of Beatrice Lillie, Cole Porter, Igor Stravinsky, Alicia Markova, Bert Lahr, George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, and the Benny Goodman Band. Opening night seats went for an unheard-of $24

  and, as one observer noted, “there was a veritable flood of newly pressed tuxedos and feminine dinner ensembles for the first time since Pearl Harbor.”2

  Nancy’s first address in New York was the Plaza Hotel, but she soon found it too costly and moved to the Barbizon Hotel for Women on East 63rd Street, where she shared a room with another aspiring actress from Smith.3 The Barbizon was where good girls from proper Midwestern and Southern families stayed; the rates were reasonable, and male visitors were not allowed beyond the lobby. A few months later Nancy rented her own apartment, a one-bedroom, fourth-floor walk-up at 409 East 51st Street, just off smart Beekman Place. “It was a wonderful apartment,” she recalled. “It had a fireplace. And I think I paid $150 a month.”4 One friend remembered it as “impeccably done,” another as nicely furnished but

  “very small—a small living room and bedroom and kitchenette thing.”5

  Living on one’s own was still a fairly daring thing for a respectable girl to do in the 1940s, but Nancy and her parents were comforted by the fact that several family friends had apartments nearby: Uncle Walter and Nan Huston were right around the corner on East 50th Street; Lillian Gish lived with her sister, Dorothy, and their aged, invalid mother on East 57th Street, off Sutton Place; Katharine Hepburn had a house on East 49th Street. Therefore, the young actress never lacked for a proper meal, or advice on agents, acting coaches, and suitable young men to go out with. “It was wonderful,”

  Nancy Reagan recalled, “I went over to the Hustons’ a lot to have dinner with them. And I also had dinner a lot with Lillian and Dorothy, and then we’d go to a movie. It was funny, because Lillian always seemed so meek and Dorothy was just the opposite. But somehow we always ended up seeing the movie Lillian wanted and never the movie Dorothy wanted.”6

  On Sunday afternoons the Gishes regularly received friends “4:30 at 430”—the number of their apartment building—and Nancy was almost 1 8 2

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House always included in these sophisticated but cozy gatherings.7 The Gish sisters were in their fifties then, but both were still working in films and the theater, as was Uncle Walter, who was well into his sixties. All three starred in Broadway plays during the time Nancy lived in New York: Dorothy Gish starred in The Magnificent Yankee, opposite Louis Calhern, another close friend of the Davises’; Walter Huston was in The Apple of His Eye; and Lillian Gish played in Crime and Punishment.

  For most of the fall of 1945, Spencer Tracy was ensconced in a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria. Tracy, in his mid-forties and still a major Hollywood star, had nervously agreed to appear in his first Broadway play in fifteen years, The Rugged Path, a heavy-duty drama written by three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Sherwood and directed by Garson Kanin. Nancy loved watching Spen
ce, as she called him, rehearse at the Plymouth Theater; once again, she was being exposed to the best.8 She was also continuing to learn about the hard realities hidden behind doors with stars on them. With Katharine Hepburn’s constant support, Tracy managed not to drink during the play’s rehearsal and run. But he fought with Sherwood and Kanin, treated Hepburn like a servant, disparaged the play in interviews, and generally made things as difficult as possible for everyone around him. The Rugged Path received lukewarm reviews and closed after ten weeks.9

  “There are times when mutual failure draws the participants closer,”

  Garson Kanin lamented in his biographical memoir, Tracy and Hepburn,

  “but, in this instance, the result was wreckage.”10 Tracy remained in New York during the winter of 1946, and he was said to be binge drinking so badly that MGM had him secretly committed to Doctors Hospital, a private institution on the Upper East Side, where he was put in a straitjacket and guarded by studio security men.11 According to Richard Davis, Tracy was hospitalized in Chicago later that year as a patient of his father’s.

  “There was a very private floor at Passavant—the top floor—and I remember he was there maybe six weeks getting dried out. Loyal and Edith kept that very quiet.”12

  Despite these family connections, Nancy did not land a single acting job during her first year in New York. To supplement monthly checks from Edith and Loyal, she signed up with the Conover Modeling Agency and posed for a few advertisements, mostly for hats and one for Colgate toothpaste. (Some contemporaries said her “thick legs” kept her from getting more assignments.)13 She took acting classes and faithfully made the rounds Nancy in New York: 1944–1949

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  of auditions, though she often found herself dreading the thought of being judged and rejected.

  “Tryouts are frightening and embarrassing,” she would later write of her struggling-actress days. “But if you are beginning in the theater and your ability is not established, you have no choice but to try out. And even if you pass, you remain on trial. There is a period after a show goes into rehearsal when many performers are replaced. In the days when I was in the theater, the first five days of rehearsal were critical. You could be fired at any time during that period and not be paid.” She continues: I got a part in one play on the basis of a tryout, but I was fired after a few days. I don’t even remember the name of the play or the director.

  Maybe I don’t want to remember. I do recall that when we broke for lunch during the rehearsal, the director caught up with me, took my arm, and led me out the stage door into the alley. “I hate to have to tell you this,” he said, “but it’s just not working. You’re just not right for the part. I have to let you go.”

  Maybe I wasn’t right for the part. Or maybe I just wasn’t any good. We cannot all be right for every part on the stage or in life. We cannot all be good at everything. But I found out how painful it is to be rejected. It was the first and last time I was ever fired from anything and it hurt horribly. I was so embarrassed. I begged the director to go back to the dressing room to get my coat and purse as I did not want to face the other people in the show. Even if they did not yet know I had been fired, they would know soon enough. I did not want them to see me leaving. He brought me my coat and purse, and I left, humiliated and depressed.14

  In December 1945 another family friend came through. Mary Martin, who had made her name seven years earlier singing a torrid “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” in Cole Porter’s Leave It to Me, was a pal of Edith’s and a patient of Loyal’s. That fall, Martin had stayed at the Davises’ apartment for several days, and to return the favor she saw to it that Nancy was given a part in her new play, Lute Song, an opulently produced musical fantasy based on the two-thousand-year-old Chinese classic Pi-Pa-Ki. Nancy played Si-Tchun, a lady in waiting to Martin’s princess; Yul Brynner, in his first starring role on Broadway, played the prince. Apparently some effort was made to make Nancy think she had gotten the part on her own, since she was hired after auditioning for producer Michael Myerberg, who told her, “You look like you could be Chinese.” Years later, director John Houseman con-1 8 4

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House firmed in his memoir that “the usual nepotistic casting” was behind the hir-ing of “a pink-cheeked, attractive but awkward and amateurish virgin by the name of Nancy Davis.”15 After a week or two of rehearsals, Houseman tried to fire her, but Martin wouldn’t hear of it. “John, I have a very bad back,”

  she told the director, “and Nancy’s father, Loyal Davis, is the greatest [neurosurgeon] in the U.S.A . We are not letting Nancy go!” 16

  Nancy dyed her brown hair black for the part, and took the crosstown bus to and from the theater. “I’d have to get out on 50th, then walk a block to my place,” she recalled. “New York was so great then. You never thought about it being dangerous or anything like that.”17 Loyal and Edith came from Chicago for the play’s opening at the Plymouth Theater on February 6, 1946, which was followed by a big party at Sardi’s. “Nancy was the in-génue,” recalled Robert Fryer, an aspiring young producer who met her when she was in Lute Song. “And we became good friends. I didn’t drink, and Nancy didn’t drink, so after the theater at night, we’d go have our cereal. Cornflakes—that was the big treat.”18 According to Nancy, they usually went to a Horn and Hardart automat, “and if we were really feeling flush, we’d have bananas.” As for drinking: “I tried . . . but I just didn’t like the taste of it.”19

  “That’s absolutely true,” said Richard Davis, who told me that his stepsister had shunned alcohol during her college years as well and would continue to do so all her life. He remembered how furious she was with him when he visited her in New York with three buddies from Princeton and got so drunk that he vomited in her bathtub. “She gave me hell,” Davis said, and it was two years before she invited him back.20

  When Lute Song closed in the summer of 1946 after a six-month run, Nancy continued to spend a lot of time with Fryer and his boyfriend, James Carr, a young actor. “Bobby and Jimmy lived right around the corner from me,” she recalled. “My building had a little backyard, so in the warm weather we would barbecue hot dogs and hamburgers and eat outside.”21 Anne Washburn, a Yale drama school graduate who lived in Fryer and Carr’s building, told me that she and Jimmy and Nancy spent their days going to auditions “trying to get parts. No parts ever seemed to be forthcoming, but Nancy could handle any situation. She was a very downto-earth person.”22 Fryer, who later became a successful Broadway and Hollywood producer, would remain a lifelong friend of Nancy’s. On a television biography of her in 1997, he noted, “The theater and films both Nancy in New York: 1944–1949

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  are strange, in that you don’t keep your relationships usually beyond the shooting schedule or the run of the show. But she was one of the people that kept her friends closely held.”23

  Ron Fletcher, a principal dancer in Lute Song, also became close to Nancy. “I found her to be a delightful creature,” he told me. “She had a wonderful sense of humor and was bright and curious. However, she didn’t seem worldly at all, which is what I liked about her. I would tell her tacky, slightly obscene stories, and that wonderful laugh would come out.”

  Fletcher said that, before the Broadway opening, they were in New Haven, Philadelphia, and Boston for twelve weeks of tryouts. “When you’re on the road, people pair off. I don’t remember how Nancy and I first started to talk—we just decided to go out and eat one night, and people were dancing.

  She was a marvelous dancer and loved to dance, and I’m a very good ballroom dancer.”

  Another Nancy Reagan biographer has implied that Fletcher was homosexual.24 “I was living with a girl when I went into the show,” he explained.

  “I later realized that I had always been gay, but I was also very attracted to unusual females, and I found Nancy very sexy. We had a little romance on the road, but I don’t think she was in love with me, and I can’t say I was in love with
her. We were just living in the moment and enjoying each other.

  After we came back to New York, we drifted apart. I went to her apartment a couple of times and realized what kind of a lifestyle she had. Maybe that intimidated me, because I’m from the backwoods of Missouri and didn’t finish ninth grade.” Nonetheless, he told me, they kept in touch. “Nancy was the type of person you may not see for ten years, but the minute you see each other, you just start laughing.”25

  Nancy’s affinity for homosexual men has been frequently remarked upon, but it would hardly have been so noteworthy if she had stayed in show business instead of marrying an actor who went into politics. She was close to a number of lesbian and bisexual women over the years, starting with her godmother and her circle of friends, but this, too, is not unusual in the entertainment world. If gay men were attracted to the young Nancy Davis, it was probably for the same reasons that straight men were: she was pretty, lively, well dressed, a good dancer, a great listener, and, like her mother, a natural-born coquette. She knew how to flirt with a man in a way that was flattering and unthreatening, which may explain why gay men felt especially comfortable with her. And when she was out with a man, she gave him her full attention.

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  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House There was also something nurselike about Nancy Davis. She had been a volunteer nurse’s aide in Chicago, and one can easily imagine her in a white uniform and pinned-back cap, hovering over a patient’s bed with care-filled eyes and a troubled brow, telling him that everything will be all right if he follows doctor’s orders and takes his medicine as prescribed.

  From high school on, by all accounts, she enjoyed spending time with the opposite sex, hearing their problems and their hopes, comforting them and encouraging them. Moreover, she had the examples of her mother, her Aunt Colleen, and even Katharine Hepburn to impress upon her that a woman’s job was to bring out the best in a man, to make him feel better about himself, to fix and improve him.