“Hollywood sympathy in this case is one hundred percent with Ronnie, who is a prince,” Silver Screen magazine’s Fredda Dudley informed her readers in early 1948. “Jane is a moody person, temperamental, ambitious, restless and seeking; furthermore, she is not now and hasn’t been well for some time. It is to be hoped, that as her health improves, Jane’s other problems will vanish, and two of the town’s favorite people will resume their marriage.”132
Friends, including Bill Holden and his wife, Ardis (who acted under the name Brenda Marshall), tried to coax the couple back together at small, tense dinner parties, but Jane refused to waver. On Ronnie’s thirty-seventh birthday, February 6, 1948, she gave him a turquoise Cadillac convertible that she had ordered months earlier as a surprise, but she signed the gift card with Maureen’s and Michael’s names. Later that month, she checked into the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas to establish residency for the divorce. After a few days, however, she returned to Los Angeles and asked Ronnie to move back in with her and the children. In May she asked him to move out again, and filed for divorce in California on the grounds of extreme mental cruelty.133 At the divorce trial the following month, which Reagan did not attend, the Los Angeles Times reported,
“Miss Wyman told the court that she and Reagan engaged in continual arguments on his political views. Despite her lack of interest in his political activities, Miss Wyman continued, Reagan insisted that she attend meetings with him and be present during discussions among his friends. But her own ideas, she complained, ‘were never considered important.’ ‘Finally, there was nothing between us,’ Miss Wyman said.”134
A divorce decree was granted on June 28, 1948. Wyman received custody of the children, $500 a month in child support, a $25,000 life insurance policy paid for by Reagan, and horseback-riding privileges at their Northridge ranch; the house on Cordell Drive was to be sold and the pro-2 2 4
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House ceeds evenly split.135 Jane left it to Ronnie to break the news to seven-year-old Maureen; Michael, then three, was too young to understand. “I can still hear Dad saying,” Maureen later wrote, “ ‘Just remember, Mermie, I still love you. I will always love you.’ His voice was cracking a little as he spoke.”136
“No marital separation since I broke the story that Mary Pickford, America’s sweetheart, was leaving Douglas Fairbanks, has had the effect of the parting of the Reagans,” wrote a crushed Louella Parsons. “Just as Mary and Doug stood for all that is best in this town, so have Ronnie and Jane. . . . For eight years they have shared a beautiful life that has earned them the respect and admiration even of people who did not know them personally. To those of us who are close friends, they were an ideal Mr. and Mrs. That’s why this hurts so much.”137
“They would not have gotten a divorce had their careers not been going in opposite directions,” said their good friend Dick Powell. “Hers up, his down.”138
“Perhaps I should have let someone else save the world and have saved my own home,” said Reagan.139
Ronald Reagan and his brother, Neil,
at a Warner Bros. radio broadcast, 1943.
(The Everett Collection)
Nelle Reagan visiting her son Ronald
on the set of Stallion Road, 1947.
(©Underwood & Underwood/Corbis)
A publicity photo of Ronald Reagan
shortly after his arrival
in Hollywood in 1937.
(Imageworks/Time Life
Picture Collection/Getty Images)
Dr. Loyal Davis and Edith Luckett
on the SS New York in 1927,
two years before their marriage.
(Collection of Richard Davis)
Nancy with her stepbrother,
Richard Davis, circa 1930.
(Reagan Family Photo Collection)
Nancy with her father, Kenneth Robbins,
who visited her in Chicago in 1929.
(Camera Press/Retna)
Nancy Davis
onstage with
ZaSu Pitts,
a friend of her
mother’s and
her theatrical
mentor,
circa 1946.
(Reagan Family
Photo
Collection)
Colleen Moore
Hargrave, the
silent screen star
turned Chicago
socialite, with her
famous Doll
House. (A.P.
Wide World
Photos)
Reagan with gossip columnist
Louella Parsons, who also hailed
from Dixon, Illinois.
(Photofest)
Jane Wyman and Ronald Reagan
on their wedding day, January 26, 1940.
(Culver Pictures)
Wyman with her Academy Award
for Johnny Belinda, March 1948.
(A.P. Wide World Photos)
Lieutenant Reagan with Jane
and little Maureen
the day he reported for
military service, April 19, 1942.
(A.P. Wide World Photos)
Screen Actors Guild leaders
Robert Montgomery,
George Murphy, and
Ronald Reagan after testifying
before HUAC, October 23, 1947.
(A.P. Wide World Photos)
Reagan and Lauren Bacall
with President
Harry Truman during his
1948 campaign.
(Al Humphreys/Los Angeles
Times)
Nancy Davis and Ronald Reagan on a date at a Beverly Hills Hotel gala.
(Globe Photos)
Nancy in a 1950
promotional photo
for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
(Photofest)
Loyal and Edith
with Nancy in Hollywood,
July 1949.
(Collection of Richard Davis)
Nancy with her co-star James Whitmore, filming The Next Voice You Hear, 1950.
(Lester Glassner Collection/Neal Peters)
Ronnie and Nancy
on their wedding day,
March 4, 1952,
photographed at the home
of their witnesses,
William and Ardis Holden.
(Reagan Family Photo
Collection)
The newlyweds on their
honeymoon at the
Arizona Biltmore Hotel
in Phoenix.
(A.P. Wide World Photos)
C H A P T E R T E N
RONNIE AND NANCY
IN HOLLYWOOD
1949–1952
It looks as though Nancy Davis, Dr. and Mrs. Loyal Davis’ talented actress daughter, may have the break for which she has hoped and persevered. She is in Hollywood now, waiting for the cameras to start rolling on “Death in the Doll’s House,” in which she has a role.
Cholly Dearborn, Chicago Herald-American, March 24, 1949
Hollywood is bounded on the North by legend, on the East by rumor, on the West by scandal and on the South by superstition. Somewhere within those boundaries lies the actual Hollywood community so many talk about and so few really know.
Dore Schary, Case History of a Movie, 1950
A FEW DAYS AFTER THE TELEVISION ADAPTATION OF RAMSHACKLE INN AIRED
on January 2, 1949, Nancy Davis received a call from her agent telling her that “someone from Metro” had seen her performance and suggested that she come out to the coast for a screen test. Nancy was so excited that, as she put it in her autobiography, “I started packing before I hung up the phone.” She added proudly, “This was one opportunity that none of my family friends had anything to do with.”1
Nonetheless, she immediately called her mother in Chicago, and Edith began working the phone on her daughter’s behalf, starting with a call to Spencer Tracy, urging him to make sure that Nancy was handled with kid gloves.2 By mid-January, Edith and Loyal were in P
hoenix, a month earlier than they usually arrived for their annual six-week stay at the Arizona Biltmore Hotel, and Nancy joined them. So did Spencer and Louise Tracy, 2 2 5
2 2 6
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House who were traveling with their good friend Benjamin Thau, MGM’s vice president in charge of talent and the executive who supervised screen tests at the studio.3
Benny Thau was forty-nine and still a bachelor. (“Thau pronounced his name like winter thaw,” noted Leonora Hornblow. “The joke was Benny never thawed.”)4 A short, heavyset man who wore his thinning hair slicked back, he spoke in a deliberate near-whisper that forced people to listen closely to what he said. He had started out in show business as a vaudeville booker in New York and was made casting director of MGM by Louis B. Mayer in 1928. “From then on,” according to Mayer biographer Charles Higham, “Thau’s casting couch was the busiest in Hollywood.”5
Thau was notorious for demanding sexual favors from starlets whose careers he advanced, for carrying on affairs with married actresses (most notably Greer Garson, whom he made an overnight star), and, according to Higham, even for organizing Christmas Eve orgies on the MGM lot during the 1930s.6 He was immediately taken by Nancy’s ladylike looks and manners.
“It was my impression that Benny was there to see Bob Rubin, who was with Metro in New York,” Nancy Reagan told me, referring to MGM’s longtime East Coast vice president and general counsel, J. Robert Rubin. “Bob and his wife stayed at the Biltmore every year and became good friends of my parents’.”7 Richard Davis said that his father had taken an instant dislike to Benny Thau and strongly disapproved of Edith’s backstage machinations on Nancy’s behalf. “Dr. Loyal was all for someone getting ahead on his or her own,” Davis told me. “To have the inside track was against his principles. And he didn’t want his daughter to be mixed up with this man at all. I think my father thought this whole Hollywood thing was a little unsavory for his daughter. But Edith encouraged it.
Edith would say, ‘Well, you have to make a few compromises if you want to get anywhere.’ My father was not that way. He wouldn’t compromise for anything or anybody.”8
A newspaper photograph of the Davises, Thau, and Louise Spencer at the opening of the new Sombrero Playhouse confirms their presence in Phoenix that month, as well as Richard Davis’s take on his parents’
conflicting attitudes: as Edith studies the Hollywood big-shot with interest, Loyal casts his wife a stern glance. Nancy is not in the picture, but she saved it in her scrapbook, a rare piece of printed evidence linking her to a man she never mentioned in any of her books or talked about in in-Ronnie and Nancy in Hollywood: 1949–1952
2 2 7
terviews.9 Her silence only fueled suspicion that she had something to hide, and several previous biographers, unaware of their meeting in Phoenix, have written that Nancy met Thau on a blind date in New York shortly before her screen test and that she became his girlfriend in Hollywood.10
This version of events was largely based on an interview Thau gave, at age eighty, to Laurence Leamer, the first Reagan biographer to research Nancy’s background in some depth. Recalling a trip to New York in early 1949, Thau said that a friend had suggested, “If you want to take somebody out to a show, call Nancy Davis. She’s a nice girl who likes company.” Over dinner after the theater, Thau said, he uttered the magic words: “Nancy, why don’t you come out and make a screen test?” Thau’s memory was not airtight, however; he told Leamer that he had taken Nancy to see a play starring Spencer Tracy, but Tracy’s last play, The Rugged Path, had closed more than two years earlier.11
Nancy Reagan told me there was no blind date—or love affair. “I never had dinner with Benny in New York,” she said. “When I came out to Los Angeles to do the test and stayed—yes, then I saw him, had dinner with him, and so on. . . . I was not his girlfriend. He took a liking to me, that’s true . . . and I liked him as a friend. But that was it, as far as I was concerned.”12
In any event, Spencer Tracy had lined up another powerful MGM executive on Nancy’s behalf, Dore Schary, vice president in charge of production. Schary had been brought over from RKO the previous year by Nicholas Schenk, the head of Loew’s Inc., MGM’s New York–based parent corporation, and it was generally thought that it was only a matter of time before he replaced the aging Mayer. Schary, a former screenwriter, had been close to Tracy since 1938, when he wrote the script for Boys Town, which won Oscars for both of them. At some point before Nancy’s screen test, Tracy called Schary and, playing to the executive’s preference for intellectual message films, recommended Nancy as a serious actress.
“The girl,” he said, “knows how to look like she’s really thinking when she’s onstage.”13
Schary was drawn into Nancy’s camp by other means as well. Like Mary Martin, he suffered from chronic back problems, and shortly before Nancy was signed, he had called Loyal Davis for advice about an operation.14 It is not clear who recommended Nancy’s stepfather to Schary, but he became a 2 2 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House regular patient. According to Nancy’s New York publishing pal Kenneth Giniger, it was Schary “who brought her out to the coast. That’s what I understood from her at the time.”15 However, there can be little doubt that meeting Thau in Phoenix advanced matters immeasurably.
“You can say I helped her” was how Thau later summed up his role.
“Stars like Norma Shearer, Elizabeth Taylor—she couldn’t compete with that. She was attractive, but not what you’d call beautiful. She [was] a very nice behaved girl.”16
Nancy Davis’s screen test was like few others in the history of Hollywood.
Ordinarily, tests were directed and filmed by whatever studio technicians were available. Nancy’s was directed by George Cukor, one of MGM’s most important directors, and filmed by George Folsey, the prestigious cinematographer. Both were known for flattering female stars, Cukor so much that he was dubbed “the women’s director.” Over the years, he had elicited exceptional performances from Jean Harlow in Dinner at Eight, Greta Garbo in Camille, Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story, and Norma Shearer, Rosalind Russell, and Joan Crawford in The Women.
Fortunately for Nancy, he was extremely close to both Hepburn and Tracy, whose long-term love affair was conducted in a guesthouse Tracy occupied on the director’s Hollywood Hills estate. When Tracy asked him to direct Nancy’s test, Cukor found it hard to say no.17
On Thau’s instructions, the studio’s drama coach, Lillian Burns, spent three weeks working with Nancy on her acting, voice, dancing, deportment, and appearance. As Lucille Ryman, the head of MGM’s talent department, explained, “I had told Lillian to give her extra special care because Benny had asked me to do the best I could with her.”18 Despite all her advantages, Nancy was so nervous on the day of the test that she had a friend of her mother’s, Nathalie Moorhead Dunham, a retired actress, accompany her to the studio. “I remember Nathalie standing there,”
Nancy told MGM’s “hairdresser to the stars,” Sydney Guilaroff, years later,
“while you were doing my hair, the two of you talking and her making suggestions and you saying what you thought and me just sitting there. I was terrified.”19
Nancy read a scene from East Side, West Side, a high-society melodrama that was scheduled to begin shooting that summer. Howard Keel, a handsome newcomer who would soon become a star in Annie Get Your Gun, played opposite her. As Nancy remembered it, Cukor was “kind and Ronnie and Nancy in Hollywood: 1949–1952
2 2 9
understanding.”20 According to his biographer Emanuel Levy, Cukor “told the studio Nancy had no talent,” and he would make nasty remarks about her for the rest of his life.21
Mayer reportedly agreed with Cukor’s assessment, but the combination of Thau and Schary prevailed. On March 2, 1949, MGM signed Nancy Davis to a seven-year contract starting at $250 a week, with forty weeks a year guaranteed; if the studio renewed her option every six m
onths, by the last year she would be making $1,250 a week. “I grabbed it,” she later wrote. “I was finally earning a regular paycheck, which meant I would no longer have to accept money from my parents.”22
Shortly after being signed, Nancy was asked to fill out a four-page biographical questionnaire for MGM’s publicity department. Dated March 15, 1949, it offers a glimpse into her personality at a moment that, in her words, “marked the end of one period of life and the beginning of another.”23 She stated her height as five-feet-four, her weight as 117 pounds, and shaved two years off her age, making herself twenty-five instead of twenty-seven, a fib she would stick to even as First Lady. She listed knit-ting as her hobby, tennis and swimming as her sports, “dancing and anything that gets me into the sun” as her favorite forms of recreation, and said she liked to sleep in “tailored nightgowns” with the “windows wide open.” Her most treasured possessions: “Two baby pictures of my mother and father—never am without them—and a locket of my great-grandmother’s with a baby picture of my mother inside. Why? Because I’m a sentimentalist, I guess.”
She named as her favorite actors Walter Huston and Spencer Tracy.
Her favorite actresses: Nazimova and, in keeping with her serious-actress image, Laurette Taylor. She admitted to believing in hunches and superstitions (“All of them and then some”), and produced a list of her phobias:
“Superficiality, vulgarity, esp. in women, untidiness of mind and person—
and cigars!” One can hear echoes of her stepfather in her answer to the question “Do you govern your life by any rule or rules?” “Do unto others,” she typed, “as you would have them do unto you. I believe strongly in the law of retribution—you get back what you give.”
Ronnie and Nancy Page 31