Love Triangle: Ronald Reagan, Jane Wyman, & Nancy Davis (Blood Moon's Babylon Series)

by Darwin Porter

  Although her starting salary was low, Nancy seemed pleased with it. “Of course, “she remarked, “Lassie, that beautiful collie, was pulling in $1,000 a week at the time.”

  Thau had previously informed Nancy that Lassie, in the dog’s capacity as a star, was equivalent to “Greer Garson with fur.”

  Berlin-born Gottfried Reinhardt was the son of the fabled Austrian theater director, Max Reinhardt. The son had produced Two-Faced Woman (1941), the final film of Greta Garbo.

  When Nancy first encountered Reinhardt as part of a chance meeting, he was in preparation for his classic 1951 film, The Red Badge of Courage, the epic Civil Wardrama starring war hero Audie Murphy.

  Dore Schary represented a new breed of mogul, making decisions and sponsoring movies that would have driven his domineering predecessor (Louis B. Mayer) crazy.

  According to Reinhardt “Benny Thau always made his directors cast the girl he was sleeping with at the time. Nancy was a horrible actress, and I knew she got her contract by devious means. Benny called me into his office and asked me to cast her in my next picture. Sidney Franklin had already rejected her. I said I would get back to him, but I never did. Of course, Benny could have insisted, but he didn’t. Even with no talent, Nancy had a lot going for her, giving Benny blow jobs and having Loyal Davis take care of Dore Schary’s back.”

  Taffeta Fashion Glam: In this haute fashion shot arranged by MGM, the hope was that Nancy would evoke an allure as pronounced as that of Lana or Ava. But as her resumé was scrutinized, she seemed less and less suited for sultry.

  Reinhardt said, “Even without a screen test, she had that contract in the bag. As long as she showed up, wasn’t drunk, and didn’t up-chuck on camera, she was in like Flynn. A lot of guys were rooting for her, including Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Dore Schary, and my friend, Benny Thau. Louis B. Mayer didn’t like her screen test, but he finally gave in and allowed her contract to go through. Mayer was beginning to lose a lot of his power in the late 1940s. Back in the 1930, he would have ordered Davis off the Metro lot.”

  Lucille Ryman Carroll, head of MGM’s talent department, cynically remarked, “Benny knew the Davis girl would never be a star. He just wanted his morning blow job. If he gives her a role, I predict it’ll be in a B picture. Of course, Schary goes for that demure look. What in hell does he know? He even turned down Marilyn Monroe, and she went over to Fox.”

  Once her contract was signed, Nancy evacuated her apartment in New York, finding a similar one in Santa Monica. After a few weeks, she rented a modest house in Beverly Glen. Her neighbors were Van Johnson and his wife, the former Evie Wynn. Like Jane Wyman before her, Nancy became close friends with Johnson, going swimming with him or else playing tennis. Evie went along for the outings.

  [Johnson’s boss, Louis B. Mayer, had ordered him to get married as a means of putting a stop to rumors that he was a homosexual. “I became ‘It,’ meaning the only safe choice woman for Van to marry,” Evie later said. “I was told to divorce Keenan, Van’s best friend, and then marry Van. To save his career at MGM, Keenan also agreed to Mayer’s harsh terms. Boy, did we make a lot of sacrifices to hold onto an MGM contract.”]

  Not the big stars, but the minor ones, resented Nancy at MGM and spread rumors about her. When Nancy arrived in Hollywood, she perhaps thought that Clark Gable would continue dating her, as he had in New York. But except for a lunch or two in the MGM commissary, he did not.

  Ernst Lubitsch (left), a brilliant director of savvy and wit, is seen with Gottfried Reinhardt, the talented son of the celebrated theater impresario, Max Reinhardt.

  When Benny Thau asked him to cast Nancy in his next picture, he was horrified.

  She’d heard that he was seeing an MGM blonde, Audrey Totter, who had signed with the studio in 1944, playing a floozy who makes her dough by rolling drunken soldiers and sailors in Main Street After Dark. Totter took up with Gable when they were cast together in Any Number Can Play (1949). She and Nancy would later come into jealous conflict over actor Robert Walker.

  [Ironically, Totter would also get into jealous tangles with Jane Wyman over the affections of John Payne and Lew Ayres.]

  Totter referred to Nancy as “Benny’s little protégée from New York.” She had taken an instant dislike to Nancy on first sight. She spread the story around the studio that one morning, she had an appointment with Thau, claiming she had entered his office and found his secretary out. She opened the door to Thau’s office without knocking, and discovered someone going down on him as he sat behind his desk. She claimed that quickly and quietly, she shut the door and left his office’s anteroom. “I waited in the hall to see who had been performing fellatio. After twenty minutes, Nancy Davis, looking prim and proper, emerged.”

  MGM’s casting director had an enormous influence on her brief film career. As vice president of MGM, he had been in charge of casting since 1928. He was one of MGM’s “College of Cardinals,” who reported directly to the boss of bosses, Louis B. Mayer. The other so-called cardinals included Eddie Mannix, Lawrence Weingarten, and Hunt Stromberg.

  Nancy-Hater: Audrey Totter

  “Nancy is in good hands with Benny,” Tracy told Gable and others. “Mayer is bombastic, but Benny is more the quiet type—in fact, his voice is so soft, you have to strain to hear the fucker. If two stars are waging war on the set, Benny is called in as the peacemaker.”

  In his early fifties, Benny had a tendency to early baldness and was developing a paunch. He always ate a large piece of cake for dessert at lunch, and repeated that order for dinner, always à la mode.

  As he said himself, “I was constantly surrounded by the most beautiful men and women in the world. I never pretended to be a looker myself.”

  Elizabeth Taylor claimed that “Benny was like a surrogate father. I turned to him for advice...and perhaps a little more.” The final phrase within that statement was deliberately enigmatic.

  Nancy Davis in 1949: A new starlet outside her home on Beverly Glen, rushing to get ready for a hot date.

  Actually, Thau could have been a second father to Nancy, too, as he was four years older than her birth father, Kenneth Robbins.

  Thau was very popular among the male stars at MGM, often lining up prostitutes for them. He was especially known for his Christmas Eve orgies.

  In spite of his unprepossessing looks and personality, Thau was rumored to have “the busiest casting couch at MGM,” rivaling that of Harry Cohn at Columbia and Darryl F. Zanuck at Fox. Greta Garbo adored him and trusted him so much that she worked without a formal contract. “Benny’s handshake was enough for me,” she said.

  His list of conquests was long—often starlets like Nancy, but sometimes, big name actresses such as Jean Harlow, Rosalind Russell, Jeanette MacDonald, Mary Astor, Joan Crawford, Loretta Young, and Norma Shearer.

  He willingly abandoned all of these ladies when a red-haired Londoner arrived at MGM. She was Greer Garson, born in 1903 and, consequently, far closer to Thau’s own age—he was born in 1898—than Nancy.

  Garson became Thau’s mistress. He closely supervised her career. In 1941, she was nominated for an Oscar for Blossoms in the Dust, that soggy Technicolor soap opera.

  Usually, MGM did not sign actresses as old as Garson for their star roles, only for character parts. But Garson’s style, manners, and ageless beauty seemed to overcome that prejudice. In 1942, she appeared in her biggest box office hit, Mrs. Miniver, which earned an Oscar for her. When she received it, she delivered the longest acceptance speech (5 ½ minutes) in Hollywood history, a liberty that would not be tolerated during Academy Award ceremonies today.

  An MGM publicity photo: Tennis anyone?

  Nancy, anyone?

  During the filming of Mrs. Miniver, a young (age 26) and very handsome actor, Richard Ney, played her son. “When I saw Richard in uniform, I fell madly in love with him,” Garson said. “So I married the boy.” She was 39.

  No longer with Garson as his mistress, Thau was a free agent when he en
countered Nancy. “She was sweet and appealing,” he recalled. “Except for some jealous actresses, she was very popular at MGM.”

  During her first weeks in Hollywood, Thau was Nancy’s constant escort, although eventually, both of them expanded their date calendars.

  [Thirty years after his affair with Nancy and long after his retirement from MGM, Thau was an invalid, confined to a wheelchair, a permanent resident of the Motion Picture and Television Hospital outside Los Angeles. He would die there in 1983 when Nancy was First Lady, presiding over the White House.

  Greer Garson, the original “cougar,” with Richard Ney. Their marriage lasted four years.

  Several members of the Hollywood elite came to visit the dying man. Reporters were shocked to find him so outspoken. “I don’t have to protect any star’s reputation at this point,” he claimed. “Even my own.” He admitted that at one point, there had been talk of marriage with Nancy. “But I didn’t pursue it. First, I was a much older man. I was also aware that Edith and Loyal were anti-Semites, and I was a Jew. So marriage was something to think about, but it just wasn’t realistic.”

  Among those interviewing Thau was the well-known biographer, Anne Edwards, author of Early Reagan (1987). She visited Thau during the closing months of his life. As reported by Kitty Kelley, Thau confided to Edwards that Nancy was renowned in Hollywood for giving oral sex. “She not only slept around, she performed that act and she performed it not only in the evening, but in offices. That was one of the reasons she got her contract, and one of the reasons she was popular at MGM.” Edwards said she did not print Thau’s claim because it was “too scandalous, too taste less,” and because her book was about Reagan, not Nancy.

  Peter Lawford, one of Nancy’s lovers, also claimed, “She was known for giving the best head in Hollywood.”

  Another biographer, Laurence Leamer, who wrote Make Believe: The Story of Nancy and Ronald Reagan (1987), also claimed that Benny Thau’s receptionist alleged that she found used condoms in Thau’s wastepaper basket after every one of Nancy’s visits. That suggested that their sex acts may have extended beyond fellatio, since in the late 1940s, few women used condoms when giving oral sex back in those halcyon days before AIDS.

  Other books—not just Kitty Kelley’s—have suggested that Nancy became known as “the fellatio queen of Hollywood” long before the release of Linda Lovelace’s Deep Throat in 1972.

  A free-lance reporter, Daniel Burns, visited Thau at his retirement home and later claimed that he made a “deathbed confession.” Perhaps unknown to Burns, that confession had already been expressed to others.

  Thau told Burns, “Nancy was the undisputed Queen of Fellatio in Hollywood. The champion had been Faye Emerson before her marriage to Elliott Roosevelt. In the 1950s, after Nancy got married to what’s his name, Marilyn Monroe was, more or less, the undisputed queen, even though she didn’t hold the title. Of course, all critics agree that by the early 70s, Linda Lovelace was the oral expert. During her brief fling with William Holden, she tried to get Reagan’s pal to fix her up with the man himself.”

  In Linda’s view, only Reagan could determine “which of us is better, Nancy or me.”

  So far as it is known, Holden never complied with Lovelace’s request.

  Later, when asked about the role of Thau in her life, Nancy claimed, “I liked him as a friend, but that is as far as it went. I was not his girlfriend.”]

  In heavily sanitized latter-day evaluations,” Nancy proclaimed, “Joining the studio was like walking into a dream world.” But because of her understated manner and her somewhat distant approach to acting, MGM often found her hard to cast. In the early 1950s, roles that might have gone to Nancy went instead to Janet Leigh, Leslie Caron, Jane Powell, and, most definitely, Debbie Reynolds.

  Almost as a foreshadowing of her future as Ronald Reagan’s wife, if a role called for “a gentle, plain, and understanding spouse,” it went to Nancy, in Thau’s opinion.

  ***

  The legacy of Nancy’s movies appear minor, indeed, when compared to the distinguished list of those of Oscar-winning Jane Wyman, and to the many (less stellar) films made by Reagan. One of the few positive things that a film critic might say about Nancy’s film repertoire is, “They’re not as bad as rumor has it.”

  Reflections in a Mirror? Or just a Shadow on the Wall? Nancy Davis gets noir-ish in her film debut.

  The first film Nancy made was a mystery thriller, Shadow on the Wall, co-starring Ann Sothern and Zachory Scott. Many movie-goers thought it was her third picture, because, although it was shot early in 1949, it was not released until more than a year later, after she’d appeared in two other films, The Doctor and the Girl and East Side, West Side. The reason for the delayed release of Shadow on the Wall is not known. Perhaps MGM had made a similar B picture and wanted to hold back the premiere of Shadow on the Wall as a means of reducing the competition.

  Although George Cukor had directed her screen test, for her first film, Nancy was assigned a relatively untried Englishman, Patrick Jackson, to helm her. He’d made documentaries in the 1930s and had directed Western Approaches, a fictional account of 22 sailors marooned in a lifeboat, in 1944. Much of that film had been shot in the Irish Sea. Real sailors rather than professional actors were used.

  “Pat was patient with me, knowing how scared I was,” Nancy said. “He told me the movie was based on a novel, Death in a Doll’s House, and he gave me a copy which I read in one night. I think I got more understanding from the book than from the director.”

  Sothern usually played sassy but sympathetic characters, but in Shadow on the Wall, she was cast as the villain, Dell Faring, who, in a jealous rage, shoots her sister, Celia (Kristine Miller), when she learns she’s involved in an affair with her boyfriend. Suspicion for the murder falls on Celia’s husband (Zachory Scott), who—if he’s found guilty—may be sent to the electric chair.

  The only witness to the murder is a nine-year-old child, the stepdaughter of the victim, played by Gigi Perreau. She saw only the shadow of the killer, projected on a wall, and she was so traumatized by what she witnessed that her memory is blocked.

  The cast of Shadow on the Wall, left to right: Ann Sothern, Zachory Scott, Gigi Perreau, and Nancy Davis.

  Who was the real killer? Sothern or Scott? Psychiatrist Nancy held the clue, which was locked inside the traumatized brain of little Gigi.

  The girl is sent for consultations with a psychiatrist (as played by Nancy), who races to unblock the child’s memory before the wrong man dies.

  In a chat with Nancy, Sothern told her, “Studios sell stars on their good looks and personality buildups. It will happen to you. You’ll be asked questions like, ‘Do you sleep in the nude?’ A star is just a big name to a studio, nothing more. Publicity will give you a fake bio. If you don’t deliver at the box office, you’re out the door.”

  One of Sothern’s most visible hits had been Fox’s A Letter to Three Wives (1949), wherein she played an ambitious writer married to a younger man (Kirk Douglas).

  Years later, Sothern expressed a dim view of Nancy to tell-all biographer Kitty Kelley. “I remember her as quite soft and pudgy, looking like she’d had a nose job. Although she was pleasant enough, she seemed rather devious to me. I can’t tell you exactly why—it was just a feeling I had. Maybe it was because she was so ambitious. She was a tough lady who definitely knew where she wanted to go. She didn’t impress me much.”

  “She was well connected with Benny Thau, if you get my drift. He sometimes appeared on the set to see how things were coming along for his Nancy.”

  Sothern viewed all female newcomers to the screen with a certain disdain, seeing them as “tomorrow’s competition.” Also, at the time she expressed her negative opinions of Nancy, she was in the process of divorcing her actor husband, Robert Sterling, and she had recently been dropped from MGM after her final appearance in a series of Maisie movies in which she had starred as a wisecracking secretary, Maisie Ravier, since 1939. [Sot
hern’s last exposure to the role was in Undercover Maisie (1947).] She was worried about her future in movies—and rightly so. In the months ahead, she would turn to television.

  Gigi Perreau, screaming and traumatized, by Shadow on the Wall.

  As a type, Scott, in real life, reminded Nancy too much of the sleazy character (Monty) he had played opposite Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce (1945). She later thanked him in a memoir for being supportive of her as she struggled through her first movie role.

  Off screen, she noticed that Scott wore a gold earring. He claimed he’d worn one ever since 1938, when the captain of a fishing boat he’d hired off the coast of Mexico had worn one.

  Scott wore it in spite of an attack by Walter Seltzer, a publicist at Warners, who claimed, “Scott has a quality of effeteness about him, a slight effeminacy. There is talk that he is a homosexual, and that he really doesn’t fit into Hollywood.”

  Nancy could not help but notice an enormous tension between Sothern and Scott. Jackson had told her, “It’s good that they don’t have to play any love scenes. I’ve known directors who had to helm love scenes between bitter enemies. Imagine having to passionately kiss one of your worst enemies?”

  At one point, Jackson explained why Scott was feuding with Sothern: He blamed her for interfering in his marriage to the former Elaine Anderson. In November of that year, Elaine would file for divorce from Scott, citing mental cruelty.

  While Scott was away from Hollywood, on location, Sothern had introduced Elaine to the novelist, John Steinbeck, asking him to escort her to dinners and parties. As their courtship continued, Steinbeck fell in love with Elaine and continued their off-the-record affair even after Scott returned. Alienating Scott further, Sothern often served as a “beard” to mask their adulterous relationship.