Eventually, as her relationship with Sinatra deepened, Gardner dumped both Lawford and Walker. Following in her footsteps, Nancy began to date both young men herself, which turned Gardner against her, even though she’d discarded the men.
“Of course, Ava got pissed off at Nancy,” LeRoy said. “Nancy was greedy, wanting Peter, Bob, and Frank. What a coincidence that each of them was or had been involved with Gardner. I don’t think it just a coincidence.”
Gardner, by then engaged to Sinatra, became friends with Mason and his wife, Pamela, and frequently went out as a foursome. It was at table with the Masons at the Sugar Hill Club in Harlem that Gardner got into a terrible fight with Sinatra over his liaison with a New York prostitute. During one of the argument’s most memorable moments, she removed her diamond engagement ring and tossed it across the club.
Of the cast, it seemed that the beautiful, talented dancer, Cyd Charisse, was the only member who, like Caesar’s wife, was above reproach.
As a child, she suffered from polio, but went on to become a dancer with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. At the time that Nancy met her, she was married to the singer, Tony Martin. As she’d tell anyone interested, “With Tony in your bed, a girl has no need of any other man.” They remained married until her death in 2008.
As was her custom on a film set, Nancy made a point of ingratiating herself with the supporting players of East Side, West Side. She often appeared even when she wasn’t needed. “She was learning, learning, learning, watching the pros go at it,” LeRoy recalled.
Devoted actress, Neo-Pinko and Reagan Hater: Gale Sondergaard.
One of the first persons she met and chatted with was Gale Sondergaard, who had won an Oscar for her film debut in Anthony Adverse (1936). She was later nominated for an Academy Award for her role as “the first wife” in Anna and the King of Siam (1946). She told Nancy that originally, she had been slated to play the evil witch in The Wizard of Oz (1939). “The first script called for the witch to be glamorous,” she told Nancy. “But then the script was changed to make the witch hideous. I bowed out. I thought that my wearing such disfiguring makeup would damage my career. Margaret Hamilton had none of my reservations.”
During the months ahead, the actress would view Reagan with “total disgust.” She later accused Reagan of turning in a report to the FBI about her and her husband, producer Herbert J. Biberman, alleging that both of them were card-carrying communists. Biberman became one of the notorious “Hollywood Ten” of the early 1950s. This led to Sondergaard being blacklisted in Hollywood. When screen roles dried up, she fled to New York to find work in the theater.
Cyd Charisse in a dance routine (“Sombrero”) that was a lot less demure than her role in East Side, West Side. Faced with the choreographic brilliance of this dance icon, it became increasingly clear that Nancy could not compete.
Nancy noticed that another actor, Douglas Kennedy, a New Yorker, was paying a lot of attention to Stanwyck. His adulation must have paid off because she was instrumental in getting him cast as the Sheriff in her hit TV series for ABC, The Big Valley (1965-69).
Also cast in the movie was veteran actor William Frawley, who had made more than a hundred movies. He told Nancy he was finding it harder and harder to find character roles. She was pleased to read that in 1951, Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball had cast him as the cantankerous, miserly landlord, Fred Mertz, in their hit TV series, I Love Lucy.
When East Side, West Side opened across the country, Nancy gave it a good review, praising it as “outstanding.” The rest of the country did not. The attack was led by Bosley Crowther of The New York Times. “It’s a picture that just about hits the low water mark of interest, intelligence, and urgency.”
Marica Davensport had co-written the screenplay, which was based on her novel. But even she said she was not going to see the picture because she’d heard that it was horrible.
Stanwyck’s biographer, Dan Callahan, summed up the film in his book, The Miracle Worker. “Mason and Heflin are stuck in dull roles, and Stanwyck herself is saddled with the worst role of the kind of sniveling, stoic wifey who does nothing but worry about her husband’s infidelities. She’s up against young Amazons like Cyd Charisse and the ultimate big blonde, Beverly Michaels, who acts as a deus ex machina in the last third. Sitting beside Charisse in a car at one point, Stanwyck is photographed like a grizzled old frontierswoman. The resplendent Ava Gardner, playing the hellcat trying to break up her marriage, dominates the whole stultifying enterprise through sheer physical splendor.”
Postwar Bad Girls: What’s an ambitious starlette to do? Go “Goody-Good” or “Baddy-Bad” on screen?
Pictured above: Beverly Michaels, a girl whose public image Nancy wanted to avoid.
MGM records revealed that East Side, West Side garnered $1,518,000 in North America and slightly more than one million in overseas rentals. But because of the expenses and the all-star talent, the profits generated were only $31,000.
LeRoy later summed up the cast of East Side, West Side, claiming, “They were a bunch of whores, faggots, cocksuckers, dykes, tramps, commies, pederasts, dopers, panty sniffers, rimmers, pillheads, floozies, and male hustlers selling it by the inch.” He told this at a party given for columnist Hedda Hopper, who, in her picture hat, laughed loudly. Of course, he knew she could not print such a provocative comment.
[Fast forward to late 1963 in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where Gardner was co-starring with Richard Burton and Deborah Kerr in Tennessee Williams’ The Night of the Iguana, directed by John Huston.
Elizabeth Taylor, who had accompanied her husband, often joined Burton, as well as Tennessee, Gardner, and Huston, for a tequila-soaked night. At the time, Gardner had turned on Nancy, because of her interest in Sinatra.
Gardner surprised her fellow drunks one night by claiming, “I got to Ronnie’s uncut inches before Nancy.” She then related an incident that took place at William Holden’s private home when his wife, Brenda Marshall, was away. At the time, Holden had been Reagan’s best friend.
“I was jaybird naked in the pool with my companions, the black model, Maddy Comfort, and the artist, Paul Clemens,” Gardner said. “Reagan came out wearing a polo shirt and slacks to see what all the raucous laughter was about. We grabbed him and tossed him in the pool with us. He put up a struggle, but we stripped him. Maddy and Paul later wandered off, and I lured Ronnie into Bill’s cabana. He wouldn’t fuck me, but I went down on him and he rose to the occasion.”
Later, after Gardner went back to her villa, Tennessee asked Huston, “Do you think Ava is telling the truth, or is she just getting back at Miss Nancy?”
“Hell, how would I know?” Huston asked. “Whether it’s true or not, the story makes a good yarn.”]
***
Nancy’s stepson, Michael Reagan, reportedly once said, “If Nancy knew that one day she’d be First Lady, she would have cleaned up her act in the late 1940s.:”
He was obviously referring to her notorious sex life. To read her two memoirs, you get the impression she was a demure virgin when she married Reagan.
It is not known how many men Nancy dated during the starlet years at MGM that preceded her first and only marriage. Only the “marquee names” of Nancy’s dating lists have emerged, and that is because some of them lived to see Nancy become famous. Men, being men, like to brag, particularly about their sexual conquests. There are even web sites today devoted to Nancy’s list of suitors, many of whom have privately praised her alleged “oral talents.”
***
It is not entirely certain if Marlon Brando ever had an affair with starlet Nancy Davis. If he did, it was of short duration and occurred shortly before she nabbed Reagan as her husband. Nancy omitted any mention of Marlon within her autobiographies, as she did each of her other lovers.
Marlon, however, told two producers— Charles Feldman and Elia Kazan—that he’d made love to Nancy, whom he found “kinda cute with her brown eyes and hair just the color I like it.”
; In the early 1950s, Nancy was known to have composed a list of unattached marriageable males. At the top of her list was Ronald Reagan. Other men on the list included actors, producers, and directors. Surely Nancy knew enough about Marlon to realize that he was “not marriage material.” She allegedly told Ava Gardner that “Marlon is just too wild and bohemian for me.”
“But not for me, honey child,” Ava was supposed to have countered. “Been there, done that.”
Nancy had first met Marlon in Manhattan when she was dating Clark Gable, a short-term romance that never got off the launch pad. When she reunited with Marlon in Hollywood, Nancy was in the throes of a torrid affair with Benny Thau, head of casting at MGM. Thau was said to be deeply in love with Nancy during a period when she was dating other men.
One of Thau’s assistants reportedly saw Nancy and Marlon dining at Chasen’s, a restaurant that Marlon had never visited before, as he hated formal dining rooms. She was elegantly attired in a black Chanel dress, a large white hat, and a corsage of small orchids. Having (temporarily) abandoned his blue jeans, Marlon wore a sports jacket and slacks but no tie.
Brando, the quintessential Postwar Bad Boy. His dining with Nancy at Chasen’s supposedly drove MGM’s casting director, Benny Thau, into a jealous rage.
His relationship with Nancy, if one developed at all, fizzled quickly.
When Thau heard that the woman he loved had been seen out with Brando, he was furious, threatening that Marlon would never make a picture for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. “By trying to move in on Nancy, the cocksucking queer has ruined himself in this town—I’ll see to that.”
Whatever relationship existed between Marlon and Nancy fizzled quickly, because she was soon seen dating others.
Marlon told Kazan that Nancy would never appear opposite him in one of his films—“That is, if I ever make another film. But if you know of any roles calling for ‘the perfect wife,’ then Nancy’s your gal. She’s the exception to every other actress in Hollywood. Instead of some big-time career, she wants to settle down in a rose-covered cottage, raise three kids, and greet hubbie with a Scotch and soda every night at six o’clock, as the smell of fried chicken wafts through the house.”
Marlon may have accurately interpreted Nancy’s feelings at the time. She later confessed to just such a dream, hardly knowing that the “cottage” would turn out to be the White House. There, in 1981, she would suffer the highest disapproval rating of any First Lady in modern times.
When Marlon was informed of Nancy’s marriage to Reagan, he sarcastically told Feldman, “It’s a perfect match. I hear Reagan brushes his teeth every time he kisses a woman. I can even suggest a theme song for their marriage. Make it George Gershwin’s ‘Our Love Is Here to Stay.’”
In the years to come, Marlon would always speak kindly of Nancy, “even when she was single-handedly running the Free World.” On the other hand, he consistently deplored Reagan for what he claimed was “His witch hunting of so-called Communists.”
***
Since Nancy had been a teenage girl, Spencer Tracy had always defined her as “my favorite daughter.” He was her mentor, someone she loved and respected. But Tracy got drunk a lot and became very indiscreet, lacking in judgment. His friend, director George Cukor, later claimed that at some point in the late 1940s, Tracy’s platonic relationship with Katharine Hepburn hit rocks in the road. “In a way, Nancy Davis was blamed.”
Tracy rented a cottage on Cukor’s estate, with Hepburn a frequent visitor. To his intimates, the gossipy director later described the Tracy-Hepburn conflicts about Nancy.
Hepburn had originally befriended Nancy, but whereas Tracy had encouraged her to become an actress, Hepburn did not.
She wrote Nancy a letter, warning her “How damn awful the acting profession is: Perhaps you think it’s all too glamorous, and it’s all about socializing with rich and famous stars. Most young girls who dream of being an actress end up waiting tables or else are found at the switchboard.”
HOLLYWOOD QUIZ: What (or who?) was one of the wedges (discounting their respective bi-sexuality) that tested the widely publicized loyalty of Spencer Tracy to Katharine Hepburn? ANSWER: Nancy Davis!
Depicted above are Tracy and Hepburn in one of their scenes from Adam’s Rib (1949).
One night, according to Cukor, Tracy became “Fed up with Kate bossing me around.” He turned on her and ordered her out of his cottage. At one point during their argument, Tracy is reported to have said, “If you don’t get out, I’ll give you a boot in your bony butt.”
Tracy had become hostile at the end of the filming of Adam’s Rib (1949), in which bisexual Hepburn had taken an “undue interest” in her co-star, Judy Holliday, another bisexual actress.
As Tracy relayed to Cukor about Hepburn, “Sometimes when I hear the sound of that out-of-control voice, my whole body cringes. I encourage her to smoke more, since that lowers her voice register.”
Before kicking her out, and perhaps as a means of making her jealous, and to infuriate her, Tracy confessed, “I’ve found an adoring woman, one who understands me, respects me, and gives in to me on any issue. How unlike you! She’s the woman I’ve been looking for all my life and never found. Believe it or not, it’s someone I’ve known for years, but have never thought of in that special way before—that is, until now. Hell, I’m even a friend of her mother’s.”
“Who might this Goddess of Virtue be?” Hepburn had asked, sarcastically.
“Nancy Davis.”
A week later, Hepburn called Cukor, claiming, “Spence has all but given up. He’ll end up one day all alone except for the bottle. I won’t be there for him.”
At the time of her dismal assessment, she seemed unaware that Tracy was experiencing renewed vigor with Nancy.
Cukor told his close gay friend, Anderson Lawler, an early lover of a young Gary Cooper, “Spence is enjoying the comforts of the damned—a bottle of whiskey. He’s not in good health. He’s no longer a champ at the box office. He looks like shit. He’s a walking tub of suet. He sucks off hustlers but won’t admit he’s a homo. Yet he’s still a big enough name he can get a date on a Saturday night, even if it’s Nancy Davis. I directed her in her screen test. I know how limited she is.”
Even though she’d headed East in 1950 to rehearse her Broadway performance of Rosalind in As You Like It, Hepburn still called Cukor for news of the Nancy Davis/Spencer Tracy liaison.
Cukor later said, “Kate has always been aware of Tracy’s affairs with other women, and even of his affairs with a number of men. The ratio was about ten women to every one male. But the mere mention of Nancy Davis’ name made her explode.”
“Spence is a big name in Hollywood, and Nancy will date anybody with a big name,” Hepburn charged. “She likes to associate with important people. She is not the only actress in Hollywood who thinks she can sleep her way to the top. There are some actresses, myself included, who get there on talent alone.”
Nancy dated Tracy, although not exclusively, for at least three months. He seemed to know she was trying to advance her career. As he admitted to Cukor, “I encourage her in a film career, although I secretly know she doesn’t have what it takes to be a star like Kate and me. Her biggest hope in life is to hook up with a producer, director, or perhaps a rich actor. The thing with Gable didn’t work out, but there are others.”
Eventually, after she started dating Reagan, Tracy and Nancy drifted apart. Tracy loathed Reagan, calling him a “Red baiter always looking for a pinko in the haystack.”
“Miss Nancy is laying a trap for this Reagan guy,” Tracy told Cukor. “I think the two of them deserve each other. I just hope Ronnie goes in for oral sex like I do. If he does, he’ll be happy as a pig in shit.”
Years later in a memoir, Nancy wrote: “Spence was the most charming man I’ve ever known.”
As for Hepburn, Nancy claimed that her friendship with the aging actress just (inexplicably) ended. “To this day, I don’t understand why. I made several attempts to re
vive our relationship, but got nowhere.”
***
Nancy’s brief fling with Norman Krasna hardly rates a blip on the radar screen, even though it led to a proposal of marriage. He was a talented screenwriter, playwright, producer, and director, who had garnered an Oscar for writing the screenplay of Princess O’Rourke, in which Jane Wyman had a co-starring role. At the time Nancy met him, he was writing a play, John Loves Mary, which would later be released as a movie (in 1949) with Reagan.
Marriages that might have been: Producer/mogul Norman Krasna, with fresh and dewy Nancy Davis, as shown in a publicity shot from way back in 1943 from a drama production at Smith College.
Krasna was only three years older than Nancy, and, like her, he too had worked in a department store, Macy’s, in Manhattan. Dropping out of law school, he’d turned to writing. When she dated him, he was in the throes of divorcing the former Ruth Frazee.
If Nancy had a selfish motive in going after him, it was to advance her career. Krasna, in collaboration with producer Jerry Wald, had signed a $50 million deal with Howard Hughes, the owner of RKO, to produce a dozen movies. Krasna promised Nancy that if she’d marry him, he’d make her the “Queen of RKO,” and offer that Hughes had previously made to Ingrid Bergman, who had turned him down.
On October 13, 1949, the Hollywood columnist, Edith Gwynn, wrote: “Nancy Davis and her whole family are thinking over a proposal of marriage from Norman Krasna. He is so currazy about her that he’s already popped the all-important question.”
When Reagan showed up on Nancy’s doorstep, two days before Christmas, she had already rejected Krasna’s proposal. Reagan, as head of SAG, congratulated her on having being assigned her own dressing room at MGM, and delivered to her a gold key, compliments of the studio, that had been commissioned as a symbolic honor from Ruser Jewelers in Beverly Hills.
Love Triangle: Ronald Reagan, Jane Wyman, & Nancy Davis (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) Page 67