Robert Walker (left) and Peter Lawford were each cynical, opportunistic, gossipy, and, as the years advanced, spectacularly unstable.
Both of them enjoyed the alluring charms of Ava Gardner and each got to enjoy Nancy Davis’ “specialty.”
Walker opted for the clinic, where he spent seven months in rehabilitation. Eager to see how he was responding to treatment, Hepburn remained in constant touch. After his return from Kansas, beginning the moment he stepped off the plane, the press mobbed him. Walker announced. “I’m able to work again—eager to live.”
After his return to Hollywood, Walker began dating Nancy. Hepburn was very upset with Nancy—“First, she moves in on Spence, and now on Bob, as if he didn’t have enough trouble.”
Soon after his return to Los Angeles, he renewed and repeated his self-destructive habits, including the consumption of inordinate amounts of alcohol. His love life grew even more complicated, especially with men. As for women, he concentrated on Nancy.
At one point, Walker confided to his friend and sometimes lover, Merv Griffin (when he was still young trim, and handsome) that he had proposed marriage to Nancy. He later became one of Griffin’s closest friends.
“Obviously, she didn’t accept,” Griffin said to Walker.
“She told me that over the course of a lifetime, she thought Reagan would be the better provider,” Walker said.
Lawford, who by now had his own key to Walker’s home, came over late one afternoon with their mutual friend, producer Joe Naar. Walker was not supposed to be there, having told Lawford he’d arrive in time for dinner.
As later relayed to Cukor, Lawford claimed that when they came into the living room, he first encountered Nancy in the nude and Walker half dressed on his sofa. “It appeared to me that they were engaged in some sort of sex act—guess what?” Lawford said. “Nancy rushed to the bathroom to get dressed. At the time, she seemed terribly embarrassed, but she recovered quickly. It wasn’t long after that she began to date both Bob and me. As you know, I was already deep into my affair with Bob.”
“The whole town’s talking,” Cukor said, “about a ménage à trois.”
[Naar later became the best and most reliable source for information about the sexual trysts among Walker, Nancy, and Lawford. A former William Morris agent, he later produced the hit (1975-1979) TV series, Starsky and Hutch. As an agent, his clients included not only Lawford, but Steve McQueen, Ali MacGraw, Raquel Welch, and Marilyn Monroe.
At one point, Naar double-dated with Lawford and Monroe. He remembered their first date, but didn’t recall the young starlet he was with at the time. “At one point, Peter urged me to switch dates, and I ended up taking Marilyn home. She became not only my temporary lover, but my lifelong friend, confidante, and client.”
Naar’s friendship with Lawford led to his becoming a member of Camelot’s inner circles. The Kennedys accepted him, and he became known for jetting around the country with them and the likes of Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis, Jr.
Ironically, one of Naar’s most successful ventures was as a producer for the General Electric Hour, which was hosted by none other than Ronald Reagan.]
Nancy was added to the marquee names of Lawford’s seductions, which included a lot of A-listers, notably June Allyson, who also seduced Reagan, as well as Lucille Ball, Anne Baxter, Noël Coward, director George Cukor (“Peter was such a lousy lay— strictly oral”), Ava Gardner, Judy Garland, Rita Hayworth (“she had bad breath”), Sal Mineo (“my all-time best”), Marilyn Monroe (“there was a problem with hygiene”)’ Lee Remick, Clifton Webb (“I let him do all the work”), Van Johnson and his lover, Keenan Wynn, whose divorced wife, Evie, Johnson had married, on orders from Louis B. Mayer.
Emmy Winner Joe Naar
The dean of Hollywood biographers, Lawrence J. Quirk, who knew Lawford “from way back when” asserted that he went out with women “to help dispel rumors about his relationships with men—and there were several of them. These relationships worried him; they were often a sexual release rather than a romance. When he fell in love with or entertained romantic feelings toward a man, Peter grew inescapably depressed. This side of his erotic life he found ominous, threatening, baleful, yet he needed it, too.”
Author Mart Martin claimed that from his investigation, Lawford often patronized “young male extras and studio messengers.”
Supposedly, Nancy was aware of Lawford’s journeys into the gay world, but for her it didn’t seem a problem. She had dated and even had affairs with gay men during her New York days.
Young lovers Peter Lawford and Nancy Davis.
Whereas he married into a First Family (the Kennedys), she became the iron-gloved matriarch of a First Family of her own.
When Lawford married Patricia Kennedy, and became part of the Kennedy clan, his wife did not seem unduly concerned with his trysts in the gay world. While he was away, she was having her own flings, including one with Porfirio Rubirosa, the Dominican playboy known for his international charm; his links to the brutal Dominican dictator, Trujillo; his failed marriages to Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton; and for his stupendous sexual endowment.
Apparently, Walker had many soul-searching talks with Nancy. As he told her and so many other friends, “Even as a kid, I knew I was not meant to be born into this world. It was an accident. I’ve spent my life trying to escape the world, wanting to go back to the peace I knew before I entered it.”
After the collapse of his Hollywood career, Drake, no longer the pretty boy at MGM, worked selling used cars in Los Angeles. In the late 1940s and early 50s, he and Lawford often slipped away to wherever Lawford had access to privacy.
Handsome Tom Drake, “the boy next door” to Judy Garland in Meet Me in St. Louis,” had a lament about his years-long affair with Peter Lawford:
“Imagine, I had to fight off Robert Walker, Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, and ultimately, Nancy Davis for squatter’s rights to this elusive Brit.”
“I’d heard stories that Peter was having a fling with both Walker and this starlet, Nancy Davis,” Drake said. “I found that out during my final weekend with Peter. He showed up in Palm Springs with Walker and Nancy. Privately, he told me that she had taken turns fellating them during their transit from Los Angeles to Palm Springs.
“She worked on one of us in the back seat,” Lawford said. “The other had to drive. We took turns.”
“I was heartbroken that weekend,” Drake said. “Peter had dumped me, and I was still madly in love with him.”
In another biography appeared an account that Lawford and Walker drove all the way to Arizona with Nancy so that she could visit her parents, then living in their retirement residence. Lawford may have relayed the incident to one of his wives, but that appears not to be true. Those who knew Nancy doubted very seriously if she would show up in Arizona with not one, but two lovers.
Drake’s account seems far more plausible. Of course, Lawford could have fabricated the Arizona tale as a means of masking his sexual tryst with Drake.
Alfred Hitchcock may have been type casting when he starred Walker as the smiling psychopath and repressed homosexual in Strangers on a Train (1951). It became Walker’s most memorable role and one of the British director’s grandest creations.
The year the picture was released, Nancy was saddened by Walker’s sudden death.
On the night of August 28, 1951, Walker’s housekeeper found the actor ranting, raging, and threatening violence. She summoned his psychiatrist, who examined him, then sedated him with amobarbital. The sedative, combined with the alcohol in Walker’s bloodstream, caused immediate respiratory failure. He was dead at the age of thirty-two.
During the years that followed, Nancy followed Lawford’s saga, especially the episodes associated with his role as brother-in-law of John F. Kennedy, based on his marriage to Patricia Kennedy. Lawford would marry three more times as he drifted into alcoholism and hired call girls, who viewed him as a “quick $50 oral sex trick,” plus a series of male hustler
s upon whom he performed fellatio and quickly dismissed them.
By then, Nancy was far, far away, her world orbiting around Ronald Reagan.
Her relationship with Reagan began when Mervyn LeRoy was directing Nancy in The Doctor and the Girl. She had a matter she wanted to take up personally with Reagan, who at the time was the President of the Screen Actors Guild. Nancy knew that LeRoy and Reagan were friends.
Although she had to wait for days, the call from Reagan finally came through.
***
The films of Nancy Davis, if they are remembered at all today, are highlighted by The Next Voice You Hear, released by MGM in 1950. Her co-star was James Whitmore, with whom she’d make another movie in 1951. Child actor Gary Gray was cast as their son. Based on a preposterous script by Charles Schnee, the movie was produced by Dore Schary and directed by William A. Wellman, popularly known in Hollywood as “Wild Bill.” The plot could easily have dipped into camp were it not for the screen sincerity of Nancy and Whitmore.
The film’s unlikely premise focused on the voice of a man claiming to be God. His declarations would pre-empt every radio program, worldwide, for six broadcasts over the same number of days. On Sunday, as an anxious world awaited his words, he was silent, presumably resting on the Sabbath.
Whitmore and Nancy portrayed a typical American couple with the clichéd names of Joe (played by Whitmore) and his pregnant wife Mary (Nancy). They hover beside their radio, listening to “God” broadcasting from “Heaven.”
Nancy’s ultimate “Mom” role: Left to right, James Whit-more, Gary Gray, and the future First Lady of the United States.
A New Englander, Wellman was the most talented of the directors who ever helmed Nancy. His 1927 silent film, Wings, was the first movie to win an Academy Award as Best Picture. He’d go on to direct A Star Is Born (1937), with Janet Gaynor and Fredric March; Nothing Sacred (also 1937) with Carole Lombard; and Beau Geste (1939) with Gary Cooper.
Before directing Nancy, he had just scored a big hit with his World War II drama, Battleground (1949). Coincidentally, that film had also starred Nancy’s friend, Van Johnson, and featured Whitmore in a supporting role.
Nancy dreaded reporting to the set to face Wellman, as his reputation had preceded him. He was known as brusque and aggressive. Louise Brooks had described him as “sadistic.”
He did not immediately endear himself to Nancy. “I hate all actresses,” he told her. “I detest their narcissism. I prefer to direct men. Women take up so much time worrying about their hair, their makeup, their wardrobe.”
“He knew I just wasn’t the big-bosom, sweater girl type like Lana Turner,” Nancy said. “So we got that out of the way. I couldn’t have looked more drab than I did in my $12.95 maternity smock.”
She was one of the first actresses to appear on screen as openly pregnant. Before that, actresses tried to conceal their pregnancy, as if it were something vulgar, an embarrassing condition not to be flaunted before audiences. But Wellman wanted realism in Nancy’s character, insisting that she wear no makeup and not to benefit from the ministrations of a hairdresser. When MGM commissioned Hollywood’s leading hairdresser, Sydney Guilaroff, to style Nancy’s hair, Wellman chased him off the set.
An affable, plain-looking actor from New York, Whitmore, with Nancy, closely resembled a typical middle-class American couple. He had recently appeared with Marilyn Monroe in The Asphalt Jungle (1950). Monroe was just emerging as a screen siren. Whitmore would later appear with Reagan’s first wife, Jane Wyman, in one of the episodes on her Jane Wyman Presents the Fireside Theatre.
Whitmore had been a dedicated student at the Actors Studio in New York, and when he moved to Los Angeles, he opened his own acting workshop. One of his new pupils was James Dean. One hot afternoon, the young actor, sloppily dressed, showed up on the set of The Next Voice You Hear. When later queried, Nancy reportedly claimed she did not remember meeting Dean, who would later threaten a character portrayed by Reagan with a gun in one of the episodes on his General Electric Theater.
In front of Nancy and Wellman, Dean said, in reference to Whitmore, “I owe a lot to Jimmy here. He has much to teach an actor. So far, he’s the only person I’ve met in Hollywood who hasn’t demanded to suck my cock in return for a favor.”
Working with Wellman did not turn out to be the ordeal for Nancy that she had feared—in fact, they became friends. She recalled, “The tiger turned out to be a pussycat.”
When it was completed, MGM sent Nancy to New York to promote The Next Voice You Hear. She recalled “my greatest thrill” involved standing in front of the Radio City Music Hall’s grand marquee, where for the first time, she saw her name, NANCY DAVIS, posted in big letters. She remembered standing for an entire hour looking up at the marquee.
At the film’s premiere on September 12, 1950, she was escorted by her new beau, Ronald Reagan, whom she had already begun to date. [More about that later…] The occasion marked the first time the couple had ever been photographed together.
Regrettably, Radio City Music Hall was not the proper venue for a message picture from Dore Schary. Movie fans were used to coming to the grand showcase for spectacles and later, to see the Rockettes performing their stunning precision dance numbers.
The New Yorker pounced on the film, attacking it as a “meandering, maudlin affair.” The New York Times, however, cited Nancy’s role as “a cheerful and considerate pregnant wife.”
In Los Angeles, her friend, Spencer Tracy, went to see the movie. To Katharine Hepburn, George Cukor, and others, he said, “Nancy projected the passion of Good Humor ice cream—frozen, on a stick, and vanilla.”
In spite of its controversial subject and nation-wide reviews, the film failed at the box office, losing $65,000 for MGM.
But what did Nancy’s newest boyfriend think of The Next Voice You Hear? After its premiere, Reagan invited Nancy to dinner and gave her some advice. “Send that wardrobe you wore in the picture to the cleaners and then lose the claim check.”
What for Nancy began as a romantic evening ended on a sour note. He told her, “I’m still in love with Jane, even though she’s divorced me. I still think we’ll get back together one day. I plan to grow old with her.”
***
Before being cast in The Next Voice You Hear, Nancy had made two screen tests, hoping to play the female leads in two films, each scheduled for release in 1950.
She first wanted to appear as the wife of Cary Grant in Crisis. In it, he played a renowned brain surgeon vacationing in South America with his wife, a role Nancy coveted. The surgeon becomes inadvertently embroiled in a revolution when the country’s dictator, played by Oscar-winning José Ferrer, urgently needs life-saving brain surgery. The dictator demands that it be performed, by the American doctor, with utmost secrecy.
Dore Schary screened Nancy’s test, later defining it as “The worst screen test in the history of motion pictures.” He told aides, “Nancy will be perfect playing the simple plain housewife to a bloke like James Whitmore. But for Cary Grant’s wife, let’s cast Paula Raymond. She’s a hell of a lot sexier than Nancy.”
[Since Grant took no part in denying the role to Nancy, she did not hold a grudge against him. In fact, in 1981, as First Lady, five weeks after the attempted assassination of Reagan, she invited Grant to a gala event at the White House in honor of the U.K.’s Prince Charles.
For that event, she selected what she called “a fun group,” consisting not only of Grant, but Audrey Hepburn, right-winger William F. Buckley, her close friends Alfred and Betsy Bloomingdale, and fashion doyenne Diana Vreeland.
The evening erupted into a media controversy when Nancy was photographed curtseying before Prince Charles. It set off a firestorm, one newspaper claiming, “No First Lady should be caught bowing her knees in front of royalty. Actually, in her current role, Nancy Reagan has far more power than Prince Charles.”]
The next role Nancy sought and appeared in a screen test for was the part of the wife of Chief Justice
Oliver Wendell Holmes. A friend of the Davis family, Louis Calhern, had already been cast as the justice in The Magnificent Yankee (1950). He would win an Oscar nomination for his role, which required him to age from 61 to 90 during the course of the film.
“I knew the part was a difficult one for me, too,” Nancy said. “I, too, had to age considerably for the role.”
Once again, studio personnel evaluated her as “totally unsuited to play the wife,” the part going to Ann Harding, who had both the talent and the presence to pull off the demanding role.
Nancy learned later that this time around, Schary had endorsed her for the role, as had Ardie Deutsch, the film’s producer. However, when John Sturges was assigned to direct The Magnificent Yankee, he sat through Nancy’s test, which seemed to infuriate him. He wrote a memo to Schary, claiming that Nancy was “WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!” for the part.
[Nancy never shared a story with Calhern that she’d learned from Dr. Loyal Davis.
At one point, in Chicago, he had performed surgery on the ailing actor. In the middle of the procedure, as he lay on the operating table, Calhern’s heart stopped. Desperately, Davis massaged his heart and resuscitated his breathing. Although he revealed details of the incident to both Edith and Nancy, the doctor chose never to tell his most famous patient.]
***
After the failure of The Next Voice You Hear, and her “bombing” in two separate screen tests, Nancy’s future as a movie star looked dim. A whole roster of new stars was on the horizon, dozens of whom were far more talented and beautiful than she was. She would limp through only a few more pictures before fading into oblivion, only to evolve decades later into one of the most powerful behind-the-scenes women of the 20th Century.
Love Triangle: Ronald Reagan, Jane Wyman, & Nancy Davis (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) Page 69