In his first autobiography, in reference to filming Hellcats, Reagan wrote: “Nancy and I had a moonlight farewell scene on the eve of my departure for the dangerous mission that was the climax of the story. The first thing I knew, Nancy was crying instead of saying the lines in the script, and then she was giggling between sobs, laughing at herself for having gotten so carried away that [in her mind, at least] she was really saying goodbye and sending me on a suicide mission.”
In each of Nancy’s memoirs, she had almost nothing to say about either her role or her involvement in Hellcats, except for a remark about kissing Reagan. In one memoir, she said the film was released in 1956; in another, she wrote 1957—and got it right that time.
Variety commiserated with Nancy for being stuck in such a thankless role.
The New York Daily News cited Nancy’s performance as “providing subordinate romantic interest which does not get in the way of the film’s primary offering—action.”
Other reviewers were less kind, especially when the movie was released on DVD during Reagan’s presidency. “Nancy and Ronnie had as much chemistry in their on-shore romance as did Wallace Beery and Marie Dressler in the 1933 Tugboat Annie,” wrote Kenneth David.
Chapter Fourteen
They Didn’t Know It Yet, but the Fading (and Fired) Movie Star and the Failed (and Fired) B-List Starlet Had a Shared Rendezvous With Destiny
One blustery afternoon, Ronald Reagan in his “Bogie trenchcoat,” took Nancy Davis to the marriage license bureau.
She shared her version of what love is. “It meant giving more than receiving, and it also meant sharing. I think you know you are in love when you no longer are the most important person you know. I would give my life for Ronnie. I feel lucky in that I have no doubt of my love and of my being loved.:”
Nancy Davis was disappointed that her very frugal husband, Ronald Reagan, had “deep pockets and short arms.” He didn’t want to spend money to hire a photographer to record the events associated with their wedding.
William Holden and his wife, the actress Brenda Marshall, however, hired a photographer to record their wedding reception and paid for a wedding cake. Knife in hand, Reagan looks like he’s about to attack the symbolic bride and groom crowning the multi-tiered confection..
She Became One of the Most Fascinating, Enigmatic, and Controversial First Ladies In American History—But How Did She Lure a Reluctant Reagan Into Marriage?
Nancy’s road to the altar was long and tortured, with many roadblocks and many detours. It would take two and a half years of steady pursuit on her part.
Before meeting Reagan, Nancy had composed a list of eligible bachelors in Hollywood, all of whom she considered worth marrying. Reagan’s name was at the top of the list. She decided to start at the top and work her way down the chart.
She opted to reach him through his friend, film director Mervyn LeRoy. For the previous few months, she’d received a lot of mail directed to “Nancy Davis” with information about rallies and meetings of the Communist Party. It was the era of Hollywood’s “Blacklist,” and she didn’t want to lose her chance at stardom for fear that she’d be mistaken for Red, or accused of socialist sympathies, or worse.
He told her he’d relay her concerns to Reagan, president of SAG, to see what he could do.
“But I’d prefer to speak to Mr. Reagan personally,” she said.
“First, let’s do it my way,” he said. “After all, I’m used to directing the scene.”
Über-Assertive, Now and Forever.
“I love to wear red, but I’m not a Red,” Nancy said. “If anything, I’m probably the most anti-communist starlet in Hollywood.”
Reagan had never seen Nancy in a film, not even East Side, West Side, a 1949 flick that had starred his friend, Barbara Stan-wyck, and in which Nancy had played a supporting role.
A hip Hollywood director like LeRoy knew Nancy’s real motive for wanting to speak to Reagan personally. “I think she wants to date you,” the director said.
“My calendar’s full, but I’ll consider it,” he answered. “I won’t ask you what she looks like, because I know that she must be attractive if she’s an MGM starlet.”
“Who knows? MGM might have signed her on as a threat to Marjorie Main. But, no, that’s not the case. Nancy is quite attractive, I assure you. I was the first director to discover Jane Wyman when I put her in a small part in Elmer the Great back in 1933. Maybe lightning will strike twice for you when you meet Nancy.”
Reagan told LeRoy that he’d think about dating her, but first, he wanted to investigate her placement “on a commie mailing list.”
Out with Nancy, Reagan, for some reason, chose to wear his glasses, although for years, he usually avoided being photographed in them.
As Nancy joked, “It’s not true that women don’t make passes at men who wear glasses.”
“She’s no Ava Gardner, but she’s kinda cute,” LeRoy said. “She’s single. You’re single. Why don’t you take her out?”
“And disappoint two dozen other Hollywood cuties that night?” he said. “I may ask her out. Then again, I might not. For all I know, I’ll fall for the hot little blonde I’m seeing.”
“Marilyn Monroe?”
“Been there, done that,” Reagan answered. “No, another Marilyn—Marilyn Maxwell.”
“You’re moving in on Frankie’s territory, I see,” LeRoy said.
Reagan took two weeks getting back to Nancy. He did discover that there was a movie extra, Nancy Lee Davis, registered as a screen worker who occasionally got a job as an extra. Her name, indeed, was on a list of movie workers who, between 1945 and 1952, were suspected of affiliations with the Communist Party. She had also supported members of the notorious, disgraced, and blacklisted “Hollywood Ten.”
Reagan reported this to LeRoy, and the director subsequently called Nancy with news that her name had been cleared of suspicion. But she still protested, claiming, “But I want to speak to Mr. Reagan myself.”
Reagan warned her, in his call to her the following day, that their meeting would have to be for an early dinner, since he was due at the studio at 5AM the following morning.
She responded, “I have the same problem.”
As it happened, both of them lied, since neither was involved in any film being shot at the time.
The historic meeting of the future President of the United States with his future First Lady took place in October of 1949.
When he arrived at her doorstep, she later told friends, “He had both legs. I’d seen Kings Row, where they were amputated. But he was on crutches.”
[He was still recovering from a broken leg he had injured in a charity baseball game.]
He took her to LaRue’s on the Strip, which back then was a hip gathering spot.
She claimed she was immediately attracted to him, “finding him nice looking.” She also viewed his mind as “stimulating and, unlike all other actors, he could talk about something other than motion pictures.”
Over dinner, he discovered that she’d never seen a performance of Sophie Tucker, “The Last of the Red Hot Mommas.” Tucker was his favorite entertainer, which surprised her. She thought his favorite singer would perhaps be Doris Day, his favorite comedian Jack Benny. But, no, it was Miss Sophie, with her raunchy jokes and her very Jewish humor, had been scheduled for an appearance at Ciro’s later that night.
By the time this photograph was taken, Reagan had proposed marriage to Nancy. but when he first met her, he wrote: “Bells didn’t ring. Nor did rockets explode.”
As he told Robert Taylor, “Nancy’s pretty, but not what I expected. A bit reserved, unlike Ann Sothern or Ruth Roman. Her large hazel eyes are her best feature. Otherwise, she’s a rather demure brunette.”
After Sophie’s act, the other couples danced to the music of Xavier Cugat’s band, but Reagan couldn’t join in, because of his injured leg.
At the end of her show, Sophie joined them at table. “I adore Ronnie,” she said to N
ancy. Then she turned to Reagan. “A brunette for a change?”
The last time she’d seen him was after her performance on Miami Beach, where he’d showed up with a blonde, Marilyn Monroe, then an aspiring starlet.
He was honest with Nancy, telling her that he’d fibbed about that early morning call. “I didn’t want to be trapped in a blind date that didn’t go well. It’ll soon be dawn, so you can say this date was a knockout.”
On her doorstep, he kissed her on the cheek and left without any promise of calling her again.
When Nancy first started dating Reagan, she was twenty-eight, though claiming to be twenty-six. “That sounds better.”
Although he failed to make any promises, Reagan called her at 11AM and invited her out for another night on the town. She later said, “We had dinner that night, and the next night, and the night after that. For about a month, we must have gone to every restaurant and nightclub in Los Angeles.”
Rumors circulated that during their first month together, he was spending his nights in her small apartment in Westwood, a suburb west of Hollywood near the UCLA campus.
In Nancy’s second memoir, she admitted that she and Reagan soon tired of going nightclubbing every night. “We started spending more of our time alone in my apartment, where we watched movies and ate popcorn.” Presumably, they found other amusements, too. She looked forward to his taking her to Chasen’s every Tuesday night for its weekly special, “Beef Belmont.”
People who knew Reagan well, including Dick Powell, claimed, “Ronnie didn’t immediately fall in love. He had to be very gently led into those pastures like a horse, and be assured that the green grass was for grazing and that he wouldn’t end up in the glue factory.”
After the first activity-filled month, Reagan didn’t call Nancy as frequently, perhaps only once or twice a week. She feared he was losing interest.
Biographer Laurence Leamer wrote: “For a woman who sought a courtly Spenserian romance, Ronnie might seem a strange choice indeed. He was a man too scared by past romantic failures to fall easily into an impassioned union typical of youthful first love. But Ronnie was the first man Nancy had ever met who measured up to Dr. Loyal. She loved Ronnie. She wanted him, a man whom she could admire uncompromisingly, the way she admired Dr. Loyal.”
“Ronnie’s heart was frozen,” Leamer continued. “To him, spring was not the harbinger of summer, but only of another winter. Nancy put up with all of Ronnie’s ambivalence. She listened to his endless political talk, as Jane had not, and loved every word. She thought his most banal political remarks rang with profound meaning. She looked at him with pure adoration.”
[When Nancy became First Lady, that loving and sometimes ferociously protective gaze became known as “The Look.”]
Had Nancy Davis not gotten pregnant (Patti was on the way), Reagan might have carried Doris Day across the threshold instead.
“I was a gentleman who preferred blondes, but married brunettes,” he told his friend, singer/actor George Murphy.
Here he is, publicizing his second picture with Doris, The Winning Team in 1952 (the year he married Nancy).
It was the last picture he ever made at Warner Brothers, a studio where he’d worked since 1937.
As he later joked, “On the way out the door, I felt the pointed toe of Jack Warner’s shoe in my most hidden spot.”
***
When Reagan didn’t call, as he had before, she concentrated on her career and very soon—when she learned that he was dating other women, she started going out with other men. That was all too evident one noonday in the MGM commissary, when she heard a starlet at a nearby table bragging to her friends about a recent gift of jewelry from Reagan. So far, he had never given Nancy any gift, not even flowers.
Their 1952 baseball flick, The Winning Team,” choreographed a “movie version” of what a Reagan/Day nuptial might look like.
In the photo above, bride and groom—with Doris wearing white satin, a veil, and lace— dig into the fixings for a cold, Depression-era wedding supper prepared, Americana-style, by well-wishing friends.
She later heard that while he was making Storm Warning (1951), he was seriously considering proposing to Doris Day.
Jane Wyman had heard that Reagan had been on the verge of marrying Nancy.
“Don’t ask me why I’m so happy that the Davis girl is going out with other men,” Jane told Joan Blondell. “I walked out on him, but I will cling to him at times for the comfort and security that only he can provide me. I know that if I ever got sick or something, and couldn’t work, he’d be the first person to arrive on my doorstep.”
As for Nancy, Jane learned she was still seeing Benny Thau at MGM.
“Ronnie didn’t want to get too involved with Nancy,” George Murphy recalled. “That’s why he stopped seeing her so much. It was getting too god damn intense. Besides, I advised him to stick with blondes—no, not Marilyn Monroe but Doris Day. Doris was all that was fine and decent and would make an ideal First Lady if his dream of becoming president ever came true.”
On one date, Nancy invited him to see her in The Next Voice You Hear (1950), wherein she co-starred with James Whitmore. After the movie, he told her, “Unpack your bags. You’re going to be around Hollywood for quite a time.”
On their dates, Reagan often shared his career woes with Nancy. In November of 1950, he gave a revealing interview to Silver Screen: “I’d love to be a louse on screen like Humphrey Bogart. You know, the kind of fellow who leers at the dolls and gets leered back. The guy who treats women rough and makes them love it. You know why I’d love to be louse? Because the public loves him. He makes money for his employers. He’s talked about and swooned over. He grimaces forth from the pages of Silver Screen and people bring mouse traps to his doorstep. The louse business is, for sure, the open road to ‘Fame in Films.’”
William Holden recognized that Reagan was in no hurry to make a commitment to another woman. “He was burned in his first marriage, and the pain still is deep. I understand why he wanted to keep dating other women. Of course, I’d call it more than dating.”
Nancy discussed her own career problems with Reagan. She was featured in a number of picture layouts—in fact, Movieland heralded her as “A Star is Born.” Despite the glamour of that connotation, she was photographed in jeans cleaning the house.
When director George Cukor saw the published version of these domestic photographs, he told friends, “The Hattie McDaniel image of a maid in Gone With the Wind is old-fashioned. The 1950s image of a maid should be none other than Miss Nancy Davis, who sure knows her way around a vacuum cleaner.”
Hedda Hopper noted that Jane and Nancy each appeared in the same magazine. “Jane was all dolled up and looking glamorous, like a movie star should. In contrast, poor Nancy looked dowdy.”
Jane and Nancy would never be mistaken for each other, although biographers over the years have noted a certain similarity in both of the “President’s Ladies.” Each has been perceived as a “strong-willed woman often displaying a fiery temper.”
Despite the critical and commercial failure of many of her pictures, the studio insisted that Nancy continue to pose for publicity layouts. MGM sent her to the chic Amelia Gray’s fashion shop in Beverly Hills for fittings of dresses from the latest Parisian designers, with the understanding that these dresses were to be borrowed for photo layouts. A sales clerk later said that “Miss Davis selected the wardrobe of a rich, thirtyish, unmarried society matron.”
The stardom that Nancy had dreamed about did not come with the release of The Next Voice You Hear (1950). In that, she played a pregnant wife. “After that film, now I’m only offered roles for pregnant wives.”
“Pregnant is something you don’t want to get,” Reagan cautioned.
“I noticed that when I go into a restaurant with you, the people at the other tables cast sly glances my way, checking to see if I’m showing any signs of pregnancy.” Nancy said.
Rumors buzzed through Hollywood
about Reagan’s upcoming marriage to Nancy. In March of 1951, a columnist in Variety wrote: “Another date, this time for dinner at LaRue’s on the Strip, adds fuel to the fires of romantic gossip raging about Ronald Reagan and Nancy Davis. Expect an announcement of marriage any day now.”
That didn’t happen. A year would drift by. Another year. Then another six months, even though some headlines had already announced Nancy as “THE NEXT MRS. RONALD REAGAN.”
The Hollywood Reporter trumpeted, “Nobody’s seen an engagement ring, but Ronnie is wearing his heart on his sleeve, and there’s a twenty-karat sparkle in the eyes of Nancy Davis.”
Modern Screen reported, “Don’t look now, but here comes the bride. Ronald Reagan and Nancy Davis have had that ‘about-to-be-married look’ for more than a year now.”
Louella Parsons weighed in with her take, writing in Modern Screen, “Are Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman haunted by their perfect love? Not long ago, I went to dinner at their home, and Maureen came in to cut her birthday cake. Her mother and father stood by her side, polite to each other and respectful—so different from those gay kids who went barnstorming across the country with me years ago. I turned away so they couldn’t see the tears in my eyes.”
“I wonder—Do those embers of the once perfect love they shared still burn deep with haunting memories that won’t let them forget?”
The report was unconfirmed, but one traumatic day, Nancy arrived to deliver something to Reagan at his apartment. It was perhaps a surprise gift she knew he wanted. After she knocked on his door, it was said to have been opened by a young actress, Christine Larson. Nancy left at once, taking the gift away with her. She was no doubt heartbroken.
Love Triangle: Ronald Reagan, Jane Wyman, & Nancy Davis (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) Page 100