by Nancy Reagan
Finally, George Folsey took me aside and said, “Nancy, what’s the matter with your eyes?” When I told him what Bill Tuttle had said, I thought George would never stop laughing. “Too big for pictures?” he repeated. “Believe me, Nancy, there’s no such thing.”
But on that first day, I was so anxious and confused that I didn’t know what to believe.
I made about a dozen pictures in all, most of them at Metro before I was married. I loved the work, although it was a lot less glamorous than most people think. Although I knew actors who could stay up half the night at parties, most of us went to bed early in order to be up in time for an early-morning call.
I had always heard stories about the wild side of Hollywood, but I never saw much evidence of it—the heavy drinking, the drugs, promiscuity, and all the rest. I’m not so naïve as to think that such things never went on; they do in every town. But it wasn’t part of my life. I wasn’t a starlet either on or off the screen, and nobody ever chased me around the casting couch. I dated working actors or writers, and I was attracted to slightly older men with a sense of humor. I was always interested in falling in love with a nice man and getting married, and I also never minded spending evenings alone.
Actors tend to play the roles they’re suited for, and unlike many young actresses, I just wasn’t the big-bosomed sweater-girl type. As a result, I was usually asked to play a young mother or a pregnant woman.
Most of my films are best forgotten, but two or three still stand out in my mind. When Dore Schary came over to Metro, one of the first pictures he made was The Next Voice You Hear, in which I starred with Jim Whitmore. The director was Wild Bill Wellman, who told me when we met that he hated to direct women—as if I weren’t nervous enough! But we ended up as close friends.
This was my first starring role, and I believe it was also the first time a character in a movie had ever been visibly pregnant on the screen. Until then you just wore a smock to indicate your condition. But because this picture was supposed to be highly realistic, I was fitted with a special pregnancy pad. I wore no makeup and had no hairdresser. When Sydney Guilaroff, head of the hairdressing department at Metro, came to the set the first day to wish me luck, Wellman, thinking he was there to comb my hair, threw him off the set.
The Next Voice You Hear had its premiere at Radio City Music Hall in New York in 1950, and the studio sent me East to promote it. Although it was only my second picture, my name was listed above the title! After years of minor roles in the theater, it was a great thrill to see NANCY DAVIS on that grand marquee, wrapping halfway around the theater. That picture brought me my first fan letter, and I was so proud of it that I pinned it to my dress and wore it around the studio all day.
I made a few other pictures, including Night into Morning, which I always thought was my best, and Donovan’s Brain, a science-fiction story that still appears from time to time on late-night television. I also had a small part in East Side, West Side, starring Ava Gardner, Cyd Charisse, Van Heflin, James Mason, and Barbara Stanwyck. Barbara was a very big star, and I was nervous about working with her. Like Mary Martin, she was known as a real pro who always knew her lines—and who expected you to know yours. We had one long scene together, in which I had all the lines, and when I got my part right on the first take, the crew broke into applause and Barbara congratulated me. That was probably my greatest moment in pictures—I felt I had really passed the test.
Looking back on that film, I didn’t do too badly, and I think I could have gone on and made a good career for myself. But after I met Ronnie, developing a career was no longer important to me.
For me, East Side, West Side was significant in one other respect. While we were shooting it, Mervyn LeRoy, our director and an old family friend, introduced me to an actor over at Warner Brothers whose name was Ronald Reagan.
6
Ronnie
I’VE said it before and I’ll say it once again: My life didn’t really begin until I met Ronnie.
This is how it happened.
One evening in the fall of 1949, I was in my apartment, reading one of the Hollywood papers, when I noticed a name—my name—in a list of Communist sympathizers in Hollywood. In those days I didn’t know much about politics, but I knew that my name did not belong on that list. In New York I had also been mistaken for another Nancy Davis and had received her mail and even some of her phone calls. But it’s not exactly an uncommon name.
When I came to Mervyn LeRoy with my problem, he had the studio arrange for an item to appear in Louella Parsons’s widely read gossip column in the Examiner, pointing out that the Nancy Davis who was listed in the paper was not the actress who was under contract to Metro.
“Feeling any better?” he asked me the next day.
“A little,” I said. “But my parents would die if they heard about this. What else can I do?”
“Maybe I should call Ronald Reagan,” he said. “This might be something the Guild should look into.”
Ronald Reagan was president of the Screen Actors Guild. I had seen some of his pictures, and on screen, at least, he seemed nice and good-looking—someone I thought I’d like to meet.
“Mervyn,” I said, “I think that would be a very good idea.”
“Come to think of it,” he said, “you two might really hit it off. I’ll have Ron call you.”
I spent that evening waiting for the phone to ring. The longer I waited, the more I liked the idea of meeting Ronald Reagan. But he didn’t call.
The next morning, Mervyn took me aside to say that he had spoken to Ronald Reagan, who had told him there were at least three other Nancy Davises in Hollywood. “If there’s ever a problem,” Mervyn said, “the Guild will defend you.”
That was reassuring, but it wasn’t exactly what I wanted to hear. So I put on a very unhappy face. “I’m really worried,” I said. “I’d feel a lot better if Mr. Reagan explained it to me himself.”
Late that afternoon, the phone rang. “Nancy Davis? This is Ronald Reagan from the Screen Actors Guild. Mervyn LeRoy asked me to look into your problem, and I have some answers for you. If you’re free for dinner tonight, perhaps we could talk about it then.”
“Well,” I stammered, “I think I could manage it.”
“How about seven-thirty?” he said. “It can’t be a late night, because I have an early call in the morning.”
I smiled when he said that. Everyone in Hollywood who went out on a blind date knew enough to mention an early call. If the evening turned out to be a disaster, you had an excuse to end it early.
“Fine,” I said. “I have an early call too.” (I didn’t, but a girl has her pride!)
Two hours later, my first thought when I opened the door was, This is wonderful. He looks as good in person as he does on the screen! (That wasn’t something you could take for granted in Hollywood.) My visitor was propped up on a cane, and he explained that he had hurt himself in a charity baseball game and had just spent eight weeks in the hospital with a broken leg.
We went to LaRue’s, one of the best restaurants on Sunset Strip. In those days, the Strip was still the place to go and to be seen. By the time we sat down to dinner, we had finished discussing the Nancy Davis problem, and my date, who was more familiar than I with the mores of Hollywood, had come up with what he thought was the ideal solution.
“Have the studio change your name,” he said. “You would hardly be the first.”
He had no way of knowing how long I had waited to be called Nancy Davis, and how much that name meant to me.
“I can’t do that,” I told him. “Nancy Davis is my name.”
I had known Ronald Reagan only ten minutes when he suggested that I change my name. More than two years later, when we came back to this topic, I would be all too happy to change my name—to his.
One of the things I liked about Ronnie right away was that he didn’t talk only about himself. I had been out on dates with a number of actors, and all the conversations were pretty much the same: h
is first picture, his second picture, his most recent picture, his current picture, his next picture.
But this man was different. His world was not limited to himself or his career. He told me about the Guild, and why the actors’ union meant so much to him. He talked about his small ranch in the San Fernando Valley, about horses and their bloodlines; he was also a Civil War buff, and he knew a lot about wine.
When he did talk about himself, he was personal without being too personal. The whole world knew that he had recently been divorced from Jane Wyman, but he didn’t go into details, and I wouldn’t have liked him if he had. To this day Ronnie has never talked about his divorce to anyone except me, and I respect him for that.
He had a wonderful sense of humor, which came out when he told me about his trip to England, where he had recently spent four months making The Hasty Heart with Richard Todd and Patricia Neal. Ronnie had hated London. He had arrived to find the worst fog in a hundred years, a fog so thick that it rolled in through the doors and windows of his hotel. To make matters worse, the austerity program meant that no marquees or window displays were lit, and the whole city was gloomy and dark.
He also hated the food; he was served so many brussels sprouts that to this day he refuses to eat them. He finally sent over to “21” in New York for a dozen steaks, but he got to eat only two of them—the others were spoiled by the hotel’s poor refrigeration system. “At least that’s what they told me,” he said with a smile. “But remember, the English were hungry, too!”
As I listened to him, I kept thinking of Mother. Like her, he told funny stories, and he really enjoyed them. When you laughed, he laughed along with you.
But he didn’t do all the talking. I told him about my parents, and I probably bragged a little about my father’s skills as a surgeon. I described our summers at Lake Arrowhead with Uncle Walter.
“Uncle Walter? You mean Walter Huston?”
I explained that he had acted on Broadway with Mother, and I told him about the time Uncle Walter was visiting us in Chicago and his son John called to offer him a part in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. John insisted that his father play the role without his false teeth, and I had fond memories of Uncle Walter taking out his upper plate and learning how to talk without his dentures while we all laughed at him.
Ronnie told me that he had been offered a part in that same picture, where he could have played together with Humphrey Bogart and Walter Huston. He was dying to accept, but he was under contract to do The Voice of the Turtle, and Warner Brothers, which produced both pictures, made the decision for him. Ronnie regrets it to this day.
As we were finishing dinner, he said that Sophie Tucker was opening at Ciro’s that night, together with Xavier Cugat and his band, and suggested that we drive over there “just for the first show.”
“Fine,” I said. “Just for the first show.”
Of course we stayed for both shows, and by the time Sophie Tucker had finished, we had admitted that neither of us really had an early call. It was almost three in the morning when Ronnie brought me home.
I don’t know if it was exactly love at first sight, but it was pretty close. We had dinner together the next night. And the night after that. And the one after that. For the first month or so we must have gone to every restaurant and nightclub in Los Angeles.
Almost as soon as we started dating, the press began to write about us and to speculate about marriage.
We realized early on that neither of us was the fast-lane type, and so instead of going out every night, we started spending most of our time alone in my apartment, watching movies on television and making popcorn. Sometimes we would spend the evening with Ronnie’s close friends Bill and Ardis Holden, who lived in a charming Tudor house in the valley. (Ardis was better known by her stage name, Brenda Marshall.) We also became regulars at Chasen’s restaurant, especially on Tuesday nights, when the special was Beef Belmont.
I wish I could report that we saw each other exclusively, and that we couldn’t wait to get married. But Ronnie was in no hurry to make a commitment. He had been burned in his first marriage, and the pain went deep. Although we saw each other regularly, he also dated other women.
I remember sitting in the commissary at Metro, eating lunch with some of the other contract actresses, when one of them started talking about a gift that Ronnie had recently given her. That hurt. I didn’t have one specific rival, but it did occur to me that perhaps I was just one girl among many.
I also knew that a divorced man needed time before he was ready to marry again. My mother reminded me that Loyal Davis had been badly burned in his first marriage. He had been terrified of making another mistake, and she had had to wait until he was ready.
Ronnie had been so deeply hurt by his divorce that it took a lot of time before he could even consider getting married again. Like most of his generation, he had been brought up to believe that you married once, and that was it. For better or for worse. And if you made a mistake and your marriage wasn’t what you hoped it would be, you suffered in silence. No matter what, marriage was forever.
His divorce had come about suddenly, and he was totally unprepared for it. He also had nobody to confide in when it happened: Nobody he knew well had ever been separated from his children. He spent a week or so living with the Holdens, but he was really lost, and he missed the children terribly.
Ronnie took a lot of trips for the Guild. I would drive him to the station, and when the train pulled out, I would run alongside it for a few yards, waving to him. Then I would drive home and start knitting him a pair of argyle socks, feeling very sorry for myself.
Ronnie would stop in Chicago on his way to New York, and Mother would be there to greet him. They had already “met” over the telephone; I called my parents every Sunday, and Ronnie would get on and say hello. Just as I expected, Ronnie and Mother hit it off. Before long, my part of the conversation got shorter, while theirs got longer and longer. I soon had the feeling that if anything went wrong between Ronnie and me, he and Mother would be perfectly happy together.
Mostly, they told each other stories. One evening, Ronnie took a chance and told Mother a joke that was more risqué than usual. Although he seemed to have second thoughts along the way, he took a deep breath and plunged ahead. When the punch line was greeted with dead silence instead of Mother’s familiar laugh, Ronnie was afraid he had gone too far. A moment later, when Mother still hadn’t reacted, Ronnie said, “Hello, Edie? Are you still there?”
Then came a cool, distant voice that he didn’t recognize. “To whom were you speaking?”
It was the long-distance operator. The call had been cut off, but before the operator told Ronnie, she had let him finish the story so she could hear the punch line.
Later, Ronnie’s only complaint about Mother was that she had ruined one of his favorite jokes. For years, he liked to open his speeches by telling his audience, “I face you today with mixed emotions.” Then he would define “mixed emotions” as the feelings a man has as he watches his mother-in-law drive over the cliff in his new Cadillac.
I decided that he was getting serious when he invited me to come with him to his ranch. Eventually I spent a number of Saturdays and Sundays there, which means that I painted a lot of fences. One Monday morning at the studio, the makeup man told me that I was the first actress he had ever worked with who had to have the paint removed before she could get her makeup on. Later, I accused Ronnie of marrying me just to get his fences painted.
But I also remember my disappointment when, driving to the ranch one day, Ronnie said, “You know, you really should buy a house. It would be a terrific investment, and you’re just throwing away your money by paying rent.”
Well! I had been thinking along the lines of joint ownership, and I just about died!
A few weeks later, Ronnie had to drive to San Diego to give a speech, and suddenly, for the first time, he realized that he didn’t want to make that drive alone anymore—and that the only person he w
anted to share it with was me. (He told me this much later.) I remember being so happy when he asked me to go with him.
Eventually he invited me to the ranch with his children, and I began to believe that we really would get married. By then we were spending most of our time together, but we tried to downplay our romance because of the press. Still, we were written about all the time, and I still have the clippings in my scrapbook. A clipping from March 1951: “Another date, this time for dinner, at Hollywood’s Restaurant LaRue, added fuel to the fires of romantic gossip raging around Ronald Reagan and Nancy Davis. Their Movieland friends expect announcement of their marriage any day now.” (In fact, we got married a year later.)
THE NEXT MRS. REAGAN? a headline read, and the article went on to say, “Nobody’s seen an engagement ring, but Ronnie is wearing his heart on his sleeve, and there’s a twenty-karat sparkle in Nancy Davis’s eye.”
And in Modern Screen: “Don’t look now, but here comes the bride. Nobody’s going to do a double-take when Ronnie and Nancy walk down the aisle. They’ve had that ‘about to be married’ look for over a year.”
And another, “Reagan never shouts from rooftops.… He keeps out of the columns.… But one look at him and Nancy Davis gives the story away.”
The hounding bothered Ronnie because he’d gone through so much of it with his first marriage and divorce. Every time we went out, the press was there, asking, “When are you going to get married?”
Ronnie had recently bought a larger ranch near Lake Malibu, and on Saturday mornings we’d pile Maureen and Michael into the car, together with their friends, and drive up for the day. Maureen and Michael lived with their mother, and Ronnie would often drive over to Jane’s big house on Beverly Glen to see them—especially on holidays. Sometimes he’d ask me to come along, and I did, although this wasn’t exactly my idea of pure joy. Jane was perfectly nice to me, but these visits were awkward. Not only had she been married to Ronnie, but she was very much The Star, and it was her house and her children. I felt out of place, and I was a little in awe of her.