The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Read online

  Nancy was realistic enough to recognize that, as she once put it, “I wasn’t setting show business on fire.” In the six years after she graduated from Smith, she performed in only four plays—three of them thanks to the beneficence of her mother’s friend ZaSu Pitts. She also knew that as she moved into her late twenties, casting directors would no longer be looking at her for ingenue roles on the stage. There was no true love in sight to carry her away from all of it—and a real danger of developing a reputation as a girl whose phone number gets passed around a lot.

  So, Nancy decided to try something different, making a professional move that more established stage actors of the day would have considered to be beneath them. She began taking roles in the new medium of television, some of it in low-budget, live dramas on Kraft Television Theatre. “Enthusiastic about television, Nancy looks forward to the day when video will have its own stars, would like a dramatic show of her own,” Mademoiselle magazine wrote in November 1948. That sounded far-fetched at the time. Four major networks were broadcasting prime-time schedules seven nights a week, but fewer than 6 percent of Americans had television sets in their homes, and just 44 percent told a Gallup opinion poll they had ever even seen a program.

  Edie might have influenced her daughter’s openness to television, as Nancy’s mother had been an early enthusiast. She launched Chicago’s 1946 Community Fund Drive with a Monday-night broadcast from the studios of WBKB, which had just that year received its license to become the first commercial TV station outside the eastern time zone. Two screens were set up in the window of the Fair Store on State Street—a giant department store where Ronald Reagan’s father had once worked as a clerk—so that the curious could get what the Chicago Tribune called “their first helping of television.” It caused a sensation. “A vacationing Iowan postponed his shopping to take in the entire show,” the Tribune wrote. The newspaper raised the possibility that someday “it will be as much fun to sit in your favorite armchair and view famous entertainers as it will be to observe the efforts of athletes. More, maybe.”

  Early black-and-white technology was crude, requiring actors to slather on greenish pancake makeup and black lipstick. Performers farsighted enough—or desperate enough—to venture into television did not exactly get star treatment. “Television, by the way, is difficult work for an actress,” Nancy told columnist Inez Wallace a few years later. “There is no pay for rehearsals, as there is in radio or stage work. And the worst of that is that television requires more rehearsals than either of the other two vehicles. And the makeup on television is ghastly. It makes a young girl of sixteen look like an old hag.” Still, it was work. In early 1949 Nancy’s agent phoned. Someone at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had seen her in a TV production of an obscure comedy called Broken Dishes. They wanted to bring her out to California for a screen test. “This was one opportunity that none of my family friends had anything to do with,” she marveled. This bolt from the blue is her version of events. Later, it would be said that, once again, others had a hand in arranging Nancy’s move to Hollywood.

  She started packing as soon as she hung up the phone. Her next call was to her mother. Edie swung into action, getting in touch with her old friend Spencer Tracy, who, as it happened, was one of the studio’s most bankable stars. He was happy to assist. Not only was he close to the Davises, but he owed them for helping him through the darkest hours of his battles with alcohol. And he was grateful to Nancy personally for the kindnesses she had shown to his deaf son, John, who stayed with her when he was visiting New York.

  Tracy made sure that Nancy’s would be no pro forma screen test conducted by the usual technicians the studio assigned to unknowns. He arranged for it to be directed by the celebrated “woman’s director” George Cukor, who had a gift for drawing out magical performances from actresses such as Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story, Greta Garbo in Camille, and a female ensemble cast that included Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, and Rosalind Russell in The Women. Reading lines with Nancy was the promising actor Howard Keel, newly signed by MGM. Camera work was done by George Folsey, who over his career was nominated thirteen times for cinematography Oscars. MGM gave her weeks of coaching in advance.

  Cukor privately deemed her to have no talent. But in his hands, Nancy did well enough. In early 1949 she signed a seven-year, $250-a-week contract, with an option for the studio to terminate. Many years later, Nancy would learn to her great amusement that MGM’s commitment to her was one reason the studio took a pass on a promising young bit actress named Marilyn Monroe.

  The studio system that ran Hollywood was nearing the end of its heyday, but the fantasy factories still controlled the destinies of actors and actresses. And none of the Big Five studios was so powerful or prestigious as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It was run by Ukrainian immigrant Louis B. Mayer, a junk dealer’s son who had moved west from Massachusetts. The tyrannical Mayer had built a star-making machine like nothing ever seen before. Movies, he said, were “the business of making idols for the public to love and worship and identify with. Everything else was secondary.” Or as Elizabeth Taylor, one of his biggest successes, once put it: “L. B. Mayer and MGM created stars out of tinsel, cellophane, and newspapers.”

  To Nancy, joining Metro felt like “walking into a dream world.” The opportunities for an actress under contract were endless: she could study French, or take lessons in singing and horseback riding. She could go on the sets and learn by seeing how the greatest actors and actresses did it. “Everything was a big step up for me when I signed with Metro, everything,” she remembered later.

  There have been more than a few theories as to how and why someone of Nancy’s modest accomplishments got such special consideration and treatment from the powerhouse of Hollywood studios. Her arrival generated no small amount of jealousy and sniping on the MGM lot. Many years later, after she had become a household name, salacious tales would circulate in Hollywood about the extent and nature of Nancy’s sexual activity in her days as a young actress. Some of this should be treated skeptically. Nancy was far from the first woman to become famous and then find that men who knew her in her early days were boasting about her supposed availability. If a few of these stories were true, it would hardly have been unusual for a thirtyish single woman to have a healthy interest in sex. And no daughter of Edie’s would have been naive about how things worked.

  What appears to have been the case is that several forces beyond Tracy’s influence were at work on her behalf. One of them was the fact that she had drawn the interest of Benjamin Thau, MGM’s vice president of talent. “I always recommended Nancy for parts. She was sweet and appealing—one of the most popular girls on the lot,” he said later. Thau, a middle-aged and unprepossessing bachelor, was known for demanding sexual favors from actresses. His “casting couch” was said to be the busiest in Hollywood. Nancy was widely presumed, both at the time and since, to have been his girlfriend. In his book Make-Believe: The Story of Nancy & Ronald Reagan, author Laurence Leamer wrote that Nancy regularly spent Saturday mornings closeted with Thau in his office suite.

  It would be nearly seventy years before women in Hollywood would stand up against harassment and join with other feminist voices to launch the #MeToo movement. Back in the 1940s, sexual favors were seen as part of the bargain for actresses seeking good roles. When he was an old man, Thau claimed to Leamer that even Nancy’s screen test had been his idea. He, like Gable, had been given her number as someone to call when he was in New York—from a friend who told him she was “a nice girl who likes company.” While they were at dinner in Manhattan in early 1949, he recalled suggesting, “Nancy, why don’t you come out and make a screen test?”

  Some details of his story do not add up. For instance, as biographer Colacello noted later, Thau claimed he and Nancy had gone to see Spencer Tracy onstage—which was impossible, because Tracy’s final play had closed two years before Thau’s date with Nancy supposedly took place. However, Nancy’s own scrapbook indicates that she and
Thau did have some kind of relationship after she arrived in Hollywood. He appears in a newspaper photo with Loyal and Edie. The clipping does not have a date, but clues suggest Thau and Nancy’s parents were together in Arizona just a few weeks after Nancy signed with MGM. They are shown chatting during the intermission of a production of Born Yesterday at Phoenix’s recently opened Sombrero Playhouse. The show started its run at the end of March 1949. Nancy is not in that picture with Thau and her parents, but she and he are together in one from July 1950, which was more than a year later. They are seated at a table celebrating Nancy’s twenty-ninth birthday at the Cocoanut Grove, a leading night spot in Los Angeles. The other couple in the photo are MGM chief Louis B. Mayer and his wife, Lorena. Nancy is the only one of the four wearing a smile.

  For her part, Nancy insisted to Colacello that there had been no blind date with Thau in New York and that the two of them had never been an item. “When I came out to Los Angeles to do the test and stayed—yes, then I saw him, had dinner with him, and so on,” she said. “I was not his girlfriend. He took a liking to me, that’s true… and I liked him as a friend.”

  But as Colacello pressed her—asking, for instance, whether Thau grew jealous when she began going on dates with other men, including Ronnie—Nancy became blunter and more candid in her answers. “I don’t know. I was not his,” she insisted. “He would have liked to have married me. I did not want to marry him.… He was a strange little man, really. He gambled a lot. I think he gambled all his money away. I finally got through to him that the answer was no. And that was it.”

  What may also have ended things was the fact that Loyal had taken a strong dislike to Thau and told his daughter so. Fortunately for Nancy, the vice president of talent was not her only important ally in the studio’s executive offices. Her well-bred manner made a good impression on Dore Schary, MGM’s cerebral, socially conscious head of production. Where studio chief Mayer had built his reputation on splashy star-making extravaganzas, Schary was interested in producing quieter “message pictures” that had a story to tell and a lesson to teach. (This clash of philosophies would help bring about Mayer’s ouster in 1951, with Schary replacing him as MGM president.) Schary took a shine to the surgeon’s daughter partly on Tracy’s recommendation. “The girl knows how to look like she’s really thinking when she’s onstage,” Tracy told him.

  Nancy was getting a late start by Hollywood standards, so one of the first things she and the studio did was shave two years off her age, declaring her to be twenty-five years old instead of the twenty-seven she actually was. On the publicity questionnaire she filled out shortly after signing her contract, Nancy listed as her phobias “superficiality, vulgarity, esp. in women, untidiness of mind and person—and cigars!” Asked for the rules by which she governed her life, Nancy offered an answer that might in later years have a familiar ring to those among her husband’s advisers who crossed her: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I believe strongly in the law of retribution—you get back what you give.” Most telling of all was what she stated as her greatest ambition: “to have a successful, happy marriage.”

  Judging by the volume of clippings in her scrapbooks, MGM made sure Nancy got some buzz, no small share of it along story lines the studio PR men manufactured. There was a four-page photo spread in Movie Stars Parade magazine of a young Peter Lawford going on a date with “city slicker Nancy Davis” and teaching her how to ride a horse. Another, in Movie Life, shows fellow contract players, supposedly her pals, helping her move into a new apartment. In some columns, Nancy offered beauty tips. One of the more puzzling was a recommended nightly moisturizing ritual, as reported in McCall’s, that was capped off by Nancy’s advice to “take a wooden picnic fork and slide gently over and over your face until all cream has disappeared.” For publicity shoots, Nancy wore clothes loaned from Amelia Gray’s high-priced boutique in Beverly Hills. The practice of borrowing or accepting free designer styles was standard in Hollywood but would get her in trouble when she got to the White House.

  MGM’s publicity machine recycled and inflated the intrigue around Nancy’s handful of dates with Gable, turning it into a supposed rivalry with actress Ann Sheridan, known from her World War II pinups as the “Oomph Girl.” A June 1949 feature in Modern Screen was headlined, “Which Girl Has the Gable?” The magazine noted archly how Nancy had come out of nowhere to land an MGM contract and offered a preposterous theory that Gable had engineered it all: “In the movie business, made-to-order success like this doesn’t come very often—and that’s just the thing. The path to fame she is walking seems to be so expertly paved, so conveniently shortened and cleared of all the usual difficulties, that there’s a touch of magic about it. And when you look around for whomever may be waving the potent wand that’s accomplishing all this for her—darned if an awful lot of things don’t point to the Great Gable himself.” As for which girl would get the Gable, the star himself answered the question six months later, when he married Lady Sylvia Ashley, a British model, actress, and socialite. He was back on the market three years later, however.

  Though the Hollywood columnists were being told by their MGM whisperers to keep an eye on Nancy as “a comer,” she did not strike some as obvious movie star material. Columnist Inez Wallace wrote: “When Nancy Davis was pointed out to me on the MGM lot, I couldn’t believe they intended to build her up. She looks more like a character actress than a leading lady, although she is really a cross between Kathryn Grayson and Claudette Colbert.”

  Wallace was assured that Nancy was still a work in progress. “ ‘Wait until a year from now, when Nancy has had the glamour treatment,’ I was told, ‘and you’ll never recognize the girl you see now. They all look like that when they first come out here. But after our makeup men and hairdressers get through with them, they seem to have a new face and a new personality,’ ” the columnist informed her readers.

  Nancy’s yellowed trove of breathless press clippings notwithstanding, she would never get the “glamour treatment,” at least not on the screen. She nearly always played pre-matronly types, the competent secretary, the perfect wife, but without the breezy edge someone like Myrna Loy brought to that kind of part. The columnist Walter Winchell noted in 1951: “Nancy Davis has the unique distinction of being pregnant in all but one of her movies.”

  Most of the eleven pictures she did, Nancy herself acknowledged, “are best forgotten.” Some were simply dreck. Her lack of success surely did not calm her insecurities in an environment where, as she noted, she might spot Lana Turner in the commissary at lunch or be seated in a makeup chair next to Ava Gardner. Still, Nancy was a more talented and supple actress than she is usually given credit for being. Cary Grant, who once did a screen test with her, said afterward, “She did something many actors didn’t know how to do. She listened to the other actor.” Her acuity about the people around her, which she had honed from childhood as a survival skill, came through in her performances. As Reagan biographer Edmund Morris once described it, “her gift was to vibrate like a membrane to the sonority of other speakers.”

  Today her acting abilities tend to be judged by the worst of her pictures, which still show up on cable television now and then. These are usually ones from the latter, leaner years of her film career. One of the most dreadful of these low-budget projects was 1957’s Hellcats of the Navy, costarring her and Ronnie, as both of their film careers hit bottom. “That picture ended movies for me,” Ronnie later said. A better gauge of Nancy’s talents was her first starring role, in Schary’s The Next Voice You Hear. The movie was not a hit and did not age well, but Nancy’s reviews were solid. The New York Times described her as “delightful as [the] gentle, plain, and understanding wife.”

  * * *

  Her personal life was a relatively quiet one by Hollywood standards. Nancy lived in an apartment in the comfortable Westwood section of Los Angeles’s west side and hired a woman to come in three days a week to clean and cook. She went to dinner parties
and on dates that were often arranged by the studio. “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,” she wrote later. “I’m not so naive 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.”

  In September 1950 Louella Parsons, one of the reigning queens of the gossip columns, asked Nancy if there was a special man in her life. “Not yet,” she replied. “I won’t be trite and say I am married to my career, but that’s pretty much the truth.” Except that it wasn’t the truth. In fact, Nancy already had fixed her sights on the man she was convinced was The One. The question was how to pin him down—and how to convince him that she was the woman who could mend his broken heart.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “You know,” Ronald Reagan once mused, “if Nancy Davis hadn’t come along when she did, I would have lost my soul.”

  The once-upon-a-time version of how the two of them met went like this: one evening in late October 1949, as Nancy was reading the Hollywood Reporter, a leading entertainment industry trade daily, she spotted her own name on a list of 208 supposed Communist sympathizers. It was alarming to see “Nancy Davis” among them. Suddenly the young contract player understood why she had been getting mail from left-wing organizations.

  With the Red Scare enveloping and dividing Hollywood, there was plenty of reason to be worried about being tagged as a Communist, especially if you were an actress who had just arrived. At the time, Nancy was making a movie called East Side, West Side and went to its renowned director, Mervyn LeRoy, for advice on how to straighten out this error. The studio arranged for friendly columnists to write items pointing out that the person mentioned on the list was another actress named Nancy Davis. Two of those stories, dated November 1 and November 7, are pasted in Nancy’s scrapbook. One noted: “When a young actress, who happens to be 100 percent American, comes face-to-face with the fact that another woman whose name is identical is active in ‘extra liberal activities’—that calls for a double dose of aspirin.”