Ronnie and Nancy (34 page)

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House (the future Senate majority leader and ambassador to Japan under Presidents Carter and Reagan). “Conversation hummed about politics, the theater and press,”
The Washington Post
reported. “Miss Pitts told a small group, ‘I’m definitely ’agin communism. I’d like to get on a soap box and warn everybody against supporting it or any other isms.’”41

Nancy had a fairly substantial role in
The Late Christopher Bean
, playing the younger and nicer of a greedy country doctor’s two daughters, and she got several good reviews. “Nancy Davis, the likeable sister, is spirited and good-looking,” wrote one critic. “She manages to make what might have been a sappy, cloying girl into a real person.” “Nancy Davis does a splendid job,” declared another. “She has lots of charm and grace as well as ability.”42

When the summer season ended, Pitts decided to take the show on a fall tour of regional theaters in larger cities, including Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, and Milwaukee.
The Late Christopher Bean
opened at Chicago’s Civic Theater on October 20, 1947, and once again Nancy’s dressing room was papered in congratulatory telegrams from family friends and assorted beaus, including the Tracys, the Hustons, Lillian Gish, Louis Calhern, Mary Martin, and Illinois governor Dwight Green. There were flowers from Mr.

and Mrs. Philip Knight Wrigley, of the super-rich chewing gum clan, with a card reading “Chicago is proud of you, Nancy,” and from Orville Taylor, the lawyer who had arranged Nancy’s adoption a decade earlier, who wrote,

“For my adorable Nancy from your general counsel and greatest admirer.”43

Loyal and Edith gave an opening night party, with a guest list that included the governor’s wife, the Hargraves, Narcissa Thorne, Mrs. Alden Swift, and millionaire retailer Leon Mandel and his wife, Carola, who was considered Chicago’s best-dressed woman. The party was noted in the next day’s papers, as was the performance of “a sleek brunette named Nancy Davis, who plays the love interest with an appealing dash of wistful charm.”44

Nancy had been on the road with ZaSu Pitts for nearly six months when
The Late Christopher Bean
tour came to an end, in December 1947 in Detroit, and from there she returned to Chicago for the holidays. The Davises had moved from 199 to 209 East Lake Shore Drive earlier that year. The eighteen-story limestone fortress built in 1925 by Benjamin Marshall, the architect of the Drake Hotel, was considered the city’s premier apartment building and counted the Davises’ good friend Mayor Kelly among its residents. Their new place was also a duplex, but it had only two bedrooms, and the main rooms were on the ground floor; according to Richard Davis, “it
Nancy in New York: 1944–1949

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was the cheapest apartment in the building.”45 Bruce McFarland, Nancy’s old Latin School friend, who was now working at a Chicago radio station, recalled going to the apartment to take Nancy out and finding her in her usual good spirits. “I could hear Dr. Davis upstairs reading the riot act to his son, Dick—he was really ticked off and letting him have it. Nancy and I just looked at each other and smiled and got the hell out of there.” On a second occasion, Loyal and Edith were “playing charades using medical terms” with a couple of other doctors and their wives when McFarland arrived.46

Nancy returned to New York in January 1948. She next appeared on the stage that July, for a two-week run in Detroit, where her pal Robert Fryer was producing a revival of Lillian Hellman’s
The Little Foxes
. Nancy played the demure daughter of the venomously evil Southern Gothic matriarch Regina Hubbard, a character made famous by Tallulah Bankhead on Broadway and by Bette Davis in the 1941 movie. Ruth Chatterton, one of the great leading ladies of the stage in the 1920s and 1930s, took the part in Detroit. Nancy Reagan told me that she didn’t remember having been in this play,47 and it is not listed among her stage credits in her memoirs or in books and articles about her. But her scrapbook contains seven clippings about it, as well as a sheaf of telegrams—from her parents, the Mandels, Bruce McFarland—she received at the Shubert Lafayette Theater opening night, July 5, 1948, the day before her twenty-seventh birthday. Perhaps she had a falling out with Fryer. A telegram sent from him in Detroit to Nancy in New York on August 5 sounds both conciliatory and foreboding: “Hoping a new future opens for you and you know what’s happening to you. Best luck to my best girl. Love Bobby.”48

The Detroit engagement marked the end of Nancy’s stage career. Meanwhile, her romantic life seemed stymied as well. She still went out once a week or so with Kenneth Giniger, but he told me, “I wouldn’t call it a romance. We were just good friends and that was it.”49 According to Kitty Kelley, she had a “short affair” with Alfred Drake, the married star of
Oklahoma!
, in early 1948, and subsequently pursued Max Allentuck, the general manager for Kermit Bloomgarden, an important Broadway producer.

Giniger, who knew Drake fairly well, doubted that he and Nancy ever met.

A clipping from March 1948 in Nancy’s scrapbook may confirm her link to Allentuck, noting that he and “Norma Davies [sic], actress, have joined the steady set at Sardi’s.” An unnamed secretary of Allentuck’s told Kelley that he would sometimes slip out a back door when Nancy—“lovely looking and beautifully dressed in her suits and fur coats”—dropped by his office. “Let’s 1 9 2

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House put it this way,” the secretary said. “She liked Max much more than he liked her.”50

One night in September 1948, Nancy got a call from Edith telling her that Spencer Tracy had given her number to Clark Gable. “The King,” as Gable was universally known—he had actually been “crowned” in a ceremony at the MGM commissary in 1938—was planning a trip to New York and would be calling Nancy to ask her out for dinner. “Be sure not to say,”

Edith warned Nancy, “‘Sure, and I’m Greta Garbo.’”51

Gable’s visit was the highlight of Nancy’s New York years, an experience she would still be talking about at dinner parties in her seventies and eighties. Gable spent a week in New York, and after their first dinner date, he took Nancy out every day and every night. Gable was a big baseball fan, so in the afternoons he and Nancy would be driven uptown to Yankee Stadium, where the crowd got so excited by his presence that the police had to escort them to and from their seats. On the days when the Yankees weren’t playing, they lunched at “21.” Then it was dinner at the Colony (the Le Cirque of its day), followed by a stop at the Stork Club. “When we got up to dance,” Nancy recalled, “I never knew I had so many friends. ‘Nancy!

How nice to see you!’ And then, of course, I had to introduce them to my date.”52

Gable, a bachelor since the death of his beloved third wife, Carole Lombard, five years earlier, was forty-six when Nancy met him and not quite the swashbuckling he-man who had carried Vivien Leigh up the stairs in
Gone With the Wind
. He had put on weight, drank heavily—according to Gore Vidal, “after a few drinks [he] would loosen his false teeth, which were on some sort of peg and then shake his head until they rattled like dice”53—smoked three packs of cigarettes a day, and admitted to being a so-so lover. His postwar pictures had flopped at the box office, but when he took Nancy to see Phil Silvers and Nanette Fabray in the hit musical
High
Button Shoes
, the audience stood and applauded him and would not sit

“until he waved his hand.”54

Nancy was enchanted by him and thrilled with the attention she received simply by being at his side. “I knew all sorts of stars as family friends,” she later wrote, but this “was my first experience going anywhere with a star of that magnitude.” One night he took her to a fancy showbiz party at the Waldorf Towers: “I was sure I would be forgotten and left in a corner somewhere when some of the gorgeous and famous glamour girls got to him. They were certainly aware of his presence! But nothing like
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that happened. When he was with you, he was with you and only you, and never looked over your shoulder to see who else was in the room. I think the secret of his charm was that he made whoever he was with feel important. He made me feel important, and I must say it gave my ego a boost.”55

In
My Turn
, she describes Gable’s attentiveness as “a quality that good courtesans also have,” but she makes it clear that things went only so far between them. “Clark was sexy, handsome, and affectionate, but I found him less the seducer he was reputed to be than a kind, romantic, and fun-loving man. He sent me flowers and we held hands, but I think that in his case the lover image had been so built up that it was a relief for him to be with someone like me, who made no demands on him.”56

Their week of dates won her more press coverage than any of her stage appearances had. All the leading New York columnists—Walter Winchell, Ed Sullivan, Earl Wilson, Dorothy Kilgallen—ran items, as did Louella Parsons in Hollywood. “Has something at last happened to Clark Gable,”

asked
Modern Screen
magazine, “something, to be exact, in the form of a slim, brown-eyed brown-haired beauty named Nancy Davis—that is changing the fitful pattern of his romantic life? Has he, in other words, finally found the Gable woman, for whom he is more than willing to give up the Gable women? The answer seems to be yes—even though, if it is love at all, it is so far a love in hiding.”57

A year later, Gable married Sylvia, Lady Ashley, in Santa Barbara. It was a fourth marriage for both of them, and it lasted a little more than a year.

In
My Turn
, written a year after she left the White House, Nancy relived her dates with the King:

Perhaps I missed some of the signals he was sending out. He lived in Encino, and he referred to his house as a ranch. One night, at dinner, he asked me, “How would you feel about living on a ranch?”

I mumbled something foolish like, “Gee, I don’t know, I never have.” But I have often looked back at that moment and wondered: Was Clark Gable sounding me out about a possible future together?

And if so, how should I have responded? I wasn’t in love with him, but if we had seen more of each other, I might have been. I was certainly taken by his attentiveness and his kindness, and by his mod-esty. It just wasn’t what you would have expected from such a star.58

Aside from her dates with Gable, the only bright spot during her last year in New York was a modicum of success in the emerging new medium 1 9 4

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House of television. Nancy had appeared on television for the first time while she was in Chicago the previous fall, most likely in a celebrity show for the Community Fund organized by Edith, who was chairman of the charity’s women’s division. Television was just beginning to take hold of the American living room—there were only 136,000 sets in the whole country in 1947—and the technology was not yet perfected. “I had to wear green makeup and black lipstick,” Nancy recalled, “to look good on those early, primitive black-and-white sets.”59

In 1948, according to
Mademoiselle
, she “had feature roles on the Kraft Television Theater and the Lucky Strike dramatic series.”60 The fashion magazine noted her progress in its November issue with a small photograph and a paragraph of text, concluding with: “Enthusiastic about television, Nancy looks forward to the day when video will have its own stars,

[and] would like a dramatic show of her own.” At the end of the year, ZaSu Pitts arranged for Nancy to reprise her three-line part in
Ramshackle
Inn
on NBC’s
Philco Television Playhouse,
another one of the live dramatic anthology series that dominated the small screen’s early years.

“I wasn’t setting show business on fire,” she later wrote, trying to put a realistic but cheerful face on this period of her life. “However, I honestly don’t think I even thought of that. I was doing something I wanted to do and having a good time.”61

Nancy Davis at twenty-seven, it would seem, was not that much closer to a successful acting career than she had been when she left Chicago four years earlier. Nor had she found Mr. Right.

C H A P T E R N I N E

DIVORCE

1947–1948

I have turned down quite a few scripts because I thought they were tinged with Communistic ideas. . . . I could never take any of this pinko mouthing very seriously, because I didn’t feel it was on the level.

Gary Cooper, testifying before HUAC,

October 1947

THE YEAR 1947 BEGAN ON A HIGH NOTE FOR RONNIE AND JANE, WITH HER

Oscar nomination for
The Yearling
and his being cast in
The Voice of the
Turtle
, a romantic comedy based on John Van Druten’s long-running Broadway play, which Warners saw as one of its top films of the year.1 On January 26, shortly after their seventh anniversary, Jane learned that she was pregnant. If they had a girl, the movie magazines confided, Ronnie wanted to name her Veronica. Jane reportedly had her heart set on a boy, who would be named Ronald Reagan Jr.2

On March 10, Robert Montgomery stepped down as SAG president, citing a conflict of interest, as he had recently begun to co-produce his own movies. In a secret vote by board members, Reagan was chosen to serve out Montgomery’s term, winning over the more liberal Gene Kelly and the more conservative George Murphy, who were then elected first and third vice presidents, respectively. William Holden—nominated by Jane Wyman—was made second vice president.3

Four nights later, Jane and Ronnie attended the Academy Awards with Mary Benny—Jack Benny was emcee—and watched Olivia de Havilland win over Jane to take the Best Actress award for
To Each His Own
. As they left the Shrine Auditorium, Reagan tried to make light of his wife’s loss, 1 9 5

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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House telling reporters that maybe they’d name their expected child Oscar—

“Jane deserves one around the house.”4

On April 10, sitting in their living room with an FBI agent, the couple named at least six SAG members as suspected Communists.5 According to Anne Edwards, who interviewed a close friend of theirs, “Wyman . . . was in an emotional state, torn, not knowing what to do but not agreeing with his decision.”6 According to the agent’s report, “Reagan and his wife advised that for the past several months they had observed during the Guild meetings there were two ‘cliques’ of members, one headed by Anne Revere and the other by Karen Morley, which on all questions of policy confronting the Guild followed the Communist Party line.”7 Both Revere and Morley were Party members; the latter had recruited Sterling Hayden, whom Reagan apparently also named because of his leadership of the pro-CSU faction in SAG.8