Ronnie and Nancy (44 page)

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Wyman. Reagan would later brag to a buddy that he was sleeping with so many different women that he woke up one morning at the Garden of Allah and “couldn’t remember the name of the gal I was in bed with. I said,

‘Hey, I gotta get a grip here.’”64 But, according to Kitty Kelley, some of the women he was linked with in 1948 and 1949 described him as sexually

“passive” and sometimes so drunk and heartbroken over Jane that he couldn’t perform.65

“Reagan was a lonely guy because of his divorce,” said Eddie Bracken, a co-star in
The Girl from Jones Beach
, which was filmed during the summer of 1948, “but a very level-headed guy. He was never for the sexpots. He was never a guy looking for the bed. He was a guy looking for companionship more than anything else. But I wouldn’t say he was strait-laced.”66

“I just can’t get it right,” Reagan told Doris Lilly, a tall, fetching blonde who later became well known as the author of
How to Meet a Millionaire
.

“I’m no good alone.” According to Lilly, Reagan proposed to her a few months after they met, but she turned him down because she knew he wasn’t in love—just desperate for someone who “was willing to make the big moves, push, be there, encourage him, never leave him alone for a moment.

. . . I couldn’t do it.”67

Reagan continued to drive the Cadillac convertible Jane had given him before they split, and he moved back into the Londonderry Terrace apartment they had shared as newlyweds, claiming he couldn’t find anything else because of the postwar housing shortage.68 He and Jane dined together regularly to discuss the children, and she seemed to play with his hopes of reconciliation, telling reporters at the October 1948 opening of
Johnny
Belinda
that she was wearing a dress he had given her, then announcing at a big Hollywood dinner party the following month that “Lew Ayres is the love of my life,” setting off speculation about an eventual marriage.69 Such behavior did little for Reagan’s self-confidence, and one can only wonder how he felt when his ex-wife, with Ayers at her side, won the best actress Oscar in March 1949. By then she had signed a new, ten-year contract with Warners.70

Reagan’s own situation at Warners was going from bad to worse. He had no films in release in 1948, and two of his three 1949 releases—
John
Loves Mary
and
Night Unto Night
(which had been held back for three years)—were flops, with only
The Girl from Jones Beach
, a cotton-candy comedy designed to show off shapely Virginia Mayo in a variety of bathing suits, scoring at the box office.71 “Ronnie wasn’t considered a big 2 4 0

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House leading man then,” recalled Connie Wald, the widow of Jerry Wald. “We used to see him after he broke up with Jane. He’d come over to the house, we’d go out to dinner, and the girls were after him like mad. I don’t think he was ever with anybody—seriously—until he went with Nancy. He was such a sweet man. We always liked him so much. But as far as his career went, it was really going downhill. . . . Who knows what he felt inside. As warm as he was, he was always a very distant person. Charming, but very private—that was Ronnie.”72

Reagan was convinced that if only he could star in the kind of Western that had made John Wayne a top box office draw his popularity would rebound. To please Jack Warner, he agreed to take the second male lead in
The Hasty Heart
, a wartime drama set in a military hospital, on the condition that his next movie would be
Ghost Mountain
, a Western based on a short story he had persuaded the studio to buy. He spent four cold months filming in London—it was his first trip abroad, and he complained inces-santly about the weather, the food, and the austerity policies of Britain’s Labour Party government—only to read in
Variety
on the day he returned that
Ghost Mountain
was being assigned to Errol Flynn.73

Hurt and angry, Reagan refused to take his next assignment, a loan-out to Columbia—a big step for someone who had always been one of the studio’s most accommodating stars.74 Lew Wasserman let his client sulk for a month, then persuaded him to accept a compromise: Reagan would make one picture a year for Warner Bros. for the remaining three years of his contract, his $150,000 annual salary would be cut in half, and he would be free to work for other studios. Indeed, even before the Warners deal was finalized in May 1949, Wasserman announced that Universal had signed Reagan to a five-year, five-picture deal at $75,000 per picture.75

As bad luck would have it, Reagan broke his right thigh in six places in a charity baseball game three days before he was to start shooting his first film for Universal, and was hospitalized for seven weeks. He had a hard time getting around on crutches when he was released in early August, so Jane let him stay in her fully staffed new house in Holmby Hills with the children while she was in London filming
Stage Fright
for Alfred Hitch-cock. When she returned, he moved into his mother’s house, on Phyllis Avenue, for a few weeks. If anyone could make him feel better about himself, it was Nelle, who in her late sixties was still driving her old Studebaker to the Olive View Sanitarium, where she now showed patients movies her son got for her from the studio. After he moved back into his apartment,
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he continued to stop by her place every Sunday for brunch and spiritual support.76

By November things were looking up. Jerry Wald came through with a part in what promised to be a good film,
Storm Warning
, the story of a courageous district attorney who busts the Ku Klux Klan in a Southern town. On November 13, two days before his first date with Nancy, Reagan won his third full term as SAG president by an overwhelming majority.

There is a conflicting version of how Ronnie and Nancy met. According to Miriam Schary, several weeks before the
Hollywood Reporter
printed its list, Nancy told her that she would like to meet Ronald Reagan, and Miriam invited them both to a small dinner party at the Scharys’ house. The dinner, as described by the Scharys’ daughter, writer Jill Robinson, bordered on the disastrous: Miriam, an outspoken liberal, and Ronnie argued about the seriousness of the Communist threat to the film industry; Dore tried to mediate, and Nancy, who was seated opposite Ronnie, “kept smiling at him in agreement.” “I don’t recall his saying much to Nancy,” Miriam said, adding that she had asked Ronnie to pick Nancy up, but he said he would be coming directly from a SAG meeting. She had then hoped he would offer her a ride home, but he was the first to leave, explaining that he had to depart for New York early the next morning.77

Reagan did indeed travel to New York in early October on SAG business.78 However, Nancy consistently maintained that the Schary dinner never took place, and Mervyn LeRoy always told the story more or less her way. So did her husband in his two books. No matter: if she wasn’t introduced to Reagan at the Scharys’, she seemed determined to meet him that fall. In mid-October, according to SAG records, she called the Guild and

“indicated her willingness and desire to run for the Board, but due to some confusion in membership records (two Nancy Davises) her name was not included on the ballot.”79 In addition, one of Nancy’s MGM acquaintances remembered her “jokingly” making a list of Hollywood’s most eligible bachelors, including producers, directors, agents, lawyers, and actors, and putting Ronald Reagan’s name on top.80

In any event, there is little doubt that they hit if off on their first date.

Ronnie arrived at Nancy’s apartment on the dot at 7:30, still using a pair of canes. She greeted him in a trim black dress with a crisp white collar, the kind of always-right, good-taste classic she had favored ever since she graduated from her Girls Latin uniform. He took her to LaRue’s, on the Sunset 2 4 2

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Strip. On the way, he came up with what he thought was an ideal solution for her name problem.

“Have the studio change your name,” he said. “You would hardly be the first.”

“He had no way of knowing,” she later wrote, “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.’”81

“Without her amplifying the statement by a single word,” he later wrote, “I knew that whether there were three or thirty Nancy Davises, they could do any name-changing that was going to be done.”82

Reading their separate accounts of that first dinner, it is clear that he was impressed and she was mesmerized. “One of the things I liked about Ronnie right away was that he didn’t talk only about himself. . . . 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.”83

He was fascinated to learn that her mother had been on Broadway, that Nazimova was her godmother, and that Walter Huston had been staying with her parents in Chicago when his son, John, called to offer him a part in
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
. He told her that he had been offered a part in that picture, but Warners had made him turn it down for
The Voice
of the Turtle
. He then segued into his miserable time in London, turning his misadventure into an extended comedy routine about too little sunshine and too many Brussels sprouts.

She laughed at his stories, and he was so enchanted by her laugh that he asked if she’d like to catch Sophie Tucker’s act at Ciro’s, which was just down the Strip, so that he could hear her laugh some more. They ended up staying for the second show—they even managed to dance despite his injured leg. It was almost three in the morning when he took her home, both of them a little giddy perhaps, because, as he told Edmund Morris, the usually abstemious Nancy had helped him consume two bottles of champagne during the course of evening.84

“Why do people fall in love? It’s almost impossible to say,” she reflected in the introduction to a book of his love letters that was published on their
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fiftieth wedding anniversary. “If you’re not a teenager or in your early twenties, you’ve gone on a lot of dates and met a lot of people. When the real thing comes along, you just know it. At least I did. . . . I loved to listen to him talk. I loved his sense of humor. I saw it clearly that very first night: He was everything that I wanted.”85

Yet after a spate of dates over the next few weeks—“Ronald Reagan and Nancy Davis together again at Kings,” “Ronnie Reagan doing Mocambo with Nancy Davis,” “Newest telephone number in Ronald Reagan’s book is Nancy Davis, attractive M-G-M actress,” “Ronnie Reagan’s romancing Nancy like mad”—Reagan pulled back.86 During most of 1950, the couple saw each other now and then, and both dated other people. “Ronnie was in no hurry to make a commitment,” Nancy later explained. “He had been burned in his first marriage, and the pain went deep. . . . 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.”87

Eager to make up for lost time and income after being incapacitated for months, Reagan completed four films that year:
Storm Warning
at Warners,
Louisa
and the infamous
Bedtime for Bonzo
at Universal, and finally a Western,
The Last Outpost
, at Paramount. With the exception of Bonzo the chimpanzee, the Hollywood press linked him with every one of his co-stars—including the flame-haired Rhonda Fleming in
The Last
Outpost
and even the nineteen-year-old Piper Laurie in
Louisa
—but these

“romances” lasted only as long as the shooting schedules. “He danced well and he had a pleasant personality,” Doris Day, who played opposite him in
Storm Warning
, said of their dates. “When he wasn’t dancing, he was talking. It really wasn’t conversation, it was rather talking at you, sort of long discourses on subjects that interested him. I remember telling him that he should be touring the country making speeches.”88

If any woman had a hold on him in 1950, it was still Jane Wyman. Although one of the columns had Wyman and Lew Ayres “ga-ga” over each other as late as November 1949,89 by early 1950 he had decided not to marry her, and Jane once again focused her attentions on her ex-husband.

For his thirty-ninth birthday in February, Reagan was honored by the Friars Club at a black-tie dinner in the ballroom of the Beverly Hills Hotel, and Wyman was among the six hundred attendees. It was a big night for Reagan—Cecil B. DeMille and Pat O’Brien made speeches extolling his virtues; 2 4 4

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Al Jolson sang “Sonny Boy” and said he hoped his son would grow up

“to be the kind of man Ronnie is.”90 Jane sat at a table close to the dais, beaming. A few nights later, when she received
Photoplay
’s Gold Medal in the same ballroom, Reagan had a ringside seat, and “clapped louder than any other person in the audience,” according to the magazine’s reporter, who added, “So many in town are still hoping that these two will reconcile.”91

Nancy saw in the New Year with her family in Chicago. She must have been happy to get away: not only had Ronnie stopped calling, but a few days before she left, the studio announced that the part she saw as her big chance and was sure she had—the female lead opposite Cary Grant in
Crisis
—was going to Paula Raymond. Another disappointment came as she arrived in Chicago:
East Side, West Side
opened in New York to generally favorable reviews but with nary a mention of her. Her mother was waiting at Dearborn Station, along with several photographers from the Chicago papers, which treated Nancy’s arrivals and departures as major celebrity events.