Ronnie and Nancy (33 page)

“That’s absolutely true,” said Richard Davis, who told me that his stepsister had shunned alcohol during her college years as well and would continue to do so all her life. He remembered how furious she was with him when he visited her in New York with three buddies from Princeton and got so drunk that he vomited in her bathtub. “She gave me hell,” Davis said, and it was two years before she invited him back.20

When
Lute Song
closed in the summer of 1946 after a six-month run, Nancy continued to spend a lot of time with Fryer and his boyfriend, James Carr, a young actor. “Bobby and Jimmy lived right around the corner from me,” she recalled. “My building had a little backyard, so in the warm weather we would barbecue hot dogs and hamburgers and eat outside.”21 Anne Washburn, a Yale drama school graduate who lived in Fryer and Carr’s building, told me that she and Jimmy and Nancy spent their days going to auditions “trying to get parts. No parts ever seemed to be forthcoming, but Nancy could handle any situation. She was a very downto-earth person.”22 Fryer, who later became a successful Broadway and Hollywood producer, would remain a lifelong friend of Nancy’s. On a television biography of her in 1997, he noted, “The theater and films both
Nancy in New York: 1944–1949

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are strange, in that you don’t keep your relationships usually beyond the shooting schedule or the run of the show. But she was one of the people that kept her friends closely held.”23

Ron Fletcher, a principal dancer in
Lute Song,
also became close to Nancy. “I found her to be a delightful creature,” he told me. “She had a wonderful sense of humor and was bright and curious. However, she didn’t seem worldly at all, which is what I liked about her. I would tell her tacky, slightly obscene stories, and that wonderful laugh would come out.”

Fletcher said that, before the Broadway opening, they were in New Haven, Philadelphia, and Boston for twelve weeks of tryouts. “When you’re on the road, people pair off. I don’t remember how Nancy and I first started to talk—we just decided to go out and eat one night, and people were dancing.

She was a marvelous dancer and loved to dance, and I’m a very good ballroom dancer.”

Another Nancy Reagan biographer has implied that Fletcher was homosexual.24 “I was living with a girl when I went into the show,” he explained.

“I later realized that I had always been gay, but I was also very attracted to unusual females, and I found Nancy very sexy. We had a little romance on the road, but I don’t think she was in love with me, and I can’t say I was in love with her. We were just living in the moment and enjoying each other.

After we came back to New York, we drifted apart. I went to her apartment a couple of times and realized what kind of a lifestyle she had. Maybe that intimidated me, because I’m from the backwoods of Missouri and didn’t finish ninth grade.” Nonetheless, he told me, they kept in touch. “Nancy was the type of person you may not see for ten years, but the minute you see each other, you just start laughing.”25

Nancy’s affinity for homosexual men has been frequently remarked upon, but it would hardly have been so noteworthy if she had stayed in show business instead of marrying an actor who went into politics. She was close to a number of lesbian and bisexual women over the years, starting with her godmother and her circle of friends, but this, too, is not unusual in the entertainment world. If gay men were attracted to the young Nancy Davis, it was probably for the same reasons that straight men were: she was pretty, lively, well dressed, a good dancer, a great listener, and, like her mother, a natural-born coquette. She knew how to flirt with a man in a way that was flattering and unthreatening, which may explain why gay men felt especially comfortable with her. And when she was out with a man, she gave him her full attention.

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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House There was also something nurselike about Nancy Davis. She had been a volunteer nurse’s aide in Chicago, and one can easily imagine her in a white uniform and pinned-back cap, hovering over a patient’s bed with care-filled eyes and a troubled brow, telling him that everything will be all right if he follows doctor’s orders and takes his medicine as prescribed.

From high school on, by all accounts, she enjoyed spending time with the opposite sex, hearing their problems and their hopes, comforting them and encouraging them. Moreover, she had the examples of her mother, her Aunt Colleen, and even Katharine Hepburn to impress upon her that a woman’s job was to bring out the best in a man, to make him feel better about himself, to fix and improve him.

One of the most heartfelt—and nurselike—stories in her autobiography concerns a visit she had from Spencer Tracy’s handicapped son while she was living in New York. John Tracy had been born deaf, was nearly blind, and had been stricken with polio as a youth—“so much affliction for one boy,” Nancy wrote. Despite his disabilities, he had graduated from college and wanted to visit New York. Louise Tracy, who stuck with her marriage despite her husband’s relationship with Katharine Hepburn, called Nancy and asked if John could stay with her. Nancy put him up on the sofa-bed in her living room and took time to guide him around town, accompanying him to the theater and museums. (“He enjoyed musicals,” she noted. “Somehow, he sensed the music through the vibrations he felt.”) The highlight of his trip was to be a date with a girl he had met in California. Without telling him, Nancy called the restaurant in advance to advise the maître d’ of John’s “difficulty in communicating.” But the girl canceled the morning of the date, and an infuriated Nancy told her off: “I took the telephone call, turned away from Johnny so he couldn’t read my lips, and told her what I thought of her leading him on. . . . I could tell she wasn’t ill, she just did not want to go out with Johnny. It had been one thing to meet Spencer Tracy’s son and therefore meet Spence in Hollywood; it was another thing to date his handicapped son in New York.

Well, she was a lot more handicapped than he was as far as I was concerned. . . . I tried to soften the blow, but he was hurt. I went out to dinner and dancing with him as his date, and we had a good time. He was a marvelous young man, and I admired his courage enormously. . . . I remember the night he left me in New York. A representative from MGM

came to take him to the airport. The man took one of his two bags, and I started to take the other to help him down to the car. He said, ‘Oh, no,
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you’re my princess, and I’m your slave,’ and took his own bag. I kissed him good-bye and dissolved into tears.”26

Nancy did not want for dates in New York—her suitors included assistant directors and producers, as well as a young Navy doctor based at the Brooklyn Naval Yard27—but, as she recalled in
Nancy
, “I had no serious romances.”28 She loved being taken to the Stork Club, where the Duke and Duchess of Windsor held court and Walter Winchell recorded the goings and comings of showgirls and playboys. She would always slip a dinner roll or two into her evening bag for breakfast the next morning, and one night the owner, Sherman Billingsley, who didn’t miss a trick, decided to have a little fun. “On the way out,” Nancy recalled, “the captain handed me a little package. I opened it right in front of my date. There was a card from Mr.

Billingsley which said: ‘For the rolls,’ and inside was a pound of butter.”29

“Nancy was very charming, very outgoing, very friendly,” recalled retired publisher Kenneth Giniger, who started dating her while she was in
Lute Song
. “She was a very nice-looking girl. I didn’t think of her as a great beauty.” At the time, Giniger, a graduate of the University of Virginia and New York University Law School fresh out of the Army, was publicity director of Prentice Hall. “I knew her mother, who in those days had a radio show in Chicago on which I placed authors,” he explained. “And her mother mentioned to me that she had a daughter in a show in New York, and I ought to look her up, which I did. She was very close to all her mother’s friends. She sort of flowed with the tide, I think. Of course, she had a very social mother and stepfather, and they helped her a great deal.”

Nancy, he said, “was quieter than Edith, more reserved, I would say. Edith was somewhat effusive.” He took her to “the Stork Club a great deal, or El Morocco,” and placed the occasional item about her in the columns. Although he was actively involved in New York’s Republican Party, they rarely discussed politics. “She wasn’t particularly interested,” Giniger said.30

In August 1946, shortly after
Lute Song
closed, ZaSu Pitts offered Nancy a supporting role in her new play,
Cordelia
. Though it was scheduled to open on Broadway that fall, the old-fashioned comedy didn’t make it beyond tryouts in New England, and Nancy did not get another theater part for almost a year. She started a scrapbook of her press clippings at that time, meticulously dating each clipping and underlining all mentions of her. The first were a pair of reviews of
Cordelia
from New Haven and Boston, the 1 8 8

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House latter dismissing the play as “hoked-up” and “amateurish” but praising her as “unusually talented and attractive.”31 These were followed by a flurry of items from Chicago society columns noting her attendance at various parties and charity events during an extended visit home for Thanksgiving 1946. “Enjoying the music of two bands against a backdrop of red velvet,”

a typical item read, “Nancy Davis here from New York, wearing Kelly green brocaded satin with a large red cabbage rose on her matching purse.

Her dancing partner was Warner [sic] G. Baird Jr.”32 She also pasted in clippings—sent to her by her mother, no doubt—charting her parents’ social and professional progress: Edith, “with orchids pinned to her mink coat,”

arriving at a Chicago theater opening in December 1946; Loyal, now president of the Society of Neurological Surgeons, lined up with his colleagues at a Vanderbilt University medical conference that April.33

In the spring of 1947, Nancy’s agent, Max Richard, persuaded RKO

Pathé, which was based in New York, to use her in several short documentaries for its “This Is America” news series, including one about the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis—not exactly the most glamorous of movie debuts. Her SAG application, dated May 20, 1947, notes her memberships in the Actors Equity Association and the American Federation of Radio Artists. Where it asks for a reference, Nancy put Walter Huston.34

She was still seeing Walter and Nan Huston quite frequently, but not under the happiest of circumstances. The Hustons’ marriage, like the Tracys’, was a case of misery wrapped in tinsel: tense, complicated, fundamentally unhappy. While Walter’s career continued to thrive, his third wife’s had withered away, and she fell into frequent and severe depressions, often requiring hospitalization. “Their marriage got to be very rough,”

said John Huston, Walter’s son by his first wife. “I think Nan was very jealous of my father and his popularity. She wanted to be a star.”35 Since suffering a nervous breakdown in 1942, Nan had been treated by a psychiatrist recommended by Loyal Davis. In February 1947, however, she was so unstable that, on Loyal’s advice, Walter agreed to have her undergo a series of electroshock treatments at Passavant Hospital. He spent the next two months by her side in their New York apartment,36 and then left for Mexico to film
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
, which was directed by John and would win Oscars for both father and son. Nancy visited them during this New York stay, and her sympathy went mostly to Uncle Walter. “Nan was a very difficult woman,” she said. “Very difficult. She
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wanted parts in plays that she couldn’t possibly get. But he was so darling.

Just darling.”37

That summer ZaSu Pitts found another job for Nancy, a supporting role in George Abbott’s revival of
The Late Christopher Bean,
which was touring the stock circuit. For three months the comedy warhorse and her protégée spent each week in a different town, working with actors from the local theater company—a learning experience for Nancy, but a step down for Pitts. As James Karen, who played opposite Nancy at the Olney Theater, in suburban Maryland, pointed out, the largely older audiences were mainly there to see how stars who were popular in the 1920s and 1930s had aged. “Some were happy, beautiful, and well-off financially,” he recalled, “others were old, beaten up, and broke, defeated by a hard profession. I was never sure about ZaSu’s status, because she complained a lot publicly about Roosevelt’s New Deal robbing her, but she seemed to be well-off. Nancy was very much under ZaSu’s control. They lived together and dressed together and ate together. They never socialized with us or with any of the locals. They came to the theater, did their job, and then went back to their hotel in Washington.”38

The tour began in Ogunquit, Maine, on July 7, the day after Nancy’s twenty-sixth birthday, and she was showered with telegrams—all saved in her scrapbook—wishing her happy birthday and good luck, from “Mother and Pops” and Richard at Princeton, from Colleen Moore Hargrave and Louise and Spencer Tracy, from her Chicago dancing partner, Warren Baird Jr., and even her former fiancé, James Platt White. (The most intriguing was sent from La Guardia Airfield and signed Tommy: “A birthday message between we two to let you know I’m thinking of you.”)39 The following week, at the Olney Theater, Nancy received a card backstage from General and Mrs. Omar Nelson Bradley saying, “We are in seats F7 and 8. If you have time, we’d love to say hello. We met your mother in Chicago last month.”40 General Bradley had led the American army at Normandy and would soon be named chairman of the joint chiefs of staff by President Truman; this was one more example of Edith’s ability to charm powerful figures and enlist them in her daughter’s cause.

That same week, the American Newspaper Women’s Club gave a tea honoring ZaSu and Nancy at its Washington headquarters, which drew a mix of reporters, socialites, and government wives, including those of Florida senator Claude Pepper and Montana congressman Mike Mansfield 1 9 0