The Triumph of Nancy Reagan by Karen Tumulty (short books for teens txt) 📕

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