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

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.”

Nancy wasn’t satisfied, so she asked LeRoy to get in touch with Ronald Reagan, the president of the Screen Actors Guild. (Ronnie said later that he