Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [111]
“Jane was restless and bored,” said Leonora Hornblow. “Ronnie talked all the time. All his life he talked all the time. In the beginning she had been so stuck on him it didn’t matter, although she never hung on his every word. She said to me, ‘I’m so bored with him. I don’t know what’s going to happen—whether I’ll die from boredom or I’ll kill him.’ ”151
C H A P T E R E I G H T
NANCY IN NEW YORK
1944–1949
I lived at 34 Beekman Place, on the corner of 51st Street, and Nancy was just around the corner in a brownstone. I can see her now in my mind’s eye, walking down the steps all ready to go make the rounds. She was a charming, wholesome, lovely girl, very pleasant to be with. A little overweight.
And an extremely pretty face.
Anne Washburn to author,
May 7, 2003
NANCY PICKED A PARTICULARLY EXCITING MOMENT TO SETTLE IN MAN-hattan. The war was still on, but victory was a few months away, and the city was full of footloose young soldiers and sailors returning from Europe, as well as rich and glamorous European exiles, including almost the entire Surrealist pantheon, who had sat out the war in New York and gave the town a high-style, Continental air. The expensive nightclubs and restaurants—El Morocco, the Stork Club, Toots Shor’s, Sardi’s, “21”—
were packed every night with café society, Hollywood stars between pictures, debutantes, gigolos, and gossip columnists.
Broadway was booming. The 1944–45 season was the best—financially and creatively—in nearly twenty years, with eighty-three new plays and twenty-four hits, including John Van Druten’s I Remember Mama, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel, Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (starring the incomparable Laurette Taylor), and Jerome Robbins’s On the Town, which had a book by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and music by Leonard Bernstein. Held over from the previous season, Oklahoma! approached its 1,000th performance, Tallulah Bankhead drew crowds to Philip Barry’s Foolish Notion, and Mae West reigned in the risqué Catherine Was Great. (Prudery was not entirely extinguished, however: the city’s 1 8 0
Nancy in New York: 1944–1949
1 8 1
license commissioner refused to renew the Belasco Theater’s license until it ceased performances of Trio, a drama about “the unhealthy subject of Lesbianism.”)1
On December 7, 1944—just about the time Nancy arrived in New York—the impresario Billy Rose unveiled his handsomely refurbished Ziegfeld Theater, with a $350,000 extravaganza titled Seven Lively Arts, featuring the combined talents of Beatrice Lillie, Cole Porter, Igor Stravinsky, Alicia Markova, Bert Lahr, George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, and the Benny Goodman Band. Opening night seats went for an unheard-of $24
and, as one observer noted, “there was a veritable flood of newly pressed tuxedos and feminine dinner ensembles for the first time since Pearl Harbor.”2
Nancy’s first address in New York was the Plaza Hotel, but she soon found it too costly and moved to the Barbizon Hotel for Women on East 63rd Street, where she shared a room with another aspiring actress from Smith.3 The Barbizon was where good girls from proper Midwestern and Southern families stayed; the rates were reasonable, and male visitors were not allowed beyond the lobby. A few months later Nancy rented her own apartment, a one-bedroom, fourth-floor walk-up at 409 East 51st Street, just off smart Beekman Place. “It was a wonderful apartment,” she recalled. “It had a fireplace. And I think I paid $150 a month.”4 One friend remembered it as “impeccably done,” another as nicely furnished but
“very small—a small living room and bedroom and kitchenette thing.”5
Living on one’s own was still a fairly daring thing for a respectable girl to do in the 1940s, but Nancy and her parents were comforted by the fact that several family friends had apartments nearby: Uncle Walter and Nan Huston were right around the corner on East 50th Street; Lillian Gish lived with her sister,