Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [112]
Nancy Reagan recalled, “I went over to the Hustons’ a lot to have dinner with them. And I also had dinner a lot with Lillian and Dorothy, and then we’d go to a movie. It was funny, because Lillian always seemed so meek and Dorothy was just the opposite. But somehow we always ended up seeing the movie Lillian wanted and never the movie Dorothy wanted.”6
On Sunday afternoons the Gishes regularly received friends “4:30 at 430”—the number of their apartment building—and Nancy was almost 1 8 2
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House always included in these sophisticated but cozy gatherings.7 The Gish sisters were in their fifties then, but both were still working in films and the theater, as was Uncle Walter, who was well into his sixties. All three starred in Broadway plays during the time Nancy lived in New York: Dorothy Gish starred in The Magnificent Yankee, opposite Louis Calhern, another close friend of the Davises’; Walter Huston was in The Apple of His Eye; and Lillian Gish played in Crime and Punishment.
For most of the fall of 1945, Spencer Tracy was ensconced in a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria. Tracy, in his mid-forties and still a major Hollywood star, had nervously agreed to appear in his first Broadway play in fifteen years, The Rugged Path, a heavy-duty drama written by three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Sherwood and directed by Garson Kanin. Nancy loved watching Spence, as she called him, rehearse at the Plymouth Theater; once again, she was being exposed to the best.8 She was also continuing to learn about the hard realities hidden behind doors with stars on them. With Katharine Hepburn’s constant support, Tracy managed not to drink during the play’s rehearsal and run. But he fought with Sherwood and Kanin, treated Hepburn like a servant, disparaged the play in interviews, and generally made things as difficult as possible for everyone around him. The Rugged Path received lukewarm reviews and closed after ten weeks.9
“There are times when mutual failure draws the participants closer,”
Garson Kanin lamented in his biographical memoir, Tracy and Hepburn,
“but, in this instance, the result was wreckage.”10 Tracy remained in New York during the winter of 1946, and he was said to be binge drinking so badly that MGM had him secretly committed to Doctors Hospital, a private institution on the Upper East Side, where he was put in a straitjacket and guarded by studio security men.11 According to Richard Davis, Tracy was hospitalized in Chicago later that year as a patient of his father’s.
“There was a very private floor at Passavant—the top floor—and I remember he was there maybe six weeks getting dried out. Loyal and Edith kept that very quiet.”12
Despite these family connections, Nancy did not land a single acting job during her first year in New York. To supplement monthly checks from Edith and Loyal, she signed up with the Conover Modeling Agency and posed for a few advertisements, mostly for hats and one for Colgate toothpaste. (Some contemporaries said her “thick legs” kept her from getting more assignments.)13 She took acting classes and faithfully made the rounds Nancy in New York: 1944–1949
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of auditions, though she often found herself dreading the thought of being judged and rejected.
“Tryouts are frightening and embarrassing,” she would later write of her struggling-actress days. “But if you are beginning in the theater and your ability is not established, you have no choice but to try out. And even if you pass, you remain on trial. There is a period after a show goes into rehearsal when many performers are replaced. In the days when I was in the theater, the first five days of rehearsal were critical. You could be fired at any time during that period and not be paid.” She continues: I got a part