Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [113]
Maybe I don’t want to remember. I do recall that when we broke for lunch during the rehearsal, the director caught up with me, took my arm, and led me out the stage door into the alley. “I hate to have to tell you this,” he said, “but it’s just not working. You’re just not right for the part. I have to let you go.”
Maybe I wasn’t right for the part. Or maybe I just wasn’t any good. We cannot all be right for every part on the stage or in life. We cannot all be good at everything. But I found out how painful it is to be rejected. It was the first and last time I was ever fired from anything and it hurt horribly. I was so embarrassed. I begged the director to go back to the dressing room to get my coat and purse as I did not want to face the other people in the show. Even if they did not yet know I had been fired, they would know soon enough. I did not want them to see me leaving. He brought me my coat and purse, and I left, humiliated and depressed.14
In December 1945 another family friend came through. Mary Martin, who had made her name seven years earlier singing a torrid “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” in Cole Porter’s Leave It to Me, was a pal of Edith’s and a patient of Loyal’s. That fall, Martin had stayed at the Davises’ apartment for several days, and to return the favor she saw to it that Nancy was given a part in her new play, Lute Song, an opulently produced musical fantasy based on the two-thousand-year-old Chinese classic Pi-Pa-Ki. Nancy played Si-Tchun, a lady in waiting to Martin’s princess; Yul Brynner, in his first starring role on Broadway, played the prince. Apparently some effort was made to make Nancy think she had gotten the part on her own, since she was hired after auditioning for producer Michael Myerberg, who told her, “You look like you could be Chinese.” Years later, director John Houseman con-1 8 4
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House firmed in his memoir that “the usual nepotistic casting” was behind the hir-ing of “a pink-cheeked, attractive but awkward and amateurish virgin by the name of Nancy Davis.”15 After a week or two of rehearsals, Houseman tried to fire her, but Martin wouldn’t hear of it. “John, I have a very bad back,”
she told the director, “and Nancy’s father, Loyal Davis, is the greatest [neurosurgeon] in the U.S.A . We are not letting Nancy go!” 16
Nancy dyed her brown hair black for the part, and took the crosstown bus to and from the theater. “I’d have to get out on 50th, then walk a block to my place,” she recalled. “New York was so great then. You never thought about it being dangerous or anything like that.”17 Loyal and Edith came from Chicago for the play’s opening at the Plymouth Theater on February 6, 1946, which was followed by a big party at Sardi’s. “Nancy was the in-génue,” recalled Robert Fryer, an aspiring young producer who met her when she was in Lute Song. “And we became good friends. I didn’t drink, and Nancy didn’t drink, so after the theater at night, we’d go have our cereal. Cornflakes—that was the big treat.”18 According to Nancy, they usually went to a Horn and Hardart automat, “and if we were really feeling flush, we’d have bananas.” As for drinking: “I tried . . . but I just didn’t like the taste of it.”19
“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