Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [114]
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are strange, in that you don’t keep your relationships usually beyond the shooting schedule or the run of the show. But she was one of the people that kept her friends closely held.”23
Ron Fletcher, a principal dancer in Lute Song, also became close to Nancy. “I found her to be a delightful creature,” he told me. “She had a wonderful sense of humor and was bright and curious. However, she didn’t seem worldly at all, which is what I liked about her. I would tell her tacky, slightly obscene stories, and that wonderful laugh would come out.”
Fletcher said that, before the Broadway opening, they were in New Haven, Philadelphia, and Boston for twelve weeks of tryouts. “When you’re on the road, people pair off. I don’t remember how Nancy and I first started to talk—we just decided to go out and eat one night, and people were dancing.
She was a marvelous dancer and loved to dance, and I’m a very good ballroom dancer.”
Another Nancy Reagan biographer has implied that Fletcher was homosexual.24 “I was living with a girl when I went into the show,” he explained.
“I later realized that I had always been gay, but I was also very attracted to unusual females, and I found Nancy very sexy. We had a little romance on the road, but I don’t think she was in love with me, and I can’t say I was in love with her. We were just living in the moment and enjoying each other.
After we came back to New York, we drifted apart. I went to her apartment a couple of times and realized what kind of a lifestyle she had. Maybe that intimidated me, because I’m from the backwoods of Missouri and didn’t finish ninth grade.” Nonetheless, he told me, they kept in touch. “Nancy was the type of person you may not see for ten years, but the minute you see each other, you just start laughing.”25
Nancy’s affinity for homosexual men has been frequently remarked upon, but it would hardly have been so noteworthy if she had stayed in show business instead of marrying an actor who went into politics. She was close to a number of lesbian and bisexual women over the years, starting with her godmother and her circle of friends, but this, too, is not unusual in the entertainment world. If gay men were attracted to the young Nancy Davis, it was probably for the same reasons that straight men were: she was pretty, lively, well dressed, a good dancer, a great listener, and, like her mother, a natural-born coquette. She knew how to flirt with a man in a way that was flattering and unthreatening, which may explain why gay men felt especially comfortable with her. And when she was out with a man, she gave him her full attention.
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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House There was also something nurselike about Nancy Davis. She had been a volunteer nurse’s aide in Chicago, and one can easily imagine her in a white uniform and pinned-back cap, hovering over a patient’s bed with care-filled eyes and a troubled brow, telling him that everything will be all right if he follows doctor’s orders and takes his medicine as prescribed.
From high school on, by all accounts, she enjoyed spending time with the opposite sex, hearing their problems and their hopes, comforting them and encouraging them. Moreover, she had the examples of her mother, her Aunt Colleen, and even Katharine Hepburn to impress upon her that a woman’s job was to bring out the best in a man, to make him feel better about himself, to fix and improve him.
One of the most heartfelt—and nurselike—stories in her autobiography concerns a