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visit she had from Spencer Tracy’s handicapped son while she was living in New York. John Tracy had been born deaf, was nearly blind, and had been stricken with polio as a youth—“so much affliction for one boy,” Nancy wrote. Despite his disabilities, he had graduated from college and wanted to visit New York. Louise Tracy, who stuck with her marriage despite her husband’s relationship with Katharine Hepburn, called Nancy and asked if John could stay with her. Nancy put him up on the sofa-bed in her living room and took time to guide him around town, accompanying him to the theater and museums. (“He enjoyed musicals,” she noted. “Somehow, he sensed the music through the vibrations he felt.”) The highlight of his trip was to be a date with a girl he had met in California. Without telling him, Nancy called the restaurant in advance to advise the maître d’ of John’s “difficulty in communicating.” But the girl canceled the morning of the date, and an infuriated Nancy told her off: “I took the telephone call, turned away from Johnny so he couldn’t read my lips, and told her what I thought of her leading him on. . . . I could tell she wasn’t ill, she just did not want to go out with Johnny. It had been one thing to meet Spencer Tracy’s son and therefore meet Spence in Hollywood; it was another thing to date his handicapped son in New York.

Well, she was a lot more handicapped than he was as far as I was concerned. . . . I tried to soften the blow, but he was hurt. I went out to dinner and dancing with him as his date, and we had a good time. He was a marvelous young man, and I admired his courage enormously. . . . I remember the night he left me in New York. A representative from MGM

came to take him to the airport. The man took one of his two bags, and I started to take the other to help him down to the car. He said, ‘Oh, no, Nancy in New York: 1944–1949

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you’re my princess, and I’m your slave,’ and took his own bag. I kissed him good-bye and dissolved into tears.”26

Nancy did not want for dates in New York—her suitors included assistant directors and producers, as well as a young Navy doctor based at the Brooklyn Naval Yard27—but, as she recalled in Nancy, “I had no serious romances.”28 She loved being taken to the Stork Club, where the Duke and Duchess of Windsor held court and Walter Winchell recorded the goings and comings of showgirls and playboys. She would always slip a dinner roll or two into her evening bag for breakfast the next morning, and one night the owner, Sherman Billingsley, who didn’t miss a trick, decided to have a little fun. “On the way out,” Nancy recalled, “the captain handed me a little package. I opened it right in front of my date. There was a card from Mr.

Billingsley which said: ‘For the rolls,’ and inside was a pound of butter.”29

“Nancy was very charming, very outgoing, very friendly,” recalled retired publisher Kenneth Giniger, who started dating her while she was in Lute Song. “She was a very nice-looking girl. I didn’t think of her as a great beauty.” At the time, Giniger, a graduate of the University of Virginia and New York University Law School fresh out of the Army, was publicity director of Prentice Hall. “I knew her mother, who in those days had a radio show in Chicago on which I placed authors,” he explained. “And her mother mentioned to me that she had a daughter in a show in New York, and I ought to look her up, which I did. She was very close to all her mother’s friends. She sort of flowed with the tide, I think. Of course, she had a very social mother and stepfather, and they helped her a great deal.”

Nancy, he said, “was quieter than Edith, more reserved, I would say. Edith was somewhat effusive.” He took her to “the Stork Club a great deal, or El Morocco,” and placed the occasional item about her in the columns. Although he was actively involved in New York’s Republican Party, they rarely discussed politics. “She wasn’t particularly interested,” Giniger said.30

In August 1946, shortly after Lute Song closed, ZaSu Pitts offered Nancy a supporting role in her new play,