Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [116]
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House latter dismissing the play as “hoked-up” and “amateurish” but praising her as “unusually talented and attractive.”31 These were followed by a flurry of items from Chicago society columns noting her attendance at various parties and charity events during an extended visit home for Thanksgiving 1946. “Enjoying the music of two bands against a backdrop of red velvet,”
a typical item read, “Nancy Davis here from New York, wearing Kelly green brocaded satin with a large red cabbage rose on her matching purse.
Her dancing partner was Warner [sic] G. Baird Jr.”32 She also pasted in clippings—sent to her by her mother, no doubt—charting her parents’ social and professional progress: Edith, “with orchids pinned to her mink coat,”
arriving at a Chicago theater opening in December 1946; Loyal, now president of the Society of Neurological Surgeons, lined up with his colleagues at a Vanderbilt University medical conference that April.33
In the spring of 1947, Nancy’s agent, Max Richard, persuaded RKO
Pathé, which was based in New York, to use her in several short documentaries for its “This Is America” news series, including one about the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis—not exactly the most glamorous of movie debuts. Her SAG application, dated May 20, 1947, notes her memberships in the Actors Equity Association and the American Federation of Radio Artists. Where it asks for a reference, Nancy put Walter Huston.34
She was still seeing Walter and Nan Huston quite frequently, but not under the happiest of circumstances. The Hustons’ marriage, like the Tracys’, was a case of misery wrapped in tinsel: tense, complicated, fundamentally unhappy. While Walter’s career continued to thrive, his third wife’s had withered away, and she fell into frequent and severe depressions, often requiring hospitalization. “Their marriage got to be very rough,”
said John Huston, Walter’s son by his first wife. “I think Nan was very jealous of my father and his popularity. She wanted to be a star.”35 Since suffering a nervous breakdown in 1942, Nan had been treated by a psychiatrist recommended by Loyal Davis. In February 1947, however, she was so unstable that, on Loyal’s advice, Walter agreed to have her undergo a series of electroshock treatments at Passavant Hospital. He spent the next two months by her side in their New York apartment,36 and then left for Mexico to film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which was directed by John and would win Oscars for both father and son. Nancy visited them during this New York stay, and her sympathy went mostly to Uncle Walter. “Nan was a very difficult woman,” she said. “Very difficult. She Nancy in New York: 1944–1949
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wanted parts in plays that she couldn’t possibly get. But he was so darling.
Just darling.”37
That summer ZaSu Pitts found another job for Nancy, a supporting role in George Abbott’s revival of The Late Christopher Bean, which was touring the stock circuit. For three months the comedy warhorse and her protégée spent each week in a different town, working with actors from the local theater company—a learning experience for Nancy, but a step down for Pitts. As James Karen, who played opposite Nancy at the Olney Theater, in suburban Maryland, pointed out, the largely older audiences were mainly there to see how stars who were popular in the 1920s and 1930s had aged. “Some were happy, beautiful, and well-off financially,” he recalled, “others were old, beaten up, and broke, defeated by a hard profession. I was never sure about ZaSu’s status, because she complained a lot publicly about Roosevelt’s New Deal robbing her, but she