Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [117]
The tour began in Ogunquit, Maine, on July 7, the day after Nancy’s twenty-sixth birthday, and she was showered with telegrams—all saved in her scrapbook—wishing her happy birthday and good luck, from “Mother and Pops” and Richard at Princeton, from Colleen Moore Hargrave and Louise and Spencer Tracy, from her Chicago dancing partner, Warren Baird Jr., and even her former fiancé, James Platt White. (The most intriguing was sent from La Guardia Airfield and signed Tommy: “A birthday message between we two to let you know I’m thinking of you.”)39 The following week, at the Olney Theater, Nancy received a card backstage from General and Mrs. Omar Nelson Bradley saying, “We are in seats F7 and 8. If you have time, we’d love to say hello. We met your mother in Chicago last month.”40 General Bradley had led the American army at Normandy and would soon be named chairman of the joint chiefs of staff by President Truman; this was one more example of Edith’s ability to charm powerful figures and enlist them in her daughter’s cause.
That same week, the American Newspaper Women’s Club gave a tea honoring ZaSu and Nancy at its Washington headquarters, which drew a mix of reporters, socialites, and government wives, including those of Florida senator Claude Pepper and Montana congressman Mike Mansfield 1 9 0
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House (the future Senate majority leader and ambassador to Japan under Presidents Carter and Reagan). “Conversation hummed about politics, the theater and press,” The Washington Post reported. “Miss Pitts told a small group, ‘I’m definitely ’agin communism. I’d like to get on a soap box and warn everybody against supporting it or any other isms.’”41
Nancy had a fairly substantial role in The Late Christopher Bean, playing the younger and nicer of a greedy country doctor’s two daughters, and she got several good reviews. “Nancy Davis, the likeable sister, is spirited and good-looking,” wrote one critic. “She manages to make what might have been a sappy, cloying girl into a real person.” “Nancy Davis does a splendid job,” declared another. “She has lots of charm and grace as well as ability.”42
When the summer season ended, Pitts decided to take the show on a fall tour of regional theaters in larger cities, including Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, and Milwaukee. The Late Christopher Bean opened at Chicago’s Civic Theater on October 20, 1947, and once again Nancy’s dressing room was papered in congratulatory telegrams from family friends and assorted beaus, including the Tracys, the Hustons, Lillian Gish, Louis Calhern, Mary Martin, and Illinois governor Dwight Green. There were flowers from Mr.
and Mrs. Philip Knight Wrigley, of the super-rich chewing gum clan, with a card reading “Chicago is proud of you, Nancy,” and from Orville Taylor, the lawyer who had arranged Nancy’s adoption a decade earlier, who wrote,
“For my adorable Nancy from your general counsel and greatest admirer.”43
Loyal and Edith gave an opening night party, with a guest list that included the governor’s wife, the Hargraves, Narcissa Thorne, Mrs. Alden Swift, and millionaire retailer Leon Mandel and his wife, Carola, who was considered Chicago’s best-dressed woman. The party was noted in the next day’s papers, as was the performance of “a sleek brunette named Nancy Davis, who plays the love interest with an appealing dash of wistful charm.”44
Nancy had been on the road with ZaSu Pitts for nearly six months when The Late Christopher Bean tour came to an end, in December 1947 in Detroit, and from there she returned to Chicago for the holidays. The Davises had moved from 199 to 209 East Lake Shore Drive earlier that year. The eighteen-story limestone fortress built in 1925 by Benjamin Marshall, the architect of the Drake Hotel, was considered the