Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [118]
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was the cheapest apartment in the building.”45 Bruce McFarland, Nancy’s old Latin School friend, who was now working at a Chicago radio station, recalled going to the apartment to take Nancy out and finding her in her usual good spirits. “I could hear Dr. Davis upstairs reading the riot act to his son, Dick—he was really ticked off and letting him have it. Nancy and I just looked at each other and smiled and got the hell out of there.” On a second occasion, Loyal and Edith were “playing charades using medical terms” with a couple of other doctors and their wives when McFarland arrived.46
Nancy returned to New York in January 1948. She next appeared on the stage that July, for a two-week run in Detroit, where her pal Robert Fryer was producing a revival of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes. Nancy played the demure daughter of the venomously evil Southern Gothic matriarch Regina Hubbard, a character made famous by Tallulah Bankhead on Broadway and by Bette Davis in the 1941 movie. Ruth Chatterton, one of the great leading ladies of the stage in the 1920s and 1930s, took the part in Detroit. Nancy Reagan told me that she didn’t remember having been in this play,47 and it is not listed among her stage credits in her memoirs or in books and articles about her. But her scrapbook contains seven clippings about it, as well as a sheaf of telegrams—from her parents, the Mandels, Bruce McFarland—she received at the Shubert Lafayette Theater opening night, July 5, 1948, the day before her twenty-seventh birthday. Perhaps she had a falling out with Fryer. A telegram sent from him in Detroit to Nancy in New York on August 5 sounds both conciliatory and foreboding: “Hoping a new future opens for you and you know what’s happening to you. Best luck to my best girl. Love Bobby.”48
The Detroit engagement marked the end of Nancy’s stage career. Meanwhile, her romantic life seemed stymied as well. She still went out once a week or so with Kenneth Giniger, but he told me, “I wouldn’t call it a romance. We were just good friends and that was it.”49 According to Kitty Kelley, she had a “short affair” with Alfred Drake, the married star of Oklahoma! , in early 1948, and subsequently pursued Max Allentuck, the general manager for Kermit Bloomgarden, an important Broadway producer.
Giniger, who knew Drake fairly well, doubted that he and Nancy ever met.
A clipping from March 1948 in Nancy’s scrapbook may confirm her link to Allentuck, noting that he and “Norma Davies [sic], actress, have joined the steady set at Sardi’s.” An unnamed secretary of Allentuck’s told Kelley that he would sometimes slip out a back door when Nancy—“lovely looking and beautifully dressed in her suits and fur coats”—dropped by his office. “Let’s 1 9 2
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House put it this way,” the secretary said. “She liked Max much more than he liked her.”50
One night in September 1948, Nancy got a call from Edith telling her that Spencer Tracy had given her number to Clark Gable. “The King,” as Gable was universally known—he had actually been “crowned” in a ceremony at the MGM commissary in 1938—was planning a trip to New York and would be calling Nancy to ask her out for dinner. “Be sure not to say,”
Edith warned Nancy, “‘Sure, and I’m Greta Garbo.’”51
Gable’s visit was the highlight of Nancy’s New York years, an experience she would still be talking about at dinner parties in her seventies and eighties. Gable spent a week in New York, and after their first dinner date, he took Nancy out every day and every night. Gable was a big baseball fan, so in the afternoons he and Nancy would be driven uptown to Yankee Stadium, where the crowd got so excited by his presence that the police had to escort them to and from their seats. On the days when the Yankees weren’t playing,