Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [119]
How nice to see you!’ And then, of course, I had to introduce them to my date.”52
Gable, a bachelor since the death of his beloved third wife, Carole Lombard, five years earlier, was forty-six when Nancy met him and not quite the swashbuckling he-man who had carried Vivien Leigh up the stairs in Gone With the Wind. He had put on weight, drank heavily—according to Gore Vidal, “after a few drinks [he] would loosen his false teeth, which were on some sort of peg and then shake his head until they rattled like dice”53—smoked three packs of cigarettes a day, and admitted to being a so-so lover. His postwar pictures had flopped at the box office, but when he took Nancy to see Phil Silvers and Nanette Fabray in the hit musical High Button Shoes, the audience stood and applauded him and would not sit
“until he waved his hand.”54
Nancy was enchanted by him and thrilled with the attention she received simply by being at his side. “I knew all sorts of stars as family friends,” she later wrote, but this “was my first experience going anywhere with a star of that magnitude.” One night he took her to a fancy showbiz party at the Waldorf Towers: “I was sure I would be forgotten and left in a corner somewhere when some of the gorgeous and famous glamour girls got to him. They were certainly aware of his presence! But nothing like Nancy in New York: 1944–1949
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that happened. When he was with you, he was with you and only you, and never looked over your shoulder to see who else was in the room. I think the secret of his charm was that he made whoever he was with feel important. He made me feel important, and I must say it gave my ego a boost.”55
In My Turn, she describes Gable’s attentiveness as “a quality that good courtesans also have,” but she makes it clear that things went only so far between them. “Clark was sexy, handsome, and affectionate, but I found him less the seducer he was reputed to be than a kind, romantic, and fun-loving man. He sent me flowers and we held hands, but I think that in his case the lover image had been so built up that it was a relief for him to be with someone like me, who made no demands on him.”56
Their week of dates won her more press coverage than any of her stage appearances had. All the leading New York columnists—Walter Winchell, Ed Sullivan, Earl Wilson, Dorothy Kilgallen—ran items, as did Louella Parsons in Hollywood. “Has something at last happened to Clark Gable,”
asked Modern Screen magazine, “something, to be exact, in the form of a slim, brown-eyed brown-haired beauty named Nancy Davis—that is changing the fitful pattern of his romantic life? Has he, in other words, finally found the Gable woman, for whom he is more than willing to give up the Gable women? The answer seems to be yes—even though, if it is love at all, it is so far a love in hiding.”57
A year later, Gable married Sylvia, Lady Ashley, in Santa Barbara. It was a fourth marriage for both of them, and it lasted a little more than a year.
In My Turn, written a year after she left the White House, Nancy relived her dates with the King:
Perhaps I missed some of the signals he was sending out. He lived in Encino, and he referred to his house as a ranch. One night, at dinner, he asked me, “How would you feel about living on a ranch?”
I mumbled something foolish like, “Gee, I don’t know, I never have.” But I have often looked back at that moment and wondered: Was Clark Gable sounding me out about a possible future together?
And if so, how should I have responded? I wasn’t in love with him, but if we had seen more of each other, I might have been. I was certainly taken by his attentiveness and his kindness, and by his mod-esty. It just wasn’t what you would have expected from such a star.58
Aside from her dates with Gable, the only bright spot during her last year in New York was a modicum of success in the emerging