Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [139]
famous Doll
House. (A.P.
Wide World
Photos)
Reagan with gossip columnist
Louella Parsons, who also hailed
from Dixon, Illinois.
(Photofest)
Jane Wyman and Ronald Reagan
on their wedding day, January 26, 1940.
(Culver Pictures)
Wyman with her Academy Award
for Johnny Belinda, March 1948.
(A.P. Wide World Photos)
Lieutenant Reagan with Jane
and little Maureen
the day he reported for
military service, April 19, 1942.
(A.P. Wide World Photos)
Screen Actors Guild leaders
Robert Montgomery,
George Murphy, and
Ronald Reagan after testifying
before HUAC, October 23, 1947.
(A.P. Wide World Photos)
Reagan and Lauren Bacall
with President
Harry Truman during his
1948 campaign.
(Al Humphreys/Los Angeles
Times)
Nancy Davis and Ronald Reagan on a date at a Beverly Hills Hotel gala.
(Globe Photos)
Nancy in a 1950
promotional photo
for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
(Photofest)
Loyal and Edith
with Nancy in Hollywood,
July 1949.
(Collection of Richard Davis)
Nancy with her co-star James Whitmore, filming The Next Voice You Hear, 1950.
(Lester Glassner Collection/Neal Peters)
Ronnie and Nancy
on their wedding day,
March 4, 1952,
photographed at the home
of their witnesses,
William and Ardis Holden.
(Reagan Family Photo
Collection)
The newlyweds on their
honeymoon at the
Arizona Biltmore Hotel
in Phoenix.
(A.P. Wide World Photos)
C H A P T E R T E N
RONNIE AND NANCY
IN HOLLYWOOD
1949–1952
It looks as though Nancy Davis, Dr. and Mrs. Loyal Davis’ talented actress daughter, may have the break for which she has hoped and persevered. She is in Hollywood now, waiting for the cameras to start rolling on “Death in the Doll’s House,” in which she has a role.
Cholly Dearborn, Chicago Herald-American, March 24, 1949
Hollywood is bounded on the North by legend, on the East by rumor, on the West by scandal and on the South by superstition. Somewhere within those boundaries lies the actual Hollywood community so many talk about and so few really know.
Dore Schary, Case History of a Movie, 1950
A FEW DAYS AFTER THE TELEVISION ADAPTATION OF RAMSHACKLE INN AIRED
on January 2, 1949, Nancy Davis received a call from her agent telling her that “someone from Metro” had seen her performance and suggested that she come out to the coast for a screen test. Nancy was so excited that, as she put it in her autobiography, “I started packing before I hung up the phone.” She added proudly, “This was one opportunity that none of my family friends had anything to do with.”1
Nonetheless, she immediately called her mother in Chicago, and Edith began working the phone on her daughter’s behalf, starting with a call to Spencer Tracy, urging him to make sure that Nancy was handled with kid gloves.2 By mid-January, Edith and Loyal were in Phoenix, a month earlier than they usually arrived for their annual six-week stay at the Arizona Biltmore Hotel, and Nancy joined them. So did Spencer and Louise Tracy, 2 2 5
2 2 6
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House who were traveling with their good friend Benjamin Thau, MGM’s vice president in charge of talent and the executive who supervised screen tests at the studio.3
Benny Thau was forty-nine and still a bachelor. (“Thau pronounced his name like winter thaw,” noted Leonora Hornblow. “The joke was Benny never thawed.”)4 A short, heavyset man who wore his thinning hair slicked back, he spoke in a deliberate near-whisper that forced people to listen closely to what he said. He had started out in show business as a vaudeville booker in New York and was made casting director of MGM by Louis B. Mayer in 1928. “From then on,” according to Mayer biographer Charles Higham, “Thau’s casting couch was the busiest in Hollywood.”5
Thau was notorious for demanding sexual favors from starlets whose careers he advanced, for carrying on affairs with married actresses (most notably Greer Garson, whom he made an overnight star), and, according to Higham, even for organizing Christmas Eve orgies on the MGM lot during the 1930s.6 He was immediately taken by