Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [140]
“It was my impression that Benny was there to see Bob Rubin, who was with Metro in New York,” Nancy Reagan told me, referring to MGM’s longtime East Coast vice president and general counsel, J. Robert Rubin. “Bob and his wife stayed at the Biltmore every year and became good friends of my parents’.”7 Richard Davis said that his father had taken an instant dislike to Benny Thau and strongly disapproved of Edith’s backstage machinations on Nancy’s behalf. “Dr. Loyal was all for someone getting ahead on his or her own,” Davis told me. “To have the inside track was against his principles. And he didn’t want his daughter to be mixed up with this man at all. I think my father thought this whole Hollywood thing was a little unsavory for his daughter. But Edith encouraged it.
Edith would say, ‘Well, you have to make a few compromises if you want to get anywhere.’ My father was not that way. He wouldn’t compromise for anything or anybody.”8
A newspaper photograph of the Davises, Thau, and Louise Spencer at the opening of the new Sombrero Playhouse confirms their presence in Phoenix that month, as well as Richard Davis’s take on his parents’
conflicting attitudes: as Edith studies the Hollywood big-shot with interest, Loyal casts his wife a stern glance. Nancy is not in the picture, but she saved it in her scrapbook, a rare piece of printed evidence linking her to a man she never mentioned in any of her books or talked about in in-Ronnie and Nancy in Hollywood: 1949–1952
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terviews.9 Her silence only fueled suspicion that she had something to hide, and several previous biographers, unaware of their meeting in Phoenix, have written that Nancy met Thau on a blind date in New York shortly before her screen test and that she became his girlfriend in Hollywood.10
This version of events was largely based on an interview Thau gave, at age eighty, to Laurence Leamer, the first Reagan biographer to research Nancy’s background in some depth. Recalling a trip to New York in early 1949, Thau said that a friend had suggested, “If you want to take somebody out to a show, call Nancy Davis. She’s a nice girl who likes company.” Over dinner after the theater, Thau said, he uttered the magic words: “Nancy, why don’t you come out and make a screen test?” Thau’s memory was not airtight, however; he told Leamer that he had taken Nancy to see a play starring Spencer Tracy, but Tracy’s last play, The Rugged Path, had closed more than two years earlier.11
Nancy Reagan told me there was no blind date—or love affair. “I never had dinner with Benny in New York,” she said. “When I came out to Los Angeles to do the test and stayed—yes, then I saw him, had dinner with him, and so on. . . . I was not his girlfriend. He took a liking to me, that’s true . . . and I liked him as a friend. But that was it, as far as I was concerned.”12
In any event, Spencer Tracy had lined up another powerful MGM executive on Nancy’s behalf, Dore Schary, vice president in charge of production. Schary had been brought over from RKO the previous year by Nicholas Schenk, the head of Loew’s Inc., MGM’s New York–based parent corporation, and it was generally thought that it was only a matter of time before he replaced the aging Mayer. Schary, a former screenwriter, had been close to Tracy since 1938, when he wrote the script for Boys Town, which won Oscars for both of them. At some point before Nancy’s screen test, Tracy called Schary and, playing to the executive’s preference for intellectual message films, recommended Nancy as a serious actress.
“The girl,” he said, “knows how to look like she’s really thinking when she’s onstage.”13
Schary was drawn into Nancy’s camp by other means as well. Like Mary Martin, he suffered from chronic back problems, and shortly before Nancy was signed, he had called Loyal Davis for advice about an operation.14 It is not clear who recommended Nancy’s stepfather to Schary, but he became a 2 2 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House regular patient. According to Nancy’s New York publishing pal