Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [141]
“You can say I helped her” was how Thau later summed up his role.
“Stars like Norma Shearer, Elizabeth Taylor—she couldn’t compete with that. She was attractive, but not what you’d call beautiful. She [was] a very nice behaved girl.”16
Nancy Davis’s screen test was like few others in the history of Hollywood.
Ordinarily, tests were directed and filmed by whatever studio technicians were available. Nancy’s was directed by George Cukor, one of MGM’s most important directors, and filmed by George Folsey, the prestigious cinematographer. Both were known for flattering female stars, Cukor so much that he was dubbed “the women’s director.” Over the years, he had elicited exceptional performances from Jean Harlow in Dinner at Eight, Greta Garbo in Camille, Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story, and Norma Shearer, Rosalind Russell, and Joan Crawford in The Women.
Fortunately for Nancy, he was extremely close to both Hepburn and Tracy, whose long-term love affair was conducted in a guesthouse Tracy occupied on the director’s Hollywood Hills estate. When Tracy asked him to direct Nancy’s test, Cukor found it hard to say no.17
On Thau’s instructions, the studio’s drama coach, Lillian Burns, spent three weeks working with Nancy on her acting, voice, dancing, deportment, and appearance. As Lucille Ryman, the head of MGM’s talent department, explained, “I had told Lillian to give her extra special care because Benny had asked me to do the best I could with her.”18 Despite all her advantages, Nancy was so nervous on the day of the test that she had a friend of her mother’s, Nathalie Moorhead Dunham, a retired actress, accompany her to the studio. “I remember Nathalie standing there,”
Nancy told MGM’s “hairdresser to the stars,” Sydney Guilaroff, years later,
“while you were doing my hair, the two of you talking and her making suggestions and you saying what you thought and me just sitting there. I was terrified.”19
Nancy read a scene from East Side, West Side, a high-society melodrama that was scheduled to begin shooting that summer. Howard Keel, a handsome newcomer who would soon become a star in Annie Get Your Gun, played opposite her. As Nancy remembered it, Cukor was “kind and Ronnie and Nancy in Hollywood: 1949–1952
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understanding.”20 According to his biographer Emanuel Levy, Cukor “told the studio Nancy had no talent,” and he would make nasty remarks about her for the rest of his life.21
Mayer reportedly agreed with Cukor’s assessment, but the combination of Thau and Schary prevailed. On March 2, 1949, MGM signed Nancy Davis to a seven-year contract starting at $250 a week, with forty weeks a year guaranteed; if the studio renewed her option every six months, by the last year she would be making $1,250 a week. “I grabbed it,” she later wrote. “I was finally earning a regular paycheck, which meant I would no longer have to accept money from my parents.”22
Shortly after being signed, Nancy was asked to fill out a four-page biographical questionnaire for MGM’s publicity department. Dated March 15, 1949, it offers a glimpse into her personality at a moment that, in her words, “marked the end of one period of life and the beginning of another.”23 She stated her height as five-feet-four, her weight as 117 pounds, and shaved two years off her age, making herself twenty-five instead of twenty-seven, a fib she would stick to even as First Lady. She listed knit-ting as her hobby, tennis and swimming as her sports, “dancing and anything that gets me into the sun” as her favorite forms of recreation, and said she liked to sleep in “tailored nightgowns” with the “windows wide open.” Her most treasured possessions: “Two baby pictures of my mother and father—never am without them—and a locket of my great-grandmother’s with a baby picture of my mother inside. Why? Because I’m a sentimentalist, I guess.”
She named