Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [142]
Her favorite actresses: Nazimova and, in keeping with her serious-actress image, Laurette Taylor. She admitted to believing in hunches and superstitions (“All of them and then some”), and produced a list of her phobias:
“Superficiality, vulgarity, esp. in women, untidiness of mind and person—
and cigars!” One can hear echoes of her stepfather in her answer to the question “Do you govern your life by any rule or rules?” “Do unto others,” she typed, “as you would have them do unto you. I believe strongly in the law of retribution—you get back what you give.”
She left several questions unanswered, including “Your favorite childhood memory?” Her childhood ambition was “to be an actress.”
Any ambitions outside present career? “Sure.”
Greatest ambition? “To have a successful happy marriage.”24
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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House
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“I arrived in the Last Days of the Glamorous Empire,” wrote the screenwriter and playwright Arthur Laurents, who was signed by MGM not long before Nancy was and whose description of Hollywood in the late 1940s captures both its insularity and seductiveness: “Everybody in town was in pictures or wanted to be in pictures. The aircraft industry was booming and paid well but nobody knew anybody in airplanes except Howard Hughes—who owned a movie studio. The oil wells on Signal Hill pumped day and night, there was even one pumping away smack in the middle of LaBrea Boulevard in West Hollywood but nobody knew anybody in oil, either. There was no smog, everybody played tennis, and everybody drove everywhere in convertibles to get a tan and flirt at stoplights.”25
Until she found Mr. Right, Nancy was thrilled to be at MGM, which was not only the biggest and most important studio but also the most glamorous and the most social—and the most protective of its stars. Ann Rutherford, who was under contract there at the time, compared it to the White House, a place where everything was taken care of for you. “I had no ambition when I was there,” she told me. “All I wanted was to make it last as long as I possibly could. I would carry a tray for someone—I didn’t give a rip—so long as I could stay forever. It was just the most wonderful life on earth. If I wanted to go to New York between pictures, all I had to do was go see [publicity chief ] Howard Strickling and say, ‘Would you arrange some interviews for me in New York?’ And he’d say, ‘What shows do you want to see?’ And they’d come up with house tickets to anything.
. . . I loved Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. . . . And they really had more stars than there are in heaven.”26
In 1949 the MGM roster included Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly, June Allyson, Deborah Kerr, Gary Cooper, Mickey Rooney, Esther Williams, Elizabeth Taylor, and Lassie. Louis B. Mayer, who had opened the studio twenty-five years earlier with a ceremony that included Army and Navy planes dropping roses from the sky, saw these stars as his children, who needed to be shaped and coddled, reprimanded and controlled by “their stern but loving father.”27 (Dore Schary may have been more liberal politically, but he was just as paternalistic.) Some found this atmosphere oppressive, but it suited Nancy. She was accustomed to being disciplined and sheltered, and with Uncle Walter Huston and Spence Ronnie and Nancy in Hollywood: 1949–1952
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and Aunt Kate all making movies at Metro in 1949, it felt very much like the “home” that Mayer insisted it was.
“In those days, if you were under contract to a studio, the studio was your life, six days a week,” Nancy later wrote. “If you weren’t making a movie . . . you were doing publicity for one you had made. . . . When I was making a movie, I’d have to be on the lot at 7:30 a.m.—women always had early calls for hair and makeup—which meant that I had to be up extra early to drive myself to work. . . . I’d stay on the lot until five or six every evening. And then, even on the days when I