• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Of course, she was off to a late start—Lana Turner and Ava Gardner, who were more or less her age, had started out as teenagers; Elizabeth Taylor was still in her teens. “Mysterious indeed are the ramifications of Hollywood,” wrote Inez Wallace, the first reporter to interview Nancy after she arrived at MGM. “Certain actors are pointed out to writers as ‘comers.’ This means that the studio is putting everything it has behind an actor to make him or her a star. When Nancy Davis was pointed out to me on the MGM

lot I couldn’t believe they intended to build her up. She looks more like a character actress than a leading lady.”29

Nancy’s publicity was personally overseen by Ann Straus, Howard Strickling’s elegant and low-key deputy. “Ann was one of the old-timers in the PR department,” said Bill Fine, who ran the West Coast office of McCall’s magazine. “She was very much a lady, and she would be very careful to make sure that the ten or twelve people she was sort of nanny for got good mannerly press. She wasn’t married, so she could always go out and have dinner with you. She had a very deep voice, very soothing, and you could tell her anything. I think the reason Nancy felt strongly about having her as a friend is she never blabbed about anything. She always kept her counsel.”30

Straus introduced Nancy to Amelia Gray, a former department store buyer from Baltimore, who had recently opened an exclusive dress shop in Beverly Hills. Gray, a soigné woman in her late thirties who always wore her jet-black hair swept back in a chignon, attracted both fashion-conscious movie stars such as Rosalind Russell and up-and-coming Los Angeles socialites such as Betsy Bloomingdale. “I was new out here and I didn’t know where to go,” Nancy Reagan told me, “so Ann took me to Amelia, and we became friends. She was a wonderful woman. I never went anyplace else.

I’d go there and sit in Amelia’s little office or the fitting room and we’d have a sandwich. That’s how I met Jimmy—through Amelia.”31

2 3 2

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House James Galanos, who would become California’s leading designer, was a Greek-American in his twenties, just starting his own business after having apprenticed at a couture house in Paris. “Amelia discovered me,” Galanos told me. “She had heard about me, and she propositioned me: if I would sell to her exclusively, she would make it worth my while. So I decided to go with her. It was unbelievable—every day she’d reorder. And I’d deliver the things—I was still delivering on my own. We’d sit in the back in her office.

I’d sit up on the table, and Nancy was always there. Amelia just loved her, and took her on like a daughter. At the end of every season, Amelia would want all my samples. And that was when Nancy started buying Galanos, because they were a terrific price that she could afford. She loved clothes.” How expensive were his dresses then? “When I first started with my little cotton dresses, they retailed for $89 to $125. Cocktail dresses were $275 to $395, which was a lot of money in the fifties.”32

“I remember the first dress of Jimmy’s that I got,” said Nancy Reagan. “I was so excited about it. It was black with a high neck. I remember Amelia turning to one of the salesgirls and saying, ‘See, that’s the way it should be.

Those other dames come in here, and they’re so blasé and bored.’”33

Nancy was almost immediately cast in Shadow on the Wall (originally titled Death in the Doll’s House), a murder mystery starring Ann Sothern and Zachary Scott. It was a B movie, and they were B stars, but Nancy was given a featured role, playing a child psychiatrist. Before shooting began in late March, the studio allowed her to fly to Phoenix to get some “authentic pointers” on how to play a doctor from her stepfather, who was still vacationing at the Biltmore. For one of her scenes, the costume designer chose an antique gold locket that still had a tag on it from the last time it had been used: by Nazimova in Escape, in 1940. Nancy saw that as a positive