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One of the hostesses who sometimes asked Deutsch to pick up Nancy was Dore Schary’s wife, Miriam. Although the Scharys saw themselves as bohemians—Miriam was a dedicated artist who showed her paintings in a New York gallery—they were quite snobbish about their guest lists, and not every newly signed actress was asked to dinner at their home in Brentwood.

As Esther Williams wrote in her memoir, The Million Dollar Mermaid, “You didn’t just hang out with people like that. You bore their scrutiny. ‘Were you from a good family?’ ‘Did you come from money?’ ‘Was your talent intellectual or even avant-garde?’”41 Miriam Schary, a difficult woman whose face was partially disfigured from a childhood accident and whom some of the town’s more fashionable hostesses considered “a bit batty,” was won over by Nancy’s deferential manner.42

Nancy was also taken up by Kitty LeRoy, the very social wife of the director Mervyn LeRoy—and the complete opposite of Miriam Schary. Petite and beautiful, Kitty was from Chicago, and one of her three previous husbands was the owner of the Pump Room, where she came to know Edith Davis and Colleen Moore. Coincidentally, Mervyn owed his first directing job, back in 1927, to Moore, and they had remained close friends after she retired and he went on to make countless hits at Warners and then at MGM, including Little Caesar and The Wizard of Oz. He had been married to Harry Warner’s daughter and was thought to be one the richest men in the business. The LeRoys entertained in the grand manner at their house in Bel Air, and the guests almost always included MCA chairman Jules Stein and his wife, Doris, who was Kitty’s best friend. “Kitty saw herself as Nancy’s duenna,” said her stepdaughter, Linda LeRoy Janklow. “She tried to protect her and make sure she had a good life in California.”43

Ronnie and Nancy in Hollywood: 1949–1952

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When Mary Astor dropped out of LeRoy’s next movie, East Side, West Side, he decided to offer her part to Nancy, and Dore Schary gave his okay.

Two weeks later, at the beginning of September, the studio picked up her first six-month option, and she finally felt secure enough to move into an unfurnished apartment closer to work and have her belongings shipped out from New York.

Richard Davis came to visit Nancy at the end of that summer, just before she moved out of the Santa Monica bungalow. He had graduated from Princeton in June and taken summer courses at Northwestern University Medical School, so Loyal and Edith rewarded him with a ticket on the Super Chief. He told me he remembered two things about his stay: Katharine Hepburn lent him her beat-up old Ford so that he could drive to Santa Barbara to see a girlfriend, and one night he and Nancy had dinner at Benny Thau’s house in the Hollywood Hills.

“It was all very much on the up and up,” Davis said. A butler served dinner, and Thau “didn’t paw Nancy or fawn over her. . . . But you could see he was a controller—sort of reminiscent of a Mafioso type.”44 During dinner Thau told a story about growing up in New York. “He said he was very, very poor,” Davis recalled, “and it was Thanksgiving and he had just enough money to buy dinner. The floor of the restaurant was covered in sawdust, and apparently his dinner spilled. There was a good-looking girl sitting next to him, alone, and he was just too embarrassed to pick the dinner up out of the sawdust and eat it. I didn’t have a soft spot in my heart for Benny Thau, but it was a very touching story. Whether it was a ploy to get Nancy’s sympathy, I don’t know.”45

Nancy was seeing a lot of Benny Thau, and rumors about their relationship were so widespread that the studio put out stories suggesting that Clark Gable had been the hidden hand behind her “gilt-edged” screen test.46

Nothing was written about her evenings out with Thau—the studio made sure of that—but according to MGM talent chief Lucille Ryman, “Benny took her to premieres and benefits and parties.”47 “People said he was her beau,” said Leonora Hornblow,