Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [146]
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House she was in love with,” he told me.50 As far as her family could tell, it was a classic case of a powerful older man falling for a younger woman who finds him interesting and supportive but is not attracted to him romantically.
Such relationships can go on for only so long before something gives, and theirs would not be an exception. In the meantime, Nancy continued to enjoy the benefits of Thau’s patronage while trying not to hurt his feelings.
Along with her princess upbringing (which the publicity department played up to the hilt), her famous family friends, and her instant A-list social life, Nancy’s closeness to Thau stirred up a certain amount of envy.
What’s more, her reputation as Thau’s paramour scared off younger, less powerful suitors. Amid all the studio-inspired fluff in her scrapbook there is not a single item about her dating anyone until November 1949, eight months after she arrived in Hollywood. And then her date was Ronald Reagan, a power in his own right as president of SAG and chairman of MPIC, the alliance of studio, guild, and union chiefs that had been formed in the wake of the 1947 HUAC hearings to restore Hollywood’s image and cleanse the industry of Communist influence.
Production on East Side, West Side began in September. Once again, Nancy was cast close to type as the socialite wife of a New York press baron. She appeared in only two scenes, but they were with the film’s star, Barbara Stanwyck, and Mervyn LeRoy made sure Nancy had her fair share of close-ups.
The big-budget, high-gloss film also starred James Mason as Stanwyck’s un-faithful husband, Ava Gardner as his mistress, who is murdered, and Van Heflin as the reporter who solves the crime.
On October 28, 1949, the Hollywood Reporter, which was owned by the ultra-right-wing nightclub impresario Billy Wilkerson, published a list of
“Communist sympathizers” who had signed an amicus curiae brief urging the Supreme Court to overturn the convictions of John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo. To Nancy’s horror, her name was on the list.51 Since she had also been receiving unsolicited mail from left-wing organizations, she called LeRoy in a panic. “She drove over that evening to show me some of the propaganda that was being slipped under her door,” the director wrote in his memoir, Take One. “We were both anti-Communist, and strongly so, so the whole business was annoying.”52
Nancy’s concern was not unreasonable. Behind the facade of klieg-lit premieres and glittery dinner parties, Hollywood was an increasingly divided and frightened community in late 1949: the right saw a Red under Ronnie and Nancy in Hollywood: 1949–1952
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every bed, the left an FBI agent; according to Arthur Laurents, people even suspected their analysts of being government informers.53 The Los Angeles Times was running as many as twenty anti-Communist articles a day, and California state senator John Tenney, who chaired a mini-HUAC
in Sacramento, had launched investigations into the political activities of Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Gene Kelly, Gregory Peck, Frank Sinatra, and Nancy’s friend Katharine Hepburn.54
The American Legion threatened to boycott studios that employed Communists, and freshly sprouted newsletters such as Red Channels and Counter-Attack printed lists of suspected Party members, friends of suspected Party members, and friends of friends of suspected Party members.
(“We don’t care whether an individual cannot be proved to be an outright Communist,” asserted Myron Fagan, whose Cinema Educational Guild distributed hundreds of thousands of pamphlets with titles such as Red