Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [149]
Hurt and angry, Reagan refused to take his next assignment, a loan-out to Columbia—a big step for someone who had always been one of the studio’s most accommodating stars.74 Lew Wasserman let his client sulk for a month, then persuaded him to accept a compromise: Reagan would make one picture a year for Warner Bros. for the remaining three years of his contract, his $150,000 annual salary would be cut in half, and he would be free to work for other studios. Indeed, even before the Warners deal was finalized in May 1949, Wasserman announced that Universal had signed Reagan to a five-year, five-picture deal at $75,000 per picture.75
As bad luck would have it, Reagan broke his right thigh in six places in a charity baseball game three days before he was to start shooting his first film for Universal, and was hospitalized for seven weeks. He had a hard time getting around on crutches when he was released in early August, so Jane let him stay in her fully staffed new house in Holmby Hills with the children while she was in London filming Stage Fright for Alfred Hitch-cock. When she returned, he moved into his mother’s house, on Phyllis Avenue, for a few weeks. If anyone could make him feel better about himself, it was Nelle, who in her late sixties was still driving her old Studebaker to the Olive View Sanitarium, where she now showed patients movies her son got for her from the studio. After he moved back into his apartment, Ronnie and Nancy in Hollywood: 1949–1952
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he continued to stop by her place every Sunday for brunch and spiritual support.76
By November things were looking up. Jerry Wald came through with a part in what promised to be a good film, Storm Warning, the story of a courageous district attorney who busts the Ku Klux Klan in a Southern town. On November 13, two days before his first date with Nancy, Reagan won his third full term as SAG president by an overwhelming majority.
There is a conflicting version of how Ronnie and Nancy met. According to Miriam Schary, several weeks before the Hollywood Reporter printed its list, Nancy told her that she would like to meet Ronald Reagan, and Miriam invited them both to a small dinner party at the Scharys’ house. The dinner, as described by the Scharys’ daughter, writer Jill Robinson, bordered on the disastrous: Miriam, an outspoken liberal, and Ronnie argued about the seriousness of the Communist threat to the film industry; Dore tried to mediate, and Nancy, who was seated opposite Ronnie, “kept smiling at him in agreement.” “I don’t recall his saying much to Nancy,” Miriam said, adding that she had asked Ronnie to pick Nancy up, but he said he would be coming directly from a SAG meeting. She had then hoped he would offer her a ride home, but he was the first to leave, explaining that he had to depart for New York early the next morning.77
Reagan did indeed travel to New York in early October on SAG business.78 However, Nancy consistently maintained that the Schary dinner never took place, and Mervyn LeRoy always told the story more or less her way. So did her husband in his two books. No matter: if she wasn’t introduced to Reagan at the Scharys’, she seemed determined to meet him that fall. In mid-October, according to SAG records, she called the Guild and
“indicated her willingness and desire to run for the Board, but due to some confusion in membership records (two Nancy Davises) her name was not included on the ballot.”79 In addition, one of Nancy’s MGM acquaintances remembered her “jokingly” making a list of Hollywood’s most eligible bachelors, including producers, directors, agents, lawyers, and actors, and putting Ronald Reagan’s name on top.80
In any event, there is little doubt that they hit if off on their first date.
Ronnie arrived at Nancy’s apartment on the dot at 7:30, still using a pair of canes. She greeted him in a trim black dress with a crisp white collar, the kind of always-right, good-taste classic she had favored ever since she graduated from her Girls Latin uniform. He took her to LaRue’s, on the Sunset 2 4 2
Ronnie and Nancy: Their