Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [150]
“Have the studio change your name,” he said. “You would hardly be the first.”
“He had no way of knowing,” she later wrote, “how long I had waited to be called Nancy Davis, and how much that name meant to me. ‘I can’t do that,’ I told him. ‘Nancy Davis is my name.’”81
“Without her amplifying the statement by a single word,” he later wrote, “I knew that whether there were three or thirty Nancy Davises, they could do any name-changing that was going to be done.”82
Reading their separate accounts of that first dinner, it is clear that he was impressed and she was mesmerized. “One of the things I liked about Ronnie right away was that he didn’t talk only about himself. . . . He told me about the Guild, and why the actors’ union meant so much to him. He talked about his small ranch in the San Fernando Valley, about horses and their bloodlines; he was also a Civil War buff, and he knew a lot about wine. When he did talk about himself, he was personal without being too personal. The whole world knew that he had recently been divorced from Jane Wyman, but he didn’t go into details, and I wouldn’t have liked him if he had.”83
He was fascinated to learn that her mother had been on Broadway, that Nazimova was her godmother, and that Walter Huston had been staying with her parents in Chicago when his son, John, called to offer him a part in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. He told her that he had been offered a part in that picture, but Warners had made him turn it down for The Voice of the Turtle. He then segued into his miserable time in London, turning his misadventure into an extended comedy routine about too little sunshine and too many Brussels sprouts.
She laughed at his stories, and he was so enchanted by her laugh that he asked if she’d like to catch Sophie Tucker’s act at Ciro’s, which was just down the Strip, so that he could hear her laugh some more. They ended up staying for the second show—they even managed to dance despite his injured leg. It was almost three in the morning when he took her home, both of them a little giddy perhaps, because, as he told Edmund Morris, the usually abstemious Nancy had helped him consume two bottles of champagne during the course of evening.84
“Why do people fall in love? It’s almost impossible to say,” she reflected in the introduction to a book of his love letters that was published on their Ronnie and Nancy in Hollywood: 1949–1952
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fiftieth wedding anniversary. “If you’re not a teenager or in your early twenties, you’ve gone on a lot of dates and met a lot of people. When the real thing comes along, you just know it. At least I did. . . . I loved to listen to him talk. I loved his sense of humor. I saw it clearly that very first night: He was everything that I wanted.”85
Yet after a spate of dates over the next few weeks—“Ronald Reagan and Nancy Davis together again at Kings,” “Ronnie Reagan doing Mocambo with Nancy Davis,” “Newest telephone number in Ronald Reagan’s book is Nancy Davis, attractive M-G-M actress,” “Ronnie Reagan’s romancing Nancy like mad”—Reagan pulled back.86 During most of 1950, the couple saw each other now and then, and both dated other people. “Ronnie was in no hurry to make a commitment,” Nancy later explained. “He had been burned in his first marriage, and the pain went deep. . . . My mother reminded me that Loyal Davis had been badly burned in his first marriage. He had been terrified of making another mistake, and she had had to wait until he was ready.”87
Eager to make up for lost time and income after being incapacitated for months, Reagan completed four films that year: Storm Warning at Warners, Louisa and the infamous Bedtime for Bonzo at Universal, and finally a Western, The Last Outpost, at Paramount. With the exception of Bonzo the chimpanzee, the Hollywood press linked him with every one of his co-stars—including the flame-haired Rhonda Fleming in The Last Outpost and even the nineteen-year-old Piper Laurie in Louisa