Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [151]
“romances” lasted only as long as the shooting schedules. “He danced well and he had a pleasant personality,” Doris Day, who played opposite him in Storm Warning, said of their dates. “When he wasn’t dancing, he was talking. It really wasn’t conversation, it was rather talking at you, sort of long discourses on subjects that interested him. I remember telling him that he should be touring the country making speeches.”88
If any woman had a hold on him in 1950, it was still Jane Wyman. Although one of the columns had Wyman and Lew Ayres “ga-ga” over each other as late as November 1949,89 by early 1950 he had decided not to marry her, and Jane once again focused her attentions on her ex-husband.
For his thirty-ninth birthday in February, Reagan was honored by the Friars Club at a black-tie dinner in the ballroom of the Beverly Hills Hotel, and Wyman was among the six hundred attendees. It was a big night for Reagan—Cecil B. DeMille and Pat O’Brien made speeches extolling his virtues; 2 4 4
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Al Jolson sang “Sonny Boy” and said he hoped his son would grow up
“to be the kind of man Ronnie is.”90 Jane sat at a table close to the dais, beaming. A few nights later, when she received Photoplay’s Gold Medal in the same ballroom, Reagan had a ringside seat, and “clapped louder than any other person in the audience,” according to the magazine’s reporter, who added, “So many in town are still hoping that these two will reconcile.”91
Nancy saw in the New Year with her family in Chicago. She must have been happy to get away: not only had Ronnie stopped calling, but a few days before she left, the studio announced that the part she saw as her big chance and was sure she had—the female lead opposite Cary Grant in Crisis—was going to Paula Raymond. Another disappointment came as she arrived in Chicago: East Side, West Side opened in New York to generally favorable reviews but with nary a mention of her. Her mother was waiting at Dearborn Station, along with several photographers from the Chicago papers, which treated Nancy’s arrivals and departures as major celebrity events.
Edith organized the first annual Passavant Cotillion and Christmas Ball that season—another rung up the Windy City social ladder for her and a mon-eymaker for Loyal’s hospital. Nancy attended with her old standby Bruce McFarland, who was about to get married to a Chicago girl.92
Upon her return to Hollywood, she, too, started playing the field, dating the actors Robert Walker and Robert Stack and the playwright-producer Norman Krasna. Perhaps coincidentally, but probably not, Stack and Krasna were friends of Reagan’s. Nancy had met Stack—who would later play Eliot Ness in The Untouchables on TV—when she first arrived in town, with a letter of introduction from Colleen Moore to his mother, a grande dame of old Los Angeles society who had bought Moore’s Bel Air mansion.93 They didn’t really click, and even now he bored her a bit, but she was pleased when he called and asked her out.
She was more amused by Norman Krasna, who had a production deal at Warners with Jerry Wald and was bright, Jewish, and twelve years her senior. For his part, Krasna was crazy about her, and started proposing marriage soon after they started dating.94
She became quite involved with Robert Walker, one of the most talented leading men on the MGM lot—and definitely the most troubled.
Three years older than Nancy, Walker had been married twice, to the movie star Jennifer Jones, who left him for producer David O. Selznick in 1945, and then to director John Ford’s daughter, Barbara, who asked for a Ronnie and Nancy in Hollywood: 1949–1952
2 4 5
divorce after five weeks in 1948, reportedly because he beat her up when he drank too much. When Nancy met him, he was putting his life back together after spending nearly a year, on Dore Schary’s orders, at the Men-ninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, where he was treated for what The New York Times called “a severe psychological crackup.”95 He was still under psy-chiatric care and prohibited