Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [152]
“Someone close to Bob tells me he is happier with Nancy than he has been at any time since his parting from Jennifer Jones.”97
Nancy’s best shot at stardom came that winter, when she was cast in Schary’s pet project, The Next Voice You Hear, which was based on a magazine story that imagined how people would react if the voice of God suddenly came over the radio. The script focused on an American Everyman named Joe Smith, who works in a Los Angeles aircraft factory, his wife, Mary, who is about to have a baby, and their eleven-year-old son, Johnny. Schary saw the picture as an experiment in a new way of moviemaking, a low-budget, high-concept antidote to the bloated, schmaltzy period pieces that Mayer favored.
Both Schary and the director, William Wellman, a veteran realist, felt strongly that the principal roles should be played by unfamiliar faces, not well-known stars who they thought would be less believable as such utterly average types. James Whitmore, whose second movie had been directed by Wellman the previous year and won him a nomination as best supporting actor, was quickly cast as Joe Smith. Miriam Schary suggested Nancy for Mary. “This idea took a bit of getting used to,” Dore Schary wrote in Case History of a Movie. “This would be an exacting star role and Nancy had had only three small parts in pictures, and all of them had been on the ‘society’ side rather than a middle-class housewife and mother. But in her favor was the fact that her looks and manner and inner self were
‘nice’ rather than cover-girl glamorous.”98
Schary asked her to read for the part with Whitmore: “I remember . . .
her waiting next to Jim on one of the straight chairs in the anteroom, her fingers clasped tight in her lap to conceal the turbulent emotions which her enormous brown eyes betrayed.” He feared he might have to tell her
“she wouldn’t do.” But he and Wellman were so impressed by “the way 2 4 6
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House these two superb young people began making the story live and breathe”
that they gave her the part without further ado.99 On the first day of shooting Nancy found a note in her trailer from Schary: “If ‘Mary’ turns out to be as real and as sincere and as sweet as you are, then everybody is going to be happy and we’re going to have the kind of picture we’re hoping for.
All the best to you, darling.”100
The Next Voice You Hear was shot in fourteen days in late February and early March, and came in under budget at $460,000, less than half the standard cost of MGM films at the time.101 It was a demanding regime, but Nancy proved herself up to the challenge. “It was the first starring role for both of us, and we worked intensely because [we] were very serious about our careers,” James Whitmore recalled. “Nancy was definitely not a frivolous person. When it came to her career, she was deadly earnest. She was delightful to work with, very affable, and had a good, hearty laugh.
She’d throw her head back and just let loose from somewhere in the center of her being. But we didn’t socialize off the set, and there was never any personal conversation about her boyfriends or anything like that. I do recall, though, that she held very strong political opinions which weren’t exactly mine.”102
Nancy’s role required great subtlety: although Joe Smith comes across as capable and good-natured, it is Mary who quietly holds the family together and gently directs her husband when he stumbles. On Wellman’s instructions, Nancy wore no makeup, combed her own hair, and was fitted with a wire-framed pregnancy pad under her $12.95 maternity smocks. “He wanted everything to be as natural as possible. I did what he wanted, and he helped me make the most of my part. . . . I’d heard he was strictly a man’s director and hated directing women. But he was