Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [153]
“Nancy Davis is considered a new ‘perfect wife’ type on the strength of her portrayal of James Whitmore’s spouse in The Next Voice You Hear,” the New York Herald Tribune’s Hollywood correspondent reported on April 5.
“MGM feels that she can be groomed to follow Myrna Loy, who first earned the title as Nora Charles in the Thin Man series. Studio head Dore Schary has instructed MGM producers to be on the lookout for likely material for the young actress.”104
Ronnie and Nancy in Hollywood: 1949–1952
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Schary himself immediately cast her as a small-town schoolteacher opposite Fredric March in It’s a Big Country, which he had co-written and was personally overseeing. He also pushed her for the role of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s wife in The Magnificent Yankee, a part that would have required her to age from sixty to ninety during the course of the film.
Ardie Deutsch was the producer, and he gladly tested Nancy in mid-April.
She also had the support of Louis Calhern—Edith’s old friend and a patient of Loyal’s—who was set for the title role. But that was before John Sturges was assigned to direct, and he apparently decided Nancy wasn’t up to the demands of the role.105
Later in April, Walter Huston suddenly fell ill on the night of his sixty-sixth birthday. “It was an aneurysm of the abdominal aorta,” Richard Davis recalled. “He was in god-awful pain and kept calling Dad. Of course, there wasn’t anything you could do about it.”106 Loyal, after sending a Los Angeles colleague to see Huston, flew in the next morning, but he arrived a few hours too late to bid his friend farewell. Nancy remembers going with him to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Walter had been staying, and comforting Nan Huston. More than six hundred people, including the Davises, attended the memorial service at the Academy Award Theater. Spencer Tracy gave the eulogy. “Professionally, he’s easy to rate,”
Tracy said. “He was the best.”107
In May, Nancy’s first movie, Shadow on the Wall, was released after nearly a year’s delay, with some very good notices for her. A few days later, Mayer and his new wife, Lorena, hosted the first screening of The Next Voice You Hear at their Benedict Canyon home. Nancy was so anxious she broke her string of pearls and spilled coffee all over Bill Wellman’s wife.108
Happily, the early reviews in the trades were glowing. “The screen has never had a better example of husband-wife affection and understanding than that which Wellman builds between James Whitmore and Nancy Davis,” said the Hollywood Reporter. “And they play it to boff results.”109
Variety added, “Nancy Davis gives her role high realism and full polish.”110
The studio flew Nancy to New York for ten days of interviews and personal appearances before the June 29 opening at Radio City Music Hall. She was thrilled to see her name above the title on the marquee of Manhattan’s most prestigious movie house. The New York Times’s Bosley Crowther found Nancy “delightful,” and Time praised her for “a fine, attractive piece of well-balanced acting.”111 The critics were less enthusiastic about the film itself—
“a naïve theological hodgepodge,” sniffed Time—and it did not do as well 2 4 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House as Schary had hoped. Still, because he pushed it so hard, The Next Voice You Hear received tremendous coverage, and Nancy was highlighted in national publications ranging from Look and Seventeen to The American Magazine, which titled its profile of her “Silver-spooned starlet.”112
Nancy frequently mentioned how much she missed major league baseball in Los Angeles, sometimes adding that she rooted for the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox because she had crushes on Joe DiMag-gio and Ted Williams. “Although she’s a bachelor girl,” one interviewer said, “Nancy states emphatically that she doesn’t wish to remain so. . . .
Her role of the wife and mother in The Next Voice You Hear . . . made family life so appealing that she’s eager