Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [154]
On July 6, 1950, wearing a black dress, a white hat, and a big corsage, Nancy was photographed celebrating her twenty-ninth birthday with Benny Thau and the Mayers at the Cocoanut Grove. Although she looked pleased to be seen with the head of the studio—one wonders if Mayer gave her the advice he always gave his daughters, “Be smart, but don’t show it”—all was not well between her and Thau. Despite his coldhearted reputation, the jaded old roué had fallen in love with his proper young protégée and was pressing her to marry him. This became increasingly problematic, especially after she started going out with other men, who were much closer to her in age. When I asked if her dates with Reagan, Walker, and Stack made Thau jealous, she snapped, “I don’t know. I was not his. . . . He would have liked to have married me. I did not want to marry him. . . . He was a strange little man, really. He gambled a lot. I think he gambled all his money away. I finally got through to him that the answer was no. And that was it.”114
Before his death in 1983, Thau was asked if he had wanted to marry Nancy. “I was friendly with her folks, and me being Jewish, I don’t know,”
he answered. “I thought about it, but that’s all I did.”115
According to Richard Davis, it was Loyal who insisted that Nancy bring the Thau situation to a head. “Dr. Loyal laid down the law,” Davis told me. “Nancy talked to Dr. Loyal very, very frequently, and he was very negative in terms of this man. It was for Nancy’s own good.”116
Nancy saw a lot of her family that summer. In early July, she flew to San Francisco, where her parents were attending a medical convention. Later that month Richard Davis visited Nancy in her new two-bedroom duplex on Hilgard Avenue in Westwood. The highlight of that trip for him, he Ronnie and Nancy in Hollywood: 1949–1952
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said, was accompanying her to a dinner party at Dinah Shore’s house, where he met Groucho Marx and golf champion Ben Hogan.117 In August, Nancy traveled to Chicago for Richard’s wedding to Shirley Hull, a socialite from suburban Wheaton. According to clippings in her scrapbook, she had been “quite ill” before leaving Los Angeles, and “on reaching Chicago, collapsed of nervous exhaustion and had to be hospitalized.” She missed a private screening of The Next Voice You Hear that Edith had organized, but after being treated for a “vitamin deficiency,” she was released in time for the August 25 wedding. The studio said Nancy “wore herself to a frazzle plugging her film in New York recently,” but surely breaking with Benny Thau while juggling the fragile Robert Walker, the irrepressible Norman Krasna, and the elusive Ronald Reagan added to the strain.118
Ronnie and Nancy had seen each other infrequently since that first rush of dates in late 1949, but the relationship took off again in the fall of 1950. In a photograph taken at the Ice Capades in September, Nancy looks wan and thin, and Reagan has his arm reassuringly around her shoulder: maybe he needed to feel she was weak as well as strong, in need of support as well as capable of giving it.119 In an interview a few days later, Louella Parsons asked Nancy, “Any one man in your life?” The gossip queen expected her to name Walker, but Nancy was noncommittal. “Not yet,” she answered.
“I won’t be trite and say I’m married to my career, but that’s pretty much the truth.”120
On October 2, Nancy started shooting Night into Morning with John Hodiak and Ray Milland—she played a “sturdy war widow” whose big scene involves talking Milland out of committing suicide—and later that month Reagan left for Tucson, where The Last Outpost was being filmed.
He wrote her while he was on location—“Just a quick line. . . . I’m balancing this on my knee while I wait to ride gallantly over another hill”—
the first of hundreds of letters, postcards, and telegrams he would lavish on her over the years.121 After he returned, there were more nights out—a cocktail party, a Friars Club roast, supper at the Sportsmen’s Lodge.122
Yet, she continued to entertain