Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [160]
What was holding him back? According to Kitty Kelley, he was secretly seeing an actress named Christine Larson at the time.177 He was also mired in his own career crisis and worried about his financial situation. On January 15, 1952, Universal cut his five-picture deal back to three after he had rejected two scripts that he considered beneath him.178 Two weeks later he completed his forty-second and last movie for Warners. For a change it was a picture he wanted to make— The Winning Team, in which he played Grover Cleveland Alexander, the troubled baseball great—but that was the end of his guaranteed annual income.
Both Ronnie and Nancy were now on their own, at a time when the studio system was collapsing all around them. The major film companies, 2 5 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House battered on one side by the 1948 Supreme Court ruling forcing them to sell their lucrative theater chains and on the other by the ever-rising popularity of television, were in a state of upheaval. Weekly movie attendance had plummeted from a postwar high of 100 million to half that by the early 1950s, and the studios were dropping contracts, slashing budgets, and cutting back production to stem their losses. The King of Hollywood, Louis B. Mayer, who more than anyone had created and upheld the old order, had finally been toppled by Dore Schary in June 1951.
According to Nancy, sometime in January 1952 she told Ronnie that she was thinking of calling her agent to “see about getting a play in New York.”
“I decided to give things a push” is how she later put it. “As I recall, he didn’t say anything, but he looked surprised. Not long afterward, while we were having dinner in our usual booth at Chasen’s, he said, ‘I think we ought to get married.’”
She quietly answered, “I think so too.”179
A few nights later, during an MPIC meeting, Ronnie asked Bill Holden to be his best man. “It’s about time,” Holden blurted out.180
On February 20, MGM issued a face-saving press release stating that Nancy had asked to be let out of her contract.181 That same evening Ronnie called Loyal from Nancy’s apartment and asked for her hand in marriage. “Davis-Reagan Nuptials Set,” Louella Parsons announced the next day, saying the wedding was scheduled for early March. “Ronnie stands for all that’s good in the industry,” added Louella about her favorite from Dixon. She also reminded her readers, “It was at my home that Jane and Ronnie held their wedding reception, so I have always felt very close to him through the years.” (In her scrapbook, Nancy blacked out references to Ronnie’s first marriage in the deluge of press items that followed Louella’s scoop.)182
On February 27, MGM announced that the wedding would take place the following Tuesday at “some small church in Southern California.” The day after that, Nancy and Ronnie were photographed at Santa Monica City Hall getting their marriage license: Ronnie looked a little pale in a turtleneck and trench coat; Nancy radiant in a white-collared black dress, just like the one she wore on their first date.183
There was one sad note leading up to the wedding: Nancy’s grandmother, Nannee Robbins, whom she hadn’t seen in years, heard about the upcoming marriage and decided to make the trip from New Jersey to meet her only grandchild’s betrothed. “The three of us were having din-Ronnie and Nancy in Hollywood: 1949–1952
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ner at Chasen’s,” Nancy later wrote, “when she suffered a stroke. We rushed her to the hospital, and although she recovered, she died not too long afterward.”184
Otherwise, the planets seemed to be aligned in their favor. According to Ed Helin, the couple consulted with Carroll Righter, and he gave their union his blessing.185 For those who believe in such things, the combination of an Aquarius II (Ronnie) and a Cancer II (Nancy) is said to be extremely potent. As Gary Goldschneider and Joost Elffers write in The Secret