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into trouble as he achieved greater and greater success, could always count on Edith and Loyal when he needed a place to dry out, far from the prying eyes of Hollywood. Spence, as his friends called him, had been born on the right side of the tracks in Milwaukee in 1900 to a Protestant mother from a colonial New England family and an Irish Catholic father who managed a trucking company, and he was bright but bad from the start. He went to four high schools—parochial, public, Jesuit, and military—before moving on to Ripon College and the American Academy of Dramatic Art in New York. His binge drinking began after he and his wife, Louise, discovered their infant son, John, was deaf. At MGM

he developed a reputation for disappearing on a week-long binge before the start of production on a film, but studio head Louis B. Mayer tolerated his behavior because he was so uniquely talented.

If Tracy was the glamorous but troubled kid brother in the Davises’

life, Walter Huston was the grand seigneur. When Dodsworth played in Chicago in 1935, he and his third wife, Nan, who co-starred in the play, stayed with the Davises.27 As Nancy recalled, Loyal “frequently stood in the wings watching the last act while waiting to drive them home. He had almost memorized Uncle Walter’s climactic speech.”28 Walter had taken a liking to Loyal, and had even made him a member of his Crovenay Society, a tongue-in-cheek club dedicated to deflating “stuffed shirts of every kidney.” Its members ranged from George M. Cohan and William Wyler, who directed Huston in the film version of Dodsworth, to the baseball player Ty Cobb and the boxing champion Max Baer.29 Loyal became Huston’s doctor and remained so until his death in 1950. “They were best friends,” Richard Davis told me.30 Walter’s son, the director John Huston, wrote in his memoir, An Open Book, “[My father] was not unduly impressed by great names. The few people he thoroughly admired included Franklin D. Roosevelt, Eugene O’Neill, Bernard Baruch, [Broadway director] Jed Harris, Loyal Davis. He responded to quality.”31

Four years older than Edith and twelve years older than Loyal, Walter Huston was a carpenter’s son from Toronto who first appeared on the stage at eighteen, in 1902. After marrying his first wife, Rhea Gore, in 1905, he decided to settle down in her home state of Missouri and took a series of engineering jobs at utilities plants. In 1906 their son, John, was born.

Three years later the marriage fell apart, and the restless Walter hit the vaudeville circuit as half of a song-and-dance team with the woman who would become his second wife, Bayonne Whipple. He made his Broadway East Lake Shore Drive: 1933–1939

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debut in 1924, and that year won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for his performance in Desire Under the Elms. His movie career was launched in 1929, when he played a bad guy in The Virginian, a Western starring Gary Cooper in his first talking role. A year later he starred in the title role of D. W. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt was one of Huston’s biggest fans, and he had attended the February 1935 opening of Dodsworth in Washington, D.C. In fact, shortly before Walter and Nan arrived to stay with the Davises, they had been received at the White House, where FDR charmed them by serving the drinks himself.32 Presumably they repeated the story to Loyal, who hated Roosevelt; if so, Loyal’s reaction is unrecorded.

In the summer of 1937, the Davises took Nancy and Richard to visit the Hustons at their rustic but lavish hideaway in the San Bernardino Mountains near Lake Arrowhead, California.33 When they had bought the four acres of land with its spectacular views and giant pines a few years earlier, Walter intended to build a log cabin with his own hands, but Nan talked him into a more substantial structure, as well as a tennis court, a gymnasium, and a swimming pool. He made eleven films in two years to pay for it, but he refused to have a telephone. Their only neighbors were the Hollywood agent Myron Selznick and the British actor