Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [48]
“Every night after dinner we’d sit in a circle and Uncle Walter would stand in front of the fireplace and read to us.”35
And then there was Colleen Moore, the Auntie Mame of the Davises’ circle.
Edith had kept up a correspondence with the star since they met in 1922, but they didn’t become intimates until fifteen years later, when Moore married Chicago stockbroker Homer Hargrave Sr. and moved to the Gold Coast. Although she was only thirty-five at the time, Moore was genuine Old Hollywood royalty—rich, glamorous, fascinating. She had retired from the movies three years earlier; her last great film, The Power and the Glory, was Spencer Tracy’s breakthrough picture, and she always said it was her favorite of the hundred films she made between 1917 and 1934.36
Moore was born Kathleen Morrison in 1902 in Port Huron, Michigan, but she considered herself a Southerner because she grew up in Atlanta and Tampa. At fifteen she arrived in Hollywood with her grandmother as 8 0
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House chaperone and signed a contract with D. W. Griffith that had been arranged by her uncle, Walter Howey, the Chicago Examiner editor who was the model for the tyrannical newspaperman in The Front Page.37 Her first starring role was in Little Orphan Annie, and Flaming Youth in 1923
made her one of the two great symbols of the Roaring Twenties, the other being the less-refined Clara Bow. Moore had been ordered to cut her dark hair into a boyish bob for that picture; F. Scott Fitzgerald declared it “the most fateful haircut since Samson’s.” She was America’s biggest box office draw in 1927 and 1928, earning $12,500 per week at First National Studio and living in a $1 million Spanish-style mansion in Bel Air with her first husband, John Emmett McCormick, an alcoholic producer.38
Those who knew her best said she was a “kick,” a “dynamo,” even a bit mad on the surface, given the obsessive extravagance of the project she called the Doll House or the Fairy Castle. Moore began building it in 1928, and by the time it was unveiled seven years later she had spent a reported $470,000 on it. Built at a scale of one inch to the foot, it was nine feet square and twelve feet high and weighed one ton. It was designed by her father, an engineer, and Horace Jackson, her set designer at First National.
The drawing room floor was inlaid with rose quartz and jade, the dining room was hung with tapestries done in petit point, Peter Pan murals lined the Bedroom of the Fairy Princess, and the white bear rug in Prince Charming’s Bedroom “was made by a taxidermist from the skin of a single ermine,”
to quote Moore’s description. The Doll House held two thousand small objects, including miniature antiquities from Egypt, Greece, and Rome, and a $50,000 chandelier made of diamonds, emeralds, and pearls from Moore’s own earrings and necklaces. It had running water, electric lighting, a radio, and a working organ in the chapel. Moore commissioned well-known writers such as Thornton Wilder, Willa Cather, Sinclair Lewis, and Anita Loos to create tiny books in their own handwriting for the library.39
Such fetishistic excess may have seemed objectionable at the height of the Depression, but Moore later defended her creation as “a beautiful toy, an extravagance, a folly, even, but one which had brought me more happiness than I’d ever known before.”40 It was also a distraction from her breakup with McCormick, which was followed by an unsuccessful second marriage to a New York stockbroker. On the suggestion of a public relations man for the May Company department store in Los Angeles, she took the Doll House on a nationwide tour of department stores to raise money for handicapped children.
East Lake Shore Drive: 1933–1939
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In 1936, when Moore showed the Doll House at the Fair Store in Chicago (where Jack Reagan had been employed