Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [55]
Another day, when Nan Huston took Edith off to Los Angeles on a shopping excursion, Uncle Walter suggested making a “radio broadcast”
of a scene from Othello. He played the title role, as he had on Broadway the year before, Loyal played Iago, and Nancy was Desdemona. When the women returned that evening, Huston played the record for them. “They were easy on me,” Nancy said, “but teased Father unmercifully. Mother told him, ‘You just got hammier and hammier.’ He took it with good nature. He was used to it.”86
Nancy later said that she had always wanted to be actress, “like my mother,”87 but surely being exposed to the top of the profession at such an early age and in such a special way made it seem almost predestined. “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t interested in the theater, and in school my main interest was drama,” she wrote in My Turn. “I was only an average student . . . [but] I acted in all the school plays. In my senior year, I played the lead in First Lady, by George S. Kaufman. I don’t recall much about the story, but I do remember that I wore a black dress with a white collar, and that when my classmates forgot their lines, I was able to jump in and start talking until we got back on track. Everyone was terribly impressed—including me.”88
In First Lady, a comedy by Katharine Dayton and George S. Kaufman, Nancy played the wife of one of two candidates running for the presidency. With lots of behind-the-scenes help from her, her man wins. Vita Scholae, the school yearbook, described a rehearsal: “In one corner of the gym two or three girls are desperately trying to learn their lines, but in the other corner, Nancy, with by far the longest role, is perched gaily on top East Lake Shore Drive: 1933–1939
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of the radiator, apparently telling a grand story to judge by the vigorous gestures and the hilarity of her appreciative classmates. The group has broken up, Miss Magowan having pleaded at length with the uproarious cast.
For the moment Nancy is not ‘on.’ She sits on the gym floor, her books spread around her, doing her homework with the amazing concentration that is hers. Nothing seems to bother her, neither the chatter of her friends, the frantic coaching of Miss Magowan, nor even Jimmy Stewart’s handsome face grinning up at her from her notebook cover.”89
Homer Hargrave Jr., who was a freshman at Boys Latin that year, told me that he had a crush on Nancy. “I remember when I first fell in love with Nancy,” he said. “We had a dance club that was just for freshmen in high school. It was called Miss Pratt’s Dancing Class, and they had it in the gym at Girls Latin. Nancy just sort of crashed the dance. I still remember the young man she was with, who I think died during the war.
But anyway, she sang ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy.’ It was really great.”90
Nancy may have molded herself to Loyal’s demanding specifications, but there was obviously a lot of Edith in her. An anecdote told by Hargrave shows how bossy she could be. “One Saturday,” he said, “I went to the movie house, and they had changed the prices and I didn’t have enough money. The Davises lived only a block and a half from that theater, so I went to see Mrs. Davis to borrow a dollar. She wasn’t home, but Nancy was. And Nancy wanted to know first who my date was. When I told her it was Joanie Johnson, she approved and gave me a dollar. But that night at dinner, my father asked, ‘What did you do all day?’ And I told this story.
My father got furious. I had to get up from the dinner table. And it was a cold winter night, and we lived about six or eight blocks from the Davises.
I had to walk over there and give that dollar back. With the admonition,
‘Don’t you