Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [56]
Nancy Davis graduated from Girls Latin in June 1939, with a B average.
The text under her photograph in the yearbook read: “Nancy’s social perfection is a constant source of amazement. She is invariably becomingly and suitably dressed. She can talk, and even better listen intelligently, to anyone from her little kindergarten partner of the Halloween party, to the grandmother of one of her friends. Even in the seventh grade, when we first began to mingle with the male of the species, Nancy was completely poised. While the rest of us huddled self-consciously on one side of the room, casting surreptitious glances at the men, aged thirteen, opposite us, 9 2
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Nancy actually crossed the yawning emptiness separating the two groups and serenely began a conversation—with a boy.”92
That September she entered Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts—just days after Hitler invaded Poland, beginning World War II in Europe. On December 28, 1939, while home for Christmas vacation, she made her debut at the Casino Club, the exclusive dining club in which the Davises had recently been accepted as members. Despite the Depression, this was the era of famous debutantes—Barbara Hutton, Doris Duke, Brenda Frazier—when high-society families spent tens of thousands on lavish coming-out parties for their eighteen-year-old daughters.
In Chicago there were balls every night during the holiday season, and all kinds of lunches, cocktail parties, and dinners in honor of that season’s debs. Edith had arranged for one of the city’s grande dames, Mrs. Patrick A. Valentine, an Armour heiress, to give a dinner for Nancy at her Gold Coast mansion. The biggest bash of the week, at the Blackstone Hotel with the Glenn Miller Orchestra, was for Priscilla Blackett, the daughter of an advertising tycoon. The night before Nancy’s debut, Jean Wescott’s parents gave their daughter a ball at the Casino.93
Nancy’s late-afternoon tea dance was a simpler affair, though the attendance of thirty Princeton boys assured its social success. (One of those young men, Frank Birney Jr., the son of a Chicago banker, would soon become Nancy’s first college beau.) To mark the occasion of their daughter’s introduction to society, Edith and Loyal gave Nancy a single strand of pearls, which she wore with her silver-trimmed white gown.94 The trunk baby had become a debutante, the near orphan a near princess.
C H A P T E R F I V E
WARNER BROS.
1937–1941
In those days at the studios, which governed everything we did, we generally saw the people who were at the same studio. Joe Mankiewicz, the screenwriter, said it was like living in a duchy, in a moated castle. From 1938 to 1941, I was in the Warner Bros. duchy, because my first husband, Wayne Morris, was an actor at Warners. He and Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman acted in the same movies, so we saw them all the time. They were not married when I first met them. Jane, as a matter of fact, was married to a man called Myron Futterman, and it used to send me into fits of laughter. He was a perfectly nice man. I don’t know why, the name tickled me. What were Jane and Ronnie like then? They were adorable. But what did I know? I was eighteen years old. They were young and beautiful. But everybody was beautiful.
Leonora Hornblow to author,
February 10, 2000
LOS ANGELES IN 1937—THE YEAR RONALD REAGAN ARRIVED—WAS A PLACE
apart, a paradise some would say, far away from the rest of the world and its problems. Its leading industry—moviemaking—employed nearly forty thousand people in the manufacture of fantasies, illusions, and myths for a nation still struggling with the grim reality of the ongoing Depression.
The hard times had only increased the public’s appetite for Busby Berkeley musicals, high-society comedies starring Carole Lombard and Myrna Loy, and Saturday-matinee Westerns with Gene Autry and William Boyd as Hopalong Cassidy. The Spanish Civil War, with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy backing one side and the Soviet Union