• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Richard said. “It was interesting, because I didn’t know why she was absolutely gray in 1940. Her hair was white.”16

As Edith began to show her age, Nancy was blossoming. She was home for Easter vacation in April 1940, when Alla Nazimova spent a night with the Davises on her way to Los Angeles, where she was making her first movie in fifteen years, Escape, directed by Mervyn LeRoy at MGM. On the train the next day the actress wrote a letter to her girlfriend, Glesca Marshall, in which she rhapsodized about her “extraordinarily beautiful”

goddaughter. Nancy’s face, she wrote, “which has every right to be bold and assertive has instead a soft dreamy quality. And add to this a figure of

‘oomph!’ You’d be crazy about the child.”17

Nancy had grown accustomed to having her mother’s show business pals stay for a night or two, but for Richard it was a new experience: “All my football friends and I called our home Ma Davis’s Boardinghouse for Actors. It really was terribly stimulating.”18 Some of these visitors observed that Edith really ran the show on East Lake Shore Drive. As Katy Weld, the wife of Walter Huston’s colleague John Weld, the writer, saw it, “Edie Davis was the power behind her husband, behind the whole thing. She ran their lives. Loyal Davis was a famous surgeon, very high up in his profession, but she pushed him up in society also. Edie was always behind everything.” John Weld added, “Edie was very ambitious about Nancy, about getting her in the movies. And Nancy was ambitious, like her mother.”19

In early 1940, another major star entered the Davises’ life. Lillian Gish,

“the First Lady of the Silent Screen,” was in Chicago with the touring company of Life with Father, which opened on February 19 and ran for a record-breaking sixty-six weeks. Gish had been a friend of Colleen Moore’s since they were both under contract to D. W. Griffith. After the advent of the talkies, Gish had moved to New York, where she became an acclaimed theatrical star and met the love of her life, George Jean Nathan, the brilliant Nancy at Smith: 1939–1944

1 2 5

drama critic and ultra-sophisticated dandy who co-edited both The Smart Set and The American Mercury with H. L. Mencken.20 Through Nathan, Gish took a seat among the fast livers and sharp wits of the Algonquin Round Table, but she always retained her pure, almost virginal, image. She never smoked or drank. She never married either, seeming to prefer the company of her mother and her actress sister, Dorothy, to that of a husband. Memories of her father, an alcoholic who had deserted the family when the girls were youngsters and died in an insane asylum in 1912, doubtless colored her views on both alcohol and men.21

“Marriage is a business,” Gish declared in a 1919 interview, when she was twenty-six. “A woman cannot combine a career and marriage. . . . I should not wish to unite the two.” Twenty years later she reaffirmed her opinion in an article titled “Why I Never Married”: “I believe that marriage is a career in itself. I have preferred a stage career to a marriage career.”22 She was forty-seven when she arrived in Chicago, and had ended her relationship with Nathan four years earlier, allegedly because she discovered that he was Jewish by birth, although his mother was a convent-educated convert to Catholicism and he himself had markedly right-wing views, not unlike her own.23

A lifelong Republican and early anti-Communist, Gish went to her grave denying that D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation— in which she starred as a Northern senator’s daughter who turns sympathetic to the Southern cause after she is almost raped by her father’s mulatto protégé—was the slightest bit racist, despite ongoing protests that it was a glorification of the Ku Klux Klan. She was thrilled when Warren Harding invited her and Dorothy to lunch at the White House after the Washington premiere of Griffith’s Orphans of the Storm in 1921,24 and she gushed with admiration about meeting Benito Mussolini while filming Romola in