Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [82]
Auden to millions across the country. It also created a politically oriented series called the Living Newspaper, which drew criticism from conservatives and which led to Davis’s being called before HUAC in late 1938. The following year Congress cut off the Federal Theater’s budget.63
At her first class with the drama students, the redheaded, tweed-caped Davis said, “I wish to say that this is a much warmer group than the last time I stood in front of a table like this. That was the [House] Investigating Committee for Un-American Activities.” Davis cast Nancy in her first production at Smith, Susan and God, 64 and later said of her, “She was a very good student, interested in the backstage as well as on stage, and she always had a feeling for her audience.”65
By that time Nancy was certain that she wanted to act, having spent the two previous summers as an unpaid apprentice at “rickety old summer-1 3 4
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House stock theaters on the eastern seaboard.”66 Between her sophomore and junior years she was at the Bass Rocks Theater near Gloucester, Massachusetts, which was run by Martin Manulis, a young producer whose father-in-law, Ralph Austin Bard, a prominent Chicago entrepreneur, was an acquaintance of Loyal Davis’s. “I did not know Nancy before she came to Bass Rocks,” Manulis said, “but she was very knowable and likable and vivacious. She was quite serious about being an actress, even then. She wanted to do something in the theater. I don’t think she was talking movies in those days.”67
Bass Rocks, Manulis explained, “was real old-fashioned summer stock.
Plays ran only one week, and they rehearsed a week. We didn’t have much money, so we tried to have unusual leading players who didn’t demand high salaries. We did former Broadway hits, and some kids were quite lucky and got bit parts in a play.”68 In her memoir Nancy Reagan writes,
“As an apprentice, I did everything—painted scenery, upholstered furniture, ran errands, tacked up announcements in the town, cleaned dressing rooms, and so forth. I learned a lot about the actors from the way in which they left their dressing rooms. Some couldn’t have cared less about the condition of their rooms and the fact that others would occupy them after they left. Others were clean, calm, and neat people, whose performances were as orderly as their dressing rooms.”69 If Nancy acted that summer, Manulis didn’t remember it. But she did develop a “big crush,”
as she put it, on a thirty-three-year-old actor and dancer named Buddy Ebsen, who had just starred in a movie called Parachute Battalion and would eventually become a household name playing the cornpone grandfather on The Beverly Hillbillies.70
Apparently that was also the summer when Nancy saw Ken Robbins for the last time. A pair of snapshots in a Robbins family scrapbook, dated 1941 and labeled Massachusetts, show father and daughter standing together in front of what appears to be a beach house, Ken looking portly in a business suit, Nancy stylish in a light-colored shirtwaist dress.
He was forty-seven and a partner in a New Jersey Chrysler-Plymouth dealership, although within three years he would lose his share of the business and never hold a steady job again.71 When I asked Nancy Reagan about this visit, she insisted that she never saw her father during her college years, and that the photos must have been taken at least two years earlier. One of these pictures was found in Robbins’s wallet when he died in 1972.
Nancy at Smith: 1939–1944
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When Nancy returned to Smith that fall, she had a new roommate, a Jewish girl from New York who was also a drama major. “She was better suited to Nancy than I was,” Jean Wescott told me, adding that Nancy
“got in with some people that I didn’t care for, and we just sort of grew apart for a while.”72
According to Kitty Kelley, “Homosexuality was an unspoken fact of life in the all-female environment