Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [84]
“We had to bring the body home for the funeral right before Christmas, which was really rough on Frank’s parents. Nancy was almost constant in Nancy at Smith: 1939–1944
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her attendance on Mrs. Birney during that time, and I would say that she as much as anyone made life halfway livable for the Birneys then.”83
“It was the first time that anybody I was close to had died,” Nancy later wrote, “and it was a tremendous shock. My roommate forced me to go out and take long, brisk walks. Frank and I skirted around the subject of marriage, and even though I doubt it would have worked out, he was a dear friend and I felt a great loss. His mother gave me his cigarette case as a me-mento—a silver case I had given him the previous Christmas with his name engraved on it. He had been carrying that case when he was killed, and I still have it.”84
Bruce McFarland, who continued to see Nancy in Chicago when she was home from Smith and he from Princeton, told me she had never mentioned that she was dating a classmate of his. “Apparently it was a terrible blow to her,” McFarland said. “But I was unaware of that at the time. Totally unaware. I didn’t even know they knew each other. She’s very close-mouthed about things like that. And we weren’t romantic at all. We just happened to see each other at parties and went out occasionally together.”85
“I remember how depressed Nancy was,” Richard Davis said. “But she never mentioned suicide. No one could be sure. You know, all those kids drank a lot. And he just ran across the railroad tracks one night.”86
America’s entry into World War II at the end of 1941 brought major changes to the Smith campus. Maid service was suspended, and there were regular air raid drills. Some nine hundred Smith students joined the Waves, the women’s volunteer branch of the Naval Reserve. Gas shortages also meant less driving back and forth to Amherst, seven miles away.87 Nonetheless, a group of Smith and Amherst students, including Nancy, formed an ad hoc theater group they called the Bandar-log, after the wild and lawless
“monkey people” in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. In the spring of 1942 they put on a musical comedy titled Ladies on the Loose, which sent up college life. Nancy did a sexy song-and-dance routine wearing a banana headdress à la Carmen Miranda.88
That year she invited a new beau to spend Easter vacation with her family at the Arizona Biltmore. Brent Starck was from Chicago; his family owned P. A. Starck & Company, a manufacturer of pianos and player pianos. “Brent was a red-blooded American boy,” Richard Davis recalled.
“He was in college someplace in Illinois. I don’t think he went to school in 1 3 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House the East. But the Starck family was very prominent, very wealthy. We went out to Phoenix on the Super Chief together.”89
That summer Nancy did summer stock with the Coach House Players in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin.90 A Chicago society columnist reported that the “company was domiciled in the fine old coach house of Danforth Lodge, Mrs. Patrick Valentine’s beautiful home on Lac La Belle.”91 Mrs.
Valentine was the friend of Edith’s who had given a dinner party for Nancy when she came out. This was Nancy’s third summer in summer stock, and as she would later write, “Only once in those summers did I actually appear on stage, in a play with Diana Barrymore. I played the maid who announced, ‘Madam, dinner is served.’ ”92
Nonetheless, according to Richard Davis, she was so determined to have a theatrical career that