Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [90]
‘Dick, don’t worry. Everything will be all right. Just go somewhere now, and I’ll take care of it.’” After calming her mother down, Nancy had a talk with her stepfather, although she never told Richard what was said. “There were a lot of things between Loyal and Nancy that I never knew about.”127
That summer was a time of romantic turmoil for Nancy as well. In her senior year at Smith she had “started going quite seriously” with James Platt White Jr., an Amherst student from a well-to-do Massachusetts family.
They decided to get engaged on a visit she made to California in May 1944, when he was stationed on a Navy aircraft carrier off San Diego.128
This was Nancy’s first trip on her own to California, and she spent much of her time in the company of her mother’s friends. She stayed with Lillian Gish, who had returned to Hollywood in late 1941 and, perhaps hoping to put her America First stigma behind her, accepted the part of a Norwegian resistance fighter’s wife in Commandos Strike at Dawn, her first movie in ten years. Nancy told me that Gish took her to a party at the home of Lady Mendl, the decorator also known as Elsie de Wolfe.129 Nearly thirty years earlier Edith Luckett had been introduced to Alla Nazimova at the New York townhouse of de Wolfe and her then companion, Bessie Marbury, whom she had left in 1926 to marry British diplomat Sir Charles Mendl.
Nancy saw her godmother for the last time on this trip. At sixty-five, Nazimova was in failing health, living in one of the bungalows on her old Sunset Boulevard estate, which she had been forced to turn into a hotel in 1927, when her silent film career came to an abrupt end. (The Garden of Alla had become the Garden of Allah.)130 “It was so small, nicely furnished but. . . . How terrible it must be for her after all that fame and glamour,”
Nancy told Nazimova’s biographer years later. One night Nancy went to the theater with Glesca Marshall and Emily Woodruff, a Coca-Cola heiress who would become Glesca’s lover after Nazimova’s death from a blood clot the following year. Another night, Nancy took her fiancé to meet Nazimova, who was quite impressed. “I think I met one of our great future statesmen,” she recorded in her diary, “perhaps even a president.”131
Nancy at Smith: 1939–1944
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On June 24, Loyal and Edith gave a party at home to announce Nancy’s engagement to James Platt White Jr. His parents presented Nancy with a diamond engagement ring from Tiffany’s on their son’s behalf, and the Chicago and Boston papers ran the announcement on their society pages.132 Later that summer, however, Nancy broke off the engagement. As she writes in her memoir, “It was a heady, exhilarating time, and I was swept up in the glamour of the war, wartime engagements, and waiting for the boys who were away. I realized I had made a mistake. It would have been unfair to him and to me. It wasn’t easy to break off the engagement, but it was the best thing for us both. We were not meant to be married, but we remain friends to this day.”133
“Jim White was the nicest guy,” Richard Davis said, “handsome, upright, straightforward, courteous. But Edith told me—‘gay’ wasn’t used then—‘He’s just a homo, Dick.’ I could never figure out how a girl like Nancy could have missed that.”134
White never talked about Nancy or their engagement. When she was First Lady, he discreetly contacted her through her friend Jerry Zipkin to let her know that he was seriously ill. Zipkin told a friend, “I heard from the man Nancy was engaged to after college. He was gay.”135
As fall approached, Nancy was getting bored and frustrated working at a department store and living at home in Chicago. She later wrote, “Soon a call came from ZaSu Pitts. I suspect that Mother had a hand in it. ZaSu told