Ronnie and Nancy (43 page)

Un-actressy. Very simple, very good manners, cheerful, bright, charming.”38

“It was a very clubby feeling at Metro,” recalled Armand “Ardie”

Deutsch, who met Nancy soon after she signed with the studio. “I don’t believe I ever took Nancy out on a quote-unquote date. But hosts would call and see if I could pick her up to come to dinner. And we got to be good friends. I developed an ability to make her laugh by just looking at her. One day we were going into a big soundstage—L. B. Mayer was going to lecture us on the evils of Communism or something of that sort—

and Nancy and I happened to meet at the entrance. I said, ‘Nancy, don’t laugh. We could get fired.’ She said, ‘Why would I laugh?’ Well, she sat a few seats from me, and I called, ‘Nancy, Nancy.’ And she looked at me and I said, ‘Don’t laugh.’ Well, she was gone. She had to take out her handkerchief and hide her laughter.”39

Ardie Deutsch had come to Hollywood the same way Nancy had: via the social route. A grandson of Julius Rosenwald, an early partner in Sears, Roebuck, he had gone from private schools in Chicago and New York to 2 3 4

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Dartmouth and the University of Chicago, and from radio to the Navy to Wall Street, never quite sure what he really wanted to do. He met Dore Schary at a dinner party in New York in 1946 and formed a fast friendship that led to a job as Schary’s assistant at RKO and a brief marriage to nightclub singer Benay Venuta. When Schary jumped to MGM two years later, Deutsch jumped with him and became a producer; he was producing his first film,
Ambush
, a Western starring Robert Taylor, when he and Nancy met. Within three years’ time, Ardie would marry a stylish young widow named Harriet Simon, Nancy would marry Ronald Reagan, and the Deutsches would become charter members of what eventually would be known as the Reagan Group.40

One of the hostesses who sometimes asked Deutsch to pick up Nancy was Dore Schary’s wife, Miriam. Although the Scharys saw themselves as bohemians—Miriam was a dedicated artist who showed her paintings in a New York gallery—they were quite snobbish about their guest lists, and not every newly signed actress was asked to dinner at their home in Brentwood.

As Esther Williams wrote in her memoir,
The Million Dollar Mermaid
, “You didn’t just hang out with people like that. You bore their scrutiny. ‘Were you from a good family?’ ‘Did you come from money?’ ‘Was your talent intellectual or even avant-garde?’”41 Miriam Schary, a difficult woman whose face was partially disfigured from a childhood accident and whom some of the town’s more fashionable hostesses considered “a bit batty,” was won over by Nancy’s deferential manner.42

Nancy was also taken up by Kitty LeRoy, the very social wife of the director Mervyn LeRoy—and the complete opposite of Miriam Schary. Petite and beautiful, Kitty was from Chicago, and one of her three previous husbands was the owner of the Pump Room, where she came to know Edith Davis and Colleen Moore. Coincidentally, Mervyn owed his first directing job, back in 1927, to Moore, and they had remained close friends after she retired and he went on to make countless hits at Warners and then at MGM, including
Little Caesar
and
The Wizard of Oz
. He had been married to Harry Warner’s daughter and was thought to be one the richest men in the business. The LeRoys entertained in the grand manner at their house in Bel Air, and the guests almost always included MCA chairman Jules Stein and his wife, Doris, who was Kitty’s best friend. “Kitty saw herself as Nancy’s
duenna
,” said her stepdaughter, Linda LeRoy Janklow. “She tried to protect her and make sure she had a good life in California.”43

Ronnie and Nancy in Hollywood: 1949–1952

2 3 5

When Mary Astor dropped out of LeRoy’s next movie,
East Side, West
Side
, he decided to offer her part to Nancy, and Dore Schary gave his okay.

Two weeks later, at the beginning of September, the studio picked up her first six-month option, and she finally felt secure enough to move into an unfurnished apartment closer to work and have her belongings shipped out from New York.

Richard Davis came to visit Nancy at the end of that summer, just before she moved out of the Santa Monica bungalow. He had graduated from Princeton in June and taken summer courses at Northwestern University Medical School, so Loyal and Edith rewarded him with a ticket on the
Super Chief.
He told me he remembered two things about his stay: Katharine Hepburn lent him her beat-up old Ford so that he could drive to Santa Barbara to see a girlfriend, and one night he and Nancy had dinner at Benny Thau’s house in the Hollywood Hills.

“It was all very much on the up and up,” Davis said. A butler served dinner, and Thau “didn’t paw Nancy or fawn over her. . . . But you could see he was a controller—sort of reminiscent of a Mafioso type.”44 During dinner Thau told a story about growing up in New York. “He said he was very, very poor,” Davis recalled, “and it was Thanksgiving and he had just enough money to buy dinner. The floor of the restaurant was covered in sawdust, and apparently his dinner spilled. There was a good-looking girl sitting next to him, alone, and he was just too embarrassed to pick the dinner up out of the sawdust and eat it. I didn’t have a soft spot in my heart for Benny Thau, but it was a very touching story. Whether it was a ploy to get Nancy’s sympathy, I don’t know.”45

Nancy was seeing a lot of Benny Thau, and rumors about their relationship were so widespread that the studio put out stories suggesting that Clark Gable had been the hidden hand behind her “gilt-edged” screen test.46

Nothing was written about her evenings out with Thau—the studio made sure of that—but according to MGM talent chief Lucille Ryman, “Benny took her to premieres and benefits and parties.”47 “People said he was her beau,” said Leonora Hornblow, noting the general perception at the time. “I don’t think this was a great passion on her part. It couldn’t have been. But as far as her career went, it didn’t hurt.”48 Thau’s receptionist later claimed that Nancy would visit his office every Saturday morning, presumably for a quick tryst.49 Nancy Reagan vehemently denied this—“I did not!”—and her brother backed her up: “I think Nancy would only go to bed with someone 2 3 6

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House she was in love with,” he told me.50 As far as her family could tell, it was a classic case of a powerful older man falling for a younger woman who finds him interesting and supportive but is not attracted to him romantically.

Such relationships can go on for only so long before something gives, and theirs would not be an exception. In the meantime, Nancy continued to enjoy the benefits of Thau’s patronage while trying not to hurt his feelings.

Along with her princess upbringing (which the publicity department played up to the hilt), her famous family friends, and her instant A-list social life, Nancy’s closeness to Thau stirred up a certain amount of envy.

What’s more, her reputation as Thau’s paramour scared off younger, less powerful suitors. Amid all the studio-inspired fluff in her scrapbook there is not a single item about her dating
anyone
until November 1949, eight months after she arrived in Hollywood. And then her date was Ronald Reagan, a power in his own right as president of SAG and chairman of MPIC, the alliance of studio, guild, and union chiefs that had been formed in the wake of the 1947 HUAC hearings to restore Hollywood’s image and cleanse the industry of Communist influence.

Production on
East Side, West Side
began in September. Once again, Nancy was cast close to type as the socialite wife of a New York press baron. She appeared in only two scenes, but they were with the film’s star, Barbara Stanwyck, and Mervyn LeRoy made sure Nancy had her fair share of close-ups.

The big-budget, high-gloss film also starred James Mason as Stanwyck’s un-faithful husband, Ava Gardner as his mistress, who is murdered, and Van Heflin as the reporter who solves the crime.

On October 28, 1949, the
Hollywood Reporter
, which was owned by the ultra-right-wing nightclub impresario Billy Wilkerson, published a list of

“Communist sympathizers” who had signed an amicus curiae brief urging the Supreme Court to overturn the convictions of John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo. To Nancy’s horror, her name was on the list.51 Since she had also been receiving unsolicited mail from left-wing organizations, she called LeRoy in a panic. “She drove over that evening to show me some of the propaganda that was being slipped under her door,” the director wrote in his memoir,
Take One
. “We were both anti-Communist, and strongly so, so the whole business was annoying.”52

Nancy’s concern was not unreasonable. Behind the facade of klieg-lit premieres and glittery dinner parties, Hollywood was an increasingly divided and frightened community in late 1949: the right saw a Red under
Ronnie and Nancy in Hollywood: 1949–1952

2 3 7

every bed, the left an FBI agent; according to Arthur Laurents, people even suspected their analysts of being government informers.53 The
Los
Angeles Times
was running as many as twenty anti-Communist articles a day, and California state senator John Tenney, who chaired a mini-HUAC

in Sacramento, had launched investigations into the political activities of Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Gene Kelly, Gregory Peck, Frank Sinatra, and Nancy’s friend Katharine Hepburn.54

The American Legion threatened to boycott studios that employed Communists, and freshly sprouted newsletters such as
Red Channels
and
Counter-Attack
printed lists of suspected Party members, friends of suspected Party members, and friends of friends of suspected Party members.

(“We don’t care whether an individual cannot be proved to be an outright Communist,” asserted Myron Fagan, whose Cinema Educational Guild distributed hundreds of thousands of pamphlets with titles such as
Red
Stars in Hollywood
. “As far as we are concerned any man or woman who is a fellow traveler, or belongs to a Red front organization, or has supported Communism with financial or moral support, a la Charlie Chaplin, or has come out in open support of the ten branded men who defied the Parnell Thomas investigation, or associates with known Communists, openly or in secret, is just as guilty of treason, and is just as much an enemy of America as any outright Communist.”)55 Although the studios continued to deny that they were blacklisting anyone, some of those whose names appeared on such lists suddenly found auditions were canceled, or parts were cut from movies in which they had already been cast, or their agents stopped returning their calls.

At MGM, Louis B. Mayer, clinging to power in his all-white office lined with framed photographs of Herbert Hoover, J. Edgar Hoover, and New York’s Cardinal Francis Spellman, sometimes whispered that he wondered if Dore Schary was a Communist, and Schary threatened to sue Hedda Hopper for referring to the studio as “Metro-Goldwyn-Moscow” because it employed him. Schary was one of the few studio executives who tried to resist the rising tide of guilt-by-association blacklisting.56 Gale Sondergaard, a well-regarded character actress who had a supporting role in
East Side, West
Side
, was married to one of the Hollywood 10, director Herbert Biberman, and under investigation by both the FBI and HUAC while the film was being shot. Not surprisingly, Sondergaard had signed the amicus curiae brief.

Seeing a fellow cast member’s name on the
Hollywood Reporter
’s list made Nancy all the more nervous.57

2 3 8

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House LeRoy tried to reassure Nancy by telling her that the studio would take care of her problem, and on November 7, Louella Parsons ran an item declaring her “100 percent American” and pointing out that there was
another
Nancy Davis, who supported “leftist theater” and “Henry Wallace’s politics.”58 The
Hollywood Reporter
also ran an item clarifying the matter, but Nancy was still not satisfied. LeRoy told her he would talk to his old friend from Warners, SAG president Ronald Reagan, and ask him to call her. As she later wrote, she sat up all night waiting for the phone to ring. “I had seen him in films and, frankly, I had liked what I had seen.” She continued, “On the set the next day, a beaming Mervyn reported that Ronnie had checked me out . . . and the Guild would defend my name if it ever became necessary. I told Mervyn that was fine, but I was so worried I’d feel better if the Guild president would call me and explain it all to me.”59

“She had her heart set on meeting Ronnie,” LeRoy told a reporter years later. “I knew they’d make a great pair, so I went along with it and fixed them up.”60

The phone rang soon after Nancy got home that afternoon. Reagan said he had an early call the next morning, but if she was free they could have a quick dinner to discuss her concerns. She told him it was awfully short notice and added that she, too, had an early call. “I didn’t, of course, but a girl has to have some pride,” she would write. “Two hours later, my first thought when I opened the door was, This is
wonderful
. He looks as good in person as he does on the screen!”61

“The door opened,” Reagan wrote in describing the same scene, “not on the expected fan magazine version of a starlet, but on a small, slender young lady with dark hair and a wide-spaced pair of hazel eyes that looked right at you and made you look back. Don’t get ahead of me: bells didn’t ring or skyrockets explode, although I think perhaps they did. It was just that I had buried the part of me where such things happened so deep, I couldn’t hear them.”62

A year and a half had passed since Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman were divorced, in June 1948, and although he put on his usual cheerful face, bachelorhood did not agree with him. To cope with his loneliness, he was going out too much, drinking too much, and spending too much—his nightclub bills alone were running $750 a month.63 And while he dated a succession of actresses, singers, and models, including Ann Sothern and Ruth Roman, the word around town was that he was still obsessed with
Ronnie and Nancy in Hollywood: 1949–1952