The Triumph of Nancy Reagan by Karen Tumulty (best books under 200 pages .txt) 📗

friends, who helped keep her occupied. “Fortunately, I wasn’t entirely alone in the big city. When I was living on East Fifty-First Street, the Hustons had an apartment around the corner. Lillian Gish, another family friend, had one nearby. They often took me out to eat or to a show, or had me over to little parties,” she recalled. “I used to go watch Spence rehearse for a play he was opening in, The Rugged Path. He was very nervous about returning to the stage, but he was very good, as he always was.” Tracy’s mistress Katharine Hepburn, who lived on East Forty-Ninth Street, had an aversion to going out and often invited Nancy over to keep her company.

Nancy also dated, though no one exclusively. Her social life intertwined with her professional ambition. Nancy kept company with Max Allentuck, a prominent theater manager who worked with some of the biggest producers of the era; they remained friendly enough that in 1981, when one of his plays came to Washington, she invited him to lunch and to tea at the White House. Her most frequent companion was Kenneth Giniger, the publicity director at publisher Prentice Hall. This friendship was another of Edie’s arrangements. Giniger sometimes booked his authors for interviews on a midmorning radio show that Edie hosted in Chicago. When Edie suggested he look up her daughter in New York, he did. Giniger took Nancy to see-and-be-seen nightspots such as the Stork Club and El Morocco, and made sure her name popped up occasionally in the newspaper columns.

One day in the fall of 1948, Edie called her daughter to let her know that if she heard from someone who said he was Clark Gable, she should not assume it was a prank. The movie star known as the “King of Hollywood” was coming to New York, and Spencer Tracy had given him Nancy’s number. Sure enough, Gable called, and the two of them went out every day for a week, usually ending up at the Stork Club. Gable charmed Nancy; he sent flowers, and they held hands. “He had a quality that good courtesans also have—when he was with you, he was really with you,” Nancy recalled later.

This was never a serious romance, however. The Gone With the Wind star was twenty years older than Nancy and in a rocky phase of his life. Gable was drinking too much, was having a string of affairs, and had never truly gotten over the death of his third wife and soulmate, actress Carole Lombard, in a 1942 plane crash.

Still, being seen with him created a brief and welcome stir around Nancy. The movie magazines and gossip columns buzzed with speculation about the famous star and the unknown actress. Those clippings, too, made it into Nancy’s scrapbook. Typical was one that said: “At the party in New York that Tommy Joyce gave in honor of Clark Gable and Walter Pidgeon, Clark arrived with Nancy Davis on his arm. Nancy, according to my informant, is a beautiful little brunette. Clark gave her the typical Gable treatment, devoting himself to her—so much so that some of the people present said, ‘This is it!’ ” Another, apparently from a Chicago newspaper, reported: “A twosome that has New York agog is our Nancy Davis and the great Clark Gable who are seen together hitting the night spots every evening. Nancy is the beautiful and talented daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Loyal Davis.” Probably closest to the truth was what Dorothy Kilgallen wrote in her syndicated column, The Voice of Broadway: “Nancy Davis, the lass who dated Clark Gable so often on his last visit here, wasn’t unhappy about the resulting publicity. She has theatrical ambitions.”

Nancy was realistic enough to recognize that, as she once put it, “I wasn’t setting show business on fire.” In the six years after she graduated from Smith, she performed in only four plays—three of them thanks to the beneficence of her mother’s friend ZaSu Pitts. She also knew that as she moved into her late twenties, casting directors would no longer be looking at her for ingenue roles on the stage. There was no true love in sight to carry her away from all of it—and a real danger of developing a reputation as a girl whose phone number gets passed around a lot.

So, Nancy decided to try something different, making a professional move that more established stage actors of the day would have considered to be beneath them. She began taking roles in the new medium of television, some of it in low-budget, live dramas on Kraft Television Theatre. “Enthusiastic about television, Nancy looks forward to the day when video will have its own stars, would like a dramatic show of her own,” Mademoiselle magazine wrote in November 1948. That sounded far-fetched at the time. Four major networks were broadcasting prime-time schedules seven nights a week, but fewer than 6 percent of Americans had television sets in their homes, and just 44 percent told a Gallup opinion poll they had ever even seen a program.

Edie might have influenced her daughter’s openness to television, as Nancy’s mother had been an early enthusiast. She launched Chicago’s 1946 Community Fund Drive with a Monday-night broadcast from the studios of WBKB, which had just that year received its license to become the first commercial TV station outside the eastern time zone. Two screens were set up in the window of the Fair Store on State Street—a giant department store where Ronald Reagan’s father had once worked as a clerk—so that the curious could get what the Chicago Tribune called “their first helping of television.” It caused a sensation. “A vacationing Iowan postponed his shopping to take in the entire show,” the Tribune wrote. The newspaper raised the possibility that someday “it will be as much fun to sit in your favorite armchair and view famous entertainers as it will be to observe the efforts of athletes. More, maybe.”

Early black-and-white technology was crude, requiring actors to slather