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

on greenish pancake makeup and black lipstick. Performers farsighted enough—or desperate enough—to venture into television did not exactly get star treatment. “Television, by the way, is difficult work for an actress,” Nancy told columnist Inez Wallace a few years later. “There is no pay for rehearsals, as there is in radio or stage work. And the worst of that is that television requires more rehearsals than either of the other two vehicles. And the makeup on television is ghastly. It makes a young girl of sixteen look like an old hag.” Still, it was work. In early 1949 Nancy’s agent phoned. Someone at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had seen her in a TV production of an obscure comedy called Broken Dishes. They wanted to bring her out to California for a screen test. “This was one opportunity that none of my family friends had anything to do with,” she marveled. This bolt from the blue is her version of events. Later, it would be said that, once again, others had a hand in arranging Nancy’s move to Hollywood.

She started packing as soon as she hung up the phone. Her next call was to her mother. Edie swung into action, getting in touch with her old friend Spencer Tracy, who, as it happened, was one of the studio’s most bankable stars. He was happy to assist. Not only was he close to the Davises, but he owed them for helping him through the darkest hours of his battles with alcohol. And he was grateful to Nancy personally for the kindnesses she had shown to his deaf son, John, who stayed with her when he was visiting New York.

Tracy made sure that Nancy’s would be no pro forma screen test conducted by the usual technicians the studio assigned to unknowns. He arranged for it to be directed by the celebrated “woman’s director” George Cukor, who had a gift for drawing out magical performances from actresses such as Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story, Greta Garbo in Camille, and a female ensemble cast that included Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, and Rosalind Russell in The Women. Reading lines with Nancy was the promising actor Howard Keel, newly signed by MGM. Camera work was done by George Folsey, who over his career was nominated thirteen times for cinematography Oscars. MGM gave her weeks of coaching in advance.

Cukor privately deemed her to have no talent. But in his hands, Nancy did well enough. In early 1949 she signed a seven-year, $250-a-week contract, with an option for the studio to terminate. Many years later, Nancy would learn to her great amusement that MGM’s commitment to her was one reason the studio took a pass on a promising young bit actress named Marilyn Monroe.

The studio system that ran Hollywood was nearing the end of its heyday, but the fantasy factories still controlled the destinies of actors and actresses. And none of the Big Five studios was so powerful or prestigious as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It was run by Ukrainian immigrant Louis B. Mayer, a junk dealer’s son who had moved west from Massachusetts. The tyrannical Mayer had built a star-making machine like nothing ever seen before. Movies, he said, were “the business of making idols for the public to love and worship and identify with. Everything else was secondary.” Or as Elizabeth Taylor, one of his biggest successes, once put it: “L. B. Mayer and MGM created stars out of tinsel, cellophane, and newspapers.”

To Nancy, joining Metro felt like “walking into a dream world.” The opportunities for an actress under contract were endless: she could study French, or take lessons in singing and horseback riding. She could go on the sets and learn by seeing how the greatest actors and actresses did it. “Everything was a big step up for me when I signed with Metro, everything,” she remembered later.

There have been more than a few theories as to how and why someone of Nancy’s modest accomplishments got such special consideration and treatment from the powerhouse of Hollywood studios. Her arrival generated no small amount of jealousy and sniping on the MGM lot. Many years later, after she had become a household name, salacious tales would circulate in Hollywood about the extent and nature of Nancy’s sexual activity in her days as a young actress. Some of this should be treated skeptically. Nancy was far from the first woman to become famous and then find that men who knew her in her early days were boasting about her supposed availability. If a few of these stories were true, it would hardly have been unusual for a thirtyish single woman to have a healthy interest in sex. And no daughter of Edie’s would have been naive about how things worked.

What appears to have been the case is that several forces beyond Tracy’s influence were at work on her behalf. One of them was the fact that she had drawn the interest of Benjamin Thau, MGM’s vice president of talent. “I always recommended Nancy for parts. She was sweet and appealing—one of the most popular girls on the lot,” he said later. Thau, a middle-aged and unprepossessing bachelor, was known for demanding sexual favors from actresses. His “casting couch” was said to be the busiest in Hollywood. Nancy was widely presumed, both at the time and since, to have been his girlfriend. In his book Make-Believe: The Story of Nancy & Ronald Reagan, author Laurence Leamer wrote that Nancy regularly spent Saturday mornings closeted with Thau in his office suite.

It would be nearly seventy years before women in Hollywood would stand up against harassment and join with other feminist voices to launch the #MeToo movement. Back in the 1940s, sexual favors were seen as part of the bargain for actresses seeking good roles. When he was an old man, Thau claimed to Leamer that even Nancy’s screen test had been his idea. He, like Gable, had been given her number as someone to call when he was in New York—from a friend who told him