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

Biographer Edmund Morris was struck by the similarities between the two women Ronnie married—and by the most important quality that set them apart. “Both had been wide-eyed, street-smart, scorchingly ambitious starlets, abandoned by their fathers in infancy, convinced of the world’s treachery, drawn to Reagan as a haven of goodness and strength, then frustrated to the point of despair by his reluctance to propose,” Morris wrote in the New Yorker in 2004, after Ronnie died. “The difference with Nancy was that her ambition concerned only him: she wanted nothing for herself except the satisfaction of making him powerful. She had taken him on, moreover, when his acting career was in rapid decline, and when his brilliant future as a politician could hardly have been predicted. Yet she never flinched in her steely belief that he would recover and prevail.”

Their early flurry of dates generated buzz that Ronnie might finally be moving past Jane’s rejection. Nancy saved the clippings in her scrapbook. One, from December 1949, reported that hers was “the newest telephone number in Ronald Reagan’s book,” and that he was “romancing Nancy like mad.”

She spent Christmas that year back in Chicago with her parents. The local papers dutifully recorded the fur-clad, hometown starlet alighting from the Super Chief into Edie’s waiting arms. But after Nancy returned to California, Ronnie stopped calling so regularly. He seemed to have lost his fascination with her and was again playing the field. At one point, Nancy was having lunch in the MGM commissary with a group of other contract actresses, when one of them started talking about a gift that Ronnie had given her. “That hurt. I didn’t have one specific rival, but it did occur to me that perhaps I was just one girl of many,” she recalled. Meanwhile, Jane was still around, feeding Ronnie’s hopes—and the movie-industry gossip—that there was still a chance they might get back together.

Nancy resumed dating other men as well. She was practical enough to know a woman in her situation had to keep open her options. It was also a way of making sure Ronnie noticed she had options. Robert Stack, later to become famous as Eliot Ness on the TV show The Untouchables, shows up on a few pages of Nancy’s scrapbook, including in one newspaper photo where he is at her side for a movie premiere. Playwright and screenwriter Norman Krasna, who had a $50 million production deal at RKO, was reported to be so smitten with her that he proposed.

More serious, it would appear, was her relationship with Robert Walker. An actor known for his edgy roles, he was as troubled as he was talented. Walker had suffered what the New York Times called “a severe psychological crackup” after his 1945 divorce from actress Jennifer Jones, who left him to marry film mogul David O. Selznick. In December 1948 he fled the Menninger psychiatric clinic in Topeka, Kansas, and smashed up a local police station after being arrested for public drunkenness. He did another stint at the clinic in May 1949 and was then reported to be ready to resume what had been a promising film career. Walker’s romance with Nancy, according to the studio publicity machine, was paving his road to rehabilitation. “Robert Walker, who has changed his whole life—and for the better—has now found happiness with Nancy Davis, M-G-M actress,” according to one clipping in her scrapbook, next to which she wrote the date, April 24, 1950. “Someone close to Bob tells me that he is happier with Nancy than he has been at any time since his parting from Jennifer Jones. While Bob was in Phoenix, he met Nancy’s parents, Dr. and Mrs. Royal [sic] Davis of Chicago, and they approved so thoroughly of him that when they were visiting here, they were entertained by Bob and their daughter.” In June the movieland columns were saying that there might be a wedding in the works. Nancy was reported to be overseeing the redecoration of Walker’s home, where his two sons by Jones were frequent visitors.

By the fall of 1950, however, Ronnie was back in the picture again. He wore a big smile and a jaunty checked bowtie as Nancy’s date to the October 1950 Los Angeles opening of her movie The Next Voice You Hear. (One photo caption about the two of them noted of Ronnie: “He and Jane Wyman, his former wife, are still the best of friends.”)

The Next Voice You Hear was a passion project of MGM chief of production Dore Schary, designed to test his theory that there was an untapped market for darker, moralistic “message” pictures. It was Nancy’s first lead role, and the closest she would ever get to a shot at bona fide stardom. The premise of the film was that the voice of God was suddenly preempting radio programming all around the world. Nancy played opposite James Whitmore as Mary and Joe Smith, a middle-class couple whose life is upended by the voice.

Schary was determined that his characters be utterly believable. He had been sold from the start on giving the male lead to the promising Whitmore, knowing he was perfect to play an everyman aircraft factory worker in postwar Southern California. The suggestion to cast Nancy as Joe’s pregnant wife, Mary, had come from Schary’s own wife, Miriam—the same woman who had earlier thrown a dinner party in a failed matchmaking attempt to bring Nancy and Ronnie together.

“This idea took a bit of getting used to: this would be an exacting star role and Nancy had had only three small parts in pictures, and all of them had been on the ‘society’ side, rather than a middle-class wife and mother,” Schary later recalled. “But in her favor was the fact that her looks and manner and inner self were ‘nice’ rather than cover girl glamorous.