Nancy was growing restless and bored. Her salvation came when she received a call from her mother’s famous friend ZaSu Pitts, a comedienne with doleful eyes and a warbly voice, who was known for playing ditzy characters. Pitts was taking her Broadway play Ramshackle Inn on the road and offered Nancy a tiny part. It did not take much acting skill. She played a girl who was kept in the attic, except for one scene in which she burst onto the stage and said three lines. Though a small start, Nancy was grateful and recognized her good fortune was not of her own doing. “This wouldn’t be the last time I benefited from Mother’s network of friends in show business,” she wrote. “I don’t think I would have had much work as a stage actress if it hadn’t been for Mother. There was just too much competition, and I didn’t have the drive that Mother had.”
She joined the cast in Detroit. Reviews of the production were brutal, but audiences turned up anyway to see Pitts. It “played eight months in New York and two years on the road despite the disdain of most critics,” a Boston newspaper noted. As Ramshackle Inn made its way across the country, Nancy and Pitts became close. The star shared her hotel rooms and dressing rooms with the young actress, who became her protégée. They eventually ended up back in New York, and the play closed in the summer of 1946.
Nancy decided to stay in New York and try her luck there. For a twentysomething just after the end of World War II, there could hardly have been a more exciting place to live than Manhattan. With other world capitals in ruins, Gotham took on a swagger. Scarcity and sacrifice were suddenly things of the past. An unprecedented building boom was under way. The nightclubs and theaters were packed. Broadway was at the dawn of a golden era. But finding her own way to the footlights was a challenge and an ordeal. Nancy modeled a bit, took acting and voice classes. She forced herself to show up for auditions that she found “frightening and embarrassing” but did not land many parts. She was fired from one she did get, on the third day of rehearsal. The director told her, “It’s just not working.”
The only Broadway role she ever snagged was playing a lady-in-waiting named Si-Tchun in the 1946 musical Lute Song. That production would be remembered as the first big break for a young Russian-born actor named Yul Brynner. Nancy was not among his fans. “All the girls were so crazy about Yul. One young girl I remember committed suicide over him,” Nancy told interviewer Judy Woodruff of PBS. “I wasn’t too impressed, really. Every time he’d tell a story about his background, it always changed.”
Nancy had read for the part in producer Michael Myerberg’s office. “After all of the tryouts, readings, refusals, and waiting for refusals by telephone, it was unbelievable how swift and easy it was when I heard the magic words, ‘You’ve got the part,’ ” she recalled. But she was puzzled when the producer added: “You look like you could be Chinese.” The real story was that the show’s leading lady—Mary Martin, another of Edie’s friends—had demanded Nancy be given the job. Martin intervened again when the director John Houseman tried to get rid of Nancy during the early weeks of rehearsals. She had dyed her hair black but was unconvincing as a Chinese handmaiden. “John,” his star told him, “I have a very bad back, and Nancy’s father Loyal Davis is the greatest [neurosurgeon] in the USA. We are not letting Nancy go.” Only later, in Houseman’s memoirs, did Nancy learn that her first big break was not due to her talent. Houseman wrote that he had offered her the role through “the usual nepotistic casting.… At Mary’s behest, to play the princess’s flower maiden, we engaged a pink-cheeked amateurish virgin by the name of Nancy Davis.”
When Lute Song closed after only four months, ZaSu Pitts came through with parts for Nancy in two more plays, one of which was a touring revival of a comedy called The Late Christopher Bean. An August 1947 review of an early performance at the Saratoga Spa Playhouse in upstate New York takes note near the end of “a Miss Nancy Davis, who looks wholesome as a ripe red apple, even though little is required of her except to be the decent one of the two Haggett daughters.” Nancy pasted her reviews, even tepid ones, into her scrapbook, along with congratulatory cards and telegrams. Many were from famous names such as the Tracys and the Hustons. Others were not so well known, but meaningful. One note, delivered with flowers for the Chicago opening of Christopher Bean, was from the lawyer and Lake Shore Drive neighbor who had helped arrange Nancy’s adoption by Loyal. It said: “To my adorable Nancy from your general counsel and greatest admirer, Orville Taylor.”
Her life in a fourth-floor walkup at 409 East Fifty-First Street had its frustrations, but it was not exactly one of hardship. Nancy got around on the crosstown bus and felt safe walking home through Midtown Manhattan late at night. Loyal and Edie kept her afloat financially. Though she was a young, single woman, Nancy was drawn to her parents’ mature circle of
