between us. She said to me: “You’re in love with him, aren’t you?”
I said yes.
She said: “I thought so.” And that was it. Nelle clearly saw where things were going, but she also knew that I would have to be patient.
The breakthroughs were, in fact, only baby steps. I just had to wait.
—
I was always so happy to get a letter from Ronnie in those early days. He wrote to me when he traveled—to stay connected, to reassure me, I think, and to let me know I was in his thoughts.
His humor, especially in difficult situations, comes through in his early letters, written before our feelings for each other had deepened and Ronnie began to write more directly about love. His letter from Tucson, Arizona, in 1950, for example, particularly shows Ronnie’s humor about himself and the light touch he brought to describing the world around him. When he wrote it, we’d been seeing each other for about a year—long enough for me to be upset when he went away and for him to tease me for being “agin’ it.”
Television in 1950 was not what it is today. It was a new and not very highly considered medium. It was just beginning to attract some Hollywood talent, but it was considered a big step down from pictures. The work was live and low-budget and you rehearsed in basements.
Ronnie was sought out often for TV roles, but he turned most of them down. He didn’t want to hurt his movie career by being typecast as a TV actor. But he did sometimes go to New York to make guest-star appearances on shows that he liked.
He wrote me this letter on one of his New York trips. I can’t remember what it was that he enclosed with it.
THE PLAZA
NEW YORK
[December 5, 1950]
Dear Nancy
Just enclosed this—thought you’d be interested. It was wrapped around some bread crusts the Guild office managed to smuggle into a TV mine where I’m being forced to work every day all day.
If this letter gets through tell all actors in the free world about this Siberia of thespians. Day after day in basement rehearsal halls we work and slave and in the few seconds of quiet between cues we can hear our ulcers growing. Mine is almost big enough to play a supporting part now but it is holding out for pictures.
They do have one custom that is cute thoug
h—
no prompter
.
I have
an extemporaneous address prepared for my first “memory loss”—it is entitled “Better Harry Cohen Yet” or “Pictures are Your Best Entertainment.”
I have hatched an escape plot (used one of the eggs I’ve already laid) and expect to hit Calif. around the 17 th or 18 th if I can lose the “secret police” on a floating ice flow. I got this latter idea from a new TV show about some kid who outwitted a character named “Legree.”
Gotta go—the guards are looking—through a viewer yet.
Ronnie
Our engagement photo; from MGM, February 1952.
W hen I met Ronnie, my picture career was really starting to take off. I’d come to Hollywood after a few years of working in the theater—first in small Smith College productions, then in summer stock during college vacations. My mother had been an actress, and the theater life had always appealed to me.
In those days, summer stock was very good training. You didn’t act right away; first, you did a little bit of everything. That way, when you finally did get onstage, you had an idea of what went on offstage to get you there. I cleaned out dressing rooms (you could tell a lot about people from the way they left their dressing rooms); I upholstered furniture; I put on backstage music, I put up signs about the theater in the towns where we toured. My first part, when I did get onstage, consisted of the classic line “Dinner is served.” It was all very, very good experience.
After college, I started acting on the “subway circuit” in the outer boroughs of New York. I even made it to Broadway once, working with Mary Martin and Yul Brynner in
Lute Song.
After someone with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer saw me in the TV