Figuring a career out with quintuple Disney leading lady Nancy Olson Livingston

“How’d you like to ski down our mountain?” “I’d follow you anywhere, Mr. Baxter.” “Ski down our mountain??!!” In their solitary Tinseltown pairing, Nancy Olson and Dean Jones tenderly embrace on location in the bitterly cold Crested Butte, Colorado, for “Snowball Express,” a slapstick family comedy distributed on Dec. 22, 1972, as Olson’s fifth and final Disney production. Photography possibly by Bob Coburn / Disney / Everett Collection / Alamy

Nancy Olson Livingston didn’t have a constant craving for her name on the marquee in spite of a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for Sunset Boulevard. Before Billy Wilder’s depressing satire of a broke screenwriter’s toxic relationship with a fading silent film maven was officially unveiled in 1950, the 22-year-old UCLA theater arts major marched into Paramount and expressed her desire not to be a movie star at the mercy of an unrepentant industry. Her home studio was not amused, suspending her weekly salary and placing Olson on a leave of absence. Soon enough the blonde Scandinavian girl-next-door brushed the dust off her high heels, wooing John Wayne in the Communist-demolishing Big Jim McLain and reinforcing Walt Disney’s live action classic Pollyanna. To breathe the same air as the small town values-affirming animator and marvel at his creative genius reoriented Olson’s career. She tarried in four more Disney productions — The Absent-Minded Professor, Son of Flubber, Smith!, and Snowball Express.

The death of first husband Alan Jay Lerner, the Oscar-winning lyricist-playwright-screenwriter behind An American in Paris, My Fair Lady, Camelot, and Paint Your Wagon alongside collaborator Frederick Loewe, inadvertently fueled the seeds of her memoir, dropped by the University Press of Kentucky. One…