Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House daughters he taught how to swim. Ronald even became a local celebrity, making the front page of a newspaper for the first time on August 3, 1928, when the Dixon Telegraph reported that he had rescued a drowning man68—one of seventy-seven lives he would save during his six summers at the park.69
In September 1928, Ronald and Margaret both enrolled in Eureka College, a small Disciples of Christ institution located a hundred miles south of Dixon. Only 8 percent of their graduating class went on to college, and Ronald was not actually sure he could afford it—tuition, room, and board at Eureka came to more than $300 a year. “While Margaret registered,” he later wrote, “I presented myself to Eureka’s new president, Bert Wilson, and Ralph McKinzie, the football coach, and tried to impress them with my credentials as a football player and as someone who could win some trophies for Eureka’s swim team.” Ronald was given a scholarship to cover half his tuition and a job washing dishes to cover his board at the Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity house.70
A teachers college that had evolved into a liberal arts institution, Eureka had a faculty of twenty and fewer than two hundred students in 1928, but its handful of ivy-covered red-brick buildings set on a spacious campus of rolling lawns crisscrossed by gravel paths and shaded by elms looked like Princeton to the small-town shoe salesman’s son. “I fell head over heels in love with Eureka,” he later wrote,71 and he was immediately caught up in campus life.
In his freshman year he took an active part in a student strike that led to the resignation of Bert Wilson, who had infuriated students and faculty with his plan for severe cutbacks in the academic curriculum. During the strike Ronald first became aware of his effectiveness as a public speaker, when a fiery speech he gave in the campus chapel, denouncing the “morally evil” president, brought the student body to its feet.72 “I discovered that night that an audience has a feel to it and, in the parlance of the theater, that audience and I were together,” he said.73 One of the strike’s organizers, Howard Short, would later explain, “We put Reagan on because he was the biggest mouth of the freshman class; he was a cocky s.o.b., a loud talker.
Dutch was the guy you wanted to put up there.”74
In October 1929 the stock market crashed, but on the surface the Depression did not seem to have much effect on Ronald’s college life.
That September, Neil had entered Eureka on a scholarship arranged by Early Ronnie: 1911–1932
3 1
his brother. Ronald’s days and nights were a whirl of extracurricular activities, occasionally interrupted by a bout of cramming. He made the varsity football and track teams, captained the swimming team, and was the lead cheerleader for the basketball team. He was a sports reporter on the school newspaper for a year, features editor of the yearbook for two years, and president of the Eureka Booster Club, which was responsible for the college’s public relations, for three years. As a senior, after two years in the student senate, he was elected student body president. Along the way he co-starred with Margaret Cleaver in several plays, including Edna St. Vincent Millay’s avant-garde verse drama Aria da Capo, which won a prize for the Eureka Dramatic Society in the Eva Le Gallienne tournament at Northwestern University’s School of Speech. Ronald played Thyrsis, a shepherd boy, in the one-acter, which was set in ancient Greece and had a strong pacifist theme; he was cited as one of the six best actors in the competition. Almost as an afterthought, it appears, he majored in social science and economics, and maintained an average that hovered between B and C. “He would take a book the night before the test,” Neil recalled, “and in about a quick hour he would thumb through it and photograph those pages and write a good test.”75
Things were not so carefree at home in Dixon. The Dixon Telegraph noted on April 3, 1928, that Jack Reagan had “severed his connection with the partnership operating The Fashion Boot Shop.”76 Jack took a temporary job at Dixon State Hospital, a mental institution, which he found “humiliating,” before going to work at another shoe store in town in August 1929.77 The Reagans had already given up their house on the North Side, and had moved from one small apartment to another. They were soon reduced to subletting all but one room and cooking on a hotplate. Jack spent most of 1930 and 1931 based two hundred miles away in Springfield, working as a traveling shoe salesman for the Red Wing Company, while Nelle remained in Dixon, working as a salesclerk and seamstress at the Marilyn Dress Shop. There was talk of a girlfriend in Springfield—and of divorce—but by late 1931 Jack and Nelle were reunited in an apartment on Monroe Avenue on Dixon’s South Side. On Christmas Eve 1931, Ronald and Neil were home for the holidays when Jack received a special delivery letter firing him. Like millions of other Americans, Jack was unemployed throughout 1932.78 Ronald, then in his last semester at Eureka and working part-time as the school’s swimming instructor, would later recall sending his mother $50 to buy food. He was able to complete his final 3 2
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House year at Eureka with a $115 loan from the Disciples of Christ–affiliated Henry Strong Educational Foundation,79 but could not afford to buy his $30 class ring.80
On June 30, 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was nominated for president at the Democratic convention in Chicago, and Jack went to work as a volunteer at the Dixon Democratic Party headquarters for the patrician who promised a New Deal. Ronald was back on the lifeguard stand at Lowell Park, where he would get into arguments over politics with his Republican boss. He was a twenty-one-year-old college graduate with no clear idea of what he was going to do with the rest of his life, except to spend it with Margaret Cleaver. “Soon after our graduation, I’d given her an engagement ring,” he later wrote, “and we’d agreed to marry as soon as we could afford it.”81
C H A P T E R T W O
EARLY NANCY
1921–1932
After Mother and my father were separated, Mother had to go back to work.
She didn’t take any alimony and she didn’t think that hauling me around from town to town and theater to theater was the best thing in the world. So I lived with my aunt and uncle and cousin in Bethesda, and it was very nice. I had a wonderful time. I’ve read that I was abandoned. I wasn’t abandoned. I adored my mother. She could have, I suppose, sent me to I don’t know where, but letting me live with my aunt and uncle and cousin—this is family. I was with my family.
Nancy Reagan to author,
June 4, 2000
When I had lunch with Peggy [Noonan, a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan], she said, “Well, you obviously had a couple of unhappy years.” I said, “Well, no, I didn’t.” I didn’t have a miserable, unhappy childhood. I was living with my aunt and uncle and cousin. And Mother would come to Bethesda.
Oh, that was a big thing when Mother came to Bethesda.
Nancy Reagan to author,
April 30, 2001
AMONG THOSE ATTENDING THE OPENING OF THE WEEK-LONG DEMOCRATIC
convention that nominated Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Chicago at the beginning of that summer of 1932 was a chubby, well-dressed eleven-year-old girl named Nancy Robbins. She and her mother, Mrs. Loyal Davis, the wife of Chicago’s first full-time neurosurgeon, were guests of Edward Joseph Kelly, the powerful Democratic machine politician who would become mayor the following year and rule the nation’s then second-largest city with an iron hand through the Depression and World War II. While the twenty-one-year-old Ronald Reagan was back in Dixon deciding what 3 3
3 4
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House to do with his life after graduating from Eureka College (and his unemployed father was rooting for Roosevelt from afar), his future First Lady was already well situated at the center of things. A photograph of Nancy and her mother at the convention ran in one of the Chicago papers.1
Nancy’s mother, the former Edith Luckett, had been a theater actress of modest success until she married Loyal Davis, at the socially prestigious Fourth Presbyterian Church on Chicago’s fashionable North
Michigan Avenue, in May 1929—about the same time that Jack Reagan grudgingly took a job at the state mental institution in Dixon. Edith had separated from her first husband, a well-bred but unenterprising New Englander named Kenneth Robbins, barely a year after their daughter’s birth in 1921
in New York, and Nancy had spent her early years in Bethesda, Maryland, living at the home of her mother’s sister. Dr. Davis would not officially adopt his stepdaughter and give her his name until she was almost seventeen, in 1938, nine years after he married her mother.
For the rest of her life Nancy would refer to Loyal Davis as “my father,” and for a long time she even went so far as to deny the existence of Kenneth Robbins and to falsify her birthplace. When she was First Lady of California, her official biography began, “Nancy Davis Reagan was born in Chicago, the only daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Loyal Davis.” When confronted with her Who’s Who entry, stating that she had been adopted by Loyal Davis, she said, “I don’t care what the book says. He is my father. In my mind, he is my father. I have no father except Loyal Davis.”2
As she explained in Nancy, her 1980 autobiography, “Since Kenneth Robbins was such a small part of my life, it is impossible for me to think of him as my father.”3
Nancy Davis Reagan was born Anne Frances Robbins on July 6, 1921, at Sloane Hospital in Flushing, a middle-class section of the New York City borough of Queens, where Edith and Kenneth Robbins were living at the time. “I was due on the fourth of July,” she later wrote, giving her birth a patriotic twist, just as her husband had given his, “but my mother, as she tells it, was a baseball fan who was determined to see a doubleheader on that day. Knowing her, I believe it. When she arrived at the hospital two days later, she was told there was no room and she would have to go elsewhere. My mother is a strong-willed woman. She lay down in the middle of the reception room floor and said, ‘Well, I guess I’ll have my baby right here.’ Everyone bustled around and miraculously discovered Early Nancy: 1921–1932
3 5
they had a room all the time. It was a hot day, and the last thing she remembered in the delivery room was the doctor talking about how hot it was and how he wanted to get it over with so he could get out on the golf course. It turned out to be a difficult forceps delivery, and when I was brought to her, my right eye was closed. The doctor told her I might be blind in that eye. She told him that she had heard what he had said in the delivery room, and that if my eye didn’t open, she would kill him. Fortunately for him, after two weeks my eye opened.”4
Although her mother called her Nancy from an early age, she was named after a great-great-aunt of her father’s, Sister Anne Ayres, the first American Episcopalian nun. One of the ironies of Nancy Reagan’s story is that the father she preferred not to acknowledge would provide the genealogical link she needed to be accepted into the Daughters of the American Revolution when she applied in 1983. Of Nancy and Ronald Reagan’s four biological parents and one adoptive parent, only Kenneth Robbins came from a certi-fiably old American family. One of his ancestors on his mother’s side, John Root, arrived from England in 1640 and was among the earliest Puritan settlers of Connecticut.5 Kenneth’s great-great-great-grandfather, Ezekiel Root (1736–1808), moved the family to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and was a captain in the American army during the Revolutionary War.6
Kenneth Seymour Robbins was born in Pittsfield in 1894, the only son of John and Anne Ayres Robbins. His father was vice president of the W. E. Tillotson Manufacturing Company, which made wool, and the family seemed fairly prosperous. Ken, as he was called, is said to have attended Princeton, but the university has no record of his application, registration, or attendance. He was reportedly employed as a salesman by the Berkshire Life Insurance Company in 1914, when he met Edith Luckett, who was then performing at the Colonial Theater in Pittsfield.7
Although Edith claimed to be two years younger than Kenneth, she was almost certainly six years older. Her birth date is as hazy as so much else about her background. She claimed to have been born on July 16, 1896, but 1888 is the more credible year. Edith took great relish in portraying herself as a Southern belle from one of the First Families of Virginia. Her parents, Charles Edward Luckett and Sarah Frances Whitlock, were married in Petersburg, Virginia, in 1868. Four years later Charles, a railroad clerk with the Adams Express Company (the predecessor of Railway Express), was transferred from Richmond to Washington, D.C.,8
where the couple’s nine children were most likely born. Edith, however, 3 6
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House maintained into her old age that her mother had returned to Petersburg for the birth of each child so that “they wouldn’t be born damn Yankees.”9
The Lucketts lived in a series of row houses near the railroad tracks in Washington; some say Sarah ran a boardinghouse.10
According to Nancy Reagan, “Times were tough for the Lucketts with their large family. Few of the children attended school for very long. They had to go to work.”11 Edith’s older brother, Joseph, managed the Columbia Theater in Washington, where she first appeared on the stage. In 1900, when she was twelve, a local newspaper wrote, “Little Edith Luckett has beauty, wit and talent. She is the unusual child. Her prattle is as merry as the chirp of a cricket on the hearth, her eyes blue, and her hair brown and wavy. She has been brought to public notice by her remarkable cleverness as a dancer, her grace of movement and form, and her sweet, pretty face.”12
By sixteen, Edith had left high school and was working steadily with various stock companies, including those of the famous Irish tenor Chauncey Olcott and the legendary Broadway producer, composer, and actor George M. Cohan.13 Nicknamed Lucky Luckett, she was a whirlwind of charm and energy, a pretty blonde with the riveting widespread eyes she would pass on to her daughter. She smoked, she swore, she told dirty jokes, and she was wildly popular. Yet she clung to her genteel Southern drawl. As Nancy Reagan would say again and again, in print and in private, “They broke the mold after they made my mother. If I could be half the woman she was, I’d be happy.”14
In December 1910, The New York Times ran a picture of Edith in the stage production of Shifting at Nazimova’s 39th Street Theater, one of Lee Shubert’s houses, named in honor of his biggest money-making star, Alla Nazimova.15 The great Nazimova was a charismatic Russian-Jewish lesbian who became a major attraction—and the incarnation of Ibsen’s New Woman—when she toured America from 1907 to 1910 in A Doll’s House, The Master Builder, and Hedda Gabler. Born in Yalta in 1879, she had been trained by the great Russian director Konstantin Stanislavsky in Moscow, where she was said to have worked as a prostitute to finance her studies. She came to New York in 1905 with her then lover, Paul Orleneff, and his St. Petersburg Players,16 but, according to Diana McLellan in The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood, she was soon seduced by none other than Emma Goldman, the fiery feminist crusader known as the Queen of the Anarchists.17
Edith had met Nazimova at a party given at the Irving Place townhouse of the literary agent Bessie Marbury, whose clients included H. G. Wells, Early Nancy: 1921–1932
3 7
George Bernard Shaw, and Somerset Maugham, and her lover, the society decorator Elsie de Wolfe, who were the reigning hostesses of Manhattan’s thriving haute bohemia.18 During this period, Edith had principal roles in the touring companies of Cohan’s musical Broadway Jones and The Fortune Hunter, starring John Barrymore . 19
At twenty-five, Edith reportedly became engaged to Edward A. R. Brown, the scion of a rich New York family.20 A year later she met Kenneth Robbins, who was swept away by her looks, her humor, and her get-up-and-go. According to relatives, young Ken was sweet but weak, “kind of a momma’s boy,” one of them said, who was “kept [in] long golden curls until he went to school.”21 His mother, a formidable figure known in the family as Nannee Robbins, was also charmed by Edith. “Even though I think she might have been a little disturbed that her only son married an actress,” Ken Robbins’s niece Kathleen Young said, “Nannee thought the
world of her.”22
Edith and Ken were wed in Burlington, Vermont, on June 27, 1916, by a Congregational minister. Edith had promised to give up the stage, but after only a few months of living in a farmhouse in the Berkshires owned by her husband’s family, she persuaded Ken to move to New York, where he floundered unhappily, working as an insurance agent according to one source, a booking agent according to another.23 Edith contacted Alla Nazimova, who offered a role in her new production, ’Ception Shoals, a melodrama “about incest, suicide, and bigotry, set in a lighthouse.”24 Edith’s first Broadway play, it opened on January 10, 1917, ran to packed houses until March, and then went on tour until summer. By then Ken had enlisted in the Army—Congress having declared war on Germany on April 6—and Edith had formed a close friendship with Nazimova.
The following year, Nazimova went to Hollywood and quickly became one of the highest-paid actresses in silent pictures, starring opposite Ru-dolph Valentino in Camille in 1921. Two years later she produced and starred in the “ostentatiously homoerotic” Salome, with sets by Natacha Rambova, Valentino’s second wife and one of Nazimova’s many lovers.25
Nazimova jokingly called the Spanish-style mansion she bought at 8080
Sunset Boulevard the Garden of Allah. Set on three and a half acres of lushly landscaped grounds, it was also known as the 8080 Club because of her constant entertaining, which included all-girl pool parties on Sunday afternoons. She attempted to cover up her lesbianism by, among other things, 3 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House maintaining a fictional marriage with the actor Charles Bryant from 1912
to 1925.26
According to Nazimova’s biographer Gavin Lambert, “Edith was probably Nazimova’s main confidante for more than ten years,” and their friendship led to rumors that they were lovers. Lambert plays down those rumors, citing the platonic tone of Nazimova’s letters to Edith, in which the star is constantly thanking her admirer for favors large and small. “Enormously proud of her friendship with a great star, Edith seems to have felt to be privileged to do favors for her,” Lambert explains, “and Nazimova . . . felt relaxed in the company of someone so exuberantly unshockable. The friendship lasted until Nazimova’s death, and their correspondence over the years makes it clear that Edith was one of the very few people with whom she was frank about her sexuality.” Lambert points out, however, that Edith’s letters to Nazimova are not included in Nazimova’s archives, even though the star was known to keep every letter she ever received.27
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