Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  In January 1919, Ken Robbins was honorably discharged and rejoined Edith in New York. In late 1920, Edith became pregnant, and Ken, who had inherited a small amount of money from his father, wanted to move back to Pittsfield and bring up their child there. When Edith refused, he left her,28 and he wasn’t present when Nancy was born in July 1921—a fact Nancy would make much of in her memoirs. Sometime after his daughter’s birth he returned, and Edith gave up acting for about a year. Nonetheless, the union between the lackluster Ken and the starstruck Edith was nearing its end. The last straw may have been Edith’s decision to make Nazimova Nancy’s godmother, which stunned her proper New England mother-in-law.29 In 1922 the couple split for good. Edith took her baby on the road.

  Ken went home to Nannee Robbins, and for reasons unknown they soon moved to Glen Ridge, New Jersey.

  At first Edith found it comforting to take little Nancy with her wherever she went. Colleen Moore, the silent screen star who would become one of Edith’s closest friends, never forgot meeting her at a party at the Long Island home of First National Studios head Richard Rowland: “One of the women caught my eye. She was a beautiful blonde, and she had the biggest blue eyes you ever saw. And she was carrying a tiny baby in her arms.” Fascinated, Moore asked her host who she was and if she always brought a baby to parties. Rowland explained that the baby was Edith’s, and that she had just been divorced and didn’t have a penny.30 Moore, only twenty-one Early Nancy: 1921–1932

  3 9

  and soon to be hailed as the spirit of the Flapper Generation for her starring role in Flaming Youth, was impressed by the spunky Edith (who was already thirty-three, but telling people she was twenty-five). The two actresses struck up a friendship that would prove to be durable and mutually advantageous.

  The following year, when Nancy was two, Edith decided to leave her with her sister and brother-in-law, Virginia and C. Audley Galbraith, in Bethesda, Maryland, just outside Washington. Edith rented a one-room apartment on West 49th Street in Manhattan’s theater district, the first in a series of temporary quarters in converted brownstones and residential hotels that she would use as a base between extended stays as a leading lady in regional theater companies in Atlanta, Dallas, and New Brunswick, New Jersey. The scrapbook she kept is filled with favorable reviews and flowery interviews, in which she goes on about her devotion to the Presbyterian Church and love of gardening, but never mentions she has been married or has a daughter. In 1924, Montague Salmon, a columnist for one of the Atlanta papers, subjected her to a “Theatrical Confession.”

  Asked to name her favorite cigarette, she answered, “Lucky Strike.” Her lucky day? “Pay day.” Her greatest ambition? “To be loved by the public.”

  What would she do if she were President for a day? “Have a party at the White House.”31

  Among the many friends she made on the road, one of her favorites was a struggling young unknown named Spencer Tracy. “Spencer was a darling,” she later recalled. “And I liked his wife, Louise. We played anywhere that anyone wanted anything. Spencer and I would always be there.

  We’d always play because we got paid for it, you see. So we didn’t care where we went. I had Nancy to take care of, and he had Louise, and then their son, John.”32

  “My favorite times were when Mother had a job in New York,” Nancy later wrote, “and Aunt Virgie would take me by train to stay with her. Although I saw her productions over and over, I was never bored.”33 Other early memories she recorded include having a stagehand build a dollhouse for her one Christmas, seeing her mother being killed on the stage and thinking she was really dead, and having double pneumonia when she was four or five and her mother not being able to visit her in Bethesda. “My aunt and uncle took care of me as well as anyone could, but I wanted my mother with me and she was somewhere out on the road away from me.

  No matter how kind someone is to you, it is just not the same as when it is 4 0

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House your mother. I can remember crying at this time and saying, ‘If I had a child and she got sick, I’d be with her.’ Now that I have children myself, I realize how much it must have hurt my mother, especially since she had no choice. She had to work.”34

  Although Bethesda, then as now, was one of Washington’s more affluent suburbs, with many large estates and several country clubs, the Galbraiths lived in “a tiny, tiny house”—Nancy Reagan’s words—in the modest Battery Park section, which was popular with military families. “It was right up the street from the Army-Navy clubhouse,” their daughter, Charlotte Galbraith Ramage, who was three years older than Nancy, said of the two-bedroom Dutch-colonial-style house at 123 Glenbrook Road. “I had my own bedroom before Nancy came, and then Mother and Dad fixed up the little sun porch, and that was her bedroom. We had a good time in Battery Park.”

  Was Nancy a happy child? “As far as I knew.” Didn’t she miss her mother?

  “I’m sure she did. But Aunt DeeDee would come down anytime she could.

  And we’d go up to New York to see the plays she was in, when she was with Walter Huston and Kay Francis and Louis Calhern and Spencer Tracy and the rest of them.”35

  Talking about her mother’s visits, Nancy Reagan told me, “Mother taught Charlotte and me the Charleston, and I was dying to have long hair, so Mother went out and bought me a Mary Pickford wig.” She and her cousin, she recalled, played hopscotch in front of their house, using coal to draw the lines, and went to a neighbor’s for taffy pulls. “We both fell down in the cinder driveway, I remember, and I had to wear knee patches. I had a boyfriend who would come by while we were eating breakfast, and he would pull me around the block in his red wagon.”36

  C. Audley Galbraith was an assistant auditor of freight accounts for the Southern Railroad; Virginia Galbraith was a housewife. But somehow they managed to send Charlotte to Sidwell Friends School, the private Quaker institution where the children of high government officials and well-to-do Washingtonians had long been, and still are, educated. In the fall of 1925, four-year-old Nancy started kindergarten at Sidwell Friends, taking the bus with Charlotte four miles down Wisconsin Avenue through Northwest Washington. The Galbraiths covered the tuition for Nancy’s first year, which must have been a burden on a railroad clerk’s salary, and Edith paid after that.37 School records show that Nancy was enrolled in kindergarten for only part of the 1925–26 school year, and then again for only part of 1926–27. Was her pneumonia the reason she missed so much Early Nancy: 1921–1932

  4 1

  school, or was her mother having trouble making the six-times-a-year tuition bills? Nancy Reagan vaguely recalled leaving school to spend stretches of time with her mother in New York. In any case, she started first grade in the fall of 1927, at age six, and completed it the following spring.

  It might be said of Nancy’s early years in Bethesda and at Sidwell Friends that she grew up with the wealthy, but was not of the wealthy.

  Charlotte Ramage recalled, for example, a Christmas party given by “the Hope Diamond gal,” referring to Evalyn Walsh McLean, the silver-mining heiress whose husband, Edward B. McLean, owned The Washington Post in those days. The McLeans’ estate, Friendship, with its own nine-hole golf course, was located directly across Wisconsin Avenue from the Sidwell Friends School. “Their son was in my class, or the class ahead of me, or behind me, I’ve forgotten which,” Charlotte Ramage told me.

  “That’s why I was included in that. And Nancy went. We saw the big tree, and they gave all the girls baby carriages, and the boys got little cars.”38

  The world of politics and power also seemed far away from the Dutch colonial in Battery Park, even though it was so near. Once, Nancy Reagan told me, Aunt Virginia and Uncle Audley took Charlotte and her to the White House Easter Egg Roll. She didn’t remember how old she had been, but given the years she lived in Bethesda, Calvin Coolidge must have been President. I asked Charlotte Ramage if her parents were involved in politics. “No.” Were they Republicans or Dem
ocrats? “Southern Democrats,”

  she answered. “Just like Edith—to start off with.”39

  In fact, Edith was an active participant in the 1924 Democratic convention in New York City. Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of New York’s governor, had asked her friend Bessie Marbury to chair the Women’s Committee of Nine “to prepare for the reception and entertainment of women delegates, alternates and visitors.” According to The New York Times of May 18, 1924, Edith served on the Sub-Committee on Theatres and Restaurant Facilities, along with Mrs. Chauncey Olcott and Mrs.

  Condé Nast, wife of the owner of Vogue and Vanity Fair.

  Ken Robbins is noticeably missing from accounts of this period. In both Nancy and My Turn, his daughter says that he pretty much ignored her until she was “older”—“He couldn’t relate to me as a very young child”40 is the way she puts it in her second book. But Charlotte Ramage said that Nancy’s father and grandmother had visited Bethesda on more than one occasion, though she offered no specific dates or anecdotes.41

  4 2

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House And apparently Nannee Robbins was diligent in sending her only granddaughter presents or cards on her birthday and holidays. “Dear grandmother,” reads an undated note written in a child’s exceptionally neat block letters. “Thank you for the nice Halloween things. We had a fine time. Love, Nancy.”42

  In the summer of 1927, Edith Luckett met Loyal Davis sailing to England on the SS New York. Edith—thirty-nine and not yet a star—was said to be joining a company of English actors.43 The thirty-one-year-old Loyal Davis, an associate professor of surgery at Northwestern University, was just starting his practice as Chicago’s first specialist in neurosurgery, at a time when operating on the brain, spinal cord, and nerves was still an emerging field.

  He was going to London with a colleague, Dr. Lewis Pollock, to give a paper on decerebrate rigidity to a conference of American and British neu-rologists. He was still married to his first wife, Pearl, and they had a two-year-old son named Richard. According to Loyal Davis’s 1973 memoir, A Surgeon’s Odyssey, “I proposed that Pearl make the trip, thinking that her mother could come to Chicago and with Willa [their housekeeper] look after Richard. Perhaps I did not insist strongly enough, but at any rate I, alone, went to England with the Pollocks on the SS New York.”44

  Richard Davis, a retired neurosurgeon living on Philadelphia’s Main Line, confirmed this story to me, with one crucial difference. “I’ve got a picture of Edith and Loyal on the ship. They were a very handsome couple. He was going to give a paper at the National Hospital in Queens Square. Dr. and Mrs. Pollock were traveling with him, and Edith was sitting at their table. Now, why she was going to London, I don’t know. She was sitting across from Mrs. Pollock and had been talking to my father.

  And then she said—not in a whisper, but just moving her lips—‘Is he married?’ Of course, my father saw this, and he said to her, ‘No.’ There’s a song called ‘Hallelujah’ and apparently they danced to that on the ship.

  And every time that was played on the radio, no matter what they were doing, they’d get up and dance.”45

  Had the young doctor removed his wedding band upon boarding the New York? Or fudged the date of his divorce when telling the story to his son years later? In any case, the invitation to Pearl was evidently a last attempt to save a collapsing marriage. Loyal Davis and Pearl McElroy were as mis-matched as Kenneth Robbins and Edith Luckett. Loyal was an intern at Cook County Hospital in Chicago when they met on a blind date in late Early Nancy: 1921–1932

  4 3

  1919. Pearl was a nurse at the hospital, who, in Loyal’s words, “had left a small town for the attractions in Chicago.” They married soon afterward, at the same fashionable Near North Side church where he would later marry Edith; neither Loyal’s nor Pearl’s parents were present. There was friction from the start. “I was unable to accept her dislike and ineptitude for housekeeping,” Loyal later wrote.46 Pearl, on the other hand, viewed Loyal’s career as her rival.

  “I think my father truly loved my mother,” Richard Davis told me.

  “She was a beautiful young woman. He probably loved her a lot more than she loved him. But she had no vision at all. She was pretty footloose and fancy-free. He was anxious to climb the academic ladder of medicine, and wanted to be a pioneer in neurological surgery. She actually denigrated his ambitions. She was quite sarcastic about it. She made fun of that. I think that’s what broke the marriage up. She was a very difficult woman. The only thing my father said about my mother was ‘I never want you to grow up like her.’”47

  A precocious and serious child who turned out to be an impatient and serious adult, Loyal Davis was born on January 17, 1896, in Galesburg, Illinois—one of the county seats where the Reagan family lived during their wandering years. He was the only son of Albert Clark Davis, a locomotive engineer on the Burlington Railroad, and Laura Hensler Davis, a housewife.

  The Davis family lived on a street called Scab Alley, because its row houses had been built by the railroad for workers who broke the strike of 1888. According to Loyal, his parents’ “entire social life centered around the Masonic and Eastern Star lodges. Mother advanced through the various offices of the Violet Chapter, memorized her speeches, became Worthy Matron, and later held an appointive office in the Grand Lodge. Lodges were important in Galesburg. They afforded the social life for the working class.”48

  “My grandfather was highly intelligent,” Richard Davis told me. “He was about six-two, quiet and self-disciplined. His son was the apple of his eye. On the other hand, my grandmother was short and very explosive. I think a lot of Dr. Loyal’s unattractive characteristics were hers. Grandfather Al married her when she was about nineteen, and that was a love affair to end all love affairs. There’s a cute story about them. He was tough—he made $16 a week, and would take the fast mail trains, or the best passenger trains, from Chicago out to Iowa and back to Galesburg. That’s called dead-heading. He came home from one of his runs, and Grandmother Laura was 4 4

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House in the middle of the kitchen floor, crying her heart out. She’d bought a pattern for a dress and material, but instead of cutting the front and the back out of the material, she had cut two fronts out. Now this man has been up more than twenty-four hours doing really tough work, and here she was weeping. So he calmed her down and went to the store and bought more material and cut the dress out himself.”49

  In his memoir Loyal Davis recalls a single but telling anecdote from his childhood:

  I went to Sunday School at the Grace Episcopal Church. I sang in the choir, wearing the black cassock and white surplice. I carried the cross, heading the choir’s procession, and was often pressed into service in pumping the organ. I was proud, scared, and quavery of voice when I sang a Te Deum.

  A prayer book was to be awarded to the boy and girl who had been perfect in attendance at Sunday school for the entire year. I was the only boy to have such a record and I knew that. The prayer book was given to the son of the owner of the largest department store in town. I was angered and crushed in spirit. When I got home, I announced I would never go back to church again. Mother cried and was angry about the unfairness of the action. Dad listened calmly.

  “Did you miss one Sunday?”

  “No, my teacher knows that but she didn’t award the prayer book.”

  “I’ve always thought you could be good and follow the golden rule without having to go to church. You do what you think is right but don’t keep talking about it to every Tom, Dick, and Harry.”50

  Although Loyal was only in grade school, he stuck to his guns and stopped going to church. He graduated from high school as valedictorian of his class at fifteen, winning a medal in shorthand and typing. “I expected to go to work for the railroad, so I took a three-year commercial course in high school,” he told a reporter years later. “But a neighbor, a professor, urged me to go back for my fourth year, take college pr
eparatory work, and, perhaps, he said, I might get a scholarship to Knox College.”51

  He did, and breezed through Knox College in Galesburg in two years, then started Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago at eighteen. He earned his M.D. four years later, in 1918.

  “We were sixty strong,” Loyal wrote of his freshman class at medical school. “There were two Jews and two Negroes. One of each was liked and Early Nancy: 1921–1932

  4 5

  accepted totally by the class; the other two were wholly disliked. It was not a question of racism; it was character and personality.”52 Of the two Jewish students, he noted, “Morrie Mazel . . . had been a chronic irritant to the whole class throughout our four years. Pushing, aggressive, confident, and smart, he pre-empted a front-row seat in every clinic. Being picked up and bodily passed back over the heads of his fellow students to a rear row didn’t stop Morrie. The next time he’d take a front-row seat, grinning and inviting battle. The other Jewish boy in the class was jolly, fat Meyer Chapman; well-liked, quiet, friendly, and one of us.”53

  Loyal was just as sanguine in describing himself as a medical student.

  For part of his time at Northwestern he boarded at the house of a classmate named Howie Goodsmith, who was the son of a doctor but an in-different student. Loyal records Dr. Goodsmith telling him “that Howie had a sense of humor, a personality that attracted people, the ability to relax, all of which, he said, I didn’t possess but should try to develop.”54