Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  “At first Mother wasn’t accepted by the other doctors’ wives in Chicago,”

  Nancy noted. “I once found her crying in her bedroom because she’d overheard another woman make a disparaging remark about this actress who had married that nice, handsome, highly eligible doctor. In the circles my father moved in, actresses were not looked on very kindly.” One of the problems may have been Edith’s irrepressible sense of humor. As her daughter recalled,

  “When my parents had company, she would tell the latest off-color jokes. If I was in the room, she would turn to me and say, ‘Nancy, would you go to the kitchen and bring me an apple?’ It took me quite a while to realize that this was a ruse to get me out of there until she had finished the joke. She ate a lot of apples in those years.”84

  Nancy’s bohemian godmother, Alla Nazimova, was one of the first of Edith’s old friends to give her approval of Loyal. In late 1930, the fifty-one-year-old actress went to Chicago on tour with Turgenev’s A Month in the Country. She was accompanied by her twenty-one-year-old girlfriend, Glesca Marshall. Though Nazimova was very much in the closet, she confided her secrets to Edith, and presumably Edith told them to Loyal. Edith arranged for Nazimova to be the guest of honor at a Chicago Dramatic League luncheon, and that afternoon she took her and Glesca home to meet Loyal. Somewhat surprisingly, there was a meeting of the minds between the exotic Jewish Democrat and the starchy Protestant Republican.

  Early Nancy: 1921–1932

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  “I do hope he likes me half as much as I do him,” Nazimova wrote Edith from the next stop on her tour. “He is grand.”85

  Nancy herself seems to have viewed her new stepfather with a mixture of awe and trepidation. “Soon after I arrived in Chicago,” she wrote, “he sat me down and explained that he and my mother were in love, and that he would be good to her. . . . He hoped that he and I would come to love each other, and that we all would become one happy family. But both of us knew it would take time.”86

  In a eulogy delivered to the Chicago Neurological Society after Loyal Davis’s death, Dr. Louis Boshes, who had assisted Davis and his research partner, Dr. Louis Pollock, at Northwestern, gave a telling picture of the newly formed Davis family: “Part of my neurology training consisted of buying cigars for Dr. Pollock and specific purchases for Dr. Davis. On Sundays, regularly, the two conducted experiments on a premise advanced by the late Dr. Lewis Weed of Johns Hopkins on intraspinal dynamics.

  The two scientists were attempting to prove or disprove Dr. Weed’s theory, and they eventually advanced their own theory. On some afternoons would come Mrs. Pollock, ‘Pinky,’ and Mrs. Davis, ‘Lucky,’ who had been an actress on the legitimate stage. She would bring along a feisty little girl named Anne Frances, whose nickname became, and still is, Nancy. One of my jobs was to ‘contain’ Anne Frances. But it was pleasurable for me to gaze with only lateral vision upon Mrs. Davis’s friend, whom she brought along now and then—Helen Hayes. And Mrs. Pollock and Mrs. Davis brought picnic luncheons for their husbands. I never rated one finger sandwich by invitation, or even as a leftover. But part of my neurological training included painting Easter eggs for Mrs. Davis and dressing and undressing Kachina dolls for Mrs. Pollock.”87

  It is clear from a short note from Loyal, typed on his office stationery, to his stepdaughter that the doctor quickly became the child’s disciplinarian: Nancy dear:

  I am sorry too that you had a little lapse of memory. We won’t do that again, will we? You must always be the ladylike Nancy that you really are, regardless of what other little girls with whom you play do or say.

  Night, big boy. Sleep tight. I’ll wake you in the morning when I leave.

  Doctor Loyal88

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  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Not long after Loyal and Edith married, Ken Robbins paid a visit to Chicago. Photographs from the summer of 1929 show Nancy and her father looking fairly comfortable with each other at a Lake Michigan beach or marina. Nancy, a chubby eight-year-old with a half-smile, is wearing a T-shirt with an airplane stenciled across the front, shorts, and a bathing cap. Ken, then a thirty-five-year-old real estate salesman with a receding hairline, looks rather prosperous, wearing a three-piece suit with a white shirt, silk tie, and pocket handkerchief in one picture, and a long terry cloth robe over a two-piece bathing suit in a second. In another photograph, most likely also taken that summer, because Nancy looks the same in it, she is standing between her grandmother and stepmother in a garden—probably at the house in suburban New Jersey that Ken and Patsie shared with Nannee Robbins.89

  Although the terms of Edith’s divorce from Ken are unclear, Kitty Kelley claims, “Edith made sure that Nancy spent part of every summer in New Jersey with him.”90 Nancy Reagan, on the other hand, has written, “I visited with my father only a few times when I was young. He had remarried, and his wife was a very nice woman who tried to make me welcome on my visits. They once took me on a trip to Niagara Falls. My father tried to please me, but too many years had gone by and we were really strangers to each other. As I look back, I am sure he was unhappy about it.”91

  There are photographs of Nancy with her father’s family two summers later, including one of her, age ten and looking slimmer, standing under a Canadian flag at Niagara Falls. Another records the Robbinses’ visit to Patsie’s sister in upstate New York, probably on that same trip. “Nancy had beautiful manners,” Patsie’s niece, Orme Staudinger, told a reporter from People magazine years later. A shot of Nancy and her father swinging golf clubs appears to be from the same period.92 Again, they seem to be getting along fine.

  Nancy probably met her stepbrother, Richard, for the first time in 1930, when he came to spend the summer with his father under the terms of his parents’ divorce agreement. His mother, he told me, “never remarried. She became really ill with tuberculosis in 1929 or 1930, which really frightened my father, because there was no treatment then—the only treatment for TB in those days was warm weather; streptomycin came out in about 1950. So she suffered terribly, and I watched her die. She died at the age of forty-three, on April 23, 1939.” Until Pearl’s death, Richard spent nine months of each year with her, first in Phoenix and from 1931

  Early Nancy: 1921–1932

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  in Beverly Hills, and three months with Loyal and Edith in Chicago. According to Richard, he was five years old when he and Nancy met, and she was nine, and they took an immediate liking to each other. “We played a game called Help! Murder! Police!,” he said, “with both of us jumping all over the furniture. We had a very, very good time.”93

  In all previous accounts of her childhood, including her own, Nancy was enrolled in Chicago’s most elite private school immediately after moving to the city. According to records at the Girls Latin School of Chicago, however, she didn’t start there until three years later. Her application indicated that she had come from the University School for Girls, a private school on Lake Shore Drive, which lacked the social cachet of Girls Latin.

  It is now defunct, so records that would show exactly when she started there are unavailable, though presumably she entered the second grade in the fall of 1928.

  When I asked her about attending the University School, she said, “I just remember Latin School had a waiting list, and Mother could not get me in when she wanted to, so I went to this other school for a couple of years.”94 It may have been that the conservative Girls Latin School looked askance at the daughter of a divorced single actress, as Edith was her first year in Chicago, but was more amenable three years later, by which time she had consolidated her social position as the wife of an increasingly respected doctor.

  Nancy started at Girls Latin in the fifth grade in September 1931. “She was very friendly and she fit in well,” said Jean Wescott Marshall, who became her best friend at the school. According to Marshall, Nancy was already self-conscious about her weight—“She watched what she ate. She was very careful about it.”—and she worshipped her stepfat
her. “She thought he was absolutely the tops. She really admired him. He was quite a person. Very strict. Very imposing. Her mother had a wonderful sense of humor. She and Nancy were very close.”95

  School records indicate that the Davises had moved from Edith’s old apartment on East Pearson Street by then. Their new apartment was two blocks north in a doorman building at 237 East Delaware Place, and, as Richard recalled, it had three bedrooms and a dining room. In 1932, Loyal was made chairman of Northwestern’s department of surgery, the position formerly occupied by Dr. Kanavel. There was some concern about his age, thirty-six, but, as the dean of the school observed, “time would take care of that objection.”96 He also became chief of surgery at Passavant that year, 5 6

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House again following Dr. Kanavel. And his reputation was growing: Dr. Franklin H. Martin, the founder of the American College of Surgeons, asked him to give the John B. Murphy Oration at the organization’s annual conference, held in Chicago that fall. Loyal was already working on his biography of Murphy, the controversial Chicago surgeon who saved Theodore Roosevelt’s life after a 1912 assassination attempt, which would be published in America and England the following year.97

  In October 1932, Edith relaunched her show-business career, taking a part in one of NBC radio’s first soap operas. After three years away from the stage, she couldn’t resist the lure of the glamorous—and lucrative—

  new medium. On Betty and Bob, Edith played both a high-society matron with a pretentious British accent and her black maid, Gardenia, who had lines such as “Sho is good to have you back, Mistah Bob.” The fifteen-minute melodrama was on the air five afternoons a week and ran for nine years. Sponsored by Wheaties cereal, Gold Medal flour, and Bisquick, it

  “set the standard for all the washboard weepers that would follow,”98

  according to radio historian John Dunning.

  According to Kitty Kelley, Edith earned between $500 and $1,000 a month from Betty and Bob, while Loyal was being paid “$150 for performing prefrontal lobotomies.”99 But Loyal wrote that his fee for a “brain operation” was $500 in the mid-1930s.100 In either case, the additional income from Edith’s radio work must have come in handy, because earlier that year the Davises had moved again—to the first of the three apartments they would occupy on East Lake Shore Drive, Chicago’s equivalent of Fifth Avenue facing Central Park. The three-bedroom apartment at 219

  East Lake Shore Drive was not much larger than the one on East Delaware Place, but it faced Oak Street Beach and was just around the corner from the Drake, Chicago’s best hotel. Edith decorated it herself “in a very traditional style, not lavish at all,” Richard Davis said, remembering that his stepmother was very proud of her “one antique—a piecrust table from England.”101

  At forty-five, Edith was finally where she wanted to be—on the best block in the city, up the street from Mr. and Mrs. W. Rockefeller Prentice, who would soon become good friends, and next door to Edward Joseph Kelly, the new political pal who invited her and Nancy to the 1932 Democratic convention. At the time, the rough-and-ready Kelly held two plum municipal posts, chief engineer of the Sanitary District and president of the South Park Board, and had a reputation for getting things Early Nancy: 1921–1932

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  done while enriching himself in the process. In February 1933, Mayor Anton Cermak was shot in Miami by an anarchist whose intended target was President-elect Franklin Roosevelt. After weeks of backroom machinations, the city council installed Kelly as mayor.

  Lester Weinrott, who worked with Edith on Betty and Bob, described her in those days:

  Her face was beautiful, a classic face; her smile warmed the eye and the heart of the beholder. Her hair, under her Bes-Ben hat, had begun to gray. She wore a smartly tailored suit, white kid gloves, mid-heel pumps—and—a corsage made of two tightly wrapped white carnations. (No ribbon or fern—just the flowers.) She started each day at the Merchandise Mart (NBC). Her first stop was at Daskiel & Shapiro, the florists. Here she would select a single gardenia, two baby orchids, carnations or whatever. Here, too, she would tell a new joke. She seemed to have a new one every day.

  Where did she get her stories? From the policeman who directed traffic at Lake Shore and Michigan, from the Drake hotel doorman, from a cab driver—she knew them all and they all knew her. It was not uncommon to be walking down Michigan Avenue with Edie and have a cabbie shout, “Hi, Miz Davis!”102

  C H A P T E R T H R E E

  IOWA

  1933–1937

  “Everything comes to him that waits”—But here is one that’s slicker: The man who goes after what he wants, Gets it a darn sight quicker.

  An optimist is the one who sees a light where there is none. A pessimist is one who blows it out.

  A “specialist” is one who knows more and more about less and less.

  Keep your head cool—feet warm—mind busy. Plan work ahead and stick to it—rain or shine. If you are a gem, someone will find you.

  From As a Man Thinketh by B. J. Palmer, founder of WOC Radio, Davenport, Iowa1

  The memories of friendships dear

  Give strength that we endure

  And the Great Purpose of it all

  Hold steadfast, and more sure.

  From “My New Year Poem 1935–36”

  by Nelle Reagan2

  EDITH DAVIS WASN’T THE ONLY ONE PURSUING A CAREER IN RADIO IN THE

  fall of 1932. After his lifeguard job in Dixon ended on that Labor Day, Ronald Reagan hitchhiked to Chicago in hopes of getting an interview at the National Broadcasting Company or the Columbia Broadcasting System, the booming new radio networks that had been established in the late 1920s by David Sarnoff and William S. Paley, respectively. Although the twenty-one-year-old Ronald didn’t even get to see the program directors at NBC and CBS, by 1934 he was becoming well known across the Midwest as Dutch Reagan, sports announcer for WHO in Des Moines, Iowa.

  It is hard to imagine how omnipresent, powerful, and glamorous radio was in the 1930s and 1940s. The biggest stars at NBC and CBS—George 5 8

  Iowa: 1933–1937

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  Burns and Gracie Allen, Jack Benny, Red Skelton, the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy Charlie McCarthy—were as famous as, and made as much money as, the top movie stars at MGM and Paramount Pictures.

  Amos ’n’ Andy, which starred Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll and went on the air in 1928 (it stayed on until 1960), was so popular that some movie theaters installed radios and interrupted their evening screenings so that audiences wouldn’t have to miss a single fifteen-minute episode.

  In Where’s the Rest of Me?, Reagan makes much of the first time he heard a crystal set, as early radios were called, at Nelle’s sister’s farm near Morrison, Illinois: “I remember sitting with a dozen others in a little room with breath-less attention, a pair of earphones attached tightly to my head, scratching a crystal with a wire. I was listening to raspy recorded music and faint voices saying, ‘This is KDKA, Pittsburgh, KDKA, Pittsburgh.’”3 According to Anne Edwards, “when the sound faded,” the nine-year-old Ronald stood up

  “and imitated the announcer. Everyone laughed and he repeated the performance.”4 Edwards places this scene at Christmastime 1920, not long after KDKA, the first commercial radio station in the nation, had begun regular broadcasts that November 2 with the returns of the Harding-Cox presidential election.5

  However, Edmund Morris quotes a 1984 speech in which Reagan said this momentous event took place “one Sunday afternoon” in Dixon. In this version, the Reagan boys had borrowed a crystal set from a neighbor:

  “My brother and I and a couple of other kids walked all over town trying to find if we could hear something. And finally we went down by the river and something was coming! We passed the headphones around and heard this orchestra playing, coming out of the air! Let me tell you, that was a miracle. ‘This is KDKA Pittsburgh—KDKA Pittsburgh.’ We were actually hearing this. . . . Ca
n you imagine our sense of wonder? You know, none of the developments that came after, talkies and television and so forth, were ever such a revelation as that day I first scratched that crystal with a wire whisker under the bridge at Dixon.”6

  Ronald Reagan’s decision to go into radio came after a talk with Sid Altschuler, the Kansas City businessman who had become a mentor to him at Lowell Park during the summer of 1932. After graduating from Eureka College, Dutch, as everyone called him by then, was back on his lifeguard stand with no clear idea about his future—the only certainty seemed to be 6 0

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House that he would marry Margaret Cleaver. “This depression isn’t going to last forever,” the farsighted Altschuler told him, “and smart businessmen are willing to take on young men who can learn their business in order to have trained manpower on hand when things start to roll.” Dutch, whose father was unemployed and spending most of his time campaigning for FDR, later wrote that it was “literally the first note of optimism I’d heard about the state of the nation.” Altschuler then asked him the question he had been avoiding since graduating from Eureka that June: “What do you think you’d like to do?” Dutch said he didn’t know. “When you determine what line of work you want to get in, let me know,” Altschuler told him,

  “and if it’s one of those areas where I can help, I’ll get you a job.”7

  Dutch spent several sleepless nights mulling over his future before going back to Altschuler with an answer. “Out of the things that Sid had talked about came a new approach. No longer did I speculate about a paycheck and security. I really wrestled with the problem of what I would be happy doing for the next few decades.” Thinking back on the thrill of winning a prize for his acting in Aria da Capo the year before, he admitted to himself that he had a “secret dream to be an actor” but was afraid to declare it “in the middle of Illinois in 1932” for fear he would be institutionalized, as he half-jokingly put it. He also reasoned, “Broadway and Hollywood were as inaccessible as outer space,” but there was a form of show business