Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  East Lake Shore Drive: 1933–1939

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  “When my father would leave for the hospital each morning, and her husband, Homer, would leave for the office, she and Mother would be on the phone with each other planning their day. What one didn’t think of, the other did.”51 She told me, “They would figure out what kind of mischief they were going to get into that day. And Colleen would be miffed if for some reason she couldn’t get Mother on the phone.”52

  Both women served on the Women’s Board of Passavant Hospital, along with such prominent social figures as Abra Rockefeller Prentice and Narcissa Ward Thorne, whose father-in-law was a co-founder of Montgomery Ward & Company. Narcissa Thorne shared Colleen Moore’s passion for grandiose dollhouses. The Thorne Miniature Rooms, like the Doll House scaled one inch to the foot, were first shown publicly at Chicago’s

  “Century of Progress” World’s Fair in 1933, and were eventually put on permanent display at the Art Institute of Chicago. The Doll House went to Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry.

  Narcissa Thorne maintained a studio near her Gold Coast apartment, where skilled craftsmen and society ladies sat side by side, the former carv-ing miniature reproductions of period settees, the latter stitching tiny pillows to put on them. Nancy Reagan told me that Mrs. Thorne had given her one of the more modest rooms she made for the children of friends. “I have it in the guest room,” she said, adding that she was impressed by Narcissa Thorne because she was so refined and “always looked perfect. Her posture was so straight and erect. You know, she was from that old school.

  And she was crazy about my father.”53

  Chicago’s society was relatively open, more like New York’s than Boston’s or Philadelphia’s. Accomplishment counted as much as lineage, and giving back in the form of charitable donations and deeds was a recognized means of social advancement. The city’s leading families had made their fortunes in trade and industry in the late nineteenth century: the Armours and Swifts in meatpacking, the Palmers and Fields in retailing; the McCormicks in farm machinery; the Wrigleys in chewing gum.

  When Edith moved to town, second- and third-generation members of those families dominated the boards of the city’s great institutions. Unlike Colleen, however, Edith never made it onto the most elite boards—those of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Lyric Opera—perhaps because the Davises weren’t rich enough, perhaps because her bawdy jokes crossed the line of decorum. Nonetheless she dedicated herself to such charities as the Red Cross and the Seeing Eye and moved comfortably in upper-class circles.

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  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House

  “She was a doer,” said Judy Hargrave Coleman about Edith’s fund-raising abilities. “You couldn’t say no to Mrs. Davis.”54

  “Edith was a total extrovert—uncontrolled,” said Richard Davis.55 “You couldn’t help but love her,” said Lester Weinrott, Edith’s friend and radio producer. “She was this adorable darling little woman with a phony theatrical Southern accent who always made you feel good just being around her. Yes, she swore like a drafted Turkish sailor and told smutty toilet jokes, but Loyal pretended not to hear, because she was paying all the bills and introducing him to the right people. I was so crazy about her I ended up being her educated slave for forty years. She could get people to do anything for her, and I have to say that Nancy, who never had her mother’s spontaneous charm and warmth, certainly learned how to manipulate from a genius. She was schooled by a social mechanic of the first order.”56

  Edith liked giving small dinner parties, especially after she and Loyal moved to their duplex at 199 East Lake Shore Drive, which had a living room, dining room, and library downstairs and three bedrooms upstairs.

  Like her charity work, Edith’s dinners revealed a social agenda. According to Richard Davis, who moved in with Edith and Loyal after his mother’s death in 1939, his father was initially a reluctant participant in Edith’s efforts. “She had to force him, really, to have people in. She was very gregarious and interested in social contacts—not only for him, but for Nancy.”

  He added, “Dr. Loyal was an opinionated man. When friends were invited over, he had to dominate the conversation.”57

  Davis described these dinner parties as jovial but serious affairs. “There was never a lot of drinking. It was one drink and then into the dining room. Except for a very occasional cocktail party, they never had more than eight or ten people, because that was all the dining room would hold.”58 Although Edith wasn’t much of cook—the Davises had a housekeeper who came in every day and fixed the evening meal—she sent the local society editors homemade mustard at Christmas, in jars labeled “From the kitchen of Mrs. Loyal Davis.”59

  Among those who sometimes came to dinner were Mayor Kelly and his second wife, Margaret, who became one of Edith’s best friends. The rough-and-ready Kelly always seemed to be denying involvement in one corruption scandal or another—among other things, he was accused of not reporting $450,000 in income and settled with the IRS for $106,390 to avoid prosecution60—but he had managed to put the city’s financial affairs in order soon after assuming office in 1933. Two years later, riding high on East Lake Shore Drive: 1933–1939

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  the repeal of Prohibition and the success of the 1933 World’s Fair, Kelly was elected to the first of three full terms by the greatest margin in Chicago history—799,060 to 167,106 for his Republican opponent. There were credible charges that as many as 300,000 of the votes were stolen, but that didn’t stop Kelly from putting his vote total on the license plates of his Cadillac.61

  “I learned many things about the workings of city, county, and state government from Ed Kelly,” Republican Loyal later wrote of the Democratic mayor. “A tall, redheaded Irishman with a quick wit, uneducated beyond grade school, he attracted people mainly, I think, because they identified with him in his mispronunciation of words and his laboring-class background.”62 Edith, still a self-professed Southern Democrat, was as usual less condescending and more practical: she gave Mayor Kelly elocution lessons and helped him write his radio addresses.

  Meanwhile, Loyal’s star continued to rise in the world of medicine. In 1936

  he was elected to membership in both the American Surgical Association, which in his words was “the most prestigious surgical society in the United States,” and the snobbish Southern Surgical Association, which held annual meetings at expensive resorts such as the Homestead in Hot Springs, Virginia, which were attended by the doctors’ wives. (Loyal claimed that Edith’s Southern background was the real reason he was invited to join.) In 1938, six years after he succeeded Dr. Kanavel as chief surgeon at Passavant and chairman of the surgery department at Northwestern, Loyal’s great mentor was killed in a car crash while vacationing in California, and Loyal was named to replace him as editor in chief of Surgery, Gynecology & Ob-stetrics, the professional journal of the American College of Surgeons. For all his honors and titles, Loyal was hardly making a fortune. His university position was unpaid, which was not unusual for medical schools at the time. “The majority of the medical profession,” Loyal wrote, “held that doctors were not subject to the temptations of average human beings and would resist the lure of money.”63 While Lester Weinrott’s assertion that Edith paid for everything was exaggerated, her substantial radio earnings were what made their affluent way of life possible.

  On January 17, 1938, Edith started working in a new radio soap opera called The Stepmother, produced and directed by Weinrott at CBS, while continuing to do Betty and Bob at NBC. Sponsored by Colgate toothpaste, the serial was about the daughter of a Chicago newspaperman who becomes the second wife of a small-town widowed banker with two children.

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  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House According to John Dunning’s On the Air: “Stepmother posed the question

  ‘Can a stepmother successfully raise another woman’s children?’” Edith, with her knack for Southern accents, pl
ayed the family’s “faithful colored servant,” Mattie.64 If the plot echoed the Hargraves’ domestic situation, the theme was not unfamiliar to the Davis household. Three months after The Stepmother premiered, and nine years after her mother had remarried, Nancy, at age sixteen, was adopted by her stepfather on April 20. Nancy Robbins was finally Nancy Davis. A sign of how eager she was for that to happen can be seen in the Girls Latin yearbook of the previous June, in which she had already dropped her birth father’s name for her stepfather’s.65

  In later accounts of what was one of the most important events of her life, Nancy Reagan was consistently vague about the time that elapsed between her mother’s remarriage and her adoption. That is partly because of the two years she subtracted from her age when she went to Hollywood, but also it must have been hard for her to face the fact of Loyal’s reluctance. It wasn’t that he didn’t love her; he worried about hurting Ken Robbins. Richard Davis explained that Nancy was his father’s favorite: “She’d sit in his lap, or at the foot of his chair. I wouldn’t say she was in awe of him, but there was an enormous respect. They were very, very close.”66

  In the end Nancy initiated the adoption process, not Loyal. For nine years she had sought to live up to his standards and values. In doing so, she had shaped herself into what he wanted her to be: neat, disciplined, agreeable, perfect. Along the way she must have learned valuable lessons about how to persuade the powerful man to see things her way. But that’s not something she would ever admit. In her telling, she did what Dr. Loyal wanted her to do, and Dr. Loyal was always right. As she wrote in My Turn, “Loyal Davis was a man of great integrity who exemplified old-fashioned values: That girls and boys should grow up to be ladies and gentlemen. That children should respect and obey their parents. That no matter what you did, you should never cheapen yourself. And that whatever you worked at—whether it was a complicated medical procedure, or a relatively simple act like sweeping the floor—you should do it as well as you could. . . . When I started going out at night, I always had a curfew.

  But although he was a strict father, he was always fair. He was, I felt, what a real father ought to be.”67

  Or, as she put it in Nancy: “Some people you meet in your life make you stretch to reach your fullest capabilities. I found my new father to be one of these people, which is why he was such a good teacher when he was East Lake Shore Drive: 1933–1939

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  Professor of Surgery at Northwestern University. He always demanded the best of you and made you want to give the best you had. He was strict but fair with me, as he was with his students. They came to respect him as I came to respect him. When he took privileges away from me as punishment for some misdeed, I understood I deserved the discipline. He was, I feel, the way a father should be.”68

  She did everything possible to please him: She chewed her food thirty-two times.69 She was always on time. (“He was a stickler about punctual-ity. When he said six o’clock, he didn’t mean two minutes after six.”)70 She tagged along on emergency calls outside Chicago. After she entered her teens, he permitted her to watch him operate, usually from a glassed-in balcony but on at least one occasion standing beside him in the operating room. (Years later she told a reporter that she had always worried about getting sick to her stomach and embarrassing him.) She promised not to drink or smoke until she was twenty-one, and kept her promise. (Loyal kept his, too, and rewarded her with $1,000.)71

  She became as interested in clothes and grooming as he was. In fact, in my interviews with Davis family friends, they almost always brought up Loyal’s style and appearance, but rarely mentioned Edith’s. “He was immaculately dressed,” Abra Rockefeller Wilkin told me.72 “My goodness, that man was very, very meticulous about his appearance and clothes,” said racetrack owner Marjorie Everett, a close family friend from both Chicago and Arizona. “Loyal Davis epitomized what you’d like to see in a doctor.

  Very distinguished-looking. Great style. Beautifully groomed. I’m certain that some of the qualities that we see in Nancy—the discipline especially—

  came from him.”73

  One of the most important ways that Nancy got closer to her stepfather was by accompanying him on his trips home to Galesburg. “Since my mother’s parents passed on early, I never knew them, so my father’s parents were especially important to me,” she later said. “They treated me as if I were their real grandchild, and I felt as if I were. They were good, hardworking people, proud of their son, happy with the second marriage he had made, happy with Mother and me. I adored my grandfather and vividly recall the last time I saw him. He was dying of cancer and I went to visit him in Galesburg. We both knew it would be our last time together, although those words were never spoken. We said our good-byes, and as I was leaving, I turned to look back before getting in the car. He was standing at the window and managed a weak wave. I waved back, threw him a kiss, and hurried 8 8

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House into the car so he would not see the tears streaming down my face.”74 (Albert Davis died in 1938.)

  Meanwhile, her relationship with Ken Robbins was deteriorating. In recounting her “last visit” to her father in New Jersey, she wrote that “things went badly. He said something about Mother I didn’t like and it made me angry. I said I was going to call my mother and go home. He got upset and locked me in the bathroom. I was terrified, and it seemed suddenly as if I were with strangers. Recalling the incident brings back a flood of memories I would rather forget. To this day I dislike locked doors and feel trapped behind them. His wife felt terrible and later wrote to my mother to apologize, but there were no more visits.”75

  But when did this traumatic incident occur? It seems unlikely that it happened in the apparently happy summer of 1931, when she was ten, because in My Turn she refers to visiting her father during her adolescence, which would mean that she spent time with him until she was at least thirteen or fourteen. Marian Robinson, whose father was Ken’s first cousin, placed Nancy in New Jersey in the late 1930s, adding, “[Nannee Robbins]

  told me . . . that I should learn some of the social graces that Nancy had.”76

  Another Robbins cousin, Kathleen Young, talked about visiting the Davises on East Lake Shore Drive in 1936, indicating that relations had not broken down between the two families. “I was awed by Nancy,” said Kathleen, who was four years younger, “because she was very pretty and she had angora socks hanging in the bathroom. The Davises bought me all new clothes and took me to the best French restaurants in town, and I ordered for them because I spoke French.”77

  Nancy Reagan never gave a date for the time her father locked her in the bathroom. “Oh, dear, I don’t remember,” she said when I asked her how old she was then. “That’s going back a lot of years.”78 Could it be that she exaggerated her birth father’s behavior in an effort to win her stepfather’s sympathy and get him to adopt her?

  In any case, she finally took matters into her own hands and one day in the elevator approached a neighbor who was a retired judge. “I asked him,

  ‘How can I go about getting adopted?’ [He] called my mother, and she must have approved because he volunteered to help me with the paperwork. I already knew that according to Illinois law, a child who reached the age of 14

  could make her own decision on matters of adoption. By then there was no longer any question in my mind, and I finally made it official by going to see Kenneth Robbins in New York. He came with my grandmother to meet me East Lake Shore Drive: 1933–1939

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  under the clock at the Biltmore Hotel. I explained what I wanted to do, and they agreed, reluctantly. I’m sure it hurt my grandmother terribly. When Kenneth Robbins signed the papers, I sent a wire to Chicago to tell my family that the adoption had gone through. I didn’t have much experience with telegrams, but I knew they had to be brief. This one read: hi dad.”79

  She explained to me that she had passed through New York on her Easter break. “I was going to Bermuda to spend the
vacation with some girls from my school, and I wrote my father that I’d like to see him. I felt badly. But then, you know, this was obviously the right thing to do.”80

  Loyal Davis matter-of-factly confirms the extraordinary role his stepdaughter played in her adoption: “Nancy had taken the initiative and consulted Orville Taylor, an attorney who lived in the same apartment building, about the steps necessary for me to adopt her. I wished it very much but was somewhat hesitant to institute the proceeding because her father and paternal grandmother were alive. After she was advised by her attorney, she made a trip east . . . obtained her father’s signed agreement, and upon her return I soon had my daughter legally.”81

  According to Cook County records, her petition for adoption, filed on April 19, 1938, stated “that the natural parents of said child are divorced, and that the mother of said child has since married Loyal Davis . . . and that the father of said child, Kenneth S. Robbins, consents in writing to the adoption of said child by the petitioners, and . . . that said minor child being more than 14 years of age likewise consents in writing to her adoption.” The petition also requested that her name be legally changed from Anne Frances Robbins to Nancy Davis.82

  Even after Nancy was adopted, she continued to address her stepfather as Dr. Loyal. “I knew he would have loved it if I had called him Dad,” she wrote in My Turn, “and in retrospect I wish I had. But at the time I just couldn’t. Although we became very close, it wasn’t until my own daughter was born that I finally dropped the formal title. When Patti was too young to say ‘Grandpa,’ she called him Bapa—and so did I.”83

  In the spring of 1938, Nancy was in her junior year at Girls Latin. Pretty, happy, and popular, she was dating the equally popular Sock Hettler, who was in the same year at Boys Latin. She was on the hockey team, in the Glee Club, and president of the Drama Club. That summer she turned seventeen and went to Lake Arrowhead with her parents to spend several weeks with Uncle Walter Huston. One day her idol Jimmy Stewart—tall, 9 0