Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  as she put it, on a thirty-three-year-old actor and dancer named Buddy Ebsen, who had just starred in a movie called Parachute Battalion and would eventually become a household name playing the cornpone grandfather on The Beverly Hillbillies.70

  Apparently that was also the summer when Nancy saw Ken Robbins for the last time. A pair of snapshots in a Robbins family scrapbook, dated 1941 and labeled Massachusetts, show father and daughter standing together in front of what appears to be a beach house, Ken looking portly in a business suit, Nancy stylish in a light-colored shirtwaist dress.

  He was forty-seven and a partner in a New Jersey Chrysler-Plymouth dealership, although within three years he would lose his share of the business and never hold a steady job again.71 When I asked Nancy Reagan about this visit, she insisted that she never saw her father during her college years, and that the photos must have been taken at least two years earlier. One of these pictures was found in Robbins’s wallet when he died in 1972.

  Nancy at Smith: 1939–1944

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  When Nancy returned to Smith that fall, she had a new roommate, a Jewish girl from New York who was also a drama major. “She was better suited to Nancy than I was,” Jean Wescott told me, adding that Nancy

  “got in with some people that I didn’t care for, and we just sort of grew apart for a while.”72

  According to Kitty Kelley, “Homosexuality was an unspoken fact of life in the all-female environment of Smith College,” and Nancy had a

  “secret but romantic” relationship with a “classmate who later became an avowed lesbian. The lesbian classmate was involved in the theater and very popular on campus.”73 When I asked Richard Davis about this, he told me, “I remember Nancy joking one Christmas when she came home from Smith that some girl had fallen in love with her, and given her flowers.”74

  Davis pointed out that Nancy was always comfortable around homosexuals of both sexes. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “the men she gets along with are a little effeminate.”75 Davis put Nancy’s high school beau, Sock Hettler, whom he said she continued to see when she was home from college, in this category, as well as James Platt White Jr., the Amherst man she would start dating in her senior year at Smith, but not Frank Birney, whom she later called “my first serious boyfriend.”76

  Nancy and Frank had started seeing each other after her coming-out party in December 1939. “I would go to Princeton for football games and dances, he would come to Smith for dances, or we would meet in New York for a weekend, ‘under the clock’ at the Biltmore Hotel,” she later wrote, hastening to add that she stayed on the hotel’s girls-only floor.

  “Frank and I went together for about eighteen months,” she continued.

  “We talked a little bit about getting married, but it ended in tragedy before that ever happened.”77

  On December 15, 1941, Birney’s life came to a mysterious end. In Nancy’s telling, he was accidentally killed while running across the tracks to catch a train from Princeton to New York, where she was waiting for him.

  But a strong case can be made that Birney, despondent about having to spend part of Christmas vacation at Princeton making up bad grades and perhaps in emotional turmoil one week after Pearl Harbor, deliberately threw himself in front of the train. Bruce McFarland, one of Nancy’s Boys Latin friends, told me, “I knew Frank fairly well at Princeton. His roommate, Geoffrey Montgomery Talbot Jones, was my best friend. Frank was a neat guy, but I’m almost certain he was a manic-depressive. And he committed suicide—no matter what Nancy says.”78

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  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House In his memoir, Christian Gauss, the dean of Princeton at the time, states that several Tiger Inn members told him that Birney had been “much depressed” and that a telegram from his sister was found in his room, “indicating she was clearly worried about his depression.” The account that Gauss gives of Birney’s death clearly suggests that suicide was the probable cause, and his use of the initials “J.S.” to disguise the student’s identity supports the assumption that it was not an accident: I learned at the station that J.S. had tried to catch a train to the Junction to meet one for New York at 6:40, but the train pulled out while he was rushing across the platform. A taxi man drove him to the Junction but too late for the connection. J.S. gave him a dollar.

  He walked down the tracks one-third of a mile toward Philadelphia. What thoughts led him to this pass? And yet it is possible to believe, as his parents would so like to do, that he was robbed and thrown upon the tracks. It is odd that his ring was missing and there was nothing, not even a penny, in his pocket when he had at the outset clearly intended to go to New York.79

  The Daily Princetonian reported the following day that the train’s engineer “saw the victim leap from behind the pole to the track, [and] he gave a long blast of his whistle and applied his brake but was unable to bring the train to a stop before it struck the man.”80 According to Kitty Kelley, “a close Princeton friend” found a suicide note in Birney’s wastebasket and gave it to Birney’s brother-in-law, who had come down from New York to identify the body. Kelley claims that Birney was on his way to New York to see his sister, not Nancy, and that “Nancy’s Talbot house-mates, none of whom ever met Frank Birney, remember her being at Smith the weekend she got the news of his death.”81

  Nancy may have been protecting Frank’s family by leaving them out of her pared-down recollection. Though she doesn’t reveal her source, Anne Edwards writes in Early Reagan that when the call came Nancy was at the apartment of Birney’s “brother and sister-in-law.” They were so concerned about his mental state that they had persuaded him to come up to New York for a night, and had also contacted Nancy at Smith, who “offered to come down to see if she couldn’t help to cheer up the despondent Birney.”82 Another of Birney’s Princeton friends, Richard E. Pate, recalled,

  “We had to bring the body home for the funeral right before Christmas, which was really rough on Frank’s parents. Nancy was almost constant in Nancy at Smith: 1939–1944

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  her attendance on Mrs. Birney during that time, and I would say that she as much as anyone made life halfway livable for the Birneys then.”83

  “It was the first time that anybody I was close to had died,” Nancy later wrote, “and it was a tremendous shock. My roommate forced me to go out and take long, brisk walks. Frank and I skirted around the subject of marriage, and even though I doubt it would have worked out, he was a dear friend and I felt a great loss. His mother gave me his cigarette case as a me-mento—a silver case I had given him the previous Christmas with his name engraved on it. He had been carrying that case when he was killed, and I still have it.”84

  Bruce McFarland, who continued to see Nancy in Chicago when she was home from Smith and he from Princeton, told me she had never mentioned that she was dating a classmate of his. “Apparently it was a terrible blow to her,” McFarland said. “But I was unaware of that at the time. Totally unaware. I didn’t even know they knew each other. She’s very close-mouthed about things like that. And we weren’t romantic at all. We just happened to see each other at parties and went out occasionally together.”85

  “I remember how depressed Nancy was,” Richard Davis said. “But she never mentioned suicide. No one could be sure. You know, all those kids drank a lot. And he just ran across the railroad tracks one night.”86

  America’s entry into World War II at the end of 1941 brought major changes to the Smith campus. Maid service was suspended, and there were regular air raid drills. Some nine hundred Smith students joined the Waves, the women’s volunteer branch of the Naval Reserve. Gas shortages also meant less driving back and forth to Amherst, seven miles away.87 Nonetheless, a group of Smith and Amherst students, including Nancy, formed an ad hoc theater group they called the Bandar-log, after the wild and lawless

  “monkey people” in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. In the spring of 1942 they put on a musical comedy titled Ladies on the
Loose, which sent up college life. Nancy did a sexy song-and-dance routine wearing a banana headdress à la Carmen Miranda.88

  That year she invited a new beau to spend Easter vacation with her family at the Arizona Biltmore. Brent Starck was from Chicago; his family owned P. A. Starck & Company, a manufacturer of pianos and player pianos. “Brent was a red-blooded American boy,” Richard Davis recalled.

  “He was in college someplace in Illinois. I don’t think he went to school in 1 3 8

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House the East. But the Starck family was very prominent, very wealthy. We went out to Phoenix on the Super Chief together.”89

  That summer Nancy did summer stock with the Coach House Players in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin.90 A Chicago society columnist reported that the “company was domiciled in the fine old coach house of Danforth Lodge, Mrs. Patrick Valentine’s beautiful home on Lac La Belle.”91 Mrs.

  Valentine was the friend of Edith’s who had given a dinner party for Nancy when she came out. This was Nancy’s third summer in summer stock, and as she would later write, “Only once in those summers did I actually appear on stage, in a play with Diana Barrymore. I played the maid who announced, ‘Madam, dinner is served.’ ”92

  Nonetheless, according to Richard Davis, she was so determined to have a theatrical career that “she threatened not to go back to Smith to graduate. My father was five thousand miles away in Europe, but he raised the roof: she had to graduate.”93

  In July 1942, Loyal had been summoned to Washington by Dr. Fred Rankin, a Lexington, Kentucky, surgeon who had been appointed chief of surgery of the U.S. Army. Rankin asked Loyal to go overseas as a senior consultant in neurological surgery in the European theater of operations. He accepted with alacrity, but panicked on the flight back to Chicago: “I was obsessed with the idea of getting home quickly; my disturbing affliction of nostalgia had recurred in a serious attack. I wondered what I would do in England suffering from homesickness.” After consulting with Edith, Dr.

  Pollock, and Dean Cutter, he decided to stick with his decision to accept the appointment.94 “It all happened so fast,” Richard Davis recalled. “He was called to Washington the first week of July ’42, and my God, he was gone six weeks later. But it was a great honor.”95

  “The night before Loyal left, Edith had a little party at home,” Davis continued. “It was more like a wake. All of our friends came in and out—

  Colleen and Homer, Margaret and Ed Kelly, Dean Cutter—like they were passing the coffin. This thing went on and on. Betty and Les Weinrott and the Pollocks were the last ones to leave. It was a grim night. Jesus, we were upset. I mean, he was going overseas for God knows how long.”96

  Before flying to England in September, Loyal spent ten days in Washington being documented, immunized, and fitted for his uniform, helmet, and gas mask. In his memoir, he records being taken to “an unforgettable cocktail party” by Chicago socialite Mrs. Henry “Patsy” Field, who introNancy at Smith: 1939–1944

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  duced him to the wife of General Dwight D. Eisenhower: “Mamie Eisenhower quickly realized that the doctor before her was uncomfortable in his strange clothes, ill at ease in the crowd, and awed by the wife of the general whom he was sure he would see at mess daily, and with whom, undoubtedly, he would have the opportunity of talking at table, even though he might well sit at the foot. She graciously steered the conversation so that a rather detailed recital of my life came pouring out. I was convinced that soon I would be living and working close to the commanding general of the European theater of operations when in excusing myself at Patsy’s insistence, Mrs. Eisenhower instructed me to tell Ike she sent her love.”97

  Loyal never laid eyes on Eisenhower during the ten months he was stationed in England, mainly in Oxford, where he consulted with American, British, and Canadian surgeons on the treatment of airmen and soldiers with cerebral, spinal, and peripheral nerve injuries. He was eventually credited with designing an improved protective helmet for airplane crewmen, as well as diagnosing high-altitude frostbite in airmen and recommending ways to prevent and treat it, though he had to fight military bureaucrats every step of the way to have his innovations accepted.98 In late 1942 he was nearly court-martialed for sending memorandums of his that had been ignored or rejected to colleagues outside the military, but he found a protector in General Paul R. Hawley, the chief surgeon of the European theater.99

  “The trials and tribulations that he had in World War II were extraordinary,” his son told me. “He actually designed plastic headgear for the Eighth Air Force, and he went through all sorts of ballistic tests at Oxford—and they turned that down. Even more devastating to him was that he recognized high-altitude frostbite in the airmen, but the Air Force physicians insisted that the airmen were burned—and of course they were absolutely wrong. For someone at the age of forty-seven who was a very accomplished neurosurgeon—and used to having his own way, too—it was a real blow to him. He simply couldn’t tolerate the bureaucracy. But nevertheless, he was given the Legion of Merit, and he came out a colonel.”100

  While her husband was overseas, Edith apparently had difficulty making ends meet. Betty and Bob had been canceled in 1940, and The Stepmother in July 1942, though she still sometimes played on the long-running soap opera Ma Perkins. 101 According to Richard Davis, “The rent at 199 [East Lake Shore Drive] was $500 a month—I remember hearing that. My father’s salary as a lieutenant colonel was about $850 a month, and he 1 4 0

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House probably sent all of that home. I would think that Edith got a lot of help from the mayor. No question. Somebody had to pay the rent while Loyal was away. I don’t know who paid Nancy’s tuition at Smith. I don’t know who paid my tuition at the Latin School.”102

  If Kelly helped Edith, she also helped him. When he was nominated for a third term in January 1943, she signed on as head of the women’s division of the Citizens’ Committee for Mayor Ed Kelly. That summer she was given a $75-a-week job as an announcer for the city-sponsored concerts in Grant Park. All through the war years, Edith, along with Colleen Moore Hargrave, put in countless hours as a volunteer at the servicemen’s canteens run by Margaret Kelly.103

  The mayor had inaugurated the main Servicemen’s Center in the Loop in August 1941, when America’s armed forces were being built up in anticipation of war. Open twenty-four hours a day, the twelve-story renovated former Elks Club offered military personnel everything from hot meals and beds to bowling alleys and big band entertainment free of charge. In 1942, Kelly opened an outdoor facility on twelve lakefront acres in Lincoln Park and an auxiliary canteen for black servicemen on the South Side. As chairman of this enormous undertaking, his wife often put in twelve-hour days, according to Roger Biles. “Her volunteer helpers ranged from society matrons to maids given time off. Approximately thirty-five hundred women, many of them members of the U.S.O.

  [United Service Organizations], acted as hostesses. . . . An average of ten thousand soldiers passed through the center on a week night, with as many as forty thousand counted on a weekend. . . . The centers constituted such an unqualified success and engendered such goodwill for the city—soldiers from across the nation spoke glowingly of their time spent in Chicago, even years later—that reporters called their operation one of Mayor Kelly’s finest achievements in office.”104

  In her final semester at Smith, Nancy starred in Make with the Maximum: A Factory Follies, “the first musical show ever staged by college girls to entertain war workers.”105 During the spring of 1943, the thirty-three-member cast performed the half-hour revue for more than five thousand workers at defense-related companies, including Westinghouse Electric and U.S. Rubber, in the Connecticut Valley. Wearing a black sheath and long gloves, Nancy played “the Glamour Gal—a Sophisticated Singer.” At the start of the show, she complains that the war has deprived her family of Nancy at Smith: 1939–1944

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  their butler and yacht, sing
ing, “Cocktails at five/Dinner at the Stork/Long drives in the country/To get away from New York.”106 At the end, however, she joins the rest of the cast in the show’s title song: “Make with the maximum/Give with the brawn!/Make with the maximum/Smother that yawn!”107

  They performed the show one last time at the Class of 1943’s graduation ceremony, on May 23, 1943. Neither Loyal nor Edith was present; he was still in England, and she could not travel owing to wartime restrictions. Despite Nancy’s desire to pursue an acting career, she returned to Chicago to stay with her mother until her stepfather completed his tour of service. She found Edith embroiled in a rather ridiculous mess.

  From 1942 to 1946, according to several Reagan biographers, Edith was secretly employed as an “undercover policewoman” by the city, at a salary of $2,141 a year. On May 8, 1943, she had invited several underage sailors to meet young women at her apartment, where a police captain and a lieutenant commander of the shore patrol gave the boys money to take their dates to particular bars; when they were served drinks, police swooped in and arrested the bartenders and owners. The charges were thrown out of court later that month on the grounds of entrapment, “after one of the sailors testified that the raids had indeed been planned at the apartment of a ‘Mrs. Davis on the North Lake Shore.’ ”108 Edith denied everything, but reporters pursued her persistently. When one got Nancy on the telephone, she answered repeatedly, “Not that I know of.”109 For several days in early June, all four Chicago newspapers ran front-page stories with headlines such as is mrs. davis a liquor cop? she won’t talk and mrs. davis, socialite, is a policewoman.110

  Nancy would later tie her mother’s police job to her volunteer work at the Servicemen’s Center. “There was a navy yard nearby,” she writes in My Turn, “and when she learned that some of these young kids were being picked up by prostitutes and infected with venereal diseases, she had herself sworn in as a policewoman so she could go out on the streets of Chicago and protect those boys.”111