Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  Richard Davis was more forthcoming. “She must have been on the city payroll,” he told me, “because one night she went on a raid with the police. Some reporter took a picture, which was on the front page of the Chicago Tribune. And she didn’t have her teeth in. It was a god-awful sort of mini-scandal. I remember this appeared in the Saturday morning paper.

  Sunday morning she took me to lunch at the Casino Club. All the old bid-1 4 2

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House dies greeted her, and she aimed her fingers at them and said, ‘Bang, bang!

  Stick ’em up! I’m Dick Tracy!’ You know, deflecting all the gossip—and she got away with it. It was amazing what she could get away with.”112

  Edith had become something of a legend in the Windy City. Lillian Gish, whom she always picked up at the station, later remarked, “When I’d get in the car and come down Michigan Avenue with her, all the people would stop and ask her to do something for them. The police, too; she practically ran Chicago.”113

  That summer Edith sublet their apartment, and she and Nancy moved into a suite at the Drake Hotel. Nancy was invited to join the Junior League of Chicago and was a bridesmaid at Jean Wescott’s wedding.114 She volunteered as a nurse’s aide at Cook County Hospital, where she was assigned to the men’s ward. “The hospitals were all terribly shorthanded and needed all the help they could get,” she recalled. “I did a lot of dirty work, but it was a job that had to be done.” She also took a job as a salesgirl at Marshall Field. “I wanted to work to make some money and keep myself occupied. My most unforgettable experience there was catching a shoplifter.”115 Her account of that incident is one of the most dramatically told stories in Nancy:

  A woman was circling around a display case in the center of the floor, and I looked up just in time to see her put a piece of jewelry in her purse. I looked around for the store detective, for anyone, but no one was available. I went up to the woman and asked if I could be of help to her. She said, No, she was just looking. . . . No one had really prepared me for what to do in such an emergency.

  She started to leave and I was frantic. As calmly as possible, I said,

  “Don’t you think you better give me back the jewelry before you go?” Whereupon she broke away and started to run for the elevator, with me hot on her heels. When I think about it now, we must have made quite a sight. The store detective appeared miraculously from nowhere, and the woman was stopped at the elevator. She turned, took hold of the top of my button-down dress, and tore it right down the front. The detective took both of us and hustled us to the store offices. Here he found that her shopping bags were full of loot she had lifted from this and other stores. I had to tell the whole story, all the while certain this woman was putting some kind of curse on me as she glared at me. . . . Later, I was reprimanded for stopping the shoplifter in the store. I learned that you have to wait until the shoplifter has left the store to substantiate the charge that Nancy at Smith: 1939–1944

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  the customer had no intention of paying for whatever was taken. I was given a twenty-five-dollar check as a reward, and even though I had gone about it all wrong, I was very proud!116

  In June 1943, General Hawley appointed Loyal to the first Anglo-American medical mission to the Soviet Union. Accompanied by two agents of the Soviet secret police, the seven members of the mission flew to Moscow via Gibraltar, Tripoli, Cairo, and Tehran. Their suite at the National Hotel was bugged, Loyal noted in his memoir. He also noted the large portraits of Charlie Chaplin and Paul Robeson on display beside those of Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt at the headquarters of the Soviet’s cultural exchange organization. After spending the Fourth of July at Spasso House, the residence of the American ambassador, watching Mickey Mouse cartoons and lunching on hot dogs and Coca-Cola, and attending a performance of Swan Lake with an audience of factory workers whose body odor Loyal found

  “overpowering,” their tour of Moscow hospitals and research institutes began. One of his American colleagues, Harvard professor Elliot Cutler, Loyal writes, “had insisted upon taking a million units of penicillin as an intro-ductory gift, like taking wampum to the Indians. The drug had just been released for use and was scarce. It was received coldly with the statement that it was nothing new to them and was available for the care of their wounded.

  This was the first bald demonstration of their facility for lying to support their claims to priority and superiority.”117

  At the Institute for Neurological Surgery, Loyal was so dismissive of a demonstration of the Russians’ nerve graft technique, which he undiplo-matically pointed out had been proven “completely useless” during World War I, that the other members of the mission “were not hesitant later in indicating that my doubting attitude might well impair the entire success of the mission and, if carried into other fields, might even destroy the alliance between the Western nations and the Soviet Union and allow Germany to win the war.”118 But at dinner that evening the institute’s head, General Burdenko, rearranged the place cards so that Loyal was next to him, and he heaped praise upon the American for his bluntness and honesty; Loyal saw this as a lesson in how to handle Communist apparatchiks.

  On July 11 the mission traveled to the front, 125 miles southwest of Moscow, where they toured the wards of a casualty-clearing station hidden in a thick forest and were served caviar, smoked fish, strawberries, and large quantities of vodka. A second feast awaited them that evening at an 1 4 4

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House evacuation hospital, and although Loyal refused to participate in all the obligatory vodka toasts, he still became violently ill during the night. The next morning at breakfast, the Russian medical officer who had mocked him for switching to water the night before complimented him for standing up to his hosts’ demands.119 One wonders how many times Loyal told these tales of how to handle the Soviets to his son-in-law before including them in his 1973 memoir.

  His wartime Russian experience became part of the Loyal Davis legend. A 1962 magazine profile summarized it thus: “He was greatly impressed by the prompt field treatment given the wounded by the Red Army doctors—both men and women. He found, however, that Russian surgeons at times used inferior techniques because the Kremlin did not permit a free exchange of knowledge between them and their American counterparts.”120

  By the beginning of August, Loyal had returned to Oxford and resumed his battle with his nemesis, General Malcolm Grow, the surgeon to the Eighth Air Force, who was now taking credit for first recognizing high-altitude frostbite. A week later Loyal was ordered to Washington to present his studies at the Pentagon. At a meeting with Colonel Walter Jensen, a top Air Force medical officer, Loyal was again confronted by General Grow, whom he angrily attacked for placing “every kind of an obstruction in the way.” The meeting ended with Jensen’s demanding that Grow apologize to Loyal. “Grow mumbled that there were no hard feelings on his part,” Loyal later recounted, “but I said that there were hard feelings on my part and they concerned the dishonest statements that had been made and were continuing to be made.”121

  Suffering from amebic dysentery picked up in Russia, Loyal was sent from Washington to an Army hospital in Chicago. After a stay in a second hospital in Michigan, he was finally cured at the Walter Reed Hospital in Washington and discharged from the Army. In an anecdote told by Richard Davis, pitting Loyal against Morton Downey, the popular entertainer, his father was still capable of combativeness. “Morton Downey was a great friend of Ed and Margaret Kelly’s, and we would see him at the Sunday dinners at 209. It so happened that the day Dr. Loyal returned from Europe he stayed at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, and Morton Downey was the first person he saw. They were in the elevator, along with several generals, and Dr. Loyal started to embrace Morton Downey, who just turned away and talked to the generals. The next summer Downey was Nancy at Smith: 1939–1944

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  visiting the Kellys, and at dinner Dr. Loyal absolutely ripped him to pi
eces in front of everybody. He said, ‘I’d been overseas doing all these things, and you were so impressed by the stars on their shoulders that you didn’t even say hello to me, Morton. You weren’t gentleman enough, and I don’t even want to be in the same room with you.’ It was absolutely devastating. And Morton Downey left. It didn’t faze Ed Kelly a bit. He knew Dr. Loyal was principled, and he didn’t want to see his good friend treated this way by Morton Downey, who was a real lightweight.”122

  Life slowly returned to normal in the Davis household after Loyal came home and resumed his work. In March 1944, Edith and Loyal made a trip to Los Angeles to visit Walter and Nan Huston, Spencer Tracy, and Nazimova. By June they had moved back into their apartment. Richard Davis, who had spent one term at Princeton in 1943 before joining the Army, recalled being home on leave in July 1944 when Franklin Roosevelt was nominated for a fourth term in Chicago. He attended the convention with his parents, the Kellys, and Spencer Tracy.

  “The big issue was black voting rights,” he said, “and Spencer Tracy just went bananas about this. He could not understand why there were all these ridiculous rules about blacks voting in the South, and he didn’t waste any time telling Mayor Kelly. I can’t say that my father disagreed with Spencer Tracy. I don’t think he said anything. He respected Spencer Tracy’s viewpoint. They were very, very close. Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn both spent time in our apartment.”123 Dr. Daniel Ruge, who became Loyal’s clerk that fall and partner in 1952, pointed out that Loyal tended to keep his views to himself around Edith’s more liberal friends, adding,

  “But that doesn’t mean he agreed with them.”124

  Tracy had been thought of as a “hidebound arch-conservative” in the 1930s,125 but his political views became more moderate after 1941, when he began his celebrated affair with Katharine Hepburn, a Connecticut blue-blood with decidedly progressive views. They would remain semisecret lovers until his death in 1967, but Tracy, a devout Catholic who had once seriously considered becoming a priest, could never bring himself to divorce his wife. According to Nancy Reagan, Edith managed to remain friends with Louise Tracy even while playing hostess to “Spence and Kate.”126

  For all Edith’s show business worldliness, however, she was not about to accept adultery in her own marriage. “When Dr. Loyal was in England, he had a love affair with his English driver,” Richard Davis revealed. “And 1 4 6

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House this woman came over to the United States, presumably to get married. I remember there was a big blowup in the summer of 1944, when she appeared in Chicago. That was the only time I’ve ever heard or seen Edith hysterical. Edith was just off her rocker because this woman had shown up. Apparently Loyal was so homesick, and this woman was, I’m sure, of great solace and comfort to him. But it certainly upset Edith. I didn’t know what was going on, but I remember how steady Nancy was. She said,

  ‘Dick, don’t worry. Everything will be all right. Just go somewhere now, and I’ll take care of it.’” After calming her mother down, Nancy had a talk with her stepfather, although she never told Richard what was said. “There were a lot of things between Loyal and Nancy that I never knew about.”127

  That summer was a time of romantic turmoil for Nancy as well. In her senior year at Smith she had “started going quite seriously” with James Platt White Jr., an Amherst student from a well-to-do Massachusetts family.

  They decided to get engaged on a visit she made to California in May 1944, when he was stationed on a Navy aircraft carrier off San Diego.128

  This was Nancy’s first trip on her own to California, and she spent much of her time in the company of her mother’s friends. She stayed with Lillian Gish, who had returned to Hollywood in late 1941 and, perhaps hoping to put her America First stigma behind her, accepted the part of a Norwegian resistance fighter’s wife in Commandos Strike at Dawn, her first movie in ten years. Nancy told me that Gish took her to a party at the home of Lady Mendl, the decorator also known as Elsie de Wolfe.129 Nearly thirty years earlier Edith Luckett had been introduced to Alla Nazimova at the New York townhouse of de Wolfe and her then companion, Bessie Marbury, whom she had left in 1926 to marry British diplomat Sir Charles Mendl.

  Nancy saw her godmother for the last time on this trip. At sixty-five, Nazimova was in failing health, living in one of the bungalows on her old Sunset Boulevard estate, which she had been forced to turn into a hotel in 1927, when her silent film career came to an abrupt end. (The Garden of Alla had become the Garden of Allah.)130 “It was so small, nicely furnished but. . . . How terrible it must be for her after all that fame and glamour,”

  Nancy told Nazimova’s biographer years later. One night Nancy went to the theater with Glesca Marshall and Emily Woodruff, a Coca-Cola heiress who would become Glesca’s lover after Nazimova’s death from a blood clot the following year. Another night, Nancy took her fiancé to meet Nazimova, who was quite impressed. “I think I met one of our great future statesmen,” she recorded in her diary, “perhaps even a president.”131

  Nancy at Smith: 1939–1944

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  On June 24, Loyal and Edith gave a party at home to announce Nancy’s engagement to James Platt White Jr. His parents presented Nancy with a diamond engagement ring from Tiffany’s on their son’s behalf, and the Chicago and Boston papers ran the announcement on their society pages.132 Later that summer, however, Nancy broke off the engagement. As she writes in her memoir, “It was a heady, exhilarating time, and I was swept up in the glamour of the war, wartime engagements, and waiting for the boys who were away. I realized I had made a mistake. It would have been unfair to him and to me. It wasn’t easy to break off the engagement, but it was the best thing for us both. We were not meant to be married, but we remain friends to this day.”133

  “Jim White was the nicest guy,” Richard Davis said, “handsome, upright, straightforward, courteous. But Edith told me—‘gay’ wasn’t used then—‘He’s just a homo, Dick.’ I could never figure out how a girl like Nancy could have missed that.”134

  White never talked about Nancy or their engagement. When she was First Lady, he discreetly contacted her through her friend Jerry Zipkin to let her know that he was seriously ill. Zipkin told a friend, “I heard from the man Nancy was engaged to after college. He was gay.”135

  As fall approached, Nancy was getting bored and frustrated working at a department store and living at home in Chicago. She later wrote, “Soon a call came from ZaSu Pitts. I suspect that Mother had a hand in it. ZaSu told me there was a part available for me in a play she had on tour, Ramshackle Inn. That first part is the hardest to get. Until then, when producers or casting directors or agents ask you what you have done, you can only speak of college plays or summer stock. When you get your first part in a professional production, then you have a credit. I grabbed the offer and joined the company in Detroit, where the girl who had been playing the part was leaving. I played the role of a girl who has been held captive in an upstairs room. At one point, I came downstairs, spoke my three lines, and was returned to my room. It wasn’t much but it was a start, and I was out on my own with the best wishes of my parents.”136

  Ramshackle Inn had opened on Broadway in January of that year to mediocre reviews—the newspaper PM called it “a dreary piece of hocus-pocus with a soporific first act and a helter skelter second and third.”137 But ZaSu Pitts was a big draw, with a long career behind her as one of America’s most prolific and popular comediennes. Everything about her was funny, 1 4 8

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House from her name, which was real, to her “blinking eyes, fluttering hands, and quavering voice.”138 Yet she gave two of the most highly praised dramatic performances of the silent film era in Erich von Stroheim’s Greed and The Wedding March. Born in Kansas and raised in Santa Cruz, California, she was made a comedy star by the director King Vidor in the 1920s. She was forty-six when Nancy went to work with her. Off screen, she was married to a Pasadena businessman a
nd best friends with Hedda Hopper, with whom she shared a devotion to Catholicism and high fashion and an antipathy to Communism.

  Pitts took Nancy under her wing, sharing her hotel rooms and dressing rooms with the young actress. “It was a brand-new world to me and, not being used to the road, having a friend was very comforting. ZaSu had been a great beauty in her youth and at this point in her career looked ageless,”

  Nancy wrote. “We traveled with the play across country and wound up in New York, playing the ‘subway circuit.’ We played theaters in Brooklyn, Long Island, The Bronx, and so forth.”139

  When Ramshackle Inn ended its tour in New York, Nancy decided to stay and pursue a theater career. She told me many years later, “When I graduated from college, I hadn’t found the man I wanted to marry, and I certainly didn’t want to sit in Chicago and be a post-deb. So I decided I wanted to be an actress. I’d done summer stock when I was in college, and I had been exposed to actors all those years. Of course, I’d seen the best. You know, I’d seen people who were very successful.”140

  C H A P T E R S E V E N

  RONNIE AND JANE

  1941–1946

  From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. . . . In a great number of countries, far from the Russian frontiers and throughout the world, Communist fifth columns are established and work in complete unity and absolute obedience to the directions they receive from the Communist center.

  Winston Churchill, “Iron Curtain Speech,”

  March 5, 1946

  Show people are emotional. You’ll find very few in this business who participate in politics on an intellectual level. Slam-bang convictions, violent loyalties, passionate enmities, purple principles, and utter naïveté—these are the ingredients of political action in show business.