by Nancy Reagan
I was thrilled when Mother came to visit and miserable when she left. I understood that she had to work, and I knew that as soon as she could manage it, we would be together. I realized that living with Aunt Virgie and Uncle Audley was only temporary. But I had been with them as long as I could remember, and I yearned for the day when Mother and I could be together again.
Early in the spring of 1929, Mother came to see me in Bethesda. “Come out on the porch with me,” she said. “There’s something I want to tell you.”
Mother and I sat down on the couch, and she told me she had fallen in love with a wonderful man. His name was Loyal Davis, and he was tall, handsome, and very kind. He was a doctor from Chicago, and he wanted to marry her, but Mother had told him that she would never get married unless I said it was all right. If I said yes, she would stop being an actress, and we would both move to Chicago, where we would live together as one happy family.
“It’s up to you,” she said. “I won’t marry Dr. Davis unless you think I should.”
I wasn’t sure what to say. My life in Bethesda was happy, but living with Mother would be my greatest wish come true.
I have often looked back at that moment and wondered: What if I had objected? But knowing Mother, I’m sure she would have found a way to bring me around.
I had no way of knowing it, of course, but Mother’s announcement eventually changed my life just as much as it changed hers. I can’t imagine what my life would have been if they had never met.
They were married in a chapel at the Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago. The best man was Dr. Allen Kanavel, my new father’s mentor. I was the bridesmaid, and I wore a blue pleated dress and carried flowers. I was happy for Mother, but I can remember, even then, feeling twinges of jealousy—a feeling I was to experience years later, from the other side, after I married a man with children. Dr. Davis was taking part of her away from me, and after being separated from Mother for so long, I wanted her all to myself.
On their honeymoon, they went to a medical convention and then toured the battlefields of the Civil War—Dr. Davis was a Civil War buff. Years later, my own honeymoon with Ronnie turned out to be about as romantic: We drove to Phoenix, and along the way my new husband stopped at roadside animal places which featured rattlesnakes and similar creatures.
“We’ve got a ranch now,” he kept saying. “You’ll have to learn what these things look like.”
Sure. But on my honeymoon?
• • •
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.
Although I came to love this man, the transition to my new life in Chicago was neither smooth nor easy. He seemed formal and distant, and at first I resented having to share my mother with him. I was jealous of their close relationship. I remember one particularly embarrassing moment, when the two newlyweds were sitting together on a couch, and I squeezed in and forced myself between them.
But Dr. Davis understood, and he never pushed me into accepting him. Perhaps it was because he had a child of his own from a previous marriage, a boy named Richard, who was a little younger than I and who lived with his mother. (When she died, Richard, my brother, Dick, moved in with us.) But whatever the reason, Dr. Loyal Davis allowed me to come to know him at my own pace.
Soon after I arrived in Chicago, he sat me down and explained that he and my mother were in love, and that he would be good to her. He didn’t think it was quite right to adopt me as long as my birth father was alive, but if I ever wanted him to, he would—and that nothing would make him happier. He hoped that he and I would come to love each other, and that we would all become one happy family. But both of us knew it would take time.
And it did. For more than twenty years I called him Dr. Loyal. I knew he would have loved it if I had called him Dad, 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 his formal title. When Patti was too young to say “Grandpa,” she called him Bapa—and so did I.
He detested the name Loyal, but I always thought it suited him perfectly, for he was nothing if not loyal—to his family, his students, his profession, his patients, and above all, to his values. He was the strong, silent type, reserved and sometimes gruff on the outside, but warm and tenderhearted underneath. Most people never saw his tender side—the man who wrote poetry and slipped it under my door, or who sent me silly limericks when I was in college.
As a teacher, he was known for being strict. And so, for example, his students were always required to wear a tie and jacket to class. He thought that if you were going to be a doctor, you should dress like one. Even today, when people talk about him, they often say that Loyal Davis was a tough teacher and a hard man to work for. But he made his students stretch to heights they hadn’t always known they could reach.
He was a stickler about punctuality. When he said six o’clock, he didn’t mean two minutes after six. If you were late, he’d let you know. 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.
After Bethesda, Chicago was a whole new world for me, and the Davis household was stimulating and challenging. My father loved to discuss serious topics, and I can remember more than one conversation about whether there was really such a thing as a human soul. I don’t remember our answers, but I recall that, unlike my mother, Loyal wasn’t religious.
I once asked him what happiness was. “Nancy,” he said, “the answer to that question is almost twenty-five centuries old, and it’s basically what the Greeks said. Happiness is the pursuit of excellence in all aspects of one’s life.”
Loyal Davis was the classic self-made man, but as I mentioned, I want to correct the impression that he was a rich ultraconservative crusader who turned me, and later Ronnie, into Republicans. I don’t doubt that Bapa was both conservative and Republican, but if he had any real interest in politics, I wasn’t aware of it. And I know that he didn’t influence Ronnie’s views. In fact, when Ronnie first decided to go into politics, my father cringed at the prospect of his beloved son-in-law stepping into what he called “a sea of sharks.”
It wasn’t politics he cared about; it was medicine. He loved his work, and I was thrilled when he finally allowed me to watch him perform an operation. I usually sat up in the gallery, and when he allowed me into the operating room, I felt I had passed the ultimate test. I’m not sure I could have watched any other kind of operation, but brain surgery is so precise, and everything is covered up except for one small area. He would work with tiny nerves that you could barely see.
I was so proud of him. Here was this wonderful, handsome, accomplished man—and he was my father!
My parents had a wonderful marriage, despite—or perhaps because of—their obvious differences. My father was tall and dark; my mother was short and blond. He was a Republican; she was a Democrat. He was often severe; she was always laughing. He was an only child; she came from a large family. He was reserved; she knew everybody.
They complemented each other beautifully. I once returned home from college with an assignment to learn several sonnets by Shelley and Keats. My father sent me upstairs for my English literature textbook, and when I came down again, Mother was doing a little soft-shoe dance, reciting a rhyme about Mr. Sheets and Mr. Kelly.
When my parents had company, she would tell the latest off-color joke. 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 finishe
d the joke. She ate a lot of apples in those years!
At first Mother wasn’t accepted by the other doctors’ wives in Chicago. 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.
I had never seen my mother as a wife before, but she was terrific at it. She cared for her husband, she expanded his social circle—she helped him in every possible way. “Now, Nancy,” she used to say, “when you get married, be sure to get up and have breakfast with your husband in the morning. Because if you don’t, you can be sure that some other woman who lives around the corner will be perfectly happy to do so.”
Within a year, she knew more people in Chicago than he did. She loosened him up, introduced him to her friends, and exposed him to the arts. He, in turn, provided her with a security she had never known.
She did a lot of charity work. For twenty-five years she was chairman of the women’s division of the Chicago Community Fund. She was involved in the Art Institute, helped set up the Passavant Hospital gift shop, and even organized an annual musical skit for my father’s students. During the war, when he was overseas, she started a servicemen’s center. There was a navy yard nearby, 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.
Mother gave up her career when she got married, but she didn’t stop working. Chicago was the capital of the radio soap operas, and Mother was part of an NBC drama called Betty & Bob, in which she played two completely different roles: Bob’s mother, a society grande dame, and Gardenia, the black maid. (In one episode, Bob’s mother came to the door and Gardenia opened it to let her in.) She was also the only woman to appear on The Amos and Andy Show.
She worked at WGN and at WBBM, which is where I first met Mike Wallace, who was doing radio in Chicago then. In 1987, when Mother died, Mike published a moving column in the Washington Post in which he described how my interest in the drug program stemmed from the values that Mother had embodied.
All through these years, my mother kept in touch with her ex-husband and with Patsy, his new wife. Although I never had much of a relationship with my birth father, I did visit him a few times during my adolescence. He couldn’t relate to me as a very young child, but as I grew older and became more of a person, he’d want to see me more. He once made a disparaging remark about Mother—I no longer recall what it was—which enraged me to the point where I screamed at him that I wanted to leave. He got upset and locked me in the bathroom. I was terrified, and I suddenly felt as if I were with strangers.
Patsy felt terrible and wrote a letter of apology to Mother, but there were no more visits. And to this day I can’t stand to be in a locked room. Years later, when Ronnie and I were staying in a hotel suite during a campaign trip, I had to ask him to unlock the bedroom door. He couldn’t understand why, until I explained that the memory of being locked in that bathroom had never entirely disappeared.
Soon after my mother remarried, we moved to the fourteenth floor of a lovely apartment building on Lake Shore Drive. One of our neighbors was a retired judge, and a few years later, in the elevator, I asked him, “How can I go about getting adopted?”
The judge 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 fourteen 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 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.
Whenever Mother’s old friends from the theater passed through town, they would stay with us. When I came home from school in the afternoon, it wasn’t unusual to find Mary Martin in the living room, or Spencer Tracy reading the newspaper, or the breathtaking Lillian Gish curled up on the sofa, talking with Mother. Spencer Tracy stayed with us so often that he became practically a member of the family.
Spence was the most charming man I have ever known. He suffered from insomnia, and when I came home late from a date or a night out with friends, he would be up, eager to have a long talk. But he was also very shy. There are actors who will enter a room and immediately take possession of it, but not Spence. He’d always head for a corner and stay there.
He hated serious and high-toned discussions about dramatic technique, and he regarded the “method” actors as pretentious. His own approach was quite simple. When I told him I was thinking of a career in the theater, his advice was “Just know your lines and don’t bump into the furniture.”
Katharine Hepburn was another regular visitor. When I told her I wanted to be an actress, she sent me a long letter warning me that acting was a very difficult profession and that I had seen only the glamorous parts. Mother’s friends were stars, she reminded me, but most would-be actresses ended up as waitresses and receptionists. It was sobering advice, but I wasn’t put off.
When I moved to New York in 1946, Kate often invited me to her house, which was just around the corner from my apartment. That was the only place I ever saw her because she had a terrible aversion to going out. She once explained to me in that distinctive Hepburn voice that even going to dinner in a restaurant would make her unbearably nervous and sick to her stomach.
Kate and I were close for years, but something happened to our friendship around the time Spence died, in 1967. Suddenly it just ended, and to this day I don’t understand why. I made several attempts to revive our relationship but got nowhere. Once, when I called her on the phone, she said, “I’m terribly busy, and besides, I don’t know what we’d have to talk about. After all, you’re a staunch Republican and I’m a staunch Democrat.”
“What difference does that make?” I replied. “I have lots of friends who are Democrats. I even married one!”
I still feel bad about it, but I’m glad she was part of my life, and I have great admiration for her.
Of all my mother’s show business friends, we were closest to Walter and Nan Huston. Walter is probably best remembered today for his role as the old man in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, starring Humphrey Bogart, and directed by his son, John Huston.
To me, he was Uncle Walter. When I was a teenager we spent a good part of several summers at his magnificent vacation home on Lake Arrowhead in the San Bernardino mountains. After dinner, we would gather in the living room, where Uncle Walter would read to us.
One summer we wrote and produced our own little home movie. There I was, acting—and with real professionals like Mother, Uncle Walter, and Nan (who had played Desdemona to Uncle Walter’s Othello on Broadway). My brother, Dick, was behind the camera, and Uncle Walter and I were the stars.
My father spent most of that summer working on a biography of John B. Murphy, the physician who had attended Theodore Roosevelt when Roosevelt was shot in 1912.
“Loyal,” said Uncle Walter, “tell me about the day that Roosevelt was shot.”
“But you’ve already read the manuscript,” my father said.
“I know,” said Walter. “But I’d still like to hear about it.”
After my father described the scene, Uncle Walter said, “Loyal, go back and write it down exactly the way you just told it. The version you wrote is too stiff.”
My father ended up rewriting the entire book. He didn’t take criticism easily, but Walter Huston was his dearest friend.
&n
bsp; One weekend, when I was fifteen, Joshua Logan, the great director, drove up to Lake Arrowhead to try to interest Uncle Walter in a musical comedy called Knickerbocker Holiday. What interested me about the visit was that Logan had brought along his friend Jimmy Stewart. I developed an instant crush on this tall, handsome man with that boyish charm, a charm so many sophisticated Hollywood women found irresistible. That night after dinner, when we were seated outside under the stars, he took out his accordion and sang “Judy,” and I almost fainted.
The next day we sat around the pool while Josh read the script of Knickerbocker Holiday. Uncle Walter promised to consider it. Later, he asked each of us for our opinion. I was thrilled to be asked, and I said, “Oh, Uncle Walter, I wouldn’t do that play. It would be a big mistake.”
I remember feeling very important that I had been consulted. And then, without a word to me, he signed up for the part.
Need I add that Knickerbocker Holiday became a Broadway hit?
Or that Brooks Atkinson wrote that the decision to cast Walter Huston in the lead role was “a stroke of genius”?
Or that Uncle Walter’s rendition of “September Song” became a classic of musical theater?
So much for my opinion!
Years later, Uncle Walter sent me a copy of a book that was made of Knickerbocker Holiday, inscribed, To Nancy, who advised me to do this play?
As Jimmy was leaving, he asked me to come down to Hollywood to go dancing at the Palladium. My heart was pounding, but my father said no, and that ended it. (Much as I love him, I found out years later that Jimmy Stewart is just about the worst dancer I know.)
My father was secretly infuriated that Walter made so much money as an actor. Loyal earned a good living, but even the most successful surgeon made only a fraction of what a Hollywood or Broadway star was paid. After years of training, my father was performing delicate brain surgery and saving lives. Sometimes he worked for nothing, and at most he received a fee of five hundred dollars. As my father saw it, Uncle Walter was being paid thousands of dollars simply to recite lines that somebody else had written. How difficult could that be?