by Anne Edwards
“Spencer was darling—he was just a darling,” she recalled. “And I liked his wife [Louise]. We played anywhere that anyone wanted anything [Winnipeg, Canada; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Grand Rapids, Michigan]. Spencer and I would always be there. We’d always play because we both got paid for it you see. So we didn’t care where we went. I had Nancy to take care of and he had Louise and then their son, John.”
While Edith was on the road, Nancy lived comfortably. The Galbraiths were people of steady but modest income and lived up to every dollar they had. Their house was in a nice middle-class neighborhood. The girls shared a room and together attended Sid-well Friends School on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, D.C, a private school. Nancy began prekindergarten classes there in September 1925. In the summers, Edith would take her on the road with her or to New York. “Nancy was good, she was so good, so well-behaved,” Edith boasted. The child would sit patiently through long performances of plays she could not possibly understand. But she did enjoy the excitement of being backstage and of being with her mother and her mother’s friends.
Ken Robbins had little interest in his daughter. He had not made much of a success of his return to Pittsfield, and in 1922 he moved with his mother to Glen Ridge, New Jersey, and went into the real-estate business.
Anna bought a many-bedroomed old house (that had once seen grander days) on Fairview Avenue in nearby Verona. Ken then rented this to a Mrs. Mae Palmer for use as a sanitarium. The Robbins family did not take a great interest in Nancy and the child saw her father and grandmother infrequently. (On one trip that Nancy did recall, her father locked her in the bathroom for speaking up when words were said against her mother. She also recalled that her stepmother finally opened the door. Since Ken Robbins did not remarry until 1935, Nancy must have been fourteen at the time.)*
In the summer of 1927, Edith was asked to join a company of players in England. She sailed on the S.S. New York. On the voyage over, she met a Chicago neurosurgeon, Dr. Loyal Davis. He was seven years younger than she, unhappily married and the father of a two-year-old son, Richard; the two fell in love.* Davis was on his way to England for a medical conference. The two saw each other again in London. That fall Edith came to Chicago with a touring company of George M. Cohan’s The Baby Cyclone. The shipboard romance was rekindled. Loyal Davis later said that his wife “made the decision to take Richard and visit friends in Los Angeles. It was but a week or so later that she informed me that she was going to Reno, Nevada, to seek a divorce.” Edith returned to Chicago the next season with Walter Huston in Elmer the Great. On May 21, 1929, after both their divorces became final, Edith and Loyal Davis were wed, with Nancy as her mother’s bridesmaid. Soon after, Nancy left the Galbraiths and joined her mother and Dr. Davis.†
“She came to live with me in Chicago and I loved it,” Edith recalled. “Her life changed then. She was very beautiful—but she was a lady, you see. Nancy was a lady, always—always.… Everyone wanted to meet her… all the people I worked with… George M., Olcott, [John Philip] Sousa… I kept up all my friends in the theater.… Loyal was very fond of theater people.… Walter Huston used to spend summers with us up in the mountains [at the Huston home in San Bernardino, California] and they were—oh, I’ll tell you, Walter and Ann [Mrs. Huston] were lovely. We were crazy about them. [In Chicago] I could go out and come home and find Walter in bed—in one of [our] beds.”
“I remember one time,” Dr. Davis added, “we were at their home up in the mountains. I had seen Walter in Dodsworth many times. ‘Let’s do something from Dodsworth,’ he said. ‘You pick the scene.’ So I chose the one where he and Mrs. Dodsworth have an altercation in the hotel. He had the script there. Nancy was Mrs. Dodsworth [she was fifteen or sixteen at the time] and I was Dodsworth. He just sat back and Nancy and I did this—and of course, I killed her. I was very intent about this. [Walter said,] ‘You’re marvelous, very good. Now, let’s do something else.’
“By this time I was an actor, ready to go onstage to make my living, forget about surgery and everything else, and so he said, ‘Let’s do a scene from Othello.… Nancy did Desdemona, I did Iago and he did Othello… and when he spoke—he was Othello—this was Othello sitting there, you see, without a script, without anything.… The next day we were all by the pool, looking at the mountains. He put his hand on my knee and said, ‘Kid’—he always called me kid—’Kid, the first time I saw you operate I thought I could do it too.’“*
And Davis added, “Edith… taught me to change my asocial tendencies and habits, to develop a sense of humor, to retain my desire and energy to succeed but to relax and enjoy the association of friends.” Nancy had come to regard Loyal Davis as her father. From the beginning she had needed to win his love. There had been all those years without a father, never quite feeling a “daughter” to her Uncle Audley, although she lived in his home. Robbins had certainly been no father to her. A close bond developed between Davis and her. He could be stern, a “rock-hard disciplinarian,” but Nancy clung to him and guilelessly charmed him in the way of little girls. And she became as important in his life as he was in hers. Richard lived with his mother in Beverly Hills, and the distance made his visits infrequent. But even when Richard did join his father, Davis found it difficult to display overt affection for a son. A daughter was a different matter. Some portion of the restraint he had placed on his own natural emotions to become the “brilliant” Dr. Davis, the respected scientist and authoritarian teacher, could be eased in his relationship with Nancy. Richard Davis has said, “Dad never raised his voice with Nancy. He did with me occasionally.”
She loved Edith, who brought a lightheartedness into their small family, but Loyal Davis was the center of Nancy’s life. He wrote her small poems and slipped them under her bedroom door. He discussed his deepest feelings with her, and answered all the questions she posed, no matter how mature or complex they might be. She called him “Dad” and, though she knew Kenneth Robbins was her father and she had seen him from time to time, she refused to face the fact that Davis was not her true, her only, father.
She believed everything that Davis believed—from the pursuit of excellence to the doctrine that men were to be the leaders and women to follow. Davis loved Edith with an equal devotion, but with greater public reserve. His life had been pedagogic before he had met Edith, and despite her help and his claims, he had not learned how to relax completely. He had to resort to the slips of paper under Nancy’s door, and hiding behind an implacable smile when Edith in her own childlike way would suddenly get up and do a little soft-shoe dance to some old-time music on the radio.
Nancy had been enrolled in 1925 in Girls Latin School, originally under the name of Anne Frances Robbins, a source of embarrassment and confusion to her. She endured her unhappiness over this for a number of years, but wanted desperately to be Nancy Davis. Even the Anne Frances belonged to ancestors of Kenneth Robbins. But not until 1935, when she was fourteen, would she have the courage to speak to Davis about it. Davis said he could want nothing more than to adopt her legally, but without her real father’s legal permission this could not be achieved. And so Nancy took the train to Verona, where he was now living, to talk to him herself. She seemed to have no problem in securing Robbins’s signature on the proper document (this could well have been the occasion when Robbins locked her in the bathroom). Edith claimed, “Nancy always handled things very mature.… It makes her so damn mad when people call Loyal her adopted [sic] father. Oh, God, he hates that too! He’s always been a father to her and he doesn’t like anybody to say he’s her adopted [sic] father. Burns the tail feathers off him he gets so mad.
“We both liked Nancy to have her friends come to the house… and I’d always invite them to dinner or lunch or what have you, you know? Our house always had exciting people walking around in it… Jimmy Cagney was always there.… I was very fond of Jimmy and I liked him because he was going down the road one day and [someone in] a car in front of him threw a dog out and he said, ‘Stop
this car—let’s go back.’ And he was so damn mad, picked up the thing, and brought it to our house (he was on his way there at the time)—and he said, ‘Do you mind if I have this dog here—or I’ll go to the hotel?’ ‘No,’ we said, ‘we’d love it.’ And he had that dog for ten or twelve years. He’s a wonderful man, that Cagney.”
Home for the family of Dr. Davis during most of Nancy’s life in Chicago was an expansive apartment with a magnificent view at 199 East Lake Shore Drive. Dr. Davis was an honored and influential man of medicine and a heavy contributor to the Republican party. Although the Davises were invited to almost all society fund-raising events, they were not included in the inner circle of Chicago’s social register. Their close friends came mainly from the theater, the world of medicine and the Republican party.
As a father, Loyal Davis expected a great deal from his children. Edith’s favorite maxim was “pretty is as pretty does—that’s what my mother taught me and that’s what I taught Nancy.” Dr. Davis was in complete accord. He also insisted his children understand that they had been privileged and that this imposed certain responsibilities toward anyone less fortunate.
“I can remember when Nancy was in school [Girls Latin School],” Edith said. “We had a lady that came and did our laundry and she [Nellie] was upstairs. And Nellie said, ‘Mrs. Davis, I can’t do the laundry today, I’m so sick. Do you mind if I take a street car and go home? I’ll come tomorrow.’ And in the midst of this, Nancy came in from school and she says, ‘What’s the matter?’ And [I told her]. Nancy went upstairs, took her piggy bank, cracked it open, took all the money out of it… and gave it to the girl. And she said, ‘Now I want you to take a cab and go home. I don’t want you on a street car ‘cause you’re not well enough. So you take this money and you go home and if you’re all right tomorrow, that’s fine. And if you’re not, my mother and I will do the laundry.’ Well, I’ll tell you! Loyal thought that was pretty terrific!”
A classmate of Nancy’s at Girls Latin School confided, “Nancy was never comfortable with the girls. She always seemed older than she was. I was at her house several times. I never met Dr. Davis, but Mrs. Davis was a good sport. Very earthy. I remember Nancy reprimanding her for using a word like darn or damn—I can’t remember exactly what it was. She was very warm too [Mrs. Davis]. She called people ‘honey’ and ‘dear’ a lot and you felt she really meant it.… I always felt Nancy took us [the girls] home, not because she wanted us there so much as she needed to show us how fine her home was. At the time I thought she was a show-off. Later, I suspected she was insecure.”
During the early years of her second marriage, Edith had continued her career locally, “Whenever I was asked.”
“Always wanted to be an actress,” Nancy declared on her studio biography. “Used to watch my mother and stay backstage as much as I could.”
Nancy’s growing-up years were spent in Chicago except for a short sojourn when, in 1934, Dr. Davis took his family to Europe for a holiday. She became the president of the dramatic club at Girls Latin School, and had the lead in several plays. She was resolute in her drive to become an actress. Nonetheless, Dr. Davis insisted she have a coming-out party and join the 1939 list of debutantes, and that she attend college for a prescribed time before setting out for a life in the theater. She promised only that she would attend a year at college. Her society debut at the Casino Club in Chicago was a great disappointment and not well attended. Nancy has commented that the entire Princeton Triangle Club finally showed up to save the day.
One member of the Princeton Triangle Club, Frank Orville Birney, Jr., certainly was present, and it is entirely possible that he brought other members with him. Birney’s father was a Chicago banker and a friend of Loyal Davis, and Frank and Nancy had been close friends since childhood.
In the summer of 1939, Richard’s mother died and he came to live full-time with his father and Edith. Nancy left for Smith College at Northampton, Massachusetts, that September, a drama and English major. Her grades were not good, but she managed to pass. Life on campus appealed to her more than she had anticipated. For one thing, she met an Amherst man whom she soon dated on a steady basis. For another, she enjoyed the extracurricular activities that a college had to offer—the football games and parties. She had developed into an attractive young woman—not beautiful, but possessing a good figure and an innate sense of style. She knew how to dress to her advantage and how to accentuate her best features. At the end of the academic year, she went home, did some amateur stock and returned to Smith for the next term, a pattern that was to be sustained over the next few years.*
Her years at Smith were blighted by two things—the advent of war, and the shocking sudden death of Frank Birney. On December 7, 1941, America entered World War II. The nation’s young men were understandably in emotional chaos during the dramatic week that followed. The schools were getting set for their Christmas holidays, but Birney, who was studying geology, had received a bad report and was told he had to remain at Princeton through a portion of the break to make up his grades. He had fallen into a deep depression, and a call to his brother and sister-in-law in New York City had so alarmed them that they telegraphed him to come to New York for a night so they could talk. The young man agreed to take the evening train into the city. His sister-in-law also contacted Nancy at Smith, and she offered to come down to see if she couldn’t help to cheer up the despondent Birney.
At six P.M., Birney left the room he shared with R. E. Pate and walked to the station to catch the local that would in turn take him to the Junction where he would change for the New York train. Fog caused the walk to take longer than he had anticipated. Dean Christian Gauss of Princeton reported that “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. [Birney] gave him a dollar. He was seen pacing the platform for twenty minutes or so. Then, he walked down the tracks one third of a mile toward Philadelphia.” No one knew the details from there. But a train was coming from the opposite direction—traveling at seventy miles an hour. When the engineer “saw the victim leap from behind the pole to the track, McGoldrick [the engineer] said 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.” Dean Gauss wrote, “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.”
Nancy was at Birney’s brother’s home when the call came through that he was dead. Whether he was a suicide or the victim of robbery and murder, his death marked the first time that real tragedy had entered her life. Birney has been described as her fiance, but if this was the case, no announcement had been made. Even so, Frank Birney was an old and valued friend and his violent death must have been a great shock to her.
After this terrible incident, she involved herself almost exclusively in acting. In the spring of 1942, Smith had, for the first time, included a musical comedy in its drama projects. That next spring she was cast in a thirty-minute production entitled Make with the Maximum, composed, written, assembled and produced by students and staff of the Smith College Department of Theater. It was advertised as “a Factory Follies—the first musical show ever staged by college girls to entertain war workers,” and for several months during this last term of Nancy’s college years, the thirty-three members of the cast toured thirteen war plants in the Connecticut Valley. Visiting such arsenals as the government’s Springfield Armory and Westinghouse Electric Company as well as the U.S. Rubber Company plant in Chicopee, Massachusetts, they performed before more than five thousand workers at their lunchtime breaks. Nancy loved it. Her role was that of “the Glamor Gal—a Sophisticated Singer.” Wearing a slinky black lace dress, gloves over her elbows, she sang in a recitative voice:
Cocktails at five and
Dinner at the Stork,
Long drives in the country
To get away from New York.
&
nbsp; She returned home after graduation to be with Edith while Dr. Davis was overseas with a medical unit. He returned in the summer of 1944 and Nancy took a job in summer stock in the New England area. By the end of the season, Edith realized her daughter was serious about wanting to go on the stage and contacted her old friend Zasu Pitts, who hired her to play the minor role of Alice in the touring company of Ramshackle Inn, in which Pitts had appeared earlier that season in New York. Pitts took Davis under her wing in more ways than one. A reactionary and ardent Red-baiter, Pitts lectured Davis on the dangers of Communist infiltration in theater and films. Her words did not fall on uninitiated ears. Dr. Davis was also a strong reactionary, and had pointed out to Nancy some of the same threats to the medical profession. Nancy and Pitts hit it off well.* At the end of the out-of-town tour of Ramshackle Inn (“a dreary piece of hocus-pocus with a soporific first act and a helter skelter second and third”), Nancy moved into a small but comfortable New York East Side apartment subsidized by her parents. She posed for a Colgate advertisement and took a few smaller modeling jobs. Finally, just before Christmas, 1945, she was cast as Si-Tchun, a lady-in-waiting in Lute Song, a musical which starred Yul Brynner and Mary Martin.
“She had been hired before I arrived as director,” John Houseman recalled, “at the suggestion of Mary Martin. During the second or third week of rehearsal I suggested to the producer that she was not physically convincing as a small Chinese handmaiden. He said, ‘Talk to Mary [Martin],’ and I did. Mary said, John, I have a very bad back and Nancy’s father Loyal Davis is the greatest [neurosurgeon] in the U.S.A. We are not letting Nancy go/’ And that was that.”
