Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  Joy Hodges had started out as a child singing star on WHO and gone on to become a semisuccessful big-band singer in Hollywood, with hopes of a contract at RKO; the Des Moines press gave her star treatment when she came back to town to visit her parents. Dutch was only too happy to interview her at WHO. His first question: “Well, Miss Hodges, how does it feel to be a movie star?” Her answer: “Well, Mr. Reagan, you may know one day.” As she explained many years later, “He sat across the microphone from me in riding breeches, which I found amusing. But he was very good-looking even with his glasses.”50

  After the interview he seemed reluctant to let her go. He grilled her about Hollywood, as well as her personal life: “Next thing I know he’s got me to agree to a riding date in the morning. I change my mind overnight, 6 8

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House and pretend to be out when he rings our bell. He just keeps on ringing, ringing, ringing. I thought he’d never go away! Ring, ring. I had to go stand in a closet and cover my ears. Well finally he stopped, but honey, you can’t believe that purposefulness! And do you know, later on, when he and I became such dear friends, he never once mentioned how I’d stood him up!

  Like it never happened. That’s why I’ve always known Dutch can’t be hurt.

  It’s water off a duck’s back.”51

  Reagan didn’t get to Hollywood on his first trip to California, and Joy Hodges was cool when, on the one night he was in Los Angeles, he looked her up at the Biltmore Hotel’s nightclub, where she was the singer with the house band. (The Biltmore, with its 1,500 rooms, was the largest and most important hotel in town.) He spent three weeks on Catalina Island covering the Cubs. He arrived on a record-breaking 82-degree day at the beginning of March and couldn’t wait to get into his swimming trunks and jump into the Pacific, which was freezing—“Everyone knew that except hick me.” Three weeks later he packed his linen suits, white sports jacket, and white buckskin shoes and took the Southern Pacific Railroad back to Des Moines, thinking, he said, California was “a nice place to visit, but . . .”52

  In 1937, WHO again sent him to cover the Cubs in Catalina. He arrived in Los Angeles on March 12, in the middle of a hailstorm, which made crossing to the island impossible that day. He checked into the Biltmore and caught a trolley out to Republic Pictures, where the Oklahoma Outlaws, a hillbilly group that had played on WHO’s Saturday night barn dance program earlier that year, were filming with Gene Autry in one of his cowboy pictures. It was the first time he had been on a movie set, and he found it entrancing. That evening he looked up Joy Hodges again at the Biltmore Hotel’s nightclub, and this time she joined him for dinner between floor shows. “I confessed to Joy,” he later wrote, “that sports announcing had actually been chosen years before as a steppingstone to acting.”53

  “Take off your glasses,” Joy Hodges told him. He did, and she promised to introduce him to her agent. The next day he flew to Catalina on a tiny seaplane. The flight was turbulent, the plane made him feel claus-trophobic, and he vowed never to fly again.54 The day after his return from Catalina two weeks later, minus his glasses and barely able to see, he met with George Ward at the Meiklejohn Agency, which represented Robert Taylor, Betty Grable, and the still unknown Jane Wyman, among Iowa: 1933–1937

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  others. Ward called Max Arnow, the casting director at Warner Bros.

  “Max,” he said, “I’ve got another Robert Taylor sitting in my office.” According to Reagan, he could hear Arnow bark back, “God only made one Robert Taylor.” But he told Ward to deliver Reagan to the studio in Burbank for an interview that same day, which happened to be Good Friday.

  Arnow greeted the hopeful with a battery of orders and questions: “Stand up against that door. Are those your own shoulders? Let me hear your voice. Is that your voice?” “It’s the only one I’ve got,” Dutch told him.

  The casting director and the agent, he later wrote, “circled me like a pair of hummingbirds,” talking about his face and body, “as if I wasn’t even in the room.”55

  Finally Arnow handed Dutch a few pages of the Philip Barry play Holiday and told him to memorize them over the Easter weekend for a screen test early the next week. The actual test—opposite Helen Valkis, an actress from Iowa whom Warners had signed earlier that year—lasted but a few minutes. When Arnow informed Dutch that it would be several days before Jack Warner, the studio boss, could watch it, he said he couldn’t wait around, he had to get back to his job in Des Moines. Both Arnow and Ward were taken aback, and Reagan himself later worried that he had

  “blown the whole thing.”56

  But on April 9, his first day back at WHO, he received a telegram from the Meiklejohn Agency: warner’s offer contract seven years stop one year’s options stop starting at $200 a week stop what shall i do? Dutch wired back: sign before they change their minds.57

  On April 16, at the request of the sponsor of his baseball broadcasts, Wheaties cereal, he addressed a meeting of sports announcers in Chicago.

  Four days later, back in Des Moines, he signed the contract that had come from Warner Bros. It was a standard-issue studio contract of that time, not quite indentured servitude but not exactly a fair deal either. He couldn’t quit for seven years, but the studio had the option to fire him every six months. If they kept him on, he would receive a raise every six months, so by end of the fourth year he would be making $600 a week, and would then have his first opportunity to renegotiate. He was guaranteed his salary for only nineteen weeks out of every twenty-six, and any earnings he made from radio, advertising, or personal appearances would go to the studio. He had no right to choose which movies he appeared in, and he could be loaned out to other studios for a fee greater than his salary, with the difference going to Warners, not to him.58

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  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House In other words, he was giving up a sure thing—General Mills, the maker of Wheaties, had a made a counteroffer to keep him at WHO—for a high-risk dream. On his last night in Des Moines, May 21, 1937, the radio station presented him with a large suitcase at an on-air farewell party attended by some of the city’s celebrities, including the mayor.59 Reagan’s contract required him to report for work on June 1. He set out for Los Angeles early the next morning in his open-topped Nash and drove six hundred miles a day through Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada, reaching California on the third day.

  “Sundown saw me driving that long stretch between the banked orange trees from San Bernardino to Los Angeles,” he later wrote. “Today the orange trees are gone, replaced by tract homes even closer together than the trees had been planted, and smog has replaced the fragrance of blossoms.”60

  Four days after her son had left for Los Angeles, Nelle wrote a letter from Dixon to Reverend Cleaver and his wife, who had been transferred to Cerro Gordo, Illinois. It reads in part:

  I am enclosing some clippings regarding Ronald. I hardly know how to explain “our feelings,” but when people ask me if I am not afraid to have him go to such a wicked place as Hollywood, all I can answer is that I feel I can trust him anywhere. He has never lost his high ideals of life, and when he called us to tell us the news, Pete MacArthur talked to me too and this is what he told me. (quote)

  “I am going to tell you something that your boy won’t tell you.

  When the wire came from Hollywood and we were all overjoyed at Dutch’s good luck, we missed him from the office and sent one of the fellows to look for him. He came back saying he had discovered Dutch in one of the smaller studio rooms on his knees, praying. He didn’t let Dutch know that he saw him, and when he told all of us there in the office, we cried like babies.” (end of quote) Friends, he does love God and never forgets to thank Him for all his many blessings. When we visited him, he told me of all the nice things he would be able to do now for Eureka College if he won the seven-year contract with Warner Brothers.

  You know he has been a wonderful son to us. His father hasn’t had any work since the 15th
of June last year, and during all that time I have received a $60.00 check the first of each month, and Iowa: 1933–1937

  7 1

  another one of the same amount the 15th of each month. If he signs the seven-year contract there, he is going to send for us. That is the thing that makes me so happy, to think I can live my last days making a home for him. It’s almost more happiness than I ever expected in this life.61

  C H A P T E R F O U R

  EAST LAKE SHORE DRIVE

  1933–1939

  Nancy was a year ahead of me at the Girls Latin School in Chicago. She was just as nice as she could be. And through the years I’ve read all this business in the newspapers, and I thought, My goodness, I don’t think she turned into this evil person. In high school she was very, very friendly. She was not a personal friend of mine—I knew her just because it was a small private school and we played field hockey together. I think everybody just plain liked her. But I’ve had people come up to me and say, “Tell us about her.

  Was she such a witch?” I say, “No, she was just this delightful person. All we knew is she wanted to be an actress.”

  China Ibsen Oughton to author,

  February 21, 2001

  Nancy is well reared, not dragged up. It comes naturally to her to behave beautifully.

  Jerry Zipkin, quoted in the

  Los Angeles Herald Examiner,

  October 30, 1980

  THE SUMMER RONALD REAGAN ARRIVED IN HOLLYWOOD FROM IOWA IN

  his Nash, Nancy Robbins, as she was still called, was given a convertible of her own for her sixteenth birthday. It was a black 1937 Mercury with a red-leather interior, and it seems that Edith Davis paid for the gift with her Betty and Bob earnings.1 Nancy loved the car so much that she drove it to school, which was just six blocks north of East Lake Shore Drive, where her family had moved up to a duplex apartment the year before.

  Reagan was lucky enough to coast through the worst years of the Great Depression on a radio sportscaster’s salary. Nancy was sheltered from the hard times by the ongoing success—professional, financial, social—of her 7 2

  East Lake Shore Drive: 1933–1939

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  stepfather and mother. And while the new Warner Bros. contract player was beginning to make the acquaintance of such stars as Dick Powell and Bette Davis, the private school teenager was already accustomed to coming home in the afternoon and finding “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.”2

  Edith had brought her daughter to Chicago at the height of the Roaring Twenties, which was called the Whoopee Era in the Windy City, where the decade’s moral lapses and criminal excesses were particularly acute. In 1927 alone, the IRS estimated, Al Capone’s organized-crime syndicate took in $105 million from its bootlegging, prostitution, and gambling enterprises.3 Four years later Capone was jailed on tax-evasion charges, and the great metropolis of the Midwest was on the verge of economic collapse. As Roger Biles writes in Big City Boss in Depression and War, his biography of Mayor Edward J. Kelly, “The economic cataclysm of 1929–31 devastated Chicago, and the city veritably ceased to function.

  The signs of suffering and want were everywhere. As the nation’s transportation hub, Chicago attracted thousands of transients to its already siz-able stable of indigents and unemployed; throngs of uprooted men and women descended upon the city hoping for work and lodging, but they found only breadlines and cardboard shacks. By 1930 a shantytown had appeared at the very edge of the Loop on Randolph Street. Its residents named it ‘Hooverville’ and its streets ‘Prosperity Road,’ ‘Hard Times Avenue,’ and ‘Easy Street.’ The relief agencies strained to meet the demand for shelter—they used asylums, poorhouses, and veterans homes to house the needy—but like all departments of city government, they were ill prepared to deal with such large-scale misery.”4

  By 1932 the unemployment rate had hit 40 percent, and 130,000

  families were on relief. In April 1933, the month Edith’s friend Ed Kelly became mayor, fourteen thousand schoolteachers, who hadn’t been paid for months, stormed the banks in the downtown financial district; the police repelled them with tear gas, and hundreds were arrested. A few days later, twenty thousand public high school students staged a one-day strike in support of their desperate teachers.5

  None of this affected Nancy, however, who was completely shielded from any sign of this upheaval and suffering. Her entire day-to-day life took place within a twelve-block cocoon surrounding the grand apartment 7 4

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House buildings of East Lake Shore Drive, where the Davises lived from 1932 on.

  Passavant Hospital, where Loyal Davis worked, was six blocks south, and it catered to the rich—patients’ meals were served on linen tablecloths with china and silver.6 And while Edith did a lot of charity work, it was more about raising money than ladling out soup to bums.

  Every year for Easter vacation, beginning in 1930, Edith and Loyal took Nancy to the posh Arizona Biltmore Hotel in Scottsdale. Nancy spent eight weeks of every summer until she was fourteen at Camp Kechuwa—“darling” in Sioux—in Michigamme, Michigan. In an early letter to Loyal, she wrote: “Please excuse my writing. It is hard to write sitting up in bed. I think I told mother that I passed my red cap. So I am working on my green cap now. Will you please tell mother that I wove a rug for the guest bathroom. How do you like my book plates that I made?

  I hope you like them. I passed a safety test for canoeing so I can go out in a canoe alone. I have learned how to paddle. Are you and mother coming down to see me? I hope so. Doctor Loyal, there were a lot of girls from school that come here that I know so I know more than I thought. I miss you and mother a lot. Love, your daughter Nancy.”7

  From the time Nancy was ten in 1931 until she graduated in 1939, she attended the Girls Latin School, set in the heart of the Gold Coast at 59 East Scott Street. The Latin School of Chicago had been established in 1888 by newly rich Gilded Age parents who wanted their children to have a classical education. (Girls were admitted in 1896; Boys and Girls Latin became separate but associated schools in 1913.) In the years Nancy attended, Girls Latin was run by a strict New England spinster whom everyone addressed as Miss Singleton. The small student body, with no more than twenty girls in each class, was extremely homogeneous. “I’d say Protestant mostly,” said Nancy’s friend Jean Wescott Marshall, whose father was a corporate lawyer.

  “What percentage of the parents were Republican?” I asked. “Pretty much all.” Most of these families lived on the Near North Side or in nearby Lake-view, another upper-class enclave. Were their daughters aware that there was a Depression going on? “We were told to turn out the lights,” Marshall said. “That was about it. Isn’t that awful?”8

  “Girls Latin was a very conservative school,” said China Ibsen Oughton, who was in the class behind Nancy’s. “Academically it was very good. I don’t know if I’d want to use the word ‘best,’ but it was the most social, the most prestigious. Our regular uniform was a dark blue skirt and a white or blue East Lake Shore Drive: 1933–1939

  7 5

  blouse. On Fridays we had to wear a special tunic top with a white collar and long sleeves. I don’t think we liked those terribly well. They were sort of droopy. And we had these awful-looking outfits we wore as we went forth onto the hockey field—bloomers with a bright blue linen tunic that came over them, and a white shirt underneath, and knee guards, and black shoes. Oh, we were quite devastating. Nancy always looked very nice. I would not say glamorous, just very nice-looking, very fresh and wholesome—very ladylike.”9

  Along with most of her privileged friends from Girls Latin, Nancy took dancing lessons at Vourniques’ Dancing School, on North Dearborn Street, near Boys Latin School. “It was where all the young men and young ladies from about seventh grade on were meant to go and learn ballroom dancing,” recalled China Ibsen Oughton. “We wore little white
gloves, and the boys sat on one side and the girls on the other.”10 Bruce McFarland, who attended Boys Latin at that time, told me, “Mr. Vournique and his wife were very impressive because of their size. She was a large woman, and he was a very slight little man. They were very proper and insisted on everyone being dressy. You didn’t come in sloppy clothes and learn how to dance.” McFarland remembered Nancy as “a very happy gal, the kind that you liked to be around because she was just a lot of fun. She was not a siren or anything like that. She was just a nice gal.” Was she a good dancer? “Very.”11

  After classes and on Saturdays, Nancy and her friends would sometimes go to Woods restaurant, which was connected to the Drake Hotel by a pedestrian tunnel underneath Michigan Avenue, and just down the block from the Davises’ apartment. “The waitresses were little ladies in white or-gandy aprons, that sort of thing,” said China Ibsen Oughton. “They had the most scrumptious sandwiches. . . . Nancy was very popular with the young men, as well as with everybody else. One of her early beaus was Sangston Hettler, whom everyone called Sock. They were good high school friends, Nancy and Sock. His sister, Elizabeth Hettler—who’s deceased; old Sock is, too—was also at Girls Latin, so we knew them and all that. Their family was in the wholesale lumber business.”12

  High school students from Girls and Boys Latin, the private coed school Frances Parker, and select public schools in the better suburbs—Evanston, Winnetka, and Lake Forest—were invited to dances at the Fortnightly Club.

  Another Chicago society institution founded in the Gilded Age, it was housed in a stately Georgian mansion on East Bellevue Place, a block north of East Lake Shore Drive. “Nancy loved to dance,” said Girls Latin alumna 7 6