Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  International Squadron, the other Reagan movie cited by the Clark committee, actually opened with an on-screen dedication to the men of the RAF and, like all Warners war movies, was made with the full cooperation of the Department of Defense. “I was a rascal who ferried Lockheed bombers to London, joined the R.A.F., and squared all my sins by taking a suicide mission,” Reagan would describe his role as a bomber pilot in this “timely production about the Battle of Britain. . . . Twin engine Lockheed planes were rolling off the line a few blocks from the studio and being flown directly to England. If we needed one of those in our picture, we’d jolly well use it in a Lockheed hangar from 8 p.m. until 4 a.m. and then it was on its way to a real war.”127

  According to Stephen Vaughn in Ronald Reagan in Hollywood, “Warner Brothers estimated in 1940 that it based a fifth of its movies on newspaper headlines.”128 Historians have suggested that this was where Reagan’s tendency to blur fact and fiction, to dramatize the political with the anecdotal, began, and point to the death ray projector as the model for his Strategic Defense Initiative, commonly known as Star Wars, forty years later. Yet as his description of the use of U.S. military planes in International Squadron indicates, Reagan was quite aware of the difference between the fake and the real, and of the ironies that grew out of basing the former on the latter.

  Lest anyone miss International Squadron’s pro-British message, Warners flew Bebe Daniels and Ben Lyon from London for the splashy premiere in Dixon. This American comedy couple had become immensely popular in England for continuing to broadcast their weekly radio show during the darkest days of the Blitz. In Dixon they gave interviews to the local press in which they spoke of the fear and bravery of the English people, who had lived through nine months of nightly air raids by the Luftwaffe during the previous fall, winter, and spring.129

  It’s clear which side Reagan was on—that of his bosses at Warners and his idol in the White House. As someone who avidly followed the news, he was keenly aware of the desperate situation in Europe—Hitler’s troops 1 2 0

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House had laid siege to Leningrad, and German submarines were blockading Britain, trying to stop American supplies released under the Lend Lease Act from getting through. Yet, as late as that November, a Gallup Poll disclosed that only 17 percent of the American public supported going to war against Germany.

  On December 7, 1941, the debate between isolationists and interventionists was rendered moot by Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. A day later, the United States Senate, with only one dissenting vote, declared war on Japan. On December 11, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. America was at war whether it wanted to be or not. And suddenly the world apart didn’t seem so far away from the rest of the world and its problems after all.

  C H A P T E R S I X

  NANCY AT SMITH

  1939–1944

  I was in Chicago in September 1941, until I went into the Navy in late 1943. I was doing the evening news on WBBM at the time and narrating one of the soap operas as well. Edith Davis was one of the people around WBBM, and we would drink occasionally in the Wrigley Building bar—

  WBBM was in the Wrigley Building. She was a very attractive, interesting woman. If she was bawdy, she was bawdy in a funny way. She was just a funny woman who was enjoying her life and was very happy to have met Loyal. I got to know her and her child. Her child was very ladylike, a Smith girl, with the Peter Pan collar and the black patent leather shoes and the white gloves and the pearls. Nancy was—her father’s darling. Utterly, utterly unlike her mother.

  Mike Wallace to author,

  May 30, 2002

  After high school, I went to Smith College, where I majored in English and drama—and boys.

  Nancy Reagan,

  My Turn 1

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1939, RICHARD DAVIS, NANCY’S STEPBROTHER, CAME

  to live with Edith and Loyal in Chicago, after his mother died of tuberculosis in California. “Nancy was terribly nice to me,” Richard recalled. “She never said, ‘Well, I’m sorry your mother died,’ but she was very kind. Of course, she was going out with boys, and they would always take me along to the movies. We had a lot of fun together as a teenager and a college student.”2 Though Nancy and Richard had hit if off from the time they met as children, a closeness was established between them during these years that would last for the rest of their lives, perhaps because they were both 1 2 1

  1 2 2

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House only children, of opposite sexes, and far enough apart in age so that they didn’t threaten each other’s position in the family. “My most positive memories of Nancy are from those days,” he said. “She was a very happy person. She had a great smile, she was always laughing, she was the life of the party.”3

  That fall Nancy started her freshman year at Smith College. She had promised Dr. Loyal that she would complete at least a year of higher education before pursuing an acting career, but she soon discovered that life at the exclusive girls’ school suited her. Situated on two hundred acres in Northampton, Massachusetts, Smith, with 2,500 students, was the largest of the prestigious group of women’s colleges known as the Seven Sisters. It had been founded in 1875 with a bequest from Sophia Smith, a deaf local spinster, with “the design to furnish for my own sex means and facilities for education equal to those which are afforded now in our Colleges to young men.”4 Nancy arrived at the end of the tenure of Smith’s greatest president, William Allan Neilson, who had vastly expanded the campus and the curriculum, transforming the high-minded provincial retreat into an internationally recognized liberal arts institution, well known for its Junior Year Abroad Program, which he started in 1924.

  Tuition, room, and board were $1,000 a year, and Nancy received an allowance of $100 a month.5 Students lived and took their meals in residences called cottages, which were staffed by uniformed maids. For her first two years Nancy roomed with her friend from Girls Latin Jean Wescott, and struggled with the required courses, particularly science and math.6

  Her first college boyfriend, Frank Birney Jr., was also from Chicago. The son of a banker, Birney had attended the private Lake Forest Academy before enrolling at Princeton University, where he was invited to join Tiger Inn, one the school’s eating clubs. Wealthy, well liked, and “utterly handsome,”7 Frank seemed to have everything Nancy wanted. He even shared her theatrical ambitions and was an officer of the Triangle Club, Princeton’s musical theater organization, whose alumni included Jimmy Stewart.8

  During Nancy’s freshman and sophomore years at Smith, Hitler would conquer most of Europe, and in her junior year the United States entered the war, but for her “those were very happy and carefree days.” As she wrote forty years later, “The students were much less serious than they are today, much less politically involved. I knew nothing about politics. I don’t say this with any pride, but it didn’t seem important then.”9 As her stepbrother said on a television show decades later, “I used to like to kid Nancy at Smith: 1939–1944

  1 2 3

  her that she spent more time at Princeton with her boyfriends than studying. But she was extremely well liked and very personable, had a great sense of humor, and didn’t seem to be burdened by anything.”10

  She was, however, in need of occasional reassurance, as evidenced by a letter Loyal sent her on December 6, 1939, a week before she would return home for her debutante party. “Nance dearest,” he wrote. “I’m sure you know I love you, but I’m afraid I haven’t told you so enough. I’m re-paid more than enough by your love and respect . . . and by knowing that you are honest, frank, direct and dependable. These are things which many of us have to acquire in later years, but you have them already. There has never been, and will not be ever, any question in my mind that you are trying to do a good job.”11

  The Davises enrolled Richard in the ninth grade at Boys Latin School, where he became friends with Homer Hargrave Jr. and Joseph Kelly, one of the mayor’s
sons. Like his father, Richard was an avid Civil War buff, and in previous summers Loyal and Edith had taken him on trips to some of the historic battlefields. Much to the delight of Edith, who had given him a biography of Robert E. Lee, The Gray Knight, young Richard saw himself as “an unreconstructed rebel.”12 Loyal’s son was fascinated by military matters, so for the next three summers the Davises sent him to camp at the prestigious Culver Military Academy in Indiana.13

  While Edith was happy to have her stepson living with them, there was a certain amount of tension involved in suddenly having a teenage boy around the house. “Edith was very, very sensitive,” Richard Davis told me.

  “I remember one Saturday afternoon when I was about fifteen, the three of us were sitting in the library. And my father and I were going down to the Drake to get a magazine or a chocolate soda. Dr. Loyal said, ‘You and your mother ought to kiss each other before we go out.’ So I turned my cheek, because I thought Edith was going to kiss me. Jesus, she interpreted that as me turning away from her. Edith could be very, very tough, especially when it involved my father. If anybody said anything critical of Loyal, Edith didn’t mince any words. It didn’t matter where she was or who was there.”14

  This was “the same sort of protective attitude,” Davis pointed out, that Nancy would later show toward Ronald Reagan. On the surface everything at the Davises’ seemed to revolve around the husband’s career, schedule, and wishes. “Nancy and me,” Richard Davis recalled, “if we said, ‘Oh, it’s chicken again tonight, DeeDee.’ Not exactly a complaint, 1 2 4

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House but she took it very seriously. ‘Your father likes chicken.’ And therefore you like chicken. It was just about that simple.”15

  There was an underlying insecurity, Davis thought, in Edith’s feelings toward Loyal. As a teacher, his father “was constantly promoting young people and stimulating their interest,” whereas Edith sometimes seemed threatened by the younger generation, including her own daughter. Perhaps this was because she was hiding the fact that she was eight years older than her husband. “I was always told that they were both born in 1896,”

  Richard said. “It was interesting, because I didn’t know why she was absolutely gray in 1940. Her hair was white.”16

  As Edith began to show her age, Nancy was blossoming. She was home for Easter vacation in April 1940, when Alla Nazimova spent a night with the Davises on her way to Los Angeles, where she was making her first movie in fifteen years, Escape, directed by Mervyn LeRoy at MGM. On the train the next day the actress wrote a letter to her girlfriend, Glesca Marshall, in which she rhapsodized about her “extraordinarily beautiful”

  goddaughter. Nancy’s face, she wrote, “which has every right to be bold and assertive has instead a soft dreamy quality. And add to this a figure of

  ‘oomph!’ You’d be crazy about the child.”17

  Nancy had grown accustomed to having her mother’s show business pals stay for a night or two, but for Richard it was a new experience: “All my football friends and I called our home Ma Davis’s Boardinghouse for Actors. It really was terribly stimulating.”18 Some of these visitors observed that Edith really ran the show on East Lake Shore Drive. As Katy Weld, the wife of Walter Huston’s colleague John Weld, the writer, saw it, “Edie Davis was the power behind her husband, behind the whole thing. She ran their lives. Loyal Davis was a famous surgeon, very high up in his profession, but she pushed him up in society also. Edie was always behind everything.” John Weld added, “Edie was very ambitious about Nancy, about getting her in the movies. And Nancy was ambitious, like her mother.”19

  In early 1940, another major star entered the Davises’ life. Lillian Gish,

  “the First Lady of the Silent Screen,” was in Chicago with the touring company of Life with Father, which opened on February 19 and ran for a record-breaking sixty-six weeks. Gish had been a friend of Colleen Moore’s since they were both under contract to D. W. Griffith. After the advent of the talkies, Gish had moved to New York, where she became an acclaimed theatrical star and met the love of her life, George Jean Nathan, the brilliant Nancy at Smith: 1939–1944

  1 2 5

  drama critic and ultra-sophisticated dandy who co-edited both The Smart Set and The American Mercury with H. L. Mencken.20 Through Nathan, Gish took a seat among the fast livers and sharp wits of the Algonquin Round Table, but she always retained her pure, almost virginal, image. She never smoked or drank. She never married either, seeming to prefer the company of her mother and her actress sister, Dorothy, to that of a husband. Memories of her father, an alcoholic who had deserted the family when the girls were youngsters and died in an insane asylum in 1912, doubtless colored her views on both alcohol and men.21

  “Marriage is a business,” Gish declared in a 1919 interview, when she was twenty-six. “A woman cannot combine a career and marriage. . . . I should not wish to unite the two.” Twenty years later she reaffirmed her opinion in an article titled “Why I Never Married”: “I believe that marriage is a career in itself. I have preferred a stage career to a marriage career.”22 She was forty-seven when she arrived in Chicago, and had ended her relationship with Nathan four years earlier, allegedly because she discovered that he was Jewish by birth, although his mother was a convent-educated convert to Catholicism and he himself had markedly right-wing views, not unlike her own.23

  A lifelong Republican and early anti-Communist, Gish went to her grave denying that D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation— in which she starred as a Northern senator’s daughter who turns sympathetic to the Southern cause after she is almost raped by her father’s mulatto protégé—was the slightest bit racist, despite ongoing protests that it was a glorification of the Ku Klux Klan. She was thrilled when Warren Harding invited her and Dorothy to lunch at the White House after the Washington premiere of Griffith’s Orphans of the Storm in 1921,24 and she gushed with admiration about meeting Benito Mussolini while filming Romola in Italy in 1923.25

  While Gish loved spending time in Europe, she was a flag-waving patriot and a practicing Episcopalian, proud that her mother’s ancestors had em-igrated from England in the 1630s and included President Zachary Taylor. Yet she endorsed FDR in 1936 and resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution when the organization refused to allow Marian Anderson, the black opera singer, to perform at its 1939 convention in Washington.26 In the 1940 election, she refused to vote for Roosevelt or Wendell Willkie, saying both “were more interested in other countries than in their own.”27

  Gish’s year and a half in Chicago coincided with the rise of the America 1 2 6

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House First Committee, and her closest friends there, General Robert E. Wood and Colonel Robert McCormick, were the leaders of the isolationist organization. According to Colleen Moore, McCormick declared Gish “the most fabulous woman he had ever known and asked her to marry him.”28

  As Gish wrote in Silver Glory, her unpublished history of Hollywood, “My days were filled happily by knowing Robert E. Wood and his family [and]

  through them the idols of us all, Charles and Anne Lindbergh.”29 Gish became the AFC’s most prominent spokesperson after Lindbergh. On April 1, 1941, she gave a radio speech urging Americans to keep the country out of war. Among those who sent her congratulatory letters was Edith’s co-star on The Stepmother, Francis X. Bushman, who wrote, “I can think of no one woman who I would rather place beside our National Hero Lindbergh, than yourself. I am sure a National Shrine will in days to come, be erected to you.”30

  In June, Gish joined Lindbergh at an America First rally at the Hollywood Bowl, where the crowd of eighty thousand chanted, “Lindy! Our next president!,” and she called for a national referendum on the war.31

  But on September 1, 1941, one month after Senator Nye’s startling attack on the Hollywood moguls in St. Louis, she suddenly resigned from the AFC’s board—some say at the urging of her old friend Mary Pickford, others say to avoid testifying be
fore Senator Clark’s Subcommittee on Moving Picture Propaganda, which was then convening in Washington.

  Ten days after Gish’s renunciation, Lindbergh gave his notorious speech in Des Moines accusing the British, the Jews, and the Roosevelt administration of pushing America into the war. By then the AFC was viewed by many as more pro-Nazi than anti-war, and according to Lindbergh biographer A. Scott Berg, “talk of Col. McCormick’s and General Wood’s anti-Semitism was rampant.”32

  There is no record of the Davises’ being friendly with either Wood or McCormick, though the latter was close to their friend Mayor Kelly. It has been reported, however, that Loyal Davis was an “active member” of America First.33 “If he had been a member, I probably would have known,” asserted Richard Davis, who doubted that he was. “He was an Anglophile, so I think he was sympathetic to the British. I never heard him say we have to stay out of the war. Maybe he did in 1937 or 1938, but he never did anything about it politically. He was very interested in politics, but he was not a joiner.”34 The only organizations Loyal belonged to, his son said, were medical associations.

  Nancy at Smith: 1939–1944

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  Loyal’s friend Homer Hargrave Sr., while admiring of America First, was not a member, according to his son. “He was very sympathetic to Lindbergh and Senator [Burton] Wheeler,” Hargrave Junior said,35 referring to the Montana Democrat who was in the forefront of the isolationist movement and whose wife was on the AFC’s board. Hargrave added that his father, having lived through World War I, was adamantly opposed to going to war again but was neither pro-German nor anti-Semitic. He told a story to illustrate his point, though it also conveyed a sense of how nonchalant the Davises’ social set seemed about the rise of right-wing au-thoritarian regimes in Europe (an attitude shared by many Americans, including Louis B. Mayer and Jack Warner, both of whom had entertained Mussolini’s son Vittorio in Hollywood in 1937).36