“In 1938, when Colleen and my father went to Europe on their honeymoon, she said she wanted to bring me a present. I said I’d like a black shirt from Italy and a swastika. She was trying to make friends with me, so she brought both back. I put the swastika up on my bedroom wall with the college pennants. One day I came home from school and the swastika was gone. I asked Colleen where it was. ‘Your father couldn’t stand it anymore.
It went down the incinerator.’”37 According to his son, this was Homer Hargrave Sr.’s reaction to Kristallnacht, the first organized attack on Jewish communities in Germany, which occurred on November 9, 1938.
Richard Davis recalled his parents’ lunching with the Lindberghs at the Arizona Biltmore, probably in the spring of 1940. “I don’t think Dr.
Loyal was impressed by Charles Lindbergh at all. He was very impressed by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, who was a marvelous author.” Davis also recalled, “Walter and Nan Huston were very much against Hitler. This went back to when we spent two summers with them, and I heard a lot of conversations at the dinner table. They were very pro-European. They were oriented to the British and the French.”38
On the other hand, Edith and Loyal saw a lot of Lillian Gish in Chicago in 1940 and 1941. Richard Davis said he had never heard any talk of America First during the dinners they had with the actress, but of all Edith’s actress friends, the conservative Gish was his father’s favorite. “She and Loyal were very close. I always thought they had a thing for each other.”39
Historians have made much of Loyal Davis’s political views and his influence on those of the future First Lady and her husband. According to the stock portrayal, the doctor was a relentless right-wing bigot who turned 1 2 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House his stepdaughter into a Republican zombie and through her converted Ronald Reagan from a New Deal liberal to a New Right conservative. As former California governor Pat Brown, whom Reagan defeated in 1966, put it, “There is no doubt that Reagan’s move to the far right began after he met and married Nancy.”40
Loyal Davis was a Republican, but he was neither a party activist nor a significant donor to any candidate other than his son-in-law. Whether he was particularly right-wing is difficult to say—his friends insist he wasn’t, his enemies insist he was. Allegations of his racism and anti-Semitism appear to be exaggerated, though not far-fetched. In discussing such matters, there is a natural but simplistic tendency to apply the standards of the present to those of the past. What can be said unequivocally about Loyal Davis is that he was very much of his time, place, class, race, sex, and profession. Only his negative attitude toward religion in general was unusual.
As a self-proclaimed Southern Democrat, Edith held views that were even more clichéd than her husband’s.
Nancy Reagan always maintained that her stepfather had little interest in politics and no influence on her views or Ronald Reagan’s, which is somewhat disingenuous and clearly overstated. “His life was medicine,”
she told me. “I never heard him say that he was a Republican. My mother was a Democrat—Southern Democrat, y’all. And I knew nothing about politics.”41
Richard Davis told me his father was a standard-issue Republican: “He didn’t like Roosevelt, but no one in upper-middle-class America did.”
Davis was uncertain as to whether Edith ever voted for Roosevelt: “If she did, she didn’t tell Loyal, that’s for sure.”42 Edith’s political hero, he noted, was Senator Carter Glass, an eminent conservative Democrat from her home state of Virginia and the last surviving member of the Senate born in the antebellum South; he had authored the Federal Reserve Act of 1913
and been secretary of the treasury under Woodrow Wilson. Nicknamed the Unreconstructed Rebel by FDR, Glass led the fight against his attempt to abolish the poll tax, which effectively deprived blacks of the vote in many Southern states, and he opposed Roosevelt’s renomination in 1936
and 1940.43
Edith was “as bigoted as her husband,” according to Kitty Kelley, who relied heavily on the recollections of Lester Weinrott, Edith’s producer and director, to reach this conclusion. “Loyal was the worst bigot in the world,”
Weinrott told Kelley. “He was a racist who called all blacks niggers, and an Nancy at Smith: 1939–1944
1 2 9
anti-Semite who called all Jews kikes. He hated every Catholic he ever met.
His mother . . . was president of the Eastern Star [a Masonic order], and she spat on the floor every time a Catholic entered the room. Loyal was the same way. We had a federal judge in Chicago named Mike Igoe, who married a nice Catholic girl from Galesburg, and Loyal never referred to Mrs.
Igoe as anything but ‘that Catholic bitch.’ Not to her face, of course, just behind her back.”44
“I never heard any racial or anti-Semitic utterance from my grandparents, nor Dr. Loyal or Edith,” Richard Davis insisted. “My father’s best friend and colleague all of his life was Dr. Louis J. Pollock, who was Jewish. A Jewish surgeon, Jacob Bookbinder, operated on my grandfather, Albert, for cancer of the bowel. My father trusted him to take care of his own father. Edith would go out to black churches on the South Side of Chicago on Sunday afternoons and participate in their activities. Lester Weinrott knew all of this. He and his wife, Betty, were at the house all the time. Les Weinrott was a very, very dear friend of Edith and Loyal. And I was extraordinarily fond of him. I don’t understand why he said what he said to Kitty Kelley.”45
Mike Wallace, the CBS newsman, whose long friendship with the Davises began in the early 1940s when he worked at the same Chicago radio station as Edith, told me, “I’m Jewish, and I never had that feeling from anybody in that family. I never heard a whisper about anti-Semitism.”
Asked why Lester Weinrott, whom he also knew, would have made such statements, Wallace answered, “He was probably bitter, because he was left behind, so to speak. He disappeared after doing radio soap operas.”46
“Dr. Davis was certainly not anti-Semitic,” said Dr. Nicholas Wetzel, who started as a clerk with Loyal Davis in 1945 and was a partner in his practice until 1977. “He brought any number of Jews on the staff at Passavant.”47 Both Wetzel and Richard Davis cited Loyal’s intervention in 1946
or 1947 on behalf of Dr. Harold Laufman, a talented surgeon whose appointment was actively opposed by many doctors at the hospital because he was Jewish. “My father absolutely blew everybody away who objected to it,” Davis recalled, “because Dr. Laufman was an outstanding surgeon.”48
Although this incident took place after the end of World War II, when the revelation of the concentration camps put a muzzle on American anti-Semitism, quotas on Jewish students persisted at some colleges and universities into the 1960s.
Wetzel also said that he saw no evidence of anti-Catholicism in Loyal, 1 3 0
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House pointing out that he himself was a Catholic. He added that, while Edith was a regular attendant at the Fourth Presbyterian Church, her husband seldom accompanied her. “I don’t think he was atheistic, but he was certainly irreligious,” said Wetzel, “and that dated back to his grade school days, when he had perfect attendance at Sunday school and the prize was given to the son of the local department store owner. I think that totally soured him on the church.”49
“I never joined a church,” Loyal wrote. “I have tried to practice the golden rule. I have never been able to subscribe to the divinity of Jesus Christ nor to his virgin birth. I don’t believe in his resurrection, or a heaven or a hell as places. If we are remembered and discussed with pleasure and happiness after death, this is our heavenly reward and mortality for having led a good life. I have never thought these beliefs necessary to the recognition of the great influence Christ’s teachings have had and which I have tried to follow. . . . I have always been affected by flagrant acts of injustice.”50
“My father loved to discuss serious topics,” Nancy Reagan explained,
“and I can remember mo
re than one conversation about whether there really was such a thing as a human soul. I don’t remember the answers, but I recall, 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.’ ”51
One of the most oft-repeated—and damning—stories about Loyal Davis was originally reported by Lou Cannon in his first book about Reagan, in 1969: “A California physician who interned under Dr. Davis remembers that his fellow interns chafed under his strictness. In those days the interns were frequently called to deliver babies in the city’s Negro districts and they would, on occasion, be asked by the mother to suggest a name for the child they had helped bring into the world. The interns invariably suggested the name Loyal Davis, a practice that was brought to the attention of the esteemed surgeon and finally prompted a bulletin board edict that interns were in no case to assist in naming an infant.”52
(Cannon repeated this story in his second Reagan book in 1982 , but not his third in 1991.)
In her version, Kitty Kelley omits Cannon’s reference to Loyal’s strictness as the basis of the resentments against him: “The prejudices of Loyal Davis were not hidden from the medical community, or from the interns Nancy at Smith: 1939–1944
1 3 1
and residents who worked for him. Some were so appalled by his virulent racism that when they went into the Chicago ghetto to deliver babies, they persuaded the black mothers to name their children ‘Loyal’ out of spite.”53
Although Cannon based the story on a single source, who apparently didn’t date it, there probably was some truth to it. “I’ve heard that story, but an equal number of babies were named after Irving Cutter,” Wetzel said, referring to the dean of Northwestern University Medical School. “It was probably before the war, because Dean Cutter quit in 1942.”54 Loyal Davis’s other longtime partner, Dr. Daniel Ruge, concurred. “I had a patient one time whose name was Loyal Davis Washington. I think it was done more as a joke, but you can’t tell. It’s true, a lot of people didn’t like him. He was a strong personality.”55
“It was always a joke,” said Richard Davis, who told an anecdote suggesting that Loyal was less a racist than a snob. When Richard was in medical school at Northwestern in the 1950s, pairs of students would go to the South Side and other neighborhoods “where people couldn’t afford hospitalization to have babies. Dr. Loyal always used to kid us— ‘Dicky, you better take a good catcher’s mitt, just to catch the babies as they fly out.’
The students would name not only the black children but all the others after their professors.
“Before and after the war, Dr. Loyal had a very famous class for junior medical students, which they nicknamed the Hour of Charm,” Davis continued. ( The Hour of Charm was a popular radio show, featuring Phil Spi-talny and His All-Girl Orchestra, that aired from 1934 to 1948 on CBS
and NBC.) “Now, if you came to that without a necktie and a coat, you were thrown out. He taught doctors to be doctors. To act like doctors and to think like doctors. In neurosurgery you can’t be sloppy.”56
No discussion of the Davises’ political attitudes would be complete without considering their relationship with Mayor Edward Kelly, which began in the early 1930s and lasted until his death, in 1950. Kelly’s wife, Margaret, was almost as close to Edith as Colleen Moore Hargrave was. Loyal and Ed Kelly also grew quite close, the train engineer’s son from Galesburg and the policeman’s son from the Southwest Side having developed a deep respect for each other as neighbors on the Gold Coast. The Kellys lived just down the block from the Davises, at 209 East Lake Shore Drive, which was considered the finest address in the city.
In the 1940s, Kelly was at the height of his power. Along with Cook 1 3 2
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House County Democratic Party chairman Pat Nash, he ran one of the most powerful political machines in the country, rivaling those of Boston’s James Michael Curley, Kansas City’s Tom Pendergast, and Jersey City’s Frank Hague. A member of FDR’s inner circle, he engineered the President’s nomination to a third term at the 1940 convention, and also the replacement of his left-wing vice president, Henry Wallace, with the middle-of-the-road Harry Truman at the 1944 convention. Both conventions were held in Chicago. Kelly supported the New Deal, but at heart he was a law-and-order fiscal conservative who knew how to get along with the city’s Republican business establishment, especially Colonel McCormick (who had roomed with Franklin Roosevelt at Groton and hated him ever after). He was also cozy with the heirs to Al Capone’s organized crime syndicate, which along with other criminal interests was said to provide the Kelly-Nash machine with an estimated $12 to $20 million annually in return for lax enforcement of the anti-gambling laws.57 Pat Nash’s nephew was Capone’s lawyer.58 (The Mafia boss had been convicted of federal income tax evasion the year Kelly became mayor; released from prison in 1939, he died in 1947.)
Kelly is not even mentioned in either Nancy or My Turn, but Nancy Reagan confirmed that he and his wife were close to her mother and stepfather. “I remember there was a picture of Mother and Margaret Kelly in our apartment,” she said. What was Mrs. Kelly like? “She was very nice.
You know, they were what they were.”59
“Margaret Kelly was a fireball—a beautiful woman and a lovely person,” Richard Davis recalled. “We would go over to the Kellys’ every Sunday. They had a spectacular apartment. It was really something else.”60 In his memoir, Loyal Davis recounted a night in the early 1940s when the Democratic mayor and the Republican governor of Illinois, Dwight Green, came for dinner at the Davises’ apartment. Loyal naively assumed that Edith must have mistakenly invited them on the same evening. But, he writes, “they greeted each other warmly, and my embarrassment quickly disappeared. After dinner, they were in earnest conversation, and the governor asked to use our telephone. When he returned, he said quietly to the mayor, ‘I’ve taken care of it.’ Until then, I thought that political rivals must be dyed-in-the-wool enemies but soon learned that this is more apparent in campaigns than it is in the day-to-day administration of government.”61
Nancy at Smith: 1939–1944
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What Edith understood and Loyal would learn was that power transcends political affiliation, and ideology need not get in the way of social success. In other words, whom you know is more important that what you believe. The Davis dining room was not so much a hotbed of political activism as a celebrity salon whose luster was heightened by the presence of not only powerful politicians but also movie stars, society figures, and prominent doctors. Loyal and Edith got along with everyone from the conservative Lillian Gish to the liberal Walter Huston to the bohemian Alla Nazimova precisely because those people’s political views—or sexual morals, for that matter—didn’t matter as much as their stardom. These were lessons that Nancy learned as a young woman, and that she would apply most effectively as she and her husband made their way through the hybrid society of Los Angeles.
At the beginning of her third year at Smith, in September 1941, Nancy was one of only eleven students out of a class of five hundred to choose drama as her major.62 That December, Smith announced the appointment of Hallie Flanagan Davis as dean of the college and professor of drama. A remarkable and controversial figure, the fifty-one-year-old Davis had been the first woman to win a Guggenheim Fellowship, had started the Vassar Experimental Theater in 1925, and from 1934 to 1939 had run the Federal Theater, part of FDR’s Works Progress Administration, which at its peak employed fifteen thousand theater workers and presented the works of such playwrights as Eugene O’Neill, George Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot, and W. H.
Auden to millions across the country. It also created a politically oriented series called the Living Newspaper, which drew criticism from conservatives and which led to Davis’s being called before HUAC in late 1938. The following y
ear Congress cut off the Federal Theater’s budget.63
At her first class with the drama students, the redheaded, tweed-caped Davis said, “I wish to say that this is a much warmer group than the last time I stood in front of a table like this. That was the [House] Investigating Committee for Un-American Activities.” Davis cast Nancy in her first production at Smith, Susan and God, 64 and later said of her, “She was a very good student, interested in the backstage as well as on stage, and she always had a feeling for her audience.”65
By that time Nancy was certain that she wanted to act, having spent the two previous summers as an unpaid apprentice at “rickety old summer-1 3 4
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House stock theaters on the eastern seaboard.”66 Between her sophomore and junior years she was at the Bass Rocks Theater near Gloucester, Massachusetts, which was run by Martin Manulis, a young producer whose father-in-law, Ralph Austin Bard, a prominent Chicago entrepreneur, was an acquaintance of Loyal Davis’s. “I did not know Nancy before she came to Bass Rocks,” Manulis said, “but she was very knowable and likable and vivacious. She was quite serious about being an actress, even then. She wanted to do something in the theater. I don’t think she was talking movies in those days.”67
Bass Rocks, Manulis explained, “was real old-fashioned summer stock.
Plays ran only one week, and they rehearsed a week. We didn’t have much money, so we tried to have unusual leading players who didn’t demand high salaries. We did former Broadway hits, and some kids were quite lucky and got bit parts in a play.”68 In her memoir Nancy Reagan writes,
“As an apprentice, I did everything—painted scenery, upholstered furniture, ran errands, tacked up announcements in the town, cleaned dressing rooms, and so forth. I learned a lot about the actors from the way in which they left their dressing rooms. Some couldn’t have cared less about the condition of their rooms and the fact that others would occupy them after they left. Others were clean, calm, and neat people, whose performances were as orderly as their dressing rooms.”69 If Nancy acted that summer, Manulis didn’t remember it. But she did develop a “big crush,”
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