Reagan

by Bob Spitz

  In 1922, a touring company offered Edith a steady income. But it meant endless travel, living out of a suitcase, and because regional theater rotated plays on a weekly basis—sometimes twice weekly—the demands on actors were extraordinary: the incessant memorizing of new lines, afternoon rehearsals, and nightly performances. Taking a baby along was out of the question.

  Edith had little recourse but to leave two-year-old Nancy with her older sister, Virginia, and her brother-in-law in Bethesda, Maryland. The Galbraiths lived on a quiet street in a small but handsome Dutch colonial with a proper front porch and enough frontage for a pair of shade trees that fanned out across the lawn. The house itself was somewhat less expansive. There were only two bedrooms—one for Nancy’s aunt and uncle, the other for her cousin, Charlotte, who was five—so a sleeping nook was created on the upstairs porch. There was no hardship. Nancy was made welcome and felt the embrace of a normal family life.

  Every once in a while, Edith would show up. She’d blow into Bethesda between dates in Atlanta or Dallas or St. Paul or Cincinnati, each of which she made sound like a glamorous resort, her stories of road life recited like fairy tales. Her vivacious personality and stagy delivery varnished each anecdote with layers of high-toned exotica. The descriptions held Nancy in thrall. She especially enjoyed hearing about backstage hijinks with a recurring cast of character actors. One in particular, a natural performer with a supple, gravelly voice named Spencer Tracy, Edith had befriended and trusted as a confidant. There were others just as exceptional in her inner circle—Walter Huston, ZaSu Pitts, Louis Calhern, and Don Ameche. She made their lives sound thrilling and rewarding, but in truth it was a constant struggle, living on a scant sixty dollars a month, often in fleabag hotels, waiting for the next gig to turn up. Still, within two years she had performed in a mixed bag of forty-two plays—drawing-room comedies, Greek tragedies, Grand Guignol, Shakespeare, farce, whatever came her way. “It was hard, brain-tormenting, bone-breaking work, but gratifying,” recalled Pat O’Brien, another young actor who frequently crossed paths with Edith.

  The real payoff for Nancy came those times when Edith landed a part in a legitimate play on Broadway, when the Galbraiths took Nancy and Charlotte on the train to see her act. Nancy would stay with her mother for the length of the run in a one-room residential hotel on West Forty-ninth Street. From there, they walked to the theater each night, hand in hand, the lights of Broadway dazzling and magical to a wide-eyed four-year-old. Nancy sat through those productions over and over, watching her mother transform herself, escaping into the fantasy of stagecraft, rushing into Edith’s arms after the curtain came down, watching, fascinated, while she removed her makeup. “I quickly came to love the special feel and the musty smell of backstage,” Nancy recalled. But just as quickly the show would close, and Edith would pack and be on a train out of town—by herself.

  Inevitably, Nancy’s mother’s absence was devastating. But despite the heartache, Nancy’s world remained deceptively calm. The Galbraiths treated her “with great love,” like a second daughter. They provided every comfort within their modest means, and beyond. In 1925, they enrolled her in the first kindergarten class ever offered at Sidwell Friends, the tony Washington private school attended by children of ambassadors, senators, Supreme Court justices, and princes, along with such White House elite as Theodore Roosevelt’s son Archibald. In the summer, Nancy and Charlotte swam at a local pool or, if they were lucky, were invited to a country club by one of their classmates’ well-to-do parents. Occasionally, Nancy’s father and Nanee Robbins would visit, though she was careful never to mention seeing them to her mother.

  In the summer of 1927, Edith accepted a job with a touring company in England, and while headed overseas on the SS New York she fell into a shipboard romance with a married doctor. Loyal Davis was on his way to London to deliver a paper on neurology to a conference of physicians at the National Hospital. A thirty-one-year-old specialist from Chicago, he was a tall, robust man with a sonorous baritone fleeing a marriage as broken as Edith’s. He and his wife had begun living apart just prior to his departure.

  Edith Luckett lost no time moving in on him. Loyal Davis represented everything she was missing in her life—status, stability, and the promise of security. Other than his marital setback, he appeared to lead a charmed life. There was a distinctive aura about him, from his impeccable, aristocratic appearance to a litany of sharp, uncompromising judgments delivered nonstop throughout their dinner conversation. To Edith, they sounded clever and intellectual—like the ruminations of a Eugene O’Neill monologist. She shadowed him through the rest of the crossing. An entry in her journal, written while at sea, mentions the “doctor she wanted to marry.”

  In 1928, while co-starring opposite Spencer Tracy in Baby Cyclone at Chicago’s Blackstone Theatre, Edith revived her romance with Loyal Davis. He was recently divorced and hopscotching between Northwestern University, where he held an assistant professorship, and a practice at the luxurious new Passavant Memorial Hospital, which fronted onto Lake Michigan. By June, when Edith segued into Elmer the Great, a baseball comedy by Ring Lardner and starring Walter Huston, Dr. Davis decided to propose.

  They chose not to wait to marry until a lavish celebration could be arranged, opting for a private wedding with a judge during the run of Elmer the Great in New York. According to Nancy, “Uncle Walter stood up with my mother and father when they were secretly married in New York in October.” Then, when the show moved to Chicago, they made it official on May 21, 1929, in a chapel service at the Fourth Presbyterian Church, with Nancy serving as her mother’s bridesmaid. Both the bride and the groom gave their ages as thirty-three, although Edith was pushing forty-one. Not that Dr. Davis complained about a disparity in their ages. “My professional and personal life became calm and happy,” he explained.

  For Nancy, it was everything she could hope for. In one fell swoop, she got rolled into a family, with her mother at home on a full-time basis. But there were growing pains. The newlyweds, unaccustomed to caring for an eight-year-old, got precious little time to acclimate themselves to married life, while Nancy struggled with adapting to her uncompromising stepfather. “He seemed formal and distant,” she recalled, “and at first I resented having to share my mother with him.” Even friends found Loyal Davis a hard person to warm up to. “He was an austere, forbidding man, tight-assed and straitlaced,” said Lester Weinrott, a family intimate. He was intolerant of those he deemed intellectually inferior, but also of blacks, Catholics, and especially Jews. At the hospital no one dared challenge his authoritarian conceits. With Nancy, he was an imposing, “rock-hard disciplinarian,” insisting on her fealty, strict punctuality, and deference to his high-handed opinions. She called him Dr. Loyal out of respect, chewed each bite of food thirty-two times, as he’d instructed, and accepted his view that “men were to be the leaders and women to follow.”

  But if he was “gruff on the outside,” as Nancy pointed out, he was also generous and kind. In 1929, in the midst of the Great Depression, Loyal Davis provided handsomely for Nancy. He sent her to the University School for Girls, a private institution, and later to Girls Latin, one of the most exclusive and prestigious private schools in the Midwest. At night, they spent long hours discussing issues he deemed worthy for her edification, and later, when he adjourned to his study to write poetry, a private guilty pleasure, verses in progress were often slipped underneath her bedroom door. On weekends, she accompanied him on his rounds at the hospital—sometimes even into surgery—where he introduced her as his daughter to colleagues and patients alike. Friends recall her gazing up at him with unconcealed awe, the same way she would, years hence, at Ronald Reagan. In no time she grew to adore her new father.

  Dr. Loyal brought structure to Nancy’s adolescence, but Edith—Edith provided the excitement. Her risqué personality seemed more outrageous than ever, her language saltier, her jokes cruder. She’d sworn off her former heady itinerant lif
e in order to give marriage and motherhood her full attention, but that didn’t mean shunning show business altogether. As anyone observing Edith’s transition might have predicted, you could take the actress out of the theater, but never the theater out of the actress. Some big names on the entertainment circuit regularly dropped by the Davis’s East Lake Shore Drive apartment. Nazimova showed up first with her lover Glesca Marshall while she was appearing locally in A Month in the Country. Spencer Tracy, chaperoned by Katharine Hepburn, came to visit “so often,” Nancy recalled, “that he practically became a member of the family”—and often to dry out under Loyal’s care; Walter Huston and his wife, Nan, moved in while they were starring in Dodsworth; Helen Hayes was a regular, as was Colleen Moore, Mary Martin, and Lillian Gish; Carol Channing brought Eartha Kitt. “Jimmy Cagney was always there,” Edith recalled. The star light burned brightly in that fourteenth-floor duplex.

  In October 1932, just after Nancy’s eleventh birthday, Edith went back to work—not on the road in a theatrical stock company, but in radio, the explosive new medium that had just begun broadcasting serials and soap operas. NBC, in Chicago, was blazing new trails in radio production—in fact, it was that very company’s outpost in the Merchandise Mart that had attracted Dutch Reagan on his early job-seeking odyssey. Edith became a mainstay of the company’s evolving lineup, first doubling as a socialite mother and a Negro maid on Betty and Bob, before eventually moving on to roles in Ma Perkins, Broadway Cinderella, Stepmother, and Amos ’n’ Andy.

  Edith’s work heightened Nancy’s interest in show business. Every Saturday and Sunday afternoon, she and a friend, Jane Wescott, rode the el to a downtown movie theater where they thumbed fan magazines and sat through endless double features. “She liked Bing Crosby,” Wescott recalled. When Jane revealed the name of her current heartthrob, Nancy shrugged indifference. “I don’t know what you see in Ronald Reagan.”

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  The family’s apartment listing read “Luckett—Davis,” but Nancy was neither. Being Anne Frances Robbins made her feel like an outsider. Every place she went, every social situation, necessitated an explanation of who she was and how she fit in. She no longer felt like a Robbins. The minimal contact she had with her father only served to emphasize his irrelevance to her. Loyal Davis had effectively taken over that role. Though Nancy didn’t call him Dad, he was every bit the father figure whose guidance she sought, whom she respected, who supported her financially and emotionally. “In my mind, he is my father,” she insisted. “I have no father except Loyal Davis.”

  She yearned to make it official. Davis was unwilling to adopt her legally while Ken Robbins and his mother, Nanee, remained vital presences in Nancy’s life. But at seventeen, after she reached legal age, Nancy took the initiative. She consulted Orville Taylor, an attorney who lived in the same apartment building, about the steps necessary for filing papers, and she set the wheels in motion. In the spring of 1938, the wheels began to spin. She flew east, asking her father to meet her in New York at the city’s most famous rendezvous spot—under the lobby clock in the Biltmore Hotel. It is unlikely he suspected the purpose of the get-together; otherwise he might not have brought along his mother, who never missed a chance to visit with her granddaughter. Instead of the anticipated happy reunion, the encounter was all business. Nancy produced the adoption papers and asked for her father’s consent, and, as she recalled it, “they agreed reluctantly.” The adoption was granted on April 20, 1938, with an additional rider attached to the court order: Anne Frances Robbins would henceforth be known officially as Nancy Davis.

  Not long afterward, she got to see her new name blazoned as she’d always fantasized it: above the title in George S. Kaufman’s First Lady, her senior class play. In her autobiography she wrote, “I don’t recall much about the story.” That’s hard to imagine. She played the president’s wife.

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  Like most families who lived on East Lake Shore Drive, the Davises were socially ambitious. They courted people with prominent pedigrees, traded on their movie-star friendships, moved in elite civic circles, and vacationed at the most exclusive resorts, but their real efforts went into grooming Nancy for a proper upper-crust life. As a debutante, her debut at the posh Casino Club was splashed across Chicago’s society pages. She joined the class of 1943 at Smith College, one of the tony Seven Sisters schools, where girls from fancy backgrounds prepared for more of the same. For a while, she dated a Princeton student whose parents were friends with Edith and Loyal, and on June 24, 1944, she became engaged, albeit briefly, to James Platt White Jr., an Amherst grad from a well-to-do East Coast family. But Nancy’s true affections lay elsewhere.

  Nancy had chosen drama as her college major and participated in several of the school’s productions. She had loftier goals in mind. Intent on paying her dues, she interned with summer-stock outfits in Massachusetts and Wisconsin that provided scant opportunity to appear onstage. But poor critiques and the lack of encouragement didn’t deter her. After graduating in 1943, she bided her time as a salesgirl at Marshall Field before family connections finally opened a door. Thanks to Edith’s intervention, ZaSu Pitts offered Nancy a walk-on in Ramshackle Inn, which had opened in New York earlier in the year and was now touring to cities around the country. No sooner had she shaken free of its three-month run than a better opportunity arose, again as a favor from a family friend. Mary Martin, a longtime patient of Loyal Davis’s, was rehearsing Lute Song, a new Broadway musical that gave Yul Brynner his breakout performance. There was a small part—a Chinese handmaiden—that suited Nancy’s nascent talents. Three weeks into rehearsal, however, the director disagreed. John Houseman found Nancy’s acting skills “awkward and amateurish” for a top-drawer Broadway production. “I suggested to the producer that she was not physically convincing,” recalled Houseman, who had been hired after Nancy joined the cast. He was told to take it up with Mary Martin. In all fairness, he’d have fared better asking her to replace Yul Brynner. Fire Nancy Davis?—not a chance, the star argued. Her bad back took precedence, and she wasn’t about to alienate her precious doctor by sacking his daughter.

  Following two additional short-lived stints in road companies with ZaSu Pitts, Nancy turned to another of her parents’ friends to facilitate a difficult leap from stage to screen. Spencer Tracy happened to be in New York on his way to shoot a film in London. For years, Tracy had plugged away in second-rate stock companies alongside Edith Luckett, banking on an eventual break. Now, in 1944, he was MGM’s most important male star, having won back-to-back Oscars for Captains Courageous and Boys Town. A measure of that success he owed to Loyal Davis, who nursed Tracy through harrowing alcoholic binges. As a matter of payback he took Nancy to dinner, during which he promised to help get her a Hollywood screen test. In the meantime, he gave her phone number to his buddy Clark Gable, who dated her fairly steadily for several months.

  It was a fabulous time for her to be in New York. The war was over. The mood throughout the city was upbeat, euphoric. Swells of humanity flowed up one side of Times Square and down the other, genial and giddy. Several times daily, carloads of servicemen emptied out of trains at Pennsylvania Station, their return a poignant reminder that the future was a precious gift. Cars honked their horns in acclamation. In the West Forties, the theater was experiencing an unprecedented burst of riches, with twenty-four smash hits lighting up Broadway. Nancy could walk down the street past the neon glare of marquees heralding Carousel, Oklahoma!, The Glass Menagerie, On the Town, I Remember Mama, and The Hasty Heart, whose film version would later star Ronald Reagan. The latest hits were being sung in jam-packed cabarets and clubs—“Straighten Up and Fly Right,” “Sentimental Journey,” “Twilight Time,” “You Always Hurt the One You Love,” and a particular favorite, “Nancy (with the Laughing Face).”

  New York had an invigorating effect on Nancy. Since graduating from Smith, she had morphed from a chubby
schoolgirl into a slim, fashionable, pretty young woman with an intelligent face and a coquettish smile. And there were many familiar faces to smile at in New York City. Walter and Nan Huston—Uncle Walter and Aunt Nan—lived around the corner from her flat at the Barbizon Hotel for Women. On Spencer Tracy’s advice, she’d struck up a friendship with Katharine Hepburn, who lived a few blocks farther south. “I also had dinner a lot with Lillian and Dorothy [Gish],” she recalled, “and then we’d go to a movie.”

  Her social life stretched beyond the circle of glamorous family friends. A posse of suitable men, not all of them young and many of them homosexual, took her out on the town on a regular basis—producers, assistant directors, publishers, actors. She became a fixture at all the city’s showbiz hot spots—the Stork Club, 21, El Morocco, the Colony, Sardi’s, parties at the Waldorf Towers. There were plenty of dates, but nothing that clicked. “I had no serious romances,” she allowed.

  No romances—and little or no work. There were few callbacks from her endless loop of Broadway auditions, no serious offers. In early 1948, a friend booked her into a limited-run revival of The Little Foxes at the Shubert Lafayette in Detroit, but that was it as far as stage work went. She kicked around New York for the rest of the year, appearing in, as a magazine column noted, “feature roles on the Kraft Television Theater and the Lucky Strike dramatic series,” but calling them feature roles was stretching it. There were a few lines here and there, a walk-on or two, nothing more substantial than what actors call window dressing. “I wasn’t setting show business on fire,” she acknowledged.

  Her career seemed ripe for a serious reassessment. Four years in New York offered little to show toward the kind of theatrical success Nancy Davis had dreamed of. Despite the smattering of breaks, famous family intermediaries who went to bat for her, a series of first-rate drama classes, and the concentrated effort she’d made, the outlook for a Broadway breakthrough was dismal. As 1949 began, a good New Year’s resolution might have been to consider another line of work.