The Triumph of Nancy Reagan

by Karen Tumulty

  So entered the second most important man in Nancy’s life, and the only one she would ever again think of as her father. Edie met Loyal Davis, a thirty-one-year-old associate professor of surgery at Northwestern University, on a ship to England in July 1927. With her daughter in Maryland, Edie was headed for a European vacation with two friends from the theater. Most accounts say she had an acting gig there; her diary suggests it was primarily a pleasure trip. Loyal was on his way to deliver a presentation in London on neurosurgery, his specialty, which was then in its infancy.

  At the time he met Edie, Loyal’s own personal life was in turmoil. His eight-year marriage to a former nurse named Pearl McElroy was collapsing. Pearl had declined his entreaties to leave their two-year-old son, Richard, in the care of her mother in Chicago and join Loyal on the voyage to England. “Perhaps I did not insist strongly enough,” he conceded later. So Loyal shared a cabin with another doctor.

  In her diary, Edie recorded her impressions of that journey aboard Hamburg-American’s SS New York, a state-of-the-art luxury liner launched just the year before. The journal is a tan leather volume, with the initials E.L. embossed in gold. Friends had given it to her so that she could compile a keepsake of the trip. One entry notes that on the evening of July 15, her first full day at sea, Edie “went to the movie—met Doctor Davis—he joined me for liquer [sic] after the movies—we all walked on deck.” Edie also asked her fellow passengers to write inscriptions in her journal. One is an awkwardly affectionate note from Loyal Davis, who wrote that he found Edie “most charming.”

  As was usually the case, Edie drew attention and admirers wherever she went. Her diary suggests that she was juggling several suitors on the voyage, including one young man she deemed “a pest. He is a very intellectual cultured boy but he follows me around from noon till nite & it’s a nuisance.” The captain threw a surprise dinner party for her birthday on July 16. At a masquerade ball a week into the voyage, Edie wrote that she “dressed up like a colored ‘mammy.’ [An] old woman came up to me & said, ‘Hey, you, stop flirting with my husband. I’ve watched you since you got on board & I’ll get you good before you get off the boat.’ ” Edie’s friends, including her new acquaintance Loyal Davis, intervened with the woman and “took her in the hall & told her they would have the capt. put her in chains if she annoyed me again.”

  Amid the gaiety, Edie wrote often how much she missed her little girl. “I do nothing but talk about my baby to everyone,” says one entry dated July 21. And from Paris the following week: “Sunday spent the day at Fontainebleau. Would have been heavenly if my baby had been with us.” A poem written in the diary by her friend and traveling companion Jack Alicoate, a Broadway writer and producer, also hinted at signs of stress and longing beneath Edie’s happy-go-lucky exterior:

  Remember they’re calling you Lucky

  And the kid that’s dependent on you

  So up with that chin and keep plucky

  The world will belong to you too.

  Edie was closing in on forty, though she still claimed she was nearly a decade younger. That meant she was reaching an age, whether she acknowledged the number or not, when her stage career would not go on much longer. Meanwhile, she would soon have another concern: Nancy’s aunt and uncle were being transferred to Atlanta by the Southern Railroad, leaving her with nowhere to put the child.

  Edie needed some new options. She needed them fast. And as it happened, both professional and personal opportunities were opening for her in Chicago. She got a part at the city’s Blackstone Theatre playing opposite Spencer Tracy in George M. Cohan’s farce The Baby Cyclone. Then followed another one there in Elmer the Great, a Ring Lardner baseball comedy starring her old friend Walter Huston, who by then had become a big name.

  All of which gave her a chance to resume the romance that had begun as a shipboard fling with Loyal Davis. He was back in Chicago, living miserably and alone in a hotel. Not long after Loyal returned from the European trip on which he had met Edie, his wife, Pearl, went to 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,” he recalled.

  Pearl had been resentful of the expectations that came with being a proper doctor’s wife and had little interest in Loyal’s surgical and academic endeavors. She and her rigidly demanding husband fought over her sloppy housekeeping and her indifferent approach to caring for their son. Word went round that Pearl was also having an affair with another physician, one of Loyal’s best friends. Loyal was devastated and worried what the stigma of a failed marriage might do to his career.

  One day Dr. Allen B. Kanavel, who had established the Department of Neurological Surgery at Northwestern University Medical School, took Loyal aside in an empty room at Wesley Memorial Hospital. His mentor told the young doctor that he knew about his personal situation and offered some advice: “Never hug a bad bargain to your breast.” Loyal decided not to contest the divorce.

  * * *

  Loyal and Edie were not an obvious match, either in demeanor or background. As Nancy put it: “My father was tall and dark; my mother was short and blonde. He was a Republican; she was a Democrat. He was often severe; she was always laughing. He was an only child; she came from a large family. He was reserved; she knew everybody.”

  But Edie’s arrival in his life brought air and light to Loyal’s constricted, work-centered existence. She introduced him to the glamorous and colorful characters she had cultivated in the theater. She charmed his colleagues. “My professional and personal life became calm and happy,” Loyal wrote. “She 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.”

  Still, after the disgrace of a divorce, Loyal was not sure whether an actress—in this case, a foulmouthed one with a blemished marital history of her own—would be suitable as a doctor’s partner for life. So once again, he looked to Kanavel for guidance. “Dr. Kanavel invited himself to her apartment for her to cook dinner to make certain, he told her, whether it was right for us to be married,” Loyal said.

  Kanavel approved, and even served as best man for Loyal and Edie’s wedding at Chicago’s Fourth Presbyterian Church during an early heat wave on May 21, 1929. Their other attendant was eight-year-old Nancy, who wore a blue pleated dress and carried flowers. “I was happy for Mother, but I can remember, even then, feeling twinges of jealousy—a feeling I was to experience years later, from the other side, after I married a man with children,” Nancy recalled. “Dr. Davis was taking part of her away from me, and after being separated from Mother for so long, I wanted her all to myself.”

  The story of that 1929 wedding is one that Nancy repeated many times. In her personal documents at the Reagan Library is a certificate from the ceremony, signed by the church’s pastor, Harrison Ray Anderson. But New York City records show that Edie and Loyal actually were married the previous year in a wedding they apparently kept a secret. It happened on October 20, 1928, at St. Luke’s, a Lutheran church on West Forty-Sixth Street, just a couple of blocks from the Lyceum Theatre, where Edie was performing during the brief Broadway run of Elmer the Great. That was a Saturday, so they presumably had to squeeze in their vows around a two thirty matinee and an eight thirty evening show. The witnesses were Walter Huston and his costar in the play, Nan Sunderland, who became his wife a few years later. Clergyman William Koepchen did the officiating.

  The certificate they all signed identifies Edie under her married name of Edith Robbins. It also lists her age as thirty-two, the same as Loyal’s, and her birthplace as Petersburg, Virginia. (District of Columbia birth records indicate she was born in that city, six years earlier than she claimed on the New York marriage registry.)

  All of this furtiveness surrounding the wedding raises questions: Why the rush to get married, less than a year after they had met? Why wait to tell Nancy of the existence of a stepfather until the follo
wing year? And why go through the charade of an engagement and a second ceremony in Chicago?

  One possibility is that there was a pregnancy scare or other imperative to legalize their union before they acknowledged it publicly. Perhaps their passion was so great that they simply could not wait any longer to live together. Whatever the reason for the urgency, this marriage turned out to be a long and happy one. Edie and Loyal remained delighted with and devoted to each other for more than five decades.

  Nancy’s mother had charted a new direction for both her own life and that of her little girl. “She saw Loyal as her lifeline and grabbed on without letting go,” Edie’s pal Lester Weinrott, a Chicago radio producer and director, later told author Kitty Kelley. “She wanted to legitimize herself and give her daughter a break.”

  Loyal provided a safe landing and also a launch pad. The son of a poorly educated railroad man, he had the drive it took to become recognized as one of the country’s most brilliant men of medicine. “The pair of sculptured hands cast in bronze that serve as book-ends at the apartment of Dr. and Mrs. Loyal Davis at 215 Lake Shore Drive are Dr. Davis’ own hands,” the Chicago Tribune noted in 1935. “Mrs. Davis had Sculptor Bernard Frazier do the hands of Dr. Davis, famous brain surgeon.”

  His professional accomplishments notwithstanding, it was Edie’s spark, her savvy, her genius for knowing who to know that propelled the Davises into Chicago’s elite. “Over the years, she transformed herself and this dour little man from the wrong side of the tracks in Galesburg, Illinois, into something that Chicago society had to pay attention to,” Weinrott said. “It was the greatest performance she ever gave, and I salute her for it.”

  Loyal recognized that as well. “She works in mysterious ways,” he once said of his wife. “She’s better known in Chicago than I am, and there is no question of that.”

  Forged together by an unconditional faith in what they could do as a couple, Edie and Loyal both complemented each other’s strengths and compensated for the weaknesses in the other. The parallels to the Reagans are impossible to miss. Dick Davis, Loyal’s son from his first marriage, moved in with the family in 1939, when he was twelve years old. As he told me the first time we talked: “Nancy’s marriage to the president mimicked her mother.”

  So whatever scars Edie’s early absence and neglect left on Nancy, she had bequeathed to her daughter two priceless gifts: the security Nancy craved and a prototype for the kind of love partnership that would provide it. Edie’s lesson to Nancy was that one plus one could be ever so much more than two. The right kind of union could be both a refuge and a ride on a comet. “If you want to understand Nancy Reagan, look at her mother,” said Robert Higdon, an aide and longtime friend to the first lady.

  Edie died from Alzheimer’s disease in 1987. As Nancy sorted and packed her mother’s belongings, she came across a small gold ring engraved with both of their initials: E-N. The nation’s first lady slipped it on her own finger. “No one,” she said, “will ever know the debt I owed my mother.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The headline over a full-page Chicago Tribune story on Sunday, January 7, 1940, declared: “Society Bids Farewell to the 1930s and Greets ’40s.”

  “Good-by to the Dirty Thirties—

  Life Begins in Forty.”

  That was how a society columnist who went by the pen name “Cousin Eve” began a breathless roundup of the holiday-season events that ushered in a new decade for the city’s advantaged class. One of the celebrations mentioned in her column that Sunday was a coming-out party that had taken place ten days earlier at Chicago’s most exclusive club, the Casino. “Seldom has this beautiful private club looked as chic. Dr. and Mrs. Davis received in the loggia with their bud, among bouquets and baskets of winter roses,” the columnist gushed. “The debutante was fresh as a rose herself in white gauze frosted in silver.”

  Nancy, then in her freshman year at Smith College, in Massachusetts, had fretted over every detail of the late-afternoon tea dance at which she made her formal debut into society. She and Loyal had an argument—the only one her stepbrother, Richard, remembered between them—over the surgeon’s stern decree that there would be no alcohol. “I think he was very disgusted by people who drank,” Dick said. “He simply did not want to see these teenagers intoxicated, and put his foot down, very hard. This upset her because all of her girlfriends were having these debut parties and served liquor. She didn’t want to be different in that sense.”

  Nancy should not have feared the party would be a dud—not so long as the arrangements were in the hands of her mother. Edie had timed it to coincide with the arrival in Chicago of Princeton University’s Triangle Club theater troupe. Edie invited them all, ensuring that Nancy’s tea dance would be teeming with eligible young men. In her Chicago Tribune column, “Cousin Eve” took note of how the oval ballroom’s soft lights caught the gleam of red cellophane bows and illuminated the party’s whimsical decorations, which included sparkly top hats with criss-crossed walking sticks. A ten-man orchestra was “beating so lustily the tom-toms that one heard their throb in the street. So young was this party and so carefree the dancers that my neighbor, a lovely in middle thirties, sighed deeply, and yearned to begin life all over again.”

  The grandiloquent prose aside, it was understandable that Americans in all walks of life were looking for a fresh beginning at the dawn of the 1940s. The nation was struggling to climb out of a catastrophic economic collapse, and, across the ocean, forces of extremism were building for another world war, which had already begun in Europe. No one knew then that they were just a few years away from the biggest bloodbath in human history.

  Chicago had seen more than its share of suffering during the Great Depression, particularly in its early years. Even before the 1929 stock market crash, its municipal government had become virtually insolvent, and by early 1932, the city’s emergency relief funds were depleted. Chicago’s unemployment rate at one point reached 50 percent. Breadlines and soup kitchens were common; one of the biggest was run by the gangster Al Capone on South State Street. In the heart of the city near Grant Park, destitute men built a huge shantytown of discarded bricks, wood, and sheet metal. They facetiously called it Hooverville, after the highly unpopular president they blamed for their troubles. The name quickly caught on, and Hoovervilles sprang up across the country.

  But all of this misery was a world away from Nancy’s privileged existence as a young woman coming of age along the eastward-bending shoulder of elegant and fashionable Lake Shore Drive, which was among the city’s fanciest addresses. “When my mother met Loyal Davis and brought me to Chicago, it was like the happy ending to a fairy tale,” Nancy said. The Davises lived in several apartments as they moved upward onto Chicago’s famed Gold Coast. By the time Nancy was in her teens, they had settled onto the fourteenth floor of a classically styled lakefront building near the Drake Hotel. The hotel was where heads of state and European royalty stayed when they were in the Windy City. Nancy cut through the Drake lobby on her daily walk to school and breathed in the ambience.

  Summers for young Nancy meant eight weeks at Camp Kechuwa on the upper peninsula of Michigan, where the Lake Michigamme water was so clean that the girls brushed their teeth with it. “Will you please tell Mother that I wove a rug for the guest bathroom. How do you like my book plates I made? I hope you like them,” Nancy wrote in one undated letter to Loyal. “I passed a safety test for canoeing so I can go out in a canoe alone.”

  Among Nancy’s other childhood pleasures were trips to visit Loyal’s parents in Galesburg. It is a town forty-five miles northwest of Peoria, one of seven spots where Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas debated during their storied 1858 race for the US Senate, which former congressman Lincoln lost to the incumbent but emerged from as a nationally prominent figure. Galesburg is also where a little boy nicknamed Dutch Reagan had once lived briefly.

  Loyal’s father, Al Davis, built Nancy and Dick a playhouse in the backyard of the family home at 219
Walnut Avenue. The first lady reminisced in a March 1981 letter that it was a place “which I adored and spent many make-believe hours in. Little did I dream at that time that my playhouse would someday be the White House.” Nancy did, however, have aspirations. Once, the neighborhood children put on a show in the Davis yard, to an audience seated on chairs that Al borrowed from a local mortuary. Nancy sang “The Sidewalks of New York” and announced at the end of her performance that the next time anyone in the town saw her, it would be on a movie screen.

  For the first two years after her 1929 move to Chicago, Nancy attended University School for Girls. In 1931, still known as Nancy Robbins, she was enrolled in the more prestigious Chicago Latin School for Girls, then located in a four-story brick building at 59 East Scott Street, a half mile from the Davises’ apartment. Tuition by the time she graduated from high school, in a class of fourteen young women, was $650 a year, which for nearly half the Depression-era families in Chicago represented more than six months of income.

  Girls Latin followed a progressive educational approach known as the Quincy Method, which had begun catching on across the country in the late eighteen hundreds. Its students were expected to take woodshop and spend at least twenty minutes each day in outdoor recess, a rare requirement among elite female schools at the time. But other parts of its curriculum were far more structured and conventional. One dreaded ritual was the annual posture walk, where girls would parade and be judged on how they carried themselves. The winner was awarded a letter, as if standing up properly were a varsity sport. They all wore blue skirts with white blouses, except on Fridays, when the uniform was a navy silk dress with white collar and cuffs. Makeup, nail polish, and jewelry—beyond a watch and one ring—were banned. Students were expected to stand when a parent or faculty member entered the classroom and remain on their feet until a teacher signaled them to be seated.