The Triumph of Nancy Reagan

by Karen Tumulty

  Nancy’s nickname was “Pinky,” a playful reference to the color of the cotton underwear she wore in sixth grade; her good friend Jean Wescott was called “Whitey” for hers. Nancy “was not particularly a good student and not a good athlete,” her stepbrother, Dick, told me. But she was popular—“the personification of a southern belle,” according to Girls Latin’s 1937 yearbook. Nancy played forward on the field hockey team and was president of both the Athletic Association and the sophomore class. The seniors a year ahead of her jokingly bequeathed Nancy a scrapbook to hold all her pictures of screen idol Tyrone Power. Wescott, who would later be her roommate at Smith, recalled: “We bought every movie magazine. She liked Bing Crosby. I liked Ronald Reagan. She said, ‘I don’t know what you see in Ronald Reagan.’ ”

  In one area, Nancy outshone everyone else. “Nancy’s social perfection is a constant source of amazement,” her 1939 yearbook marveled. “She is invariably becomingly and suitably dressed. She can talk and even better listen intelligently, to anyone from her little kindergarten partner at the Halloween party, to the grandmother of one of her friends. Even in the seventh grade, when we first began to mingle with the male of the species, Nancy was completely poised. While the rest of us huddled self-consciously on one side of the room, casting surreptitious glances at the men, aged thirteen, opposite us, Nancy actually crossed the yawning emptiness separating the two groups and serenely began a conversation—with a boy.”

  She already styled herself an actress in training and starred in the senior play—presciently, one called First Lady—as a character named Lucy Chase Wayne, the scheming wife of a presidential candidate. “Nancy knows not only her own lines but everyone else’s,” the yearbook noted. “She picks up the cue her terrified classmates forget to give, improvises speeches for all and sundry. Just a part of the game for Nancy.”

  In her senior year, Nancy was also selected to be student judge, a position that involved meting out punishments to girls who had committed infractions such as coming back from lunch wearing a smidge of lipstick, or failing to pass the daily noon inspection of their desks for neatness. She did not cut any slack. “Nancy had a very effective approach to a culprit, looking straight at her and asking, ‘Why did you do that?’ ” one retired teacher wrote.

  Her grades were mediocre, which teachers attributed not to lack of effort or intelligence but anxiety. “She works very faithfully and does well from day to day. In spite of much experience, she is nervous about examinations and never does herself justice on them,” read one note in her record. “Fine cooperation and attention. Accurate, does not guess. Extremely good visual memory and observation which might be used pedagogically,” another noted. “Her daily work is better than her tests.”

  * * *

  The Latin School files also hint at an early disquietude that accompanied the “fairy-tale” turn Nancy’s life had taken. “When she entered the school, her mother had just remarried, and Nancy had an adjustment to make to her stepfather, Dr. Loyal Davis, a brain specialist of whom she stood in awe,” one teacher wrote.

  It is not surprising that she might have been intimidated by her new stepfather at first. Loyal (“a terrible name, and quite a handicap,” he said) was the proud, stern son of a locomotive engineer. Growing up in Galesburg, he lived with his parents on a street known as Scab Alley, in a set of row houses that had been built by the railroad during an 1888 strike. His father never made it as far as high school, having been forced to go to work at the age of seven. But Al Davis was determined that his only child would earn a living with his head, not his back. On nights when Al was not away on runs to Chicago for the Burlington Railroad, he monitored his son’s schoolwork at the kitchen table. “My father knew nothing about my studies and couldn’t aid me, but he sat next to me as though his presence would help,” Loyal wrote later.

  Fueled by those expectations and his own inner drive, Loyal was an unbending perfectionist, obdurate and disciplined from an early age. One year when he was in grade school, Loyal compiled a perfect Sunday school attendance record at Galesburg’s Grace Episcopal Church, his sights set on a prayer book that was to be awarded to a boy and a girl. Loyal donned a black cassock and white surplice to lend his quavery voice to the choir and carried the cross at the head of the procession into services. He even pumped the organ.

  But at the end of the year, the prize went to a boy whose father owned the town’s largest department store. “I was the only boy to have such a record, and I knew that,” Loyal wrote in his 1973 memoir, still burning at the injustice of it. “I was angered and crushed in spirit. When I got home, I announced I would never go back to the church again.”

  From then on, Loyal proclaimed himself a nonbeliever: “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 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.”

  He graduated from high school at sixteen as his class valedictorian, attended nearby Knox College for two years on scholarship, and then headed to Chicago and Northwestern University Medical School, from which he received his degree in 1918 at the age of twenty-two. After an internship at Cook County Hospital, he joined a general-medicine practice back in Galesburg.

  This was right around the time he married nurse Pearl McElroy. “She was beautifully impressive in her black velvet dress with her black hair and brown eyes, the first time we met as the result of a date arranged by telephone by a mutual friend,” Loyal recalled. “Our courtship was short, and there was no chance to learn about each other’s idiosyncrasies.”

  Those became apparent soon enough. “I was unable to accept her dislike and ineptitude for housekeeping. She had left a small town for the attractions in Chicago; she was not prepared to settle down to life in Galesburg,” Loyal said. There were also financial problems, as his practice was not earning much, and Loyal had to borrow to furnish their apartment and pay for a Velie coupe automobile.

  So, in search of “security as against an uncertain future,” he headed back to Northwestern to train as a neurosurgeon. In 1923 and 1924, Loyal did a stint in Boston working under Dr. Harvey Cushing, considered among the most renowned surgeons in history. (As first lady, Nancy would get the postal service to issue a stamp in Cushing’s honor in 1988.) Afterward, Loyal returned to Northwestern and joined the faculty as an associate professor.

  Loyal inspired more fear than affection in those he taught. He could call the roll in class by memory and demanded silence in the operating room. On Saturday mornings he held clinics where he drilled first-year medical students on how to take a patient’s history and make a diagnosis. For those aspiring physicians, these sessions felt “like sitting on a powder keg waiting for someone to light a match,” recalled Harold L. Method, a one-time All-America football player who went on to be a prominent surgeon himself. “Woe to the student who was not properly attired—clean shaven, clean shirt, tie, and jacket.” Indeed, Loyal, who sported a stylish wardrobe at a time when most doctors on the hospital staff wore white shirts and gray suits, was known to expel from class students whose grooming and clothes did not meet his standards. “If you are to become a doctor,” he decreed, “you must look like one.”

  But there was another, softer side to Loyal Davis. Frank Stinchfield, a student of his in 1932, was too poor to replace his tattered overcoat. One day he found an expensive new Burberry in his locker, with a note that said only: “For Frank.” Not for months would Stinchfield, later a pioneer in hip replacements, discover the identity of his mysterious benefactor. As he recounted the story at a 1982 memorial service for his old professor: “It wasn’t until spring cleaning that I discovered a sales slip from Abercrombie & Fitch in an inside pocket, which read: ‘Sold to Dr. Loyal Davis.’ ”

  One of the harshest stories about Loyal—difficult to nail down but told often—came to light in Ronnie
and Jesse, a 1969 book by journalist and biographer Lou Cannon about the political rivalry between the conservative California governor and assembly speaker Jesse Unruh, a fearsome liberal. The detail about Loyal comes as an aside to the book’s main narrative.

  “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.”

  In her scorching 1991 biography of Nancy, Kitty Kelley wrote that the interns did this “out of spite” and revulsion to what she claimed was their professor’s “virulent racism.” Others have denied that bigotry was among Loyal’s faults. His longtime medical partner Daniel Ruge, who was also the first Reagan White House physician, told author Bob Colacello in 1981: “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.”

  Kelley also wrote that Edie was a racist who once berated actress Carol Channing for bringing the singer Eartha Kitt, an African American, to a party at the Davis apartment. In a letter to Nancy after the book was published, Channing accused Kelley of having “fabricated a malicious story” and offered a vastly different one: “Your mom was a dear friend. When Eartha Kitt called while I was playing in Chicago in ‘Wonderful Town’ ”—which would have been around 1954—“I took her to see your mother, and being the lady that she was, she secured a hotel for Eartha,” Channing wrote. “All we theater folk depended on your mother to supply those necessities like schools for our children, doctors, playgrounds—the essentials of life.”

  Granted, Edie was a product of a different time. She told racist jokes and was known to have used the word nigger. But other accounts attest to her empathy with the plight of African Americans in the era before the civil rights movement. In a 1985 interview for the Black Women Oral History Project at Harvard University, Etta Moten Barnett, a contralto and actress who played Bess in George Gershwin’s 1942 Broadway revival of Porgy and Bess, talked of her own friendship with Nancy’s mother. The two of them had gotten to know each other while working in radio in Chicago.

  The African American star noted that it was Edith, not she, who voiced characters who spoke in black dialect on the radio programs on which they performed. That was the kind of practice that would make modern audiences cringe. Still, Barnett insisted, Edith “just could not stand discrimination. Any time she thought that I might be going into a situation where I might be discriminated against, she wanted me to let her know. You talk about Miss Lillian—what’s his name’s mother? You know, Carter’s mother.” (President Jimmy Carter’s mother was known for her kindness to blacks, including receiving them in her parlor in Plains, Georgia, when that was not generally done by whites in the Deep South.) “She could not hold a light to Edith Davis if she got started, because she just couldn’t stand it. She just was very much against discrimination, and she let it be known in very good, strong language.”

  Barnett recalled telling Edie that she planned to bring her granddaughter up to Chicago from Memphis and hoped to enroll her in Girls Latin. According to Barnett’s account, Edie replied: “When Nancy went to Latin School, they didn’t have any Negroes there. Now, if you have any trouble, you let me know. I don’t want no foolishness from those damn people.”

  There was another thing that Barnett said she noticed when she became friends with Edie: a tension between mother and daughter, who at times seemed like they were almost in a competition for the affection of a man who did not offer it easily. As Barnett put it: “Nancy made on over her father—stepfather —who adopted her, more than she did her mother, like she was probably prouder of him or something.”

  Or perhaps it was a craving for validation and acceptance. When Loyal arrived in Nancy’s life, she became part of a new family, but in at least one important sense, she was still an outsider in her own home. That she did not carry the name of the man she so adored was a source of awkwardness and shame. So it was a momentous day when Nancy Robbins arrived at school with an announcement: “You can call me Nancy Davis from now on.”

  From the moment she was legally adopted, Nancy would recognize no other identity. She once held up her hands during an interview with Reagan biographer Edmund Morris and declared: “I have his hands—surgeon’s hands.”

  “You mean your real father, not your stepfather’s?” Morris asked, perplexed.

  Nancy replied, this time more firmly: “I have my father’s hands.”

  In the files of the Reagan Library is an essay that Nancy wrote in October 1938, when she was a senior in high school. The composition is titled “Surgeon Extraordinary.” For most of it, Nancy described herself in the third person, as the daughter of a most impressive man. Her version of events indicates that she had asked Loyal to adopt her the previous year—in 1937—as a way of “telling him that she was grateful and that as far as she was concerned, he would always be tops.” When she made the request to become his daughter, Nancy wrote, “he understood, because by that time, they had reached the place where no words were necessary.”

  But that is not exactly how it happened. Nancy had engineered her adoption herself, with a preternatural determination for a girl her age. She sought out Orville Taylor, a neighbor who was a lawyer, and asked him how to go about it. On a trip to New York, she met with Kenneth Robbins near Grand Central Station and presented him, apparently by surprise, with papers to sign relinquishing his rights as her biological father. Her account of that meeting is still more evidence that Robbins felt deeply attached to his only child and was not the uncaring figure she later portrayed him to be. He was wounded by her request, as was Nanee Robbins, his mother. “He came with my grandmother to meet me under the clock at the Biltmore Hotel,” Nancy recalled. “I explained what I wanted to do, and they agreed, reluctantly. I’m sure it hurt my grandmother terribly.”

  Then she sent a wire to Loyal in Chicago. Her message contained only two words: “Hi Dad.”

  Loyal had taken no role in making it happen. As Nancy’s son, Ron, put it: “The way she [told] it was that he was happy to adopt her, but that she would need to ask to be adopted. That had to be her desire, her choice, and she needed to make the request. I’m not sure exactly how that went, but that seems a little bit cold to me.” Loyal’s hesitation stemmed not from a lack of affection but rather from his sense of propriety. He wrote later that adopting Nancy was something he had wished for “very much but was somewhat hesitant to institute the proceeding because her father and paternal grandmother were alive.”

  The timing of all of this, and precisely how it unfolded, remain vague. Her brother, Dick, told me she was adopted when she was sixteen, which suggests it was around the latter half of 1937 or the first half of 1938. In Girls Latin yearbooks, her name changed from Nancy Robbins to Nancy Davis between her freshman and sophomore years. That puts it at an earlier point, somewhere around 1936. Her adoption petition was not filed in Cook County until later, on April 19, 1938, according to Kitty Kelley’s book.

  So, her adoption does not appear to have happened as quickly or cleanly as she later claimed it did. What is clear is how badly she yearned for her bond with Loyal to be legally recognized and how slow he was in embracing the idea. She had been living under his roof for at least six years, and possibly close to nine, before her stepfather granted what Nancy wanted more than anything else and claimed her as his daughter. Her attachment to Loyal, her need for the security that came with belonging to him, foreshadowed the intensity of what Nancy would one day feel for Ronnie, though the two most important men in her life were different
in nearly every way. The stepfather she held in awe was a prickly figure—a man of high professional standards and inflexible personal ones. Once, over dinner, she asked him what he thought happiness was. Loyal told her: “Nancy, the answer to happiness is almost twenty-five hundred years old, and it’s basically what the Greeks said. It’s the pursuit of excellence in all aspects of one’s life.”

  From the beginning of their life together, Nancy had spent as much time as she could at Loyal’s side. She accompanied him on visits with patients in Joliet and other towns near Chicago. When she was in her teens, Loyal permitted her to watch from a glassed-in balcony as he performed brain surgery. “My father seemed to perform miracles,” she said.

  Her stepbrother, Dick, was a frequent visitor during Nancy’s early years in Chicago and moved in permanently when his mother, Loyal’s first wife, Pearl, died of tuberculosis in 1939. As Nancy had, Dick saw his new blended family as the storybook ending to a sad, unsettled chapter of his childhood. “I hate to say it, but I didn’t care for my biological mother at all. I really didn’t have a mother. She drank a lot,” he told me. Dick ran away from home several times.

  When he first met his stepsister, the forlorn little boy looked with envy on the life that Nancy was living in Chicago and the affection that his father showered on her. “My first memory of Nancy was probably when she was in the third or fourth grade,” Dick recalled. “In those days, she wore a school uniform: tunic, knee socks, and a beret. At the beginning of the school year, my father and I would walk her to the corner of the drive and get her off to school. She had a bouncy gait, was very vivacious, and was a happy child. She would speak to everyone on the way.

  “With each step, the tunic, which was too short, would sort of pop up in the air, and we’d see her bloomers. Father would say, ‘Richard, Nancy has on those dreadful navy-blue bloomers, doesn’t she?’ and I would dutifully agree. And then he’d say, with a big, broad smile, ‘Isn’t she just the most wonderful child?’ ”