The Triumph of Nancy Reagan

by Karen Tumulty

  Loyal became Huston’s doctor and his friend. Nancy’s father would jokingly admit to being perplexed that the actor could get $75,000 for doing a movie, while he earned only $500 for a life-saving operation, “and all my care was exceptional.” During a couple of summers, the Davises vacationed at Huston’s getaway in Running Springs near Lake Arrowhead, California. The actor had a magnificent three-story lodge on the edge of a mountain overlooking the San Bernardino National Forest. After dinner, everyone would sit on a couch that went around the fireplace and listen to him read. Among those who dropped by were the director Joshua Logan and a boyish actor named James Stewart, who played his accordion and sang to Nancy under the stars. She was thrilled when Jimmy Stewart invited her to come dancing with him at the Palladium in Hollywood. Loyal said no.

  Nancy was captivated by these earthbound gods and goddesses, who possessed a magical ability to transport the masses into their world of make-believe. As she wrote in her memoir: “One summer we wrote and produced our own little home movie. There I was, acting—and with real professionals like Mother, Uncle Walter, and Nan (who had played Desdemona to Uncle Walter’s Othello on Broadway). My brother, Dick, was behind the camera, and Uncle Walter and I were the stars.”

  Huston saw that Nancy had show business ambitions and gently advised Edie to discourage them. While the girl was attractive, her looks—that “soft, dreamy quality” that so captivated Nazimova—were not going to stand out among the busty, blonde sweater girls and dark, smoky beauties who were in favor in Hollywood at the time. “She has a little talent, but she’s demure,” Huston told Edie, according to Nancy’s brother. Dick’s own assessment of his stepsister concurred with Huston’s: “Socially, she was outgoing, but not in front of an audience. She liked to sing, but did not have a good voice.” Katharine Hepburn also told Nancy not to set her heart on making it as an entertainer. “She sent me a long letter warning that acting was a very difficult profession and that I had seen only the glamorous parts,” Nancy said. “Mother’s friends were stars, she reminded me, but most would-be actresses ended up as waitresses and receptionists. It was sobering advice, but I wasn’t put off.”

  * * *

  Politics was another world to which Edie introduced her daughter during those formative years in Chicago. Urban political machines, such as the one that ran Nancy’s hometown, were practical, businesslike endeavors: knowing how to get things done was more important than party labels or ideological purity. The Davises were close friends with legendary—and legendarily corrupt—Democratic mayor Edward J. Kelly and his wife, Margaret, who were their neighbors on East Lake Shore Drive.

  Loyal and Edie sat in Margaret Kelly’s box at the 1944 Democratic convention in Chicago, where Franklin D. Roosevelt was nominated for an unprecedented fourth term in the White House, despite the open secret among party insiders that the president’s health was in serious decline. Mayor Kelly’s maneuvering during that convention was instrumental in securing the second spot on the ticket for Missouri senator Harry Truman over sitting vice president Henry A. Wallace, whom Kelly and his allies regarded as too progressive. It would turn out to be a move of historic significance when Roosevelt died less than three months after his 1945 inauguration.

  Edie’s political connection to the mayor had also put her in a less welcome spotlight. This was back on June 4, 1943, when a headline on the second page of the Chicago Tribune blared: “Mystery Veils Identity of a Policewoman.” Below it in smaller type was a subhead: “Mrs. Loyal Davis Denies Pay Roll Name Is Hers.” The sardonically written story told of an intrigue that arose when city records revealed that a woman by the name of Mrs. Edith Davis, who lived at 199 Lake Shore Drive, was working as a temporary policewoman on the municipal payroll. This Edith Davis—whom city records indicated had the same birthdate and birthplace as Edie claimed—was getting a city salary of $2,141 a year, or northward of $30,000 in today’s dollars. The newspaper then hilariously described Edie’s reaction when a reporter confronted her:

  “Mrs. Loyal Davis, whose first name coincidentally is Edith and who lives at 199 Lake Shore Drive, last evening raised her eyebrows at this bit of news and vehemently denied that she was, or ever has been, a policewoman. Mrs. Loyal Davis is the wife of a prominent neurologist and surgeon serving in the army medical corps overseas as a lieutenant colonel.

  “Early in the evening, Mrs. Davis—Mrs. Loyal Davis—was reported by her maid to be at a dinner party, but shortly afterwards she answered her own door with pin curls in her hair and two newspapers under her arm. She denied emphatically that she is or was a policewoman.”

  Edie, whose newspaper photo caught her without her false teeth in, deflected the embarrassment with her typical flair. At lunch the next day at the Casino Club, she greeted the other society matrons: “Bang, bang! Stick ’em up! I’m Dick Tracy!”

  So, what was really going on? The payments to Edie had started the previous August. That was right around the time of Loyal’s military enlistment and two years after the cancelation of Betty and Bob, when things had become more stressful financially for the Davises. Nancy later offered an elaborate—and unconvincing—explanation for how her mother ended up on the city payroll. While Loyal was overseas, Edie had helped start a Chicago Service Men’s Center near the navy yard. Her daughter claimed that when she discovered “some of these young kids were being picked up by prostitutes and infected with venereal diseases, she had herself sworn in as a policewoman so she could go out on the streets of Chicago and protect those boys.”

  Perhaps Edie was involved in some sort of undercover operation. It is more likely, however, that the mayor was looking for a backdoor way to pay her for political work she was doing on his behalf. That included helping to write, direct, and produce his weekly radio speeches. Kelly, who came from a working-class background, certainly needed the professional assistance. He was famous for his malapropisms, which included pronouncing vitamins as “vitamums,” and once introducing Admiral William Halsey, the acclaimed World War II commander, as “Alderman Halsey.”

  Just twelve weeks before the story of her supposed secret life as a policewoman broke, Edie—a Democrat—gave a radio testimonial in favor of Kelly’s reelection titled: “A Republican Woman’s Appraisal of Mayor Kelly.” She declared, without irony, that “Mayor Kelly has proved his right to be called the best mayor Chicago ever had. There has never been a single scandal connected with his administration which involved either himself of any member of his Cabinet.”

  One night, when Edie was throwing yet another of her dinners, Loyal was startled to see both Kelly and Republican governor Dwight Green arrive. Surely, he thought, his wife had made some horrible error. The two men had run a bitter campaign against each other in 1939 for Chicago mayor. So Loyal was astonished by what actually happened when they encountered each other in his apartment. Not only did the opposing party bosses greet each other warmly, but after dinner, they huddled in private conversation. The governor then asked to use the phone and, when he returned, assured the mayor that he had “taken care of” whatever it was they had been discussing. “Until then,” Loyal marveled, “I thought 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.”

  Reagan biographer Bob Colacello put it this way: “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 than what you believe.” Those pragmatic lessons about cultivating influence and turning adversaries into allies would not be lost on Edie’s daughter.

  CHAPTER THREE

  When Nancy filled out a questionnaire for the twenty-fifth reunion of her Smith classmates in 1968, the first lady of California listed this as her occupation: “Politics! And wife and mother.”

  Smith College was, as Girls Latin had been, a rigorous academic environment that catered to daughters of we
alth and privilege. Tuition at the time was $600 a year, plus $500 for room and board, which was more than it cost to go to Yale University. “I always had it in my mind that I wanted to go to Smith,” Nancy told Judy Woodruff in an interview for a Public Broadcasting System documentary broadcast in 2011. But not many young women came to the Northampton, Massachusetts, campus in 1939 with an eye toward making a professional mark of their own. Fulfilling their dreams meant finding the right mate, raising his perfect children, and keeping dinner warm when he stayed late at his office.

  Bettye Naomi Goldstein, a brainy girl from Peoria, was a year ahead of Nancy at Smith. She recalled: “You had no women role models, virtually none, that combined serious work with motherhood [and] marriage, which had become almost exaggerated values for women.” Bettye dropped the coquettish e from the end of her first name and took her husband’s surname when she got married. At her fifteenth reunion in the late 1950s, Betty Friedan did a survey of her Smith classmates and was struck by how unhappy they seemed in their confining lives as highly educated suburban housewives. The former Bettye Goldstein realized she was one of them herself, left with a “nameless, aching dissatisfaction” because she had never pursued a career in psychology after doing graduate work in the field. Friedan’s book about what she called “the problem that has no name” was published in 1963. The Feminine Mystique became the manifesto that sparked the feminist movement. Those rigid, midcentury values that Friedan rejected were the very ones Nancy Reagan would one day come to represent for scornful feminists. “She has not advanced the cause of women at all,” Friedan told Time magazine in 1985. “She is like Madame Chiang Kai-shek, doing it the old way, through the man.”

  At Smith, Nancy was not a particularly serious student. She would later joke that she majored in “English and drama—and boys.” When she first stepped onto the ivy-strewn campus, pampered young women still had the luxury of dealing with nothing more nettlesome than finding ways to get around their weekend curfews. But when Nancy was a junior in 1941, everything changed with the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the start of a war that would inflict a crushing toll on her generation. For a perpetually insecure and anxious girl on the cusp of adulthood, those years would be yet another lesson that she could never take security or stability for granted. As Nancy put it later, the most important education she got in college was “that life is not always easy, and romances do not always have romantic endings. I went through difficult changes and emotional experiences, and I learned that you have to take life as it comes and be prepared for sudden twists of fate.”

  Nancy’s initial plan had been to spend a year or two at Smith and then head toward the allure and excitement of the theater. Unless and until the right man came along. But Loyal, whose own education had changed his destiny, insisted she stay and earn her degree. She did what she was told, but not with much enthusiasm or aptitude for academics. “She’d come back from Smith at Christmas, and she was not a good student at all,” recalled her stepbrother, Dick. “As a senior at Smith—and I being a senior at the Latin School—I’d do her physics problems for her, which amused everybody.” In her 1980 autobiography, Nancy acknowledged, “I had a terrible time with science and math. My mind just did not seem to function correctly for these subjects.”

  Her roommate during the first two years was Jean Wescott, her good friend from Girls Latin. They lived steps from the center of campus, on the first floor of Talbot House, which had a cozy living room and a big front porch. Nancy studied on the banks of picturesque Paradise Pond and “gorged myself with the blueberry muffins at Wiggins Tavern.” At night, when peanut butter and jelly sandwiches were set out at the dorm, Nancy took three. Her weight shot up to 143 pounds, adding to her already plump five-foot-four-inch frame and prompting Loyal to insist that she watch her diet—which she did, strenuously, for the rest of her life. Her weight and eating habits would become a visible barometer of her anxiety level, dropping sharply if she was feeling under stress. As first lady, Nancy claimed to be a reasonably healthy 106 pounds, but there were persistent rumors that she was anorexic, as well as a legend that she chewed each bite thirty-two times. (Reporters who watched her at meals were known to count under their breaths.) Nancy was also self-conscious about her thick legs—she would later be devastated by a catty journalist who referred to them as “piano legs”—and exercised regularly to trim them.

  Even for the sheltered women of Smith, the horrors that were taking place across the ocean were impossible to ignore. Just three weeks before Nancy’s first day of classes her freshman year, Adolf Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Poland’s allies England and France declared war on Germany two days later. Then Hitler took Denmark and Norway in the spring of 1940. Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg fell shortly after that, and by June 1940, France was occupied by the Germans.

  When Nancy returned to Northampton for her sophomore year, the United States was torn over whether to join the allied forces in the cause of stopping the German military. According to a recollection in the Smith College yearbook, “This was the year we sold carnations for Britain one day and gardenias for Peace Day the next. Fortunately, this detachment kept the war from our well-ordered lives.” But by the spring semester of 1941, with England bravely carrying on the fight but teetering on the brink of defeat, “the question of our responsibility intruded itself more and more. Drinking champagne at the Tavern was uncomfortably reminiscent of the luxurious appointments of the Maginot Line,” the lavish fortifications that had given France a false sense of security.

  With all the darkness in the news, there were still diversions. One afternoon Nancy and her friends cut class to watch a murder trial that was going on at the Hampshire County Courthouse. The defendant was a man who had caught his wife with a lover and killed him. “We were all terribly excited about it,” Nancy told a reporter forty years later. “I imagined that the wife was going to look like Carole Lombard and the husband would resemble Clark Gable. But when this fat, unattractive couple walked in, it sort of lost its excitement.”

  The Smith yearbooks from those years carry no mention of Nancy receiving academic distinctions or honors. Nor are there indications that she was a leader in campus activities. But she kept a busy social life. “She was very pretty and popular and always had men come calling,” recalled Frances Hawley Greene, Nancy’s roommate her junior and senior years. “She had boyfriends at Amherst, Yale, Princeton, and Dartmouth, and she used to go away quite often at weekends.”

  Her calendar was just as full during breaks from school, some of which were spent in sunny Phoenix, where Loyal and Edie started going to escape the midwestern winters. A Chicago Tribune photo from March 1940 shows Nancy in a sarong with a flower in her hair, fixing what would later become famous as “the gaze” on an heir to the Wrigley chewing gum fortune. “Miss Nancy Davis and Wrigley Offield were two young Chicagoans at the South Seas party given recently by Mr. Offield’s brother-in-law and sister, Mr. and Mrs. Denis E. Sullivan, Jr., at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix,” the caption said. “Miss Nancy is spending her spring vacation from Smith with her parents, Dr. and Mrs. Loyal Davis, at the desert hotel.”

  Her most serious beau was a Princeton student named Frank Birney, the rich, handsome son of a Chicago banker. They had met at Nancy’s debutante party, where Birney had been the first member of the Triangle Club to show up. He had sensed her nervousness about her big event and put her at ease by going through the receiving line over and over, making her laugh each time by assuming a different voice and pretending to be an additional guest. When Nancy returned to Smith, she and Frank became an item, seeing each other on weekends. She went to Princeton for football games and dances; Frank came to Smith for parties. Occasionally, they rendezvoused in New York. They began talking, though not all that seriously, about marriage.

  Eight days after the December 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, Nancy and Frank’s courtship came to an abrupt and tragic end. “Frank was planning to go to New
York. He must have been late, because he ran across the tracks to catch his train, not realizing how fast the train was moving,” Nancy wrote in her 1989 memoir. “The engineer pulled so hard on the emergency brake that he broke it, but he couldn’t stop the train, and Frank was killed instantly.”

  What surely made twenty-year-old Frank Birney’s death even harder to accept was the fact that it was not the accident that Nancy and his family claimed it was. He had killed himself. State police concluded he had jumped from behind a pole in front of an eastbound Pennsylvania Railroad express train. The locomotive was going seventy miles per hour when the engineer spotted him and blew the whistle. Frank’s mangled body was dragged more than a hundred feet before the train finally came to a stop. He had been carrying no identification or money, which was peculiar for someone supposedly headed to New York. According to a local newspaper account, his classmates told investigators that the Princeton senior “had been in a despondent state lately because his grades had not come up to his own expectations.” Frank’s mother gave Nancy a silver cigarette case with his name engraved on it, which was a present Nancy had bought for him the previous Christmas. She held on to that keepsake for the rest of her life. “It was the first time that anybody I was close to had died, and it was a tremendous shock,” Nancy recalled. “My roommate forced me to go out and take long, brisk walks.”