Ronnie and Nancy (14 page)

High school students from Girls and Boys Latin, the private coed school Frances Parker, and select public schools in the better suburbs—Evanston, Winnetka, and Lake Forest—were invited to dances at the Fortnightly Club.

Another Chicago society institution founded in the Gilded Age, it was housed in a stately Georgian mansion on East Bellevue Place, a block north of East Lake Shore Drive. “Nancy loved to dance,” said Girls Latin alumna 7 6

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Angie Johnson Galbraith. “And she used to stand up and sing—‘Pennies from Heaven’ was her favorite. I think she sang it once a month at the Fortnightly.”13 (Bing Crosby, the country’s number one crooner, recorded “Pennies from Heaven” with the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra in 1936; it was at the top of the charts for ten weeks late that year and in early 1937.)

“She had a lot of personality,” said Jean Wescott Marshall. “I don’t want to say bubbly, but she was fun-loving. She was very at ease with the boys.

And she had been with adults a lot, so she was very at ease with them, too.

Nancy was the leader of everything.”14 In a television interview in 1997, Marshall elaborated on this description slightly: “Everybody looked up to her. She sort of ran the rest of us.”15 Nancy was freshman class vice president, sophomore class president, junior class vice president, and senior class judge.

Nancy’s best friend chose a curious story to illustrate her leadership qualities: “At the end of our freshman year, Nancy got the great idea that we should go to boarding school. So I went home and told my family that I wanted to go to boarding school. Five of us went away for our sophomore and junior years. And Nancy stayed home.”16 (A look at the school’s yearbooks shows that five students out of eighteen in Nancy’s class, including Jean Wescott, left Girls Latin after their freshman year, in 1936; Wescott returned for her senior year.)

Practically the only time the Latin School kids left the Near North Side was to go to the movie palaces in the Loop. They usually took the bus downtown, which cost a dime, though they were occasionally driven by the chauffeurs of the richer families. McFarland recalled that such excursions made a deep impression on him: “You couldn’t go downtown in the thirties—early thirties especially—and
not
see the guys selling apples on the corners and the soup kitchens and the people lined up where a job was available.”17

Nancy saw nearly every movie, collected movie magazines, and made scrapbooks of her favorite stars.18 “We were all wrapped up in movie stars,”

Jean Wescott Marshall told me. “I liked Ronald Reagan, and she liked Bing Crosby. She used to say, ‘I don’t see what you see in Ronald Reagan.’ And I’d say, ‘Well, I don’t see what you see in Bing Crosby.’ But we both liked Jimmy Stewart and kept pictures of him.”19 When Nancy was a junior, the Senior Class Will bequeathed her “a scrap book to hold all her pictures of Tyrone Power.”20

It was far from unusual for teenage girls in the 1930s to be starstruck. But among her classmates, only Nancy had an Uncle Walter Huston and an
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7 7

Aunt Colleen Moore, not to mention a godmother named Alla Nazimova, whom she called Zim. As Garry Wills notes, “She was in touch with a very wide world, through her mother.”21 Although Edith had retired from the stage when she married Loyal, she kept up the relationships she had developed in the theatrical world, and her husband enjoyed meeting Edith’s glittery friends. One of the advantages Edith had in maintaining her Broadway and Hollywood connections was that the fastest way to cross the country at the time was by train; passengers had to change trains in Chicago, which encouraged stopovers. Another was that Chicago was a big theater town.

It is also worth noting that Edith’s friends were stars of the highest rank, not has-beens or wannabes. Spencer Tracy, her co-star in
Baby Cyclone
back in 1928, had been discovered by the great Hollywood director John Ford two years later; by the mid-1930s he was one of MGM’s most important leading men, winning back-to-back best-acting Oscars for
Captains Courageous
in 1937 and
Boys Town
in 1938. Walter Huston, Edith’s friend since the 1928 Chicago and New York runs of
Elmer the
Great
, had also become hugely successful in the movies while continuing to triumph on Broadway with the biggest hit of his theatrical career, the Sinclair Lewis play
Dodsworth
, which ran for 1,238 performances at the Shubert Theater in 1934 and 1935.22

In January 1936, Nazimova was in Chicago with her legendary production of Ibsen’s
Ghosts
, which she not only starred in but also directed.

(“Great is a word for sparing use,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in
The New
York Times
after its Broadway opening, “but there is no other way to characterize a transcendent performance of a tragic role.”)23 Edith and Loyal attended the Chicago opening, and a few nights later had Nazimova and her companion, Glesca Marshall, to dinner, a fact that Edith made sure was noted in the
Chicago Herald
’s gossip column. Nazimova recorded the evening in her diary: “To the Davises. Family. Peace. Contentment. Happiness? Must be.”24

Edith put time and effort into these friendships. Nancy Reagan told me that it seemed every time the family was ready to go out, she and Loyal had to pull Edith away from her desk. “We used to tease her because she would always be writing a postcard to somebody. And we’d say, ‘C’mon, Mother.

C’mon.’ She’d say, ‘I just have to get this off.’”25 After Nazimova had a partial mastectomy in June 1937, the Davises traveled to New York and visited her at her Westchester County estate.26 Spencer Tracy, who seemed to get 7 8

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House deeper and deeper into trouble as he achieved greater and greater success, could always count on Edith and Loyal when he needed a place to dry out, far from the prying eyes of Hollywood. Spence, as his friends called him, had been born on the right side of the tracks in Milwaukee in 1900 to a Protestant mother from a colonial New England family and an Irish Catholic father who managed a trucking company, and he was bright but bad from the start. He went to four high schools—parochial, public, Jesuit, and military—before moving on to Ripon College and the American Academy of Dramatic Art in New York. His binge drinking began after he and his wife, Louise, discovered their infant son, John, was deaf. At MGM

he developed a reputation for disappearing on a week-long binge before the start of production on a film, but studio head Louis B. Mayer tolerated his behavior because he was so uniquely talented.

If Tracy was the glamorous but troubled kid brother in the Davises’

life, Walter Huston was the grand seigneur. When
Dodsworth
played in Chicago in 1935, he and his third wife, Nan, who co-starred in the play, stayed with the Davises.27 As Nancy recalled, Loyal “frequently stood in the wings watching the last act while waiting to drive them home. He had almost memorized Uncle Walter’s climactic speech.”28 Walter had taken a liking to Loyal, and had even made him a member of his Crovenay Society, a tongue-in-cheek club dedicated to deflating “stuffed shirts of every kidney.” Its members ranged from George M. Cohan and William Wyler, who directed Huston in the film version of
Dodsworth
, to the baseball player Ty Cobb and the boxing champion Max Baer.29 Loyal became Huston’s doctor and remained so until his death in 1950. “They were best friends,” Richard Davis told me.30 Walter’s son, the director John Huston, wrote in his memoir,
An Open Book
, “[My father] was not unduly impressed by great names. The few people he thoroughly admired included Franklin D. Roosevelt, Eugene O’Neill, Bernard Baruch, [Broadway director] Jed Harris, Loyal Davis. He responded to quality.”31

Four years older than Edith and twelve years older than Loyal, Walter Huston was a carpenter’s son from Toronto who first appeared on the stage at eighteen, in 1902. After marrying his first wife, Rhea Gore, in 1905, he decided to settle down in her home state of Missouri and took a series of engineering jobs at utilities plants. In 1906 their son, John, was born.

Three years later the marriage fell apart, and the restless Walter hit the vaudeville circuit as half of a song-and-dance team with the woman who would become his second wife, Bayonne Whipple. He made his Broadway
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7 9

debut in 1924, and that year won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for his performance in
Desire Under the Elms
. His movie career was launched in 1929, when he played a bad guy in
The Virginian,
a Western starring Gary Cooper in his first talking role. A year later he starred in the title role of D. W. Griffith’s
Abraham Lincoln.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt was one of Huston’s biggest fans, and he had attended the February 1935 opening of
Dodsworth
in Washington, D.C. In fact, shortly before Walter and Nan arrived to stay with the Davises, they had been received at the White House, where FDR charmed them by serving the drinks himself.32 Presumably they repeated the story to Loyal, who hated Roosevelt; if so, Loyal’s reaction is unrecorded.

In the summer of 1937, the Davises took Nancy and Richard to visit the Hustons at their rustic but lavish hideaway in the San Bernardino Mountains near Lake Arrowhead, California.33 When they had bought the four acres of land with its spectacular views and giant pines a few years earlier, Walter intended to build a log cabin with his own hands, but Nan talked him into a more substantial structure, as well as a tennis court, a gymnasium, and a swimming pool. He made eleven films in two years to pay for it, but he refused to have a telephone. Their only neighbors were the Hollywood agent Myron Selznick and the British actor Reginald Denny, both of whom were members of the Crovenay Society.34 “The living room had a huge fireplace and a U-shaped sofa with its back even to the floor above—it was a sunken living room,” Nancy Reagan told me.

“Every night after dinner we’d sit in a circle and Uncle Walter would stand in front of the fireplace and read to us.”35

And then there was Colleen Moore, the Auntie Mame of the Davises’ circle.

Edith had kept up a correspondence with the star since they met in 1922, but they didn’t become intimates until fifteen years later, when Moore married Chicago stockbroker Homer Hargrave Sr. and moved to the Gold Coast. Although she was only thirty-five at the time, Moore was genuine Old Hollywood royalty—rich, glamorous, fascinating. She had retired from the movies three years earlier; her last great film,
The Power and the Glory
, was Spencer Tracy’s breakthrough picture, and she always said it was her favorite of the hundred films she made between 1917 and 1934.36

Moore was born Kathleen Morrison in 1902 in Port Huron, Michigan, but she considered herself a Southerner because she grew up in Atlanta and Tampa. At fifteen she arrived in Hollywood with her grandmother as 8 0

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House chaperone and signed a contract with D. W. Griffith that had been arranged by her uncle, Walter Howey, the
Chicago Examiner
editor who was the model for the tyrannical newspaperman in
The Front Page
.37 Her first starring role was in
Little Orphan Annie,
and
Flaming Youth
in 1923

made her one of the two great symbols of the Roaring Twenties, the other being the less-refined Clara Bow. Moore had been ordered to cut her dark hair into a boyish bob for that picture; F. Scott Fitzgerald declared it “the most fateful haircut since Samson’s.” She was America’s biggest box office draw in 1927 and 1928, earning $12,500 per week at First National Studio and living in a $1 million Spanish-style mansion in Bel Air with her first husband, John Emmett McCormick, an alcoholic producer.38

Those who knew her best said she was a “kick,” a “dynamo,” even a bit mad on the surface, given the obsessive extravagance of the project she called the Doll House or the Fairy Castle. Moore began building it in 1928, and by the time it was unveiled seven years later she had spent a reported $470,000 on it. Built at a scale of one inch to the foot, it was nine feet square and twelve feet high and weighed one ton. It was designed by her father, an engineer, and Horace Jackson, her set designer at First National.

The drawing room floor was inlaid with rose quartz and jade, the dining room was hung with tapestries done in petit point, Peter Pan murals lined the Bedroom of the Fairy Princess, and the white bear rug in Prince Charming’s Bedroom “was made by a taxidermist from the skin of a single ermine,”

to quote Moore’s description. The Doll House held two thousand small objects, including miniature antiquities from Egypt, Greece, and Rome, and a $50,000 chandelier made of diamonds, emeralds, and pearls from Moore’s own earrings and necklaces. It had running water, electric lighting, a radio, and a working organ in the chapel. Moore commissioned well-known writers such as Thornton Wilder, Willa Cather, Sinclair Lewis, and Anita Loos to create tiny books in their own handwriting for the library.39

Such fetishistic excess may have seemed objectionable at the height of the Depression, but Moore later defended her creation as “a beautiful toy, an extravagance, a folly, even, but one which had brought me more happiness than I’d ever known before.”40 It was also a distraction from her breakup with McCormick, which was followed by an unsuccessful second marriage to a New York stockbroker. On the suggestion of a public relations man for the May Company department store in Los Angeles, she took the Doll House on a nationwide tour of department stores to raise money for handicapped children.

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8 1

In 1936, when Moore showed the Doll House at the Fair Store in Chicago (where Jack Reagan had been employed twenty years earlier), Edith took Nancy to meet her. On that trip, Colleen met Homer Hargrave, a well-to-do widower with two children. They were married on May 19, 1937. After their wedding ceremony, Homer took Colleen to the Riverview Amusement Park. “We rode on the roller coaster, had a wedding supper of hot dogs,” she recalled. “Then we went to Europe.”41 Hargrave, who had been born in Danville, Indiana, had never been abroad.