Ronnie and Nancy (15 page)

Not long after he married Colleen, he became a founding partner in Mer-rill Lynch Pierce, Fenner & Beane (later Smith), following a series of complicated mergers. “As he liked to tell it,” his son, Homer Hargrave Jr., said,

“he left Indiana after the war, went to Chicago, joined a brokerage firm, and never changed jobs—it was just the name on the window that kept changing.”42

Colleen Moore Hargrave and Edith Luckett Davis quickly became the closest of confidantes—two actresses with social ambitions checking in with each other on the telephone every morning. The retired flapper also became an important influence on Nancy, who was entranced by her Doll House, her Hollywood stories, and her somewhat kooky personality, all of which obscured a shrewd and unshakable inner core. Nancy was apparently deeply impressed by this combination of fabulousness and practicality.

“Colleen was the best. She was bubbly. She was fun,” recalled Abra Rockefeller Wilkin, whose mother, Abra Rockefeller Prentice, became a close friend of both Edith’s and Colleen’s in Chicago. “She built the wonderful Fairy Castle, and she sort of thought she was one of the fairies. I mean, everything was magical. Yet she always had great advice. She’d say,

‘If you’re feeling blue, just get yourself dressed up and go out, because that’s what I did, and I met Homer.’ Her first husband was gay. Whatever has been done, Colleen did it. But she made it sort of respectable, and she told it in a ladylike way. Colleen was more ladylike than Edie. Colleen could be fun and bawdy, too, but she just pulled it off a little better.”43

“She had it all,” said Homer Hargrave Jr., who was thirteen when his father married Colleen. “She had all the street smarts. All of them.”44 His younger sister, Judy Hargrave Coleman, added, “She was wise in the ways of the world. People-smart. Astute. She knew people. She understood them. I don’t remember her ever saying she had a great dislike for anyone. I know she didn’t like a phony. She could pick them out. She was a very wise lady.

She knew what she was doing and what she wanted.”45

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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House The Hargraves had a duplex apartment at 1320 North State Parkway, eight blocks north of the Davises’ and next door to the Ambassador West Hotel, where Colleen would take visiting movie star friends such as Lillian Gish to the Pump Room and hold court with Edith in the first booth inside the entrance. The Hargrave apartment was decorated in a grand style with English antiques and Oriental rugs. “She entertained a lot,” said Judy Hargrave Coleman. “She loved a party. She was a wonderful mother and a wonderful wife. My father was all business. But he had a dry wit.”46

According to Homer Hargrave Jr., his father was greatly helped by Colleen, who was greatly helped by Edith. “She was very kind to my mother. Colleen moved to Chicago knowing no one, and Edie Davis helped her a great deal.” Wasn’t his father already well established in Chicago? “In business. But not socially. Colleen made him. First place, everybody falls in love with a movie star. Colleen did a great deal for my father.” Like Edith did for Loyal? “Yes. Because Loyal was absolutely concentrated on medicine.

And he was tough.”47 Judy Hargrave Coleman found Loyal Davis intimidating. “You almost wanted to curtsey to him.”48

The two couples were alike in many ways—a hardheaded all-business husband promoted and supported by a lighthearted, loads-of-fun wife. Although it was the second time around for Homer, and the third for Colleen, the Hargrave marriage would prove to be as durable as the Davises’—and one might even say it reinforced Nancy’s idea of what an ideal marriage ought to be. Homer and Loyal grew to be almost as close as their wives. And in Colleen, Edith finally had the social collaborator, the high-spirited accomplice, she hadn’t found in Edna Kanavel, Pinky Pollock, or the other doctors’ wives.

These were not women who could be bossed around by men. Colleen Moore had single-handedly made her joke writer Mervyn LeRoy into a major director and later insisted that he give the fourteen-year-old Loretta Young a screen test.49 Edith, her daughter assured me, wasn’t intimidated by anyone. “Edith was impossible,” said Abra Rockefeller Wilkin. “The stories, the antics. She was demanding. She was exacting. Difficult. And Loyal had to have enjoyed her, or he wouldn’t have put up with her. I think they probably had more fun backstage than the rest of us realized.”50 Both Colleen Hargrave and Edith Davis realized that in enhancing their husband’s status, they were enhancing their own.

“She and Mother were such a pair in Chicago,” Nancy later wrote.

East Lake Shore Drive: 1933–1939

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“When my father would leave for the hospital each morning, and her husband, Homer, would leave for the office, she and Mother would be on the phone with each other planning their day. What one didn’t think of, the other did.”51 She told me, “They would figure out what kind of mischief they were going to get into that day. And Colleen would be miffed if for some reason she couldn’t get Mother on the phone.”52

Both women served on the Women’s Board of Passavant Hospital, along with such prominent social figures as Abra Rockefeller Prentice and Narcissa Ward Thorne, whose father-in-law was a co-founder of Montgomery Ward & Company. Narcissa Thorne shared Colleen Moore’s passion for grandiose dollhouses. The Thorne Miniature Rooms, like the Doll House scaled one inch to the foot, were first shown publicly at Chicago’s

“Century of Progress” World’s Fair in 1933, and were eventually put on permanent display at the Art Institute of Chicago. The Doll House went to Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry.

Narcissa Thorne maintained a studio near her Gold Coast apartment, where skilled craftsmen and society ladies sat side by side, the former carv-ing miniature reproductions of period settees, the latter stitching tiny pillows to put on them. Nancy Reagan told me that Mrs. Thorne had given her one of the more modest rooms she made for the children of friends. “I have it in the guest room,” she said, adding that she was impressed by Narcissa Thorne because she was so refined and “always looked perfect. Her posture was so straight and erect. You know, she was from that old school.

And she was crazy about my father.”53

Chicago’s society was relatively open, more like New York’s than Boston’s or Philadelphia’s. Accomplishment counted as much as lineage, and giving back in the form of charitable donations and deeds was a recognized means of social advancement. The city’s leading families had made their fortunes in trade and industry in the late nineteenth century: the Armours and Swifts in meatpacking, the Palmers and Fields in retailing; the McCormicks in farm machinery; the Wrigleys in chewing gum.

When Edith moved to town, second- and third-generation members of those families dominated the boards of the city’s great institutions. Unlike Colleen, however, Edith never made it onto the most elite boards—those of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Lyric Opera—perhaps because the Davises weren’t rich enough, perhaps because her bawdy jokes crossed the line of decorum. Nonetheless she dedicated herself to such charities as the Red Cross and the Seeing Eye and moved comfortably in upper-class circles.

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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House

“She was a doer,” said Judy Hargrave Coleman about Edith’s fund-raising abilities. “You couldn’t say no to Mrs. Davis.”54

“Edith was a total extrovert—uncontrolled,” said Richard Davis.55 “You couldn’t help but love her,” said Lester Weinrott, Edith’s friend and radio producer. “She was this adorable darling little woman with a phony theatrical Southern accent who always made you feel good just being around her. Yes, she swore like a drafted Turkish sailor and told smutty toilet jokes, but Loyal pretended not to hear, because she was paying all the bills and introducing him to the right people. I was so crazy about her I ended up being her educated slave for forty years. She could get people to do anything for her, and I have to say that Nancy, who never had her mother’s spontaneous charm and warmth, certainly learned how to manipulate from a genius. She was schooled by a social mechanic of the first order.”56

Edith liked giving small dinner parties, especially after she and Loyal moved to their duplex at 199 East Lake Shore Drive, which had a living room, dining room, and library downstairs and three bedrooms upstairs.

Like her charity work, Edith’s dinners revealed a social agenda. According to Richard Davis, who moved in with Edith and Loyal after his mother’s death in 1939, his father was initially a reluctant participant in Edith’s efforts. “She had to force him, really, to have people in. She was very gregarious and interested in social contacts—not only for him, but for Nancy.”

He added, “Dr. Loyal was an opinionated man. When friends were invited over, he had to dominate the conversation.”57

Davis described these dinner parties as jovial but serious affairs. “There was never a lot of drinking. It was one drink and then into the dining room. Except for a very occasional cocktail party, they never had more than eight or ten people, because that was all the dining room would hold.”58 Although Edith wasn’t much of cook—the Davises had a housekeeper who came in every day and fixed the evening meal—she sent the local society editors homemade mustard at Christmas, in jars labeled “From the kitchen of Mrs. Loyal Davis.”59

Among those who sometimes came to dinner were Mayor Kelly and his second wife, Margaret, who became one of Edith’s best friends. The rough-and-ready Kelly always seemed to be denying involvement in one corruption scandal or another—among other things, he was accused of not reporting $450,000 in income and settled with the IRS for $106,390 to avoid prosecution60—but he had managed to put the city’s financial affairs in order soon after assuming office in 1933. Two years later, riding high on
East Lake Shore Drive: 1933–1939

8 5

the repeal of Prohibition and the success of the 1933 World’s Fair, Kelly was elected to the first of three full terms by the greatest margin in Chicago history—799,060 to 167,106 for his Republican opponent. There were credible charges that as many as 300,000 of the votes were stolen, but that didn’t stop Kelly from putting his vote total on the license plates of his Cadillac.61

“I learned many things about the workings of city, county, and state government from Ed Kelly,” Republican Loyal later wrote of the Democratic mayor. “A tall, redheaded Irishman with a quick wit, uneducated beyond grade school, he attracted people mainly, I think, because they identified with him in his mispronunciation of words and his laboring-class background.”62 Edith, still a self-professed Southern Democrat, was as usual less condescending and more practical: she gave Mayor Kelly elocution lessons and helped him write his radio addresses.

Meanwhile, Loyal’s star continued to rise in the world of medicine. In 1936

he was elected to membership in both the American Surgical Association, which in his words was “the most prestigious surgical society in the United States,” and the snobbish Southern Surgical Association, which held annual meetings at expensive resorts such as the Homestead in Hot Springs, Virginia, which were attended by the doctors’ wives. (Loyal claimed that Edith’s Southern background was the real reason he was invited to join.) In 1938, six years after he succeeded Dr. Kanavel as chief surgeon at Passavant and chairman of the surgery department at Northwestern, Loyal’s great mentor was killed in a car crash while vacationing in California, and Loyal was named to replace him as editor in chief of
Surgery, Gynecology & Ob-stetrics
, the professional journal of the American College of Surgeons. For all his honors and titles, Loyal was hardly making a fortune. His university position was unpaid, which was not unusual for medical schools at the time. “The majority of the medical profession,” Loyal wrote, “held that doctors were not subject to the temptations of average human beings and would resist the lure of money.”63 While Lester Weinrott’s assertion that Edith paid for everything was exaggerated, her substantial radio earnings were what made their affluent way of life possible.

On January 17, 1938, Edith started working in a new radio soap opera called
The Stepmother
, produced and directed by Weinrott at CBS, while continuing to do
Betty and Bob
at NBC. Sponsored by Colgate toothpaste, the serial was about the daughter of a Chicago newspaperman who becomes the second wife of a small-town widowed banker with two children.

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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House According to John Dunning’s
On the Air:
“
Stepmother
posed the question

‘Can a stepmother successfully raise another woman’s children?’” Edith, with her knack for Southern accents, played the family’s “faithful colored servant,” Mattie.64 If the plot echoed the Hargraves’ domestic situation, the theme was not unfamiliar to the Davis household. Three months after
The
Stepmother
premiered, and nine years after her mother had remarried, Nancy, at age sixteen, was adopted by her stepfather on April 20. Nancy Robbins was finally Nancy Davis. A sign of how eager she was for that to happen can be seen in the Girls Latin yearbook of the previous June, in which she had already dropped her birth father’s name for her stepfather’s.65

In later accounts of what was one of the most important events of her life, Nancy Reagan was consistently vague about the time that elapsed between her mother’s remarriage and her adoption. That is partly because of the two years she subtracted from her age when she went to Hollywood, but also it must have been hard for her to face the fact of Loyal’s reluctance. It wasn’t that he didn’t love her; he worried about hurting Ken Robbins. Richard Davis explained that Nancy was his father’s favorite: “She’d sit in his lap, or at the foot of his chair. I wouldn’t say she was in awe of him, but there was an enormous respect. They were very, very close.”66

In the end Nancy initiated the adoption process, not Loyal. For nine years she had sought to live up to his standards and values. In doing so, she had shaped herself into what he wanted her to be: neat, disciplined, agreeable, perfect. Along the way she must have learned valuable lessons about how to persuade the powerful man to see things her way. But that’s not something she would ever admit. In her telling, she did what Dr. Loyal wanted her to do, and Dr. Loyal was always right. As she wrote in
My
Turn,
“Loyal Davis was a man of great integrity who exemplified old-fashioned values: That girls and boys should grow up to be ladies and gentlemen. That children should respect and obey their parents. That no matter what you did, you should never cheapen yourself. And that whatever you worked at—whether it was a complicated medical procedure, or a relatively simple act like sweeping the floor—you should do it as well as you could. . . . When I started going out at night, I always had a curfew.