Ronnie and Nancy (16 page)

But although he was a strict father, he was always fair. He was, I felt, what a real father ought to be.”67

Or, as she put it in
Nancy
: “Some people you meet in your life make you stretch to reach your fullest capabilities. I found my new father to be one of these people, which is why he was such a good teacher when he was
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Professor of Surgery at Northwestern University. He always demanded the best of you and made you want to give the best you had. He was strict but fair with me, as he was with his students. They came to respect him as I came to respect him. When he took privileges away from me as punishment for some misdeed, I understood I deserved the discipline. He was, I feel, the way a father should be.”68

She did everything possible to please him: She chewed her food thirty-two times.69 She was always on time. (“He was a stickler about punctual-ity. When he said six o’clock, he didn’t mean two minutes after six.”)70 She tagged along on emergency calls outside Chicago. After she entered her teens, he permitted her to watch him operate, usually from a glassed-in balcony but on at least one occasion standing beside him in the operating room. (Years later she told a reporter that she had always worried about getting sick to her stomach and embarrassing him.) She promised not to drink or smoke until she was twenty-one, and kept her promise. (Loyal kept his, too, and rewarded her with $1,000.)71

She became as interested in clothes and grooming as he was. In fact, in my interviews with Davis family friends, they almost always brought up Loyal’s style and appearance, but rarely mentioned Edith’s. “He was immaculately dressed,” Abra Rockefeller Wilkin told me.72 “My goodness, that man was very, very meticulous about his appearance and clothes,” said racetrack owner Marjorie Everett, a close family friend from both Chicago and Arizona. “Loyal Davis epitomized what you’d like to see in a doctor.

Very distinguished-looking. Great style. Beautifully groomed. I’m certain that some of the qualities that we see in Nancy—the discipline especially—

came from him.”73

One of the most important ways that Nancy got closer to her stepfather was by accompanying him on his trips home to Galesburg. “Since my mother’s parents passed on early, I never knew them, so my father’s parents were especially important to me,” she later said. “They treated me as if I were their real grandchild, and I felt as if I were. They were good, hardworking people, proud of their son, happy with the second marriage he had made, happy with Mother and me. I adored my grandfather and vividly recall the last time I saw him. He was dying of cancer and I went to visit him in Galesburg. We both knew it would be our last time together, although those words were never spoken. We said our good-byes, and as I was leaving, I turned to look back before getting in the car. He was standing at the window and managed a weak wave. I waved back, threw him a kiss, and hurried 8 8

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House into the car so he would not see the tears streaming down my face.”74 (Albert Davis died in 1938.)

Meanwhile, her relationship with Ken Robbins was deteriorating. In recounting her “last visit” to her father in New Jersey, she wrote that “things went badly. He said something about Mother I didn’t like and it made me angry. I said I was going to call my mother and go home. He got upset and locked me in the bathroom. I was terrified, and it seemed suddenly as if I were with strangers. Recalling the incident brings back a flood of memories I would rather forget. To this day I dislike locked doors and feel trapped behind them. His wife felt terrible and later wrote to my mother to apologize, but there were no more visits.”75

But when did this traumatic incident occur? It seems unlikely that it happened in the apparently happy summer of 1931, when she was ten, because in
My Turn
she refers to visiting her father during her adolescence, which would mean that she spent time with him until she was at least thirteen or fourteen. Marian Robinson, whose father was Ken’s first cousin, placed Nancy in New Jersey in the late 1930s, adding, “[Nannee Robbins]

told me . . . that I should learn some of the social graces that Nancy had.”76

Another Robbins cousin, Kathleen Young, talked about visiting the Davises on East Lake Shore Drive in 1936, indicating that relations had not broken down between the two families. “I was awed by Nancy,” said Kathleen, who was four years younger, “because she was very pretty and she had angora socks hanging in the bathroom. The Davises bought me all new clothes and took me to the best French restaurants in town, and I ordered for them because I spoke French.”77

Nancy Reagan never gave a date for the time her father locked her in the bathroom. “Oh, dear, I don’t remember,” she said when I asked her how old she was then. “That’s going back a lot of years.”78 Could it be that she exaggerated her birth father’s behavior in an effort to win her stepfather’s sympathy and get him to adopt her?

In any case, she finally took matters into her own hands and one day in the elevator approached a neighbor who was a retired judge. “I asked him,

‘How can I go about getting adopted?’ [He] called my mother, and she must have approved because he volunteered to help me with the paperwork. I already knew that according to Illinois law, a child who reached the age of 14

could make her own decision on matters of adoption. By then there was no longer any question in my mind, and I finally made it official by going to see Kenneth Robbins in New York. He came with my grandmother to meet me
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under the clock at the Biltmore Hotel. I explained what I wanted to do, and they agreed, reluctantly. I’m sure it hurt my grandmother terribly. When Kenneth Robbins signed the papers, I sent a wire to Chicago to tell my family that the adoption had gone through. I didn’t have much experience with telegrams, but I knew they had to be brief. This one read: hi dad.”79

She explained to me that she had passed through New York on her Easter break. “I was going to Bermuda to spend the vacation with some girls from my school, and I wrote my father that I’d like to see him. I felt badly. But then, you know, this was obviously the right thing to do.”80

Loyal Davis matter-of-factly confirms the extraordinary role his stepdaughter played in her adoption: “Nancy had taken the initiative and consulted Orville Taylor, an attorney who lived in the same apartment building, about the steps necessary for me to adopt her. I wished it very much but was somewhat hesitant to institute the proceeding because her father and paternal grandmother were alive. After she was advised by her attorney, she made a trip east . . . obtained her father’s signed agreement, and upon her return I soon had my daughter legally.”81

According to Cook County records, her petition for adoption, filed on April 19, 1938, stated “that the natural parents of said child are divorced, and that the mother of said child has since married Loyal Davis . . . and that the father of said child, Kenneth S. Robbins, consents in writing to the adoption of said child by the petitioners, and . . . that said minor child being more than 14 years of age likewise consents in writing to her adoption.” The petition also requested that her name be legally changed from Anne Frances Robbins to Nancy Davis.82

Even after Nancy was adopted, she continued to address her stepfather as Dr. Loyal. “I knew he would have loved it if I had called him Dad,” she wrote in
My Turn
, “and in retrospect I wish I had. But at the time I just couldn’t. Although we became very close, it wasn’t until my own daughter was born that I finally dropped the formal title. When Patti was too young to say ‘Grandpa,’ she called him Bapa—and so did I.”83

In the spring of 1938, Nancy was in her junior year at Girls Latin. Pretty, happy, and popular, she was dating the equally popular Sock Hettler, who was in the same year at Boys Latin. She was on the hockey team, in the Glee Club, and president of the Drama Club. That summer she turned seventeen and went to Lake Arrowhead with her parents to spend several weeks with Uncle Walter Huston. One day her idol Jimmy Stewart—tall, 9 0

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House slim, a big star at thirty—turned up with the director Joshua Logan, who wanted to feature Huston in the Maxwell Anderson and Kurt Weill musical
Knickerbocker Holiday
on Broadway.

“Walter was the best American actor on the stage, no question about it,” Logan later said. “I flew out to California and then I rented a car and drove to Lake Arrowhead. . . . He had visitors staying with him: a young girl named Nancy Davis and her mother and father. [Walter] arranged immediately for me to read them the play aloud. So I put on a big show. And Nancy Davis sat there and howled and laughed, she was the best audience I ever had.”84 Nancy later wrote that when Uncle Walter asked her opinion, she advised him against taking the part. He ignored her counsel, and would be remembered long after his death for his recording of “September Song” from
Knickerbocker Holiday.
85

Another day, when Nan Huston took Edith off to Los Angeles on a shopping excursion, Uncle Walter suggested making a “radio broadcast”

of a scene from
Othello
. He played the title role, as he had on Broadway the year before, Loyal played Iago, and Nancy was Desdemona. When the women returned that evening, Huston played the record for them. “They were easy on me,” Nancy said, “but teased Father unmercifully. Mother told him, ‘You just got hammier and hammier.’ He took it with good nature. He was used to it.”86

Nancy later said that she had always wanted to be actress, “like my mother,”87 but surely being exposed to the top of the profession at such an early age and in such a special way made it seem almost predestined. “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t interested in the theater, and in school my main interest was drama,” she wrote in
My Turn.
“I was only an average student . . . [but] I acted in all the school plays. In my senior year, I played the lead in
First Lady
, by George S. Kaufman. I don’t recall much about the story, but I do remember that I wore a black dress with a white collar, and that when my classmates forgot their lines, I was able to jump in and start talking until we got back on track. Everyone was terribly impressed—including me.”88

In
First Lady
, a comedy by Katharine Dayton and George S. Kaufman, Nancy played the wife of one of two candidates running for the presidency. With lots of behind-the-scenes help from her, her man wins.
Vita
Scholae
, the school yearbook, described a rehearsal: “In one corner of the gym two or three girls are desperately trying to learn their lines, but in the other corner, Nancy, with by far the longest role, is perched gaily on top
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9 1

of the radiator, apparently telling a grand story to judge by the vigorous gestures and the hilarity of her appreciative classmates. The group has broken up, Miss Magowan having pleaded at length with the uproarious cast.

For the moment Nancy is not ‘on.’ She sits on the gym floor, her books spread around her, doing her homework with the amazing concentration that is hers. Nothing seems to bother her, neither the chatter of her friends, the frantic coaching of Miss Magowan, nor even Jimmy Stewart’s handsome face grinning up at her from her notebook cover.”89

Homer Hargrave Jr., who was a freshman at Boys Latin that year, told me that he had a crush on Nancy. “I remember when I first fell in love with Nancy,” he said. “We had a dance club that was just for freshmen in high school. It was called Miss Pratt’s Dancing Class, and they had it in the gym at Girls Latin. Nancy just sort of crashed the dance. I still remember the young man she was with, who I think died during the war.

But anyway, she sang ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy.’ It was really great.”90

Nancy may have molded herself to Loyal’s demanding specifications, but there was obviously a lot of Edith in her. An anecdote told by Hargrave shows how bossy she could be. “One Saturday,” he said, “I went to the movie house, and they had changed the prices and I didn’t have enough money. The Davises lived only a block and a half from that theater, so I went to see Mrs. Davis to borrow a dollar. She wasn’t home, but Nancy was. And Nancy wanted to know first who my date was. When I told her it was Joanie Johnson, she approved and gave me a dollar. But that night at dinner, my father asked, ‘What did you do all day?’ And I told this story.

My father got furious. I had to get up from the dinner table. And it was a cold winter night, and we lived about six or eight blocks from the Davises.

I had to walk over there and give that dollar back. With the admonition,

‘Don’t you ever,
ever
borrow any money from friends of mine again!’”91

Nancy Davis graduated from Girls Latin in June 1939, with a B average.

The text under her photograph in the yearbook read: “Nancy’s social perfection is a constant source of amazement. She is invariably becomingly and suitably dressed. She can talk, and even better listen intelligently, to anyone from her little kindergarten partner of 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, 9 2

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Nancy actually crossed the yawning emptiness separating the two groups and serenely began a conversation—with a boy.”92

That September she entered Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts—just days after Hitler invaded Poland, beginning World War II in Europe. On December 28, 1939, while home for Christmas vacation, she made her debut at the Casino Club, the exclusive dining club in which the Davises had recently been accepted as members. Despite the Depression, this was the era of famous debutantes—Barbara Hutton, Doris Duke, Brenda Frazier—when high-society families spent tens of thousands on lavish coming-out parties for their eighteen-year-old daughters.