Ronnie and Nancy (25 page)

Nonetheless, according to Richard Davis, she was so determined to have a theatrical career that “she threatened not to go back to Smith to graduate. My father was five thousand miles away in Europe, but he raised the roof: she
had
to graduate.”93

In July 1942, Loyal had been summoned to Washington by Dr. Fred Rankin, a Lexington, Kentucky, surgeon who had been appointed chief of surgery of the U.S. Army. Rankin asked Loyal to go overseas as a senior consultant in neurological surgery in the European theater of operations. He accepted with alacrity, but panicked on the flight back to Chicago: “I was obsessed with the idea of getting home quickly; my disturbing affliction of nostalgia had recurred in a serious attack. I wondered what I would do in England suffering from homesickness.” After consulting with Edith, Dr.

Pollock, and Dean Cutter, he decided to stick with his decision to accept the appointment.94 “It all happened so fast,” Richard Davis recalled. “He was called to Washington the first week of July ’42, and my God, he was gone six weeks later. But it was a great honor.”95

“The night before Loyal left, Edith had a little party at home,” Davis continued. “It was more like a wake. All of our friends came in and out—

Colleen and Homer, Margaret and Ed Kelly, Dean Cutter—like they were passing the coffin. This thing went on and on. Betty and Les Weinrott and the Pollocks were the last ones to leave. It was a grim night. Jesus, we were upset. I mean, he was going overseas for God knows how long.”96

Before flying to England in September, Loyal spent ten days in Washington being documented, immunized, and fitted for his uniform, helmet, and gas mask. In his memoir, he records being taken to “an unforgettable cocktail party” by Chicago socialite Mrs. Henry “Patsy” Field, who introNancy at Smith: 1939–1944

1 3 9

duced him to the wife of General Dwight D. Eisenhower: “Mamie Eisenhower quickly realized that the doctor before her was uncomfortable in his strange clothes, ill at ease in the crowd, and awed by the wife of the general whom he was sure he would see at mess daily, and with whom, undoubtedly, he would have the opportunity of talking at table, even though he might well sit at the foot. She graciously steered the conversation so that a rather detailed recital of my life came pouring out. I was convinced that soon I would be living and working close to the commanding general of the European theater of operations when in excusing myself at Patsy’s insistence, Mrs. Eisenhower instructed me to tell Ike she sent her love.”97

Loyal never laid eyes on Eisenhower during the ten months he was stationed in England, mainly in Oxford, where he consulted with American, British, and Canadian surgeons on the treatment of airmen and soldiers with cerebral, spinal, and peripheral nerve injuries. He was eventually credited with designing an improved protective helmet for airplane crewmen, as well as diagnosing high-altitude frostbite in airmen and recommending ways to prevent and treat it, though he had to fight military bureaucrats every step of the way to have his innovations accepted.98 In late 1942 he was nearly court-martialed for sending memorandums of his that had been ignored or rejected to colleagues outside the military, but he found a protector in General Paul R. Hawley, the chief surgeon of the European theater.99

“The trials and tribulations that he had in World War II were extraordinary,” his son told me. “He actually designed plastic headgear for the Eighth Air Force, and he went through all sorts of ballistic tests at Oxford—and they turned that down. Even more devastating to him was that he recognized high-altitude frostbite in the airmen, but the Air Force physicians insisted that the airmen were burned—and of course they were absolutely wrong. For someone at the age of forty-seven who was a very accomplished neurosurgeon—and used to having his own way, too—it was a real blow to him. He simply couldn’t tolerate the bureaucracy. But nevertheless, he was given the Legion of Merit, and he came out a colonel.”100

While her husband was overseas, Edith apparently had difficulty making ends meet.
Betty and Bob
had been canceled in 1940, and
The Stepmother
in July 1942, though she still sometimes played on the long-running soap opera
Ma Perkins.
101 According to Richard Davis, “The rent at 199 [East Lake Shore Drive] was $500 a month—I remember hearing that. My father’s salary as a lieutenant colonel was about $850 a month, and he 1 4 0

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House probably sent all of that home. I would think that Edith got a lot of help from the mayor. No question. Somebody had to pay the rent while Loyal was away. I don’t know who paid Nancy’s tuition at Smith. I don’t know who paid my tuition at the Latin School.”102

If Kelly helped Edith, she also helped him. When he was nominated for a third term in January 1943, she signed on as head of the women’s division of the Citizens’ Committee for Mayor Ed Kelly. That summer she was given a $75-a-week job as an announcer for the city-sponsored concerts in Grant Park. All through the war years, Edith, along with Colleen Moore Hargrave, put in countless hours as a volunteer at the servicemen’s canteens run by Margaret Kelly.103

The mayor had inaugurated the main Servicemen’s Center in the Loop in August 1941, when America’s armed forces were being built up in anticipation of war. Open twenty-four hours a day, the twelve-story renovated former Elks Club offered military personnel everything from hot meals and beds to bowling alleys and big band entertainment free of charge. In 1942, Kelly opened an outdoor facility on twelve lakefront acres in Lincoln Park and an auxiliary canteen for black servicemen on the South Side. As chairman of this enormous undertaking, his wife often put in twelve-hour days, according to Roger Biles. “Her volunteer helpers ranged from society matrons to maids given time off. Approximately thirty-five hundred women, many of them members of the U.S.O.

[United Service Organizations], acted as hostesses. . . . An average of ten thousand soldiers passed through the center on a week night, with as many as forty thousand counted on a weekend. . . . The centers constituted such an unqualified success and engendered such goodwill for the city—soldiers from across the nation spoke glowingly of their time spent in Chicago, even years later—that reporters called their operation one of Mayor Kelly’s finest achievements in office.”104

In her final semester at Smith, Nancy starred in
Make with the Maximum:
A Factory Follies,
“the first musical show ever staged by college girls to entertain war workers.”105 During the spring of 1943, the thirty-three-member cast performed the half-hour revue for more than five thousand workers at defense-related companies, including Westinghouse Electric and U.S. Rubber, in the Connecticut Valley. Wearing a black sheath and long gloves, Nancy played “the Glamour Gal—a Sophisticated Singer.” At the start of the show, she complains that the war has deprived her family of
Nancy at Smith: 1939–1944

1 4 1

their butler and yacht, singing, “Cocktails at five/Dinner at the Stork/Long drives in the country/To get away from New York.”106 At the end, however, she joins the rest of the cast in the show’s title song: “Make with the maximum/Give with the brawn!/Make with the maximum/Smother that yawn!”107

They performed the show one last time at the Class of 1943’s graduation ceremony, on May 23, 1943. Neither Loyal nor Edith was present; he was still in England, and she could not travel owing to wartime restrictions. Despite Nancy’s desire to pursue an acting career, she returned to Chicago to stay with her mother until her stepfather completed his tour of service. She found Edith embroiled in a rather ridiculous mess.

From 1942 to 1946, according to several Reagan biographers, Edith was secretly employed as an “undercover policewoman” by the city, at a salary of $2,141 a year. On May 8, 1943, she had invited several underage sailors to meet young women at her apartment, where a police captain and a lieutenant commander of the shore patrol gave the boys money to take their dates to particular bars; when they were served drinks, police swooped in and arrested the bartenders and owners. The charges were thrown out of court later that month on the grounds of entrapment, “after one of the sailors testified that the raids had indeed been planned at the apartment of a ‘Mrs. Davis on the North Lake Shore.’ ”108 Edith denied everything, but reporters pursued her persistently. When one got Nancy on the telephone, she answered repeatedly, “Not that I know of.”109 For several days in early June, all four Chicago newspapers ran front-page stories with headlines such as is mrs. davis a liquor cop? she won’t talk and mrs. davis, socialite, is a policewoman.110

Nancy would later tie her mother’s police job to her volunteer work at the Servicemen’s Center. “There was a navy yard nearby,” she writes in
My
Turn
, “and when she learned that 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.”111

Richard Davis was more forthcoming. “She must have been on the city payroll,” he told me, “because one night she went on a raid with the police. Some reporter took a picture, which was on the front page of the
Chicago Tribune
. And she didn’t have her teeth in. It was a god-awful sort of mini-scandal. I remember this appeared in the Saturday morning paper.

Sunday morning she took me to lunch at the Casino Club. All the old bid-1 4 2

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House dies greeted her, and she aimed her fingers at them and said, ‘Bang, bang!

Stick ’em up! I’m Dick Tracy!’ You know, deflecting all the gossip—and she got away with it. It was amazing what she could get away with.”112

Edith had become something of a legend in the Windy City. Lillian Gish, whom she always picked up at the station, later remarked, “When I’d get in the car and come down Michigan Avenue with her, all the people would stop and ask her to do something for them. The police, too; she practically ran Chicago.”113

That summer Edith sublet their apartment, and she and Nancy moved into a suite at the Drake Hotel. Nancy was invited to join the Junior League of Chicago and was a bridesmaid at Jean Wescott’s wedding.114 She volunteered as a nurse’s aide at Cook County Hospital, where she was assigned to the men’s ward. “The hospitals were all terribly shorthanded and needed all the help they could get,” she recalled. “I did a lot of dirty work, but it was a job that had to be done.” She also took a job as a salesgirl at Marshall Field. “I wanted to work to make some money and keep myself occupied. My most unforgettable experience there was catching a shoplifter.”115 Her account of that incident is one of the most dramatically told stories in
Nancy
:

A woman was circling around a display case in the center of the floor, and I looked up just in time to see her put a piece of jewelry in her purse. I looked around for the store detective, for anyone, but no one was available. I went up to the woman and asked if I could be of help to her. She said, No, she was just looking. . . . No one had really prepared me for what to do in such an emergency.

She started to leave and I was frantic. As calmly as possible, I said,

“Don’t you think you better give me back the jewelry before you go?” Whereupon she broke away and started to run for the elevator, with me hot on her heels. When I think about it now, we must have made quite a sight. The store detective appeared miraculously from nowhere, and the woman was stopped at the elevator. She turned, took hold of the top of my button-down dress, and tore it right down the front. The detective took both of us and hustled us to the store offices. Here he found that her shopping bags were full of loot she had lifted from this and other stores. I had to tell the whole story, all the while certain this woman was putting some kind of curse on me as she glared at me. . . . Later, I was reprimanded for stopping the shoplifter in the store. I learned that you have to wait until the shoplifter has left the store to substantiate the charge that
Nancy at Smith: 1939–1944

1 4 3

the customer had no intention of paying for whatever was taken. I was given a twenty-five-dollar check as a reward, and even though I had gone about it all wrong, I was very proud!116

In June 1943, General Hawley appointed Loyal to the first Anglo-American medical mission to the Soviet Union. Accompanied by two agents of the Soviet secret police, the seven members of the mission flew to Moscow via Gibraltar, Tripoli, Cairo, and Tehran. Their suite at the National Hotel was bugged, Loyal noted in his memoir. He also noted the large portraits of Charlie Chaplin and Paul Robeson on display beside those of Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt at the headquarters of the Soviet’s cultural exchange organization. After spending the Fourth of July at Spasso House, the residence of the American ambassador, watching Mickey Mouse cartoons and lunching on hot dogs and Coca-Cola, and attending a performance of
Swan
Lake
with an audience of factory workers whose body odor Loyal found

“overpowering,” their tour of Moscow hospitals and research institutes began. One of his American colleagues, Harvard professor Elliot Cutler, Loyal writes, “had insisted upon taking a million units of penicillin as an intro-ductory gift, like taking wampum to the Indians. The drug had just been released for use and was scarce. It was received coldly with the statement that it was nothing new to them and was available for the care of their wounded.

This was the first bald demonstration of their facility for lying to support their claims to priority and superiority.”117

At the Institute for Neurological Surgery, Loyal was so dismissive of a demonstration of the Russians’ nerve graft technique, which he undiplo-matically pointed out had been proven “completely useless” during World War I, that the other members of the mission “were not hesitant later in indicating that my doubting attitude might well impair the entire success of the mission and, if carried into other fields, might even destroy the alliance between the Western nations and the Soviet Union and allow Germany to win the war.”118 But at dinner that evening the institute’s head, General Burdenko, rearranged the place cards so that Loyal was next to him, and he heaped praise upon the American for his bluntness and honesty; Loyal saw this as a lesson in how to handle Communist apparatchiks.