Ronnie and Nancy (9 page)

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House 1895, and did his residency at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore. When Loyal Davis met him, he had been surgeon-in-chief at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital for more than a decade. Three years later, his
Life of Sir William Osler
, the great nineteenth-century medical educator, would win the Pulitzer Prize in biography. His three daughters would become famous for marrying well: Minnie, the eldest, was the first Mrs. Vincent Astor; Betsy wed James Roosevelt, one of FDR’s sons, and later the polo-playing Long Island multimillionaire Jock Whitney; Barbara, the youngest, known as Babe, struck it rich with her first husband, Standard Oil heir Stanley Mortimer, then reigned over the international jet set as the wife of William Paley, the head of CBS. “Babe’s father was brilliant but austere—disconnected,” Kay Meehan, a close friend of the Paleys’, told me. “The mother ran the show.”

“Dr. Davis was tremendously influenced by Dr. Cushing,” said Dr.

Nicholas Wetzel, a partner of Loyal Davis’s in his Chicago practice. “He modeled himself very much after him. One of the funny things was that when he was with Dr. Cushing, he came in one day wearing a blue shirt—

Oxford cloth probably—and Dr. Cushing made a snide remark: ‘Well, that’s what you’d expect from the son of a railroad engineer.’ Dr. Davis never wore a colored shirt, as far as I know, from then on. He wore white-on-white, which I think is absolutely atrocious.”57

In his memoir, Loyal Davis defends Cushing’s strictness: “He rigidly disciplined himself and was unsparing in demands upon his energy and talents. It is difficult to find fault with him when he drove his residents and nurses relentlessly, because he asked even more of himself. . . . He could not help trying to direct the lives of everyone around him, trying to make them discipline themselves so they would be working at their greatest possible efficiency. . . . His philosophy was that those who did not like the work well enough to stay in spite of his treatment were not suitable to stand the rigors of a surgical practice in later years.”58

According to Cushing’s records, Loyal Davis was his junior assistant associate in surgery from March to October 1924. Upon his return to Chicago, he was given an assistant professorship under Kanavel at Northwestern. Kanavel, who was best known as a hand surgeon, generously turned over his neurological practice to Davis. “Dr. Davis was the first full-time neurological surgeon in Chicago,” Wetzel explained. In 1926 he became involved with the reorganization of the Passavant Memorial Hospital, where he would become an attending surgeon in 1929, when its new
Early Nancy: 1921–1932

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building on the Near North Side was completed. The new Passavant, with its private suites facing Lake Michigan, was the city’s most luxurious hospital, and Loyal Davis would remain associated with it until the end of his career.59

Things should have been looking up for Loyal and Pearl. Richard was born on June 15, 1925. “Our apartment was small,” Loyal wrote, “and we moved to another, farther north, so the baby could have a separate room.

Pearl’s girl friends, her sister, and Willa, a black housemaid, helped her take care of our son.”60 But, according to Wetzel, “Pearl was very unhappy with Dr. Davis. I think she wanted him to be a general practitioner. In his first years, he would operate in the morning, work in the laboratory in the afternoon, and then take care of his patients in the evening. So I think they had very little of a life. She just didn’t like that at all. She kept calling him the ‘little professor’ and all that sort of thing. He was extremely ambitious, Dr. Davis was.”61

By the summer of 1927, when Loyal went to England without Pearl, the marriage was clearly in trouble. He was apparently in no hurry to return home after his London conference, for he joined the Pollocks for a week on the French Riviera and three days in Paris. The problems he left behind were still there when he returned to Chicago.

In retrospect, I am sure that my desire to excel in my profession contributed as much as, if not more than, Pearl’s disinterest in my professional life, ambitions, and friends to the slowly progressive and ultimate disintegration of our marital relations. I accept the onus of not having insisted strongly upon her accompanying me on our trip to England. In an effort to try to save the situation, I agreed to move to Evanston, Illinois, to a larger, nicer apartment. Still, Pearl’s use and reliance upon her girl friends and Willa in the care of our son became more pronounced. Suddenly, she made the decision to take Richard and visit friends in Los Angeles. It was but a week or so later that she informed me that she was going to Reno, Nevada, to seek a divorce.

I had never discussed my domestic affairs with Dr. Kanavel, but one day he took me into a patient’s empty room at [the hospital]

and without preamble said that he had been aware of the difficulty I was experiencing in my marriage and said, “Never hug a bad bargain to your breast.” The opposite advice came from Lewis Pollock, also without solicitation. It was that a divorce would react unfavorably upon my professional career, and every effort should be made to avoid it. I did not contest the divorce.62

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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Loyal gave no dates for this sequence of events, though most likely the move to suburban Evanston happened in late 1927 and the divorce sometime in 1928. Nor did he mention the possibility that Pearl had been having an affair—according to Richard Davis, probably “with Dr. Robert Gunning, Dr. Loyal’s best friend.” Was his mother aware of his father’s dalliance with Edith Luckett aboard the
New York
in the summer of 1927?

“I don’t think Edith had anything to do with their divorce.”63

Yet Edith had evidently set her sights on marrying Loyal while crossing the Atlantic. “Years later I came across the journal of Mother’s trip when she met the ‘doctor she wanted to marry,’” Nancy Reagan says in her autobiography. “It had been a shipboard romance. . . . Each day she would describe her meeting with him and what they had done. But at the bottom of each page, she would write, ‘How I miss my baby.’ I cried when I first read it, and still get a lump in my throat at the thought.”64

On November 21, 1927—just a few months after she had met Loyal—

Edith Luckett and Kenneth Robbins filed a petition for an uncontested divorce, on the grounds of desertion, in Trenton, New Jersey. The decree was granted in February 1928, and soon Robbins married Patricia “Patsie”

Cross, a Junior Leaguer from Montclair, New Jersey.65 By April 1928, Edith was in Chicago, co-starring opposite Spencer Tracy in
Baby Cyclone
, a George M. Cohan farce about two couples quarreling over a Pekingese dog, which opened at the Blackstone Theater on April 16 and ran until the middle of June.66 During its run, Edith picked up her friendship with Tracy, who in his late 20s was finally having some success on Broadway, and his wife, Louise. She also resumed her romance with Loyal Davis.

According to Lester Weinrott, a Chicago radio producer-director and Davis family friend, Loyal “had been cuckolded by his first wife and was living in a drafty hotel after his humiliating divorce. Edith took it from there.

She saw Loyal as her lifeline and grabbed on without letting go. She wanted to legitimize herself and give her daughter a break. Over the years, she transformed herself and this dour little man from the wrong side of the tracks in Galesburg, Illinois, into something that Chicago society had to pay attention to. It was the greatest performance she ever gave, and I salute her for it.”67

The week after
Baby Cyclone
closed, Edith was back onstage at the Blackstone Theater in another George M. Cohan production, this time in a supporting role.
Elmer the Great
, a baseball comedy written by Ring Lardner, starred Walter Huston, then forty-four years old and a major star of the stage
Early Nancy: 1921–1932

4 9

since his award-winning performance in Eugene O’Neill’s
Desire Under the
Elms
four years earlier. Edith had been recommended for the part of “a local scribe” by Huston’s co-star and mistress, Nan Sunderland, who had taken a liking to her when they worked together and who would become the third Mrs. Walter Huston three years later.68

Elmer the Great
opened in Chicago on June 18, 1928, and ran into August, which meant Edith was in Chicago for much of that spring and summer. At some point she took an apartment at 210 East Pearson Street on the Near North Side, a few blocks from Northwestern University Medical School and Passavant Hospital. And at some point her doctor proposed.

Typically, Loyal Davis does not provide a date for that event in his memoir, noting only that after he had invited Kanavel, Pollock, and their wives to a performance of
Elmer the Great
and dinner with Edith, “Dr. Kanavel invited himself to her apartment for her to cook dinner to make certain, he told her, whether it was right for us to be married.”69 As Richard Davis told me, “There was some jeopardy because Edith was an actress, and actresses weren’t accepted.”70 There may have also been an element of pressing necessity on Edith’s part. Uncle Audley Galbraith had learned that he would be transferred to Atlanta by the Southern Railroad that fall. Where was Nancy, turning seven and about to enter second grade, going to go?

In both
Nancy
and
My Turn
, Nancy Reagan said that her mother made a special trip to Bethesda to tell her about Dr. Davis. Decades later she repeated the story almost word for word to me, emphasizing as always that Edith sought
her permission
to marry: “She came and she told me that she had met this man who had asked her to marry him, and she wanted to.

But she wouldn’t do it unless it was all right with me. And I said of course.

I often wonder what would have happened if I’d said no. I’m sure Mother would have talked me into it. But anyway, I said yes. And then we moved to Chicago.”71

She placed this event in the spring of 1929, but it must have happened the previous year. Nancy finished first grade at the Sidwell School in June 1928, and Charlotte Galbraith Ramage told me that her family moved to Atlanta in the fall of 1928. “When we moved, she moved to Chicago.”72

Meanwhile, after closing in Chicago that August,
Elmer the Great
opened on Broadway on September 24, with Edith still in the cast, along with Walter Huston and Nan Sunderland. It played for five weeks, which meant Edith was in New York until the end of October.73 The most likely sequence of events, therefore, is that Nancy joined her mother in Chicago in November 5 0

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House 1928, after Edith returned from New York and about the time the Galbraiths left Bethesda for Atlanta.

In an interview Nancy Reagan gave to Lawrence Grobel for his 1989

history of the Huston family,
The Hustons
, she revealed the previously undisclosed secret wedding of Edith and Loyal in New York during the run of
Elmer the Great
. “Uncle Walter and Nan stood up with my mother and father when they were secretly married in New York in October,” she said.

“Then when the play ended, they were remarried in May, in Chicago.”74

That was the first and only time a clandestine wedding has ever been mentioned, and she was the sole source. When I asked her why Loyal and Edith would have married secretly, she answered, “They just wanted to get married. They were married in front of a judge, I think.” She said she “couldn’t be there,” which lends further credence to the probability that she was reunited with her mother a month later, in November 1928, and lived with her in the East Pearson Street apartment for a full seven months before Edith and Loyal’s official marriage.75

I asked Richard Davis about the possibility that Edith and Loyal lived together before they were married and that the secret marriage was a yarn told to Nancy to cover up that fact. “No, no, no,” he said. “Because if Dr.

Kanavel ever knew that, Loyal Davis would have been finished.” Richard couldn’t recall for certain if his father had lived in a hotel between his marriages, but said, “I know he ate his dinners at a Greek restaurant, and that he was alone.”76

On May 21, 1929, Edith Robbins and Loyal Davis were married in a chapel at the Fourth Presbyterian Church, with only two attendants. “The best man was Dr. Allen Kanavel, my new father’s mentor,” Nancy Reagan later wrote. “I was the bridesmaid, and I wore a blue pleated dress and carried flowers. I was happy for Mother, but I can remember, even then, feeling twinges of jealousy—a feeling I was to experience years later, from the other side, after I married a man with children. Dr. Davis was taking part of her away from me, and after being separated from Mother for so long, I wanted her all to myself. On their honeymoon, they went to a medical convention and then toured the battlefields of the Civil War—Dr. Davis was a Civil War buff.”77

The day after their wedding, the
Chicago Tribune
’s society section noted,

“Both Dr. Davis and his bride gave their ages as 33 years.”78 The bride was fibbing, but that was of little concern to the groom. “My professional and personal life became calm and happy,” he later wrote. “My father and
Early Nancy: 1921–1932

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mother were devoted to Edith, as she was to them. . . . She taught me to change my asocial tendencies and habits, to develop a sense of humor, to retain my desire and energy to succeed but to relax and enjoy the association of friends.”79

“They were a great couple” is how Nancy Reagan put it. “A really great couple. An ideal couple, if you think about it. Because they each gave the other something they didn’t have.”80 Richard Davis saw it somewhat differently: “Edith was the giver. He was more of a taker. My God, for Edith the sun rose and set on Loyal Davis.”81

In many ways their marriage, which endured for fifty-three years, until Loyal Davis’s death in 1982, was the model for the marriage of Ronald and Nancy Reagan. Loyal’s and Edith’s shared big-time ambitions, their clear-cut roles of star husband and helpmate wife, his avid pursuit of leadership in professional organizations, her equally avid cultivation of rich and powerful friends, their attraction to glamour and style, their undying devotion to each other—all this and more would be repeated and magnified when Nancy married Ronnie. These were both marriages in which one plus one added up to much more than two, and in which a romantic partnership based on sexual attraction and emotional needs evolved into a joint venture based on power and prestige without losing love along the way. But there is an obvious twist in this comparison: in temperament and inclination, perfectionist Nancy was more like Loyal, and carefree Ronnie was more like Edith.