The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Page 2

  Motherhood did not slow down Edie or cramp her style. She asked her most famous friend, the great silent-movie star Alla Nazimova, to be the baby’s godmother. Though Nazimova is all but forgotten today, she was at one point the highest-paid actress in the world. She and Edie had been close from the time Nancy’s mother had played a small part as an unmarried pregnant passenger aboard a yacht in Nazimova’s 1917 Broadway play ’Ception Shoals.

  The Crimea-born Nazimova—whom Nancy called “Zim”—had a wildly unconventional lifestyle. Nazimova made little secret of her sexual relationships with women, and was considered a founding mother of early Hollywood’s underground network of lesbian and bisexual actresses. Among its other members, it was said, were screen sirens such as Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. Those who knew what was going on in their closet called them “the sewing circle.”

  There is no evidence that Nazimova and Edie were anything more than friends and confidants. But it is easy to see why the two of them got along. “Edith was a New Woman, a suffragist and careerist who refused to grow up female in the accepted sense,” Nazimova biographer Gavin Lambert wrote. “Although she chose acting as a means of self-advancement, her real talent was in the theatre of life.”

  Edie ran with a crowd that included promising young actors Spencer Tracy and Walter Huston. She entertained at parties with tales of her life and pedigree, saying she had been raised on a Virginia plantation and attended an exclusive private school. None of that was true. Edie’s parents had moved to Washington from Virginia in 1872, before the first of their five children were born. Her father, Charles, was a shipping agent for the Adams Express Company on F Street, where he spent fifty-two years handling batches of money for the US Treasury and local banks. Edie, the baby of the family, attended the city’s public schools. Nonetheless, Nancy’s mother spoke with what Lambert described as “an almost absurdly refined Southern accent. She dropped her guard but not her accent to use four-letter words and tell breathtakingly dirty jokes.”

  After she and her husband split, Edie had the additional imperative of earning a living for herself and her daughter. Nancy claimed she spent the first two years of her life as a “backstage baby,” being carted by her plucky, penniless mother to the theater and post-curtain-call parties. An often-repeated story of Nancy’s early years was how the famous actress Colleen Moore first spotted Edie at a fancy party on Long Island. “She was a beautiful blonde, and she had the biggest blue eyes you ever saw. And she was carrying a tiny baby in her arms,” Moore recalled. When Moore asked her host who this woman was and whether she always hauled that baby around, he told her: “She has no choice. She just got divorced, and she doesn’t have a penny.” Moore decided she must get to know this determined mother. They became friends for life.

  The full truth, it would appear, made for less of a tender story. The arrival of an inconveniently timed baby did not fit with Edie’s plans. Her child took second place to pursuing her acting career and her busy social life. In 1982 Nancy received a letter and a set of photos from a woman named Katherine Carmichael, who wrote that she had been the future first lady’s live-in nanny. The letter suggests that Edie was not as financially strapped as her daughter said she was—and perhaps as Nancy had been led to believe. From the start, Edie left Nancy for extended periods in the care of others. “Your mother travelled at times in her work as an actress; I was in full charge of you when your mother was not there. I would wheel you to Central Park every day weather permitting, I would guess for over a year, and I loved it, you were a darling,” Carmichael recalled in the letter, which is among Nancy’s papers at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum. “I remember your mother was either going abroad or in a show touring this country, and you were being sent to Virginia with relatives. All these years I would often wonder about you, and finally came across a clipping in our Portland Maine newspaper and recognized your father and mother names. I was so glad to know how well you are doing.”

  Though the accompanying photos are not in the file, it would appear from her response that Nancy recognized herself as the baby in the old images. She replied: “How nice of you to write and send the snapshots. I can’t say I remember you—being a little young at the time!—but I do remember how I looked forward to being with mother.

  “Thank you for looking after me so well,” she added. “I’m glad I wasn’t too much trouble.”

  Carmichael’s memory was off, but only by a bit. Once Nancy was out of diapers, Edie did indeed put her in the care of an aunt and uncle. The aunt—not the place where Nancy landed—was named Virginia.

  C. Audley and Virginia Galbraith lived in a modest Dutch colonial in the Battery Park neighborhood of Bethesda, Maryland, on the outskirts of Washington, DC. They converted their sunroom so that the child could have a place to sleep. Virginia was the opposite of her sister, Edie, in almost every way—so proper that she referred to her husband as “Mr. Galbraith” and went into the bathroom to undress at night. The Galbraiths were kind to Nancy; their outgoing daughter Charlotte, later a talented artist and Olympic-caliber diver, became almost a sister to the younger girl. Nancy would be a bridesmaid in her cousin Charlotte’s 1942 wedding, and Charlotte would name a daughter after Nancy.

  But the next six years cast a permanent shadow on Nancy’s spirit, leaving her with an insecurity and wariness that lasted. “It was a crucial moment in my mother’s life, and one that she never really got over,” said Nancy’s son, Ron Reagan. “I’m not a psychologist, but I think she suffered from a kind of separation anxiety ever since and was very concerned about being left—being abandoned—her whole life.”

  Her daughter, Patti, also discerned that something rooted in childhood trauma haunted her mother: “She always harbored a need to be noticed. I suspect she grew up clamoring for control, because the world was unpredictable, because people left her and hurt her.”

  From the time Nancy was two years old until she was eight, her mother was an occasional and fleeting presence. Nancy would later come to understand that the emptiness of those early years without Edie left an imprint that subsequently affected her ability to deal with her own rebellious children. “Maybe our six-year separation is one reason I appreciated her so much, and why we never went through a period of estrangement,” she wrote. “It may also explain why, years later, during the 1960s, I couldn’t really understand how children—including my own—could turn against their parents. I always wanted to say, ‘You don’t know how lucky you are that we had all those years together.’ ”

  In September 1925 four-year-old Anne Frances Robbins was enrolled in Washington’s prestigious Sidwell Friends School, where many of the city’s most prominent families sent their children. The Galbraiths paid her tuition at first. A registration form identified her mother as Mrs. K. S. Robbins, though it appears to have been signed in Edie’s absence by Virginia. Chubby, wide-eyed Nancy began kindergarten at Sidwell’s Suburban School, a structure newly built from timbers reputed to have been first used for Woodrow Wilson’s inaugural viewing stand. On her report cards, Nancy was described as smart, engaging, and eager to please. One teacher’s note from June 1927 reads: “A very bright child, very popular with the children, and a blessing to the teacher. Nancy does everything well.”

  She held tea parties for her dolls by the Galbraiths’ front steps, less than ten miles from the presidential mansion where one day she would throw fifty-five glittering state dinners. A little boyfriend would cart her around the neighborhood in his red wagon. Nancy made her first trip to the White House when Calvin Coolidge lived there. Her aunt and uncle took her for the annual Easter Egg Roll for children on the South Lawn, where first lady Grace Coolidge was known to appear with a pet raccoon named Rebecca that she kept on a leash.

  The brightest moments of Nancy’s life were Edie’s visits, which to her daughter felt “as if Auntie Mame herself had come to town.” The worldly actress taught Nancy and the Galbraiths the latest dances, like the Charleston. She brought g
ifts that included a wig of long, blonde ringlets, just like those of Mary Pickford, the silent-screen actress known as “America’s sweetheart.” Nancy, whose own hair was bobbed, wore it constantly. Occasionally, Nancy’s aunt took her to New York to see Edie perform, and the child fell in love with the musty backstage smells that she came to associate with her mother. One Christmas, the stagehands built Nancy a dollhouse.

  Yet there are spans during this unsettled period in which there is no record of where Nancy was or who she was with. In February 1926, not five months after she arrived at Sidwell, its files show the four-year-old was withdrawn for the remainder of the term. “Left the city,” read a notation in the school’s files. She returned for the 1926–27 academic year but was absent from kindergarten twenty-five days of the third marking period. The explanation: “Went to Trenton, N.J.” Nancy may have been temporarily reunited with Edie, who in March 1926 was starring in Plainfield, New Jersey, in a play titled, ironically enough, Dancing Mothers. Or she might have been with her father, who also lived in New Jersey. Perhaps another relative took her in, or she was ill. What Nancy remembered from around that time was a bout with what she understood to be “double ammonia,” during which the little girl cried for the absent Edie and thought to herself: “If I had a child, and she got sick, I’d be with her.”

  Sidwell’s records also include a 1928 anthology of compositions by its students. Where other first graders wrote chirpy little essays about their pets, Nancy offered a fantasy of an intact, perfect family and an image that evoked her own lonely reality: “The little girl was walking with her mother and father. They were looking for flowers, and there was not a flower in the garden.”

  As an adult, Nancy bristled when it was suggested that her mother had abandoned her. But a complex set of emotional forces were set in motion by Edie’s absence. One speech she gave as first lady stands out for its raw honesty about how that time in her life left its mark. Nancy was being honored in 1986 at Boys Town, the famous orphanage in Omaha founded by Father Edward J. Flanagan. The purpose of the event was to give recognition to her antidrug advocacy. But she had another message she wanted to deliver to the 430 children in the audience: “The reason I’m here today is not because of the award, but because of you. There was a time when I didn’t quite know where I belonged, either.

  “What I wished for more than anything else in the world was a normal family,” Nancy said, her voice cracking and her eyes welling up. “Do you know what happens when you hurt inside? You usually start closing your heart to people. Because that’s how you got hurt in the first place—you opened your heart. Another thing that happens is that you stop trusting people, because somewhere along the way, they probably didn’t live up to your trust.

  “And there’s another thing that happens when you’ve been hurt. You start to think you’re not worth much. You think to yourself, ‘Well, how can I be worth anything, if someone would treat me in this terrible way?’ So I understand why you feel beaten down by it all.”

  Speechwriter Landon Parvin, who drafted that address and many others for the first lady, recalled a line that Nancy quoted often in her public appearances. It was from the William Inge play The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, in which a mother says of her children: “I always thought I could give them life like a present, all wrapped in white with every promise of success.”

  “For some reason, she couldn’t deliver this line without getting tears in her eyes,” Parvin told me. “I always tried to figure, was she talking about her mother, or her children? What was it that always brought tears to her eyes?”

  Nancy’s biological father aroused no such misty sentimentality. “Since Kenneth Robbins was such a small part of my life, it is impossible for me to think of him as my father,” she wrote in Nancy, her sanitized 1980 autobiography coauthored with Bill Libby. Kenneth and Edie divorced, quietly and amicably, in late 1927. He remarried in August 1928. Edie remained on good terms with her ex-husband and occasionally helped him out financially.

  Their daughter gave various and conflicting accounts of how much contact she had with her father as she was growing up. The evidence suggests he was a bigger part of her life than she acknowledged. In the 1980 memoir, she wrote she had visited Kenneth only “a few times when I was young” and that “there had never been any relationship of any kind.” Her 1989 autobiography, My Turn, indicated she last saw him when she was an adolescent. But there is at least one photo of Nancy with him, both of them looking relaxed and happy, that was taken in Massachusetts in 1941, when she was around twenty and in college. Other relatives recall him going to see her frequently in her early years in Bethesda and later in Chicago.

  Nancy claimed that there was a traumatic moment, one that brought an irreparable rupture. It came, in her telling, while she was staying at his apartment. He said something insulting about her mother. Nancy announced angrily that she wanted to go home, and he locked her in a bathroom. That was the end of her contact with her biological dad, she said, adding that it left her with a lifelong fear of being in locked rooms. Nancy never specified when, exactly, this event happened. Her father’s relatives were skeptical that it did, at least not in the way she told it. They said in various news articles over the years that it would have been unlike Robbins, a sweet if aimless man, to have behaved so brutally.

  Her stepbrother, Richard Davis, was also doubtful of Nancy’s account, which he did not recall her telling in the years when they were growing up. He had his own theory: Robbins was part of a chapter of her life that she simply wanted to forget; one that she preferred to pretend had never happened. “Ken Robbins was a rather decent chap, actually,” Dick said. “I think once Nancy got away from her situation with Edith’s sister and Charlotte, she probably felt pretty superior.”

  Kenneth mourned this lost connection to his only child. When he died in 1972, relatives found in his wallet an old photo of him with Nancy. His mother, Anne, known as Nanee, continued to visit her sole grandchild even after Nancy moved to Los Angeles to become an actress in the 1940s.

  Files at the Reagan Library include a 1982 letter to the first lady from a Vermont man named Peter Harrison. He wrote that he spent a few years of his childhood in Verona, New Jersey, near Kenneth, his second wife, Patsy, and his mother, Anne. In later years, Harrison wrote, “I remember Ken telling us his daughter Nancy was getting married to the movie star Ronald Reagan. How proud he would be to know that you are now the First Lady. He mentioned you often.” He also noted that Nancy’s grandmother had given him a bloodstone ring, which Harrison’s wife wore every day.

  Nancy’s reply conspicuously makes no mention of her father, who had died a decade earlier: “I received your letter and was happy to learn of your friendship with the Robbins family. Grandmother Robbins was very special to me, and I am glad to know that you have taken such good care of her ring and that your wife is enjoying it.”

  Kenneth Robbins’s finances deteriorated with a series of bad investments after World War II. A second cousin, Kathleen Young, told the Los Angeles Times’s Beverly Beyette that she phoned the California governor’s mansion several times in 1970. She wanted to alert Nancy that her biological father, whose second wife had recently died, was ill and needed money. Young said her calls were never returned. “Maybe the right word didn’t get to the right place,” she said.

  Though a Look magazine profile of the California first lady written around then mentioned her biological father, that detail in the magazine article “was never picked up by the press, for which I was grateful,” Nancy said. (Ironically, it would be Kenneth Robbins’s bloodline that in 1985 qualified the nation’s first lady for acceptance into membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution.) His obituary, published in the New Jersey Herald on February 4, 1972, included no reference to his famous daughter. It noted only: “He is survived by several nieces and nephews.”

  As an adult, Nancy rarely reminisced about her early years. Her own children have only a vague sense of them. When
I asked her son, Ron, about her whereabouts during the months where there are gaps in her school records, he told me that “details of this period were scarce. Your guess is as good as mine.” Stu Spencer, Ronnie’s earliest and closest political strategist, said Nancy’s reticence contrasted with the nostalgic bent of her husband, who often told stories of the early hardships that had formed his character: “Reagan talked about his childhood, but I never heard her talk about hers. She’d never talk about it.”

  Douglas Wick, an Academy Award–winning movie producer whose parents were close to the Reagans, knew Nancy from the time he was in grade school. A close friend and admirer of hers through the end of her life, Wick came to believe that the pain of Nancy’s early childhood helped explain the keen radar she developed about other people and made her wary of letting them know too much about her. Both were a means of protecting herself.

  “She had so much fear, from the instability of her own upbringing and whatever demons she had from that; in her background, where she was embarrassed, so embarrassed, not to have a mother—a regular mother—so embarrassed not to have a regular father,” Wick explained. “I always thought shame and embarrassment were what she most feared. Hence, she was very good at going stealth, not revealing her true self, except when she felt comfortable.”

  * * *

  Nancy’s official biography as California first lady wipes her story entirely clean of its complicated beginnings. That document, which is in the records of the Reagan Library, begins with two lies: “Nancy Davis Reagan was born in Chicago, the only daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Loyal Davis.” But maybe that was simply how she saw it. Seven-year-old Nancy got a new beginning in the spring of 1929, when Edie arrived in Bethesda to deliver a big announcement. She sat on her daughter’s bed and told her she was getting married. They were moving to Chicago. Together.