The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Read online

  Nancy and Loyal often spoke to each other in pig Latin, treating the made-up language as their secret code. When she was fifteen years old, her brother recalled, Nancy still sat on Loyal’s lap. She nestled there as the family listened to the 1936 radio broadcast in which King Edward VIII of Great Britain abdicated his throne to marry the woman he loved, twice-divorced Wallis Simpson, a commoner from America.

  Nancy “was a flirt, no doubt about that,” Nancy’s mother told author Anne Edwards. “Aren’t all little girls? She always tried to get Loyal’s attention, and he responded. Why wouldn’t he?”

  There was another reason Loyal and Nancy were so close. In temperament, she was more like her straitlaced adoptive father than like her effervescent biological mother. Her sense of propriety matched his, and she worked hard to win his approval. “He wanted me to earn his love,” she once told her daughter, Patti, as though the parental bond were subject to some sort of initiation rite. “He wanted to be sure that I was serious about it. So I did everything he wanted. I never disobeyed him.”

  Among Nancy’s personal papers at the Reagan Library is an undated, typewritten note from Loyal about some unmentioned infraction she had committed. He apparently slipped the missive into her room after she had gone to sleep. “Nancy dear,” he began, “I am sorry too that you had a little lapse of memory. We won’t do that again, will we? You must always be the ladylike Nancy that you really are, regardless of what other little girls with whom you play do or say.

  “Night big boy. Sleep tight. I’ll wake you in the morning when I leave.”

  He signed it “Doctor Loyal,” which was the name that Nancy continued to call him after he adopted her. “I knew he would have loved it if I had called him Dad, and in retrospect I wish I had,” Nancy said. “But at the time, I just couldn’t.”

  Even after Nancy left for college, her father remained her center of gravity, her primary source of the reassurance she craved. The Reagan Library files contain another letter from Loyal, postmarked December 6, 1939. That was surely a time of both excitement and stress for Nancy. She was adjusting to her first semester at Smith while preparing to make her debut in Chicago a few weeks later. In it, Loyal seems to be trying to soothe some angst on her part:

  Nance dearest,

  We’ve both left unsaid a number of things that each of us knew to be true and fully understood. I’m sure you know I love you, but I’m afraid I haven’t told you so enough.

  I’m repaid more than enough by your love and respect which you’ve given me and by knowing you are honest, frank, direct and dependable. These are things which many of us have to acquire in later years, but you have them already. There has never been, and will not be ever, any question in my mind that you are trying to do a good job.

  Lots and lots of love dearest

  “Poppy”

  Nancy’s attachment to and reverence for Loyal would beget one of the enduring myths about Ronald Reagan. It would often be said, mostly by Ronnie’s friends from Hollywood, that Nancy and her father influenced the future president’s conversion from Franklin D. Roosevelt–worshiping union leader to a hard-Right, anti-Communist, antitax crusader. There is no real evidence that was true. Ronnie “was already moving to the right before he met her. He was sitting at the Brown Derby complaining how it made no sense to make more than one or two movies a year because of the ninety percent marginal tax rate,” said columnist George Will, who became a confidant of Nancy’s. “The idea that she turned Ronald Reagan, that’s just one of the myriad ways people had of saying Reagan was a cardboard figure, whereas the more you learn about Ronald Reagan from his diaries and all the rest, the more you realize he was very much his own man and a tough politician.”

  Though Loyal was rock-hard in his conservatism, and always voted the Republican ticket, he rarely got involved in electoral politics. One exception was in 1940, when he served on the National Committee of Physicians for Wendell W. Willkie for President. The ostensibly nonpartisan organization supported the GOP nominee against Roosevelt, whom it accused of trying to engineer a government takeover of medicine. On the other hand, both Loyal and Edie were close friends with the Democratic politicians who ran Chicago. And Loyal accepted with good humor the fact that his own vote was always canceled out by that of his ardently Democratic wife. “If he had any real interest in politics, I wasn’t aware of it. And I know that he didn’t influence Ronnie’s views,” Nancy insisted. “In fact, when Ronnie first decided to go into politics, my father cringed at the prospect of his beloved son-in-law stepping into what he called ‘a sea of sharks.’ ”

  What fascinated Ronnie most about his father-in-law was Loyal’s deep knowledge of medicine. “A friend would mention a disease, and Reagan could recall word for word what Loyal Davis said would be the progression of it,” recalled Michael Deaver, the aide who was personally closest to both of the Reagans. The only major policy question on which Ronnie is believed to have consulted Loyal was whether to legalize abortion. The issue came up early in his governorship, in 1967, when the legislature presented him with a bill that would give California the most liberal state abortion law in the nation. Loyal helped convince his son-in-law to sign the measure, according to Reagan biographer Cannon.

  Loyal did speak up publicly—and showed courage—on other salient, politically charged issues, but they generally had to do with controversies that were roiling his own profession. As early as 1953, more than a decade before a landmark surgeon general’s report identified cigarette smoking as a cause of cancer, he was among a group of prominent physicians calling for the tobacco industry to finance extensive research into whether its product was a carcinogen. In 1954 he wrote a provocative novel about a small-town doctor agonizing over euthanasia as he watches the love of his life struggle with hopeless, intolerably painful stomach cancer. Where Loyal waged his most heated public battle was over “fee-splitting”: a once-common, unethical practice in which doctors made payments to each other in exchange for referrals. Some in the Chicago Medical Society circulated petitions in the early 1950s calling for him to be expelled, a drastic punishment for challenging the way other physicians made money. The society conducted an investigation. It decided in March 1953 to drop the matter and let him remain in the professional association.

  That was not the only area in which Loyal was a thorn in the medical establishment and its way of doing business. He publicly declared that health insurance was no more than a license for doctors to overcharge. Fees, he believed, should be based, as his were, on patients’ ability to pay, with factors such as their income, other financial responsibilities, and number of children taken into consideration. When Nancy was first lady of California and later of the nation, she would from time to time get letters from people grateful for the life-saving treatment Loyal had provided them and their loved ones decades before. Often they mentioned how little he had charged them.

  Nor did Loyal become any more popular among his fellow surgeons when he declared, at a November 1960 medical meeting in Montreal, that half the operations in the United States were performed by doctors not adequately trained in surgery. “How much of this type surgery is bungled no one knows, and not all of it results in disaster,” Loyal said. “Surgeons properly qualified by training and education encounter difficulties in performing operations, but the difference between the qualified and unqualified man is that the former is able to correct the error.” Loyal regularly referred to state licensing systems as “legalized mayhem.”

  Time did not soften Loyal’s reputation for arrogance among his professional colleagues and the resentments he fostered in the interns he had traumatized. In 1975, more than a decade after Loyal had retired, a senior medical student named Cory Franklin found himself flustered and struggling through his final oral exam in surgery at Northwestern Medical School. He was sure he would fail. And then came a bewildering final question from the professor who was administering the test: “Who is Loyal Davis?”

  Franklin confessed he had
no clue.

  “That’s the right answer!” the professor declared jubilantly. “That SOB thought everyone would remember him forever. I just love to hear students say they don’t know who he is.”

  * * *

  In the years when Loyal was rising professionally, medicine was a prestigious field. But it was no way to get rich—at least, not wealthy enough to afford a Lake Shore Drive standard of living, which for the Davises included having a live-in maid and cook. Loyal charged $500 for a brain operation, and less, if he thought a patient could not afford his standard fee. (Translated into 2020 dollars, $500 in the mid-1930s would have been somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000.) He got no compensation at all for his position as chairman of the Department of Surgery at Northwestern University’s medical school. Things for the Davises tightened financially when World War II began. Loyal was told that his skills were needed in the hospitals that the army was building in the European theater, and he shipped off as a lieutenant colonel consulting on neurological surgery. During the war, he developed a helmet that protected pilots from shrapnel wounds and advanced the treatment of high-altitude frostbite. He would be discharged from the army after a year, when he suffered a bout of amoebic dysentery and then developed a kidney stone.

  Though Edie had given up the stage, she had continued—by necessity—to earn money. This had been the case from the beginning of the Davises’ marriage. Radio, which in the early 1930s was entering its heyday, offered the aging actress an opportunity to make a new turn. One of her lucrative gigs was on a popular national soap opera, Betty and Bob. Edie played two roles on the melodrama, switching back and forth between society matron May Drake, the mother of the main character, Bob, and Gardenia, his black maid. (“Sho is good tuh have you back, Mr. Bob.”)

  Each workday, Edie would tuck her graying curls under a smart Bes-Ben hat, slip on white kid gloves, and head for the Wrigley Building studio, with a stop at a Merchandise Mart florist for a fresh corsage. She made it her business to have a word with everyone she regularly saw along the way, swapping stories and jokes with the Drake Hotel doorman and with the policeman directing traffic. “She knew them all, and they all knew her,” recalled Les Weinrott, who started writing for Betty and Bob in the summer of 1936. “It was not uncommon to be walking down Michigan Avenue with Edie and have a cabbie shout, ‘Hi, Miz Davis!’ ”

  Edie was working at the CBS station WBBM in the 1940s when she met a twenty-four-year-old announcer named Mike Wallace, later famous for his penetrating interviews on 60 Minutes. Though she was old enough to be his mother, Edie and the new kid became buddies. “Edie was gregarious and high spirited and, at the time, the bawdiest woman I had ever met,” Wallace remembered. “I frequently ran into her in the station’s green room, where we all gravitated for coffee and gossip, and invariably, she would greet me with some choice obscenity and then proceed to relate, with lip-smacking glee, the latest dirty joke she had heard.” Wallace recalled Edie’s daughter, Nancy, as “a prim and proper young lady who often wore white gloves and Peter Pan collars. Although I didn’t know her well in those days, she struck me as being shy and reserved—almost the opposite of her exuberant mother.”

  Exuberance alone, however, was not going to win Edie acceptance into Chicago’s elite circles. During the early years after she married Loyal, she had not fit in well with the stuffy doctors’ wives at Northwestern University’s Passavant Memorial Hospital, where wealthy Chicagoans went for their medical care. The city’s social order was not as airtight as that of New York or Boston, but being an actress still carried a whiff of disrepute. Nancy once came upon her mother sobbing in a bedroom after Edie had overheard another woman making a catty remark about her.

  Edie found her opening by becoming an organizer and indefatigable fund-raiser for charity. The society pages carried regular tidbits about Edie’s work as president of the Women’s Faculty Club, where she held card parties for the Northwestern medical school’s free clinic, and her role in a $100,000 campaign for Herbert Hoover’s Finnish relief effort. During World War II, she put out a public appeal for donations of chocolate cake, chewing gum, and cigarettes for the soldiers coming through the Red Cross Canteen that she helped run. In 1946 Edie led a force of twenty thousand doorbell-ringing women raising money for the Chicago Community Fund. Two years later, she chaired the women’s division of the local American Brotherhood campaign, a drive by the National Conference of Christians and Jews “to further interracial and interfaith amity.” She also became a regular on the city’s best-dressed lists and in 1952 was proclaimed Chicago’s “Sweetest Woman of the Year.”

  Some early accounts of Edie’s endeavors included mentions of her young daughter. A photo of fourteen-year-old Nancy appeared in the November 10, 1935, edition of the Chicago Tribune, with the caption “Miss Nancy Davis is the daughter of Mrs. Loyal Davis, who is interested in the success of the ball the alumni of Northwestern University will give Friday at the Drake hotel in celebration of the university’s 80th anniversary. Miss Davis will attend the ball.”

  Through all of this, Edie showed her characteristic knack for ingratiating herself with the right people. “I think if you wanted to put it in cruel terms, she was a social climber,” her stepson, Dick, told me. “My father was not part of the Chicago establishment, but Edith made it a point to cultivate a friendship of—for instance, Narcissa Thorne. She was Montgomery Ward, very respected, an old Chicago dame. Edith cultivated all of these important women in Chicago and got them on the board of the hospital. My father would object to Edith having dinner parties. She had to force him to have dinner parties and entertain these ‘important people.’ ”

  Among Edie’s closest confidants was Colleen Moore, the woman she had met at that long-ago party in New York where Edie was carting around her baby. Moore had been among the most famous actresses of the silent-movie era. Her bobbed hair and short skirts helped launch the flapper craze; as the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald once put it, Moore was the torch that lit the “flaming youth” of the 1920s. In 1932 Moore married her third husband, Chicago stockbroker Homer Hargrave Sr., and moved to the Gold Coast, where she and Edie renewed their friendship. Moore and Edie talked nearly every day; Nancy would later name Colleen the godmother of her first child, Patti. Moore was both wealthy and whimsical. At the depths of the Depression, she spent nearly a half million dollars to build an eight-square-foot dollhouse, known as the Fairy Castle. Exquisitely detailed, it stood almost six feet tall. Moore employed nearly a hundred people to construct it.

  While Edie was forging a new life in Chicago, she kept up her old connections as well. Her friends from the theater were constantly coming through town. In those days, show people regularly crossed the country by rail between Hollywood and New York, with a stop in Chicago. Many rode in on the luxurious Santa Fe Super Chief, which was known as “the train of the stars.” Nancy’s godmother, Nazimova, was one such visitor in transit. After a railroad breakdown forced the fading silent-screen star to spend twenty-four hours with the Davises in Chicago in 1940, Nazimova wrote to her longtime lover, actress Glesca Marshall, that eighteen-year-old Nancy was “extraordinarily beautiful, Doodie, and the face which has every right to be bold and assertive has instead a soft dreamy quality. And add to this a figure of ‘oomph!’ You’d go crazy about the child.”

  Boldface names were a regular sight at the Davis apartment. “When I came home from school in the afternoon, it wasn’t unusual to find Mary Martin in the living room, or Spencer Tracy reading the newspaper, or the breathtaking Lillian Gish curled up on the sofa, talking with Mother,” Nancy said. “Spencer Tracy stayed with us so often that he became practically a member of the family.”

  Indeed, it said something of Edie’s diplomatic skills that she managed to maintain a friendship with Tracy’s wife, Louise, while also cultivating his costar and paramour Katharine Hepburn, with whom the actor began a celebrated quarter-century-long affair in 1941. Nancy’s scrapbook includes news clippings of her mother ou
t and about with both women at various times in Chicago. One item notes: “Spencer Tracy’s daughter Susie had her first date here in Chicago last week. Mrs. Loyal Davis, the Tracys’ hostess, asked Carl G. Leigh Jr. to arrange a date for just-16 Susie.… Miss T, as Mrs. Davis has nicknamed her, wore a small blue and white checked suit and navy blue and white spectator shoes. Her brown hair is cut short. She cut the bangs in front herself.”

  There was a darker side to those frequent visits by Tracy. He was among the most beloved movie idols of his day, the Oscar-winning star of Boys Town and Captains Courageous. What his legions of fans did not know was that Tracy was a violent alcoholic who occasionally needed a discreet place to recover from his benders. It was Loyal and Edie to whom he sometimes turned. Loyal, chief of surgery at Passavant Hospital, was able to arrange for Tracy to stay at the hospital on a private floor, where he would be out of the reach of prying gossip columnists. Nancy’s stepbrother recalls Tracy—who would later help set up Nancy’s screen test at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer—drying out three or four times at Passavant. “There were, maybe, five or six beds. It was sort of the VIP floor. All hospitals used to have that, until Medicare,” Dick Davis said. “He was a terribly nice man, just marvelous. I never saw him intoxicated. After he got through this alcoholic withdrawal, he would stay in our apartment for several days and then go on about his business.”

  Among the Davises’ closest friends were Walter Huston and his actress wife Nan Sunderland, who had been the witnesses to Edie and Loyal’s secret wedding in 1928. Huston, a one-time vaudevillian, was among the greatest character actors of the era and the patriarch of four generations of performers, including his granddaughter Anjelica Huston. The year Nancy arrived in Hollywood, the man she grew up calling “Uncle Walter” won a 1949 Academy Award for his portrayal of a talkative old prospector in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. His son, John, won the Best Director Oscar for that same movie. (Ronald Reagan, to his everlasting regret, turned down a part in that picture because he was already committed to another one, a modestly successful romantic comedy called The Voice of the Turtle.)