The Triumph of Nancy Reagan by Karen Tumulty (best books under 200 pages .txt) 📗

one of the biggest was run by the gangster Al Capone on South State Street. In the heart of the city near Grant Park, destitute men built a huge shantytown of discarded bricks, wood, and sheet metal. They facetiously called it Hooverville, after the highly unpopular president they blamed for their troubles. The name quickly caught on, and Hoovervilles sprang up across the country.

But all of this misery was a world away from Nancy’s privileged existence as a young woman coming of age along the eastward-bending shoulder of elegant and fashionable Lake Shore Drive, which was among the city’s fanciest addresses. “When my mother met Loyal Davis and brought me to Chicago, it was like the happy ending to a fairy tale,” Nancy said. The Davises lived in several apartments as they moved upward onto Chicago’s famed Gold Coast. By the time Nancy was in her teens, they had settled onto the fourteenth floor of a classically styled lakefront building near the Drake Hotel. The hotel was where heads of state and European royalty stayed when they were in the Windy City. Nancy cut through the Drake lobby on her daily walk to school and breathed in the ambience.

Summers for young Nancy meant eight weeks at Camp Kechuwa on the upper peninsula of Michigan, where the Lake Michigamme water was so clean that the girls brushed their teeth with it. “Will you please tell Mother that I wove a rug for the guest bathroom. How do you like my book plates I made? I hope you like them,” Nancy wrote in one undated letter to Loyal. “I passed a safety test for canoeing so I can go out in a canoe alone.”

Among Nancy’s other childhood pleasures were trips to visit Loyal’s parents in Galesburg. It is a town forty-five miles northwest of Peoria, one of seven spots where Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas debated during their storied 1858 race for the US Senate, which former congressman Lincoln lost to the incumbent but emerged from as a nationally prominent figure. Galesburg is also where a little boy nicknamed Dutch Reagan had once lived briefly.

Loyal’s father, Al Davis, built Nancy and Dick a playhouse in the backyard of the family home at 219 Walnut Avenue. The first lady reminisced in a March 1981 letter that it was a place “which I adored and spent many make-believe hours in. Little did I dream at that time that my playhouse would someday be the White House.” Nancy did, however, have aspirations. Once, the neighborhood children put on a show in the Davis yard, to an audience seated on chairs that Al borrowed from a local mortuary. Nancy sang “The Sidewalks of New York” and announced at the end of her performance that the next time anyone in the town saw her, it would be on a movie screen.

For the first two years after her 1929 move to Chicago, Nancy attended University School for Girls. In 1931, still known as Nancy Robbins, she was enrolled in the more prestigious Chicago Latin School for Girls, then located in a four-story brick building at 59 East Scott Street, a half mile from the Davises’ apartment. Tuition by the time she graduated from high school, in a class of fourteen young women, was $650 a year, which for nearly half the Depression-era families in Chicago represented more than six months of income.

Girls Latin followed a progressive educational approach known as the Quincy Method, which had begun catching on across the country in the late eighteen hundreds. Its students were expected to take woodshop and spend at least twenty minutes each day in outdoor recess, a rare requirement among elite female schools at the time. But other parts of its curriculum were far more structured and conventional. One dreaded ritual was the annual posture walk, where girls would parade and be judged on how they carried themselves. The winner was awarded a letter, as if standing up properly were a varsity sport. They all wore blue skirts with white blouses, except on Fridays, when the uniform was a navy silk dress with white collar and cuffs. Makeup, nail polish, and jewelry—beyond a watch and one ring—were banned. Students were expected to stand when a parent or faculty member entered the classroom and remain on their feet until a teacher signaled them to be seated.

Nancy’s nickname was “Pinky,” a playful reference to the color of the cotton underwear she wore in sixth grade; her good friend Jean Wescott was called “Whitey” for hers. Nancy “was not particularly a good student and not a good athlete,” her stepbrother, Dick, told me. But she was popular—“the personification of a southern belle,” according to Girls Latin’s 1937 yearbook. Nancy played forward on the field hockey team and was president of both the Athletic Association and the sophomore class. The seniors a year ahead of her jokingly bequeathed Nancy a scrapbook to hold all her pictures of screen idol Tyrone Power. Wescott, who would later be her roommate at Smith, recalled: “We bought every movie magazine. She liked Bing Crosby. I liked Ronald Reagan. She said, ‘I don’t know what you see in Ronald Reagan.’ ”

In one area, Nancy outshone everyone else. “Nancy’s social perfection is a constant source of amazement,” her 1939 yearbook marveled. “She is invariably becomingly and suitably dressed. She can talk and even better listen intelligently, to anyone from her little kindergarten partner at 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, Nancy actually crossed the yawning emptiness separating the two groups and serenely began a conversation—with a boy.”

She already styled herself an actress in training and starred in the senior play—presciently, one called First Lady—as a character named Lucy Chase Wayne, the scheming