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

through the receiving line over and over, making her laugh each time by assuming a different voice and pretending to be an additional guest. When Nancy returned to Smith, she and Frank became an item, seeing each other on weekends. She went to Princeton for football games and dances; Frank came to Smith for parties. Occasionally, they rendezvoused in New York. They began talking, though not all that seriously, about marriage.

Eight days after the December 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, Nancy and Frank’s courtship came to an abrupt and tragic end. “Frank was planning to go to New York. He must have been late, because he ran across the tracks to catch his train, not realizing how fast the train was moving,” Nancy wrote in her 1989 memoir. “The engineer pulled so hard on the emergency brake that he broke it, but he couldn’t stop the train, and Frank was killed instantly.”

What surely made twenty-year-old Frank Birney’s death even harder to accept was the fact that it was not the accident that Nancy and his family claimed it was. He had killed himself. State police concluded he had jumped from behind a pole in front of an eastbound Pennsylvania Railroad express train. The locomotive was going seventy miles per hour when the engineer spotted him and blew the whistle. Frank’s mangled body was dragged more than a hundred feet before the train finally came to a stop. He had been carrying no identification or money, which was peculiar for someone supposedly headed to New York. According to a local newspaper account, his classmates told investigators that the Princeton senior “had been in a despondent state lately because his grades had not come up to his own expectations.” Frank’s mother gave Nancy a silver cigarette case with his name engraved on it, which was a present Nancy had bought for him the previous Christmas. She held on to that keepsake for the rest of her life. “It was the first time that anybody I was close to had died, and it was a tremendous shock,” Nancy recalled. “My roommate forced me to go out and take long, brisk walks.”

By Nancy’s senior year at Smith, the war abroad defined almost everything about life at home. Existence was regimented by Meatless Mondays, gasoline rationing, air-raid drills, blood drives. Women of Smith shoveled their own snow and did without their customary maid service. They looked askance at those who left coffee in their cups or precious butter on their plates. Some of Nancy’s classmates helped out local farmers, who were hard pressed by labor shortages. Smith women picked their asparagus and weeded their onions.

There were fewer beaus at the ready to take them out on Saturday nights. In their stead came letters from overseas, which arrived with a censor’s stamp. Campus housing and classrooms were bursting at the seams, owing to the fact that much of Smith had been turned over to the first classes of officers for the US Naval Reserve’s women’s branch, better known as WAVES, an acronym for Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service. A new class of five hundred female midshipmen arrived every month for sixty to ninety days of strenuous training. As the WAVES marched by silently in their uniforms to classes and meals, Smithies noticed themselves standing a little straighter.

Another of Smith’s contributions to the war effort—one in which Nancy participated—was the Factory Follies. This was a thirty-three-woman morale-boosting musical troupe that entertained at lunch and break time in more than a dozen war plants across the Connecticut River Valley. Their revue, which toured in the spring of 1943, opened with a chorus marching across the stage, singing:

Make with the maximum, give with the brawn.

Make with the maximum, smother that yawn.

Tell the boys we’ll stand behind ’em till the lights come on.

And we’ll make with the maximum.

Make with the maximum, give with the brain.

Make with the maximum, gonna raise Cain.

Tell the boys in boats and tanks, tell the guy who flies a plane.

That we’ll make with the maximum.

Switch on, contact, turn on the juice,

Double the output, and here’s my excuse:

Life can be pretty when you’re being of use.

Hey! Fellas! We’ve gotta produce.

Nancy played the sophisticated “Glamour Gal,” a shirker on the production line. Glamour Gal lamented that she missed her prewar life of luxury:

Maybe you’re right

But the yacht was fun,

Cocktails at five and

Dinner at the Stork,

Long drives in the country,

To get away from New York.

Nancy also acted in a few plays on campus, including a musical comedy called Ladies on the Loose. At one of the college’s annual Rally Day shows, she and her classmates tap-danced in Morse code, and sang: “Dit-dit-dit-dah! We’ll win this wah.” But Smith was not known as a training ground for serious actresses. She was one of only three theater majors in 1943. The college did not even have a full-fledged theater department until her senior year. The closest thing Nancy got to actual professional experience was on summer breaks, when she apprenticed on “the straw-hat circuit” doing summer stock in Wisconsin and New England. She cleaned dressing rooms, painted scenery, sold tickets, and tacked up flyers around town. Only rarely did she get to act. In her three years of summer stock, Nancy delivered a total of one line—“Madam, dinner is served”—when she played a maid in a production starring Diana Barrymore, a lesser member of the famous theater family.

In 1941 Nancy worked at the Bass Rocks Theater in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where she developed what she remembered as a “big crush” on one of its visiting stars, Buddy Ebsen. He would become most famous for his starring role as Jed Clampett in the 1960s TV sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies, but at the time, Ebsen was known for movies that put his dancing talent to use. Backstage, Nancy was so entranced by one of his performances that she forgot her own task, which was to turn on the musical sound effect when his character pretended to play a Victrola. Nancy