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

insecure and anxious, but also fearless when she discerned threats to the happiness and wholeness that she and Ronnie finally realized in each other. “Every marriage finds its own balance,” she wrote. “It’s part of Ronnie’s character not to confront certain problems, so I’m usually the one who brings up the tough subjects—which often makes me seem like the bad guy.” The couple filled in the voids of each other’s personalities so completely that there wasn’t much room left for anyone else—including their four children, two from his first marriage and two they had together. A dysfunctional family was the collateral heartbreak that accompanied the Reagans’ epic love.

The final, sad chapter of the Reagans’ lives together would bring another reassessment of Nancy. Even her harshest critics were moved by the stoicism and devotion she showed during the last decade of her husband’s life, as he descended deeper and deeper into Alzheimer’s disease. For the acclaim and sympathy that finally came her way, Nancy paid the highest price imaginable. Theirs had been a monumental story, and she was left to write the ending alone. “Not being able to share memories is an awful thing,” she said.

If there were ever to be an epitaph that finally solved the riddle that was Nancy Reagan, it might be the words with which she once admonished a biographer, Bob Colacello: “Don’t say I was tough. I was strong. I had to be, because Ronnie liked everybody and sometimes didn’t see or refused to see what the people around him were really up to. But everything I did, I did for Ronnie. I did for love. Remember, Bob, the most important word is love.”

CHAPTER ONE

“I’ve always wanted to belong to somebody and to love someone who belonged to me,” Nancy Reagan once wrote. “I always wanted someone to take care of me, someone I could take care of.”

That yearning took root early in a bewildered, sensitive, and deeply insecure child. She was born Anne Frances Robbins in New York City, on July 6, 1921—though for decades, she would say it was two years later. Nicknamed Nancy from the start, this baby was the product of a bad match between an ambitious actress and an aimless car salesman. The couple would soon go their separate ways.

Nancy’s mother, Edith Luckett, was known to her friends as Edie or DeeDee or Lucky. That last nickname may have been the one that fit best. It was by a stroke of luck that Edith had made her debut on the stage, shortly before the turn of the twentieth century. A winsome, golden-haired girl, she could often be found hanging around the Columbia Theater in downtown Washington, DC, where her older brother Joe managed the front office. One night, a boy who had been cast as Little Willie in the popular Victorian Era melodrama East Lynne suddenly took sick just as the curtain was about to rise on his death scene. Edith, who had just turned eleven, was shoved into his nightie and told to play it big. “So impressive was her work that one woman in the balcony became hysterical, her cries and groans being heard in every corner,” the Washington Times wrote later of the “infant phenom.” As the curtain fell, Edith stood up and waved to the audience.

Thus began a lifetime of grabbing opportunity when it presented itself and creating it when it didn’t. Edie quit school before she was sixteen and found her way to New York, where she made the most of her brother’s theater connections. Networking, as things turned out, was a talent that would serve her longer and more usefully than anything she would ever do on the stage.

She was outspoken and socially liberal. In 1913 the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote of the young actress: “Edith Luckett is an earnest suffragist.… She believes that a radical change would be effected… were women permitted to vote against the present system.” This was nearly seven years before that would happen, with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution.

Edie played small parts on Broadway, and bigger ones with regional theater companies, which were thriving across the country in the early twentieth century. She toured with some of the biggest names of the era, including legendary musical showman George M. Cohan and Irish tenor Chauncey Olcott. While she was doing summer stock at the Colonial Theater in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, she fell in love with a handsome twenty-three-year-old insurance agent named Kenneth Robbins. In late June 1916, after a two-month courtship, the couple drove across the state line in his Cadillac roadster to be married in Vermont.

Kenneth came from faded New England gentility. Whatever money his family might have had was long gone. He was an only child, and “kind of a momma’s boy,” according to one relative. His parents, with whom he lived, were not thrilled by the match between their son and an older actress. A newspaper account in the July 21 Washington Evening Star hinted of a hush around the wedding:

“Miss Edith Luckett, one of Washington’s prominent actresses, who played stock and amateur theatricals in this city before she became associated with Broadway stars, was secretly married June 27 to Kenneth S. Robbins of Pittsfield, Mass. The ceremony was performed by Rev. George S. Mills of the Congregational Church of Bennington, Vt.,” the story said. “The news of the marriage became known by the returning of the marriage license to Pittsfield, where Mr. Robbins resides with his father and mother, Mr. and Mrs. John N. Robbins.” The newspaper also noted that the bride “does not intend to give up the stage for the present, at least, and has agreed to appear in a new New York production which will have its initial performance shortly.”

So, their union was strained from the start. Edie was not cut out for life in a Berkshires farmhouse and insisted upon moving to New York. The couple rented a house in Flushing, a working-class