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

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