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

Though a Look magazine profile of the California first lady written around then mentioned her biological father, that detail in the magazine article “was never picked up by the press, for which I was grateful,” Nancy said. (Ironically, it would be Kenneth Robbins’s bloodline that in 1985 qualified the nation’s first lady for acceptance into membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution.) His obituary, published in the New Jersey Herald on February 4, 1972, included no reference to his famous daughter. It noted only: “He is survived by several nieces and nephews.”

As an adult, Nancy rarely reminisced about her early years. Her own children have only a vague sense of them. When I asked her son, Ron, about her whereabouts during the months where there are gaps in her school records, he told me that “details of this period were scarce. Your guess is as good as mine.” Stu Spencer, Ronnie’s earliest and closest political strategist, said Nancy’s reticence contrasted with the nostalgic bent of her husband, who often told stories of the early hardships that had formed his character: “Reagan talked about his childhood, but I never heard her talk about hers. She’d never talk about it.”

Douglas Wick, an Academy Award–winning movie producer whose parents were close to the Reagans, knew Nancy from the time he was in grade school. A close friend and admirer of hers through the end of her life, Wick came to believe that the pain of Nancy’s early childhood helped explain the keen radar she developed about other people and made her wary of letting them know too much about her. Both were a means of protecting herself.

“She had so much fear, from the instability of her own upbringing and whatever demons she had from that; in her background, where she was embarrassed, so embarrassed, not to have a mother—a regular mother—so embarrassed not to have a regular father,” Wick explained. “I always thought shame and embarrassment were what she most feared. Hence, she was very good at going stealth, not revealing her true self, except when she felt comfortable.”

Nancy’s official biography as California first lady wipes her story entirely clean of its complicated beginnings. That document, which is in the records of the Reagan Library, begins with two lies: “Nancy Davis Reagan was born in Chicago, the only daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Loyal Davis.” But maybe that was simply how she saw it. Seven-year-old Nancy got a new beginning in the spring of 1929, when Edie arrived in Bethesda to deliver a big announcement. She sat on her daughter’s bed and told her she was getting married. They were moving to Chicago. Together.

So entered the second most important man in Nancy’s life, and the only one she would ever again think of as her father. Edie met Loyal Davis, a thirty-one-year-old associate professor of surgery at Northwestern University, on a ship to England in July 1927. With her daughter in Maryland, Edie was headed for a European vacation with two friends from the theater. Most accounts say she had an acting gig there; her diary suggests it was primarily a pleasure trip. Loyal was on his way to deliver a presentation in London on neurosurgery, his specialty, which was then in its infancy.

At the time he met Edie, Loyal’s own personal life was in turmoil. His eight-year marriage to a former nurse named Pearl McElroy was collapsing. Pearl had declined his entreaties to leave their two-year-old son, Richard, in the care of her mother in Chicago and join Loyal on the voyage to England. “Perhaps I did not insist strongly enough,” he conceded later. So Loyal shared a cabin with another doctor.

In her diary, Edie recorded her impressions of that journey aboard Hamburg-American’s SS New York, a state-of-the-art luxury liner launched just the year before. The journal is a tan leather volume, with the initials E.L. embossed in gold. Friends had given it to her so that she could compile a keepsake of the trip. One entry notes that on the evening of July 15, her first full day at sea, Edie “went to the movie—met Doctor Davis—he joined me for liquer [sic] after the movies—we all walked on deck.” Edie also asked her fellow passengers to write inscriptions in her journal. One is an awkwardly affectionate note from Loyal Davis, who wrote that he found Edie “most charming.”

As was usually the case, Edie drew attention and admirers wherever she went. Her diary suggests that she was juggling several suitors on the voyage, including one young man she deemed “a pest. He is a very intellectual cultured boy but he follows me around from noon till nite & it’s a nuisance.” The captain threw a surprise dinner party for her birthday on July 16. At a masquerade ball a week into the voyage, Edie wrote that she “dressed up like a colored ‘mammy.’ [An] old woman came up to me & said, ‘Hey, you, stop flirting with my husband. I’ve watched you since you got on board & I’ll get you good before you get off the boat.’ ” Edie’s friends, including her new acquaintance Loyal Davis, intervened with the woman and “took her in the hall & told her they would have the capt. put her in chains if she annoyed me again.”

Amid the gaiety, Edie wrote often how much she missed her little girl. “I do nothing but talk about my baby to everyone,” says one entry dated July 21. And from Paris the following week: “Sunday spent the day at Fontainebleau. Would have been heavenly if my baby had been with us.” A poem written in the diary by her friend and traveling companion Jack Alicoate, a Broadway writer and producer, also hinted at signs of stress and longing beneath Edie’s happy-go-lucky exterior:

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