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

And the kid that’s dependent on you

So up with that chin and keep plucky

The world will belong to you too.

Edie was closing in on forty, though she still claimed she was nearly a decade younger. That meant she was reaching an age, whether she acknowledged the number or not, when her stage career would not go on much longer. Meanwhile, she would soon have another concern: Nancy’s aunt and uncle were being transferred to Atlanta by the Southern Railroad, leaving her with nowhere to put the child.

Edie needed some new options. She needed them fast. And as it happened, both professional and personal opportunities were opening for her in Chicago. She got a part at the city’s Blackstone Theatre playing opposite Spencer Tracy in George M. Cohan’s farce The Baby Cyclone. Then followed another one there in Elmer the Great, a Ring Lardner baseball comedy starring her old friend Walter Huston, who by then had become a big name.

All of which gave her a chance to resume the romance that had begun as a shipboard fling with Loyal Davis. He was back in Chicago, living miserably and alone in a hotel. Not long after Loyal returned from the European trip on which he had met Edie, his wife, Pearl, went to visit friends in Los Angeles. “It was but a week or so later that she informed me that she was going to Reno, Nevada, to seek a divorce,” he recalled.

Pearl had been resentful of the expectations that came with being a proper doctor’s wife and had little interest in Loyal’s surgical and academic endeavors. She and her rigidly demanding husband fought over her sloppy housekeeping and her indifferent approach to caring for their son. Word went round that Pearl was also having an affair with another physician, one of Loyal’s best friends. Loyal was devastated and worried what the stigma of a failed marriage might do to his career.

One day Dr. Allen B. Kanavel, who had established the Department of Neurological Surgery at Northwestern University Medical School, took Loyal aside in an empty room at Wesley Memorial Hospital. His mentor told the young doctor that he knew about his personal situation and offered some advice: “Never hug a bad bargain to your breast.” Loyal decided not to contest the divorce.

Loyal and Edie were not an obvious match, either in demeanor or background. As Nancy put it: “My father was tall and dark; my mother was short and blonde. He was a Republican; she was a Democrat. He was often severe; she was always laughing. He was an only child; she came from a large family. He was reserved; she knew everybody.”

But Edie’s arrival in his life brought air and light to Loyal’s constricted, work-centered existence. She introduced him to the glamorous and colorful characters she had cultivated in the theater. She charmed his colleagues. “My professional and personal life became calm and happy,” Loyal wrote. “She taught me to change my asocial tendencies and habits, to develop a sense of humor, to retain my desire and energy to succeed but to relax and enjoy the association of friends.”

Still, after the disgrace of a divorce, Loyal was not sure whether an actress—in this case, a foulmouthed one with a blemished marital history of her own—would be suitable as a doctor’s partner for life. So once again, he looked to Kanavel for guidance. “Dr. Kanavel invited himself to her apartment for her to cook dinner to make certain, he told her, whether it was right for us to be married,” Loyal said.

Kanavel approved, and even served as best man for Loyal and Edie’s wedding at Chicago’s Fourth Presbyterian Church during an early heat wave on May 21, 1929. Their other attendant was eight-year-old Nancy, who wore a blue pleated dress and carried flowers. “I was happy for Mother, but I can remember, even then, feeling twinges of jealousy—a feeling I was to experience years later, from the other side, after I married a man with children,” Nancy recalled. “Dr. Davis was taking part of her away from me, and after being separated from Mother for so long, I wanted her all to myself.”

The story of that 1929 wedding is one that Nancy repeated many times. In her personal documents at the Reagan Library is a certificate from the ceremony, signed by the church’s pastor, Harrison Ray Anderson. But New York City records show that Edie and Loyal actually were married the previous year in a wedding they apparently kept a secret. It happened on October 20, 1928, at St. Luke’s, a Lutheran church on West Forty-Sixth Street, just a couple of blocks from the Lyceum Theatre, where Edie was performing during the brief Broadway run of Elmer the Great. That was a Saturday, so they presumably had to squeeze in their vows around a two thirty matinee and an eight thirty evening show. The witnesses were Walter Huston and his costar in the play, Nan Sunderland, who became his wife a few years later. Clergyman William Koepchen did the officiating.

The certificate they all signed identifies Edie under her married name of Edith Robbins. It also lists her age as thirty-two, the same as Loyal’s, and her birthplace as Petersburg, Virginia. (District of Columbia birth records indicate she was born in that city, six years earlier than she claimed on the New York marriage registry.)

All of this furtiveness surrounding the wedding raises questions: Why the rush to get married, less than a year after they had met? Why wait to tell Nancy of the existence of a stepfather until the following year? And why go through the charade of an engagement and a second ceremony in Chicago?

One possibility is that there was a pregnancy scare or other imperative to legalize their union before they acknowledged it publicly. Perhaps their passion was so great that they simply could not wait any longer to live together. Whatever the reason for the urgency, this marriage turned out to be a long