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

Nancy’s mother had charted a new direction for both her own life and that of her little girl. “She saw Loyal as her lifeline and grabbed on without letting go,” Edie’s pal Lester Weinrott, a Chicago radio producer and director, later told author Kitty Kelley. “She wanted to legitimize herself and give her daughter a break.”

Loyal provided a safe landing and also a launch pad. The son of a poorly educated railroad man, he had the drive it took to become recognized as one of the country’s most brilliant men of medicine. “The pair of sculptured hands cast in bronze that serve as book-ends at the apartment of Dr. and Mrs. Loyal Davis at 215 Lake Shore Drive are Dr. Davis’ own hands,” the Chicago Tribune noted in 1935. “Mrs. Davis had Sculptor Bernard Frazier do the hands of Dr. Davis, famous brain surgeon.”

His professional accomplishments notwithstanding, it was Edie’s spark, her savvy, her genius for knowing who to know that propelled the Davises into Chicago’s elite. “Over the years, she transformed herself and this dour little man from the wrong side of the tracks in Galesburg, Illinois, into something that Chicago society had to pay attention to,” Weinrott said. “It was the greatest performance she ever gave, and I salute her for it.”

Loyal recognized that as well. “She works in mysterious ways,” he once said of his wife. “She’s better known in Chicago than I am, and there is no question of that.”

Forged together by an unconditional faith in what they could do as a couple, Edie and Loyal both complemented each other’s strengths and compensated for the weaknesses in the other. The parallels to the Reagans are impossible to miss. Dick Davis, Loyal’s son from his first marriage, moved in with the family in 1939, when he was twelve years old. As he told me the first time we talked: “Nancy’s marriage to the president mimicked her mother.”

So whatever scars Edie’s early absence and neglect left on Nancy, she had bequeathed to her daughter two priceless gifts: the security Nancy craved and a prototype for the kind of love partnership that would provide it. Edie’s lesson to Nancy was that one plus one could be ever so much more than two. The right kind of union could be both a refuge and a ride on a comet. “If you want to understand Nancy Reagan, look at her mother,” said Robert Higdon, an aide and longtime friend to the first lady.

Edie died from Alzheimer’s disease in 1987. As Nancy sorted and packed her mother’s belongings, she came across a small gold ring engraved with both of their initials: E-N. The nation’s first lady slipped it on her own finger. “No one,” she said, “will ever know the debt I owed my mother.”

CHAPTER TWO

The headline over a full-page Chicago Tribune story on Sunday, January 7, 1940, declared: “Society Bids Farewell to the 1930s and Greets ’40s.”

“Good-by to the Dirty Thirties—

Life Begins in Forty.”

That was how a society columnist who went by the pen name “Cousin Eve” began a breathless roundup of the holiday-season events that ushered in a new decade for the city’s advantaged class. One of the celebrations mentioned in her column that Sunday was a coming-out party that had taken place ten days earlier at Chicago’s most exclusive club, the Casino. “Seldom has this beautiful private club looked as chic. Dr. and Mrs. Davis received in the loggia with their bud, among bouquets and baskets of winter roses,” the columnist gushed. “The debutante was fresh as a rose herself in white gauze frosted in silver.”

Nancy, then in her freshman year at Smith College, in Massachusetts, had fretted over every detail of the late-afternoon tea dance at which she made her formal debut into society. She and Loyal had an argument—the only one her stepbrother, Richard, remembered between them—over the surgeon’s stern decree that there would be no alcohol. “I think he was very disgusted by people who drank,” Dick said. “He simply did not want to see these teenagers intoxicated, and put his foot down, very hard. This upset her because all of her girlfriends were having these debut parties and served liquor. She didn’t want to be different in that sense.”

Nancy should not have feared the party would be a dud—not so long as the arrangements were in the hands of her mother. Edie had timed it to coincide with the arrival in Chicago of Princeton University’s Triangle Club theater troupe. Edie invited them all, ensuring that Nancy’s tea dance would be teeming with eligible young men. In her Chicago Tribune column, “Cousin Eve” took note of how the oval ballroom’s soft lights caught the gleam of red cellophane bows and illuminated the party’s whimsical decorations, which included sparkly top hats with criss-crossed walking sticks. A ten-man orchestra was “beating so lustily the tom-toms that one heard their throb in the street. So young was this party and so carefree the dancers that my neighbor, a lovely in middle thirties, sighed deeply, and yearned to begin life all over again.”

The grandiloquent prose aside, it was understandable that Americans in all walks of life were looking for a fresh beginning at the dawn of the 1940s. The nation was struggling to climb out of a catastrophic economic collapse, and, across the ocean, forces of extremism were building for another world war, which had already begun in Europe. No one knew then that they were just a few years away from the biggest bloodbath in human history.

Chicago had seen more than its share of suffering during the Great Depression, particularly in its early years. Even before the 1929 stock market crash, its municipal government had become virtually insolvent, and by early 1932, the city’s emergency relief funds were depleted. Chicago’s unemployment rate at one point reached 50 percent. Breadlines and soup kitchens were common;