Ronnie and Nancy (24 page)

You know, they were what they were.”59

“Margaret Kelly was a fireball—a beautiful woman and a lovely person,” Richard Davis recalled. “We would go over to the Kellys’ every Sunday. They had a spectacular apartment. It was really something else.”60 In his memoir, Loyal Davis recounted a night in the early 1940s when the Democratic mayor and the Republican governor of Illinois, Dwight Green, came for dinner at the Davises’ apartment. Loyal naively assumed that Edith must have mistakenly invited them on the same evening. But, he writes, “they greeted each other warmly, and my embarrassment quickly disappeared. After dinner, they were in earnest conversation, and the governor asked to use our telephone. When he returned, he said quietly to the mayor, ‘I’ve taken care of it.’ Until then, I thought that political rivals must be dyed-in-the-wool enemies but soon learned that this is more apparent in campaigns than it is in the day-to-day administration of government.”61

Nancy at Smith: 1939–1944

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What Edith understood and Loyal would learn was that power transcends political affiliation, and ideology need not get in the way of social success. In other words, whom you know is more important that what you believe. The Davis dining room was not so much a hotbed of political activism as a celebrity salon whose luster was heightened by the presence of not only powerful politicians but also movie stars, society figures, and prominent doctors. Loyal and Edith got along with everyone from the conservative Lillian Gish to the liberal Walter Huston to the bohemian Alla Nazimova precisely because those people’s political views—or sexual morals, for that matter—didn’t matter as much as their stardom. These were lessons that Nancy learned as a young woman, and that she would apply most effectively as she and her husband made their way through the hybrid society of Los Angeles.

At the beginning of her third year at Smith, in September 1941, Nancy was one of only eleven students out of a class of five hundred to choose drama as her major.62 That December, Smith announced the appointment of Hallie Flanagan Davis as dean of the college and professor of drama. A remarkable and controversial figure, the fifty-one-year-old Davis had been the first woman to win a Guggenheim Fellowship, had started the Vassar Experimental Theater in 1925, and from 1934 to 1939 had run the Federal Theater, part of FDR’s Works Progress Administration, which at its peak employed fifteen thousand theater workers and presented the works of such playwrights as Eugene O’Neill, George Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot, and W. H.

Auden to millions across the country. It also created a politically oriented series called the Living Newspaper, which drew criticism from conservatives and which led to Davis’s being called before HUAC in late 1938. The following year Congress cut off the Federal Theater’s budget.63

At her first class with the drama students, the redheaded, tweed-caped Davis said, “I wish to say that this is a much warmer group than the last time I stood in front of a table like this. That was the [House] Investigating Committee for Un-American Activities.” Davis cast Nancy in her first production at Smith,
Susan and God,
64 and later said of her, “She was a very good student, interested in the backstage as well as on stage, and she always had a feeling for her audience.”65

By that time Nancy was certain that she wanted to act, having spent the two previous summers as an unpaid apprentice at “rickety old summer-1 3 4

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House stock theaters on the eastern seaboard.”66 Between her sophomore and junior years she was at the Bass Rocks Theater near Gloucester, Massachusetts, which was run by Martin Manulis, a young producer whose father-in-law, Ralph Austin Bard, a prominent Chicago entrepreneur, was an acquaintance of Loyal Davis’s. “I did not know Nancy before she came to Bass Rocks,” Manulis said, “but she was very knowable and likable and vivacious. She was quite serious about being an actress, even then. She wanted to do something in the theater. I don’t think she was talking movies in those days.”67

Bass Rocks, Manulis explained, “was real old-fashioned summer stock.

Plays ran only one week, and they rehearsed a week. We didn’t have much money, so we tried to have unusual leading players who didn’t demand high salaries. We did former Broadway hits, and some kids were quite lucky and got bit parts in a play.”68 In her memoir Nancy Reagan writes,

“As an apprentice, I did everything—painted scenery, upholstered furniture, ran errands, tacked up announcements in the town, cleaned dressing rooms, and so forth. I learned a lot about the actors from the way in which they left their dressing rooms. Some couldn’t have cared less about the condition of their rooms and the fact that others would occupy them after they left. Others were clean, calm, and neat people, whose performances were as orderly as their dressing rooms.”69 If Nancy acted that summer, Manulis didn’t remember it. But she did develop a “big crush,”

as she put it, on a thirty-three-year-old actor and dancer named Buddy Ebsen, who had just starred in a movie called
Parachute Battalion
and would eventually become a household name playing the cornpone grandfather on
The Beverly Hillbillies
.70

Apparently that was also the summer when Nancy saw Ken Robbins for the last time. A pair of snapshots in a Robbins family scrapbook, dated 1941 and labeled Massachusetts, show father and daughter standing together in front of what appears to be a beach house, Ken looking portly in a business suit, Nancy stylish in a light-colored shirtwaist dress.

He was forty-seven and a partner in a New Jersey Chrysler-Plymouth dealership, although within three years he would lose his share of the business and never hold a steady job again.71 When I asked Nancy Reagan about this visit, she insisted that she never saw her father during her college years, and that the photos must have been taken at least two years earlier. One of these pictures was found in Robbins’s wallet when he died in 1972.

Nancy at Smith: 1939–1944

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When Nancy returned to Smith that fall, she had a new roommate, a Jewish girl from New York who was also a drama major. “She was better suited to Nancy than I was,” Jean Wescott told me, adding that Nancy

“got in with some people that I didn’t care for, and we just sort of grew apart for a while.”72

According to Kitty Kelley, “Homosexuality was an unspoken fact of life in the all-female environment of Smith College,” and Nancy had a

“secret but romantic” relationship with a “classmate who later became an avowed lesbian. The lesbian classmate was involved in the theater and very popular on campus.”73 When I asked Richard Davis about this, he told me, “I remember Nancy joking one Christmas when she came home from Smith that some girl had fallen in love with her, and given her flowers.”74

Davis pointed out that Nancy was always comfortable around homosexuals of both sexes. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “the men she gets along with are a little effeminate.”75 Davis put Nancy’s high school beau, Sock Hettler, whom he said she continued to see when she was home from college, in this category, as well as James Platt White Jr., the Amherst man she would start dating in her senior year at Smith, but not Frank Birney, whom she later called “my first serious boyfriend.”76

Nancy and Frank had started seeing each other after her coming-out party in December 1939. “I would go to Princeton for football games and dances, he would come to Smith for dances, or we would meet in New York for a weekend, ‘under the clock’ at the Biltmore Hotel,” she later wrote, hastening to add that she stayed on the hotel’s girls-only floor.

“Frank and I went together for about eighteen months,” she continued.

“We talked a little bit about getting married, but it ended in tragedy before that ever happened.”77

On December 15, 1941, Birney’s life came to a mysterious end. In Nancy’s telling, he was accidentally killed while running across the tracks to catch a train from Princeton to New York, where she was waiting for him.

But a strong case can be made that Birney, despondent about having to spend part of Christmas vacation at Princeton making up bad grades and perhaps in emotional turmoil one week after Pearl Harbor, deliberately threw himself in front of the train. Bruce McFarland, one of Nancy’s Boys Latin friends, told me, “I knew Frank fairly well at Princeton. His roommate, Geoffrey Montgomery Talbot Jones, was my best friend. Frank was a neat guy, but I’m almost certain he was a manic-depressive. And he committed suicide—no matter what Nancy says.”78

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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House In his memoir, Christian Gauss, the dean of Princeton at the time, states that several Tiger Inn members told him that Birney had been “much depressed” and that a telegram from his sister was found in his room, “indicating she was clearly worried about his depression.” The account that Gauss gives of Birney’s death clearly suggests that suicide was the probable cause, and his use of the initials “J.S.” to disguise the student’s identity supports the assumption that it was not an accident: I learned at the station that J.S. had tried to catch a train to the Junction to meet one for New York at 6:40, but the train pulled out while he was rushing across the platform. A taxi man drove him to the Junction but too late for the connection. J.S. gave him a dollar.

He walked down the tracks one-third of a mile toward Philadelphia. What thoughts led him to this pass? And yet it is possible to believe, as his parents would so like to do, that he was robbed and thrown upon the tracks. It is odd that his ring was missing and there was nothing, not even a penny, in his pocket when he had at the outset clearly intended to go to New York.79

The
Daily Princetonian
reported the following day that the train’s engineer “saw the victim leap from behind the pole to the track, [and] he gave a long blast of his whistle and applied his brake but was unable to bring the train to a stop before it struck the man.”80 According to Kitty Kelley, “a close Princeton friend” found a suicide note in Birney’s wastebasket and gave it to Birney’s brother-in-law, who had come down from New York to identify the body. Kelley claims that Birney was on his way to New York to see his sister, not Nancy, and that “Nancy’s Talbot house-mates, none of whom ever met Frank Birney, remember her being at Smith the weekend she got the news of his death.”81

Nancy may have been protecting Frank’s family by leaving them out of her pared-down recollection. Though she doesn’t reveal her source, Anne Edwards writes in
Early Reagan
that when the call came Nancy was at the apartment of Birney’s “brother and sister-in-law.” They were so concerned about his mental state that they had persuaded him to come up to New York for a night, and had also contacted Nancy at Smith, who “offered to come down to see if she couldn’t help to cheer up the despondent Birney.”82 Another of Birney’s Princeton friends, Richard E. Pate, recalled,

“We had to bring the body home for the funeral right before Christmas, which was really rough on Frank’s parents. Nancy was almost constant in
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her attendance on Mrs. Birney during that time, and I would say that she as much as anyone made life halfway livable for the Birneys then.”83

“It was the first time that anybody I was close to had died,” Nancy later wrote, “and it was a tremendous shock. My roommate forced me to go out and take long, brisk walks. Frank and I skirted around the subject of marriage, and even though I doubt it would have worked out, he was a dear friend and I felt a great loss. His mother gave me his cigarette case as a me-mento—a silver case I had given him the previous Christmas with his name engraved on it. He had been carrying that case when he was killed, and I still have it.”84

Bruce McFarland, who continued to see Nancy in Chicago when she was home from Smith and he from Princeton, told me she had never mentioned that she was dating a classmate of his. “Apparently it was a terrible blow to her,” McFarland said. “But I was unaware of that at the time. Totally unaware. I didn’t even know they knew each other. She’s very close-mouthed about things like that. And we weren’t romantic at all. We just happened to see each other at parties and went out occasionally together.”85

“I remember how depressed Nancy was,” Richard Davis said. “But she never mentioned suicide. No one could be sure. You know, all those kids drank a lot. And he just ran across the railroad tracks one night.”86

America’s entry into World War II at the end of 1941 brought major changes to the Smith campus. Maid service was suspended, and there were regular air raid drills. Some nine hundred Smith students joined the Waves, the women’s volunteer branch of the Naval Reserve. Gas shortages also meant less driving back and forth to Amherst, seven miles away.87 Nonetheless, a group of Smith and Amherst students, including Nancy, formed an ad hoc theater group they called the Bandar-log, after the wild and lawless

“monkey people” in Rudyard Kipling’s
The Jungle Book
. In the spring of 1942 they put on a musical comedy titled
Ladies on the Loose
, which sent up college life. Nancy did a sexy song-and-dance routine wearing a banana headdress à la Carmen Miranda.88

That year she invited a new beau to spend Easter vacation with her family at the Arizona Biltmore. Brent Starck was from Chicago; his family owned P. A. Starck & Company, a manufacturer of pianos and player pianos. “Brent was a red-blooded American boy,” Richard Davis recalled.

“He was in college someplace in Illinois. I don’t think he went to school in 1 3 8

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House the East. But the Starck family was very prominent, very wealthy. We went out to Phoenix on the
Super Chief
together.”89

That summer Nancy did summer stock with the Coach House Players in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin.90 A Chicago society columnist reported that the “company was domiciled in the fine old coach house of Danforth Lodge, Mrs. Patrick Valentine’s beautiful home on Lac La Belle.”91 Mrs.

Valentine was the friend of Edith’s who had given a dinner party for Nancy when she came out. This was Nancy’s third summer in summer stock, and as she would later write, “Only once in those summers did I actually appear on stage, in a play with Diana Barrymore. I played the maid who announced, ‘Madam, dinner is served.’ ”92