Ronnie and Nancy (26 page)

On July 11 the mission traveled to the front, 125 miles southwest of Moscow, where they toured the wards of a casualty-clearing station hidden in a thick forest and were served caviar, smoked fish, strawberries, and large quantities of vodka. A second feast awaited them that evening at an 1 4 4

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House evacuation hospital, and although Loyal refused to participate in all the obligatory vodka toasts, he still became violently ill during the night. The next morning at breakfast, the Russian medical officer who had mocked him for switching to water the night before complimented him for standing up to his hosts’ demands.119 One wonders how many times Loyal told these tales of how to handle the Soviets to his son-in-law before including them in his 1973 memoir.

His wartime Russian experience became part of the Loyal Davis legend. A 1962 magazine profile summarized it thus: “He was greatly impressed by the prompt field treatment given the wounded by the Red Army doctors—both men and women. He found, however, that Russian surgeons at times used inferior techniques because the Kremlin did not permit a free exchange of knowledge between them and their American counterparts.”120

By the beginning of August, Loyal had returned to Oxford and resumed his battle with his nemesis, General Malcolm Grow, the surgeon to the Eighth Air Force, who was now taking credit for first recognizing high-altitude frostbite. A week later Loyal was ordered to Washington to present his studies at the Pentagon. At a meeting with Colonel Walter Jensen, a top Air Force medical officer, Loyal was again confronted by General Grow, whom he angrily attacked for placing “every kind of an obstruction in the way.” The meeting ended with Jensen’s demanding that Grow apologize to Loyal. “Grow mumbled that there were no hard feelings on his part,” Loyal later recounted, “but I said that there were hard feelings on my part and they concerned the dishonest statements that had been made and were continuing to be made.”121

Suffering from amebic dysentery picked up in Russia, Loyal was sent from Washington to an Army hospital in Chicago. After a stay in a second hospital in Michigan, he was finally cured at the Walter Reed Hospital in Washington and discharged from the Army. In an anecdote told by Richard Davis, pitting Loyal against Morton Downey, the popular entertainer, his father was still capable of combativeness. “Morton Downey was a great friend of Ed and Margaret Kelly’s, and we would see him at the Sunday dinners at 209. It so happened that the day Dr. Loyal returned from Europe he stayed at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, and Morton Downey was the first person he saw. They were in the elevator, along with several generals, and Dr. Loyal started to embrace Morton Downey, who just turned away and talked to the generals. The next summer Downey was
Nancy at Smith: 1939–1944

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visiting the Kellys, and at dinner Dr. Loyal absolutely ripped him to pieces in front of everybody. He said, ‘I’d been overseas doing all these things, and you were so impressed by the stars on their shoulders that you didn’t even say hello to me, Morton. You weren’t gentleman enough, and I don’t even want to be in the same room with you.’ It was absolutely devastating. And Morton Downey left. It didn’t faze Ed Kelly a bit. He knew Dr. Loyal was principled, and he didn’t want to see his good friend treated this way by Morton Downey, who was a real lightweight.”122

Life slowly returned to normal in the Davis household after Loyal came home and resumed his work. In March 1944, Edith and Loyal made a trip to Los Angeles to visit Walter and Nan Huston, Spencer Tracy, and Nazimova. By June they had moved back into their apartment. Richard Davis, who had spent one term at Princeton in 1943 before joining the Army, recalled being home on leave in July 1944 when Franklin Roosevelt was nominated for a fourth term in Chicago. He attended the convention with his parents, the Kellys, and Spencer Tracy.

“The big issue was black voting rights,” he said, “and Spencer Tracy just went bananas about this. He could not understand why there were all these ridiculous rules about blacks voting in the South, and he didn’t waste any time telling Mayor Kelly. I can’t say that my father disagreed with Spencer Tracy. I don’t think he said anything. He respected Spencer Tracy’s viewpoint. They were very, very close. Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn both spent time in our apartment.”123 Dr. Daniel Ruge, who became Loyal’s clerk that fall and partner in 1952, pointed out that Loyal tended to keep his views to himself around Edith’s more liberal friends, adding,

“But that doesn’t mean he agreed with them.”124

Tracy had been thought of as a “hidebound arch-conservative” in the 1930s,125 but his political views became more moderate after 1941, when he began his celebrated affair with Katharine Hepburn, a Connecticut blue-blood with decidedly progressive views. They would remain semisecret lovers until his death in 1967, but Tracy, a devout Catholic who had once seriously considered becoming a priest, could never bring himself to divorce his wife. According to Nancy Reagan, Edith managed to remain friends with Louise Tracy even while playing hostess to “Spence and Kate.”126

For all Edith’s show business worldliness, however, she was not about to accept adultery in her own marriage. “When Dr. Loyal was in England, he had a love affair with his English driver,” Richard Davis revealed. “And 1 4 6

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House this woman came over to the United States, presumably to get married. I remember there was a big blowup in the summer of 1944, when she appeared in Chicago. That was the only time I’ve ever heard or seen Edith hysterical. Edith was just off her rocker because this woman had shown up. Apparently Loyal was so homesick, and this woman was, I’m sure, of great solace and comfort to him. But it certainly upset Edith. I didn’t know what was going on, but I remember how steady Nancy was. She said,

‘Dick, don’t worry. Everything will be all right. Just go somewhere now, and I’ll take care of it.’” After calming her mother down, Nancy had a talk with her stepfather, although she never told Richard what was said. “There were a lot of things between Loyal and Nancy that I never knew about.”127

That summer was a time of romantic turmoil for Nancy as well. In her senior year at Smith she had “started going quite seriously” with James Platt White Jr., an Amherst student from a well-to-do Massachusetts family.

They decided to get engaged on a visit she made to California in May 1944, when he was stationed on a Navy aircraft carrier off San Diego.128

This was Nancy’s first trip on her own to California, and she spent much of her time in the company of her mother’s friends. She stayed with Lillian Gish, who had returned to Hollywood in late 1941 and, perhaps hoping to put her America First stigma behind her, accepted the part of a Norwegian resistance fighter’s wife in
Commandos Strike at Dawn
, her first movie in ten years. Nancy told me that Gish took her to a party at the home of Lady Mendl, the decorator also known as Elsie de Wolfe.129 Nearly thirty years earlier Edith Luckett had been introduced to Alla Nazimova at the New York townhouse of de Wolfe and her then companion, Bessie Marbury, whom she had left in 1926 to marry British diplomat Sir Charles Mendl.

Nancy saw her godmother for the last time on this trip. At sixty-five, Nazimova was in failing health, living in one of the bungalows on her old Sunset Boulevard estate, which she had been forced to turn into a hotel in 1927, when her silent film career came to an abrupt end. (The Garden of Alla had become the Garden of Allah.)130 “It was so small, nicely furnished but. . . . How terrible it must be for her after all that fame and glamour,”

Nancy told Nazimova’s biographer years later. One night Nancy went to the theater with Glesca Marshall and Emily Woodruff, a Coca-Cola heiress who would become Glesca’s lover after Nazimova’s death from a blood clot the following year. Another night, Nancy took her fiancé to meet Nazimova, who was quite impressed. “I think I met one of our great future statesmen,” she recorded in her diary, “perhaps even a president.”131

Nancy at Smith: 1939–1944

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On June 24, Loyal and Edith gave a party at home to announce Nancy’s engagement to James Platt White Jr. His parents presented Nancy with a diamond engagement ring from Tiffany’s on their son’s behalf, and the Chicago and Boston papers ran the announcement on their society pages.132 Later that summer, however, Nancy broke off the engagement. As she writes in her memoir, “It was a heady, exhilarating time, and I was swept up in the glamour of the war, wartime engagements, and waiting for the boys who were away. I realized I had made a mistake. It would have been unfair to him and to me. It wasn’t easy to break off the engagement, but it was the best thing for us both. We were not meant to be married, but we remain friends to this day.”133

“Jim White was the nicest guy,” Richard Davis said, “handsome, upright, straightforward, courteous. But Edith told me—‘gay’ wasn’t used then—‘He’s just a homo, Dick.’ I could never figure out how a girl like Nancy could have missed that.”134

White never talked about Nancy or their engagement. When she was First Lady, he discreetly contacted her through her friend Jerry Zipkin to let her know that he was seriously ill. Zipkin told a friend, “I heard from the man Nancy was engaged to after college. He was gay.”135

As fall approached, Nancy was getting bored and frustrated working at a department store and living at home in Chicago. She later wrote, “Soon a call came from ZaSu Pitts. I suspect that Mother had a hand in it. ZaSu told me there was a part available for me in a play she had on tour,
Ramshackle Inn
. That first part is the hardest to get. Until then, when producers or casting directors or agents ask you what you have done, you can only speak of college plays or summer stock. When you get your first part in a professional production, then you have a credit. I grabbed the offer and joined the company in Detroit, where the girl who had been playing the part was leaving. I played the role of a girl who has been held captive in an upstairs room. At one point, I came downstairs, spoke my three lines, and was returned to my room. It wasn’t much but it was a start, and I was out on my own with the best wishes of my parents.”136

Ramshackle Inn
had opened on Broadway in January of that year to mediocre reviews—the newspaper
PM
called it “a dreary piece of hocus-pocus with a soporific first act and a helter skelter second and third.”137 But ZaSu Pitts was a big draw, with a long career behind her as one of America’s most prolific and popular comediennes. Everything about her was funny, 1 4 8

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House from her name, which was real, to her “blinking eyes, fluttering hands, and quavering voice.”138 Yet she gave two of the most highly praised dramatic performances of the silent film era in Erich von Stroheim’s
Greed
and
The
Wedding March
. Born in Kansas and raised in Santa Cruz, California, she was made a comedy star by the director King Vidor in the 1920s. She was forty-six when Nancy went to work with her. Off screen, she was married to a Pasadena businessman and best friends with Hedda Hopper, with whom she shared a devotion to Catholicism and high fashion and an antipathy to Communism.

Pitts took Nancy under her wing, sharing her hotel rooms and dressing rooms with the young actress. “It was a brand-new world to me and, not being used to the road, having a friend was very comforting. ZaSu had been a great beauty in her youth and at this point in her career looked ageless,”

Nancy wrote. “We traveled with the play across country and wound up in New York, playing the ‘subway circuit.’ We played theaters in Brooklyn, Long Island, The Bronx, and so forth.”139

When
Ramshackle Inn
ended its tour in New York, Nancy decided to stay and pursue a theater career. She told me many years later, “When I graduated from college, I hadn’t found the man I wanted to marry, and I certainly didn’t want to sit in Chicago and be a post-deb. So I decided I wanted to be an actress. I’d done summer stock when I was in college, and I had been exposed to actors all those years. Of course, I’d seen the best. You know, I’d seen people who were very successful.”140

C H A P T E R S E V E N

RONNIE AND JANE

1941–1946

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. . . . In a great number of countries, far from the Russian frontiers and throughout the world, Communist fifth columns are established and work in complete unity and absolute obedience to the directions they receive from the Communist center.

Winston Churchill, “Iron Curtain Speech,”

March 5, 1946

Show people are emotional. You’ll find very few in this business who participate in politics on an intellectual level. Slam-bang convictions, violent loyalties, passionate enmities, purple principles, and utter naïveté—these are the ingredients of political action in show business.

Robert Ardrey, quoted by Stephen Vaughn

in
Ronald Reagan in Hollywood
1

ON DECEMBER 2, 1941, FIVE DAYS BEFORE PEARL HARBOR, WARNERS’ PUBlicity department announced that Ronald Reagan had received more fan mail that year than any other male star at the studio except Errol Flynn; James Cagney was in third place.2 A few months earlier, a Gallup survey had ranked Reagan 82nd among the top 100 stars. By the beginning of 1942, he was tied for 74th place with Laurence Olivier, and Gallup estimated that he was earning $52,000 per film, while Flynn was earning $157,000 and Clark Gable, America’s box office king, $210,000.3

Reagan was getting leading roles in A movies consistently now, and in early 1941 Warners had even lent him to MGM for
The Bad Man,
with Wallace Beery and Lionel Barrymore. He was “duly impressed” by the poshest of the studios but was also happy to return to “the meat and 1 4 9

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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House potatoes atmosphere of Warners,”4 where executive producer Hal Wallis promptly cast him as a concert pianist in
Million Dollar Baby
. He was in such demand that he had to do reshoots for
International Squadron
and the opening scenes of
Nine Lives Are Not Enough
on alternating days during June 1941; the latter would win him critical praise for his comic turn as a hapless newspaper reporter.5