Ronnie and Nancy (7 page)

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they had a room all the time. It was a hot day, and the last thing she remembered in the delivery room was the doctor talking about how hot it was and how he wanted to get it over with so he could get out on the golf course. It turned out to be a difficult forceps delivery, and when I was brought to her, my right eye was closed. The doctor told her I might be blind in that eye. She told him that she had heard what he had said in the delivery room, and that if my eye didn’t open, she would kill him. Fortunately for him, after two weeks my eye opened.”4

Although her mother called her Nancy from an early age, she was named after a great-great-aunt of her father’s, Sister Anne Ayres, the first American Episcopalian nun. One of the ironies of Nancy Reagan’s story is that the father she preferred not to acknowledge would provide the genealogical link she needed to be accepted into the Daughters of the American Revolution when she applied in 1983. Of Nancy and Ronald Reagan’s four biological parents and one adoptive parent, only Kenneth Robbins came from a certi-fiably old American family. One of his ancestors on his mother’s side, John Root, arrived from England in 1640 and was among the earliest Puritan settlers of Connecticut.5 Kenneth’s great-great-great-grandfather, Ezekiel Root (1736–1808), moved the family to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and was a captain in the American army during the Revolutionary War.6

Kenneth Seymour Robbins was born in Pittsfield in 1894, the only son of John and Anne Ayres Robbins. His father was vice president of the W. E. Tillotson Manufacturing Company, which made wool, and the family seemed fairly prosperous. Ken, as he was called, is said to have attended Princeton, but the university has no record of his application, registration, or attendance. He was reportedly employed as a salesman by the Berkshire Life Insurance Company in 1914, when he met Edith Luckett, who was then performing at the Colonial Theater in Pittsfield.7

Although Edith claimed to be two years younger than Kenneth, she was almost certainly six years older. Her birth date is as hazy as so much else about her background. She claimed to have been born on July 16, 1896, but 1888 is the more credible year. Edith took great relish in portraying herself as a Southern belle from one of the First Families of Virginia. Her parents, Charles Edward Luckett and Sarah Frances Whitlock, were married in Petersburg, Virginia, in 1868. Four years later Charles, a railroad clerk with the Adams Express Company (the predecessor of Railway Express), was transferred from Richmond to Washington, D.C.,8

where the couple’s nine children were most likely born. Edith, however, 3 6

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House maintained into her old age that her mother had returned to Petersburg for the birth of each child so that “they wouldn’t be born damn Yankees.”9

The Lucketts lived in a series of row houses near the railroad tracks in Washington; some say Sarah ran a boardinghouse.10

According to Nancy Reagan, “Times were tough for the Lucketts with their large family. Few of the children attended school for very long. They had to go to work.”11 Edith’s older brother, Joseph, managed the Columbia Theater in Washington, where she first appeared on the stage. In 1900, when she was twelve, a local newspaper wrote, “Little Edith Luckett has beauty, wit and talent. She is the unusual child. Her prattle is as merry as the chirp of a cricket on the hearth, her eyes blue, and her hair brown and wavy. She has been brought to public notice by her remarkable cleverness as a dancer, her grace of movement and form, and her sweet, pretty face.”12

By sixteen, Edith had left high school and was working steadily with various stock companies, including those of the famous Irish tenor Chauncey Olcott and the legendary Broadway producer, composer, and actor George M. Cohan.13 Nicknamed Lucky Luckett, she was a whirlwind of charm and energy, a pretty blonde with the riveting widespread eyes she would pass on to her daughter. She smoked, she swore, she told dirty jokes, and she was wildly popular. Yet she clung to her genteel Southern drawl. As Nancy Reagan would say again and again, in print and in private, “They broke the mold after they made my mother. If I could be half the woman she was, I’d be happy.”14

In December 1910,
The New York Times
ran a picture of Edith in the stage production of
Shifting
at Nazimova’s 39th Street Theater, one of Lee Shubert’s houses, named in honor of his biggest money-making star, Alla Nazimova.15 The great Nazimova was a charismatic Russian-Jewish lesbian who became a major attraction—and the incarnation of Ibsen’s New Woman—when she toured America from 1907 to 1910 in
A Doll’s House,
The Master Builder
, and
Hedda Gabler.
Born in Yalta in 1879, she had been trained by the great Russian director Konstantin Stanislavsky in Moscow, where she was said to have worked as a prostitute to finance her studies. She came to New York in 1905 with her then lover, Paul Orleneff, and his St. Petersburg Players,16 but, according to Diana McLellan in
The Girls: Sappho
Goes to Hollywood,
she was soon seduced by none other than Emma Goldman, the fiery feminist crusader known as the Queen of the Anarchists.17

Edith had met Nazimova at a party given at the Irving Place townhouse of the literary agent Bessie Marbury, whose clients included H. G. Wells,
Early Nancy: 1921–1932

3 7

George Bernard Shaw, and Somerset Maugham, and her lover, the society decorator Elsie de Wolfe, who were the reigning hostesses of Manhattan’s thriving haute bohemia.18 During this period, Edith had principal roles in the touring companies of Cohan’s musical
Broadway Jones
and
The Fortune Hunter,
starring John Barrymore
.
19

At twenty-five, Edith reportedly became engaged to Edward A. R. Brown, the scion of a rich New York family.20 A year later she met Kenneth Robbins, who was swept away by her looks, her humor, and her get-up-and-go. According to relatives, young Ken was sweet but weak, “kind of a momma’s boy,” one of them said, who was “kept [in] long golden curls until he went to school.”21 His mother, a formidable figure known in the family as Nannee Robbins, was also charmed by Edith. “Even though I think she might have been a little disturbed that her only son married an actress,” Ken Robbins’s niece Kathleen Young said, “Nannee thought the world of her.”22

Edith and Ken were wed in Burlington, Vermont, on June 27, 1916, by a Congregational minister. Edith had promised to give up the stage, but after only a few months of living in a farmhouse in the Berkshires owned by her husband’s family, she persuaded Ken to move to New York, where he floundered unhappily, working as an insurance agent according to one source, a booking agent according to another.23 Edith contacted Alla Nazimova, who offered a role in her new production,
’Ception Shoals,
a melodrama “about incest, suicide, and bigotry, set in a lighthouse.”24 Edith’s first Broadway play, it opened on January 10, 1917, ran to packed houses until March, and then went on tour until summer. By then Ken had enlisted in the Army—Congress having declared war on Germany on April 6—and Edith had formed a close friendship with Nazimova.

The following year, Nazimova went to Hollywood and quickly became one of the highest-paid actresses in silent pictures, starring opposite Ru-dolph Valentino in
Camille
in 1921. Two years later she produced and starred in the “ostentatiously homoerotic”
Salome,
with sets by Natacha Rambova, Valentino’s second wife and one of Nazimova’s many lovers.25

Nazimova jokingly called the Spanish-style mansion she bought at 8080

Sunset Boulevard the Garden of Allah. Set on three and a half acres of lushly landscaped grounds, it was also known as the 8080 Club because of her constant entertaining, which included all-girl pool parties on Sunday afternoons. She attempted to cover up her lesbianism by, among other things, 3 8

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House maintaining a fictional marriage with the actor Charles Bryant from 1912

to 1925.26

According to Nazimova’s biographer Gavin Lambert, “Edith was probably Nazimova’s main confidante for more than ten years,” and their friendship led to rumors that they were lovers. Lambert plays down those rumors, citing the platonic tone of Nazimova’s letters to Edith, in which the star is constantly thanking her admirer for favors large and small. “Enormously proud of her friendship with a great star, Edith seems to have felt to be privileged to do favors for her,” Lambert explains, “and Nazimova . . . felt relaxed in the company of someone so exuberantly unshockable. The friendship lasted until Nazimova’s death, and their correspondence over the years makes it clear that Edith was one of the very few people with whom she was frank about her sexuality.” Lambert points out, however, that Edith’s letters to Nazimova are not included in Nazimova’s archives, even though the star was known to keep every letter she ever received.27

In January 1919, Ken Robbins was honorably discharged and rejoined Edith in New York. In late 1920, Edith became pregnant, and Ken, who had inherited a small amount of money from his father, wanted to move back to Pittsfield and bring up their child there. When Edith refused, he left her,28 and he wasn’t present when Nancy was born in July 1921—a fact Nancy would make much of in her memoirs. Sometime after his daughter’s birth he returned, and Edith gave up acting for about a year. Nonetheless, the union between the lackluster Ken and the starstruck Edith was nearing its end. The last straw may have been Edith’s decision to make Nazimova Nancy’s godmother, which stunned her proper New England mother-in-law.29 In 1922 the couple split for good. Edith took her baby on the road.

Ken went home to Nannee Robbins, and for reasons unknown they soon moved to Glen Ridge, New Jersey.

At first Edith found it comforting to take little Nancy with her wherever she went. Colleen Moore, the silent screen star who would become one of Edith’s closest friends, never forgot meeting her at a party at the Long Island home of First National Studios head Richard Rowland: “One of the women caught my eye. She was a beautiful blonde, and she had the biggest blue eyes you ever saw. And she was carrying a tiny baby in her arms.” Fascinated, Moore asked her host who she was and if she always brought a baby to parties. Rowland explained that the baby was Edith’s, and that she had just been divorced and didn’t have a penny.30 Moore, only twenty-one
Early Nancy: 1921–1932

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and soon to be hailed as the spirit of the Flapper Generation for her starring role in
Flaming Youth,
was impressed by the spunky Edith (who was already thirty-three, but telling people she was twenty-five). The two actresses struck up a friendship that would prove to be durable and mutually advantageous.

The following year, when Nancy was two, Edith decided to leave her with her sister and brother-in-law, Virginia and C. Audley Galbraith, in Bethesda, Maryland, just outside Washington. Edith rented a one-room apartment on West 49th Street in Manhattan’s theater district, the first in a series of temporary quarters in converted brownstones and residential hotels that she would use as a base between extended stays as a leading lady in regional theater companies in Atlanta, Dallas, and New Brunswick, New Jersey. The scrapbook she kept is filled with favorable reviews and flowery interviews, in which she goes on about her devotion to the Presbyterian Church and love of gardening, but never mentions she has been married or has a daughter. In 1924, Montague Salmon, a columnist for one of the Atlanta papers, subjected her to a “Theatrical Confession.”

Asked to name her favorite cigarette, she answered, “Lucky Strike.” Her lucky day? “Pay day.” Her greatest ambition? “To be loved by the public.”

What would she do if she were President for a day? “Have a party at the White House.”31

Among the many friends she made on the road, one of her favorites was a struggling young unknown named Spencer Tracy. “Spencer was a darling,” she later recalled. “And I liked his wife, Louise. We played anywhere that anyone wanted anything. Spencer and I would always be there.

We’d always play because we got paid for it, you see. So we didn’t care where we went. I had Nancy to take care of, and he had Louise, and then their son, John.”32

“My favorite times were when Mother had a job in New York,” Nancy later wrote, “and Aunt Virgie would take me by train to stay with her. Although I saw her productions over and over, I was never bored.”33 Other early memories she recorded include having a stagehand build a dollhouse for her one Christmas, seeing her mother being killed on the stage and thinking she was really dead, and having double pneumonia when she was four or five and her mother not being able to visit her in Bethesda. “My aunt and uncle took care of me as well as anyone could, but I wanted my mother with me and she was somewhere out on the road away from me.

No matter how kind someone is to you, it is just not the same as when it is 4 0

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House your mother. I can remember crying at this time and saying, ‘If I had a child and she got sick, I’d be with her.’ Now that I have children myself, I realize how much it must have hurt my mother, especially since she had no choice. She had to work.”34

Although Bethesda, then as now, was one of Washington’s more affluent suburbs, with many large estates and several country clubs, the Galbraiths lived in “a tiny, tiny house”—Nancy Reagan’s words—in the modest Battery Park section, which was popular with military families. “It was right up the street from the Army-Navy clubhouse,” their daughter, Charlotte Galbraith Ramage, who was three years older than Nancy, said of the two-bedroom Dutch-colonial-style house at 123 Glenbrook Road. “I had my own bedroom before Nancy came, and then Mother and Dad fixed up the little sun porch, and that was her bedroom. We had a good time in Battery Park.”

Was Nancy a happy child? “As far as I knew.” Didn’t she miss her mother?

“I’m sure she did. But Aunt DeeDee would come down anytime she could.

And we’d go up to New York to see the plays she was in, when she was with Walter Huston and Kay Francis and Louis Calhern and Spencer Tracy and the rest of them.”35