Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [197]
Often overlooked is Edith Davis’s role in Reagan’s rise. A year after Nancy and Ronnie married, Edith accosted the Reverend Billy Graham on the Biltmore golf course and dragged him into the house to meet her sonin-law. The politically conservative evangelical minister would say that the two-hour talk he and Reagan had that afternoon was the beginning of a lifelong friendship, and that Reagan was the president to whom he was closest.15 After Mayor Kelly’s death, Edith herself apparently switched parties. “I can assure you that she worked for Republican candidates starting already in 1960, and maybe before that,” Loyal’s partner Dr. Daniel Ruge told me.16
Edith’s greatest influence continued to derive from the fact that she, not her husband, decided whom they saw for dinner. By the early 1960s, Loyal was semiretired, and the Davises had given up their lakefront maisonette for a pied-à-terre in a new high-rise off Michigan Avenue. Although they had finally made the Chicago Social Register—Cleveland Amory in Who Killed Society? listed Edith as one of the city’s leading grande dames17—
Phoenix was now their primary residence. Edith had encouraged her Chicago friend Abra Rockefeller Prentice to build a house down the street, and Colleen Moore and Homer Hargrave took a casita at the Biltmore Hotel for several months each winter. Edith and Loyal’s group also included Donald Harrington, a right-wing oilman from Amarillo, Texas, and his wife, Sybil, who was known for her fabulous jewelry and for giving $1 million a year to the Metropolitan Opera. The Davises continued to spend Christmas in Pacific Palisades, and Nancy, Ronnie, and the children took the overnight train to Phoenix for Easter every year.
Henry Luce and his wife, Clare, who had been Eisenhower’s ambassador to Italy, were also spending more time in Phoenix by then, though he remained editor in chief at Time-Life until 1964. The Luces were the king and queen of Biltmore Estates, and Edith sought eagerly to have them look favorably upon Ronnie. Apparently she succeeded, because Henry Grunwald, 3 1 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House then managing editor of Time, recalled in his memoir that the magazine’s
“first significant political mention” of Reagan, in April 1961, was the result of a “suggestion” from Henry Luce, who later “groused” that he had had to push the editors to run the story. “The piece summarized Reagan’s message about the excesses of government and described him as ‘boyish of face and gleaming of tooth,’” recalled Grunwald, adding that he didn’t take the G.E.
spokesman very seriously back then.18
An anecdote told by Richard Davis indicates that Loyal sometimes made Edith’s job more difficult. “The Luces had a dinner party one night, and Henry Luce got to talking about marijuana and other drugs and the pharmacology on it. Dr. Loyal ate him alive. He didn’t spare any language at all. He said Luce didn’t know a goddamn thing about marijuana or co-caine or their effects on the brain. At that point Mrs. Luce got up and left the dining room in tears. Edith and the other women had to go and sympathize with her to get her back to the table. Loyal would not tolerate fools lightly. Unless you really had the facts, you were in no position to disagree with him. . . . I also think he resented people with money. And, of course, they were the poor kids on the block, there’s no question about that.”19
Edith assiduously cultivated another powerful figure in Arizona: the charismatic Senator Barry Goldwater. She and Loyal got to know Goldwater because his brother, Robert, was married to Donald and Sybil Harrington’s daughter. “Mother and Barry were good friends,” Nancy Reagan told me. “They were very close, actually.”20 When Reagan gave a speech to the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce in March 1961, the Davises took Goldwater to hear him. Goldwater’s Polish-Jewish grandfather had founded Arizona’s leading department store chain, and his mother was descended from