Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [20]
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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House to do with his life after graduating from Eureka College (and his unemployed father was rooting for Roosevelt from afar), his future First Lady was already well situated at the center of things. A photograph of Nancy and her mother at the convention ran in one of the Chicago papers.1
Nancy’s mother, the former Edith Luckett, had been a theater actress of modest success until she married Loyal Davis, at the socially prestigious Fourth Presbyterian Church on Chicago’s fashionable North Michigan Avenue, in May 1929—about the same time that Jack Reagan grudgingly took a job at the state mental institution in Dixon. Edith had separated from her first husband, a well-bred but unenterprising New Englander named Kenneth Robbins, barely a year after their daughter’s birth in 1921
in New York, and Nancy had spent her early years in Bethesda, Maryland, living at the home of her mother’s sister. Dr. Davis would not officially adopt his stepdaughter and give her his name until she was almost seventeen, in 1938, nine years after he married her mother.
For the rest of her life Nancy would refer to Loyal Davis as “my father,” and for a long time she even went so far as to deny the existence of Kenneth Robbins and to falsify her birthplace. When she was First Lady of California, her official biography began, “Nancy Davis Reagan was born in Chicago, the only daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Loyal Davis.” When confronted with her Who’s Who entry, stating that she had been adopted by Loyal Davis, she said, “I don’t care what the book says. He is my father. In my mind, he is my father. I have no father except Loyal Davis.”2
As she explained in Nancy, her 1980 autobiography, “Since Kenneth Robbins was such a small part of my life, it is impossible for me to think of him as my father.”3
Nancy Davis Reagan was born Anne Frances Robbins on July 6, 1921, at Sloane Hospital in Flushing, a middle-class section of the New York City borough of Queens, where Edith and Kenneth Robbins were living at the time. “I was due on the fourth of July,” she later wrote, giving her birth a patriotic twist, just as her husband had given his, “but my mother, as she tells it, was a baseball fan who was determined to see a doubleheader on that day. Knowing her, I believe it. When she arrived at the hospital two days later, she was told there was no room and she would have to go elsewhere. My mother is a strong-willed woman. She lay down in the middle of the reception room floor and said, ‘Well, I guess I’ll have my baby right here.’ Everyone bustled around and miraculously discovered Early Nancy: 1921–1932
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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