Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [29]
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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Loyal gave no dates for this sequence of events, though most likely the move to suburban Evanston happened in late 1927 and the divorce sometime in 1928. Nor did he mention the possibility that Pearl had been having an affair—according to Richard Davis, probably “with Dr. Robert Gunning, Dr. Loyal’s best friend.” Was his mother aware of his father’s dalliance with Edith Luckett aboard the New York in the summer of 1927?
“I don’t think Edith had anything to do with their divorce.”63
Yet Edith had evidently set her sights on marrying Loyal while crossing the Atlantic. “Years later I came across the journal of Mother’s trip when she met the ‘doctor she wanted to marry,’” Nancy Reagan says in her autobiography. “It had been a shipboard romance. . . . Each day she would describe her meeting with him and what they had done. But at the bottom of each page, she would write, ‘How I miss my baby.’ I cried when I first read it, and still get a lump in my throat at the thought.”64
On November 21, 1927—just a few months after she had met Loyal—
Edith Luckett and Kenneth Robbins filed a petition for an uncontested divorce, on the grounds of desertion, in Trenton, New Jersey. The decree was granted in February 1928, and soon Robbins married Patricia “Patsie”
Cross, a Junior Leaguer from Montclair, New Jersey.65 By April 1928, Edith was in Chicago, co-starring opposite Spencer Tracy in Baby Cyclone, a George M. Cohan farce about two couples quarreling over a Pekingese dog, which opened at the Blackstone Theater on April 16 and ran until the middle of June.66 During its run, Edith picked up her friendship with Tracy, who in his late 20s was finally having some success on Broadway, and his wife, Louise. She also resumed her romance with Loyal Davis.
According to Lester Weinrott, a Chicago radio producer-director and Davis family friend, Loyal “had been cuckolded by his first wife and was living in a drafty hotel after his humiliating divorce. Edith took it from there.
She saw Loyal as her lifeline and grabbed on without letting go. She wanted to legitimize herself and give her daughter a break. Over the years, she transformed herself and this dour little man from the wrong side of the tracks in Galesburg, Illinois, into something that Chicago society had to pay attention to. It was the greatest performance she ever gave, and I salute her for it.”67
The week after Baby Cyclone closed, Edith was back onstage at the Blackstone Theater in another George M. Cohan production, this time in a supporting role. Elmer the Great, a baseball comedy written by Ring Lardner, starred Walter Huston, then forty-four years old and a major star of the stage Early Nancy: 1921–1932
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since his award-winning performance in Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms four years earlier. Edith had been recommended for the part of “a local scribe” by Huston’s co-star and mistress, Nan Sunderland, who had taken a liking to her when they worked together and who would become the third Mrs. Walter Huston three years later.68
Elmer the Great opened in Chicago on June 18, 1928, and ran into August, which meant Edith was in Chicago for much of that spring and summer. At some point she took an apartment at 210 East Pearson Street on the Near North Side, a few blocks from Northwestern University Medical School and Passavant Hospital. And at some point her doctor proposed.
Typically, Loyal Davis does not provide a date for that event in his memoir, noting only that after he had invited Kanavel, Pollock, and their wives to a performance of Elmer the Great and dinner with Edith, “Dr. Kanavel invited himself to her apartment for her to cook dinner to make certain, he told her, whether it was right for us to be married.”69 As Richard Davis told me, “There was some jeopardy because