Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [30]
In both Nancy and My Turn, Nancy Reagan said that her mother made a special trip to Bethesda to tell her about Dr. Davis. Decades later she repeated the story almost word for word to me, emphasizing as always that Edith sought her permission to marry: “She came and she told me that she had met this man who had asked her to marry him, and she wanted to.
But she wouldn’t do it unless it was all right with me. And I said of course.
I often wonder what would have happened if I’d said no. I’m sure Mother would have talked me into it. But anyway, I said yes. And then we moved to Chicago.”71
She placed this event in the spring of 1929, but it must have happened the previous year. Nancy finished first grade at the Sidwell School in June 1928, and Charlotte Galbraith Ramage told me that her family moved to Atlanta in the fall of 1928. “When we moved, she moved to Chicago.”72
Meanwhile, after closing in Chicago that August, Elmer the Great opened on Broadway on September 24, with Edith still in the cast, along with Walter Huston and Nan Sunderland. It played for five weeks, which meant Edith was in New York until the end of October.73 The most likely sequence of events, therefore, is that Nancy joined her mother in Chicago in November 5 0
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House 1928, after Edith returned from New York and about the time the Galbraiths left Bethesda for Atlanta.
In an interview Nancy Reagan gave to Lawrence Grobel for his 1989
history of the Huston family, The Hustons, she revealed the previously undisclosed secret wedding of Edith and Loyal in New York during the run of Elmer the Great. “Uncle Walter and Nan stood up with my mother and father when they were secretly married in New York in October,” she said.
“Then when the play ended, they were remarried in May, in Chicago.”74
That was the first and only time a clandestine wedding has ever been mentioned, and she was the sole source. When I asked her why Loyal and Edith would have married secretly, she answered, “They just wanted to get married. They were married in front of a judge, I think.” She said she “couldn’t be there,” which lends further credence to the probability that she was reunited with her mother a month later, in November 1928, and lived with her in the East Pearson Street apartment for a full seven months before Edith and Loyal’s official marriage.75
I asked Richard Davis about the possibility that Edith and Loyal lived together before they were married and that the secret marriage was a yarn told to Nancy to cover up that fact. “No, no, no,” he said. “Because if Dr.
Kanavel ever knew that, Loyal Davis would have been finished.” Richard couldn’t recall for certain if his father had lived in a hotel between his marriages, but said, “I know he ate his dinners at a Greek restaurant, and that he was alone.”76
On May 21, 1929, Edith Robbins and Loyal Davis were married in a chapel at the Fourth Presbyterian Church, with only two attendants. “The best man was Dr. Allen Kanavel, my new father’s mentor,” Nancy Reagan later wrote. “I was the bridesmaid, and I wore a blue pleated dress and carried flowers. I was happy for Mother, but I can remember, even then, feeling twinges of jealousy—a feeling I was to experience years later, from the other side, after I married a man with children. Dr. Davis was taking part of her away from me, and after being separated from Mother for so long, I wanted her all to myself. On their honeymoon, they went to a medical convention and then toured the battlefields of the Civil War—Dr. Davis was a Civil War buff.”77
The day after their wedding, the Chicago Tribune’s society section noted,
“Both Dr. Davis and his bride gave their ages as 33 years.”78 The bride was fibbing, but that was of little