Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [31]
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mother were devoted to Edith, as she was to them. . . . She taught me to change my asocial tendencies and habits, to develop a sense of humor, to retain my desire and energy to succeed but to relax and enjoy the association of friends.”79
“They were a great couple” is how Nancy Reagan put it. “A really great couple. An ideal couple, if you think about it. Because they each gave the other something they didn’t have.”80 Richard Davis saw it somewhat differently: “Edith was the giver. He was more of a taker. My God, for Edith the sun rose and set on Loyal Davis.”81
In many ways their marriage, which endured for fifty-three years, until Loyal Davis’s death in 1982, was the model for the marriage of Ronald and Nancy Reagan. Loyal’s and Edith’s shared big-time ambitions, their clear-cut roles of star husband and helpmate wife, his avid pursuit of leadership in professional organizations, her equally avid cultivation of rich and powerful friends, their attraction to glamour and style, their undying devotion to each other—all this and more would be repeated and magnified when Nancy married Ronnie. These were both marriages in which one plus one added up to much more than two, and in which a romantic partnership based on sexual attraction and emotional needs evolved into a joint venture based on power and prestige without losing love along the way. But there is an obvious twist in this comparison: in temperament and inclination, perfectionist Nancy was more like Loyal, and carefree Ronnie was more like Edith.
Like Jack and Nelle Reagan, Edith and Loyal Davis were a case of opposites attracting. She was an extrovert, a partygoer, fun-loving, funny, even a bit vulgar. He was an introvert, a taskmaster, a workaholic perfectionist, proper to a fault. A journalist once described them as “a short, gay Democrat” and “a tall, serious Republican.”82 Edith was the type who acquired nicknames—Lucky, DeeDee, Edie. Loyal was always Loyal.
Unlike Jack and Nelle, however, Loyal and Edith made it. The American dream came true for them: they were the self-made man and his oh-so-social wife, the picture of upward mobility triumphant. On their way up, they moved more times than the Reagans in Dixon, but, with the exception of a post-retirement pied-à-terre, always to a bigger apartment in a better building and always within Chicago’s best neighborhood, the Near North Side off Lake Michigan, also known as the Gold Coast. The year before Loyal married Edith, he had been elected to membership in the small Society of Neurological Surgeons, which was led by such illustrious figures as 5 2
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Dr. William Mayo, the founder of the Mayo Clinic, and Dr. Harvey Cushing, Loyal’s old idol. Five months after they exchanged vows, the stock market crashed and the Great Depression began to take its toll. Chicago would be one of the hardest-hit cities in the country, but that did not stop the Davises. As Loyal continued to put in long hours seeing patients in his office, operating at the hospital, and teaching and researching at Northwestern, Edith set about transforming herself from a stock company actress into a full-fledged socialite, giving up the stage—but not her stage friends—
hosting small dinners for her husband’s colleagues, and cultivating useful new acquaintances among Chicago’s social and political elite.
“Within a year, she knew more people in Chicago than he did,” Nancy Reagan recalled. “I had never seen my mother as a wife before, but she was terrific at it. She cared for her husband, she expanded his social circle—she helped him in every possible way. ‘Now, Nancy,’ she used to say, ‘when you get married, be sure to get up and have breakfast with your husband in the morning. Because if you don’t, you can be sure that some other woman who lives around the corner will be perfectly happy to do so.’ ”83
“At first Mother wasn’t accepted by the other doctors’ wives