Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [32]
Nancy noted. “I once found her crying in her bedroom because she’d overheard another woman make a disparaging remark about this actress who had married that nice, handsome, highly eligible doctor. In the circles my father moved in, actresses were not looked on very kindly.” One of the problems may have been Edith’s irrepressible sense of humor. As her daughter recalled,
“When my parents had company, she would tell the latest off-color jokes. If I was in the room, she would turn to me and say, ‘Nancy, would you go to the kitchen and bring me an apple?’ It took me quite a while to realize that this was a ruse to get me out of there until she had finished the joke. She ate a lot of apples in those years.”84
Nancy’s bohemian godmother, Alla Nazimova, was one of the first of Edith’s old friends to give her approval of Loyal. In late 1930, the fifty-one-year-old actress went to Chicago on tour with Turgenev’s A Month in the Country. She was accompanied by her twenty-one-year-old girlfriend, Glesca Marshall. Though Nazimova was very much in the closet, she confided her secrets to Edith, and presumably Edith told them to Loyal. Edith arranged for Nazimova to be the guest of honor at a Chicago Dramatic League luncheon, and that afternoon she took her and Glesca home to meet Loyal. Somewhat surprisingly, there was a meeting of the minds between the exotic Jewish Democrat and the starchy Protestant Republican.
Early Nancy: 1921–1932
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“I do hope he likes me half as much as I do him,” Nazimova wrote Edith from the next stop on her tour. “He is grand.”85
Nancy herself seems to have viewed her new stepfather with a mixture of awe and trepidation. “Soon after I arrived in Chicago,” she wrote, “he sat me down and explained that he and my mother were in love, and that he would be good to her. . . . He hoped that he and I would come to love each other, and that we all would become one happy family. But both of us knew it would take time.”86
In a eulogy delivered to the Chicago Neurological Society after Loyal Davis’s death, Dr. Louis Boshes, who had assisted Davis and his research partner, Dr. Louis Pollock, at Northwestern, gave a telling picture of the newly formed Davis family: “Part of my neurology training consisted of buying cigars for Dr. Pollock and specific purchases for Dr. Davis. On Sundays, regularly, the two conducted experiments on a premise advanced by the late Dr. Lewis Weed of Johns Hopkins on intraspinal dynamics.
The two scientists were attempting to prove or disprove Dr. Weed’s theory, and they eventually advanced their own theory. On some afternoons would come Mrs. Pollock, ‘Pinky,’ and Mrs. Davis, ‘Lucky,’ who had been an actress on the legitimate stage. She would bring along a feisty little girl named Anne Frances, whose nickname became, and still is, Nancy. One of my jobs was to ‘contain’ Anne Frances. But it was pleasurable for me to gaze with only lateral vision upon Mrs. Davis’s friend, whom she brought along now and then—Helen Hayes. And Mrs. Pollock and Mrs. Davis brought picnic luncheons for their husbands. I never rated one finger sandwich by invitation, or even as a leftover. But part of my neurological training included painting Easter eggs for Mrs. Davis and dressing and undressing Kachina dolls for Mrs. Pollock.”87
It is clear from a short note from Loyal, typed on his office stationery, to his stepdaughter that the doctor quickly became the child’s disciplinarian: Nancy dear:
I am sorry too that you had a little lapse of memory. We won’t do that again, will we? You must always be the ladylike Nancy that you really are, regardless of what other little girls with whom you play do or say.
Night, big boy. Sleep tight. I’ll wake you in the morning when I leave.
Doctor Loyal88
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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Not long after Loyal and Edith married, Ken Robbins paid a visit to Chicago. Photographs from the summer of 1929 show Nancy and her father looking fairly comfortable with each other at a Lake Michigan beach or marina. Nancy, a chubby eight-year-old with a