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half-smile, is wearing a T-shirt with an airplane stenciled across the front, shorts, and a bathing cap. Ken, then a thirty-five-year-old real estate salesman with a receding hairline, looks rather prosperous, wearing a three-piece suit with a white shirt, silk tie, and pocket handkerchief in one picture, and a long terry cloth robe over a two-piece bathing suit in a second. In another photograph, most likely also taken that summer, because Nancy looks the same in it, she is standing between her grandmother and stepmother in a garden—probably at the house in suburban New Jersey that Ken and Patsie shared with Nannee Robbins.89

Although the terms of Edith’s divorce from Ken are unclear, Kitty Kelley claims, “Edith made sure that Nancy spent part of every summer in New Jersey with him.”90 Nancy Reagan, on the other hand, has written, “I visited with my father only a few times when I was young. He had remarried, and his wife was a very nice woman who tried to make me welcome on my visits. They once took me on a trip to Niagara Falls. My father tried to please me, but too many years had gone by and we were really strangers to each other. As I look back, I am sure he was unhappy about it.”91

There are photographs of Nancy with her father’s family two summers later, including one of her, age ten and looking slimmer, standing under a Canadian flag at Niagara Falls. Another records the Robbinses’ visit to Patsie’s sister in upstate New York, probably on that same trip. “Nancy had beautiful manners,” Patsie’s niece, Orme Staudinger, told a reporter from People magazine years later. A shot of Nancy and her father swinging golf clubs appears to be from the same period.92 Again, they seem to be getting along fine.

Nancy probably met her stepbrother, Richard, for the first time in 1930, when he came to spend the summer with his father under the terms of his parents’ divorce agreement. His mother, he told me, “never remarried. She became really ill with tuberculosis in 1929 or 1930, which really frightened my father, because there was no treatment then—the only treatment for TB in those days was warm weather; streptomycin came out in about 1950. So she suffered terribly, and I watched her die. She died at the age of forty-three, on April 23, 1939.” Until Pearl’s death, Richard spent nine months of each year with her, first in Phoenix and from 1931

Early Nancy: 1921–1932

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in Beverly Hills, and three months with Loyal and Edith in Chicago. According to Richard, he was five years old when he and Nancy met, and she was nine, and they took an immediate liking to each other. “We played a game called Help! Murder! Police!,” he said, “with both of us jumping all over the furniture. We had a very, very good time.”93

In all previous accounts of her childhood, including her own, Nancy was enrolled in Chicago’s most elite private school immediately after moving to the city. According to records at the Girls Latin School of Chicago, however, she didn’t start there until three years later. Her application indicated that she had come from the University School for Girls, a private school on Lake Shore Drive, which lacked the social cachet of Girls Latin.

It is now defunct, so records that would show exactly when she started there are unavailable, though presumably she entered the second grade in the fall of 1928.

When I asked her about attending the University School, she said, “I just remember Latin School had a waiting list, and Mother could not get me in when she wanted to, so I went to this other school for a couple of years.”94 It may have been that the conservative Girls Latin School looked askance at the daughter of a divorced single actress, as Edith was her first year in Chicago, but was more amenable three years later, by which time she had consolidated her social position as the wife of an increasingly respected doctor.

Nancy started at Girls Latin in the fifth grade in September 1931. “She was very friendly and she fit in well,” said Jean Wescott Marshall, who became her best friend at the school. According to Marshall, Nancy