Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [34]
School records indicate that the Davises had moved from Edith’s old apartment on East Pearson Street by then. Their new apartment was two blocks north in a doorman building at 237 East Delaware Place, and, as Richard recalled, it had three bedrooms and a dining room. In 1932, Loyal was made chairman of Northwestern’s department of surgery, the position formerly occupied by Dr. Kanavel. There was some concern about his age, thirty-six, but, as the dean of the school observed, “time would take care of that objection.”96 He also became chief of surgery at Passavant that year, 5 6
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House again following Dr. Kanavel. And his reputation was growing: Dr. Franklin H. Martin, the founder of the American College of Surgeons, asked him to give the John B. Murphy Oration at the organization’s annual conference, held in Chicago that fall. Loyal was already working on his biography of Murphy, the controversial Chicago surgeon who saved Theodore Roosevelt’s life after a 1912 assassination attempt, which would be published in America and England the following year.97
In October 1932, Edith relaunched her show-business career, taking a part in one of NBC radio’s first soap operas. After three years away from the stage, she couldn’t resist the lure of the glamorous—and lucrative—
new medium. On Betty and Bob, Edith played both a high-society matron with a pretentious British accent and her black maid, Gardenia, who had lines such as “Sho is good to have you back, Mistah Bob.” The fifteen-minute melodrama was on the air five afternoons a week and ran for nine years. Sponsored by Wheaties cereal, Gold Medal flour, and Bisquick, it
“set the standard for all the washboard weepers that would follow,”98
according to radio historian John Dunning.
According to Kitty Kelley, Edith earned between $500 and $1,000 a month from Betty and Bob, while Loyal was being paid “$150 for performing prefrontal lobotomies.”99 But Loyal wrote that his fee for a “brain operation” was $500 in the mid-1930s.100 In either case, the additional income from Edith’s radio work must have come in handy, because earlier that year the Davises had moved again—to the first of the three apartments they would occupy on East Lake Shore Drive, Chicago’s equivalent of Fifth Avenue facing Central Park. The three-bedroom apartment at 219
East Lake Shore Drive was not much larger than the one on East Delaware Place, but it faced Oak Street Beach and was just around the corner from the Drake, Chicago’s best hotel. Edith decorated it herself “in a very traditional style, not lavish at all,” Richard Davis said, remembering that his stepmother was very proud of her “one antique—a piecrust table from England.”101
At forty-five, Edith was finally where she wanted to be—on the best block in the city, up the street from Mr. and Mrs. W. Rockefeller Prentice, who would soon become good friends, and next door to Edward Joseph Kelly, the new political pal who invited her and Nancy to the 1932 Democratic convention. At the time, the rough-and-ready Kelly held two plum municipal posts, chief engineer of the Sanitary District and president of the South Park Board, and had a reputation for getting things Early Nancy: 1921–1932
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done while enriching himself in the process. In February 1933, Mayor Anton Cermak was shot in Miami by an anarchist whose intended target was President-elect Franklin Roosevelt. After weeks of backroom machinations, the city council installed Kelly as mayor.
Lester Weinrott, who worked with Edith on Betty and Bob, described her in those days:
Her face was beautiful, a classic face; her smile warmed the eye and the heart of the beholder. Her hair, under her Bes-Ben hat, had begun to gray. She wore