Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [43]
“I am going to tell you something that your boy won’t tell you.
When the wire came from Hollywood and we were all overjoyed at Dutch’s good luck, we missed him from the office and sent one of the fellows to look for him. He came back saying he had discovered Dutch in one of the smaller studio rooms on his knees, praying. He didn’t let Dutch know that he saw him, and when he told all of us there in the office, we cried like babies.” (end of quote) Friends, he does love God and never forgets to thank Him for all his many blessings. When we visited him, he told me of all the nice things he would be able to do now for Eureka College if he won the seven-year contract with Warner Brothers.
You know he has been a wonderful son to us. His father hasn’t had any work since the 15th of June last year, and during all that time I have received a $60.00 check the first of each month, and Iowa: 1933–1937
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another one of the same amount the 15th of each month. If he signs the seven-year contract there, he is going to send for us. That is the thing that makes me so happy, to think I can live my last days making a home for him. It’s almost more happiness than I ever expected in this life.61
C H A P T E R F O U R
EAST LAKE SHORE DRIVE
1933–1939
Nancy was a year ahead of me at the Girls Latin School in Chicago. She was just as nice as she could be. And through the years I’ve read all this business in the newspapers, and I thought, My goodness, I don’t think she turned into this evil person. In high school she was very, very friendly. She was not a personal friend of mine—I knew her just because it was a small private school and we played field hockey together. I think everybody just plain liked her. But I’ve had people come up to me and say, “Tell us about her.
Was she such a witch?” I say, “No, she was just this delightful person. All we knew is she wanted to be an actress.”
China Ibsen Oughton to author,
February 21, 2001
Nancy is well reared, not dragged up. It comes naturally to her to behave beautifully.
Jerry Zipkin, quoted in the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner,
October 30, 1980
THE SUMMER RONALD REAGAN ARRIVED IN HOLLYWOOD FROM IOWA IN
his Nash, Nancy Robbins, as she was still called, was given a convertible of her own for her sixteenth birthday. It was a black 1937 Mercury with a red-leather interior, and it seems that Edith Davis paid for the gift with her Betty and Bob earnings.1 Nancy loved the car so much that she drove it to school, which was just six blocks north of East Lake Shore Drive, where her family had moved up to a duplex apartment the year before.
Reagan was lucky enough to coast through the worst years of the Great Depression on a radio sportscaster’s salary. Nancy was sheltered from the hard times by the ongoing success—professional, financial, social—of her 7 2
East Lake Shore Drive: 1933–1939
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stepfather and mother. And while the new Warner Bros. contract player was beginning to make the acquaintance of such stars as Dick Powell and Bette Davis, the private school teenager was already accustomed to coming home in the afternoon and finding “Mary Martin in the living room, or Spencer Tracy reading the newspaper, or the breathtaking Lillian Gish curled up on the sofa, talking with Mother.”2
Edith had brought her daughter to Chicago at the height of the Roaring Twenties, which was called the Whoopee Era in the Windy City, where the decade’s moral lapses and criminal excesses were particularly acute. In 1927 alone, the IRS estimated, Al Capone’s organized-crime syndicate took in $105 million from its bootlegging, prostitution, and gambling enterprises.3 Four years later Capone was jailed on tax-evasion charges, and the great metropolis of the Midwest was on the verge of economic collapse. As Roger Biles writes in Big City Boss in Depression and War, his biography of Mayor Edward J. Kelly, “The economic cataclysm of