Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [45]
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blouse. On Fridays we had to wear a special tunic top with a white collar and long sleeves. I don’t think we liked those terribly well. They were sort of droopy. And we had these awful-looking outfits we wore as we went forth onto the hockey field—bloomers with a bright blue linen tunic that came over them, and a white shirt underneath, and knee guards, and black shoes. Oh, we were quite devastating. Nancy always looked very nice. I would not say glamorous, just very nice-looking, very fresh and wholesome—very ladylike.”9
Along with most of her privileged friends from Girls Latin, Nancy took dancing lessons at Vourniques’ Dancing School, on North Dearborn Street, near Boys Latin School. “It was where all the young men and young ladies from about seventh grade on were meant to go and learn ballroom dancing,” recalled China Ibsen Oughton. “We wore little white gloves, and the boys sat on one side and the girls on the other.”10 Bruce McFarland, who attended Boys Latin at that time, told me, “Mr. Vournique and his wife were very impressive because of their size. She was a large woman, and he was a very slight little man. They were very proper and insisted on everyone being dressy. You didn’t come in sloppy clothes and learn how to dance.” McFarland remembered Nancy as “a very happy gal, the kind that you liked to be around because she was just a lot of fun. She was not a siren or anything like that. She was just a nice gal.” Was she a good dancer? “Very.”11
After classes and on Saturdays, Nancy and her friends would sometimes go to Woods restaurant, which was connected to the Drake Hotel by a pedestrian tunnel underneath Michigan Avenue, and just down the block from the Davises’ apartment. “The waitresses were little ladies in white or-gandy aprons, that sort of thing,” said China Ibsen Oughton. “They had the most scrumptious sandwiches. . . . Nancy was very popular with the young men, as well as with everybody else. One of her early beaus was Sangston Hettler, whom everyone called Sock. They were good high school friends, Nancy and Sock. His sister, Elizabeth Hettler—who’s deceased; old Sock is, too—was also at Girls Latin, so we knew them and all that. Their family was in the wholesale lumber business.”12
High school students from Girls and Boys Latin, the private coed school Frances Parker, and select public schools in the better suburbs—Evanston, Winnetka, and Lake Forest—were invited to dances at the Fortnightly Club.
Another Chicago society institution founded in the Gilded Age, it was housed in a stately Georgian mansion on East Bellevue Place, a block north of East Lake Shore Drive. “Nancy loved to dance,” said Girls Latin alumna 7 6
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Angie Johnson Galbraith. “And she used to stand up and sing—‘Pennies from Heaven’ was her favorite. I think she sang it once a month at the Fortnightly.”13 (Bing Crosby, the country’s number one crooner, recorded “Pennies from Heaven” with the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra in 1936; it was at the top of the charts for ten weeks late that year and in early 1937.)
“She had a lot of personality,” said Jean Wescott Marshall. “I don’t want to say bubbly, but she was fun-loving. She was very at ease with the boys.
And she had been with adults a lot, so she was very at ease with them, too.
Nancy was the leader of everything.”14 In a television interview in 1997, Marshall elaborated on this description slightly: “Everybody looked up to her. She sort of ran the rest of us.”15 Nancy was freshman class vice president, sophomore class president, junior class vice president, and senior class judge.
Nancy’s best friend chose a curious story to illustrate her leadership qualities: “At the end of our freshman year, Nancy got the great idea that we should go to boarding school. So I went home and told my family that I wanted to go to boarding school. Five of us went away for our sophomore and junior years. And Nancy