Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [46]
Practically the only time the Latin School kids left the Near North Side was to go to the movie palaces in the Loop. They usually took the bus downtown, which cost a dime, though they were occasionally driven by the chauffeurs of the richer families. McFarland recalled that such excursions made a deep impression on him: “You couldn’t go downtown in the thirties—early thirties especially—and not see the guys selling apples on the corners and the soup kitchens and the people lined up where a job was available.”17
Nancy saw nearly every movie, collected movie magazines, and made scrapbooks of her favorite stars.18 “We were all wrapped up in movie stars,”
Jean Wescott Marshall told me. “I liked Ronald Reagan, and she liked Bing Crosby. She used to say, ‘I don’t see what you see in Ronald Reagan.’ And I’d say, ‘Well, I don’t see what you see in Bing Crosby.’ But we both liked Jimmy Stewart and kept pictures of him.”19 When Nancy was a junior, the Senior Class Will bequeathed her “a scrap book to hold all her pictures of Tyrone Power.”20
It was far from unusual for teenage girls in the 1930s to be starstruck. But among her classmates, only Nancy had an Uncle Walter Huston and an East Lake Shore Drive: 1933–1939
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Aunt Colleen Moore, not to mention a godmother named Alla Nazimova, whom she called Zim. As Garry Wills notes, “She was in touch with a very wide world, through her mother.”21 Although Edith had retired from the stage when she married Loyal, she kept up the relationships she had developed in the theatrical world, and her husband enjoyed meeting Edith’s glittery friends. One of the advantages Edith had in maintaining her Broadway and Hollywood connections was that the fastest way to cross the country at the time was by train; passengers had to change trains in Chicago, which encouraged stopovers. Another was that Chicago was a big theater town.
It is also worth noting that Edith’s friends were stars of the highest rank, not has-beens or wannabes. Spencer Tracy, her co-star in Baby Cyclone back in 1928, had been discovered by the great Hollywood director John Ford two years later; by the mid-1930s he was one of MGM’s most important leading men, winning back-to-back best-acting Oscars for Captains Courageous in 1937 and Boys Town in 1938. Walter Huston, Edith’s friend since the 1928 Chicago and New York runs of Elmer the Great, had also become hugely successful in the movies while continuing to triumph on Broadway with the biggest hit of his theatrical career, the Sinclair Lewis play Dodsworth, which ran for 1,238 performances at the Shubert Theater in 1934 and 1935.22
In January 1936, Nazimova was in Chicago with her legendary production of Ibsen’s Ghosts, which she not only starred in but also directed.
(“Great is a word for sparing use,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in The New York Times after its Broadway opening, “but there is no other way to characterize a transcendent performance of a tragic role.”)23 Edith and Loyal attended the Chicago opening, and a few nights later had Nazimova and her companion, Glesca Marshall, to dinner, a fact that Edith made sure was noted in the Chicago Herald ’s gossip column. Nazimova recorded the evening in her diary: “To the Davises. Family. Peace. Contentment. Happiness? Must be.”24
Edith put time and effort into these friendships. Nancy Reagan told me that it seemed every time the family was ready to go out, she and Loyal had to pull Edith away from her desk. “We used to tease her because she would always be writing a postcard to somebody. And we’d say, ‘C’mon, Mother.
C’mon.’ She’d say, ‘I just have to get this off.’”25 After Nazimova had a partial mastectomy in June 1937, the Davises traveled to New York and visited her at her Westchester County estate.26 Spencer Tracy, who seemed to get 7 8
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