Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [50]
These were not women who could be bossed around by men. Colleen Moore had single-handedly made her joke writer Mervyn LeRoy into a major director and later insisted that he give the fourteen-year-old Loretta Young a screen test.49 Edith, her daughter assured me, wasn’t intimidated by anyone. “Edith was impossible,” said Abra Rockefeller Wilkin. “The stories, the antics. She was demanding. She was exacting. Difficult. And Loyal had to have enjoyed her, or he wouldn’t have put up with her. I think they probably had more fun backstage than the rest of us realized.”50 Both Colleen Hargrave and Edith Davis realized that in enhancing their husband’s status, they were enhancing their own.
“She and Mother were such a pair in Chicago,” Nancy later wrote.
East Lake Shore Drive: 1933–1939
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“When my father would leave for the hospital each morning, and her husband, Homer, would leave for the office, she and Mother would be on the phone with each other planning their day. What one didn’t think of, the other did.”51 She told me, “They would figure out what kind of mischief they were going to get into that day. And Colleen would be miffed if for some reason she couldn’t get Mother on the phone.”52
Both women served on the Women’s Board of Passavant Hospital, along with such prominent social figures as Abra Rockefeller Prentice and Narcissa Ward Thorne, whose father-in-law was a co-founder of Montgomery Ward & Company. Narcissa Thorne shared Colleen Moore’s passion for grandiose dollhouses. The Thorne Miniature Rooms, like the Doll House scaled one inch to the foot, were first shown publicly at Chicago’s
“Century of Progress” World’s Fair in 1933, and were eventually put on permanent display at the Art Institute of Chicago. The Doll House went to Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry.
Narcissa Thorne maintained a studio near her Gold Coast apartment, where skilled craftsmen and society ladies sat side by side, the former carv-ing miniature reproductions of period settees, the latter stitching tiny pillows to put on them. Nancy Reagan told me that Mrs. Thorne had given her one of the more modest rooms she made for the children of friends. “I have it in the guest room,” she said, adding that she was impressed by Narcissa Thorne because she was so refined and “always looked perfect. Her posture was so straight and erect. You know, she was from that old school.
And she was crazy about my father.”53
Chicago’s society was relatively open, more like New York’s than Boston’s or Philadelphia’s. Accomplishment counted as much as lineage, and giving back in the form of charitable donations and deeds was a recognized means of social advancement. The city’s leading families had made their fortunes in trade and industry in the late nineteenth century: the Armours and Swifts in meatpacking, the Palmers and Fields in retailing; the McCormicks in farm machinery; the Wrigleys in chewing gum.
When Edith moved to town, second- and third-generation members of those families dominated the boards of the city’s great institutions. Unlike Colleen, however, Edith never made it onto the most elite boards—those of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Lyric Opera—perhaps because the Davises weren’t rich enough, perhaps because her bawdy jokes crossed the line of decorum. Nonetheless she dedicated herself to such charities as the Red Cross and the Seeing Eye and moved comfortably in upper-class circles.
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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House
“She was a doer,” said Judy Hargrave Coleman about Edith’s fund-raising abilities. “You couldn’t say no to Mrs. Davis.”54
“Edith was a total extrovert—uncontrolled,” said Richard Davis.55 “You couldn’t help but love her,” said Lester Weinrott, Edith’s friend and radio producer. “She was this adorable darling