Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [51]
Edith liked giving small dinner parties, especially after she and Loyal moved to their duplex at 199 East Lake Shore Drive, which had a living room, dining room, and library downstairs and three bedrooms upstairs.
Like her charity work, Edith’s dinners revealed a social agenda. According to Richard Davis, who moved in with Edith and Loyal after his mother’s death in 1939, his father was initially a reluctant participant in Edith’s efforts. “She had to force him, really, to have people in. She was very gregarious and interested in social contacts—not only for him, but for Nancy.”
He added, “Dr. Loyal was an opinionated man. When friends were invited over, he had to dominate the conversation.”57
Davis described these dinner parties as jovial but serious affairs. “There was never a lot of drinking. It was one drink and then into the dining room. Except for a very occasional cocktail party, they never had more than eight or ten people, because that was all the dining room would hold.”58 Although Edith wasn’t much of cook—the Davises had a housekeeper who came in every day and fixed the evening meal—she sent the local society editors homemade mustard at Christmas, in jars labeled “From the kitchen of Mrs. Loyal Davis.”59
Among those who sometimes came to dinner were Mayor Kelly and his second wife, Margaret, who became one of Edith’s best friends. The rough-and-ready Kelly always seemed to be denying involvement in one corruption scandal or another—among other things, he was accused of not reporting $450,000 in income and settled with the IRS for $106,390 to avoid prosecution60—but he had managed to put the city’s financial affairs in order soon after assuming office in 1933. Two years later, riding high on East Lake Shore Drive: 1933–1939
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the repeal of Prohibition and the success of the 1933 World’s Fair, Kelly was elected to the first of three full terms by the greatest margin in Chicago history—799,060 to 167,106 for his Republican opponent. There were credible charges that as many as 300,000 of the votes were stolen, but that didn’t stop Kelly from putting his vote total on the license plates of his Cadillac.61
“I learned many things about the workings of city, county, and state government from Ed Kelly,” Republican Loyal later wrote of the Democratic mayor. “A tall, redheaded Irishman with a quick wit, uneducated beyond grade school, he attracted people mainly, I think, because they identified with him in his mispronunciation of words and his laboring-class background.”62 Edith, still a self-professed Southern Democrat, was as usual less condescending and more practical: she gave Mayor Kelly elocution lessons and helped him write his radio addresses.
Meanwhile, Loyal’s star continued to rise in the world of medicine. In 1936
he was elected to membership in both the American Surgical Association, which in his words was “the most prestigious surgical society in the United States,” and the snobbish Southern Surgical Association, which held annual meetings at expensive resorts such as the Homestead in Hot Springs, Virginia, which were attended by the doctors’ wives. (Loyal claimed that Edith’s Southern background was the real reason he was invited to join.) In 1938, six years after he succeeded Dr. Kanavel as chief surgeon at Passavant and chairman of the surgery department at Northwestern, Loyal’s great mentor was killed in a car crash while vacationing in California, and Loyal was named to replace him as editor