Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [52]
On January 17, 1938, Edith started working in a new radio soap opera called The Stepmother, produced and directed by Weinrott at CBS, while continuing to do Betty and Bob at NBC. Sponsored by Colgate toothpaste, the serial was about the daughter of a Chicago newspaperman who becomes the second wife of a small-town widowed banker with two children.
8 6
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House According to John Dunning’s On the Air: “Stepmother posed the question
‘Can a stepmother successfully raise another woman’s children?’” Edith, with her knack for Southern accents, played the family’s “faithful colored servant,” Mattie.64 If the plot echoed the Hargraves’ domestic situation, the theme was not unfamiliar to the Davis household. Three months after The Stepmother premiered, and nine years after her mother had remarried, Nancy, at age sixteen, was adopted by her stepfather on April 20. Nancy Robbins was finally Nancy Davis. A sign of how eager she was for that to happen can be seen in the Girls Latin yearbook of the previous June, in which she had already dropped her birth father’s name for her stepfather’s.65
In later accounts of what was one of the most important events of her life, Nancy Reagan was consistently vague about the time that elapsed between her mother’s remarriage and her adoption. That is partly because of the two years she subtracted from her age when she went to Hollywood, but also it must have been hard for her to face the fact of Loyal’s reluctance. It wasn’t that he didn’t love her; he worried about hurting Ken Robbins. Richard Davis explained that Nancy was his father’s favorite: “She’d sit in his lap, or at the foot of his chair. I wouldn’t say she was in awe of him, but there was an enormous respect. They were very, very close.”66
In the end Nancy initiated the adoption process, not Loyal. For nine years she had sought to live up to his standards and values. In doing so, she had shaped herself into what he wanted her to be: neat, disciplined, agreeable, perfect. Along the way she must have learned valuable lessons about how to persuade the powerful man to see things her way. But that’s not something she would ever admit. In her telling, she did what Dr. Loyal wanted her to do, and Dr. Loyal was always right. As she wrote in My Turn, “Loyal Davis was a man of great integrity who exemplified old-fashioned values: That girls and boys should grow up to be ladies and gentlemen. That children should respect and obey their parents. That no matter what you did, you should never cheapen yourself. And that whatever you worked at—whether it was a complicated medical procedure, or a relatively simple act like sweeping the floor—you should do it as well as you could. . . . When I started going out at night, I always had a curfew.
But although he was a strict father, he was always fair. He was, I felt, what a real father ought to be.”67
Or, as she put it in Nancy: “Some people you meet in your life make you stretch to reach your fullest capabilities. I found my new father to be one of these people, which is why he was such a good teacher when he was East Lake Shore Drive: 1933–1939
8 7
Professor of Surgery at Northwestern University. He always demanded the best of you and made you want to give the best you had. He was strict but fair with me, as he was with his students. They came to respect him as I came to respect him. When he took privileges away from me as punishment for some misdeed, I understood I