Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [53]
She did everything possible to please him: She chewed her food thirty-two times.69 She was always on time. (“He was a stickler about punctual-ity. When he said six o’clock, he didn’t mean two minutes after six.”)70 She tagged along on emergency calls outside Chicago. After she entered her teens, he permitted her to watch him operate, usually from a glassed-in balcony but on at least one occasion standing beside him in the operating room. (Years later she told a reporter that she had always worried about getting sick to her stomach and embarrassing him.) She promised not to drink or smoke until she was twenty-one, and kept her promise. (Loyal kept his, too, and rewarded her with $1,000.)71
She became as interested in clothes and grooming as he was. In fact, in my interviews with Davis family friends, they almost always brought up Loyal’s style and appearance, but rarely mentioned Edith’s. “He was immaculately dressed,” Abra Rockefeller Wilkin told me.72 “My goodness, that man was very, very meticulous about his appearance and clothes,” said racetrack owner Marjorie Everett, a close family friend from both Chicago and Arizona. “Loyal Davis epitomized what you’d like to see in a doctor.
Very distinguished-looking. Great style. Beautifully groomed. I’m certain that some of the qualities that we see in Nancy—the discipline especially—
came from him.”73
One of the most important ways that Nancy got closer to her stepfather was by accompanying him on his trips home to Galesburg. “Since my mother’s parents passed on early, I never knew them, so my father’s parents were especially important to me,” she later said. “They treated me as if I were their real grandchild, and I felt as if I were. They were good, hardworking people, proud of their son, happy with the second marriage he had made, happy with Mother and me. I adored my grandfather and vividly recall the last time I saw him. He was dying of cancer and I went to visit him in Galesburg. We both knew it would be our last time together, although those words were never spoken. We said our good-byes, and as I was leaving, I turned to look back before getting in the car. He was standing at the window and managed a weak wave. I waved back, threw him a kiss, and hurried 8 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House into the car so he would not see the tears streaming down my face.”74 (Albert Davis died in 1938.)
Meanwhile, her relationship with Ken Robbins was deteriorating. In recounting her “last visit” to her father in New Jersey, she wrote that “things went badly. He said something about Mother I didn’t like and it made me angry. I said I was going to call my mother and go home. He got upset and locked me in the bathroom. I was terrified, and it seemed suddenly as if I were with strangers. Recalling the incident brings back a flood of memories I would rather forget. To this day I dislike locked doors and feel trapped behind them. His wife felt terrible and later wrote to my mother to apologize, but there were no more visits.”75
But when did this traumatic incident occur? It seems unlikely that it happened in the apparently happy summer of 1931, when she was ten, because in My Turn she refers to visiting her father during her adolescence, which would mean that she spent time with him until she was at least thirteen or fourteen. Marian Robinson, whose father was Ken’s first cousin, placed Nancy in New Jersey in the late 1930s, adding, “[Nannee Robbins]
told me . . . that I should learn some of the social graces that Nancy had.”76
Another Robbins cousin, Kathleen Young, talked about visiting the Davises on East Lake Shore Drive in 1936, indicating that relations had not broken down between the two families. “I was awed by Nancy,” said Kathleen, who was four years younger, “because she was very pretty and she had angora socks hanging in the bathroom. The Davises bought me all new clothes and took me to the best French restaurants in town, and I ordered for them because I spoke French.”77
Nancy Reagan