Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [54]
In any case, she finally took matters into her own hands and one day in the elevator approached a neighbor who was a retired judge. “I asked him,
‘How can I go about getting adopted?’ [He] called my mother, and she must have approved because he volunteered to help me with the paperwork. I already knew that according to Illinois law, a child who reached the age of 14
could make her own decision on matters of adoption. By then there was no longer any question in my mind, and I finally made it official by going to see Kenneth Robbins in New York. He came with my grandmother to meet me East Lake Shore Drive: 1933–1939
8 9
under the clock at the Biltmore Hotel. I explained what I wanted to do, and they agreed, reluctantly. I’m sure it hurt my grandmother terribly. When Kenneth Robbins signed the papers, I sent a wire to Chicago to tell my family that the adoption had gone through. I didn’t have much experience with telegrams, but I knew they had to be brief. This one read: hi dad.”79
She explained to me that she had passed through New York on her Easter break. “I was going to Bermuda to spend the vacation with some girls from my school, and I wrote my father that I’d like to see him. I felt badly. But then, you know, this was obviously the right thing to do.”80
Loyal Davis matter-of-factly confirms the extraordinary role his stepdaughter played in her adoption: “Nancy had taken the initiative and consulted Orville Taylor, an attorney who lived in the same apartment building, about the steps necessary for me to adopt her. I wished it very much but was somewhat hesitant to institute the proceeding because her father and paternal grandmother were alive. After she was advised by her attorney, she made a trip east . . . obtained her father’s signed agreement, and upon her return I soon had my daughter legally.”81
According to Cook County records, her petition for adoption, filed on April 19, 1938, stated “that the natural parents of said child are divorced, and that the mother of said child has since married Loyal Davis . . . and that the father of said child, Kenneth S. Robbins, consents in writing to the adoption of said child by the petitioners, and . . . that said minor child being more than 14 years of age likewise consents in writing to her adoption.” The petition also requested that her name be legally changed from Anne Frances Robbins to Nancy Davis.82
Even after Nancy was adopted, she continued to address her stepfather as Dr. Loyal. “I knew he would have loved it if I had called him Dad,” she wrote in My Turn, “and in retrospect I wish I had. But at the time I just couldn’t. Although we became very close, it wasn’t until my own daughter was born that I finally dropped the formal title. When Patti was too young to say ‘Grandpa,’ she called him Bapa—and so did I.”83
In the spring of 1938, Nancy was in her junior year at Girls Latin. Pretty, happy, and popular, she was dating the equally popular Sock Hettler, who was in the same year at Boys Latin. She was on the hockey team, in the Glee Club, and president of the Drama Club. That summer she turned seventeen and went to Lake Arrowhead with her parents to spend several weeks with Uncle Walter Huston. One day her idol Jimmy Stewart—tall, 9 0
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House slim, a big star at thirty—turned up with the director Joshua Logan, who wanted to feature Huston in the Maxwell Anderson and Kurt Weill musical Knickerbocker Holiday on Broadway.
“Walter was the best American actor on the stage, no question about it,” Logan later said. “I flew out to California and then I rented a car and drove to Lake Arrowhead. . . . He had visitors staying with him: a young girl named Nancy Davis and her mother and father. [Walter] arranged immediately