Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [80]
“My father loved to discuss serious topics,” Nancy Reagan explained,
“and I can remember more than one conversation about whether there really was such a thing as a human soul. I don’t remember the answers, but I recall, unlike my mother, Loyal wasn’t religious. I once asked him what happiness was. ‘Nancy,’ he said, ‘the answer to that question is almost twenty-five centuries old, and it’s basically what the Greeks said. Happiness is the pursuit of excellence in all aspects of one’s life.’ ”51
One of the most oft-repeated—and damning—stories about Loyal Davis was originally reported by Lou Cannon in his first book about Reagan, in 1969: “A California physician who interned under Dr. Davis remembers that his fellow interns chafed under his strictness. In those days the interns were frequently called to deliver babies in the city’s Negro districts and they would, on occasion, be asked by the mother to suggest a name for the child they had helped bring into the world. The interns invariably suggested the name Loyal Davis, a practice that was brought to the attention of the esteemed surgeon and finally prompted a bulletin board edict that interns were in no case to assist in naming an infant.”52
(Cannon repeated this story in his second Reagan book in 1982 , but not his third in 1991.)
In her version, Kitty Kelley omits Cannon’s reference to Loyal’s strictness as the basis of the resentments against him: “The prejudices of Loyal Davis were not hidden from the medical community, or from the interns Nancy at Smith: 1939–1944
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and residents who worked for him. Some were so appalled by his virulent racism that when they went into the Chicago ghetto to deliver babies, they persuaded the black mothers to name their children ‘Loyal’ out of spite.”53
Although Cannon based the story on a single source, who apparently didn’t date it, there probably was some truth to it. “I’ve heard that story, but an equal number of babies were named after Irving Cutter,” Wetzel said, referring to the dean of Northwestern University Medical School. “It was probably before the war, because Dean Cutter quit in 1942.”54 Loyal Davis’s other longtime partner, Dr. Daniel Ruge, concurred. “I had a patient one time whose name was Loyal Davis Washington. I think it was done more as a joke, but you can’t tell. It’s true, a lot of people didn’t like him. He was a strong personality.”55
“It was always a joke,” said Richard Davis, who told an anecdote suggesting that Loyal was less a racist than a snob. When Richard was in medical school at Northwestern in the 1950s, pairs of students would go to the South Side and other neighborhoods “where people couldn’t afford hospitalization to have babies. Dr. Loyal always used to kid us— ‘Dicky, you better take a good catcher’s mitt, just to catch the babies as they fly out.’
The students would name not only the black children but all the others after their professors.
“Before and after the war, Dr. Loyal had a very famous class for junior medical students, which they nicknamed the Hour of Charm,” Davis continued. ( The Hour of Charm was a popular radio show, featuring Phil Spi-talny and His All-Girl Orchestra, that aired from 1934 to 1948 on CBS
and NBC.) “Now, if you came to that without a necktie and a coat, you were thrown out. He taught doctors to be doctors. To act like doctors and to think like doctors. In neurosurgery you can’t be sloppy.”56
No discussion of the Davises’ political attitudes would be complete without considering their relationship with Mayor Edward Kelly, which began in the early 1930s and lasted until his death, in 1950. Kelly’s wife, Margaret, was almost as close to Edith as Colleen Moore Hargrave was. Loyal and Ed Kelly also grew quite close, the train engineer’s son from Galesburg and the policeman’s son from the Southwest Side having developed a deep respect for each other as neighbors on the Gold Coast. The Kellys lived just down the block from the Davises, at 209 East Lake Shore Drive, which was considered the finest address in the city.
In the 1940s,