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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House County Democratic Party chairman Pat Nash, he ran one of the most powerful political machines in the country, rivaling those of Boston’s James Michael Curley, Kansas City’s Tom Pendergast, and Jersey City’s Frank Hague. A member of FDR’s inner circle, he engineered the President’s nomination to a third term at the 1940 convention, and also the replacement of his left-wing vice president, Henry Wallace, with the middle-of-the-road Harry Truman at the 1944 convention. Both conventions were held in Chicago. Kelly supported the New Deal, but at heart he was a law-and-order fiscal conservative who knew how to get along with the city’s Republican business establishment, especially Colonel McCormick (who had roomed with Franklin Roosevelt at Groton and hated him ever after). He was also cozy with the heirs to Al Capone’s organized crime syndicate, which along with other criminal interests was said to provide the Kelly-Nash machine with an estimated $12 to $20 million annually in return for lax enforcement of the anti-gambling laws.57 Pat Nash’s nephew was Capone’s lawyer.58 (The Mafia boss had been convicted of federal income tax evasion the year Kelly became mayor; released from prison in 1939, he died in 1947.)

Kelly is not even mentioned in either Nancy or My Turn, but Nancy Reagan confirmed that he and his wife were close to her mother and stepfather. “I remember there was a picture of Mother and Margaret Kelly in our apartment,” she said. What was Mrs. Kelly like? “She was very nice.

You know, they were what they were.”59

“Margaret Kelly was a fireball—a beautiful woman and a lovely person,” Richard Davis recalled. “We would go over to the Kellys’ every Sunday. They had a spectacular apartment. It was really something else.”60 In his memoir, Loyal Davis recounted a night in the early 1940s when the Democratic mayor and the Republican governor of Illinois, Dwight Green, came for dinner at the Davises’ apartment. Loyal naively assumed that Edith must have mistakenly invited them on the same evening. But, he writes, “they greeted each other warmly, and my embarrassment quickly disappeared. After dinner, they were in earnest conversation, and the governor asked to use our telephone. When he returned, he said quietly to the mayor, ‘I’ve taken care of it.’ Until then, I thought that political rivals must be dyed-in-the-wool enemies but soon learned that this is more apparent in campaigns than it is in the day-to-day administration of government.”61

Nancy at Smith: 1939–1944

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What Edith understood and Loyal would learn was that power transcends political affiliation, and ideology need not get in the way of social success. In other words, whom you know is more important that what you believe. The Davis dining room was not so much a hotbed of political activism as a celebrity salon whose luster was heightened by the presence of not only powerful politicians but also movie stars, society figures, and prominent doctors. Loyal and Edith got along with everyone from the conservative Lillian Gish to the liberal Walter Huston to the bohemian Alla Nazimova precisely because those people’s political views—or sexual morals, for that matter—didn’t matter as much as their stardom. These were lessons that Nancy learned as a young woman, and that she would apply most effectively as she and her husband made their way through the hybrid society of Los Angeles.

At the beginning of her third year at Smith, in September 1941, Nancy was one of only eleven students out of a class of five hundred to choose drama as her major.62 That December, Smith announced the appointment of Hallie Flanagan Davis as dean of the college and professor of drama. A remarkable and controversial figure, the fifty-one-year-old Davis had been the first woman to win a Guggenheim Fellowship, had started the Vassar Experimental Theater in 1925, and from 1934 to 1939 had run the Federal Theater, part of FDR’s Works Progress Administration, which at its peak employed