Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [83]
“secret but romantic” relationship with a “classmate who later became an avowed lesbian. The lesbian classmate was involved in the theater and very popular on campus.”73 When I asked Richard Davis about this, he told me, “I remember Nancy joking one Christmas when she came home from Smith that some girl had fallen in love with her, and given her flowers.”74
Davis pointed out that Nancy was always comfortable around homosexuals of both sexes. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “the men she gets along with are a little effeminate.”75 Davis put Nancy’s high school beau, Sock Hettler, whom he said she continued to see when she was home from college, in this category, as well as James Platt White Jr., the Amherst man she would start dating in her senior year at Smith, but not Frank Birney, whom she later called “my first serious boyfriend.”76
Nancy and Frank had started seeing each other after her coming-out party in December 1939. “I would go to Princeton for football games and dances, he would come to Smith for dances, or we would meet in New York for a weekend, ‘under the clock’ at the Biltmore Hotel,” she later wrote, hastening to add that she stayed on the hotel’s girls-only floor.
“Frank and I went together for about eighteen months,” she continued.
“We talked a little bit about getting married, but it ended in tragedy before that ever happened.”77
On December 15, 1941, Birney’s life came to a mysterious end. In Nancy’s telling, he was accidentally killed while running across the tracks to catch a train from Princeton to New York, where she was waiting for him.
But a strong case can be made that Birney, despondent about having to spend part of Christmas vacation at Princeton making up bad grades and perhaps in emotional turmoil one week after Pearl Harbor, deliberately threw himself in front of the train. Bruce McFarland, one of Nancy’s Boys Latin friends, told me, “I knew Frank fairly well at Princeton. His roommate, Geoffrey Montgomery Talbot Jones, was my best friend. Frank was a neat guy, but I’m almost certain he was a manic-depressive. And he committed suicide—no matter what Nancy says.”78
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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House In his memoir, Christian Gauss, the dean of Princeton at the time, states that several Tiger Inn members told him that Birney had been “much depressed” and that a telegram from his sister was found in his room, “indicating she was clearly worried about his depression.” The account that Gauss gives of Birney’s death clearly suggests that suicide was the probable cause, and his use of the initials “J.S.” to disguise the student’s identity supports the assumption that it was not an accident: I learned at the station that J.S. had tried to catch a train to the Junction to meet one for New York at 6:40, but the train pulled out while he was rushing across the platform. A taxi man drove him to the Junction but too late for the connection. J.S. gave him a dollar.
He walked down the tracks one-third of a mile toward Philadelphia. What thoughts led him to this pass? And yet it is possible to believe, as his parents would so like to do, that he was robbed and thrown upon the tracks. It is odd that his ring was missing and there was nothing, not even a penny, in his pocket when he had at the outset clearly intended to go to New York.79
The Daily Princetonian reported the following day that the train’s engineer “saw the victim leap from behind the pole to the track, [and] he gave a long blast of his whistle and applied his brake but was unable to bring the train to a stop before it struck the man.”80 According to Kitty Kelley, “a close Princeton friend” found a suicide note in Birney’s wastebasket and gave it to Birney’s brother-in-law, who had come down from New York to identify the body. Kelley claims that Birney was on his way to New York to see his sister, not Nancy, and that “Nancy’s Talbot house-mates, none of whom ever met Frank Birney, remember her being at Smith the weekend she got the news of his death.”81
Nancy may have been protecting