Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [86]
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House probably sent all of that home. I would think that Edith got a lot of help from the mayor. No question. Somebody had to pay the rent while Loyal was away. I don’t know who paid Nancy’s tuition at Smith. I don’t know who paid my tuition at the Latin School.”102
If Kelly helped Edith, she also helped him. When he was nominated for a third term in January 1943, she signed on as head of the women’s division of the Citizens’ Committee for Mayor Ed Kelly. That summer she was given a $75-a-week job as an announcer for the city-sponsored concerts in Grant Park. All through the war years, Edith, along with Colleen Moore Hargrave, put in countless hours as a volunteer at the servicemen’s canteens run by Margaret Kelly.103
The mayor had inaugurated the main Servicemen’s Center in the Loop in August 1941, when America’s armed forces were being built up in anticipation of war. Open twenty-four hours a day, the twelve-story renovated former Elks Club offered military personnel everything from hot meals and beds to bowling alleys and big band entertainment free of charge. In 1942, Kelly opened an outdoor facility on twelve lakefront acres in Lincoln Park and an auxiliary canteen for black servicemen on the South Side. As chairman of this enormous undertaking, his wife often put in twelve-hour days, according to Roger Biles. “Her volunteer helpers ranged from society matrons to maids given time off. Approximately thirty-five hundred women, many of them members of the U.S.O.
[United Service Organizations], acted as hostesses. . . . An average of ten thousand soldiers passed through the center on a week night, with as many as forty thousand counted on a weekend. . . . The centers constituted such an unqualified success and engendered such goodwill for the city—soldiers from across the nation spoke glowingly of their time spent in Chicago, even years later—that reporters called their operation one of Mayor Kelly’s finest achievements in office.”104
In her final semester at Smith, Nancy starred in Make with the Maximum: A Factory Follies, “the first musical show ever staged by college girls to entertain war workers.”105 During the spring of 1943, the thirty-three-member cast performed the half-hour revue for more than five thousand workers at defense-related companies, including Westinghouse Electric and U.S. Rubber, in the Connecticut Valley. Wearing a black sheath and long gloves, Nancy played “the Glamour Gal—a Sophisticated Singer.” At the start of the show, she complains that the war has deprived her family of Nancy at Smith: 1939–1944
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their butler and yacht, singing, “Cocktails at five/Dinner at the Stork/Long drives in the country/To get away from New York.”106 At the end, however, she joins the rest of the cast in the show’s title song: “Make with the maximum/Give with the brawn!/Make with the maximum/Smother that yawn!”107
They performed the show one last time at the Class of 1943’s graduation ceremony, on May 23, 1943. Neither Loyal nor Edith was present; he was still in England, and she could not travel owing to wartime restrictions. Despite Nancy’s desire to pursue an acting career, she returned to Chicago to stay with her mother until her stepfather completed his tour of service. She found Edith embroiled in a rather ridiculous mess.
From 1942 to 1946, according to several Reagan biographers, Edith was secretly employed as an “undercover policewoman” by the city, at a salary of $2,141 a year. On May 8, 1943, she had invited several underage sailors to meet young women at her apartment, where a police captain and a lieutenant commander of the shore patrol gave the boys money to take their dates to particular bars; when they were served drinks,