Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [87]
Nancy would later tie her mother’s police job to her volunteer work at the Servicemen’s Center. “There was a navy yard nearby,” she writes in My Turn, “and when she learned that some of these young kids were being picked up by prostitutes and infected with venereal diseases, she had herself sworn in as a policewoman so she could go out on the streets of Chicago and protect those boys.”111
Richard Davis was more forthcoming. “She must have been on the city payroll,” he told me, “because one night she went on a raid with the police. Some reporter took a picture, which was on the front page of the Chicago Tribune. And she didn’t have her teeth in. It was a god-awful sort of mini-scandal. I remember this appeared in the Saturday morning paper.
Sunday morning she took me to lunch at the Casino Club. All the old bid-1 4 2
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House dies greeted her, and she aimed her fingers at them and said, ‘Bang, bang!
Stick ’em up! I’m Dick Tracy!’ You know, deflecting all the gossip—and she got away with it. It was amazing what she could get away with.”112
Edith had become something of a legend in the Windy City. Lillian Gish, whom she always picked up at the station, later remarked, “When I’d get in the car and come down Michigan Avenue with her, all the people would stop and ask her to do something for them. The police, too; she practically ran Chicago.”113
That summer Edith sublet their apartment, and she and Nancy moved into a suite at the Drake Hotel. Nancy was invited to join the Junior League of Chicago and was a bridesmaid at Jean Wescott’s wedding.114 She volunteered as a nurse’s aide at Cook County Hospital, where she was assigned to the men’s ward. “The hospitals were all terribly shorthanded and needed all the help they could get,” she recalled. “I did a lot of dirty work, but it was a job that had to be done.” She also took a job as a salesgirl at Marshall Field. “I wanted to work to make some money and keep myself occupied. My most unforgettable experience there was catching a shoplifter.”115 Her account of that incident is one of the most dramatically told stories in Nancy:
A woman was circling around a display case in the center of the floor, and I looked up just in time to see her put a piece of jewelry in her purse. I looked around for the store detective, for anyone, but no one was available. I went up to the woman and asked if I could be of help to her. She said, No, she was just looking. . . . No one had really prepared me for what to do in such an emergency.
She started to leave and I was frantic. As calmly as possible, I said,
“Don’t you think you better give me back the jewelry before you go?” Whereupon she broke away and started to run for the elevator, with me hot on her heels. When I think about it now, we must have made quite a sight. The store detective appeared miraculously from nowhere, and the woman was stopped at the elevator. She turned, took hold of the top of my button-down dress, and tore it right down the front. The detective took both of us and hustled us to the store offices. Here he found that her shopping bags were full of loot she had lifted from this and other stores. I had to tell the whole story, all the while certain this woman was putting some kind of curse on me as she glared at me. . . . Later, I was reprimanded for stopping the shoplifter in the store. I learned that you have to wait until the shoplifter has left the store