Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [89]
Suffering from amebic dysentery picked up in Russia, Loyal was sent from Washington to an Army hospital in Chicago. After a stay in a second hospital in Michigan, he was finally cured at the Walter Reed Hospital in Washington and discharged from the Army. In an anecdote told by Richard Davis, pitting Loyal against Morton Downey, the popular entertainer, his father was still capable of combativeness. “Morton Downey was a great friend of Ed and Margaret Kelly’s, and we would see him at the Sunday dinners at 209. It so happened that the day Dr. Loyal returned from Europe he stayed at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, and Morton Downey was the first person he saw. They were in the elevator, along with several generals, and Dr. Loyal started to embrace Morton Downey, who just turned away and talked to the generals. The next summer Downey was Nancy at Smith: 1939–1944
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visiting the Kellys, and at dinner Dr. Loyal absolutely ripped him to pieces in front of everybody. He said, ‘I’d been overseas doing all these things, and you were so impressed by the stars on their shoulders that you didn’t even say hello to me, Morton. You weren’t gentleman enough, and I don’t even want to be in the same room with you.’ It was absolutely devastating. And Morton Downey left. It didn’t faze Ed Kelly a bit. He knew Dr. Loyal was principled, and he didn’t want to see his good friend treated this way by Morton Downey, who was a real lightweight.”122
Life slowly returned to normal in the Davis household after Loyal came home and resumed his work. In March 1944, Edith and Loyal made a trip to Los Angeles to visit Walter and Nan Huston, Spencer Tracy, and Nazimova. By June they had moved back into their apartment. Richard Davis, who had spent one term at Princeton in 1943 before joining the Army, recalled being home on leave in July 1944 when Franklin Roosevelt was nominated for a fourth term in Chicago. He attended the convention with his parents, the Kellys, and Spencer Tracy.
“The big issue was black voting rights,” he said, “and Spencer Tracy just went bananas about this. He could not understand why there were all these ridiculous rules about blacks voting in the South, and he didn’t waste any time telling Mayor Kelly. I can’t say that my father disagreed with Spencer Tracy. I don’t think he said anything. He respected Spencer Tracy’s viewpoint. They were very, very close. Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn both spent time in our apartment.”123 Dr. Daniel Ruge, who became Loyal’s clerk that fall and partner in 1952, pointed out that Loyal tended to keep his views to himself around Edith’s more liberal friends, adding,
“But that doesn’t mean he agreed with them.”124
Tracy had been thought of as a “hidebound arch-conservative” in the 1930s,125 but his political views became more moderate after 1941, when he began his celebrated affair with Katharine Hepburn, a Connecticut blue-blood with decidedly progressive views. They would remain semisecret lovers until his death in 1967, but Tracy, a devout Catholic who had once seriously considered becoming a priest, could never bring himself to divorce his wife. According to Nancy Reagan, Edith managed to remain friends with Louise Tracy even while playing hostess to “Spence and Kate.”126
For all Edith’s show business worldliness, however, she was not about to accept adultery in her own marriage. “When Dr. Loyal was in England, he had a love affair with his English driver,” Richard Davis revealed. “And 1 4 6
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House this woman came over to the United States, presumably to get married. I remember there was a big blowup in the summer of 1944, when she appeared in Chicago. That was the only time