Free Ronnie and Nancy by Bob Colacello Page A

they Republicans or Democrats? “Southern Democrats,”
    she answered. “Just like Edith—to start off with.”39
    In fact, Edith was an active participant in the 1924 Democratic convention in New York City. Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of New York’s governor, had asked her friend Bessie Marbury to chair the Women’s Committee of Nine “to prepare for the reception and entertainment of women delegates, alternates and visitors.” According to The New York Times of May 18, 1924, Edith served on the Sub-Committee on Theatres and Restaurant Facilities, along with Mrs. Chauncey Olcott and Mrs.
    Condé Nast, wife of the owner of Vogue and Vanity Fair.
    Ken Robbins is noticeably missing from accounts of this period. In both Nancy and My Turn, his daughter says that he pretty much ignored her until she was “older”—“He couldn’t relate to me as a very young child”40 is the way she puts it in her second book. But Charlotte Ramage said that Nancy’s father and grandmother had visited Bethesda on more than one occasion, though she offered no specific dates or anecdotes.41

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    Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House And apparently Nannee Robbins was diligent in sending her only granddaughter presents or cards on her birthday and holidays. “Dear grandmother,” reads an undated note written in a child’s exceptionally neat block letters. “Thank you for the nice Halloween things. We had a fine time. Love, Nancy.”42
    In the summer of 1927, Edith Luckett met Loyal Davis sailing to England on the SS New York . Edith—thirty-nine and not yet a star—was said to be joining a company of English actors.43 The thirty-one-year-old Loyal Davis, an associate professor of surgery at Northwestern University, was just starting his practice as Chicago’s first specialist in neurosurgery, at a time when operating on the brain, spinal cord, and nerves was still an emerging field.
    He was going to London with a colleague, Dr. Lewis Pollock, to give a paper on decerebrate rigidity to a conference of American and British neu-rologists. He was still married to his first wife, Pearl, and they had a two-year-old son named Richard. According to Loyal Davis’s 1973 memoir, A Surgeon’s Odyssey , “I proposed that Pearl make the trip, thinking that her mother could come to Chicago and with Willa [their housekeeper] look after Richard. Perhaps I did not insist strongly enough, but at any rate I, alone, went to England with the Pollocks on the SS New York .”44
    Richard Davis, a retired neurosurgeon living on Philadelphia’s Main Line, confirmed this story to me, with one crucial difference. “I’ve got a picture of Edith and Loyal on the ship. They were a very handsome couple. He was going to give a paper at the National Hospital in Queens Square. Dr. and Mrs. Pollock were traveling with him, and Edith was sitting at their table. Now, why she was going to London, I don’t know. She was sitting across from Mrs. Pollock and had been talking to my father.
    And then she said—not in a whisper, but just moving her lips—‘Is he married?’ Of course, my father saw this, and he said to her, ‘No.’ There’s a song called ‘Hallelujah’ and apparently they danced to that on the ship.
    And every time that was played on the radio, no matter what they were doing, they’d get up and dance.”45
    Had the young doctor removed his wedding band upon boarding the New York ? Or fudged the date of his divorce when telling the story to his son years later? In any case, the invitation to Pearl was evidently a last attempt to save a collapsing marriage. Loyal Davis and Pearl McElroy were as mis-matched as Kenneth Robbins and Edith Luckett. Loyal was an intern at Cook County Hospital in Chicago when they met on a blind date in late Early Nancy: 1921–1932
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    1919. Pearl was a nurse at the hospital, who, in Loyal’s words, “had left a small town for the attractions in Chicago.” They married soon afterward, at the same