But there was another, softer side to Loyal Davis. Frank Stinchfield, a student of his in 1932, was too poor to replace his tattered overcoat. One day he found an expensive new Burberry in his locker, with a note that said only: “For Frank.” Not for months would Stinchfield, later a pioneer in hip replacements, discover the identity of his mysterious benefactor. As he recounted the story at a 1982 memorial service for his old professor: “It wasn’t until spring cleaning that I discovered a sales slip from Abercrombie & Fitch in an inside pocket, which read: ‘Sold to Dr. Loyal Davis.’ ”
One of the harshest stories about Loyal—difficult to nail down but told often—came to light in Ronnie and Jesse, a 1969 book by journalist and biographer Lou Cannon about the political rivalry between the conservative California governor and assembly speaker Jesse Unruh, a fearsome liberal. The detail about Loyal comes as an aside to the book’s main narrative.
“A California physician who interned under Dr. Davis remembers that his fellow interns chafed under his strictness. In those days the interns were frequently called to deliver babies in the city’s Negro districts, and they would, on occasion, be asked by the mother to suggest a name for the child they had helped bring into the world. The interns invariably suggested the name Loyal Davis, a practice that was brought to the attention of the esteemed surgeon and finally prompted a bulletin board edict that interns were in no case to assist in naming an infant.”
In her scorching 1991 biography of Nancy, Kitty Kelley wrote that the interns did this “out of spite” and revulsion to what she claimed was their professor’s “virulent racism.” Others have denied that bigotry was among Loyal’s faults. His longtime medical partner Daniel Ruge, who was also the first Reagan White House physician, told author Bob Colacello in 1981: “I had a patient one time whose name was Loyal Davis Washington. I think it was done more as a joke, but you can’t tell. It’s true, a lot of people didn’t like him. He was a strong personality.”
Kelley also wrote that Edie was a racist who once berated actress Carol Channing for bringing the singer Eartha Kitt, an African American, to a party at the Davis apartment. In a letter to Nancy after the book was published, Channing accused Kelley of having “fabricated a malicious story” and offered a vastly different one: “Your mom was a dear friend. When Eartha Kitt called while I was playing in Chicago in ‘Wonderful Town’ ”—which would have been around 1954—“I took her to see your mother, and being the lady that she was, she secured a hotel for Eartha,” Channing wrote. “All we theater folk depended on your mother to supply those necessities like schools for our children, doctors, playgrounds—the essentials of life.”
Granted, Edie was a product of a different time. She told racist jokes and was known to have used the word nigger. But other accounts attest to her empathy with the plight of African Americans in the era before the civil rights movement. In a 1985 interview for the Black Women Oral History Project at Harvard University, Etta Moten Barnett, a contralto and actress who played Bess in George Gershwin’s 1942 Broadway revival of Porgy and Bess, talked of her own friendship with Nancy’s mother. The two of them had gotten to know each other while working in radio in Chicago.
The African American star noted that it was Edith, not she, who voiced characters who spoke in black dialect on the radio programs on which they performed. That was the kind of practice that would make modern audiences cringe. Still, Barnett insisted, Edith “just could not stand discrimination. Any time she thought that I might be going into a situation where I might be discriminated against, she wanted me to let her know. You talk about Miss Lillian—what’s his name’s mother? You know, Carter’s mother.” (President Jimmy Carter’s mother was known for her kindness to blacks, including receiving them in her parlor in Plains, Georgia, when that was not generally done by whites in the Deep South.) “She could not hold a light to Edith Davis if she got started, because she just couldn’t stand it. She just was very much against discrimination, and she let it be known in very good, strong language.”
Barnett recalled telling Edie that she planned to bring her granddaughter up to Chicago from Memphis and hoped to enroll her in Girls Latin. According to Barnett’s account, Edie replied: “When Nancy went to Latin School, they didn’t have any Negroes there. Now, if you have any trouble, you let me know. I don’t want no foolishness from those damn people.”
There was another thing that Barnett said she noticed when she became friends with Edie: a tension between mother and daughter, who at times seemed like they were almost in a competition for the affection of a man who did not offer it easily. As Barnett put it: “Nancy made on over her father—stepfather —who adopted her, more than she did her mother, like she was probably prouder of him or something.”
Or perhaps it was a craving for validation and acceptance. When Loyal arrived in Nancy’s life, she became part of a new family, but in at least one important sense, she was still an outsider in her own home. That she did not carry the name of the man she so adored was a source of awkwardness and shame. So it was a momentous day when Nancy Robbins arrived at school with an announcement: “You can call me Nancy Davis from now on.”
From the moment she was legally adopted, Nancy would recognize no other identity. She once held up
