“You mean your real father, not your stepfather’s?” Morris asked, perplexed.
Nancy replied, this time more firmly: “I have my father’s hands.”
In the files of the Reagan Library is an essay that Nancy wrote in October 1938, when she was a senior in high school. The composition is titled “Surgeon Extraordinary.” For most of it, Nancy described herself in the third person, as the daughter of a most impressive man. Her version of events indicates that she had asked Loyal to adopt her the previous year—in 1937—as a way of “telling him that she was grateful and that as far as she was concerned, he would always be tops.” When she made the request to become his daughter, Nancy wrote, “he understood, because by that time, they had reached the place where no words were necessary.”
But that is not exactly how it happened. Nancy had engineered her adoption herself, with a preternatural determination for a girl her age. She sought out Orville Taylor, a neighbor who was a lawyer, and asked him how to go about it. On a trip to New York, she met with Kenneth Robbins near Grand Central Station and presented him, apparently by surprise, with papers to sign relinquishing his rights as her biological father. Her account of that meeting is still more evidence that Robbins felt deeply attached to his only child and was not the uncaring figure she later portrayed him to be. He was wounded by her request, as was Nanee Robbins, his mother. “He came with my grandmother to meet me under the clock at the Biltmore Hotel,” Nancy recalled. “I explained what I wanted to do, and they agreed, reluctantly. I’m sure it hurt my grandmother terribly.”
Then she sent a wire to Loyal in Chicago. Her message contained only two words: “Hi Dad.”
Loyal had taken no role in making it happen. As Nancy’s son, Ron, put it: “The way she [told] it was that he was happy to adopt her, but that she would need to ask to be adopted. That had to be her desire, her choice, and she needed to make the request. I’m not sure exactly how that went, but that seems a little bit cold to me.” Loyal’s hesitation stemmed not from a lack of affection but rather from his sense of propriety. He wrote later that adopting Nancy was something he had wished for “very much but was somewhat hesitant to institute the proceeding because her father and paternal grandmother were alive.”
The timing of all of this, and precisely how it unfolded, remain vague. Her brother, Dick, told me she was adopted when she was sixteen, which suggests it was around the latter half of 1937 or the first half of 1938. In Girls Latin yearbooks, her name changed from Nancy Robbins to Nancy Davis between her freshman and sophomore years. That puts it at an earlier point, somewhere around 1936. Her adoption petition was not filed in Cook County until later, on April 19, 1938, according to Kitty Kelley’s book.
So, her adoption does not appear to have happened as quickly or cleanly as she later claimed it did. What is clear is how badly she yearned for her bond with Loyal to be legally recognized and how slow he was in embracing the idea. She had been living under his roof for at least six years, and possibly close to nine, before her stepfather granted what Nancy wanted more than anything else and claimed her as his daughter. Her attachment to Loyal, her need for the security that came with belonging to him, foreshadowed the intensity of what Nancy would one day feel for Ronnie, though the two most important men in her life were different in nearly every way. The stepfather she held in awe was a prickly figure—a man of high professional standards and inflexible personal ones. Once, over dinner, she asked him what he thought happiness was. Loyal told her: “Nancy, the answer to happiness is almost twenty-five hundred years old, and it’s basically what the Greeks said. It’s the pursuit of excellence in all aspects of one’s life.”
From the beginning of their life together, Nancy had spent as much time as she could at Loyal’s side. She accompanied him on visits with patients in Joliet and other towns near Chicago. When she was in her teens, Loyal permitted her to watch from a glassed-in balcony as he performed brain surgery. “My father seemed to perform miracles,” she said.
Her stepbrother, Dick, was a frequent visitor during Nancy’s early years in Chicago and moved in permanently when his mother, Loyal’s first wife, Pearl, died of tuberculosis in 1939. As Nancy had, Dick saw his new blended family as the storybook ending to a sad, unsettled chapter of his childhood. “I hate to say it, but I didn’t care for my biological mother at all. I really didn’t have a mother. She drank a lot,” he told me. Dick ran away from home several times.
When he first met his stepsister, the forlorn little boy looked with envy on the life that Nancy was living in Chicago and the affection that his father showered on her. “My first memory of Nancy was probably when she was in the third or fourth grade,” Dick recalled. “In those days, she wore a school uniform: tunic, knee socks, and a beret. At the beginning of the school year, my father and I would walk her to the corner of the drive and get her off to school. She had a bouncy gait, was very vivacious, and was a happy child. She would speak to everyone on the way.
“With each step, the tunic, which was too short, would sort of pop up in the air, and we’d see her bloomers. Father would say, ‘Richard, Nancy has on those dreadful navy-blue bloomers, doesn’t she?’ and I would dutifully agree. And then he’d say, with a
