Nancy and Loyal often spoke to each other in pig Latin, treating the made-up language as their secret code. When she was fifteen years old, her brother recalled, Nancy still sat on Loyal’s lap. She nestled there as the family listened to the 1936 radio broadcast in which King Edward VIII of Great Britain abdicated his throne to marry the woman he loved, twice-divorced Wallis Simpson, a commoner from America.
Nancy “was a flirt, no doubt about that,” Nancy’s mother told author Anne Edwards. “Aren’t all little girls? She always tried to get Loyal’s attention, and he responded. Why wouldn’t he?”
There was another reason Loyal and Nancy were so close. In temperament, she was more like her straitlaced adoptive father than like her effervescent biological mother. Her sense of propriety matched his, and she worked hard to win his approval. “He wanted me to earn his love,” she once told her daughter, Patti, as though the parental bond were subject to some sort of initiation rite. “He wanted to be sure that I was serious about it. So I did everything he wanted. I never disobeyed him.”
Among Nancy’s personal papers at the Reagan Library is an undated, typewritten note from Loyal about some unmentioned infraction she had committed. He apparently slipped the missive into her room after she had gone to sleep. “Nancy dear,” he began, “I am sorry too that you had a little lapse of memory. We won’t do that again, will we? You must always be the ladylike Nancy that you really are, regardless of what other little girls with whom you play do or say.
“Night big boy. Sleep tight. I’ll wake you in the morning when I leave.”
He signed it “Doctor Loyal,” which was the name that Nancy continued to call him after he adopted her. “I knew he would have loved it if I had called him Dad, and in retrospect I wish I had,” Nancy said. “But at the time, I just couldn’t.”
Even after Nancy left for college, her father remained her center of gravity, her primary source of the reassurance she craved. The Reagan Library files contain another letter from Loyal, postmarked December 6, 1939. That was surely a time of both excitement and stress for Nancy. She was adjusting to her first semester at Smith while preparing to make her debut in Chicago a few weeks later. In it, Loyal seems to be trying to soothe some angst on her part:
Nance dearest,
We’ve both left unsaid a number of things that each of us knew to be true and fully understood. I’m sure you know I love you, but I’m afraid I haven’t told you so enough.
I’m repaid more than enough by your love and respect which you’ve given me and by knowing you are honest, frank, direct and dependable. These are things which many of us have to acquire in later years, but you have them already. There has never been, and will not be ever, any question in my mind that you are trying to do a good job.
Lots and lots of love dearest
“Poppy”
Nancy’s attachment to and reverence for Loyal would beget one of the enduring myths about Ronald Reagan. It would often be said, mostly by Ronnie’s friends from Hollywood, that Nancy and her father influenced the future president’s conversion from Franklin D. Roosevelt–worshiping union leader to a hard-Right, anti-Communist, antitax crusader. There is no real evidence that was true. Ronnie “was already moving to the right before he met her. He was sitting at the Brown Derby complaining how it made no sense to make more than one or two movies a year because of the ninety percent marginal tax rate,” said columnist George Will, who became a confidant of Nancy’s. “The idea that she turned Ronald Reagan, that’s just one of the myriad ways people had of saying Reagan was a cardboard figure, whereas the more you learn about Ronald Reagan from his diaries and all the rest, the more you realize he was very much his own man and a tough politician.”
Though Loyal was rock-hard in his conservatism, and always voted the Republican ticket, he rarely got involved in electoral politics. One exception was in 1940, when he served on the National Committee of Physicians for Wendell W. Willkie for President. The ostensibly nonpartisan organization supported the GOP nominee against Roosevelt, whom it accused of trying to engineer a government takeover of medicine. On the other hand, both Loyal and Edie were close friends with the Democratic politicians who ran Chicago. And Loyal accepted with good humor the fact that his own vote was always canceled out by that of his ardently Democratic wife. “If he had any real interest in politics, I wasn’t aware of it. And I know that he didn’t influence Ronnie’s views,” Nancy insisted. “In fact, when Ronnie first decided to go into politics, my father cringed at the prospect of his beloved son-in-law stepping into what he called ‘a sea of sharks.’ ”
What fascinated Ronnie most about his father-in-law was Loyal’s deep knowledge of medicine. “A friend would mention a disease, and Reagan could recall word for word what Loyal Davis said would be the progression of it,” recalled Michael Deaver, the aide who was personally closest to both of the Reagans. The only major policy question on which Ronnie is believed to have consulted Loyal was whether to legalize abortion. The issue came up early in his governorship, in 1967, when the legislature presented him with a bill that would give California the most liberal state abortion law in the nation. Loyal helped convince his son-in-law to sign the measure, according to Reagan biographer Cannon.
Loyal did speak up publicly—and showed courage—on other salient, politically charged issues, but they generally had to do with controversies that were roiling his own profession. As early as 1953, more than a decade before a landmark surgeon general’s report identified cigarette smoking as a cause of cancer, he was
