That was not the only area in which Loyal was a thorn in the medical establishment and its way of doing business. He publicly declared that health insurance was no more than a license for doctors to overcharge. Fees, he believed, should be based, as his were, on patients’ ability to pay, with factors such as their income, other financial responsibilities, and number of children taken into consideration. When Nancy was first lady of California and later of the nation, she would from time to time get letters from people grateful for the life-saving treatment Loyal had provided them and their loved ones decades before. Often they mentioned how little he had charged them.
Nor did Loyal become any more popular among his fellow surgeons when he declared, at a November 1960 medical meeting in Montreal, that half the operations in the United States were performed by doctors not adequately trained in surgery. “How much of this type surgery is bungled no one knows, and not all of it results in disaster,” Loyal said. “Surgeons properly qualified by training and education encounter difficulties in performing operations, but the difference between the qualified and unqualified man is that the former is able to correct the error.” Loyal regularly referred to state licensing systems as “legalized mayhem.”
Time did not soften Loyal’s reputation for arrogance among his professional colleagues and the resentments he fostered in the interns he had traumatized. In 1975, more than a decade after Loyal had retired, a senior medical student named Cory Franklin found himself flustered and struggling through his final oral exam in surgery at Northwestern Medical School. He was sure he would fail. And then came a bewildering final question from the professor who was administering the test: “Who is Loyal Davis?”
Franklin confessed he had no clue.
“That’s the right answer!” the professor declared jubilantly. “That SOB thought everyone would remember him forever. I just love to hear students say they don’t know who he is.”
In the years when Loyal was rising professionally, medicine was a prestigious field. But it was no way to get rich—at least, not wealthy enough to afford a Lake Shore Drive standard of living, which for the Davises included having a live-in maid and cook. Loyal charged $500 for a brain operation, and less, if he thought a patient could not afford his standard fee. (Translated into 2020 dollars, $500 in the mid-1930s would have been somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000.) He got no compensation at all for his position as chairman of the Department of Surgery at Northwestern University’s medical school. Things for the Davises tightened financially when World War II began. Loyal was told that his skills were needed in the hospitals that the army was building in the European theater, and he shipped off as a lieutenant colonel consulting on neurological surgery. During the war, he developed a helmet that protected pilots from shrapnel wounds and advanced the treatment of high-altitude frostbite. He would be discharged from the army after a year, when he suffered a bout of amoebic dysentery and then developed a kidney stone.
Though Edie had given up the stage, she had continued—by necessity—to earn money. This had been the case from the beginning of the Davises’ marriage. Radio, which in the early 1930s was entering its heyday, offered the aging actress an opportunity to make a new turn. One of her lucrative gigs was on a popular national soap opera, Betty and Bob. Edie played two roles on the melodrama, switching back and forth between society matron May Drake, the mother of the main character, Bob, and Gardenia, his black maid. (“Sho is good tuh have you back, Mr. Bob.”)
Each workday, Edie would tuck her graying curls under a smart Bes-Ben hat, slip on white kid gloves, and head for the Wrigley Building studio, with a stop at a Merchandise Mart florist for a fresh corsage. She made it her business to have a word with everyone she regularly saw along the way, swapping stories and jokes with the Drake Hotel doorman and with the policeman directing traffic. “She knew them all, and they all knew her,” recalled Les Weinrott, who started writing for Betty and Bob in the summer of 1936. “It was not uncommon to be walking down Michigan Avenue with Edie and have a cabbie shout, ‘Hi, Miz Davis!’ ”
Edie was working at the CBS station WBBM in the 1940s when she met a twenty-four-year-old announcer named Mike Wallace, later famous for his penetrating interviews on 60 Minutes. Though she was old enough to be his mother, Edie and the new kid became buddies. “Edie was gregarious and high spirited and, at the time, the bawdiest woman I had ever met,” Wallace remembered. “I frequently ran into her in the station’s green room, where we all gravitated for coffee and gossip, and invariably, she would greet me with some choice obscenity and then proceed to relate, with lip-smacking glee, the latest dirty joke she had heard.” Wallace recalled Edie’s daughter, Nancy, as “a prim and proper young lady who often wore white gloves and Peter Pan collars. Although I didn’t know her well in those days, she struck me as being shy and reserved—almost the opposite
