Exuberance alone, however, was not going to win Edie acceptance into Chicago’s elite circles. During the early years after she married Loyal, she had not fit in well with the stuffy doctors’ wives at Northwestern University’s Passavant Memorial Hospital, where wealthy Chicagoans went for their medical care. The city’s social order was not as airtight as that of New York or Boston, but being an actress still carried a whiff of disrepute. Nancy once came upon her mother sobbing in a bedroom after Edie had overheard another woman making a catty remark about her.
Edie found her opening by becoming an organizer and indefatigable fund-raiser for charity. The society pages carried regular tidbits about Edie’s work as president of the Women’s Faculty Club, where she held card parties for the Northwestern medical school’s free clinic, and her role in a $100,000 campaign for Herbert Hoover’s Finnish relief effort. During World War II, she put out a public appeal for donations of chocolate cake, chewing gum, and cigarettes for the soldiers coming through the Red Cross Canteen that she helped run. In 1946 Edie led a force of twenty thousand doorbell-ringing women raising money for the Chicago Community Fund. Two years later, she chaired the women’s division of the local American Brotherhood campaign, a drive by the National Conference of Christians and Jews “to further interracial and interfaith amity.” She also became a regular on the city’s best-dressed lists and in 1952 was proclaimed Chicago’s “Sweetest Woman of the Year.”
Some early accounts of Edie’s endeavors included mentions of her young daughter. A photo of fourteen-year-old Nancy appeared in the November 10, 1935, edition of the Chicago Tribune, with the caption “Miss Nancy Davis is the daughter of Mrs. Loyal Davis, who is interested in the success of the ball the alumni of Northwestern University will give Friday at the Drake hotel in celebration of the university’s 80th anniversary. Miss Davis will attend the ball.”
Through all of this, Edie showed her characteristic knack for ingratiating herself with the right people. “I think if you wanted to put it in cruel terms, she was a social climber,” her stepson, Dick, told me. “My father was not part of the Chicago establishment, but Edith made it a point to cultivate a friendship of—for instance, Narcissa Thorne. She was Montgomery Ward, very respected, an old Chicago dame. Edith cultivated all of these important women in Chicago and got them on the board of the hospital. My father would object to Edith having dinner parties. She had to force him to have dinner parties and entertain these ‘important people.’ ”
Among Edie’s closest confidants was Colleen Moore, the woman she had met at that long-ago party in New York where Edie was carting around her baby. Moore had been among the most famous actresses of the silent-movie era. Her bobbed hair and short skirts helped launch the flapper craze; as the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald once put it, Moore was the torch that lit the “flaming youth” of the 1920s. In 1932 Moore married her third husband, Chicago stockbroker Homer Hargrave Sr., and moved to the Gold Coast, where she and Edie renewed their friendship. Moore and Edie talked nearly every day; Nancy would later name Colleen the godmother of her first child, Patti. Moore was both wealthy and whimsical. At the depths of the Depression, she spent nearly a half million dollars to build an eight-square-foot dollhouse, known as the Fairy Castle. Exquisitely detailed, it stood almost six feet tall. Moore employed nearly a hundred people to construct it.
While Edie was forging a new life in Chicago, she kept up her old connections as well. Her friends from the theater were constantly coming through town. In those days, show people regularly crossed the country by rail between Hollywood and New York, with a stop in Chicago. Many rode in on the luxurious Santa Fe Super Chief, which was known as “the train of the stars.” Nancy’s godmother, Nazimova, was one such visitor in transit. After a railroad breakdown forced the fading silent-screen star to spend twenty-four hours with the Davises in Chicago in 1940, Nazimova wrote to her longtime lover, actress Glesca Marshall, that eighteen-year-old Nancy was “extraordinarily beautiful, Doodie, and the face which has every right to be bold and assertive has instead a soft dreamy quality. And add to this a figure of ‘oomph!’ You’d go crazy about the child.”
Boldface names were a regular sight at the Davis apartment. “When I came home from school in the afternoon, it wasn’t unusual to find Mary Martin in the living room, or Spencer Tracy reading the newspaper, or the breathtaking Lillian Gish curled up on the sofa, talking with Mother,” Nancy said. “Spencer Tracy stayed with us so often that he became practically a member of the family.”
Indeed, it said something of Edie’s diplomatic skills that she managed to maintain a friendship with Tracy’s wife, Louise, while also cultivating his costar and paramour Katharine Hepburn, with whom the actor began a celebrated quarter-century-long affair in 1941. Nancy’s scrapbook includes news clippings of her mother out and about with both women at various times in Chicago. One item notes: “Spencer Tracy’s daughter Susie had her first date here in Chicago last week. Mrs. Loyal Davis, the Tracys’ hostess, asked Carl G. Leigh Jr. to arrange a date for just-16 Susie.… Miss T, as Mrs. Davis has nicknamed her, wore a small blue and white checked suit and navy blue and white spectator shoes. Her brown hair is cut short. She cut the bangs in front herself.”
There was a darker side to those frequent visits by Tracy. He was among the most beloved movie idols of his day, the Oscar-winning star of Boys Town and Captains Courageous. What his legions of fans did not know was that Tracy was a violent alcoholic who occasionally needed a discreet place to recover from his benders. It was Loyal and Edie to whom he sometimes turned. Loyal, chief of surgery
