Nancy’s initial plan had been to spend a year or two at Smith and then head toward the allure and excitement of the theater. Unless and until the right man came along. But Loyal, whose own education had changed his destiny, insisted she stay and earn her degree. She did what she was told, but not with much enthusiasm or aptitude for academics. “She’d come back from Smith at Christmas, and she was not a good student at all,” recalled her stepbrother, Dick. “As a senior at Smith—and I being a senior at the Latin School—I’d do her physics problems for her, which amused everybody.” In her 1980 autobiography, Nancy acknowledged, “I had a terrible time with science and math. My mind just did not seem to function correctly for these subjects.”
Her roommate during the first two years was Jean Wescott, her good friend from Girls Latin. They lived steps from the center of campus, on the first floor of Talbot House, which had a cozy living room and a big front porch. Nancy studied on the banks of picturesque Paradise Pond and “gorged myself with the blueberry muffins at Wiggins Tavern.” At night, when peanut butter and jelly sandwiches were set out at the dorm, Nancy took three. Her weight shot up to 143 pounds, adding to her already plump five-foot-four-inch frame and prompting Loyal to insist that she watch her diet—which she did, strenuously, for the rest of her life. Her weight and eating habits would become a visible barometer of her anxiety level, dropping sharply if she was feeling under stress. As first lady, Nancy claimed to be a reasonably healthy 106 pounds, but there were persistent rumors that she was anorexic, as well as a legend that she chewed each bite thirty-two times. (Reporters who watched her at meals were known to count under their breaths.) Nancy was also self-conscious about her thick legs—she would later be devastated by a catty journalist who referred to them as “piano legs”—and exercised regularly to trim them.
Even for the sheltered women of Smith, the horrors that were taking place across the ocean were impossible to ignore. Just three weeks before Nancy’s first day of classes her freshman year, Adolf Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Poland’s allies England and France declared war on Germany two days later. Then Hitler took Denmark and Norway in the spring of 1940. Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg fell shortly after that, and by June 1940, France was occupied by the Germans.
When Nancy returned to Northampton for her sophomore year, the United States was torn over whether to join the allied forces in the cause of stopping the German military. According to a recollection in the Smith College yearbook, “This was the year we sold carnations for Britain one day and gardenias for Peace Day the next. Fortunately, this detachment kept the war from our well-ordered lives.” But by the spring semester of 1941, with England bravely carrying on the fight but teetering on the brink of defeat, “the question of our responsibility intruded itself more and more. Drinking champagne at the Tavern was uncomfortably reminiscent of the luxurious appointments of the Maginot Line,” the lavish fortifications that had given France a false sense of security.
With all the darkness in the news, there were still diversions. One afternoon Nancy and her friends cut class to watch a murder trial that was going on at the Hampshire County Courthouse. The defendant was a man who had caught his wife with a lover and killed him. “We were all terribly excited about it,” Nancy told a reporter forty years later. “I imagined that the wife was going to look like Carole Lombard and the husband would resemble Clark Gable. But when this fat, unattractive couple walked in, it sort of lost its excitement.”
The Smith yearbooks from those years carry no mention of Nancy receiving academic distinctions or honors. Nor are there indications that she was a leader in campus activities. But she kept a busy social life. “She was very pretty and popular and always had men come calling,” recalled Frances Hawley Greene, Nancy’s roommate her junior and senior years. “She had boyfriends at Amherst, Yale, Princeton, and Dartmouth, and she used to go away quite often at weekends.”
Her calendar was just as full during breaks from school, some of which were spent in sunny Phoenix, where Loyal and Edie started going to escape the midwestern winters. A Chicago Tribune photo from March 1940 shows Nancy in a sarong with a flower in her hair, fixing what would later become famous as “the gaze” on an heir to the Wrigley chewing gum fortune. “Miss Nancy Davis and Wrigley Offield were two young Chicagoans at the South Seas party given recently by Mr. Offield’s brother-in-law and sister, Mr. and Mrs. Denis E. Sullivan, Jr., at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix,” the caption said. “Miss Nancy is spending her spring vacation from Smith with her parents, Dr. and Mrs. Loyal Davis, at the desert hotel.”
Her most serious beau was a Princeton student named Frank Birney, the rich, handsome son of a Chicago banker. They had met at Nancy’s debutante party, where Birney had been the first member of the Triangle Club to show up. He had sensed her nervousness about her big event and put her at ease by going
