May commencement ceremonies for the 408 women of the Smith College class of 1943 were somber and spare. Bowing to shortages and to the national mood, the college dispensed with the gayest of its traditions. There was no parade of colorfully dressed alumnae waving placards with witty slogans, no procession of juniors with a train of ivy on their shoulders, no roses carried by the seniors. Attendance was limited to parents and families of the graduates, who had to stay in the dorms because there was nowhere else to house them. Loyal, still stationed in Europe, did not make it back for the ceremony; nor, apparently, could Edie, because of wartime travel restrictions that gave priority on trains to military personnel. The college did broadcast a special program from Smith president Herbert Davis’s house. “The class of 1943 did not go, as commencement orators used to be fond of saying, out into the world. For four years, they have participated, as students, in a world at war,” the announcer said. “They are not leaving the little world for the great world; they have lived in the great world all along.”
On graduation day, about twenty-five members of Nancy’s class were already married, and a greater number were engaged to be. She herself was dating a wealthy Amherst College boy off and on. Just over a year later, in June 1944, Nancy announced her plans to marry James Platt White Jr., who by then was stationed on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific. “The young couple met during their college days and renewed their friendship when Navy orders took Lieutenant White to Chicago,” the city’s Daily News noted. “Both brunette, they made an attractive couple at parties and benefits during the year in which he was stationed in Chicago on the aircraft carrier Sable.” When her godmother Nazimova was introduced to Nancy’s fiancé over dinner, he made a strong impression. Nazimova wrote in her diary: “I think I met one of our great future statesmen, perhaps even a president.”
Their intention was to be married when the war ended, but Nancy abruptly canceled the engagement shortly after it was announced. “It was a heady, exhilarating time, and I was swept up in the glamour of the war, wartime engagements, and waiting for the boys who were away. I realized I had made a mistake. It would have been unfair to him and to me. It wasn’t easy to break off the engagement, but it was the best thing for us both. We were not meant to be married, but we remain friends,” she wrote in her 1980 memoir.
Her brother has a different explanation: when White came home on leave, Nancy discovered he was homosexual. White “was extremely handsome and was a naval aviator, and they had, sort of, a rendezvous or a pre-engagement party in California, when she found out he was gay,” Dick Davis told me. This discovery was not something Nancy ever discussed with her stepbrother. “Edith told me, actually. Edith would know things like that, you know, about everybody,” he said.
After Nancy became a nationally known political figure, her past romantic life was a sensitive subject. Dick said she “went to great trouble when she got to the White House” to make sure that no one ever learned the truth about the breakup of her first engagement. White, who became a partner in a New York City importing firm, was discreetly silent about their long-ago betrothal. “All I can tell you, all I will tell you, is that Nancy was a lovely, lovely girl. It was just one of those wartime things,” he told Parade magazine in one rare interview. When White became seriously ill, he got in touch with the nation’s first lady indirectly through her friend Jerry Zipkin, a fixture on the New York City social scene who was also gay. It was through Zipkin that Nancy learned White had died.
From the time she was a young woman, many of Nancy’s closest friends were gay. “Nancy’s affinity for homosexual men has been frequently remarked upon, but it would hardly have been so noteworthy if she had stayed in show business instead of marrying an actor who went into politics. She was close to a number of lesbian and bisexual women over the years, starting with her godmother and her circle of friends, but this, too, is not unusual in the entertainment world,” biographer Colacello noted. “If gay men were attracted to the young Nancy Davis, it was probably for the same reasons that straight men were: she was pretty, lively, well dressed, a good dancer, a great listener, and, like her mother, a natural-born coquette. She knew how to flirt with a man in a way that was flattering and unthreatening, which may explain why gay men felt especially comfortable with her. And when she was out with a man, she gave him her full attention.”
Having broken her engagement in the summer of 1944, Nancy once again found herself confronting an uncertain, unmoored future. She had returned to Chicago after her graduation to be with her mother while Loyal remained overseas. Edie had temporarily sublet the Lake Shore Drive apartment and moved into the Drake Hotel, no doubt to lift some of the strain on their finances. Nancy looked for ways to fill her days. She joined the Chicago Junior League and
