The marriage was effectively over by the time Nancy was born. Her father, by then selling cars in New Jersey, was not present at Sloane Hospital for her arrival. The delivery, by forceps, was botched, leaving the infant’s right eye shut. If it stayed that way for two weeks, a doctor warned Edie, Nancy might be partially blind. The new mother was furious and accused the physician of rushing the birth so that he could make the golf date she had heard him discussing just before they put her under. “If my little girl’s eye doesn’t open, so help me God, I’m going to kill you,” Edie told him. Nancy’s eye turned out to be fine, but the forceps left a small scar on the right side of her face that was visible for the rest of her life.
Motherhood did not slow down Edie or cramp her style. She asked her most famous friend, the great silent-movie star Alla Nazimova, to be the baby’s godmother. Though Nazimova is all but forgotten today, she was at one point the highest-paid actress in the world. She and Edie had been close from the time Nancy’s mother had played a small part as an unmarried pregnant passenger aboard a yacht in Nazimova’s 1917 Broadway play ’Ception Shoals.
The Crimea-born Nazimova—whom Nancy called “Zim”—had a wildly unconventional lifestyle. Nazimova made little secret of her sexual relationships with women, and was considered a founding mother of early Hollywood’s underground network of lesbian and bisexual actresses. Among its other members, it was said, were screen sirens such as Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. Those who knew what was going on in their closet called them “the sewing circle.”
There is no evidence that Nazimova and Edie were anything more than friends and confidants. But it is easy to see why the two of them got along. “Edith was a New Woman, a suffragist and careerist who refused to grow up female in the accepted sense,” Nazimova biographer Gavin Lambert wrote. “Although she chose acting as a means of self-advancement, her real talent was in the theatre of life.”
Edie ran with a crowd that included promising young actors Spencer Tracy and Walter Huston. She entertained at parties with tales of her life and pedigree, saying she had been raised on a Virginia plantation and attended an exclusive private school. None of that was true. Edie’s parents had moved to Washington from Virginia in 1872, before the first of their five children were born. Her father, Charles, was a shipping agent for the Adams Express Company on F Street, where he spent fifty-two years handling batches of money for the US Treasury and local banks. Edie, the baby of the family, attended the city’s public schools. Nonetheless, Nancy’s mother spoke with what Lambert described as “an almost absurdly refined Southern accent. She dropped her guard but not her accent to use four-letter words and tell breathtakingly dirty jokes.”
After she and her husband split, Edie had the additional imperative of earning a living for herself and her daughter. Nancy claimed she spent the first two years of her life as a “backstage baby,” being carted by her plucky, penniless mother to the theater and post-curtain-call parties. An often-repeated story of Nancy’s early years was how the famous actress Colleen Moore first spotted Edie at a fancy party on Long Island. “She was a beautiful blonde, and she had the biggest blue eyes you ever saw. And she was carrying a tiny baby in her arms,” Moore recalled. When Moore asked her host who this woman was and whether she always hauled that baby around, he told her: “She has no choice. She just got divorced, and she doesn’t have a penny.” Moore decided she must get to know this determined mother. They became friends for life.
The full truth, it would appear, made for less of a tender story. The arrival of an inconveniently timed baby did not fit with Edie’s plans. Her child took second place to pursuing her acting career and her busy social life. In 1982 Nancy received a letter and a set of photos from a woman named Katherine Carmichael, who wrote that she had been the future first lady’s live-in nanny. The letter suggests that Edie was not as financially strapped as her daughter said she was—and perhaps as Nancy had been led to believe. From the start, Edie left Nancy for extended periods in the care of others. “Your mother travelled at times in her work as an actress; I was in full charge of you when your mother was not there. I would wheel you to Central Park every day weather permitting, I would guess for over a year, and I loved it, you were a darling,” Carmichael recalled in the letter, which is among Nancy’s papers at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum. “I remember your mother was either going abroad or in a show touring this country, and you were being sent to Virginia with relatives. All these years I would often wonder about you, and finally came across a clipping in our Portland Maine newspaper and recognized your father and mother names. I was so glad to know how well you are doing.”
Though the accompanying photos are not in the file, it would appear from her response that Nancy recognized herself as the baby in the old images. She replied: “How nice of you to write and send
