Nancy Reagan
Nancy Davis Reagan was an American actress who was First Lady of the United States from 1981 to 1989. She was the second wife of Ronald Reagan, the 40th president of the United States.
Reagan was born in New York City. After her parents separated, she lived in Maryland with an aunt and uncle for six years. When her mother remarried in 1929, she moved to Chicago and was adopted by her mother's second husband. As Nancy Davis, she was a Hollywood actress in the 1940s and 1950s, starring in films such as The Next Voice You Hear..., Night into Morning, and Donovan's Brain. In 1952, she married Ronald Reagan, who was then president of the Screen Actors Guild. He had two children from his previous marriage to Jane Wyman, and he and Nancy had two children together. Nancy Reagan was the first lady of California when her husband was governor from 1967 to 1975, and she began to work with the Foster Grandparents Program.
Reagan became First Lady of the United States in January 1981, following her husband's victory in the 1980 presidential election. Early in his first term, she was criticized largely due to her decisions both to replace the White House china, which had been paid for by private donations, and to accept free clothing from fashion designers. She championed opposition to recreational drug use when she founded the "Just Say No" drug awareness campaign, considered her major initiative as First Lady, although it received substantial criticism for stigmatizing poor communities affected by the crack epidemic. More discussion of her role ensued following a 1988 revelation that she had consulted an astrologer to assist in planning the president's schedule after the attempted assassination of her husband in 1981. She generally had a strong influence on her husband and played a role in a few of his personnel and diplomatic decisions.
The couple returned to their home in Bel Air, Los Angeles, California, after leaving the White House. Reagan devoted most of her time to caring for her husband, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1994, until his death at the age of 93 on June 5, 2004. Reagan remained active within the Reagan Library and in politics, particularly in support of embryonic stem cell research, until her death from congestive heart failure at age 94 in 2016. She gained high approval ratings in later life for her devotion to her husband in his final illness.
Early life and education
Anne Frances Robbins was born in Manhattan on July 6, 1921, but throughout her life she told others she was born in 1923. Her parents were used car salesman Kenneth Robbins and actress Edith Luckett. The actress Alla Nazimova was her godmother. She was named Anne after her great-great-great-grandmother, but her mother took to calling her "Nancy" until that became the name she was known by. Robbins lived her first two years in Flushing, a neighborhood in Queens, in a two-story house on Roosevelt Avenue between 149th and 150th Streets.Robbins' parents split in 1923 when her mother decided to return to acting and the couple could not agree on where to live. Her father removed himself from her life, and her mother resumed work as a stage actress. Robbins was placed with her mother's sister, Virginia Galbraith, in Bethesda, Maryland, along with her uncle and cousin. She attended Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C. Robbins missed her mother while living with her aunt, and they made trips to New York so she could see her mother perform on stage. She emulated her mother by wearing makeup and pretending to be an actress. Robbins' parents finalized their divorce in 1928. Later analysis of her life has focused on this unstable family environment as a reason why she held marriage as a life goal.
Robbins's mother remarried in 1929, giving her a stepfather at age seven. Loyal Davis was a neurosurgeon, and the family moved to Chicago together where she formed a close bond with her stepfather. She would always refer to him as her father. She also had a stepbrother but did not develop a close relationship with him. She attended Girls' Latin School in Chicago, where she involved in Drama Club, field hockey, and student government. In her senior year, she had the lead role in the school play First Lady.
Having a wealthy neurosurgeon as a stepfather meant a comfortable childhood where Robbins lived beyond the means of most Americans, and the family socialized in high society. Her mother's career also meant that Robbins had regular interactions with famous actors of the day, especially with their family friends Katharine Hepburn, Walter Huston, and Spencer Tracy. Her stepfather's conservative beliefs were a strong influence on her own politics.
Robbins was adopted by her stepfather at age fourteen, and she changed her legal name to Nancy Davis. In 1939, Davis left Girls' Latin School and began attending Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she studied English and drama. Among her instructors was Federal Theatre Project director Hallie Flanagan. Davis was a debutante that December, where she met Frank Birney, who kept introducing himself to her under different names to make her comfortable. They were eventually engaged, but he was struck by a train and killed before they were married.
Davis graduated from Smith College in 1943. She took a job as a sales clerk at Marshall Field's in Chicago, but she left the job before long and volunteered as a nurse's aide.
Acting career
Davis moved to New York to work as an actress and model under the tutelage of Walter Huston and Spencer Tracy. This began when family friend ZaSu Pitts got her a role in the play Ramshackle Inn on Broadway in 1945. She had a total of three lines. Although the play closed soon after, she followed it with a role in Lute Song. Davis dated Clark Gable for one week, which brought her a higher public profile.In 1940, a young Davis had appeared as a National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis volunteer in a memorable short subject film shown in movie theaters to raise donations for the crusade against polio. The Crippler featured a sinister figure spreading over playgrounds and farms, laughing over its victims, until finally dispelled by the volunteer. It was very effective in raising contributions.
She landed the role of Si-Tchun, a lady-in-waiting, in the 1946 Broadway musical about the Orient, Lute Song, starring Mary Martin and a pre-fame Yul Brynner. The show's producer told her, "You look like you could be Chinese."
Davis went to Hollywood in 1949 when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer asked her to participate in a screen test. Her mother worked with Tracy to get director George Cukor to evaluate the test. They gave her a seven-year contract and was paid $250 per week. She went on to appear in eleven films, including The Doctor and the Girl, East Side, West Side, Night into Morning, It's a Big Country, and Donovan's Brain. She was generally well-received but did not achieve mainstream success. These appearances generally typecast her as a wife and mother.
Davis played a child psychiatrist in the film noir Shadow on the Wall with Ann Sothern and Zachary Scott; her performance was called "beautiful and convincing" by New York Times critic A. H. Weiler. She co-starred in 1950's The Next Voice You Hear..., playing a pregnant housewife who hears the voice of God from her radio. Influential reviewer Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote that "Nancy Davis delightful as gentle, plain, and understanding wife." MGM released Davis from her contract in 1952; she sought a broader range of parts, but also married Reagan, keeping her professional name as Davis, and had her first child that year. She soon starred in the science fiction film Donovan's Brain ; Crowther said that Davis, playing the role of a possessed scientist's "sadly baffled wife", "walked through it all in stark confusion" in an "utterly silly" film. In her next-to-last movie, Hellcats of the Navy, she played nurse Lieutenant Helen Blair, and appeared in a film for the only time with her husband, playing what one critic called "a housewife who came along for the ride". Another reviewer, however, stated that Davis plays her part satisfactorily, and "does well with what she has to work with".
Author Garry Wills has said that Davis was generally underrated as an actress because her constrained part in Hellcats was her most widely seen performance. In addition, Davis downplayed her Hollywood goals: promotional material from MGM in 1949 said that her "greatest ambition" was to have a "successful happy marriage"; decades later, in 1975, she would say, "I was never really a career woman but only because I hadn't found the man I wanted to marry. I couldn't sit around and do nothing, so I became an actress." Ronald Reagan biographer Lou Cannon nevertheless characterized her as a "reliable" and "solid" performer who held her own in performances with better-known actors. After her final film, Crash Landing, Davis appeared for a brief time as a guest star in television dramas, such as the Zane Grey Theatre episode "The Long Shadow", where she played opposite Ronald Reagan, as well as Wagon Train and The Tall Man, until she retired as an actress in 1962.
During her career, Davis served for nearly ten years on the board of directors of the Screen Actors Guild. Decades later, Albert Brooks attempted to coax her out of acting retirement by offering her the title role opposite himself in his 1996 film Mother. She declined in order to care for her husband, and Debbie Reynolds played the part.
Marriage and family
During her Hollywood career, Davis dated many actors, including Clark Gable, Robert Stack, and Peter Lawford; she later called Gable the nicest of the stars she had met.Davis met the president of the Screen Actors Guild, Ronald Reagan, on November 15, 1949. According to Davis, she had the meeting arranged after she discovered her name was on the Hollywood blacklist. They met for dinner where he explained that she was being confused with another Nancy Davis. The exact nature of their meeting has been disputed, with some biographers arguing that she was already well-connected enough to address the issue or that they had met in other circumstances entirely. She later said that meeting him was the moment her life began. Although Ronald was hesitant to begin a relationship following his divorce from Jane Wyman, he started dating Davis. They were not exclusive at first, and Ronald continued seeing other women in the early period of their relationship. Their relationship was the subject of many gossip columns; one Hollywood press account described their nightclub-free times together as "the romance of a couple who have no vices".
Both of the Reagans had experiences with frequent moving and instability during their childhoods and strained relationships with their fathers. They were contrasted by their personalities, as Ronald was an optimist while Nancy was a pessimist. Ronald's gregariousness and his status as a self-made man are cited as reasons for Nancy's attraction to him. There's disagreement among historians as to whether Nancy or Ronald influenced the other in a rightward political shift, or whether they both already held strong conservative political views when they met.
After three years of dating, they eventually decided to marry while discussing the issue in the couple's favorite booth at Chasen's, a restaurant in Beverly Hills.
Ronald and Nancy Reagan married in Los Angeles on March 4, 1952. William Holden and Brenda Marshall were the only wedding guests. Upon their marriage, Ronald's children Maureen and Michael became Nancy's stepchildren. They honeymooned in Phoenix, Arizona.
After their marriage, Ronald began working as a traveling spokesman for General Electric and host of the General Electric Theater drama series. Though Nancy occasionally traveled with Ronald and acted in General Electric Theater, they spent large amounts of time apart as she tended to their children. Nancy had her daughter Patti on October 22, 1952, and her son Ron on May 20, 1958. Ronald's success meant they were able to buy a home in the Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, where she bonded with other wives of influential men, including Betsy Bloomingdale, Marion Jorgensen, and Mary Jane Wick. Nancy spent much of her time raising the children, and she served on the school board. She appeared in two more films during this period, Hellcats of the Navy and Crash Landing, as well as some appearances on television shows. She officially retired from acting in 1962.
File:Reagan wedding - Holden - 1952.jpg|thumb|Matron of honor Brenda Marshall and best man William Holden, sole guests at the Reagans' wedding, flank the newlywed couple
The Reagans' relationships with their children grew strained as they dedicated more of their time to politics. They also did not know how to handle their children's sympathy toward the counterculture of the 1960s.
Observers described Nancy and Ronald's relationship as intimate. As president and first lady, the Reagans were reported to display their affection frequently, with one press secretary noting, "They never took each other for granted. They never stopped courting." Ronald often called Nancy "Mommy"; she called him "Ronnie". While the president was recuperating in the hospital after the 1981 assassination attempt, Nancy wrote in her diary, "Nothing can happen to my Ronnie. My life would be over." In a letter to Nancy, Ronald wrote, "whatever I treasure and enjoy... all would be without meaning if I didn't have you." In 1998, a few years after her husband had been given a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease, Nancy told Vanity Fair, "Our relationship is very special. We were very much in love and still are. When I say my life began with Ronnie, well, it's true. It did. I can't imagine life without him." Nancy was known for the focused and attentive look, termed "the Gaze", that she fastened upon her husband during his speeches and appearances.
President Reagan's death in June 2004 ended what Charlton Heston called "the greatest love affair in the history of the American Presidency".
Nancy frequently quarreled with her biological children and her stepchildren, and was estranged from all of them at various points, as was Ronald. Her relationship with Patti was the most contentious; Patti flouted American conservatism, rebelled against her parents by joining the nuclear freeze movement, and authored many anti-Reagan books. Patti became estranged from her parents. Soon after her father's Alzheimer's disease was diagnosed, Patti and her mother reconciled and began to speak on a daily basis. Nancy's disagreements with Michael were also public matters; in 1984, she was quoted as saying that the two were in an "estrangement right now". Michael responded that Nancy was trying to cover up for the fact she had not met his daughter, Ashley, who had been born nearly a year earlier. They too eventually made peace. Nancy was thought to be "closest" to her stepdaughter Maureen during the White House years, but earned a reputation for being a poor mother.