Holden and his wife, Ardis, were the only witnesses.Īfter their marriage, the Reagans bought a house in the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles, where their daughter, Patricia Ann, was born - “a bit precipitously,” Mrs. Reagan and Nancy Davis were married on March 4, 1952, at a private ceremony at the Little Brown Church in the Valley, in Studio City. Reagan began having dinner every Monday night after the meetings, often with the actor William Holden, the guild vice president, according to Mr. Miss Davis had been accepted on the board of the Screen Actors Guild, and she and Mr. But they began seeing each other again in 1950.
Reagan and Miss Davis drifted apart and dated others.
Reagan still hoped for a reconciliation with his first wife, the actress Jane Wyman, who had divorced him in 1948.Īfter dating several times in the fall of 1949, Mr. According to Bob Colacello, who has written extensively about the Reagans, Mr. Reagan, recovering from multiple leg fractures suffered in a charity baseball game, was on crutches. The meeting took place over dinner at LaRue’s, a fashionable Hollywood restaurant on Sunset Strip. Cast as the socialite wife of a New York press baron, Miss Davis appeared in only two scenes, but they were with Miss Stanwyck, the film’s top star. Nonetheless, she was given a part in the film she had tested for, “East Side, West Side,” which was released in 1949 starring Barbara Stanwyck, James Mason and Ava Gardner. With the help of a friend, the actor Spencer Tracy, her mother then arranged a screen test given by the director George Cukor, of MGM.Ĭukor, according to his biographer, told the studio that Miss Davis lacked talent. After doing summer stock in New England, she landed a part in the Broadway musical “Lute Song,” with Mary Martin and Yul Brynner. Slender, with photogenic beauty and large, luminous eyes, she considered an acting career. Nancy Davis graduated from the elite Girls’ Latin School in Chicago and then from Smith College in 1943. Throughout the rest of her life, she described Dr. Luckett married a Chicago neurosurgeon, Loyal Davis, who adopted Nancy and gave her the family name.Īlmost overnight, Nancy Davis’s difficult childhood became stable and privileged. Miss Luckett resumed her stage career when her daughter was 2 and sent the child to live with relatives in Bethesda, Md. And I’ve had to do that sometimes - often.”īorn Anne Frances Robbins on July 6, 1921, in New York City, Nancy Davis was the daughter of Edith Luckett, an actress, and Kenneth Robbins, a car dealer who abandoned the family soon after her birth. But there are times when somebody has to step in and say something. “It’s hard to envision Ronnie as being a bad guy,” she said in a 1989 interview. Reagan to take a leading role in the Regan ouster and in other personnel matters in the White House. He didn’t worry at all, she wrote, “and I seem to do the worrying for both of us.” Reagan wrote in her memoirs that she sometimes became angry with her husband because of his relentless optimism. Whenever she’s out of sight, I’m a worrier about her.” “Never waking up bored? The only thing wrong is, she’s made a coward out of me. “How do you describe coming into a warm room from out of the cold?” he once said. “He was all I had ever wanted in a man, and more,” she wrote in “ My Turn: The Memoirs of Nancy Reagan,” published in 1989. In public, she gazed at him adoringly and portrayed herself as a contented wife who had willingly given up a Hollywood acting career of her own to devote herself to her husband’s career. Reagan did not wish to detract from her husband’s luster by appearing to be a power behind the presidential throne.
His wife, typically, neither sought nor received credit for the turnaround. On March 4, 1987, the president made a distanced apology for the arms sale in a nationally televised address that significantly improved his slumping public approval ratings. Reagan eventually conceded that she was right.
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