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As a boss, the First Lady is a stern taskmaster. Behind her back, some underlings mockingly call her Nana. When traveling, she has members of the entourage paged at restaurants to ask trivial questions, and phones them at home with petty requests. Even Deaver is cowed by the First Lady: last year, having incompletely quit smoking, he felt obliged to hide his cigarettes from her. A West Wing official who gets along well with her admits that she is sometimes charmless with her subordinates. "She is a demanding person in that she knows what she wants, she wants the best and she wants it right now," says the presidential aide. "If there's a fault in there, it's that she doesn't take the time to coax things out of people. She demands." "She does get obsessive about detail," says Son Ron. "That is part of her personality. It's like her worrying." Naturally, she is most obsessive and fretful about the President. "She is fiercely loyal to my father," says their son. "I think it has a lot to do with the fact that she comes from a somewhat broken home."
The home was broken, not just somewhat. Anne Frances Robbins, soon nicknamed Nancy, was born in 1921 in Manhattan. Her parents, Car Salesman Kenneth Robbins and Actress Edith ("Lucky") Luckett, split up the same year. Edith felt she had to go on the road to earn a living, so the toddler was deposited just outside Washington, in Bethesda, Md., to live with her Aunt Virginia's family. In 1929, Edith was married for the second time, to a Chicagoan named Loyal Davis, and reclaimed her seven-year-old child.
For Nancy Davis, suddenly the stepdaughter of a socially esteemed Lake Shore Drive surgeon, the Depression was a happy time of summer camp and nice clothes. She played field hockey and went on vacations with doting family friends; Actor Walter Huston was the most memorable. Nancy loved Davis, and wanted to be adopted legally. In the mid-1930s, during a family trip to New York, the teen-age Nancy tracked down Kenneth Robbins and had him sign away his parental rights. "He was my father, but I somehow never could think of him that way," she wrote in Nancy, her 1980 autobiography. Says President Reagan: "She is very protective, with an intense family loyalty that grew out of her own rearing in the doctor's family."
The 17-year-old Nancy Davis sounds quite like the 63-year-old Nancy Reagan. In her debutante year, according to the high school yearbook, "Nancy's social perfection is a constant source of amazement. She is invariably becomingly and suitably dressed." At Smith she majored in drama and dated a lot. Her best beau, a Princeton boy, was struck and killed by a New York-bound train a week after the U.S. entered World War II.