Ronnie and Nancy (3 page)

In the case of those who had died, I was usually able to interview their children, several of whom worked on Ronald Reagan’s campaigns and, in two cases, in his White House.

Mostly in their seventies, eighties, and nineties, the surviving members of the Reagan Group were proud of their long association with Ronnie and Nancy, as they always called the Reagans, and were still jealous of one another’s closeness to them. They actually referred to themselves as the Group. “She wasn’t in the Group as early as some of us were,” said Betty Adams, who took credit for introducing Nancy Reagan to many of the women in the Group in 1958, referring to Erlenne Sprague, who said she 1 0

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House had sponsored Nancy’s membership in the Colleagues, the exclusive Los Angeles charity, in 1962. “There were a lot of Johnny-come-latelys,” Jean French Smith, the widow of the Kitchen Cabinet lawyer who became attorney general in the first Reagan administration, told me, “who say they were in the Kitchen Cabinet from the beginning but weren’t. If you turn off your tape recorder, I’ll tell you which ones.”

The Kitchen Cabinet—the term goes back to the gang of cronies who unofficially advised President Andrew Jackson—was led by three self-made multimillionaires, auto dealer Holmes Tuttle, oilman Henry Salvatori, and drugstore tycoon Justin Dart, all long gone. Alfred Bloomingdale, steel magnate Earle Jorgensen, and oil equipment manufacturer William Wilson, the husbands of Nancy Reagan’s three best friends, Betsy Bloomingdale, Marion Jorgensen, and Betty Wilson, were also in the inner circle. Somewhat removed but extremely influential were the Group’s only billionaire, Walter Annenberg, the owner of
TV Guide
and President Nixon’s ambassador to Great Britain, and his wife, Lee, who were based in Philadelphia but who spent several months each year in California.

Over the years, the Reagans and their friends came to resemble a court, and their social life, with its fixed calendar and closed guest list, took on the aura of ritual. Every Fourth of July these same couples trekked to the Santa Inez Mountains for Nancy Reagan’s birthday picnic at the Reagans’ Rancho del Cielo. Every New Year’s Eve they celebrated at Sunnylands, the Annenbergs’ palatial Palm Springs estate. Every New Year’s Day they went to Holmes and Virginia Tuttle’s bungalow on the grounds of the Eldorado Country Club. Every election night they watched the returns at the Jorgensens’ house in Bel Air. When President Reagan turned seventy in 1981

and seventy-five in 1986, his black-tie birthday parties at the White House were paid for by the Annenbergs, the Jorgensens, the Wilsons, and the Armand Deutsches, who were also longtime members of the Group. “We all stood up when Ronnie cut the cake,” recalled Harriet Deutsch, sitting in the screening room of their Beverly Hills house, surrounded by dozens of framed photographs of the Reagans and their friends. “Oh, he was so darling. The most loving, sweet man. I don’t think he has a mean bone in his body. And Nancy is a darling friend. When she is your friend.”

One of the advantages of taking a social approach in writing about the Reagans is that it highlights Nancy Reagan’s role—the importance of which cannot be overemphasized—in Ronald Reagan’s political career. As the pun-Le Cirque: 1981

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dit George Will once said, “Ronald Reagan has one best friend, and he married her.” I would go further: one cannot figure out Ronald Reagan without figuring out Nancy Reagan, too.

Taking this angle has led me to three conclusions. First, the marriage of Ronald and Nancy Reagan is undoubtedly one of the great love stories of our time, with few rivals in fidelity, intensity, and longevity. Second, the social life that grew out of their marriage made Ronald Reagan’s political career possible, mainly because, more than those of any other presidential couple, the Reagans’ social and political lives were completely intertwined.

Third, Nancy Reagan was one of the most powerful first ladies in history—although she was largely successful in her efforts to cover her tracks during the White House years and remained reluctant to reveal the extent of her influence for fear of appearing to be the power behind the throne and thereby diminishing her husband’s legacy. Like Woodrow Wilson’s wife, Edith, she shielded an aging and sometimes ill husband, though as president Ronald Reagan was never as incapacitated as Woodrow Wilson.

Like Eleanor Roosevelt, she lobbied her husband on appointments and policy, though always privately, never publicly. Like Hillary Clinton, she stood by her man, particularly in times of crisis, though Reagan’s crises were never as sordid as Clinton’s. And like Jacqueline Kennedy, she understood the connection between style and substance, though she never quite matched Mrs. Kennedy in elegance and cultivation.

Ronald Reagan’s five-day state funeral, at once grand and intimate, historic and moving, was his wife’s finest moment. His death came on June 5, 2004, the day before the sixtieth anniversary of the Normandy invasion, which it eclipsed on the world’s television screens. Nancy Reagan had begun planning the obsequies a decade earlier, concerning herself with every detail, determined to make this her final contribution to her husband’s legend. From the first moment we saw her, standing outside the funeral home in Santa Monica, leaning on the arm of a brigadier general as she watched her husband’s casket being lifted into a hearse, this frail eighty-two-year-old woman in a perfect black suit and pearls was a picture of dignity and grace.

More than 110,000 people filed past the casket at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, and nearly as many paid homage in the Rotunda of the Capitol in Washington, where Reagan’s body lay in state for thirty-six hours. The funeral service in Washington National Cathedral brought together four former United States presidents, and eulogies 1 2

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House were delivered by former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, Reagan’s vice president, George H. W. Bush, and President George W. Bush. Among the four thousand mourners were Mikhail Gorbachev, Reagan’s partner in ending the Cold War, and Lech Walesa, the Polish union leader who led the struggle to overthrow Communism in Eastern Europe; the current leaders of Germany, Great Britain, and South Africa; and an array of Reagan friends from the East Coast ranging from David Rockefeller to Joan Rivers.

Prince Charles accompanied the Reagan family on Air Force One back to California for the sunset burial service that same day. Awaiting the party at the burial site on a hilltop behind the Reagan Library were the surviving members of the Group, including Betsy Bloomingdale, Marion Jorgensen, William Wilson, Erlenne Sprague, and Betty Adams. Eulogies there were given by the three surviving Reagan children, Michael, Patti, and Ron, and at the end of the service Nancy Reagan broke down for the first time. According to her old friend Merv Griffin, an honorary pall-bearer, she was astounded and touched by the outpouring of sympathy across the land. “I thought people had forgotten Ronnie,” she said. “They hadn’t seen him for almost ten years.”

This work is not a full-scale biography of either Reagan, but rather an attempt to paint a portrait of a marriage that changed the course of history. I have sought to expand and correct the rather limited existing record of Nancy Reagan’s life before she became First Lady, which is riddled with errors and distortions, partly because her most extensive biography to date was written by the sensationalistic Kitty Kelley, a dogged digger for documents but a relentlessly negative judge of character. Nancy Reagan herself contributed to the confusion by redacting and deleting, whitewashing and sugarcoating the more unpleasant and complicated facts of her life. Ronald Reagan was also prone, like most politicians, to sentimentalizing and mythologizing his past, but his many biographers, including Lou Cannon, Garry Wills, Stephen Vaughn, and the self-destructive Edmund Morris (who for some inexplicable reason virtually ignored Nancy Reagan), have done an admirable job of setting the record of his life straight. I have mostly summarized and interpreted that record in order to give the reader a clearer picture of the man with whom Nancy Reagan fell in love. This volume, the first of two, follows the couple up to 1980 and the start of Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

“He never would have made it without her,” I was told again and again
Le Cirque: 1981

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in the course of interviewing nearly two hundred Reagan relatives, friends, colleagues, campaign aides, administration officials, and observers. “He never would have been elected Governor without her.” “He never would have become President without her.” They talked about her devotion, her protectiveness, her “antennae” for sussing out people who put their agendas ahead of her husband’s. This was not to discredit Ronald Reagan’s intelligence, talents, or achievements, they insisted. He was the simple man with the simple plan, the visionary, the dreamer, the great communicator, who had the big ideas he believed could change the country and the world for the better. She was the complicated woman of parts, the strategist, the fighter, the “personnel director of the Reagan operation,” who created the atmosphere and forged the relationships that made it possible for him to carry out what both of them saw as his destiny.

One of the most telling conversations I ever had with Nancy Reagan was after I had appeared on the
Today
show to talk about my
Vanity Fair
story and had stressed the point that the Reagans were a great political team. “How was I?” I asked when she called that same day.

“You were good,” she said, with a certain hesitation in her voice. “But you left out the most important word.”

What was that? I asked.

“Love,” she said. “Please don’t make me sound like some kind of master backstage manipulator. Everything I did, I did for Ronnie.”

C H A P T E R O N E

EARLY RONNIE

1911–1932

We were poor and I suppose at the bottom edge of the town, but we thought of ourselves as typically middle-class Americans. . . . My father told Neil, two years older, and me, that he would try to help us get to college, but that we would have to do most toward it ourselves.

Ronald Reagan, in a
Saturday Evening Post
interview, April 1974

I was the one who . . . would go down to the one pool hall in town that was downstairs under a store, where your folks couldn’t see you if they happened to walk by on the walk. [Dutch] would never do anything like that. He would rather be up there, just gazing at his birds’ eggs.

Neil Reagan, UCLA Oral History Program, 19811

RONALD WILSON REAGAN WAS BORN AT HOME ON FEBRUARY 6, 1911, IN

Tampico, Illinois, the son of John Edward Reagan, a shoe salesman everyone called Jack, and Nelle Wilson Reagan, a housewife who sometimes took in sewing. The Reagans lived in a five-room apartment over a row of stores on the town’s one-block-long Main Street. Heated by three coal-burning stoves, the apartment, like most homes in Tampico at that time, did not have running water or an indoor toilet. Nelle’s labor was extremely difficult and went on for twenty-four hours. Jack became so worried that he went out in a blizzard to get a doctor, who delivered the ten-pound boy at 4:16 in the morning and told Nelle she could not have any more children.2

In his 1965 autobiography,
Where’s the Rest of Me?
, written as he was preparing to run for governor of California, Ronald Reagan painted the scene of his birth in patriotic colors: “My face was blue from screaming, my bottom was red from whacking, and my father claimed afterward that 1 5

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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House he was white when he said shakily, ‘For such a little bit of a fat Dutchman, he makes a hell of a lot of noise, doesn’t he?’ ‘I think he’s perfectly wonderful,’ said my mother weakly. . . . Those were their first opinions of me.

As far as I know, they never changed during their lifetimes. As for myself, ever since my birth my nickname has been ‘Dutch’ and I have been particularly fond of the colors that were exhibited—red, white, and blue.”3

His brother, Neil, born in September 1908, recalled the event in less glowing terms. “[T]hey came to me—I’d been sent to the neighbors for a couple of days—[and said,] ‘Now you can go home and see your baby brother,’ and I wanted to go in the opposite direction. I went home, and for two days after I was home, I would not go in the room where my brother and my mother were. I didn’t want any part of a brother. I had been promised a sister by my mother and father. That’s all I wanted. I guess that shows you how early in life I determined not to be queer. I was strictly a girl man.”4

Neil Reagan also said, “Ronald is my mother’s boy and I’m my father’s boy.” One way to illustrate what he meant is to compare how the two brothers remembered their youth. “We were poor, and I mean poor,” Neil said.5 “We were poor,” Ronald said, “but we didn’t know we were poor.”6

Another way to put it: the first son drank, the second didn’t.

Reagan’s biographers, following his lead, have presented Nelle and Jack Reagan as a case of opposites attracting. He was Irish Catholic; she was Scots-English Protestant. He could be moody, cynical, and stubborn; she was determined to be sunny, idealistic, and understanding. He was a charmer, a storyteller, a chain-smoker, a binge drinker. She was a do-gooder, a Bible-thumper, a teetotaler. He was a bit of a clown; she was a bit of a saint.

But they also had a lot in common, starting with their immigrant rural roots and their mutual desire to transcend those roots and make something of themselves. Both Jack and Nelle were amateur actors, autodidacts, and stylish dressers who stood out in the series of small Midwestern towns where Jack went from job to job and Nelle fixed up rented home after rented home. Both felt a need to be different, which expressed itself in Nelle’s poetry writing and elocution recitals and in Jack’s political views—he was an outspoken Democrat in solidly Republican rural Illinois. There was a whiff of bohemianism in their insisting that their sons call them Nelle and Jack, not Mother and Father. Both loved an audience; Jack’s preferred venue was
Early Ronnie: 1911–1932