Ronnie and Nancy (51 page)

Politics was almost always on the menu at the Reagans’ dinners, even when it was just Ronnie and Nancy and Bob and Ursula in sweaters and blue jeans. Like most of the Reagans’ friends, the Taylors were staunch Republicans; he was on the board of the right-wing Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. In contrast to Jane Wyman, who would roll her eyes and let out audible sighs of boredom when the conversation turned political, Nancy actively participated in these dinner-table discussions and even cultivated friendships with politically minded people, such as Goldie and Bob Arthur (who was also on the Alliance board). As Reagan himself recalled, “Even though I’d done a picture for Bob, it was Nancy who really brought me into the warm circle of their friendship. Bless baseball, she’d met them at a World Series game in New York and it was a sort of instant liking.”76

Edgar Bergen was a staunch Eisenhower supporter, and through the Bergens the Reagans became friendly with Freeman Gosden, the President’s
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Palm Springs golfing partner, and his second wife, Jane. Coincidentally, Gosden knew Edith Davis from his days in Chicago, where the
Amos ’n’

Andy
radio show had been produced, and, according to Nancy, her mother was the only woman to have been on the program—once. In 1948, Gosden, along with his partner, Charles Correll, had sold the show to CBS for more than $2 million. He was an important behind-the-scenes player in national Republican circles; the brainy, elegant Jane was as passionate about politics as her husband.

Dick Powell and George Murphy, according to June Allyson, were still trying “to shift Ronnie Reagan into the Republican Party” over dinners at Mandeville Canyon.78 So was Holmes Tuttle, the Ford dealer, who tried to persuade Reagan to run for the U.S. Senate in 1954. “I turned down the offer with thanks,” Reagan told the
Los Angeles Daily News
at the time.

“I’m a ham—always was and always will be.”79

During the years he worked for G.E., most of Reagan’s political energies were channeled into the speeches he gave on his tours. “He never directly hawked G.E. products,” noted Paul Gavaghan, who was the company’s publicity director for New England. “He promoted anticommunism and the free enterprise system.”80 From the beginning, Reagan realized that he “couldn’t be a mouthpiece for someone else’s thoughts. . . . I had to have something I wanted to say, and something in which I believed.”81

As Reagan’s reputation as a speaker spread, he found himself addressing increasingly powerful groups, including the National Association of Manufacturers and the Executives Club of Chicago, and his message evolved from a rose-colored defense of the unfairly maligned citizens of Hollywood into a full-frontal attack on the dangers of big government, with its wasteful welfare programs and power-grabbing bureaucracy. “My speeches were nonpartisan as far the two major political parties were concerned,” he later noted, “and I went out of my way to point out that the problems of centralizing power in Washington, with subsequent loss of freedom at the local level, were problems that crossed party lines.”82 In the late 1950s, according to Lou Cannon, Reagan was told by a G.E. executive that “he was more in demand as a public speaker than anyone in the country except President Eisenhower.”83

“I heard Ronnie speak at a gathering of maybe two hundred people in Tennessee or Kentucky,”
G.E. Theater
producer Bill Frye told me. “He was 2 8 0

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House unbelievable. He sounded as though he were running for something. Of course, this was before one ever thought that he’d be running for governor, let alone president. Those people just loved him, and I was totally surprised. I
knew
he was good on-screen, when the camera was going, but he was just as good without the cameras. They used to say about Jimmy Stewart, ‘He saves it for the camera.’ Well, Ronnie didn’t save it for the camera. Ronnie did just as much before a group of two hundred people as he did in front of that camera for a million people.”84

Bill Frye and his friend producer James Wharton were among Hollywood’s most popular extra men, and they frequently gave dinner parties at their house on Coldwater Canyon. “Every so often the G.E. people would come to town and I’d have to give a dinner for them,” Frye told me. “I’d call my social Hollywood friends and say, ‘Listen, the G.E. people are coming and I thought I’d have a little dinner for Ronnie and Nancy.’ None of the A-list people wanted to come. Now, flash-forward ten years to 1966. Ronald Reagan is Governor of California and Nancy is the First Lady. All of those same people are
surrounding
the Reagans. They can’t get
enough
of the Reagans.

And I can’t get any of them to come to my parties, including Ronnie and Nancy, because they’re much too busy—seeing all the people who wouldn’t see
them
ten years before.”85

Despite the attitude of some of his snobbish friends, Frye grew fond of the Reagans. He sometimes went to dinner at San Onofre, and when Nancy asked for help in finding a live-in housekeeper, he recommended a Czechoslovak woman named Anne Allman. “Her sister Sophie worked for me,” Frye explained. “Anne was crazy about the Reagans. She was just a big, lovable, capable, country-type woman who could not cook fancy food. And she was on the shy side, never had married. She must have been awfully good with the Reagans, or they wouldn’t have kept her for thirty years. That’s a long time to keep help.”86

Even in those days, Frye found Nancy’s devotion to Ronnie endearing, and he admired the subtlety with which she advocated her husband’s cause. “She just adored him. He could do no wrong. I used Nancy and Ronnie together in maybe three
G.E.
episodes, and there was such a sweet-ness between them. . . . She was always behind him, but she never was pushy about it. Just to give you a comparison, I used Alan Ladd a few times on
G.E.,
and I was crazy about Alan, but his wife could be the worst
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2 8 1

pain in the ass! She would come in before he would, and say, ‘Who is going to play this part? How tall is she? Is she married?’ She wanted to know everything! Nancy never once came to the studio or interfered, with me at least. I always appreciated that. I mean, she knew what was going on. She knew that I’d offer Ronnie a part after it had been turned down by Charles Laughton, or Gregory Peck, or Jimmy Stewart. And she’d call me on it.

She’d say, ‘I heard Gregory Peck turned it down.’ Or, ‘So and so told me you sent her husband the script.’ But she was nice about it.87

“I remember the Wassermans invited me for the weekend in Palm Springs,” Frye continued. “And who should show up on Saturday morning but Nancy and Ronnie. Now, the Wassermans had two guest rooms, a smaller one, which I was in, and the larger one, which the Reagans took, with a bathroom in between, which we had to share. I got up in the middle of the night, and the bathroom door was locked. So I opened the sliding glass door and peed on the oleanders. The next morning I said to Nancy, ‘Please don’t lock the door tonight. I might have to do more than pee.’ And she laughed and promised she wouldn’t. But the same thing: I got up, the door was locked, and I peed on the oleanders.”88

An invitation from the Wassermans was considered a command performance. Nancy Reagan told me, “You had to be nice to Edie or she could make life difficult for you at the agency.”89 One of the trickier feats Nancy—or any Hollywood wife with social aspirations—had to manage was staying on the good side of the Wassermans while cozying up to the much more socially significant Jules and Doris Stein. “The Steins were
it
,”

explained Leonora Hornblow. “Jules thought very highly of Lew professionally, but he used to say, ‘I don’t have to have dinner with him.’ And Doris could not bear Edie.”90

“That was a very bad mix, unfortunately,” Richard Gully confirmed.

“Edie handled it very graciously, but it was endless snubbing— really un-kind. Doris was a very autocratic woman, a great hostess, wonderful . . . but she did like the spotlight, and she regarded Edie Wasserman basically as hired help.”91 Others said Edie Wasserman was less discreet about her feelings. “Edie Wasserman hated Doris Stein,” Bill Frye told me, “and she used to call Jules ‘the little eye doctor.’”92

Jules Caesar Stein, the Chicago ophthalmologist who founded the Music Corporation of America in 1924, and his imperious wife, Doris, who liked to forget that her Jewish father had changed his name from 2 8 2

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Jonus to Jones, took the town by storm from the moment they arrived in 1936. “I’m going to be king of Hollywood,” Jules, who had just turned forty, told Hedda Hopper,93 as he began gobbling up independent talent agencies, including the one that represented Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman. He also bought 10 percent of Paramount’s stock and began construction of MCA’s 25,000-square-foot headquarters, a Beverly Hills version of the White House, complete with an oval office for the chairman. Ann Rutherford vividly recalled Stein at the time: “You should have seen him trying to teach these meticulous bricklayers, who were used to laying bricks and scraping off all the mortar so that you had a flush, even surface.
Au contraire.
Jules wanted
weeping
mortar, the kind they have down South, so he took off his coat and took a trowel—it was
the
sight in town. He’d go by every day and make them redo what didn’t have enough weeping.”94

Doris Stein formed firm alliances with Mary Pickford, Marion Davies, and Buff Chandler. The Steins became regulars at San Simeon, and returned the hospitality with seated dinners for fifty to a hundred at their Spanish-style villa, Misty Mountain, set high on Angelo Drive. Both MCA’s offices and the Steins’ house were decorated with the finest English antiques, and Doris set her tables with the largest collection of Flora Dan-ica china in Los Angeles, complemented by orchids grown in her own hothouses. After conquering the local royals, she cast her net eastward, becoming
the
Hollywood hostess for visiting New York grandees and Europeans titles such as fashion arbiter Diana Vreeland, philanthropist Mary Lasker, and the Duke and Duchess of Bedford.95

In the 1950s, the Reagans were occasionally invited to Misty Mountain. Doris had been favorably disposed to Nancy by Kitty LeRoy, and was slightly acquainted with the Davises from Chicago. Jules had known Ronnie since shortly after they both arrived in Hollywood, and he was one of the tycoons who wished the well-spoken and well-informed actor would go into politics on the Republican side. Like his good friends Justin Dart, Alfred Bloomingdale, Edgar Bergen, and Freeman Gosden, the MCA chairman was a big Eisenhower supporter, though he was careful to maintain good relations with politicians of both parties, believing that was best for business. “Thanks to Jules, MCA had its bases covered,” said Bill Frye.

“Lew Wasserman was a big Democrat, Taft Schreiber was a big Republican, and Jules was for whoever was in power.”96

Of the three, Taft Schreiber would play the most important role in
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2 8 3

Ronald Reagan’s future political career. Schreiber had started out as an office boy during MCA’s early days in Chicago, and as Stein’s oldest and closest friend at the agency was the natural rival of Wasserman. Although Taft and Rita Schreiber were not as socially elevated as the Steins, they still ranked several tiers above the Wassermans in the 1950s, having established themselves among the city’s pioneer modern art collectors. “Taft was very fond of Ronnie,” Frye recalled. “Matter of fact, I went to Ronnie’s forty-fifth-birthday party at the Schreibers’. They had a beautiful house, very modern, way up toward Tower Drive. I was pleased to be included, because it wasn’t a big party. I can’t remember who-all was there, but it wasn’t a celebrity crowd.”97

Reagan was evolving into a different kind of celebrity, not so much a Hollywood movie star as a national public figure: the amiably distinguished host of a television show that was watched by millions of Americans every Sunday night and the most famous corporate spokesman in the land. Even the few movies released after he signed on with G.E. added to this image. He played classic Western heroes in
Cattle Queen of Montana
in 1954 and
Tennessee’s Partner
in 1955 and a real-life World War II submarine commander in
Hellcats of the Navy
in 1957. His co-star in the last was his real-life wife, Nancy, who, true to form, played the nurse who is in love with him.

One of the things Ronnie liked most about his G.E. job was that it gave him plenty of time at the ranch when he wasn’t on the road. “I had television worked down to an average of about one day a week,” he later said, “and I could spend four or five days a week at the ranch. My routine was just get up—the ranch was only a thirty-five-minute drive from our home—go out there for the day, back in the evening. I loved every minute of that.”98

In the summer of 1957, Nancy became pregnant for the third time since Patti’s birth. She had suffered two miscarriages in four years but was determined to have a boy. As Reagan later wrote, “Nancy had decided Patti should have a brother. Personally I would have settled for the three of us: I grew frightened every time I remembered that long night when Patti was born, and didn’t want to take chances with a happiness already so great I couldn’t believe it. At the same time I knew Patti would have that brother, because I couldn’t say no to Nancy.”99

Nancy was ordered to stay in bed for the last three months of her preg-2 8 4

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House nancy. Frances Bergen and June Allyson gave her a small baby shower. Arlene Dahl, who was one of the guests, recalled, “I had just had my son, Lorenzo, and friends of mine had given me a blue candle that Nancy wanted in the worst way. She was hoping and praying that her second child would be a boy, and I gave her what was left of my blue candle, which had produced Lorenzo.”100

Ronnie arrived home from a G.E. tour the day before Nancy went into the hospital for a planned cesarean. “Moral support for Papa,” he recalled, was provided by Ursula Taylor and Edith, who had flown in from Chicago.