Ronnie and Nancy (77 page)

Authors: Bob Colacello

BOOK: Ronnie and Nancy

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‘Would you like to come to dinner when you’re here?’ She said they couldn’t, because he was going to some male dinner—the Alfalfa Club dinner, I think. I said, ‘That’s too bad, but why don’t
you
come?’ And she said, ‘Oh, you don’t want me without Ronnie.’ I said—because the light had started to dawn at that point about women—‘Nancy, that’s not where it’s at anymore.

Of course, I want you.’ She said, ‘You do?’ I mean, she had apparently never gone out without him. So she was very pleased to be asked on her own.”152

Graham put together a serious group for Nancy’s solo dinner, including the man who was trying to save Nixon from Watergate, White House special counsel Leonard Garment; Helmut Sonnenfeld from the State Department; columnists James Reston, William Safire, and James Kilpatrick; and Clay Felker, the publisher and editor of
New York
magazine. In her
Sacramento II: 1969–1974

4 2 7

thank-you note, Nancy wrote, “You can’t tell what might happen now that I’ve made the plunge.”153

Two months later Ronnie and Nancy were back in Palm Springs with the Annenbergs and their houseguest, Prince Charles. The Prince of Wales, then twenty-six, was in the Royal Navy, on shore leave from his ship, HMS
Jupiter.
Lee Annenberg recalled that “Nancy phoned and said,

‘Prince Charles is going to be in San Diego. What do you think we should do?’ I suggested they come down to Sunnylands, and I would invite him.

He came with his equerry for the weekend. And that’s when they got to know him very well.”154

While the Reagans and “the With-It Prince,” as he was sometimes called, were the only houseguests that weekend, a small group including Bob and Dolores Hope and Frank Sinatra, unrepentant but apparently absolved, came for dinner on Saturday night. The caviar Lee served was a personal gift, she told her guests, from the Shah of Iran.155

That summer, as the House Judiciary Committee began drawing up articles of impeachment, everyone knew that it was only a matter of time before the nation really wouldn’t have Nixon to kick around anymore. He resigned on August 9, 1974, and was succeeded by Gerald Ford, who under the terms of the Twenty-fifth Amendment was charged with nominating a new vice president for Congress to approve. According to Ed Mills, the Kitchen Cabinet made another play to get the vice presidency for Reagan. “I’m sure that Justin Dart and Holmes Tuttle made contact, but there was never any invitation, to my knowledge, for Reagan to come back and be interviewed relative to the situation,” Mills said, adding, “Rockefeller was actually selected. Maybe it’s a good thing it didn’t happen. Sometimes fate seems to dictate how these things ultimately work out.”156

On December 15, 1974, the
Sacramento Union
ran a farewell interview with Nancy Reagan. In eight years the First Lady had not given a single interview to the much more important
Sacramento Bee
—as many a former friend and ex-employee knew, when Mrs. Reagan was crossed, she stayed crossed. Mae Belle Pendergast, the society reporter who had gushed over Nancy’s inaugural wardrobe in 1967, was asking the questions. “What is ahead for the Reagans?” she wondered. “We’ll take that day by day,” said Nancy.157

In one of his end-of-term interviews, Ronnie told the
Saturday Evening
Post,
“I’ve heard Nancy’s father say he could not possibly accomplish what 4 2 8

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House he did—even with his skill as a surgeon—without her mother. I could never do what I’m doing without Nancy. When you want to go home as much as I do, you work at it.”158

Shortly after Ronnie and Nancy left Sacramento, Jesse Unruh summed up the Reagan governorship: “I think he has been better than most Democrats would concede and not nearly as good as most Republicans and conservatives might like to think. As a politician I think he has been nearly masterful.” He added, “I do not like Ronald Reagan. I find him cold, with-drawn, shallow, sanctimonious and with very little personal warmth in spite of his appeal to people from the platform and the television tube.”159