The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Page 12

  What might have precipitated this final break? In her memoir, Nancy claimed Jane had convinced Ronnie that he shouldn’t get married again unless and until she did, so one possibility is that Jane told him that night she’d found someone else. A week after Ronnie and Nancy were married, Jane announced what turned out to be a brief engagement to a wealthy real estate development heir twelve years her junior. But it is also possible that, seeing her ex-husband get serious about someone new, Jane had reconsidered, made one last play for Ronnie, and he was the one who cut it off. At any rate, things with Nancy and Ronnie moved along quickly after that. Ronnie proposed over dinner in their usual booth at Chasen’s. He said only three words: “Let’s get married.” To which Nancy replied, suppressing her jubilation: “Let’s.”

  There was another factor that no doubt spurred Ronnie to finally commit to Nancy: she was pregnant. Some—including Jane, in private conversations with family members—would later claim that Ronnie was distraught and felt trapped, that he had been given no choice but to marry Nancy once he found out a baby was on the way. But to believe that requires a cynicism that overlooks the devotion that the Reagans showed to each other over the next six decades. What had stood in their way was Ronnie’s fear and reserve. Nancy’s soft persistence found a way through his emotional defenses like drops of water on a rock. As Ronnie would later write: “Nancy moved into my heart and replaced an emptiness I had been trying to ignore for a long time.”

  One of the first to whom he broke the news was his friend William Holden. Ronnie passed a note during a long, boring session of the Motion Picture Industry Council, where he and the Sunset Boulevard star were representing the Screen Actors Guild. It said: “To hell with this, how would you like to be the best man when I marry Nancy?”

  “It’s about time!” Holden blurted out, and the two of them walked out of the meeting.

  The newly engaged couple also called Edie and Loyal, who had never met Ronnie in person and were only vaguely aware that he and Nancy were getting serious. According to Nancy, her parents were thrilled when Ronnie asked Loyal’s permission to marry his daughter. That Ronnie would do things in such an old-fashioned way “only endeared him to me more,” Nancy said. Her stepbrother, Dick, remembered it differently. He was a Northwestern medical resident at the time, with strict rules that he was not to have outside disturbances when he was on duty. No one would have understood that better than his physician father. So, Dick was surprised when Loyal paged him at the hospital and ordered him to come over for dinner.

  “He was absolutely furious that Nancy had not told him and Edith that she was going to marry. He was extremely upset,” Dick told me. The decision had been presented to Nancy’s parents as a fait accompli. Their wedding would take place in less than two weeks. It is not clear whether Nancy’s parents were told about her pregnancy, and they may have been concerned about the fact that Ronnie was divorced. But whatever other objections Loyal might have had about his daughter’s precipitous decision, he also felt a sense of betrayal. As Dick put it, Loyal “felt a closeness to her that she violated. He would expect a child of his to inform him that she was going to do this, make this important step.”

  Or perhaps what bothered Loyal was that another man had supplanted him as the center of Nancy’s universe.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Nancy might have liked a big wedding, but Ronnie put his foot down. He refused to stage a lavish production for the Hollywood gossip queens to hyperventilate over in their columns. Ronnie had seen how the make-believe machine could confect gauzy visions of future bliss. He had seen how real-life could blow those dreams to bits. His one concession to the media interest in their nuptials was to allow newspaper photographers to snap him and Nancy applying for their marriage license in Santa Monica, two days after MGM announced their engagement on February 27, 1952. In the photo, Ronnie looks annoyed. He would later regret denying Nancy a chance to come down a church aisle on a cloud of white lace with everyone they knew present and wishing them well. “Came our wedding day, and not one protest from Nancy over the fact that I cheated her out of the ceremony every girl deserves. It is hard for me to look back and realize the extent to which I was ruled by my obsession about the press and the fuss that would accompany a regular wedding. I can only confess that at the time to even contemplate facing reporters and flashbulbs made me break out in a cold sweat,” he wrote.

  On March 4 Nancy donned a gray wool suit with a white collar that she had found on the rack at the upscale department store I. Magnin. Atop her head, she sported a perky little flowered hat, which had a bit of net veiling. Around her neck was the strand of pearls her parents had given her for her debut. She looked like she might be going to a Junior League luncheon rather than to her own wedding. The ensemble could hardly have been more different from the ice-blue satin, sable-accessorized gown that Jane had worn like a princess a dozen years earlier.

  Ronnie picked Nancy up at her apartment. He brought her a bouquet of orange blossoms, her favorite. His mother, her parents, and his children were not invited to their ceremony at the Little Brown Church, a Disciples of Christ sanctuary in the San Fernando Valley. The only witnesses were Bill and Ardis Holden. The exchange of vows was over so quickly that Nancy didn’t realize they were married until Bill asked to be the first to kiss the new Mrs. Reagan. Nor in her euphoric daze did she notice that Bill and Ardis were sitting on opposite sides of the chapel, not speaking to each other because they had just had a big argument.

  Had Ardis not thought to arrange for a photographer, there would have been no visual record of the day. She also had a tiered wedding cake waiting back at the Holden home in Toluca Lake. The Reagans spent their wedding night at the Mission Inn in Riverside, where Ronnie carried Nancy over the threshold of a room bedecked with red roses. From there they went to Phoenix for a quick two-day honeymoon at the Biltmore, much of which was spent in the company of Nancy’s parents.

  Ronnie was a hit with the Davises. He was intimidated at first by Loyal, but he and Edie quickly discovered they had the same sense of humor, which included an affinity for dirty jokes. Once, years later, Ronnie was telling Edie a particularly filthy one over the phone, and there was silence on the other end. He was afraid that, this time, he had gone too far. What had actually happened was that the line had gone dead—something the long-distance operator did not tell him until she got to hear the punch line. “I soon had the feeling that if anything went wrong with Ronnie and me, he and Mother would be perfectly happy together,” Nancy recalled. On Nancy’s birthdays, Ronnie would send Edie flowers.

  When Nancy and Ronnie got back from their honeymoon, they kept their two apartments for a few months—there was no room for his clothes in her tiny one. But by July, they had built a modest ranch-style house at 1258 Amalfi Drive in Pacific Palisades, a not-yet-fashionable area near the ocean. They paid $42,000 for it.

  How to handle Nancy’s increasingly apparent pregnancy was a delicate issue. This being the early 1950s, the answer was to lie and assume the Hollywood press would go along. Twelve weeks after they were married, columnist Hedda Hopper broke the news to her readers that Nancy was expecting. “How did you find out it was due early in December?” Nancy asked. “We were keeping it a secret because I knew I would be in for lots of kidding.” Patricia Ann Reagan arrived about six weeks before her purported due date, and though she weighed a healthy seven pounds, the papers dutifully reported that she had been born prematurely. The story had it that the Reagans were at a horse show when Nancy’s labor pains began, but that she did not recognize what they were, because the baby was not expected to arrive for more than a month. The Reagans kept up the fiction even at home. As a child, Patti was told an absurd story that she had spent the first two months of her life in an incubator.

  Nancy fibbed about all of this in a 1980 memoir, saying she got pregnant “early in our marriage,” because she was “close to 30 years old and didn’t want to wait.” (Make that two fibs: She was already thirty when
she married.) In Nancy’s 1989 book, however, she owned up to all of it, though with a touch of coy defiance. Patti, she wrote, “was born—go ahead and count—a bit precipitously, but very joyfully, on October 22, 1952.” Ronnie planted an olive tree in their yard to commemorate their daughter’s arrival, and for many years after, Nancy would drive past the house to see how big it had grown.

  Parenthood was not the only big adjustment the Reagans had to make in those early months of their marriage. Ronnie stepped down as president of SAG after having led the union for five turbulent years in which there had been violent strikes in the industry, Communist blacklisting, the enforcement of antiunion laws, and the decline of film production in the face of new competition from television. (He and Nancy remained on the board, and he would return to the presidency for a year in 1959.) His decision to give up leading the union was a relief to Nancy. “There’s no question in my mind that Ronnie’s political involvements had begun to hurt his prospects for work. By the time I came along, he had become so identified with the Screen Actors Guild that the studio heads had begun to think of him less as an actor than an adversary,” she reasoned.

  On his way out, Ronnie did his agent Lew Wasserman a favor of the highest order. The six-member SAG board, which also included Nancy, quietly voted to give Wasserman’s MCA agency a waiver that would allow him to both represent talent and to produce television programs. It was a blatant conflict of interest because it put MCA in a position of being both labor and management in negotiations over issues such as stars’ salaries. Even more significantly for the industry, the new arrangement gave Wasserman a beachhead in television. It propelled him into becoming one of the biggest powers in the entertainment industry and the last of the true Hollywood moguls. His rise helped demolish the studio system for good.

  Wasserman and television would a few years later become the Reagans’ financial salvation, though there is no indication they could have imagined it then. What the newlyweds could see were trouble signs building. Movie roles were drying up for both of them, as the collapsing industry was dumping supposed stars who couldn’t pull in enough ticket buyers to justify their salaries. Almost concurrently with its announcement of Ronnie and Nancy’s engagement, MGM put out another one saying that she had asked to be let out of her contract. Nancy was going to get the axe anyway after having done eight not particularly noteworthy pictures for the studio. But the fiction that leaving was her own choice allowed her to exit “with more dignity than I had managed under like circumstances,” noted Ronnie, who was losing deals he had with Warner Brothers and Universal Pictures at just about the same time.

  Nancy accepted that she was nearing the end of the road for an acting career that had never really taken her very far. Turning her energies to building a marriage echoed the pragmatic choice that her mother had made a generation before, when Edie realized that her own professional options as an actress were running out. Nancy had found a steadfast man to love and belong to. But it was far from certain, at least in the beginning, that this union would bring the security and success that Edie and Loyal’s match had. Money became tight, and the newlyweds were piling up debt. Between the ranch and the house, they had two first mortgages and a second one. Ronnie had run up $10,000 in medical bills when he broke his leg. He also incurred a big fine for back taxes he had deferred during World War II. A separate error made by his studio in reporting his income added another $21,000 to the amount Uncle Sam was owed. There was also his obligation to pay $500 a month in child support. The Reagans employed an English nanny, and someone to cook and clean, but they could not afford to buy furniture for the living room of their small house.

  Five months after Patti was born, their financial circumstances forced Nancy to accept the female lead in a turkey of a film, Donovan’s Brain. She played the wife of a mad scientist who preserves the brain of a dead tycoon alive in a jar. Not exactly Oscar-worthy material. “Quite simply, we needed the money. This was a blow to Ronnie, but we had to face facts and face them together. I could get work, but his movie career was at a standstill,” Nancy recalled. Ronnie went for more than a year without doing a picture, turning down a few scripts that were embarrassingly bad. He scraped by accepting some guest spots on television shows. A regular TV series, however, was something he considered “a professional kiss of death to a movie actor: The people who owned movie theaters thought nobody would buy a ticket to see someone they could see at home in their living room for nothing.”

  But moviemaking was changing, and even when Ronnie got a decent part, he no longer loved it as he once had. In one letter to Nancy from the set of 1954’s Cattle Queen of Montana in Glacier National Park, he vented about the chaos of the operation, the imperiousness of his costar, Barbara Stanwyck, and his frustrations with director Allan Dwan and scriptwriter Robert Blees. Ronnie referred to all of them by initials: “I don’t know how the picture is going. We started in confusion and have managed to develop that characteristic to an unusual degree. B.B. is still defending his script. I’m still feeding suggestions to A.D. and those two huddle and argue. Right now I’m waiting to go to work and the scheduled scene is one of those that needs changing the most. I’m quite interested to see what happens. In the meantime what the h—l do I learn. B.S. just continues to go her merry way in the exclusive company of two hairdressers and her maid. I wonder what picture she’s making.”

  He added, “This, incidentally, is my first crack at picture making since the big switch to TV film work in Hollywood, and it bears out everything we’ve ever said. First of all—getting a crew was a case of rounding up who you could find. The industry as we have so often said literally forced our technicians to seek work in TV, and now we reap the harvest.”

  The Reagans grasped at other ideas, at one point trying to sell a radio series to be called Yearling Row, based on the idea of an actor and actress who go into ranching. Then came the most humbling proposition of all: a Las Vegas nightclub act. When an agent at MCA first suggested that he consider it, Ronnie’s initial answer to such a tacky proposal was “You must be kidding!” But the money was good. Better than good. It paid nearly as much for a two-week gig as the $30,000 he had made for his previous picture, yet another disappointment called Prisoner of War, which was set during the Korean War.

  On the morning he had reluctantly agreed to discuss the Las Vegas project with his agents, Ronnie decided to consult his horoscope. Nancy’s reliance on astrology would one day cause a national sensation. But back in those days, many people in Hollywood turned to their star charts for guidance. Entertainers have always been a superstitious tribe. Some considered it prudent to check the alignment of the heavens for the right date to sign a contract for a movie, commence filming, conceive a child, or get a divorce. Astrologer Carroll Righter’s column in the paper that morning advised Aquarians like Ronnie: “This is a day to listen to the advice of experts.” So, he marched into the meeting and began it by asking: “Are you guys experts?” When his agents assured him they were, he said, “Well, let’s get on with it, then.”

  Ronnie was to tell jokes and stories and introduce the other performers. He backed out when the owner of the first club they talked to, El Rancho Vegas, insisted that one of those acts be a stripper. But his agents managed to scrounge up another offer at the Last Frontier, also on the Vegas Strip. There, Ronnie would be on the bill with a male quartet called the Continentals, a song-and-dance duo, comedians, and showgirls in feathered headdresses. The ninety-minute show ran for two weeks in February 1954 and sold out.

  Nancy saw a role for herself as well: as the guardian of her husband’s reputation and well-being, as well as his emotional support at a rock-bottom moment. Her duties as a wife meant neglecting her ones as a mother, and it would not be the last time she made the choice she did. “Ronnie could have gone to Las Vegas alone, but if there ever was a time my husband needed me, it was then,” she recalled. “It almost killed me, but I left three-month-old Patti at home with our housekeeper.” Nancy w
ent to every rehearsal, taking notes and fretting over whether Ronnie had his comedic timing down. Once the show opened, she sat through two performances a night in the Ramona Room, her laugh greeting every punchline as though she had never heard it before. “I never got bored,” she said gamely. Late each evening, after the show was over, the Reagans headed back to their hotel room and read themselves to sleep. Not until their final night did they spend any time in the casino, where they lost $20. “I hope I never have to sink this low again,” Ronnie told Nancy as they drove home to Los Angeles.

  Their attachment to each other had grown deeper as their circumstances became shakier and their future more uncertain. After Patti was born, Ronnie—who had been instructed by his own mother to address her by her first name—began to call his wife “Mommie.” To Nancy, he was “Daddy.” Those nicknames would later make Ronnie’s political advisers roll their eyes and snicker behind his back. But it was probably no coincidence that this was also around the time Nelle began showing signs of what was then called senility, leaving Nancy to be Ronnie’s sole source of comfort and security. Nelle moved into a nursing facility in 1958 and died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1962 at the age of seventy-nine. More than three decades later, both of her sons would be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. When aides cleaned out Ronnie’s office desk in Los Angeles for the last time, they found five or six of the poems Nelle had written tucked inside.

  For the rest of Ronnie’s life, Nancy “filled the role that his own mother had filled in his childhood and youth. She provided him with a safe space for his solitude,” their son, Ron, said. “He needed a safe place to come home to, to be by himself, to recharge where nobody’s at him. She would provide him that. She’d be the gatekeeper. She’d keep people away when he needed to be alone. And, of course, served the social purpose of getting him out when he needed to get out, too. He was probably less enamored of that than the other.”