The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Page 13
Ronnie himself put it this way: “How do you describe coming into a warm room from out of the cold? Never waking up bored? The only thing wrong is, she’s made a coward out of me. Whenever she’s out of sight, I’m a worrier about her.”
The truest, rawest record of this emotional attachment are his passionate letters to her. He wrote her scores of them over the decades. Nancy saved every one in a shopping bag in her closet. She also kept telegrams, sentimental and funny greeting cards, and the notes that came with the flowers he sent her. A particular favorite was a missive he wrote on July 15, 1953, from New York on stationery printed with the name of the Sherry-Netherland Hotel. Nancy would reread it many times over the decades to come, always getting tears in her eyes. In the letter, Ronnie addressed her by another favorite nickname—“Nancy Poo Pants”—and wrote of his loneliness for her. Then he fantasized about what it would have been like if, instead of dining at the 21 Club alone, he had been there with her:
We walked back in the twilight and I guess I hadn’t ought to put us on paper from there on. Let’s just say I didn’t know my lines this morning.
Tonight I think we’ll eat here at the hotel, and you’ve got to promise to let me study—at least for a little while.
I suppose some people would find it unusual that you and I can so easily span three thousand miles but in truth it comes very naturally. Man can’t live without a heart, and you are my heart, by far the nicest thing about me and so very necessary. There would be no life without you nor would I want any.
I Love You
“The Eastern Half of Us.”
The Las Vegas act, which showcased Ronnie’s talents as an emcee, indirectly opened a new opportunity: a television series. He no longer considered such a thing out of the question, and his agent Taft Schreiber, a top MCA executive, had an idea that seemed particularly well suited to a movie star in eclipse. General Electric was looking to sponsor a new show, a weekly dramatic production with a rotating cast of guest performers. Ronnie could host it and star in a half dozen or so episodes a year.
So was born General Electric Theater, a half-hour program that aired Sunday evenings at nine o’clock on CBS for eight years. It featured such high-wattage guest stars as James Dean, Jimmy Stewart, and Fred Astaire in adaptations of novels, short fiction, plays, and films. GE Theater debuted on September 26, 1954, and was broadcast from both New York and Hollywood. Initially the series alternated between filmed productions and live ones, the latter being a difficult challenge to pull off on television. Nancy performed in one of the early live shows and had to wear two dresses for the first ten minutes, ripping off the outer one between shots.
Ronnie’s association with General Electric would also lay the seeds of his political career. The “real extra” of the deal, in his view, was its promotional side. He would travel the country and visit GE plants, where he would meet workers and could give speeches on whatever he liked. The only proviso was that he promote the virtues of free enterprise and electricity. GE figured Ronnie would be a natural. As he put it: “I had been tagged because of my experience in the Guild and the speaking I’d done in the industry’s behalf along the ‘mashed potato’ circuit.”
Television, a medium he would later employ more skillfully than any politician before him, made Ronnie a bigger household name than he had ever been as a film star. GE Theater was an instant hit and, by 1956, was the third most popular television series in the country, reaching more than twenty-five million viewers a week. Critics loved it too, praising the show’s quality, creativity, and intelligence. In one memorable episode, Jimmy Stewart did Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol as a Western. Ronnie’s five-year contract, which started at $125,000 a year, quickly rose to $150,000 and solved the Reagans’ money worries. Later he would become part owner of the show, making them even wealthier.
GE’s slogan in those postwar-boom days was “Progress is our most important product.” The company built the Reagans an all-electric dream home that overlooked the Pacific from the top of San Onofre Drive in Pacific Palisades. On clear days, they could see all the way to Catalina Island. As it was being constructed, Ronnie drew hearts with his and Nancy’s initials in the wet cement on the patio. The five-thousand-foot ranch-style house “pointing the way to the electrical future” was fitted with every conceivable gadget. Among its wonders were a hidden projector in the dining room for movie screenings, a retractable roof over the atrium, lights that changed color to give different effects, three refrigerators, and two freezers. At night, the Reagans sat on the deck after dinner and watched the lights of the city sparkling beneath them. “You see,” Ronnie would tell Nancy, taking her hand, “I’ve given you all these jewels.”
The house was also a marvel of engineering. It used so much power that GE had to install a three-thousand-pound switch box, twelve feet long and eight feet high, at 1669 San Onofre. Ronnie joked that they had a direct line to Hoover Dam. “I wasn’t wild about having my home turned into a corporate showcase,” Nancy wrote, “but this was Ronnie’s first steady job in years, so it was a trade-off I was more than happy to make.”
There were other accommodations to Ronnie’s new career that Nancy found harder to accept. Chief among them were her husband’s long absences. Ronnie’s contract initially committed him to at least sixteen weeks a year on the road. Most of that time was spent on trains, because he was terrified of flying. Starting with his first appearance at a turbine plant near GE headquarters in Schenectady, New York, he visited 130 company facilities over eight years and met 250,000 employees. He sometimes gave as many as fourteen speeches in a day. Ronnie had a twenty-minute pitch, from which he would pivot to questions and answers where workers would share their opinions and their concerns. “No barnstorming politician ever met the people on quite such a common footing. Sometimes I had an awesome, shivering feeling that America was making a personal appearance for me, and it made me the biggest fan in the world,” he recalled later. The folks he met loved him back. After one speech, Ronnie signed more than ten thousand photos, blistering his fingers. By his recollection, he walked so many miles of concrete floor in GE’s plants that he sometimes had to cut his laces to get his shoes off.
Nancy would later muse: “Although he wasn’t running for any political office, essentially he spent eight years campaigning—going out and talking to people, listening to their problems, and developing his own ideas about how to solve them.” It was in those speeches that Ronnie developed both his feel for what resonated with Middle Americans and many of the nascent ideas that would become his philosophy for governing. As columnist George Will noted in an interview with me: “Those GE years were very important to Reagan because he went around the country talking to those people on factory floors for GE who became Reagan Democrats. That’s where he learned the vocabulary and the cadence of speech and all the rest.”
Still, the stress that his travel put on their marriage was hard on both Ronnie and Nancy. On yet another trip to Schenectady, he wrote her:
I find myself hating these people for keeping us apart. Please be real careful because you carry my life with you every second.
Maybe we should build at the farm so we could surround the place with high barb wire and booby traps and shoot anyone who even suggests one of us go to the corner store without the other. I promise you—this will not happen again. How come you moved in on me like this? I’m all hollow without you and the “hollow” hurts.
I love you
Ronnie.
Their family, meanwhile, was growing again. Nancy was determined to do what Jane could not, which was to give Ronnie a son of his own flesh and blood. After two miscarriages, she did. She spent the final three months of that pregnancy in bed, taking weekly hormone injections so that she would make it to full term. Patti’s delivery had been difficult. Ronnie was unenthusiastic about having another child—not because he didn’t want one but because he feared putting Nancy through an ordeal that might risk her health and “take chances wi
th a happiness so great I couldn’t believe it.” He arrived home from a GE tour just in time to make it to the hospital for Nancy’s scheduled Cesarean section on May 20, 1958. Then he waited, in what he described as a “cold terror,” wishing “I could turn back the clock and cancel out this moment.
“… At 8:04 a.m., a nurse told me Ronald Prescott had arrived, weighing eight and a half pounds. Again, that wasn’t the first thing I wanted to hear. I’m in favor of a rule that, under the circumstances, nurses will begin their announcement with the words, ‘Your wife is all right,’ ” Ronnie wrote later.
To the world, the Reagans presented an image of what every American family wanted to be in the middle of the twentieth century. Ronnie was named “Screen Father of the Year” in 1957 by the National Father’s Day Committee, an organization that existed solely to confer such honors. In GE ads, Nancy was living every housewife’s dream as she marveled at how easily she could turn out a souffle with her state-of-the-art appliances. In reality, her son said, she “couldn’t make steam. She was just the worst cook.” Even coffee was beyond Nancy’s abilities in the kitchen.
Nine-year-old Patti and three-year-old Ron beamed with their parents in front of the fireplace for the 1961 Christmas Eve episode of GE Theater. One ad segment touted the glories of modern electrical illumination and featured Patti rocking her doll Cynthia in a cradle. “Notice the lights,” Ronnie exulted. “They look like Japanese lanterns, and they’re just as colorful.” Nancy, Patti, and Ron also did a commercial for Crest toothpaste, in which they posed by their pool—the children in bathing suits, and Nancy in a crisp, sleeveless dress topped with a double strand of pearls.
“I’ve never had a single cavity,” Patti declared.
To which her beaming mother replied: “And don’t think I’m not proud of that. And I aim to keep it that way.”
* * *
That was what television audiences saw. The memories of Nancy’s children tell a darker story, one that didn’t fit their image as America’s ideal family. The Screen Father of the Year, so often on the road, was inaccessible even when he was home. “He was easy to love but hard to know,” his son, Ron, wrote later. “He was seldom far from our minds, but you couldn’t help wondering sometimes whether he remembered you once you were out of his sight.”
The vacuum that Ronnie left behind during his long absences was often filled by their mother’s anxiety and insecurity, which took control of family life when he was gone. Nancy hired and fired maids and cooks in quick succession. “What happened between arrival and departure was yelling. I remember sitting in my bedroom with my hands over my ears because I could hear my mother’s voice in the kitchen, yelling at the maid about dishes in the wrong cupboards or something not being prepared right. I would sing to myself to block out the sound,” Patti wrote in her 1992 memoir.
Nancy’s wrath landed on her children as well. Patti (who declined to be interviewed for this book) claimed that her mother beat her, starting when she was eight and escalating into “a weekly, sometimes daily, event.” The slaps and blows came at the end of arguments about nearly everything: over whether Patti was too chubby to be eating cookies, over Nancy’s demand that her daughter go to the bathroom before she went to bed, over Patti’s insistence that she be allowed to grow her hair as long as she wanted.
Patti also wrote that her mother abused prescription drugs—among them, the tranquilizer Miltown and Seconal for sleep. If so, Nancy was hardly alone among housewives in the 1950s and 1960s. They later became known as the “Miltown generation.” The male-dominated medical profession preferred the quick fix of sedating these women rather than taking the causes of their underlying mental health issues more seriously. Female patients were expected to accept without question this doctor-knows-best approach, and Nancy most likely would have, being the daughter of a physician herself. Patti said she once asked her father why her mother took so many pills, and Ronnie told her: “Because you upset her so much.”
Nancy, on the other hand, believed that the rage Patti directed at her was really about her high-strung daughter’s need for attention and “unresolved feelings about her father.” The implication was that Patti saw herself in a competition with Nancy for a place in Ronnie’s heart. They had been adversaries from the start. Patti’s toddler years had been tests of will. When Nancy appealed to her pediatrician for advice, he told her to ignore Patti’s antics and busy herself elsewhere. So, Nancy tried it one day when Patti refused to swallow her string beans. An hour and a half went by. Patti’s nap time passed. Her mother returned to check on her, only to find the two-year-old sitting there with her cheeks still full of beans. Patti said impishly: “What I got in my mouth, Mommy?”
Years later when Nancy drove the carpool to school, Patti always sat as far from her as possible. If they were walking, Patti dropped several steps behind rather than be at her mother’s side. Nancy would later contend that, if anything, she was too lenient with her daughter and too indulgent of Patti’s constant demands to be center stage in their home. Ronnie was no help in the discipline department. He dismissed Patti’s behavior as “only a phase” and seemed bewildered when Nancy raised the possibility that there might be something amiss in their family.
Ron, the more easygoing younger child, was known as Skipper and was the open favorite of both his parents. He told me he believes Patti’s claims about her mother’s abuse were exaggerated. “This is Patti’s story, and she’s entitled to it. This is what she thinks, and I don’t mean to take issue with it. But we grew up in the same house,” he said.
Ron did acknowledge there had been instances where Nancy hit Patti on the face. And he recalls that his father once smacked his sister for invoking the name of the Lord in anger. But Ron sees it from the perspective of the era, when that kind of punishment was widely considered an acceptable form of discipline. “We just weren’t a physically abusive household. A lot worse was going on in a lot of houses,” Ron said. “Jane Wyman used to beat Maureen and Mike with a riding crop. There was nothing like that that went on in our house.”
And while his mother was prescribed diet and sleeping pills, “my impression is that, a little like the abuse, that there’s a little bit of hyperbole there” in Patti’s version of events, Ron said. “They would prescribe something to calm you down. ‘Mother’s Little Helper’ kind of stuff. But I don’t know that my mother ever took them. I was aware. As a little kid, you go through every drawer in the house just looking to see what’s there. We had a medicine chest. Pills and stuff like that were in there. But they always seemed to be the same pills, and they were always full, the bottles.
“My mother didn’t like to drink much. She did not want to dull her senses,” Ron added. “She was too anxious, really, to give up that kind of awareness. So, no, she was not a zombie, by any means. She was hyperalert, if anything.”
What the baby of the family did see, however, was that their household became a battleground when Ronnie was away. Nancy—her long-buried fears of abandonment stirring—weaponized her insecurities. She manufactured crises and drama. “My mother was difficult at times, could be emotionally—abusive is too big a word, because it implies a kind of calculated cruelty that was constant. She was an anxious personality, and her anxieties, particularly when my father was away, were visited upon her children,” Ron said. “You didn’t know quite who you’re going to be dealing with today, so you had to be wary of her.”
Trouble would erupt every time his father had to be on the road for a few days. “There was sort of a routine to it, where you could just count on her picking a fight at some point. It might be about nothing, really, but she’d start in on you, and eventually, as a twelve- or fourteen-year-old, you’re going to snap back. And that’s it. There you go. That’s what [she] wanted,” Ron said.
“My perception of it as a kid, and still today, is that one way to kind of get [his father] back into the family, in her mind, was to create some incident with one of the kids, either Patti or me,” R
on told me. “In her mind, I think, he had left, and he needed to be pulled back. And this was the way to do it, somehow. Of course, my father hated any kind of interpersonal stuff like that; any strife in the family.”
Ronnie invariably accepted without question Nancy’s version of the horrible things his children had supposedly done in his absence. He would pull Ron aside and tell him: “Now, now, Ron. You know you’ve hurt your mother very much. She’s in there crying her eyes out, and I know that it would mean the world to her if she could just hear those two little words: ‘I’m sorry.’ ”
As the years went by and he matured, Ron began to comprehend the dynamic that was driving the drama between his parents. He rejected the guilt that was being foisted on his small shoulders. “At first, when you’re six or something, that kind of works. You feel terrible: ‘My God, what have I done?’ By the time you’re twelve or so, it’s like, ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ ” Ron said. “Then you start saying, ‘I’ve got nothing to apologize for. And I know you won’t believe me, but she starts a fight every time you leave.’ ”
Dysfunctional strains also developed between Nancy and her two stepchildren from Ronnie’s first marriage. “Now that I’m older and more experienced in life, I think there’s probably more I could have done to help Maureen and Michael when they were young,” Nancy wrote decades later. “If I had been more confident in myself as a mother, I think I would have. It’s too bad that the most important job we have in life—parenting—is the one we have no training for.”
Though Nancy’s relationship with Maureen had been an easy one when she was dating Ronnie, that changed after she married him. Maureen felt displaced. Her father had started a new family, and it stung her to hear him call Patti “Shorty,” which was the nickname he had once used for her. Jane had also remarried. Maureen didn’t really feel at home in either household. Nor did either seem to want her. She was shipped off to a Catholic high school in New York and then to a college in Virginia, from which she dropped out at the age of eighteen. (None of the four Reagan children got a degree.)