The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Read online

  Maureen made a rocky entry into adulthood. It began with a brief marriage to a District of Columbia police officer who beat her. She left him after he slammed their kitten into a wall. “When I told my parents about the divorce, I simply told them the marriage hadn’t worked out, but I didn’t tell them why,” she wrote later. “The shame and embarrassment I’d felt from the first had by this time grown into something I could not get past. I had built a wall, and I decided to leave the wall intact.”

  Because she lived so far away, Ronnie’s eldest was only an occasional presence on San Onofre. Nonetheless, she was startled when she visited around 1960 and discovered that eight-year-old Patti had no clue they were sisters. When Maureen told her they were, Patti burst into tears and ran from the room. “Dad was quite embarrassed when he explained to me later that afternoon, ‘Well, we just haven’t gotten that far yet,’ ” Maureen recalled.

  That was around the time that fourteen-year-old Michael, who had become a discipline problem for Jane, was sent to live with his father and Nancy on the recommendation of a psychiatrist. Michael’s was the saddest situation of any of the four Reagan children. He arrived at the Reagan home with no wardrobe other than his school uniforms. When Nancy took him to a dentist, she discovered he had ten cavities.

  Michael had been barely out of diapers when Ronnie and Jane divorced, and the turmoil that followed—a succession of boarding schools, new stepparents on both sides—left him feeling, as Maureen did, that he had no place to belong. But Michael had additional, deep-seated insecurities about having been adopted, a fact about himself he learned when he was four. He learned not from his parents, but from Maureen, who blurted it out during a quarrel. And there was something else—a secret he would reveal many years later. Michael was sexually abused by a camp counselor when he was eight years old. The man had also taken lewd pictures of him, which Michael was terrified would surface someday. His secret made the boy feel ashamed and confused and dirty.

  Nancy, at the time, knew none of this. “I was flying blind with Michael, and I had no idea what was really going on with him,” she wrote. “Michael and I had such rough times during that period that there were times when I could have killed him. Teenagers can be difficult in any case, but Mike was especially troubled and rebellious.”

  Michael had hoped that he might live with his father’s family full-time. Instead, he found himself in yet another boarding school. He visited the GE dream house in Pacific Palisades only on weekends and had to sleep on a couch in the living room. There was no bed for him. At one point, he learned that Ronnie and Nancy were adding a room to their house. He was thrilled, until he discovered the new bedroom was for Ron’s nurse. Michael begged to be allowed to stay with them all the time. “Why can’t Nancy drive me to school every morning and pick me up in the afternoon just like the other kids?” Michael asked his father. “It’s only half an hour from home.”

  “She’s too busy with Ron and Patti,” Ronnie told him. “Don’t you think it’s enough that she has opened up her house to you and invited you in?”

  There was one moment that, in Michael’s telling, suggests a shocking vindictiveness on his stepmother’s part. In 1961 the two of them were having yet another argument, this one over his latest miserable report card. Nancy told the sixteen-year-old: “You’re not living up to the Reagan name or image, and unless you start shaping up, it would be best for you to change your name and leave the house.”

  “Fine,” Michael retorted. “Why don’t you just tell me the name I was born with, so at least when I walk out the door, I’ll know what name to use?”

  It is not hard to imagine the storm of feelings this must have stirred up in Nancy, who herself had once wanted so badly to earn the name of the man she thought of as her father. But her reaction was harsh. “Okay, Mr. Reagan,” Nancy snapped. “I’ll do just that.”

  She got the name of Michael’s birth mother from the business manager Ronnie still shared with Jane. A week later, Nancy informed Michael that he had been born John Flaugher and was the product of a fling between an unmarried woman and an army sergeant. Michael was mortified to discover he was, in his words, “an illegitimate bastard who would never amount to anything. Without being aware of it, Nancy had rubber-stamped all the fears I’d had for years.”

  In explaining why she had disclosed to Michael information that his adoptive parents had withheld from him, Nancy offered a version that was only slightly more benign—and not exactly persuasive of her good intentions: “I was told that Jane was not pleased that I had answered Michael’s question. But he was obviously troubled by having been adopted, and I thought he had the right to know the truth about his own background. It seemed like a natural thing to want to know, and I hoped this would give him some peace of mind.”

  From there, Michael and Nancy rarely spoke. Which meant his father became even more remote. At Michael’s 1964 graduation from the exclusive Judson prep school in Arizona, Ronnie gave the commencement speech. Before he spoke, the famous television star posed for pictures with some of the graduates. Ronnie said the same thing to each in turn, including Michael: “My name is Ronald Reagan. What’s yours?”

  Michael whipped off his mortar board. “Remember me?” he said. “I’m your son Mike.”

  “Oh,” Ronnie replied. “I didn’t recognize you.”

  Nancy, looking for guidance on how to handle her rebellious children, turned to the parent that she herself had idolized. “She probably talked to my father every day and got his input,” her brother, Richard, told me. “I don’t think he always gave her the best advice. It was always very strict, which is good for some children and not for others.”

  Loyal “felt that the children were dragging her down, were depressing her,” Richard added. Their father frequently reminded Nancy to remember that “your husband comes first.”

  Michael found support from a different source: Nancy’s mother. Michael’s Arizona boarding school was not far from where the Davises had retired. He was delighted when his step-grandmother showed up in the stands at his baseball games. Once, when Michael was up to bat with two runners on base, he heard Edie shout: “You better hit a home run, you little sonofabitch!”

  And he did, for the first and only time ever.

  Edie “was a warm-hearted, generous woman who, I think, knew I was having problems and was always sympathetic to me,” Michael recalled. When he graduated, Edie gave him a signet ring, which he cherished. Michael regretted that he never told Nancy’s mother how much that meant to him. When Edie died in 1987, he cried. It was the first time, Michael realized, that he had ever wept over someone in the family who was not himself.

  Ronnie, meanwhile, was explicit in his priorities. He had only one: Nancy. In a letter dated May 24, 1963, after they had apparently been discussing their difficulties with Michael over the phone, Ronnie wrote this:

  Whether Mike helps buy his first car or spends the money on sports coats isn’t really important. We both want for get him started on a road that will lead to his being able to provide for himself. In x number of years, we’ll face the same problem with The Skipper and somehow we’ll probably find the right answers. (Patti is another kind of problem, and we’ll do all we can to make that one right, too.) But what is really important is that having fulfilled our responsibilities to our offspring we haven’t been careless with the treasure that is ours—namely what we are to each other.

  Do you know that when you sleep you curl your fists up under your chin and many mornings when it is barely dawn I lie facing you and looking at you until finally I have to touch you ever so lightly so you won’t wake up—but touch you I must or I will burst?

  … Probably this letter will reach you only a few hours before I arrive myself, but not really because right now as I try to say what is in my heart I think my thoughts must be reaching for you without waiting for paper and ink and stamps and such. If I ache, it’s because we are apart and yet that can’t be because you are inside and a part of m
e, so we aren’t really apart at all. Yet I ache but wouldn’t be without the ache, because that would mean being without you and that I can’t be because I love you.

  Your Husband

  By the time Ronnie wrote this, their circumstances had changed again. General Electric Theater had slipped in the ratings and plunged when NBC in 1961 moved its popular Western show Bonanza into the same time slot on Sunday nights. In March 1962 General Electric informed Ronnie that it was canceling his show. Ronnie believed that one reason he lost his corporate sponsor was the more overtly political direction that his speeches had taken. He was constantly talking of the dangers of government run amok. One of his lines of argument went like this: “Today there is an increasing number who can’t see a fat man standing beside a thin one without automatically coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one. So they would seek the answer to all the problems of human need through government.”

  By the late 1950s, Ronnie had fully broken with the New Deal liberalism of his youth; in 1962 he reregistered as a Republican. General Electric began pressuring him to confine his speeches to pitching the company’s products—or as Ronnie put it, suggesting he pick such spellbinding topics as “a description of the new 1963 coffee pot.” Ronnie refused, so he and GE parted ways. His career in show business was effectively over, save for a twenty-one-episode gig hosting and acting in the television series Death Valley Days and a flop of a film called The Killers. The Reagans were once again fearful about their financial security, although their situation was far better than it had been before GE Theater. Nancy could also see that Ronnie’s passions were driving him in a new direction. As early as 1962, he was getting letters urging him to run for president. I found one of them saved among the personal papers at the Reagan Library. “The country needs your kind of leadership,” wrote Norman L. Stevens Jr., a petroleum consultant from Roswell, New Mexico, who had heard Ronnie speak to the local chamber of commerce.

  Ronnie became a sought-after campaign surrogate for Republican candidates, including 1964 GOP presidential nominee Barry Goldwater, who had become friendly with Edie and Loyal in Arizona. As Ronnie spoke on behalf of others, he made basically the same pitch he had been giving for years, throwing in a few references to the campaign and the candidate he was promoting. He lit up conservative audiences as he had the workers in the GE plants. After a group of Goldwater donors heard him give his standard spiel at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Los Angeles, some of them came up with an idea: they would buy a big block of time on national television to have Ronnie deliver it again right before the election.

  Goldwater himself was initially hesitant to let Ronnie do it. The Republican standard-bearer wanted to instead air a more conventional spot featuring himself meeting with former president Dwight D. Eisenhower. But his backers persuaded him that Ronnie could make a stronger case for Goldwater than he could for himself. On October 27, 1964, he gave an electrifying half-hour address, which was broadcast on NBC. “A Time for Choosing” would later be seen as a pivotal moment in the Reagan story. Its most memorable passage echoed one that FDR had delivered when he accepted the Democratic nomination in 1936. “You and I have a rendezvous with destiny,” Ronnie declared. “We can preserve for your children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we can sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness.” By some accounts, his appeal raised $8 million for Goldwater—an unheard-of sum. Not even that windfall, however, was enough to save the Arizona senator from losing to incumbent Lyndon Johnson in a landslide of historic proportion.

  Still, that televised speech turned out to be Ronnie and Nancy’s rendezvous with their own destiny. Ronnie was suddenly seen as the voice of a conservative movement, the savior who might lead the Republican Party’s rise from the wreckage of the 1964 defeat. Just a few days after the election, a group of Goldwater’s big fund-raisers were in the Reagans’ Pacific Palisades living room, pleading with Ronnie to consider running for California governor in 1966. They were led by wealthy automobile dealer Holmes Tuttle. He was a respected figure among Republicans in the West, well connected enough to be a regular member of Eisenhower’s golfing foursomes in Palm Desert.

  As Ronnie told it later, Nancy was “flabbergasted.” But that was not true. “I knew those people were going to come up to the house after that disastrous election,” she told biographer Bob Colacello. “I knew it. And they did. At first, Ronnie said, ‘Well, let me think about it.’ And then finally he said to me, ‘You know, the party is in such bad shape, if I felt that I could do something to help it, and I didn’t do it, I’d feel terrible.’ So he said to them, ‘Let me go out and see what the response of the people is.’

  “And there we were. On a road we never intended to be on. Ever.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Actor Jimmy Stewart was purported to have once said: “If Ronald Reagan had married Nancy the first time round, she could’ve got him the Academy Award.” Nancy may never have expected to see Ronnie go into politics. But once their life turned in that direction, she was determined that the two of them would set a course for greatness.

  History has given much credit to the early assistance that Ronnie got from his Kitchen Cabinet, the group of wealthy backers who recognized the potential in a former movie actor. Most of them self-made millionaires who had picked up an interest in politics on the way to earning their fortunes, they financed his first campaigns and oversaw the selection of his advisers. At the core of this small group were auto dealer Holmes Tuttle and Italian-born geophysicist Henry Salvatori, who was among the pioneers of petroleum exploration. After the 1964 election debacle, they turned to Ronnie as their best hope of rebuilding the Republican Party in California and beyond. He was the man, they were convinced, whose eloquence and common touch would make their conservative principles appeal to working-class and suburban Democrats.

  As the Kitchen Cabinet built the scaffolding for Ronnie’s rise, Nancy became a frequent intermediary. “Reagan seldom sought their collective advice,” recalled Thomas C. Reed, a top operative in Ronnie’s first gubernatorial campaign, but “their grievances, if untended, would surely percolate into his quiet space via Nancy.” She was constantly on the phone with Ronnie’s rich benefactors, stroking their egos and soliciting their opinions, gathering up whatever scraps of gossip they might have heard. “She cultivated them and maintained them in a way that my father just wouldn’t have; wouldn’t have occurred to him, really,” Ron said.

  While Ronnie was moving more deeply into political activism in the early 1960s, he got to know some of the leading intellectual lights of the conservative movement. Chief among those relationships was the friendship the Reagans developed with National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr. and his wife, Patricia, a legendary hostess and socialite. “Probably the best instructor he had in the process was Bill Buckley. He really respected Bill Buckley, a thoughtful guy who had a point of view that he found interesting,” Ronnie’s first campaign manager, Stu Spencer, recalled. Nancy was the caretaker of the more personal side of that relationship. For decades, she and Buckley sent flirtatious letters back and forth. In one, dated January 4, 1965, she teased the erudite Buckley about his famously expansive vocabulary: “I’m still waiting for just the right moment to drop Zeitgeist (sp?) into the conversation and amaze all my friends—but so far it hasn’t come—it’s terribly frustrating.” Ten days later, Nancy’s tone was more serious as she confided to Buckley that she was deeply ambivalent about the path on which her husband was about to take them: “I alternately feel terribly brave about the whole thing and then as if I’d like to crawl into a cave where no one could find me. I know if Ronnie does decide to go into politics all the way, I’d better get over that.”

  Though her ambition burned as brightly as Ronnie’s, Nancy was keenly aware of how much they were putting at risk, how much they would be leaving behind. The Reagans finally had achieved financial security and were traveling—thanks largely to
her—in an elite social circle. During the lean, early years of their marriage, they kept company mostly with a tight group of friends from their movie days. They still saw Bill and Ardis Holden, of course. “Our idea of a big evening was to watch a picture on television with the Holdens, or go out to the movies,” Nancy said. Ronnie and Nancy also were close with onetime matinee idol Robert Taylor and his stunning wife, Ursula, who lived across the street in Pacific Palisades. Bob Taylor and Ronnie had a lot in common, including an introverted nature and a shared love of retreating to their ranches at every opportunity. Get-togethers with the Taylors were low-key and casual. Ronnie liked it that everyone felt comfortable wearing jeans at dinner.

  But as Ronnie’s fortunes improved, so did Nancy’s opportunity to meet and ingratiate the Reagans into a more gilt-edged—and beneficial—set of friends. During their father’s years on television, Patti and Ron went to Bel Air’s exclusive John Thomas Dye School, as did the children of many famous Hollywood people. Nancy threw herself into volunteer work there. She met Mary Jane Wick at a 1959 school fair where the two of them ran the hot dog booth. The families started a ritual of spending Christmases together and continued to do so right through the Reagans’ years in the White House. Mary Jane’s husband, Charles Z. Wick, an entertainment lawyer who made a fortune in investments and nursing homes, would later raise $15 million for Ronnie’s 1980 presidential campaign and be rewarded with a post as head of the United States Information Agency, which was set up during the Cold War to spread this country’s vision across the world via platforms such as Voice of America. Their son Doug Wick, who became a producer of major films, including the 2000 epic Gladiator, described Nancy as “the queen bee. She was glamorous and fun and smart. At my parents’ parties, my dad would play the piano, and she would sing. She had a beautiful voice.” But Nancy was also “very strategic” in her relationships, Wick said: “She had a very good X-ray vision for who was full of shit and who was a person of substance.”