The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Page 15
A sprawling city with no definable center, Los Angeles ran on imagination, opportunity, and reinvention. There existed an older social order, bunkered in the mansions of San Marino and Hancock Park. But power and prestige were the by-products of ambition in Southern California, growing as fortunes were made in oil, real estate, banking, and water. In just a generation or two, a family could go from being hungry speculators to stodgy capitalists welcomed into the downtown sanctums of the Jonathan Club or the California Club.
As Edie once had, Nancy found a foothold among the select by doing charity work. She was accepted for membership into the Colleagues, an elite organization of fifty socialites who raised money for women and children’s causes and who got together each month for gossip-fueled luncheons. The Colleagues were perfectly coiffed clotheshorses. Their big annual fund-raiser was a sale of slightly used designer creations that had been worn only once or twice before they were ready to be cast off. “The ladies of the Colleagues were serious indeed about their projects,” Laurence Leamer wrote. “They roamed the precincts of Los Angeles in Mercedes and Rolls-Royces, picking up boxes of clothes, and gowns on hangers. Nancy was driving only a station wagon at the time, but she was one of them.”
The Reagans’ newer, flashier friends—who would later be dubbed “the Group” by the press—were far richer than they were. Film producer Armand Deutsch, a fellow Chicagoan whom Nancy had known from MGM, was the oldest grandson of a longtime Sears, Roebuck chairman; his wife, Harriet, was an arts patron. Through the Deutsches, Nancy got to know billionaire philanthropists Walter and Leonore Annenberg, whose fortune came from publishing. The Annenbergs’ two-hundred-acre Sunnylands estate near Palm Springs would be where Ronnie and Nancy spent every New Year’s Eve between 1974 and 1993. The Reagans also became close to Earle Jorgensen, who made a pile of money in steel, and his wife, Marion, who was a tireless networker on behalf of both her causes and her chums. Another friend was Betty Wilson, a Pennzoil heiress married to wealthy rancher and oil-equipment manufacturer William Wilson, later Ronnie’s envoy to the Vatican.
Fabulously fun Betsy Bloomingdale—her husband, Alfred, was a grandson of the department store founder and ran the successful Diners Club credit card franchise—was Nancy’s closest confidant and her role model on all matters of taste and style. Betsy’s legendary wardrobe of haute couture filled eleven meticulously organized closets. Through Betsy, Nancy was introduced to favored designers such as Adolfo Sardiña, known only as Adolfo to his legions of wealthy female devotees. Betsy’s interesting friends also included “social moth” Jerry Zipkin, a gay, uber-sophisticated Manhattan real estate heir. In its 1995 obituary of Zipkin, the New York Times referred to him as “a man about everywhere.” Zipkin was a fixture at society galas, usually as a “walker” escorting rich women whose husbands had other places they would rather be. Nancy saw him as “a sort of modern-day Oscar Wilde.” For decades, Zipkin would be her near-daily source of news and gossip, and a channel through which others gained access to her. When Nancy was in the White House, Zipkin regularly mailed her batches of New York newspaper clippings, with the juicy parts highlighted in yellow marker.
It took no small amount of prodding from Nancy to get her husband to plunge into her rapidly growing milieu of fellow climbers. High-powered socializing was not how Ronnie would have chosen to spend their time. “He was great in front of an audience, great in a room, great telling people stories, putting them at ease, making them laugh. But left to his own devices, he would have much preferred to just go to the ranch and ride horses and cut brush and pound fence posts and things like that,” their son, Ron, said. “She got him out and about and meeting people, both in California and in Washington. Even to the extent of arranging ‘playdates’ for him. As amicable and genial and fun to be with as he was, he had virtually no close friends. Lots of acquaintances, lots of what I and some of my friends used to call the ‘El Friendos,’ who were sort of the Kitchen Cabinet types, but these were not people that he really hung out with.”
Stu Spencer, the top political adviser who moved in and out of Ronnie’s orbit for more than two decades, put it more succinctly: “Reagan would have been a great hermit, a perfect hermit.” Others around Ronnie often used the exact same word—hermit—to describe his inner nature. Spencer and his partner, Bill Roberts, were among the first people Ronnie and his backers sought out as he began thinking more seriously about running for governor. They had been recommended to Ronnie by Goldwater, against whom their firm had worked in the 1964 GOP primary in California. The duo had guided New York governor Nelson Rockefeller’s campaign to a surprisingly close second-place finish. “I’d hire those sons of bitches,” Goldwater advised Ronnie.
That was a time when professional political consulting was still in its infancy; campaigns before then were generally run by amateurs and cronies. The young operatives started their firm in 1960 and quickly developed a reputation for sure-footed strategy and hardball tactics. Spencer and Roberts had already been approached to run the campaign of one of Ronnie’s prospective GOP opponents, former San Francisco mayor George Christopher, who was considered the favorite in the Republican race. But when they were summoned to Pacific Palisades for a meeting in March 1965, they sensed something in the fading movie actor that made him worth a gamble. “This guy could do it,” they told each other. “If we handle it right, this guy could make it.”
But Spencer and Roberts also recognized that both Ronnie and his wife were Hollywood people, which meant they were clueless about what running for office would entail. They had potential, but they were going to require a lot of preparation. What was also clear, from the outset, was that the Reagans came as a package deal. During that first session in their living room, Nancy sat in a chair, her legs tucked under her. She listened intently and said almost nothing. “Nancy was in every one of the meetings we had with Reagan. She was quiet. With those big eyes of hers, she’d be watching you almost warily. Every now and then she’d ask a question, but probably less than a handful of times,” Spencer recalled. “I was always sure she had plenty to say to him after Bill and I left.”
At one point during their initial meeting, Nancy got up and went into a bedroom. Spencer followed her, and asked, “Nancy, what’s wrong?”
“I don’t know,” she answered. “It’s just too much. It’s a whole new world, and I’m not sure I’m ready for it.”
“You can do it,” Spencer told her. “But I don’t want to kid you. This is just the beginning. It’s going to get worse.”
Over the coming years, Nancy would speak up more often, as her confidence in her own instincts grew. At those times, Spencer learned, he was the one who should be listening. “She’s actually a terrifically intelligent politician,” he said. “She thinks politically. In some ways, much more than he ever did.… She developed over the years an instinct about people who would fit her husband best. She knew his strengths and weaknesses, surely. But the chief criterion for her was: whose agenda are they pursuing? Ronald Reagan’s or their own? She got very good at sorting that out.”
The intensity of the Reagans’ emotional and romantic bond became evident to Spencer early. One evening, following a dinner at a Mexican restaurant, he accompanied the couple to Los Angeles’s Union Station, where Ronnie was catching a train for a television shoot. As the conductor shouted, “All aboard!” Ronnie and Nancy fell into each other’s arms and started making out for what seemed like an interminable amount of time. Spencer grew deeply embarrassed. “Jesus, this is like a scene out of a damn movie,” he thought to himself. “What the hell is going on?” Those cinematic displays of affection were something he would learn to get used to.
There was one more insight into the couple that Spencer would gain as he was deciding whether to attempt to turn a movie actor into a politician. He had lunch one day with Reagan’s agent, Taft Schreiber, who cautioned him that Ronnie was allergic to interpersonal conflict, which is something endemic to nearly every political operation. �
��You’re going to have to fire a lot of people,” Schreiber advised. “Ronnie never fired anybody in his life.”
That, Spencer would later come to understand, would be Nancy’s job—just as so many other distasteful things would fall to her, in California and beyond. “She was the one that was going to be the bad guy,” he said. “She took on a role as personnel director. She knew as well as I knew, because we discussed it. ‘Ronnie won’t fire anybody.’ I said, ‘Well, somebody’s going to have to fire people.’ She had no qualms about firing people. She’d get somebody to do the job. One of her qualities was tenacity.”
The initial order of business: Spencer and Roberts told both Reagans they were going to have to get over their fear of flying. It was the only way to get around the vast state. Ronnie and Nancy agreed, though for years they would insist on traveling in separate planes, apparently superstitious that being on the same one was tempting fate. On Spencer’s first flight with Nancy, a short hop from LA to San Francisco on Western Airlines, she dug her nails so deeply into his hand that it bled.
The consultants went to work writing campaign plans for Ronnie. It was a challenge to figure out how to put one together for such an unconventional candidate. Former actor George Murphy, who, coincidentally, had played Ronnie’s father in the 1943 movie This Is the Army, had been elected to the US Senate the previous year. The Republican’s victory showed that Californians were willing to vote for a former movie actor with a conservative message. But putting one in the governor’s mansion was a bigger leap.
Around their third day on the job, the consultants were pondering the candidate’s potential negatives. What from Reagan’s past might emerge and become a problem for his campaign? That was when they suddenly realized there was a big unknown that had to be dealt with: Jane Wyman. Divorced politicians were a rarity in those days, and they had no idea what Ronnie’s ex-wife might say once the campaign got under way.
“We’ve got to find out where she is on this whole thing,” Roberts said. Spencer drew the short straw to take on this awkward task. He made an appointment to visit Wyman at her home. Though it was only ten in the morning, Jane greeted him with a cocktail in her hand—apparently not her first of the day. Spencer also noticed that she didn’t offer him one. He told Jane that her ex-husband was thinking of running for governor, something she already knew from reading the papers. After a little more small talk, Jane interrupted him: “I think I know why you’re here. You’re worried about what I might do.”
“You hit it right on the head,” Spencer replied. “We just feel it’s important that we know where you stand in this whole thing.”
“I hope Ronnie wins,” Jane said. “He deserves it.”
Spencer was relieved, but he wasn’t prepared for what Jane said next. “She had a little bit of Irish devil in her,” Spencer told me. “She says, ‘I will not tell the world that Ronnie was a lousy lay.’ ”
Jane was as good as her word. For the next two decades, as Ronnie rose to the most powerful office in the world, she refrained from making public comments about her ex-husband. “She played it straight the whole time. I think she made one statement early about how he’s always wanted this. ‘I wish him well,’ ” Spencer said. “I remember, on election night, she was about the third person that called us at the Biltmore hotel to congratulate him.
“I didn’t tell Nancy that,” he added.
Spencer also found an unexpected asset in Edie. Nancy’s mom handed the campaign manager a list of names of people she promised would give large sums to help her son-in-law get elected. Spencer called them, and sure enough, every one of them promised a contribution. When Edie checked in a few weeks later to see how it went, Spencer dutifully tallied for her what he had gotten from her friends: a $1,500 check here, another $4,000 there. He thought she would be pleased.
“Those cheap sons of bitches!” Edie sputtered. “I’m taking over!”
Spencer marveled: “I watched it. One of the sons of bitches sent a check for fifteen grand, and another one sent a check for twenty. She really got on them.”
The exploratory committee launched in May 1965. Ronnie spent the next months testing his message and his abilities as a candidate in small communities across the state. He questioned why his handlers weren’t sending him to larger places, where there were more votes to be had. “It’s like a show,” Spencer explained to Ronnie and Nancy, trying to frame the endeavor in terms the couple would understand. “You take it out of town. You work it out, get the kinks out of it, and screwups and all of this stuff, and then you go to the big city.”
Ronnie formally declared he was running for governor on January 4, 1966. His campaign broadcast the announcement in a pretaped speech on fifteen television stations across the state. A week earlier, Nancy had written William F. Buckley: “I must say my emotions are wired. I awaken early often and think, ‘Good God. What have we gotten ourselves into?’ Well, we shall see. Don’t you think you’ll have to come out here sometime during the campaign for National Review? Please do—I want my friends around me too—not just my enemies!”
California was a state where Democrats outnumbered Republicans by a 3-to-2 margin, but its voters were not intensely partisan. They had elected Republican governors Earl Warren and Goodwin Knight in the 1950s, and George Murphy as their senator over former Kennedy White House press secretary Pierre Salinger in 1964. Moreover, the political environment was ripe for Ronnie’s message and his fresh qualities as a “citizen-politician.” Los Angeles had been shaken in 1965 by race riots in Watts, which left thirty-four dead and created deep anxiety among whites. California news broadcasts were filled with anti–Vietnam War protests on the University of California at Berkeley campus and scenes of free-loving hippies in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco, which unsettled people in the suburbs. Meanwhile, there was frustration across the political spectrum at the state’s soaring property taxes. A revolt was brewing.
With little guidance from Ronnie’s team, Nancy struggled to figure out what her own role in the campaign should be. At first, she did not want to go on the trail at all. Then she agreed to make appearances, but only to take questions about her husband, not to give speeches. “We went to tiny, tiny little towns,” she said. “One town I remember we landed in darkness, and they didn’t even have lights at the airport. They had gotten cars out to line the way, and they turned their lights on. And that’s how we landed.” Nancy learned not to mention the name of the city where she was speaking, because when she was making six stops a day, it was easy to get it wrong. “It’s nice to be here,” she would say. Part of her job was to reinforce Ronnie’s conservative message. On campuses, Nancy was asked about marijuana and said that as a doctor’s daughter, she opposed it. She told audiences she thought the movies of the day were too violent and explicit. She denounced premarital sex, live-in relationships, and permissive child rearing.
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Her own home, however, was hardly the picture of the values she espoused. Nancy’s daughter was smoking pot with her friends and becoming addicted to diet pills. Patti’s rebellious nature was a constant source of potential embarrassment. One crisis came when she attempted to run off to Alaska with the handsome dishwasher from her Arizona boarding school. The plan was thwarted only because Patti tried to enlist her stepbrother, Michael, by then a twenty-one-year-old adult, to sign her out, and he alerted Nancy. At another point during the campaign, Patti disappeared from home for a day after an argument with her mother, one that started over Patti’s refusal to wear a Reagan campaign button. When Patti decided to return, Nancy sounded more concerned about how the incident might reflect upon Ronnie than about her daughter’s welfare. “It could have been all over the papers!” Nancy said.
“She slapped my face hard and then stormed out,” Patti wrote later. “I went to the mirror and watched as my face grew red. It had become a ritual: the siege would end with a slap, and I’d be left alone, staring in the mirror with hard, tearless eyes.”
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nbsp; Ronnie, as usual, left all of the difficult and contentious parts of parenting to Nancy.
It was decided that Maureen and Michael—awkward reminders of Ronnie’s first marriage—were to be rendered invisible for the duration of the campaign. On that, Nancy and Spencer agreed.
Michael seemed to have little interest in politics. He was adrift and preoccupied with finding his own way in life. Having flunked out of college, he worked a series of menial jobs, fell deeply into debt, and discovered a passion for racing expensive boats. At one point, Nancy asked Maureen whether her second husband, a marine captain named David Sills, might find a way to have Michael drafted and shipped off to Vietnam.
But while Michael was not clamoring for a role in his father’s campaign, it was hurtful to Maureen to be excluded from it. She had become a Republican before he had and worked for Goldwater in 1964. Early in Ronnie’s gubernatorial run, Maureen was invited by a local GOP organization to introduce her father at a banquet in San Diego. That seemed fine to assistant campaign director Dave Tomshany, who had driven Ronnie to the event. But when Tomshany and the candidate returned to Pacific Palisades later that night, they were met at the door by Nancy.
“She was livid—because Jane Wyman’s daughter, Maureen, had introduced Ron, her father, at this San Diego banquet and speech,” Tomshany recounted later in a book of reminiscences compiled by Reagan aide Curtis Patrick. “Now, I had no idea who Maureen was before that day—and all of a sudden, it’s his daughter from the previous marriage and—oh, she was livid! I think she chewed me out for, probably, fifteen minutes.”