The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Page 16

  The event had been painful for Maureen as well. She was handed a biography the campaign had drafted to be read as her father’s introduction. It said: “Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy, have two children, Patti and Ronnie.” Humiliated to see herself written out of the story of his life, Ronnie’s eldest discarded it and read from her own notes, telling stories from her and Michael’s childhood. Later, Maureen claimed, Spencer told her husband that Maureen should “dig a hole and pull the dirt in over me until after the election.” Maureen appealed to her father, asking for a more visible role. But Ronnie told her: “If you pay someone to manage a campaign, then you’ve got to give them the authority to do it as they see fit.”

  Nancy, meanwhile, was becoming less willing to defer to the campaign’s hired guns. She let the men who ran the campaign know when she—and her friends—thought they were falling down on the job. “I’m working. My phone would ring, it’s Nancy Reagan,” Spencer told me. “It’s six o’clock, and she wants to talk about the campaign, talk about all the goddamn rumors she’d heard at the bridge party that day with Betsy, and blah, blah, blah. All the stuff, and all her political counsel and advice, every day.”

  One morning, the operator running the old-fashioned PBX switchboard at campaign headquarters neglected to put Nancy on hold before announcing to Spencer: “The bitch is on the phone again.” Then the operator accidentally dropped the line. Nancy called right back and said icily: “Well, I hope I didn’t destroy your day.” This time the embarrassed woman quickly transferred her to Spencer. Nancy didn’t miss a beat before launching into her fresh list of concerns.

  Ronnie’s Northern California chairman, Tom Reed, also got regular calls, which he considered “a dubious honor heretofore sloughed off on those closer at hand. Nancy was a very active candidate’s wife, supportive and protective of RR, but incessantly injecting her views and personal demands on anyone who would listen—along with many who did not wish to do so.” Reed wrote that “Nancy’s political calls, directed at any who would listen, usually came first thing in the morning as soon as RR left the house. She wanted to discuss her perception of the campaign, garnered from her dinner companions of the night before. These women were hardly a cross-section of working-class California.”

  No doubt there was more than a little sexism at work in these men’s dismissal of the idea that Nancy should be anything but ornamental to Ronnie’s campaign. In their view, the role of the spouse was to make herself presentable, show up where asked, and parrot what she was told to say. Spencer, though, would come to understand that Nancy’s instincts were generally on the mark. They revealed a deep understanding of her husband and a sharp sense of what he needed to stay on the top of his game. Nancy made demands that Ronnie wouldn’t. She insisted, for instance, that no matter how much he traveled, he must spend every night possible at home in his own bed. She knew that when Ronnie was tired or under the weather, or when the campaign ran him too hard, he blundered—as he did when he stormed out of a convention of black Republicans after his GOP opponents suggested he was racist for opposing the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act.

  In the June primary, Ronnie easily beat former San Francisco mayor Christopher, getting 65 percent of the vote. That set him up to face Democratic incumbent governor Edmund G. (Pat) Brown in the fall election. Brown made the mistake—as so many others would in the years to come—of underestimating Ronnie and his appeal from the outset. The governor painted his opponent as an inexperienced extremist; at one point referring to the affable host everyone remembered from GE Theater as an “enemy of the people.” One of Brown’s television spots featured the governor telling a group of schoolchildren: “I’m running against an actor, and you know who shot Lincoln, don’t ya?” That kind of rhetoric backfired, sending more disaffected voters to the Republican side.

  Hollywood also took note of Brown’s over-the-top comment about actors. “Frank Sinatra called me the next day,” Spencer recalled. “He was a big Democrat then for whom I had done a little work. Without even a hello, he’s going on, ‘What can I do? What can I do?’

  “And he was just the first. They came out of the woodwork, those Hollywood Democrats. Maybe they were already supporting Ron, but certainly not publicly. Brown’s quote blew him out of the water with those folks.”

  Ronnie won the November election in a landslide. He got nearly a million more votes than Brown and carried many traditionally Democratic precincts in suburban and rural California, as well as working-class enclaves of Los Angeles. As the Reagans drove to his campaign party on election night, they heard an announcer on the radio proclaim that Ronnie would be California’s next governor. “I had always thought you waited up all night listening to the returns, and although this may sound silly, I felt let down,” Nancy recalled. “After so much hard work, Ronnie’s early and overwhelming victory seemed almost an anticlimax.”

  They were on their way.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Ronnie was sworn in as governor just minutes after midnight on January 2, 1967, his hand on a four-hundred-year-old Bible believed to have been brought to California by Father Junipero Serra, the Spanish priest who had spread the Catholic faith in the seventeen hundreds. That odd hour brought no small amount of speculation—including by his predecessor, Pat Brown—that the timing had been determined by astrology. After all, it was no secret that the Reagans began each day by reading what the signs were saying in their friend Carroll Righter’s column. The official story, plausible enough, was that Ronnie wanted to put a stop to Brown’s aggressive use of last-minute appointments of friends and allies to judgeships and other posts. So, he decided to take office at the first moment it was possible. “I don’t know what the stars prescribed, but we had our reasons for doing it at this hour,” Ronnie said.

  Three days later, there was a lavish celebration. Airlines had to add flights from Los Angeles to Sacramento to accommodate the seven thousand people who came for it. At the inaugural ball, two orchestras played for revelers on a half dozen raised dance floors. Nancy wore a showstopping, one-shouldered gown of white wool and silk, studded with sparkling daisies. It was designed for her by couturier Jimmy Galanos, who said it was “a little grander and has a little more glitter than she usually allows.” The San Francisco Examiner noted approvingly that the new first lady was “an extremely pretty woman who knows how to wear clothes. Her clothes are not the drab costumes politicians’ wives in the past have worn in order not to call attention to themselves.” The Oakland Tribune declared: “The eyes of the fashion world, long focused on Jackie Kennedy as a pacesetter, are already finding pleasure in watching Mrs. Reagan.”

  This was a time for Nancy to bask in her husband’s triumph. But her brother, Dick, who had not seen her much since Ronnie had decided to enter politics, sensed a change in her; a shadow over the gay girl he remembered growing up in Chicago. “She was very tight and not her old open self,” he told me.

  As Nancy was starting to understand, first lady is a title that comes without a job description. Always wary about moving into new situations, she understood she had a lot to learn. But one thing—the most important thing—remained constant. Ronnie was as devoted to her as ever. Two months after his inauguration, Nancy woke up to a note from the governor:

  My Darling First Lady

  I’m looking at you as you lie here beside me on this fifteenth anniversary and wondering why everyone has only just discovered you are the First Lady. You’ve been the First—in fact the only—to me for fifteen years.

  That sounds so strange—“fifteen years.” It still seems like minutes, they’ve gone by so swiftly. If I have any regret it is for the days we’ve been apart and I’ve had to awaken without watching you. Some day, you’ll have to explain how you can be five years old when you sleep and for fifteen years yet. But then maybe it has something to do with my only being fifteen—because I wasn’t living before I began watching you.

  Nancy, not as good at putting her emotions on paper, was left at a lo
ss for words. Along with the love in her response was an undercurrent of anxiety and protectiveness. She wrote him:

  My darling husband,

  You beat me to it this morning ’cause I was going to write you—

  I can never say what I really feel in my heart to you ’cause I get puddled up—and you always say everything so much better. But I too can’t believe it’s been fifteen (16!) years. In another way tho’ it seems like forever—I really can’t even remember a life before you now. Everything began with you. My whole life—so you’d better be careful and take care of yourself because there’d be nothing and I’d be no one without you.

  I love you so much—I never thought I could love you more than the day we were married but I do—and I’m so proud of you—every day—I could pop—It just keeps getting bigger and bigger—those poor other mommies—they don’t have a you—but I do—and I hope you’ll always have a me.

  Sacramento, where Ronnie served two terms as governor, was different from anything they had ever known. It was a fog-prone, medium-sized city in an agricultural valley, a plane trip from the glamour of Los Angeles and a long drive from the sophistication of San Francisco. Living on the governor’s $44,000-a-year salary meant Ronnie had to sell his Yearling Row ranch, and with it, his beloved horses. But there was some consolation—and perhaps something ethically questionable—in the fact that the newly elected governor reaped a handy profit when Twentieth Century-Fox bought the property for an eyebrow-raising $2 million. That was nearly double what the tax assessor set as the ranch’s value, and twenty-three times what Ronnie had paid for it in 1951. Democrats suggested the inflated price, negotiated by some of his wealthy friends, was a sweetheart deal meant to buy the governor’s favor on a tax bill that gave a big break to the movie industry.

  The Reagans stood apart from and above the scene in Sacramento. Legislators noticed that the governor never joined them for nights of carousing at their regular haunts, such as Frank Fat’s, a Chinese restaurant and watering hole a block from the capitol that was considered the “third house” of the legislature. Bills were said to have been written on Frank Fat’s napkins. “Reagan was convivial, but he had neither a genuine interest in socializing with other politicians nor a need to demonstrate he was one of the boys,” wrote journalist Lou Cannon, who covered the statehouse for the San Jose Mercury News in those days. “Some legislators thought their celebrity governor looked down on them; the prosaic truth was that Reagan was tired at the end of the day and preferred to spend evenings at home.”

  Occasionally, lawmakers were invited over to the Reagans’ house—though it generally took a bit of prodding from Ronnie’s legislative secretary, George Steffes. However reluctant she may have been, Nancy brought an entertaining flair of the kind Sacramento had not seen before. Famous acts such as Jack Benny, Danny Thomas, and Red Skelton performed at the annual parties they held for the legislators in their backyard, where Nancy had a temporary stage built over the swimming pool. When she spotted the neighborhood kids hanging on to the fence to watch, Nancy invited them to join as well. But the California first lady was not subtle in letting everyone know when it was time to leave so that Ronnie could get to bed.

  Unlike previous first ladies, Nancy had little to do with the wives of lawmakers and lobbyists. They were offended when she did not join their busy club, Pals and Gals, which met for regular luncheons and golf outings. Pat Brown’s wife, Bernice, had been a regular. The gals thought Nancy snobby and standoffish; she didn’t see why she should be expected to make small talk with women whose husbands were constantly carping in the news media about hers. Nor did Nancy hide the fact that she considered the state capital a backwater—a place where there was nowhere decent to shop for clothes or get her hair done. The Reagans spent every possible weekend back at their home in Pacific Palisades. Where a decade before they had been B-listers in Hollywood, their social standing in Los Angeles had soared with Ronnie’s election. Nancy soon joined her best friend, Betsy Bloomingdale, as a fixture on the International Best Dressed List and ultimately was named to its Hall of Fame.

  * * *

  As imperious as she might have seemed in those early years, the truth was that Nancy was insecure and naive about the expectations that came with her new life. There was a price to be paid for not understanding that she and Ronnie had moved into a world that played by different rules. They were used to the movie business, which was lubricated by fantasy. Studios in the Reagans’ day had the power to bury scandals and fill the gossip columns with manufactured tidbits about their stars. Politics, on the other hand, ran on cynicism. On this stage, there was a harsher kind of spotlight, one that accentuated every imperfection.

  Nancy emerged onto the political scene in the turbulent 1960s, at a time when broader social forces were taking hold. She was a proudly—no, fiercely—traditional wife, which made her a pathetic caricature in the eyes of women who were joining the burgeoning feminist movement. Reporters snickered at the way she fixed her gaze on her husband during his speeches, sure that it had to be an act. “While other Reagan fans alternately applaud or laugh at the governor’s one-liners, Nancy composes her features into a kind of transfixed adoration more appropriate to a witness of the Virgin Birth,” Cannon wrote.

  A profile by the brilliant writer Joan Didion in the June 1, 1968, issue of the Saturday Evening Post set the tone for years of media narrative about Nancy. The story, headlined “Pretty Nancy,” began with a scene in which a television crew was setting up a shot of the California first lady picking flowers in the garden of the executive residence. It was the most ordinary kind of photo op. But in Didion’s hands, it became a metaphor for artificiality—“something revelatory, the truth about Nancy Reagan at 24 frames a second.”

  “[W]henever I think of Nancy Reagan now, I think of her just so, the frame frozen, pretty Nancy Reagan about to pluck a rhododendron blossom too large to fit into her decorative six-inch basket. Nancy Reagan has an interested smile, the smile of a good wife, a good mother, a good hostess, the smile of someone who grew up in comfort and went to Smith College and has a father who is a distinguished neurosurgeon,” Didion wrote, adding that Nancy’s was “the smile of a woman who seems to be playing out some middle-class American woman’s daydream, circa 1948.” Nancy was stunned at how her cooperation with the television crew refracted through the lens of Didion’s contempt. “Would she have liked it better if I had snarled?” Nancy wrote more than twenty years later. “She had obviously written the story in her mind before she ever met me.”

  Though she would in time grow far more sophisticated in her dealings with journalists, that profile left a bruise that never went away. “The idea that somebody would sit down and interview you at length, and then just torture you, was really shocking to her,” her son, Ron, said. “She was probably wondering, ‘What is this even about?’ Her conception of feminism at the time would have been almost nonexistent. The idea that she was being portrayed as this kind of throwback—she barely understood what the point of the whole thing was.”

  In at least one important regard, Didion read the first lady’s character backward. Nancy’s flaw was not that she was skillful at pretense. It was that she wasn’t. As Cannon wrote: “She alienated even those who were disposed to like her with statements that were bluntly honest and undiplomatic.”

  Nancy found plenty to fret over during Ronnie’s early years in Sacramento. He got off to a rocky and turbulent start as governor. Though he had run a brilliant campaign, and the electorate was eager for change, Ronnie and his team arrived in the state capital unprepared for the challenges of actually doing the job. Many of the new governor’s key appointments had been selected by his Kitchen Cabinet and came from the business world, which meant almost no one in the senior ranks of his administration had any experience in government. “We were not only amateurs. We were novice amateurs,” press spokesman Lyn Nofziger acknowledged later. Ronnie opened his first senior staff meeting with a question: “What do we do
now?”

  Personnel problems and infighting beset his administration from the start, but conflict-averse Ronnie was ill-equipped to bring internal discipline to his operation. Nor had the governor anticipated some of the policy challenges he would confront in his first year. His predecessor bequeathed him a fiscal deficit twice as big as he expected, and the spending cuts he proposed came nowhere near meeting the state constitution’s requirement that California balance its budget. So, the conservative who had run for office as an antitax crusader found himself in the position of having to raise revenues by $1 billion, which gave him the ignominious distinction of having signed the biggest tax hike ever for any state in the country.

  Compounding the problem had been Ronnie’s choice of a finance director. Gordon Smith, a management consultant, knew almost nothing about the state budget and tried to wing it. Legislators considered him a joke, and in just over a year, Smith was gone. He was replaced in February 1968 by future defense secretary Caspar Weinberger, a former state party chairman who was then working as a San Francisco attorney.

  As would be the case in so many personnel shifts to come, Nancy’s unseen hand was at work in replacing Smith with Weinberger. The Kitchen Cabinet had initially rejected the highly credentialed Weinberger, deeming him too liberal because he had committed the unpardonable sin of supporting Nelson Rockefeller over Barry Goldwater in the 1964 Republican primary. Nancy was far less concerned with ideology than competence. With turmoil mounting, she worked her back channels of information, which included Spencer. Who, Nancy asked over and over, could straighten out this mess?