The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Read online

  Nofziger took on the job. He indiscreetly, and at times drunkenly, began informing reporters about the real reason behind Battaglia’s departure. The governor’s spokesman swore the journalists to secrecy and assumed none of them would write about such a taboo subject as homosexuality. But that did not mean they wouldn’t talk about it, and eventually the rumors started seeping into print. A blind item about an unnamed “top GOP presidential prospect” facing “a potentially sordid scandal” appeared in Newsweek in late October 1967. Shortly after that, Drew Pearson’s nationally syndicated column carried a claim that there had been an eight-man “sex orgy which had taken place at a cabin near Lake Tahoe leased by two members of Reagan’s staff.” At the conclusion of his irresponsibly reported claims regarding the unnamed “homo-ring,” Pearson remarked: “It will be very interesting to note what effect the incident has on the governor’s zooming chances to be president of the United States.”

  When Ronnie held his next weekly news conference, he tried to deny everything and tossed the question to Nofziger: “This is just absolutely not true. Want to confirm it, Lyn?”

  “Confirmed,” Nofziger piped up.

  Ronnie piled on, huffily calling Pearson “a liar. He’s lying.”

  The story that Nofziger had leaked, thinking no one would actually publish it, was suddenly all over the papers. Nancy was furious and wanted him fired. She didn’t speak to him for five months. Nofziger offered his resignation to the governor and cited the first lady as the reason.

  “I’m tired of Nancy cutting me up,” he told Ronnie. “It isn’t doing me any good, and it isn’t doing you any good. It just isn’t worth it.”

  Ronnie, typically, insisted his wife was doing no such thing and told Nofziger he wanted him to stay, which the spokesman did until departing to work on a Senate campaign in 1968. He later moved on to the Nixon White House. After Ronnie was elected president, Nofziger would be back to work for him, but his relationship with Nancy would always be touchy.

  * * *

  Battaglia’s ouster did produce one welcome result. The team around Ronnie was reconfigured and became far more cohesive and disciplined. Some of them would stay with him all the way to Washington. Cabinet Secretary William P. Clark, a soft-spoken thirty-five-year-old lawyer who shared Ronnie’s love of ranching, took over as chief of staff. His natural reserve was much like the boss’s, and he was a good manager. Clark soon discovered that the first lady had strong opinions about the major issues they were dealing with, and some of the minor ones as well. Many mornings, one of the first calls he took was from Nancy, who dialed her husband’s top staff member as soon as Ronnie climbed into the limousine to make the short trip from the residence to the basement garage in the Capitol. “She’d use that fifteen minutes to call me and say, ‘Bill, please talk to Ronnie about this or that,’ indicating to me that she had not necessarily gotten her position in his mind solidly enough,” Clark recalled later. “He’d come off the elevator with a smile at me, knowing darn well she had phoned to make her position very clear.”

  When Ronnie appointed Clark to a longed-for judgeship in 1968, beginning his rise to the California Supreme Court, he was replaced by legal affairs secretary Edwin Meese III, who ran the staff for the remainder of Ronnie’s governorship. Meese was deeply loyal and masterful at translating Ronnie’s ideas into policy. He was also notoriously disorganized, the opposite of a boss who cleaned off his desk at the end of every day. But that didn’t matter, because Clark had left behind an operation that could practically run on its own.

  One of the most important things Clark and Meese figured out was a way to deal with Nancy. The solution was the number two guy in the office: Michael K. Deaver. A smooth former adman, Deaver had risen through the early turmoil to become deputy chief of staff. As Clark and then Meese tired of having to take the first lady’s calls, Deaver’s portfolio grew to include what he would later call the “Nancy Clause.” Others dubbed it the “Mommy Watch.” His job was to handle the incoming from Nancy and keep her out of everyone else’s hair.

  Deaver was terrified the first time his secretary announced that Mrs. Reagan was on the phone. Nancy wanted to rearrange the governor’s schedule so that he could make an event she was planning in Los Angeles. Deaver told her that wouldn’t be possible because Ronnie had to be in Sacramento for state business. After a long silence, Nancy agreed. “That was it,” Deaver recalled later. “Flames hadn’t shot out of the handset. State marshals didn’t bust down my door as soon as we were through and order me to start packing. ‘Whew,’ I thought to myself. ‘Just maybe this job is doable.’ ”

  What Nancy demanded was, in short, utter honesty. Deaver had given her the facts, without finessing them or treating the first lady with condescension. That respect—along with, Deaver’s detractors would say, his subservience—would be the basis of their close bond over the decades to come. It was to be one of the most significant relationships that Nancy would ever form. Though the two of them would hit some rough patches, each trusted that the other would always put Ronnie’s interest and image first. Each was determined not to see him fail. As Deaver put it: “In taking the job nobody else wanted—the guy who, in addition to other duties, would have to answer to California’s inexhaustible first lady—I had stumbled upon my niche.”

  Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that his niche had found him. “Nancy was soon able to see in me a quality I wasn’t at all sure I possessed: the instinct for how the media operates and how best to present Ronald Reagan to it, a job she had been doing alone for years,” he wrote. “Although I was admittedly nervous in my initial dealings with her, I think she realized after a few months that she didn’t intimidate me. Soon we were huddling on scheduling, politics, the press, speeches, and other affairs of state. I had fully expected to learn the lion’s share of politics at the side of Ronald Reagan. He’s the one who bucked the odds and drove California’s Democratic machine to the ground. But Nancy proved to be a shrewd political player in her own right.”

  Ronnie liked the fact that the two were conferring so closely and started referring slyly to Nancy as Deaver’s “phone pal.” Meese and others in the office also began turning to Deaver as a back channel to the first lady, to get her advice without having to deal with her calls. When issues came up that required some persuasion, Nancy coached Deaver on how to win Ronnie to his side: not by arguing the political consequences, she advised, but by pointing out who might get helped or hurt, or how it fit with the governor’s philosophy. “By the time he came into the White House, he really knew Ronnie and understood when to approach him and how,” Nancy wrote. “Mike was never afraid to bring Ronnie the bad news or tell him when he thought he was wrong.”

  Another who worked well with the governor’s wife was former local TV news anchor Nancy Clark Reynolds, who had the office next to Deaver’s. She had been hired to handle the broadcast side of the media operation and, by virtue of being one of the few women on the staff, was also assigned to Mommy Watch. She traveled frequently with the first lady, and the two became comfortable with each other. The daughter of a former US senator from Idaho, Reynolds had grown up surrounded by the power players of Washington and was not intimidated by Nancy’s often imperious manner. Eventually she began to appreciate what few others saw in Mrs. Reagan. “She was the smartest person, so up on everything,” Reynolds said to me many years later. “She was the smartest politician I ever knew.”

  Reynolds also discerned the vulnerability behind the first lady’s brittle facade. “Nancy is very wary. She’s terribly cautious about the unknown, and suspicious, almost, of strangers or situations with which she’s not familiar,” Reynolds told Lou Cannon in a 1981 off-the-record interview, a transcript of which is in his papers at the University of California at Santa Barbara. “I’ve always said I felt that she had some insecurities.”

  * * *

  As hyper-attuned as Nancy was to her husband’s public image, she had—and would always have—some gap
ing blind spots when it came to her own. During those early years in Sacramento, she touched off a series of controversies, some of which foreshadowed her later stumbles in Washington.

  The first came soon after Ronnie was inaugurated, when she declared that she would not live in the decrepit Governor’s Mansion. The eighty-nine-year-old wooden Victorian Gothic house at Sixteenth and H Streets was not without its charms. The gingerbread structure had a cupola, winding staircases, high ceilings, and big bedrooms. But it was gloomy and located in a seedy part of Sacramento. Its neighbors included a bustling gas station, a no-star motel, and an American Legion hall. The house was also on a major one-way thoroughfare between Reno and San Francisco, where trucks roared by twenty-four hours a day. They idled at the stoplight just outside the mansion, then shifted gears, interrupting dinner-party conversation and making it impossible for insomniac Nancy to sleep at night.

  Then there were the safety issues. The mold-scented bedrooms had ropes instead of fire escapes. When a false alarm went off only a month after the Reagans moved in, the fire marshal told Nancy that if there had been an actual blaze, eight-year-old Ron would have had to break through the rusted window screen of his second-floor bedroom with a dresser drawer and climb out. Nancy pronounced it “a tinderbox” and “a firetrap.”

  The Reagans were not the first gubernatorial family to complain about the mansion. As far back as 1911, Governor Hiram Johnson had refused to move in until it was rid of an infestation of bats. Ronnie’s predecessor, Pat Brown, wanted a new residence built, but only got as far as having plans drawn up. However, Brown did manage to secure one improvement: a kidney-shaped swimming pool was installed after a newspaper photographer caught Brown crossing the street in his bathrobe to take a dip at the nearby motel.

  Following Nancy’s announcement that they were moving, the Reagans rented a spacious Tudor on Forty-Fifth Street in upscale East Sacramento. It was a more normal residential area, full of children with whom young Ron could play. Gina Spadafori, a fifth-grade classmate, recalls the neighborhood kids swam in the pool, and rode their bikes to school with Ron, trailed by a big black Lincoln carrying bodyguards. When the owner of the house decided in 1968 to sell it, a group of Ronnie’s rich backers—among them, Holmes Tuttle, his old agent Taft Schreiber, Alfred Bloomingdale, Henry Salvatori, Earle Jorgensen, and Armand Deutsch—bought it for $150,000. They put another $40,000 into renovations that included a dining room triple the size of the old one, a glassed-in porch, and a new “powder parlor.” Then they leased it back to the Reagans for the same $1,250 a month the first family had previously been paying in rent.

  Nancy solicited $125,000 in donations and loans of art and furnishings, including rare antiques. Much of that bounty came from the Group. The Bloomingdales chipped in a $3,500 custom-designed eighteenth-century mahogany dining table that could seat twenty-four. The Jorgensens added a $3,000 set of a dozen Queen Anne–style chairs. This brought accusations of corruption. Assembly speaker Jesse Unruh, who was Ronnie’s Democratic opponent in his 1970 bid for a second term, suggested the Reagans’ new nest was being feathered by “half-hidden millionaires who call the shots in Sacramento.”

  It was a sign of her growing confidence in the political sphere that Nancy held her first-ever press conference to respond. Seated on a miniature French provincial chair in front of the fireplace in her living room, she lamented what she said must have been “a misunderstanding” on Unruh’s part, adding: “I feel very proud of my project, which is resulting in some fine antiques being donated to the state of California.” Poised and disarming, she obliterated Unruh’s criticisms one by one. “It’s too early in the political season to determine how well Mr. Unruh will fare against Ronald Reagan, but it’s already apparent he’s no match for Mrs. Reagan,” an editorial in the conservative Oakland Tribune declared. Ronnie ran for reelection that year in a fierce political headwind that battered Republicans across the country: in 1970 they lost eleven governorships. The incumbent beat Unruh that fall, but his margin was barely half what it had been over Brown four years before.

  Despite the stresses, the stumbles, and the scrutiny, their new life brought a deeper satisfaction than either of the Reagans had ever known. At one point while Ronnie and Nancy were sitting in their living room, they found themselves in a reflective mood, contemplating the unlikely place to which destiny had brought them. “All of a sudden it came to both of us that what we were doing made everything else we’d done seem ‘dull as dishwater’—that was the expression she used,” Ronnie remembered. “And it was true.… Instead of just talking about problems from the outside—to actually deal with them and to have a hand in solving them—well, one man who was a governor back when I was a performer had said to me about his job that sometimes he went home feeling ten feet tall. We both felt that way about it.”

  Ronnie’s second inaugural gala in January 1971 was an even bigger production than his first. Five thousand people packed Sacramento’s Memorial Auditorium. Outside were protesters, some of whom carried Vietcong flags. But inside the hall, there were so many stars that it was hard to even count them all. Hollywood legends John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart acted as masters of ceremonies. Comedian Jack Benny joked from the stage: “Even though Ronald Reagan left show business, show business did not leave him, as you can see tonight.” The highlight of the evening was Frank Sinatra, who had produced the gala, singing more than a dozen of his hits. Sinatra had been a stalwart backer of Democrats going back to his energetic campaigning for Franklin D. Roosevelt. But he had completed a personal and political evolution that many thought began with a personal falling-out with the Kennedy family. Sinatra raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Ronnie’s reelection effort. At the inaugural gala, Sinatra dedicated one of his signature hits, “Nancy (With the Laughing Face),” to the beaming first lady in the front row.

  * * *

  If her admirers regarded their governor’s wife as California’s own Jackie Kennedy, there were plenty who viewed Nancy as the second coming of Marie Antoinette. First, there had been her decision to move out of the old Governor’s Mansion. Then she announced a campaign to build a new one on eleven acres their friends had bought for the state on the American River. Furious letters poured into the California first lady’s office. An Escondido woman wrote: “Build your own mansion, the old one was good enough for a Democrat, but—no—not classy enough for a couple of ‘show people,’ millionaires. My husband is 80 yrs. old. I am 72. We live on a measly $142.50 a month.… You don’t need to live in a $170,000 mansion and then beg people to donate expensive furniture for your mansion.” A La Jolla constituent sent a letter accusing Nancy of “embezzling $1,000,000 tax funds to build this extravagant whimsey.” The first lady responded that the money would come from a California government fund maintained for capital construction and added: “I’m sure it must be obvious… that I am trying to do this for the state and future governors, since I’ll never be living in it.”

  As it turned out, no one ever lived in the twenty-thousand-square-foot modern monstrosity that eventually went up on the site. Pat Brown’s son, Jerry, a thirtysomething bachelor who succeeded Ronnie as governor, called it a “Taj Mahal” and refused to move in, preferring instead to sleep on a mattress on the floor of his $250-a-month studio apartment. Joan Didion wrote that the soulless palace that Nancy insisted upon building was “evocative of the unspeakable.” It was also too far from the capitol to be practical. The state, which was spending $85,000 a year to guard the unoccupied property, auctioned it off in 1982. When Jerry Brown returned for a second tour as governor nearly three decades later, he had the old mansion renovated and moved back in, becoming the first governor to reside there since the Reagans had vacated it.

  Nancy’s files show that she frequently exchanged correspondence with constituents, even those who criticized her. She was curious to learn what individual Californians were thinking and insisted on reading nearly all of her own mail. She wrote her replies by hand, to be typewri
tten by a secretary, sparing the recipient the ordeal of struggling to decipher her loopy handwriting, which made the letter N look like a U, and M like a W.

  Her letters offered blunt views on a wide range of subjects, particularly the changing social mores of the late 1960s and early 1970s. She was contemptuous of that era’s giddy fashion trends, such as gaucho pants. (“I personally like a feminine, soft, elegant look and for a woman to look like a woman!”) Nor did she like the R- and X-rated movies that Hollywood was churning out. (“Having been in the business, I do know that the only thing they understand is how much money they can take in at the box office. If people would stop going to see—out of curiosity or whatever other excuse they use—the pictures that we don’t agree with, the producers would very quickly stop making them.”)

  A girl reached out to her in 1972 as part of a civics assignment in which students were given a choice of writing to the California first lady, feminist Gloria Steinem, or political activist Angela Davis. The question she posed to Nancy: What is your role in life? And can a woman combine a career with her home life?

  “I assume you’re talking about the woman who is able to choose between the two—not the one who must work to supplement the family income. In the latter case, there is no choice—of course—one does what one must,” Nancy replied. “However, for the woman who can choose, this is a very individual decision. I had a career when I got married and very gladly gave it up. I think in most cases when you try to combine the two, one suffers, and it’s usually the marriage. That was a gamble I wasn’t willing to take.