The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Page 9
Nancy wasn’t satisfied, so she asked LeRoy to get in touch with Ronald Reagan, the president of the Screen Actors Guild. (Ronnie said later that he was disappointed when he realized the famous director wasn’t calling to offer him a part.) LeRoy reported back to Nancy that SAG would stand behind her. By then, however, she had decided nothing short of a face-to-face with the union president would settle her nerves. At least, that’s what she told LeRoy. In truth, “I had seen some of his pictures, and, on-screen, at least, he seemed nice and good-looking—someone I wanted to meet,” Nancy would admit later.
Ronnie called and suggested dinner that night. It would have to be a quick one. He claimed to have an early call at the studio the next morning. Nancy recognized that as a standard white lie employed by Hollywood people. It was a bail-out option against the possibility that a blind date would turn out to be a dud. So, her pride a little bruised, Nancy fibbed that she had an early call too.
She opened the door of her apartment two hours later to a man who in the flesh was every bit as handsome as she had seen on-screen—even though he was leaning on two canes. During a charity baseball game, Ronnie had broken his right thighbone in a half dozen places. He had just been released from the hospital after having spent nearly two months in traction. For his part, Ronnie had expected a typically flashy MGM starlet. He saw instead “a small, slender young lady with dark hair and a wide-spaced pair of hazel eyes that looked right at you and made you look back.”
They headed to trendy LaRue’s on the Sunset Strip. Ronnie told Nancy there was a simple solution to her problem. “Have the studio change your name,” he said. “You would hardly be the first.” Naturally, he couldn’t have known how much it meant to her to be called Nancy Davis, or the years she had waited, or the effort she had put into earning the validation that came with that identity. There could be only one reason she would ever change it—and it wasn’t her career. She replied firmly: “Nancy Davis is my name.”
Before long, the pretexts of having to be home early for sunrise calls were forgotten. Nancy was entranced by Ronnie’s lack of movie-star ego and his seemingly bottomless inventory of amusing stories. As for him: “I had discovered her laugh and spent most of my time trying to say something funny. A lot of George Burns and Georgie Jessel material got an airing that night, and not always with credit given.” He was fascinated to learn that she was the daughter of a brilliant surgeon and had grown up in a household where movie legends like Spencer Tracy and Walter Huston were practically family. Ronnie also discovered she had never seen the ribald entertainer Sophie Tucker, known as the “Last of the Red Hot Mamas,” who was opening at Ciro’s nightclub a block away. They went for the first show and stayed for the second one. Despite his bum leg, Ronnie gamely tried some steps on the dance floor with Nancy. They had a late snack afterward with Tucker herself, and it was three thirty before they called it a night. “I don’t know if it was love at first sight, but it was something close to it,” Nancy recalled.
So goes the opening scene of the script for their love story. It appeared that fate’s hand was at work, bringing together by seeming happenstance two people who were perfect for each other. But, in fact, Nancy had been looking for a way to catch Ronnie’s eye, though he apparently was oblivious. Jill Schary Robinson, the daughter of MGM production head Dore Schary, claims that her mother had invited both Nancy and Ronnie to a dinner party some weeks before their supposedly blind date. Jill was only a teenager, but she knew that something was up with Nancy, relating to me, “Even I could see she was dazzled by Mr. Reagan.” Her mother, Miriam Schary, told author Anne Edwards she had arranged the evening specifically because Nancy wanted an opportunity to meet Ronnie. He, alas, “was obviously preoccupied and there were ten for dinner that night. I don’t recall his saying much to Nancy.”
Lynne Wasserman, daughter of Ronnie’s agent Lew Wasserman, told me that she has seen a photo of the future first couple at an even earlier social gathering held right after Nancy arrived in Los Angeles in 1949. It was a big celebration that the elder Wasserman and Anita May, whose husband’s family owned a leading department store chain, held every year on March 15 to celebrate their birthdays. Lynne Wasserman says she is sure of her facts on this one: “Ronnie and Nancy met at Tom and Anita May’s.” Nancy was also looking for other avenues that might bring the two of them together. How else to explain the fact that an actress newly arrived in Hollywood had already put in an application to run for a seat on the Screen Actors Guild board?
However their paths finally crossed, it seems safe to stipulate that Nancy set her sights on Ronnie early and that she was not going to let him slip past her. Nancy, after all, had declared upon her arrival at MGM that her major goal in life was to find a husband. She even showed friends at the studio a list she had compiled of Hollywood’s most “eligible bachelors.” Ronnie’s name was at the top. “Subtlety has never been Nancy’s forte,” biographer Edmund Morris wrote, “but the fact remains that when Dutch rang the bell of her apartment that November night, leaning heavily on two canes, the door opened on a future beyond their combined powers of belief.”
* * *
After their first date, Nancy and Ronnie had dinner again the next night, and the night after that, and the one after that. “For the first month or so we must have gone to every restaurant and nightclub in Los Angeles,” Nancy wrote. But the rush of early romance stalled and sputtered, in no small part because Ronnie wasn’t ready to settle down with anyone. He was newly divorced from his first wife, Academy Award–winning actress Jane Wyman, and still in shock over the fact that she had gotten bored with him and walked out.
Ronnie was carrying a torch for Wyman that shone like a klieg light and had not yet given up on the possibility of a reconciliation. In the meantime, he had discovered that a suddenly single movie actor—even one whose career was on the downward slide—did not lack for available female companionship. His business manager gave him a stern lecture after discovering that Ronnie was spending $750 a month in nightclubs. In his biography of Ronnie, Edmund Morris made a tally of the women that he went out with in the two years after his first date with Nancy. Morris came up with “at least sixteen different young and beautiful actresses, from Doris Day and Rhonda Fleming to the peachy and not-yet-legal Piper Laurie. God knows how many more there were or how many came back to spend the night with him in his hillside apartment, with its celestial view of the sparkling city. He was always shy about speaking of such matters when I interviewed him as an old man, and, to tell the truth, I didn’t think it was my biographical business.” Ronnie did admit to sleeping with so many women that he once woke up with one of them and realized he did not know who she was.
All this sexual hyperkinesia aside, Ronnie would later acknowledge that when he met Nancy, he was broken inside. His heart, as he put it, was in a “deep freeze.” And as a result, he almost blew his chance for happiness with her. “This story, I know, will be a disappointment to those who want romance neatly packaged. The truth is, I did everything wrong, dating her off and on, continuing to volunteer for every Guild trip to New York—in short, doing everything which could have lost her if Someone up there hadn’t been looking after me,” he wrote. “In spite of my determination to remain foot-loose, in spite of my belief that the pattern of my life was all set and would continue without change, nature was trying to tell me something very important.”
It would take a long time before he understood what that was. In later years, he would often quote Clark Gable: “There’s nothing more important than approaching your own doorstep and knowing that someone is on the other side of the door, listening for the sound of your footsteps.” Ronnie in particular had an emotional need for such a woman. In his life, he had known three of them. One was his devoted and protective mother; the second, his grounded, tough-willed high school sweetheart; and finally, his restless and ambitious first wife. The trio had little in common except strength and determination. But all of them had connected with something
inside him, something that he kept the rest of the world from seeing.
Nancy, with her razor-sharp instincts about people, no doubt sensed there were deep roots to Ronnie’s remoteness. Like hers, his childhood had been one of upheaval and insecurity. Ronnie’s father was John Edward “Jack” Reagan, a charismatic shoe salesman and alcoholic whose high-flying dreams inevitably crashed when they hit the wall of reality. With every fresh failure or new scheme, the family moved again.
The Reagans lived five places in Illinois before Ronnie was nine. For the first three months of his life, during the late winter and spring of 1911, the family occupied an apartment on the second floor of a building at 111 Main Street, in Tampico, an Illinois farming town of fewer than 1,300 people. Various accounts have it that they lived over a bakery, a restaurant, or a bar. The next three years found them in a rented house on the outskirts of town, across the street from the rail depot. At the end of 1914, they moved to the South Side of Chicago, where they lived in a shabby apartment building near the University of Chicago. It was lit, Ronnie recalled later, “by a single gas jet brought to life with the deposit of a quarter in a slot down the hall.”
The following December, the family decamped for Galesburg—as it happens, Loyal Davis’s hometown. Ronnie’s memory from there was of big green trees and dark red-brick streets. He started first grade in Galesburg at the age of five, but before he finished second, they moved again, to Monmouth, a college town in western Illinois, where they lived from early 1917 to August 1919. Ronnie recalled how the downtown celebrated the end of World War I on November 11, 1918: “The streets were suddenly filled with people, bonfires were lighted, and grown-ups and children paraded down the street singing and carrying torches in the air. I was only seven, but old enough to share in the hopes of everyone in Monmouth that we had fought ‘the war to end all wars.’ ”
Not long after that, they were back in Tampico, living above Pitney’s Shoe Store, the place where his father had been working when Ronnie was born. By then, Jack had been made the manager and was promised he could become a part owner. Instead, Mr. Pitney made Jack his partner in another venture: a fancier store called the Fashion Boot Shop. It was in Dixon, a city of about ten thousand people that straddled the Rock River about a hundred miles west of Chicago. The family moved there in December 1920 and finally seemed ready to settle down. They lived on the rougher side of town, but to nine-year-old Ronnie, Dixon was heaven, “a small universe where I learned standards and values that would guide me for the rest of my life.” Of all the places where the family had lived, it is the two-story, Queen Anne–style rental house they occupied in Dixon for three years that has since been designated the “home of Ronald Reagan” and a national landmark. Its street, once known as Hennepin Avenue, is now named Reagan Way.
The constant uprooting made for solitary early years. Ronnie was not particularly close to his outgoing older brother, Neil, either by age or temperament. He taught himself to read when he was five. When he was California governor, Ronnie told his chief of staff, Edwin Meese III, “Well, if you have a book, you always have a friend.”
As is not unusual with children of alcoholics, Ronnie preferred to keep the grimmest images from his past at bay. This was a trait that would carry him through the rest of his life, until Alzheimer’s disease wiped out all memory—the good and the bad—entirely. “What Ronald Reagan inherited from his childhood is an astounding ability to turn away from any reality which is too harsh and paint one that is softer, gentler to the eyes,” his daughter Patti wrote in her 1992 memoir. But some truths could not be burnished and blurred in sepia tones. There was the year Jack got fired on Christmas Eve, and the string of other jobs that Ronnie’s father lost because of his drinking. There was at least one arrest for public drunkenness. His sons heard fiery arguments through their parents’ bedroom wall. Sometimes Jack would just disappear for days. At other times, Ronnie’s mother took the children to stay with her sister—for sojourns away from Jack that Ronnie eventually figured out were not, as he put it in his autobiography, “unexpected vacations.”
Ronnie was but eleven years old when he came home and nearly tripped over his father passed out on the porch. Jack’s arms were outstretched as though he had been crucified; his hair was soaked in melting snow. Part of the boy wanted to go into the house and pretend he didn’t know the snoring figure sprawled in front for the whole town to see. “But someplace along the line, to each of us, I suppose, must come that first moment of accepting responsibility. If we don’t accept it (and some don’t), then we must grow older without quite growing up. I felt myself fill with grief for my father at the same time I was feeling sorry for myself,” he would later write. “I bent over him, smelling the sharp odor of whiskey from the speakeasy. I got a fistful of his overcoat. Opening the door, I managed to drag him inside and get him to bed. In a few days, he was the bluff, hearty man I knew and loved and will always remember.”
The stabilizing force in Ronnie’s childhood was his mother, Nelle Wilson Reagan, a tiny, devout woman with a big heart. She was, as White House speechwriter Peggy Noonan would later describe her, “a little tornado of goodness.” Her son once noted that Nelle assumed everyone else loved her for no other reason than that she knew she loved them. However hard things got for the Reagans, Nelle could always find someone worse off who needed her help. She looked for these lost souls in jails and hospitals and mental institutions. “Nelle never saw anything evil in another human being, and Ronnie is the same way,” Nancy once wrote. “Sometimes it infuriates me, but that’s how he is.”
As he would later do with Nancy, Ronnie found sanctuary in Nelle’s adoring gaze. His mother called him Ronald, though nearly everyone else knew him by the nickname “Dutch,” which his father had given him at birth. Jack thought the squalling, ten-pound infant, who had come out feet first on February 6, 1911, looked like “a fat Dutchman.”
“I think he’s perfectly wonderful,” Nelle replied, summoning what strength she could after twenty-four hours of labor. “Ronald Wilson Reagan.”
A seamstress by trade, Nelle found her calling when she was baptized by immersion into the Disciples of Christ church on Easter Sunday 1910, a little less than a year before Ronnie was born. The denomination has loose doctrinal boundaries. Its members live, as they put it, “by no creed but Christ, no book but the Bible.” They identify themselves only as Christians. Nelle tried to plant that religious outlook in both her sons. It took root in the younger, quieter one. (Jack was a Catholic, in various stages of lapse. Neil followed his father in faith, as in other practices.)
Ronnie’s mother also introduced young Ronald to performing and the exhilarating sound of applause. At first, he resented being conscripted to join her as she entertained in productions that were staged at the local theater, at her church, and at the state hospital. But her enthusiasm for make-believe was contagious. “Nelle was the dean of dramatic recitals for the countryside. It was her sole relaxation from her family and charitable duties; she executed it with the zest of a frustrated actress,” Ronnie remembered. “She recited classic speeches in tragic tones, wept as she flung herself into the more poignant, if less talented, passages of such melodramas as East Lynne”—coincidentally, the same play in which Edith Luckett had made her first appearance onstage as a child in Washington, DC—“and poured out poetry by the yard.” Nine-year-old Ronnie made his own debut as a solo performer in early May 1920. He recited a piece called “On Mother.”
Ronnie’s greatest dream, which was hampered by his small size, was to be a football star, as his brother was. He excelled as a powerful swimmer. Dutch spent seven summers as a lifeguard at Lowell Park beach on the Rock River; over those years, his proudest achievement was rescuing seventy-seven people from drowning. He kept track of the number by putting notches on a log.
Where Ronnie felt most at home was in his own company, exploring an inner life nurtured and protected by his mother. Nelle understood that the geniality her son showed the wo
rld was an opaque curtain behind which lived a solitary nature. “In some ways, I think this reluctance to get close to people never left me completely. I’ve never had trouble making friends, but I’ve been inclined to hold back a little of myself, reserving it for myself,” Ronnie reflected in his post-presidential autobiography.
In Galesburg, Ronnie would sit for hours in the attic of the Reagans’ rented house, gazing at a previous tenant’s long-forgotten collection of bird’s eggs and butterflies. In Tampico, his refuge was the home of a childless elderly couple next door who had taken a liking to the boy. He planted himself every afternoon in a giant rocking chair in their living room, snacking by himself on chocolate and cookies. He wrote later: “The best part was that I was allowed to dream.”
Ronnie pored over his mother’s leather-bound volume of poems by Robert Service, known as the Bard of the Yukon. Even as president, he could—and often did—recite from memory Service’s most famous ballad, The Shooting of Dan McGrew. Nelle also put into his eleven-year-old hands That Printer of Udell’s: A Story of the Middle West. The melodramatic 1903 novel by Harold Bell Wright tells the story of itinerant printer Dick Falkner, a poor young man with an alcoholic father. In the story, Dick’s destiny is transformed by two things: becoming a Christian and his devotion to a woman.
“That book—That Printer of Udell’s—had an impact I shall always remember,” Ronnie wrote the author’s daughter-in-law from the White House in 1984. “After reading it and thinking about it for a few days, I went to my mother and told her I wanted to declare my faith and be baptized. We attended the Christian Church in Dixon, and I was baptized several days after finishing the book.