Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  Even in those days, Frye found Nancy’s devotion to Ronnie endearing, and he admired the subtlety with which she advocated her husband’s cause. “She just adored him. He could do no wrong. I used Nancy and Ronnie together in maybe three G.E. episodes, and there was such a sweet-ness between them. . . . She was always behind him, but she never was pushy about it. Just to give you a comparison, I used Alan Ladd a few times on G.E., and I was crazy about Alan, but his wife could be the worst Pacific Palisades: 1952–1958

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  pain in the ass! She would come in before he would, and say, ‘Who is going to play this part? How tall is she? Is she married?’ She wanted to know everything! Nancy never once came to the studio or interfered, with me at least. I always appreciated that. I mean, she knew what was going on. She knew that I’d offer Ronnie a part after it had been turned down by Charles Laughton, or Gregory Peck, or Jimmy Stewart. And she’d call me on it.

  She’d say, ‘I heard Gregory Peck turned it down.’ Or, ‘So and so told me you sent her husband the script.’ But she was nice about it.87

  “I remember the Wassermans invited me for the weekend in Palm Springs,” Frye continued. “And who should show up on Saturday morning but Nancy and Ronnie. Now, the Wassermans had two guest rooms, a smaller one, which I was in, and the larger one, which the Reagans took, with a bathroom in between, which we had to share. I got up in the middle of the night, and the bathroom door was locked. So I opened the sliding glass door and peed on the oleanders. The next morning I said to Nancy, ‘Please don’t lock the door tonight. I might have to do more than pee.’ And she laughed and promised she wouldn’t. But the same thing: I got up, the door was locked, and I peed on the oleanders.”88

  An invitation from the Wassermans was considered a command performance. Nancy Reagan told me, “You had to be nice to Edie or she could make life difficult for you at the agency.”89 One of the trickier feats Nancy—or any Hollywood wife with social aspirations—had to manage was staying on the good side of the Wassermans while cozying up to the much more socially significant Jules and Doris Stein. “The Steins were it,”

  explained Leonora Hornblow. “Jules thought very highly of Lew professionally, but he used to say, ‘I don’t have to have dinner with him.’ And Doris could not bear Edie.”90

  “That was a very bad mix, unfortunately,” Richard Gully confirmed.

  “Edie handled it very graciously, but it was endless snubbing— really un-kind. Doris was a very autocratic woman, a great hostess, wonderful . . . but she did like the spotlight, and she regarded Edie Wasserman basically as hired help.”91 Others said Edie Wasserman was less discreet about her feelings. “Edie Wasserman hated Doris Stein,” Bill Frye told me, “and she used to call Jules ‘the little eye doctor.’”92

  Jules Caesar Stein, the Chicago ophthalmologist who founded the Music Corporation of America in 1924, and his imperious wife, Doris, who liked to forget that her Jewish father had changed his name from 2 8 2

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Jonus to Jones, took the town by storm from the moment they arrived in 1936. “I’m going to be king of Hollywood,” Jules, who had just turned forty, told Hedda Hopper,93 as he began gobbling up independent talent agencies, including the one that represented Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman. He also bought 10 percent of Paramount’s stock and began construction of MCA’s 25,000-square-foot headquarters, a Beverly Hills version of the White House, complete with an oval office for the chairman. Ann Rutherford vividly recalled Stein at the time: “You should have seen him trying to teach these meticulous bricklayers, who were used to laying bricks and scraping off all the mortar so that you had a flush, even surface. Au contraire. Jules wanted weeping mortar, the kind they have down South, so he took off his coat and took a trowel—it was the sight in town. He’d go by every day and make them redo what didn’t have enough weeping.”94

  Doris Stein formed firm alliances with Mary Pickford, Marion Davies, and Buff Chandler. The Steins became regulars at San Simeon, and returned the hospitality with seated dinners for fifty to a hundred at their Spanish-style villa, Misty Mountain, set high on Angelo Drive. Both MCA’s offices and the Steins’ house were decorated with the finest English antiques, and Doris set her tables with the largest collection of Flora Dan-ica china in Los Angeles, complemented by orchids grown in her own hothouses. After conquering the local royals, she cast her net eastward, becoming the Hollywood hostess for visiting New York grandees and Europeans titles such as fashion arbiter Diana Vreeland, philanthropist Mary Lasker, and the Duke and Duchess of Bedford.95

  In the 1950s, the Reagans were occasionally invited to Misty Mountain. Doris had been favorably disposed to Nancy by Kitty LeRoy, and was slightly acquainted with the Davises from Chicago. Jules had known Ronnie since shortly after they both arrived in Hollywood, and he was one of the tycoons who wished the well-spoken and well-informed actor would go into politics on the Republican side. Like his good friends Justin Dart, Alfred Bloomingdale, Edgar Bergen, and Freeman Gosden, the MCA chairman was a big Eisenhower supporter, though he was careful to maintain good relations with politicians of both parties, believing that was best for business. “Thanks to Jules, MCA had its bases covered,” said Bill Frye.

  “Lew Wasserman was a big Democrat, Taft Schreiber was a big Republican, and Jules was for whoever was in power.”96

  Of the three, Taft Schreiber would play the most important role in Pacific Palisades: 1952–1958

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  Ronald Reagan’s future political career. Schreiber had started out as an office boy during MCA’s early days in Chicago, and as Stein’s oldest and closest friend at the agency was the natural rival of Wasserman. Although Taft and Rita Schreiber were not as socially elevated as the Steins, they still ranked several tiers above the Wassermans in the 1950s, having established themselves among the city’s pioneer modern art collectors. “Taft was very fond of Ronnie,” Frye recalled. “Matter of fact, I went to Ronnie’s forty-fifth-birthday party at the Schreibers’. They had a beautiful house, very modern, way up toward Tower Drive. I was pleased to be included, because it wasn’t a big party. I can’t remember who-all was there, but it wasn’t a celebrity crowd.”97

  Reagan was evolving into a different kind of celebrity, not so much a Hollywood movie star as a national public figure: the amiably distinguished host of a television show that was watched by millions of Americans every Sunday night and the most famous corporate spokesman in the land. Even the few movies released after he signed on with G.E. added to this image. He played classic Western heroes in Cattle Queen of Montana in 1954 and Tennessee’s Partner in 1955 and a real-life World War II submarine commander in Hellcats of the Navy in 1957. His co-star in the last was his real-life wife, Nancy, who, true to form, played the nurse who is in love with him.

  One of the things Ronnie liked most about his G.E. job was that it gave him plenty of time at the ranch when he wasn’t on the road. “I had television worked down to an average of about one day a week,” he later said, “and I could spend four or five days a week at the ranch. My routine was just get up—the ranch was only a thirty-five-minute drive from our home—go out there for the day, back in the evening. I loved every minute of that.”98

  In the summer of 1957, Nancy became pregnant for the third time since Patti’s birth. She had suffered two miscarriages in four years but was determined to have a boy. As Reagan later wrote, “Nancy had decided Patti should have a brother. Personally I would have settled for the three of us: I grew frightened every time I remembered that long night when Patti was born, and didn’t want to take chances with a happiness already so great I couldn’t believe it. At the same time I knew Patti would have that brother, because I couldn’t say no to Nancy.”99

  Nancy was ordered to stay in bed for the last three months of her preg-2 8 4

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House nancy. Frances Bergen and June Allyson gave her a small baby shower. Arlene Dahl, who was one of the guests, recalle
d, “I had just had my son, Lorenzo, and friends of mine had given me a blue candle that Nancy wanted in the worst way. She was hoping and praying that her second child would be a boy, and I gave her what was left of my blue candle, which had produced Lorenzo.”100

  Ronnie arrived home from a G.E. tour the day before Nancy went into the hospital for a planned cesarean. “Moral support for Papa,” he recalled, was provided by Ursula Taylor and Edith, who had flown in from Chicago.

  At 8:04 a.m. on May 20, 1958, the eight-and-a-half-pound Ronald Prescott Reagan arrived.101 Reagan again admitted that his primary emotion was relief that his wife had survived. For Nancy, a dream had come true, and people soon sensed that the little boy was her favorite.

  That’s certainly what five-and-half-year-old Patti felt. “As much as I wanted to participate in this new adventure of having a baby in the house,”

  she recalled, “I was usually ushered out of my brother’s room. I didn’t know it then, but Ron’s and my relationship was being defined at that point. There were nights when I snuck into his room and stared at him sleeping, smelled his baby smells, listened to his breathing. I had to be very quiet because there were intercoms in both his room and mine. I knew I was taking a risk, but it was worth it. I used to ask my mother if I could hold Ron, but the answer was always the same. ‘No. You might drop him.’”102

  The Reagans asked the Taylors to be Ron’s godparents, and in 1959 they became the godparents of Bob and Ursula’s daughter, Tessa. In March of that year, Ronnie and Nancy celebrated their seventh anniversary, and when his G.E. contract came up for renewal not long after that, he was given 25

  percent ownership of the show, making him a partner of MCA/Revue. The new contract also reduced his time on the road to ten weeks a year.103

  “He was always glad to come home,” a close family friend told me.

  “He knew Nancy would be there waiting for him with open arms. To be treasured like that is a wonderful, wonderful thing. I’ve never seen a marriage like that. He was nuts about her. He’d come into a room and look at her like she was the flower of the Nile.”

  C H A P T E R T W E LV E

  THE GROUP

  1958–1962

  My mother always said, “You’re known by the company you keep.” And it’s true.

  Nancy Reagan to author, February 7, 1999

  Nancy cherry-picked her friends.

  A close friend of the Reagans’ to author

  Motion-picture people engage in civic, cultural and charitable activities, and individually appear occasionally in the doings of “downtown” society.

  But it is axiomatic that any function where movie people turn out in force automatically is not “society.”

  Gladwin Hill, “California Society Stems from Gold Rush,”

  The New York Times, February 18, 1957

  DURING THE FIRST FIVE OR SIX YEARS OF THE REAGANS’ MARRIAGE, THEIR

  close friends were mostly people Ronnie had known before he met Nancy—

  the Holdens, the Taylors, Dick Powell and June Allyson, Frances and Edgar Bergen, Bob and Goldie Arthur. But gradually Nancy began reaching out to a wider circle, first among their Hollywood acquaintances and then to a whole social set beyond the film industry. These new friends—Armand and Harriet Deutsch, Walter and Lee Annenberg, Earle and Marion Jorgensen, Bill and Betty Wilson, Alfred and Betsy Bloomingdale—would come to be called the Group, and they would help to forge Ronald Reagan’s entire political future.

  Nancy had known Armand Deutsch since her MGM days, but after she married Ronnie and Ardie married Harriet, the two couples crossed paths only occasionally. Then, according to Harriet Deutsch, “Nancy called me 2 8 5

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  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House one day, and said, ‘Couldn’t the four of us just have dinner alone?’ We went to Trader Vic’s. And from then on we became very close friends.”1 The Polynesian-themed Trader Vic’s had opened in the new Beverly Hilton in 1955, and it instantly became a favorite of the Beverly Hills in crowd, of which the Deutsches were very much a part. Deutsch left MGM in 1957, along with his mentor and boss, Dore Schary, and would cap his career in the entertainment business three years later by producing The World of Carl Sandburg, starring Bette Davis, on Broadway. But as the grandson of a Sears, Roebuck partner and reportedly its largest shareholder, he still commanded a prized seat at the tables of such leading hostesses as Buff Chandler and Edie Goetz, and he would later be appointed to the Warner Bros. board. He and Harriet had been introduced by producer Ray Stark and his wife, Fran, in 1951, shortly after Ardie divorced Benay Venuta and Harriet was widowed by director Sylvan Simon, the heir apparent to Harry Cohn at Columbia Pictures. Fran Stark, the daughter of the legendary comedienne Fanny Brice, was one of Harriet’s two best friends. The other was Cohn’s niece, Lee Annenberg, the wife of the powerful newspaper and magazine publisher Walter Annenberg.

  A slim beauty who had been a salesgirl and model in New York before coming west, Harriet was a clotheshorse of the first rank, one of Amelia Gray’s best customers and Jimmy Galanos’s earliest devotees. Perhaps more than any other woman in the Group, she fit the press image of a flighty socialite largely concerned with gowns, parties, and social status. But she could be warm, generous, and loyal, particularly to Nancy Reagan. According to Harriet, the loyalty went both ways. “Nancy has the capacity of being a great friend,” she told me. “Never ever has Nancy forgotten a birthday or an anniversary of ours in forty-five years.”2

  “We used to go to parties a lot on San Onofre Drive,” Ardie Deutsch added. “They often had barbecues for eighteen people—show business people pretty much. Bill and Ardis Holden. George Burns and Gracie Allen.

  And Jack Benny, who always referred to Ronnie as Governor—I don’t know why, but he did. We also used to go to the Reagans’ every Christmas morning for eggnog, and her mother and father were always there. I remember Loyal and I were sitting on the sofa one day, and I said, ‘Loyal, I hear you’re to the right of Attila the Hun. Is that true?’ He said, ‘No, I’m just a bit conservative.’ I said, ‘Do you hear that I’m to the left of Stalin?’ He said, ‘Never actually heard it.’”3

  Ardie Deutsch was the lone Democrat among the husbands of Nancy’s The Group: 1958–1962

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  new friends. He had refused to sign a loyalty oath at MGM and gotten away with it because of Schary’s protection. In 1952, Deutsch and Reagan had joined forces with labor leader Roy Brewer and screenwriter Philip Dunne in the Democratic primary to oppose California state senator Jack Tenney, who they believed had unfairly criticized the film industry’s anti-Communist efforts. Now, when the Reagans went to dinner at the Deutsches’, the political discussions between the increasingly conservative Reagan and the steadfastly liberal Deutsch sometimes got out of hand.

  “Ronnie, that’s enough of the political talk,” Harriet remembered Ardie saying. “That’s enough of that.”4

  In 1960 the Deutsches moved into a new house on Coldwater Canyon Drive, a sprawling white-brick-and-glass ranch with a matching annex behind the pool for their screening room (which Harriet, like most Hollywood hostesses, kept well stocked with big bowls of M&M’s, Milky Ways, and Snickers). The only guests at their first dinner party were the Reagans and the Annenbergs, who were visiting from Philadelphia, where Walter’s company, Triangle Publications, was based. The Deutsches’ guest book records that intimate housewarming dinner:

  Being the first houseguests of Harriet and Ardie is a privilege and responsibility of which we are proud. We are grateful for the privilege and find the responsibility inspirational.

  Always devotedly,

  Lee and Walter Annenberg

  We have no hesitation, indeed it is with pride we take second billing to Lee and Walter. And besides, we’d sign anything anywhere just to be at the Deutsches’.

  Ronald Reagan

  Me too. Nancy. XX

  Next to the kiss-kiss symbol, Nancy drew a little “happy face.”


  Ronald Reagan and Walter Annenberg first crossed paths in 1937, when Ronnie was a fresh face at Warners and Walter was a young publishing scion overseeing one of his father’s publications, Screen Guide, and they both sought the affections of June Travis. Their paths crossed again when Reagan was traveling for General Electric. “On several occasions,” Lee Annenberg 2 8 8

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House recalled, “Walter and I would be coming back from New York to Philadelphia on the train, and there would be Ronald Reagan.”5 Annenberg would later disclose that, as the owner of TV Guide, he had put in a good word with one of G.E.’s top executives when Reagan was up for the job: “I told him Ron was a great speaker, that he had been a very effective and respected head of the Screen Actors Guild, that he was a good-looking guy, genial and very able on his feet.”6 Lee shared her husband’s high opinion of the actor. “As far back as I remember, he was always interested in issues,” she told me. “I always thought he was a very thoughtful and discerning man.

  He wasn’t just a Hollywood star, he was a thinking man. A lot of people didn’t realize that.”7

  Reagan was on the cover of TV Guide in 1958 and 1961, but it was mainly through Nancy’s growing friendship with Harriet Deutsch that the Reagans came to see more and more of the Annenbergs. Harriet and Lee had been inseparable since they were in their early twenties and married to their first husbands. They thought alike, dressed alike, and changed their hairdos in tandem—somewhere along the way the brunette Harriet and the redhead Lee both went blond. Yet there was always a lady-in-waiting quality to Harriet’s relationship with the richer, more forceful Lee.

  Leonore Cohn was born in New York in 1918. Her mother died when she was seven, and she and her sister were taken in by their Uncle Harry, who was considered the most tyrannical of the studio moguls. Cohn was an admirer of Mussolini and made a point of working on Yom Kippur even though he was Jewish—Lee herself would later admit that “his character was third-rate.”8 His wife, Rose, a convert to Christian Science, managed to instill a strong sense of faith in Lee. Aunt Rose was also an indefatigable hostess, who gave impeccably organized dinner parties for everyone from Irving Berlin to Rita Hayworth. By the time Lee and her sister were teenagers, they had sailed on the Normandie and stayed at the Dorchester in London and the Ritz in Paris, but as Annenberg biographer Christopher Ogden notes, “nothing was theirs. They were always treated as wards, never as family members.”9