Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  “Alfred was divine. He was a fascinating man. And warm and cozy and The Group: 1958–1962

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  wonderful. He brought his barber from New York out here with him, and got him a job in a barbershop in Beverly Hills. He came to the house every evening to shave Alfred. Isn’t that funny?” At the time of their marriage, Alfred was still hoping to produce Petty Girl, but at Columbia, where he had been hired by Harry Cohn. “We went on Harry Cohn’s yacht,” Betsy Bloomingdale recalled. “He was a rough old coot. Alfred was supposed to be a producer, but he really didn’t like working at a studio. He was more of an entrepreneur.” His first venture involved installing soda machines in movie theaters. “No one had ever done that before,” said his wife. “But Alfred had so many businesses going. And then he started the Diners Club.”62

  While Bloomingdale did not invent the credit card, as is often claimed, in 1950 he was the first to see the possibilities in an infant company called Dine and Sign, the brainchild of Frank X. McNamara, a Brooklyn savings-and-loan executive. Two years later he bought out McNamara and took over the renamed Diners Club.63 Until American Express introduced its card in 1958, Diners Club had a virtual monopoly on the credit card business. “Alfred Bloomingdale was a very colorful man,” said Richard Gully.

  “I’ve never known a man with such bad table manners. And yet he was enormously likable. He really was beloved. I never met anyone who didn’t like Alfred Bloomingdale.”64

  “Alfred had a great rapport with Ronnie,” Betsy Bloomingdale told me.

  “He adored Ronnie. And Nancy adored Alfred.” Nancy Reagan concurred, saying, “Alfred was a wonderful man, and wonderful with Betsy. It was a good combination.”65

  If Anita May was like a second mother to Nancy, Betsy was the sister she had never had, and one from whom she would learn much. Even more than Anita, Betsy was infatuated with the rituals and minutiae of entertaining on a grand scale, and while Nancy could not match either of her mentors’ collections of china, crystal, or silver at that time, she was eager to soak up their expertise.

  When the Bloomingdales traveled to Europe, as they did every summer, Betsy kept notebooks of dinners they attended at private homes in London, Paris, Rome, and Vienna, listing the guests and recording what was served and how the table was set. “I’ve always been fascinated by table settings,” she explained. “And I was very influenced by what I saw in Europe and New York.” After moving into the Holmby Hills house in 1959, she started keeping records of her own dinner parties.

  “The first date I have for Ronnie and Nancy coming for dinner here 3 0 4

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House was April 7, 1962,” she said, reading from one of her party books. “I had the Wilsons, the Reagans, the Peter Douglases, and the Gordon Walkers.

  Peter Douglas’s father was our ambassador to London then. And the Walkers were very social people here—she was in the Colleagues and was always a dedicated Republican. We had beef Wellington, zucchini, limestone let-tuce with two cheeses, strawberry sherbet, fresh raspberries, fresh strawberries, apricot sauce, oatmeal cookies, and Château Cheval Blanc.”66

  Betsy was not only a social dynamo but also a dedicated mother of three, who believed in being very involved in her children’s upbringing. She often found herself giving advice to Nancy, who seemed to have a harder time raising her children, especially Patti—perhaps, as Richard Davis believed, because she harbored a lingering resentment toward her mother for not having been there during her early years; perhaps, as many others suggested, because she expended most of her emotional energy in keeping her husband happy. “She and my father were this country unto themselves,” Patti Davis told me. “And we were these little islands kind of floating out there. As an adult I can now look at their love and be very impressed and moved by it—

  not so many of us can ever find a love like that. But I still recognize that as a child you absolutely got that you were excluded from that.”67

  Nancy Reagan never saw it quite that way. “Both of us were always there for the children,” she told me. “We were not the people that they try to paint us as—you know, this disinterested mother and father. That’s just a lot of malarkey.”68 Her friends tended to take her side. One of them told me, “Nancy put a lot of time into those kids. Not him much, but she did, more than a lot of those Hollywood dames. She really loved them. Patti always gave her lip and trouble, but not little Ron. Nancy worshipped at the altar of little Ron.”

  Both Reagan children attended the exclusive John Thomas Dye School in Bel Air, Patti starting pre-kindergarten in 1956, Ron in 1961. John Thomas Dye is where Betty Adams sent her children, as did Dick Powell and June Allyson, Bob and Ursula Taylor, Jimmy and Gloria Stewart, Ray and Fran Stark, and Kirk and Anne Douglas. Judy Garland’s younger daughter, Lorna Luft, was in the same class as Patti, who remembered being thrilled when the star of The Wizard of Oz turned up at Parents’ Day one year. “It was an elite atmosphere, but it didn’t seem so to us,” Patti later wrote. “We just accepted celebrity as a part of life.”69

  The school had been founded in 1929 as the Brentwood Town and The Group: 1958–1962

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  Country School by John and Cathryn Dye, and renamed in 1959 in honor of their son, who had died in World War II. Although the Dyes were upright Midwestern Republicans who believed in a strict classical education—

  Latin and French were compulsory—they ran their school in a distinctly casual California way. The 280 students, from nursery school to the eighth grade, began their day by reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and an inspirational poem called “The Salutation of the Dawn.” The girls in the lower grades wore blue-and-white gingham dresses with heart-shaped abalone buttons and blue-and-white saddle shoes; the boys wore blue shorts and white shirts without ties. Set at the top of a ridge with spectacular views of the Pacific, the campus looked like a storybook horse farm, with its white fences and two-story yellow schoolhouse topped with a weathervane. Everyone called the headmaster and headmistress, who were in their sixties, Uncle John and Auntie Cathryn.

  “The day before Thanksgiving, there would be turkeys roasting on a spit in the great big fireplace in the assembly hall,” said Lanetta Wahlgren, a Hershey Chocolate heiress who was one of Patti’s friends at the school.

  “Uncle John and Auntie Cathryn sat in these red high-backed chairs on either side of the fireplace, and we would sit at their feet. Every once in a while Auntie Cathryn would let us sit in the chair with her and cuddle up.”70 At Christmastime, the children were robed in white and sang carols while their parents were served hot gingerbread and wassail. “Ronnie would saw wood for the school,” Betty Adams recalled. “And he and Bob Taylor would bring over piles of it, and we had our Yuletide drink, and Ronnie’s enormous logs burned away.”

  She continued, “I happened to be president of the Mothers’ Club board. Right after I met Nancy at Amelia Gray’s and realized her daughter was going to the same school as my children, I said, ‘Oh, good, you can join the Mothers’ Club board.’ Then Mary Jane Wick came along with her kids. So I said, ‘Oh, good, Mary Jane, you can be on the board, too.’ The three of us practically ran the school.”71 When the main building burned down in the 1961 Bel Air fire, the Mothers’ Club raised a large part of the money to rebuild it, and Betty Adams and Mary Jane Wick arranged for classes to be held at the Westwood Methodist Church during the reconstruction. “Betty’s father had given the land for the church years back,” explained Mary Jane Wick. “And I taught Sunday school there.”72

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  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Mary Jane and Charles Wick, a show business lawyer who started a nationwide chain of nursing homes in 1956, would eventually become an integral part of the Reagan Group. In those days, however, the Wicks were not very social, and their friendship with the Reagans revolved around the school and the children. Charlie Wick, an inveterate joke-teller and
all-occasion piano player, would eventually double as the Group’s court jester. When I asked him where he and Mary Jane were from, he immediately shot back, “She was from Minneapolis and I was from Cleveland, before it closed.” They met in Los Angeles in 1944. “Tommy Dorsey had sent me out here to buy the Casino Gardens in Ocean Park, where all the big bands played, and I was staying at Rudy Vallee’s house,” Wick recalled. “One Saturday I was coming down to the pool and there was this gorgeous creature sitting by the tennis court watching them play.”73 It was a case of opposites attracting: the short, dark, nominally Jewish Wick and the tall, fair, staunchly Protestant Mary Jane Woods were married in 1947 and had five children, one right after another. Their eldest son, Charles junior, whom everyone called C.Z., was in Patti’s class at John Thomas Dye, and their daughter Cindy was in Ron’s.

  “A lot of mothers didn’t pick up their own children from school,” Mary Jane Wick told me. “They had nannies, and they picked them up. Nancy always picked up her children. I always picked up my children. And I think we became friends because we would always get there early. She would get in my car or I would get in her car—Nancy drove a red station wagon.

  Nancy and Ronnie were both very involved with the school. They both worked in the hot-dog booth at the annual school fair in June, and they both came out with ketchup and mustard all over them when it was over.”74

  Betty Adams recalled teasing Nancy about her station wagon. “I’d say,

  ‘Aren’t you ever going to sell that old Ford?’ She said, ‘You’ll be surprised when you see what I’m doing.’ So I said to Mary Jane, ‘Oh, she’s getting a new Ford station wagon.’ The next day she brought it to school, and she’d just had it repainted. That’s the way Nancy was. She saved everything.”

  Adams added, “One year after I married Bob Adams, he had a heart attack, and they put him in bed from December to June. Nancy never forgot me. I couldn’t do anything for her, because my whole attention was to my husband, but she’d come by in the afternoon just to say hi.”75

  Patti was such a good student that, like her father, she skipped third grade.

  “She was smart, and musically talented, and one of the prettiest girls in our class,” recalled C. Z. Wick.76 According to Lanetta Wahlgren, she was also The Group: 1958–1962

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  something of a tomboy. “Patti and I used to go down to Bristol Circle on Sunset with a bunch of our gang. It was all dirt in those days, and we would make these little mounds and jump off them on our bikes. Brentwood and Pacific Palisades were almost like the country then, and we were all really farm kids in a way, living in a very sophisticated environment.”77

  When Patti was about nine, Betty Adams recalled, “Nancy wanted her to go to dancing school at Miss Ryan’s, which was near Hancock Park on Wilshire across from Perrino’s.” (Perrino’s restaurant was to L.A. society what Chasen’s was to Hollywood.) “My daughter, Fonza, was in the same grade as Patti, and we made sure they went places together, whether they wanted to or not. Ronnie and Nancy and I would drive our girls to the dancing school about five o’clock. Then we’d go to Perrino’s, eat our dinner, pick up the little darlings, and go home. . . . We did have fun together with the kids. We sent them to Douglas Camp up in Carmel Valley, and Betsy and Alfred Bloomingdale sent their child. Nancy and I took Fonza and Patti to the train ourselves. We put them on the train and cried all the way home. Nancy was a good mother. You never read about that.”78

  Betsy Bloomingdale recalled driving the children to camp with the Reagans some summers. “That’s really how Alfred and I became friends with Nancy and Ronnie,” she said. “The four of us would stay at John Gardiner’s Tennis Ranch for the weekend. It was right next to the Douglas Camp, and they had beautiful bungalows and wonderful food. I remember the kids would all be lined up at the camp with their hands out, and Ronnie would inspect their fingernails.”79

  Betsy said Patti was a “sullen” child, and Patti describes how unhappy she was in her 1992 book, The Way I See It. She craved her father’s attention and dreaded her mother’s. Her father, she told reporter Nancy Collins years later, “was not terribly engaged” in family matters. Her mother, on the other hand, was “too engaged, her presence too much felt. Overwhelming. There was no balance.”80 In her telling, Patti and her mother argued about her clothes, her weight, her hair, her bathroom habits, even the way she would stare silently out the window of the car when her mother was driving her home from school. “Don’t you ignore me, young lady,” Nancy would scream. “Why can’t you just do what I say?”81

  Patti wrote that her mother slapped her for the first time when she was eight, and that it became a regular occurrence, but in 2004 she told me that her memoir had been written in anger, with a certain amount of exaggeration.82 She also wrote that her mother’s rage was worst when her father was 3 0 8

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House away on his G.E. trips, and that when he came home, he refused to credit her complaints. On the contrary, he would tell Patti that her behavior was the reason Nancy was so nervous and had to take the tranquilizers that Patti had found in her mother’s medicine cabinet.83 “My mother is a woman who needs to control everything around her,” Patti concludes. “Yet, inside, she doubts her ability to do so.”84 From Nancy’s point of view, back then Patti was the control freak. “I remember at Christmastime my mother and father would be there, and Patti would write these little Christmas plays,”

  she told me. “She’d give a part to Ron, but Ron never had anything to do.

  He’d just be standing in the background. Finally, one day he walked off. He wouldn’t stand there anymore. It was always all about Patti. She had to be the center of attention.”85

  Even Patti’s rosier memories seem to have strange endings. When she was eight, she recounted in a 1999 George magazine article, her pet fish, Blackie, died, and her father gave it a “fish funeral.” He dug a small grave in the backyard, tied two sticks into a cross, and gave a eulogy. “I was so into this ceremony, and I was having so much fun, that when it ended, and after my father had asked me if I felt better, I said, ‘Yeah, can we go kill another one?’ ”86

  In 1959, at the recommendation of a child psychiatrist, Michael Reagan came to live with his father and Nancy. Now fourteen and severely troubled, he had not had an easy time of it since his mother eloped with Freddy Karger shortly after his father remarried. Jane’s second marriage had fallen apart within two years, and she had moved several times. In 1955, with Loretta Young as her godmother, Jane converted to Catholicism and had Maureen and Michael baptized alongside her. Maureen was dispatched to a Catholic boarding school in Tarrytown, New York, and in 1958 to Marymount College in Arlington, Virginia. Meanwhile, Michael was bounced from the Chadwick School to a public elementary school in Westwood—he would later claim he was sexually molested at age eight by a male counselor at an after-school gymnastics camp87—and then to the Good Shepherd Catholic school in Beverly Hills for fifth grade. He had to repeat that grade at St. John’s Military Academy, a Catholic boarding school in downtown Los Angeles, where he stayed for two years. He spent seventh grade at a private school in Newport Beach, where Jane briefly lived, and where he was a straight-D student. By then Jane had her own TV show at Revue Productions and was hardly ever at home, and when she was they fought bitterly.

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  He was thrilled when his father agreed to take him in—“I thought that at last I would be living with a family unit just like a normal kid.”88 But he would soon be let down once again: he was going to be a boarder, not a day student, at the Jesuit-run Loyola High School, despite the fact that it was only a half hour away from San Onofre Drive. He spent only weekends with his father and stepmother, and he slept on the living room couch. Several months after he arrived, an additional bedroom was added onto the house for Ron’s nurse, and Michael was given the daybed in the playroom.

  “The first thing Nancy did when I moved in
was send me to the dentist,” Michael writes in his memoir, On the Outside Looking In. “I had not been to the dentist in years. . . . [He] discovered I had almost a dozen cav-ities. Nancy was livid with Mom because my teeth had been let go for so long. She also took me shopping for new clothes, something Mom rarely had time for.” But, he adds, “like everyone else in the house, including Dad, I was a little intimidated by Nancy.”89 On Sunday mornings, when the family went to services at the Bel Air Presbyterian Church, Michael was left home, because he was a Catholic.90 According to Patti, her parents avoided any mention of Jane Wyman, and she was never made to feel that Michael was her true brother.91

  Both Patti and Michael looked forward to Saturdays at the Malibu Hills ranch, when Ronnie took them riding, and Nancy often stayed home. “I planned all week what I wanted to say to him,” Patti later wrote. “I thought if I found the right words, shared enough thoughts with him, he would reach across the distance.”92 “I didn’t dare talk with Dad about my feelings,”

  recalled Michael, “because he always seemed to be uncomfortable whenever he and I embarked on anything resembling a personal discussion.”93

  “Ronnie certainly wasn’t given to sitting down and psychoanalyzing himself with the children,” Nancy Reagan admitted. “How many fathers did in those days?” But he made an effort, she pointed out: “There was an empty lot at the top of our street, and Ronnie would take the children and their friends up there on windy days to fly kites.”94 In 1961, when Maureen, who had dropped out of Marymount and was working as a typist in Washington, announced that she was marrying a policeman, Ronnie and Nancy attended the wedding. Jane, who remarried Fred Karger that year, did not.