introduced the Therapeutic Abortion Act, which permitted abortion in cases of rape or incest, and when the physical or mental health of the mother was endangered. Reagan anguished over his decision for months while being pulled from all sides. His top aides were split, as was the Kitchen Cabinet, and Catholic friends, including the Wilsons and Betsy Bloomingdale, made their views known to both Ronnie and Nancy. The archdiocese of Los Angeles had hired Spencer-Roberts, and the firm arranged a meeting between Reagan and Francis Cardinal McIntyre, which only added to the controversy. Nancy suggested that Ronnie consult with Loyal, whom she called every day, according to her stepbrother, “to talk about the children or to get his advice.” As a physician, Loyal approved of Sacramento: 1967–1968
3 6 1
legalizing abortion, and Richard Davis believes that this was one instance where the doctor’s purported influence was real.41
Reagan finally signed what was then the country’s most liberal abortion law, on June 14, 1967 (and promptly wrote a letter to Betsy Bloomingdale asking her to forgive him). A year later he told a reporter that he had done “a lot of soul-searching” and had ultimately concluded that the legal concept of self-defense meant that a “woman had a right to defend herself from her unborn child.”42 (Legal abortions in California would jump from 518 in 1967 to 199,089 in 1980, and the Governor and his wife blamed psychiatrists for making a mockery of the law by recommending an abortion for any woman who claimed she might become depressed or suicidal if she gave birth to an unwanted child.)43
These early policy decisions surprised and disappointed Reagan’s most right-wing supporters. “I really think that he is taking us for granted,” said State Senator John Schmitz, a John Birch Society member and one of the few Republican legislators willing to criticize the Governor publicly. “As far as I’m concerned the words don’t match up with the action.” As Schmitz and other conservatives saw it, Reagan was making the government bigger, not smaller. Reagan responded in a late 1967 interview with CBS’s Harry Reasoner: “I think we’ve got some narrow groups on both sides of the spectrum, who are well-meant and sincere,” he said. “But I think that sometimes they would rather see someone go down in glorious defeat, jump off the cliff with flag flying, than recognize the practicality of trying to promote your philosophy and get it a step at a time. I try to point out to Republicans that it has taken the opposition thirty-five years to accomplish many of the things we’re opposing. We can’t believe that someplace out of the sunrise a man on a white horse is going to wave a wand and, if we get elected, change everything all at once.”44
Nancy had an even harder time than Ronnie adjusting to life in Sacramento, where it seemed that her every move was scrutinized by the local press. She told Hollywood Reporter columnist George Christy, “When Ronnie was first elected, someone said that it wouldn’t be much of a change for us, that politics was just like the picture business, that both were such public lives. But they were wrong. Politics is a completely different life. In the picture business you’re protected somewhat—by the studio, by your producer, and so on. In politics you aren’t protected in any way. You don’t belong for a night to a theater audience; you belong to everyone all the time.”45
3 6 2
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Her first run-in with the press came when the Reagans moved out of the Governor’s Mansion three months after they had moved in. Nancy hated living in the old gingerbread pile, which had been built for a Gold Rush merchant in 1877 and occupied by governors and their families since the turn of the century. It was already rat-infested and creaking by the time Earl Warren lived there in the 1940s, and Goodwin Knight’s wife would chide legislators who came for dinner about the need for a new official residence. Although the three-story, white frame structure had six Italian marble fireplaces in its reception rooms, beautifully carved panel-ing and moldings, and a lovely cupola rising above its mansard roof, it stood on a major thoroughfare in the middle of downtown and faced two gas stations and a motel. Because of the traffic, Earl Warren Jr. remembered, it was “like living over an earthquake fault.”46 Nancy worried about the Skipper being run over or the whole place going up in flames. When the fire alarm went off one afternoon that first winter, the fire marshal who came to the house told Nancy that the only way to get out of her son’s room was to break a window with a dresser drawer. “That was it,” said Nancy.47
At their own expense, the Reagans rented a six-bedroom Tudor-style house with a pool on 45th Street, a wealthy enclave on the eastern edge of the city. They called it the Executive Residence and had stationery and matchbooks made up with that moniker. When the owner put the house up for sale two years later, seventeen California businessmen, including Tuttle, Dart, Hume, Earle Jorgensen, the Cook brothers, the Fluor brothers, and Irene Dunne’s husband, Z. Wayne Griffin, purchased and remodeled it for $170,000. The Reagans continued to pay $1,250 a month in rent, until the state took over the payments in 1970.48 Marion Jorgensen pointed out that when the group sold the house after Reagan left office,
“We all made $5,000 profit—we never felt Ronnie and Nancy owed us anything.”49 Nonetheless, the press carped.
Reporters also carped when Nancy turned to her friends for help in furnishing the house and arranged for their gifts to be tax-deductible.
Betsy gave her an English-style mahogany dining room table that seated twenty-four, and Marion provided the chairs. Virginia Milner, the wife of steel heir Reese Llewellyn Milner and a member of the Colleagues, donated Nancy’s favorite piece—an antique French Regency fruitwood secretary—and other items reportedly totaling $17,000.50 “The furniture belongs to the state, not to us,” Nancy explained to George Christy, Sacramento: 1967–1968
3 6 3
“but wouldn’t you know that some politicians tried to make a brouhaha of it.”51
Meanwhile, Reagan asked Leland Kaiser to raise $500,000 to build a new Governor’s Mansion. The legislature had gone along with Pat Brown when he submitted plans for a glass-and-marble palazzo that would have cost $750,000; the only reason it wasn’t built was that there were disagreements over its location. But Reagan’s effort came under heavy attack for relying on private funding, and Kaiser compounded the problem by sending a letter to lobbyists asking them for contributions. The project was temporarily shelved, and Kaiser was eased out of the Kitchen Cabinet.52 However, Nancy kept on complaining—“When I go to other states and see how the governors live, I’m embarrassed”—and the press kept on carping.53
Nothing wounded Nancy more than a June 1968 Saturday Evening Post profile by Joan Didion, the dryly brilliant chronicler of California’s history and society. Didion was the sister-in-law of Dominick Dunne, a good friend of the Bloomingdales’, and Nancy thought the day they spent together at the 45th Street residence had gone well. Unbeknownst to Nancy, Didion had once stayed at the Governor’s Mansion with Earl Warren’s daughter and considered it her “favorite house in the world.”54 It is hardly surprising that she mocked the suburban Tudor Nancy was so proud of as “a stage set . . . for a woman who seems to be playing out some middle-class American woman’s daydream, circa 1948.”55 Nancy was furious at Didion for implying that her constant smiling was nothing more than the obvious insincerity of a second-rate actress. From then on, whenever Didion’s name came up, Nancy would snap, “Would she have liked it better if I had snarled?” Because of Didion’s skill and reputation this piece would set the tone for much of the coverage of Nancy that followed—at least that is what Nancy and her friends believed.
“That article hugely affected how Nancy Reagan responded to the press,” said Betsy Bloomingdale’s daughter-in-law Justine. “Betsy told me that Nancy was just stunned by the way she was ripped up one end and down the other. It was the first time she had been excoriated like that.” As it happened, Justine’s sister Serena Carroll was taking a writing course taught by Joan Didion at UCLA that summer. “She talked about interviewing Nancy Reagan—repeatedly—and about how cold
she was,” Carroll told me.
“Joan Didion intensely disliked Nancy Reagan.”56
Apparently Didion wasn’t alone. An article published a year earlier in 3 6 4
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House the California News Reporter summed up the contradictory impressions people had of the controversial First Lady:
She is a beautiful, charming, talented lady, a devoted mother and wife, a warm, friendly, gentle and unpretentious human being with a deep interest in flowers, art, animals and music, a frail and un-complaining little girl out of place in the rough-and-tumble world of politics.
Or—she is an ambitious, shrewd, domineering woman, a cold and brittle professional actress, a self-centered, demanding and determined extrovert, the cleverly-concealed but constant driving force behind a husband of far less social and political ambition.57
Underlying much of the criticism of Nancy during her first two years in Sacramento was the feeling that, as Bill Boyarsky writes in The Rise of Ronald Reagan, “Mrs. Reagan had considerable influence in running the state government.” Boyarsky had been covering Reagan for the Associated Press since 1965, and later recounted being in the Governor’s office one day early in the first term when Nancy happened to call. Apparently Gordon Smith, Reagan’s ill-fated first finance director, had said something in a speech that contradicted a previous statement by the Governor. As Boyarsky listened, after several “Yes, dears,” Reagan told his wife, “No, dear, I don’t think he was being insubordinate.”58
Lou Cannon, the capital correspondent for the San Jose Mercury News in those days, recalled a similar phone call from Nancy after the Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver had made derogatory and threatening remarks about Reagan. “But, honey,” the Governor was overheard saying, “I can’t have him arrested just because he said those things.” Cannon was one of the first to make note of The Gaze, though he didn’t use the term. “The adoration that Nancy displays for her husband is publicly expressed every time she watches a Reagan speech,” he writes in Ronnie and Jesse, which was published in 1969. “During these moments, 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.” In Cannon’s estimation, Nancy was “the most formidable personality of the Reagan administration.”59
When Reagan was asked by Harry Reasoner if he discussed major decisions with his wife, he was more frank than his aides may have wanted Sacramento: 1967–1968
3 6 5
him to be. “We have no secrets,” Reagan told the CBS newsman. “She usually knows what’s on my mind and knows what’s bothering me. She also, I think, knows by now . . . that a lot of my thinking is done out loud.
So she usually hears a few different approaches to it, and suddenly one hits, and that’s the script we go with.” Reasoner also asked Nancy about the common perception that she was behind her husband’s conversion to conservatism. “No, that’s just not true at all,” she answered, looking directly at him and smiling sweetly. “My husband is not that weak a man.
And I’m not that strong a woman.”60
Reagan tended to dismiss criticism of himself as just so many bad reviews; it was box office he cared about. But, as he explained in another 1967 TV interview, his wife had the “greatest sense of loyalty” of almost anyone he knew, especially when it came to her family. “She mans the barricades when the attacks start,” he said with an admiring chuckle,
“whether it’s editorially, or a cartoon, or a fight here in the legislature, or someone making a statement on some controversy that we’re engaged in.
I have to bar the door every once in a while or she’ll march forth and do battle.”61
The Governor’s wife wasn’t above canceling their subscription to the relentlessly critical Sacramento Bee, or calling the publisher of the Los Angeles Times at home to complain about yet another Paul Conrad cartoon making fun of her husband. Reagan’s assistant press secretary, Nancy Reynolds, who was assigned to travel with the First Lady, remembered that on their very first trip her charge lit into a fellow passenger. “I was sitting next to her,”
Reynolds said, “and right behind us was some guy who was tearing into Reagan’s budget. She flipped that seat back, damn it, and turned around to him and said, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about— that’s my husband—
and you don’t have the facts right!’ Well, you can imagine, this guy was so stunned that he was like a fish. He never said another word. Then she flipped the seat back up and just sat there until we landed in L.A.”62
Reynolds, who had covered politics for the CBS affiliate in San Francisco before being hired by Lyn Nofziger, learned early on that the Governor would not tolerate the slightest questioning of his wife’s judgment.
“The first week Reagan was Governor, I had set up an interview with a TV
reporter from L.A., and I had him waiting in a room. I walked out into the hall and there was Nancy Reagan with Curtis Patrick, a young man who worked for the Governor. They were discussing something she wanted off the wall, and he was saying, ‘Gee, I don’t think we should do this.’ She 3 6 6
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House said, ‘I want this taken down, and I want that put up.’ I was afraid the reporter would hear this—it wasn’t anything bad, but for some reason I thought, Oh, gee. So I went into the Governor’s office, and I said, “Governor, Mrs. Reagan is out in the hall with Curtis Patrick, and they’re having a lively discussion about the placement of something. I thought since we have a TV reporter in the next room, you might want to step out and tell Mrs. Reagan that there’s somebody down the hall.’ He looked at me in amazement and said, ‘You must be mistaken. Nancy would never say or be in a position to cause any problem.’ I realized from that moment that I was mistaken, and that he would always see her as he really thought about her—as the perfect wife and mother.”63
The biggest crisis of Reagan’s first year in office came in the summer of 1967, when he was forced to fire Phil Battaglia because of rumors that he was the leader of a “homosexual ring” on the Governor’s staff. These charges were never proven, and, because Battaglia was married and had two adopted children, it was reported that he was leaving to return to his law practice. All this was actually the result of a coup against the egotistical and aggressive chief of staff led by Tom Reed, Lyn Nofziger, and Bill Clark, the Governor’s appointments secretary, who would take Battaglia’s job. “Battaglia behaved as if he ran the place,” Lou Cannon later observed. “And some reporters sarcastically called him ‘deputy governor’ before Nofziger began using this phrase. My opinion at the time was that Battaglia patronized Reagan. He acted as if he were smarter than his boss.”64
Battaglia had raised suspicions by the keen interest he took in Jack Kemp—the Buffalo Bills quarterback (and future congressman) who was working on the Governor’s staff during his off-season that year—with whom he bought a cabin at Lake Tahoe. Kemp denied any sexual involvement with Battaglia. Battaglia was also close to the Governor’s young scheduler, Richard Quinn, which added to the speculation about “homosexual activities,” in Nofziger’s words. “My concerns were purely political and they had to do with Reagan,” Nofziger claimed. “Because he came out of the Hollywood scene, where homosexuality was almost the norm, I . . . feared that rumors would insinuate that he, too, was one. In those days that would have killed him politically.”65
Reed, Nofziger, and Clark tried to bug Battaglia’s office, had him and Kemp followed, and tracked them to a San Francisco hotel, only to discover that they stayed in separate rooms. Still, they were convinced that Sacramento: 1967–1968
3 6 7
some kind of “hanky panky” was going on, and produced a report to give to Reagan that was mostly based on circumstantial evidence. Reed, who by then had returned to his real estate development business, informed Tuttle and French Smith that the Governor was facing a “Walter Je
nkins situation,” referring to the 1964 scandal surrounding the arrest of a close adviser to President Johnson in a YMCA men’s room.66
Reagan was surprised when Tuttle, French Smith, and nine of his top aides came to see him in late August at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego, where he was recuperating from a minor prostate operation. Reed said that Reagan “initially made excuses for Battaglia, suggesting he had been ill or under strain.”67 After an hour, however, according to Nofziger,
“Reagan agreed that Battaglia and Quinn would have to go.”68 But he wouldn’t confront Battaglia himself; he had Holmes Tuttle do it for him the next day. “You know who fired Phil Battaglia? Dad,” Robert Tuttle told me. “I remember hearing raised voices downstairs at our house in Hancock Park. Phil was trying to get a judgeship out of it, and my father told him, ‘Phil, when you walk out that door, you are no longer employed by Governor Reagan.’ ”69
Instead of disappearing, Battaglia remained in Sacramento and began using his Reagan connections on behalf of clients. Nofziger recalled,
“Battaglia’s behavior infuriated Nancy Reagan,” who asked in exasperation,
“Why doesn’t someone do something about Phil?” Nofziger set about “destroying Battaglia’s credibility” by confiding the details of his demise to several reporters he thought he could trust. In late September, Newsweek ran a blind item referring to a “top GOP presidential prospect” who had a “potentially sordid scandal on his hands,” and a month later syndicated columnist Drew Pearson broke the story. Pearson inaccurately claimed that Reagan’s security chief had a tape recording of a “sex orgy” at the Lake Tahoe cabin, and ominously asserted, “The most interesting speculation among political leaders in this key state of California is whether the magical charm of Governor Ronald Reagan can survive the discovery that a homosexual ring has been operating in his office.”70
Ronnie and Nancy Page 50
