Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  Reagan denied the story with increasing indignation at his weekly press conferences well into November, despite articles in The New York Times and the Washington Star stating that Nofziger had indeed talked to at least three journalists. Nancy was so mad at Nofziger for mishandling the situation that she refused to speak to him for five months. She had never really approved of the press secretary because of his rumpled appearance, and 3 6 8

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House now she conspired with Stu Spencer, Tuttle, and Salvatori to get him fired.

  Nofziger finally offered to resign, telling the Governor, “I’m tired of Nancy cutting me up. . . . It just isn’t worth it.” Reagan replied that Nancy was doing no such thing, and persuaded Nofziger to stay through the 1968 elections. “Those who think that Ronald Reagan is run by Nancy should know that almost immediately I ceased hearing about demands that I be fired,”

  he later wrote. “In fact, it wasn’t long before she and I were back on speaking terms, where we have pretty much remained ever since.”71

  This was apparently an instance where Reagan put his foot down with his wife, but even though she had to wait several more months, in the end she got her way. And the campaign against Nofziger may have continued without his knowing it. “We’d get phone calls from Henry Salvatori after he had seen Nofziger on the six o’clock news with his tie down and hair messed up,” said Battaglia’s successor, Bill Clark. “ ‘Can’t you straighten him up?’ Henry would say. I heard that from several of the Kitchen Cabinet—almost in concert. ‘Think about it for a moment,’ I’d say, ‘with Lyn standing there disheveled, doesn’t it make Ron look better?’ ”72

  Battaglia’s downfall led to the rise of the team that would follow Reagan all the way to Washington: William P. Clark, Edwin Meese III, and Michael Deaver. As the Governor’s new chief of staff, Clark, a thirty-five-year-old county lawyer and rancher who loved horseback riding, would become closer to Reagan than any other aide. In 1969, when he was appointed to a judgeship, he was succeeded by Ed Meese, a former prosecu-tor from Oakland who had been the Governor’s legal affairs adviser. Mike Deaver served as deputy chief of staff to both Clark and Meese in Sacramento, where he became the personal favorite and political ally of Nancy Reagan. Then there was Helene von Damm, the Austrian-born dynamo who started out as Clark’s secretary and then became Reagan’s. Nancy Reynolds, who would grow as close to the First Lady as Deaver, completed the Reagan team.

  “Ronald Reagan was the sweetest, kindest, most wonderful man to work for,” Reynolds told me. “One of the great things about him was that he never equated disagreement with disloyalty. That was really important, because Mike and Lyn and I and many others could disagree with him even on policy matters. He would listen and then he’d argue back. He’d say, ‘Well, now here’s why I believe such-and-such.’ Or, ‘This is what I’m Sacramento: 1967–1968

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  thinking.’ And yet when you parted, you knew he’d never say, ‘Sounds like disloyalty to me.’ ”73

  The low-key, soft-spoken Clark brought an openness and calm to the Governor’s office that had been missing under the controlling, peripatetic Battaglia. A fourth-generation Californian and churchgoing Catholic with a German wife and five kids, Clark had been raised as a “Jeffersonian Democrat” but changed parties in 1964 because he was impressed with the Goldwater message. He had met Reagan—on horseback, appropriately enough—when he managed his campaign in Ventura County in 1966. Both men were asked to join Rancheros Vistadores, the private riding club of which Justin Dart and Bill Wilson were long-standing members. Clark invented the “mini-memo” for Reagan, “a form of communication which the Governor liked very much—one page, four paragraphs, which started the discussion in cabinet meetings,” he explained.

  “But I never had any aspirations for government or political work,” he added. “I didn’t have the fire in the belly.”74 Clark’s laid-back attitude was reassuring to Reagan, but others felt that he was much more dogmatic and ambitious than he seemed.

  It was Clark who assigned Deaver to what was derisively referred to as the “Mommy watch” by staffers who found dealing with the First Lady difficult. As Clark told me, “My workload got so heavy—in the reorganization of state government, in working with the Democratic legislature—

  and Nancy’s calls were so frequent, that I asked her first, and then the Governor, to understand that Mike could handle her requests, up to a point. But I told them that he would always keep me informed.”75 Helene von Damm noted that “Mrs. R,” as everyone in the office called her, “was an extremely persistent person. If she called when Bill was in a meeting, I knew that she’d call back in half an hour. If Bill’s meetings ran long enough to provoke a third call from Mrs. R, I’d call Mike Deaver and ask him to talk to her rather than have to tell her that Bill was still unavailable.” According to von Damm, that was how the Nancy Reagan–Mike Deaver friendship began.

  “Mrs. R didn’t have the skill with people that her husband had,” von Damm wrote in her memoir, At Reagan’s Side. “In fact, where he always gave people the impression that he liked them, she, probably without knowing it, gave the opposite impression. Everyone tensed when she came into the office. I have to admit that when I heard her voice on the other end of the phone I’d always stiffen a little bit in anticipation of some criticism 3 7 0

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House or other. Mrs. R was goal-oriented with people. If you were someone she thought important enough to befriend, she could pour on the charm. And she usually got the friendships she wanted. Similarly, if you worked for her or her husband, she wanted things done a certain way and would make constant demands until she was satisfied. In both cases, it seemed to me that she saw people, potential friends or employees, as means to an end, not as ends in themselves.”76

  Von Damm, a buxom brunette who was not yet thirty in 1967—and who had flown herself to San Francisco and begged for a job with Reagan’s campaign after hearing him give a speech in Chicago—aroused suspicions in Nancy from the first. They gave each other a wide berth and would become openly hostile in the years to come, so there is a strong element of score-settling in von Damm’s account. But even Nancy’s close friends remarked about her tenaciousness. “When she gets onto something,” Betsy Bloomingdale told me, “she is like a dog with a bone.”77

  “From the beginning, everybody was scared to death of Nancy,” Deaver admitted. “Nancy’s only interaction with the staff would be when there was a problem. She’d call up and say, ‘Well, why did this happen?’ Or, ‘Why is Ronnie doing that?’ My reaction was to tell her the truth. ‘We did it because it’s the right thing to do, and here’s why.’ ‘Oh, okay.’ And so pretty soon people would say, ‘You can deal with her.’ And I didn’t have a problem with that. Because I liked her. So I developed a kind of personal relationship with Ronald and Nancy Reagan. I wasn’t intimidated by either of them.”78

  According to Nancy Reynolds, “Mike had the personality and the ability to anticipate her needs, and that’s always a helpful thing. He had a great sense of PR, although that was not what he was hired for at the time.

  He had good instincts and she liked him. She trusted him. But she didn’t just rush into it.”79 Stu Spencer, who was Deaver’s political mentor, described the evolution of the alliance between the First Lady and her husband’s deputy more cynically. “In the early days Mike worked at it,”

  Spencer told me. “And then she found somebody who would carry the water when she wanted it carried.”80

  Deaver was a twenty-eight-year-old Republican Party field worker when Spencer put him in charge of the Reagan campaign in Santa Clara County. The first time Deaver saw the candidate, he thought, “My God, he has on rouge,” but he soon realized that Reagan’s rosy cheeks were as real as his convictions.81 He had come to politics more by accident than by Sacramento: 1967–1968

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  choice: he was playing piano in a San Jose cocktail lounge “for
beer and sandwiches,” according to Republican politician Vernon Cristina, who

  “hired him for a damn little amount of money” to work for the local party organization in 1962.82 In his senior year at San Jose State, Deaver had flirted with the idea of becoming an Episcopalian priest, but upon graduation in 1960 he opted for a job in sales with IBM, which he found so boring that he took off on an around-the-world trip with a college buddy.

  Restless by nature, easily impressed by glamour and power, gregarious and charming, Deaver was one of those people who needed to be in the middle of things.

  “My roots were lower middle class, not unlike Reagan’s,” he wrote in his memoir, Behind the Scenes. “We Deavers had what we needed and not much else.” His father was a Shell Oil distributor in Bakersfield, and Deaver had after-school and summer jobs as a paper boy, soda jerk, fry cook, ditch digger, meter reader, and offset printer. His family was the last on the block to have a TV set;83 perhaps he watched it more intently as a result, for somehow he developed a keen visual sense that would serve him well in the image-obsessed world of modern American politics. This attribute had particular appeal to Nancy Reagan, who shared his understanding of how much appearances mattered, even if she seemed better at shaping her husband’s public persona than her own. In fact, Deaver later said, it was Nancy who first saw in him “a quality I wasn’t at all sure I possessed: the instinct for how the media operates and how to best present Ronald Reagan to it.”

  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. . . . But Nancy proved to be a shrewd political player in her own right. She forced me to get in front of the governor, promoting issues where [she]

  and I found common cause. She also taught me ways to win him over, ones other aides were unaware of. If you want to prevail on Reagan, she advised, never use blatant, crass politics as a tool to pull him in your direction. If I were to say that going to a certain event or supporting a certain bill would mean “political death” for him, he would dismiss my argument out of hand. But if I said that his support of this bill or his attendance at this event would hurt folks or damage a cause, Reagan would want to know more and would often end up taking my side if I could prove my case. . . . Nancy 3 7 2

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House knew this was often the only way to move an inherently stubborn man, perhaps because she had a stubborn streak of her own.

  Reagan surely had an inkling of what was going on—in conversations with Deaver he would refer to Nancy as “your phone pal.” But, Deaver recalled, he “never once questioned my relationship with Nancy or asked how I was able to get along with her so well. I think he was comforted knowing his wife had a confidant within the inner circle.”84

  Deaver had one more thing going for him with Nancy. He could make her laugh, even when he was telling her something she didn’t want to hear.

  Shortly after going to work for Reagan in Sacramento, Deaver met his future wife, the California-born, Smith-educated Carolyn Judy, who had also worked on the campaign. “I was dating Helene von Damm,” he recalled. “We drove to the opera one night in San Francisco and she suggested we stop by a party at the apartment of a friend of hers. The friend was Carolyn.”85 Six months later Mike and Carolyn were married; their first child, Amanda, was born in Sacramento, their second, Blair, just after the end of Reagan’s second term. “Nancy liked Carolyn,” Reynolds said, and she sometimes turned to the younger woman for advice on how to deal with Patti’s rebelliousness. Reagan also became fond of both Deavers; looking back on her husband’s long career with the future president, the down-to-earth Carolyn joked, “When I married Mike Deaver, I didn’t know I was also marrying Ronald and Nancy Reagan.”86

  As close as they were, the Deavers were invited to the Executive Residence mostly for major functions, and then Mike would liven things up by playing the piano. Helene von Damm told me, “I would say the Reagans were rather—I don’t know if ‘aloof ’ is the right word—not unfriendly, but there was always a certain distance with the staff. Ronald Reagan was always a rather formal person, very respectful. He would hold the door open for the last file clerk. He was extremely easy to work for, totally undemanding, grateful for whatever you brought him—he would even sharpen his own pencils. But he didn’t socialize in that sense.”87

  It was the same way with Nancy Reynolds, who von Damm insists was the closest of all during the gubernatorial years, and whom Nancy Reagan called “my close friend and right arm.” “I never had dinner with just Ron and Nancy at the house in Sacramento,” Reynolds told me. “They really wanted to be private people. They loved being alone. You know, Ronald Sacramento: 1967–1968

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  Reagan was a gregarious guy, but he could spend many days and nights alone, or with Nancy, and be perfectly happy. When he came in that door after a terrible day with the legislature, there were always flowers and a wonderful, quiet meal, with no telephone going off. I think he was enormously grateful to Nancy for creating this wonderful sanctuary.”88

  “The pols never could figure it out,” Deaver said. “They kept asking,

  ‘Why doesn’t this guy go out and drink with us?’ Because the Reagans were kind of a fifties family, that’s why. They wanted to be together in the evening.” Nancy agreed: “I remember in Sacramento there was a place called Frank Fat’s, and they would all go over there. Not Ronnie. Ronnie would come right home.”89

  Other staffers found the Governor remote, the First Lady dismissive, and their standoffishness problematic. “In his initial years in Sacramento

  [Reagan] exuded an attitude of intolerance for legislators,” said Paul Haerle, who succeeded Tom Reed as appointments secretary. “This was reinforced by the fact his wife [was] hardly the ideal person to rub shoulders with legislators. None of them were wealthy. None of them, with very few exceptions, measured up socially to what she was used to in Pacific Palisades and the group they ran with socially there. So there was a sort of an ill-disguised contempt running from Nancy to legislators and legislators’ wives.”

  Clark attempted to rectify the problem by setting up meetings between Reagan and individual legislators or small groups, rather than having him

  “just go make speeches to them en masse and then leave.” Haerle continued, “It was very difficult still, to get him to mix socially. The thing Ronald Reagan did least well is go across to the Comstock Club in Sacramento and have a drink with the boys. It was like pulling teeth to get him to do that. He would invite them out to his . . . rented mansion . . . and there would be dinner parties there for groups of legislators and their wives. But the parties were quite rigid, and the legislators were always let know one way or another that about 9:30 or ten o’clock they were expected to go home, please.”90

  There is a scene in the 1967 documentary Nancy: Portrait of a Politician’s Wife that shows how naive she was about her role, and how different or disconnected she was from the typical spouse of a government official. California’s new First Lady is giving a tour of the office she redecorated for her husband to the new First Ladies of Arizona and Oregon. Nancy is perfectly coiffed and made up, with the barest hint of coral lipstick, wearing a trendy 3 7 4

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House chemise in a black-and-white Op Art print. Her guests are wearing prim blouses over straight skirts and have schoolteachers’ hairdos. “This is the study I did for Ronnie’s birthday,” Nancy tells them as they enter the wood-paneled inner office, which has English-style mahogany furniture and warm red carpeting.

  “What a nice present,” says the First Lady of Oregon, Mrs. Tom McCall.

  “And there are the jellybeans,” says Nancy, pointing to a big apothe-cary jar on the Governor’s desk. “You’ve heard about our jellybeans?”

  “No, I don’t know about your jellybeans,” Mrs. McCall replies.

  “Well, Ronnie loves jellybeans, and I d
iscovered over many years that there are jellybeans—and jellybeans.”

  “You mean they aren’t all the same?” asks Arizona’s first lady, Mrs. Jack Williams.

  “Uh-uh. Uh-uh. And the best kinds are little tiny ones—they have the best flavor.”

  “Is this your son’s decision?” Oregon again.

  “This is my husband! When I said Ronnie, I meant big Ronnie.”

  The wives of the Governors of Arizona and Oregon try hard not to look too amazed, then titter along with the Governor of California’s wife, who goes on about the jellybeans: “So anyway, there’s a special place that I get them. And this friend of ours gave us this container to have in the office. And when I first put it in here, all the other men would come in and say, ‘Oh, really, jellybeans.’ Now the first thing they do is come in and head for this, and I have to constantly keep it filled.”91

  “July 8, 1967: Dinner for Governor and Mrs. Reagan . . .” Betsy Bloomingdale was reading from her party book. “Caviar cream cheese, quenelles of salmon, medallions of veal. We had eighty-six people. It was an interesting sort of list.” She reeled off the names: “Bill and Betty Adams, the Brissons—that’s Rosalind Russell—the Bennys, the Bergens, the de Cordovas, Lady Colefax, Sammy Cahn—you know, the famous songwriter—

  the Dohenys, the Douglases, the Deutsches, one Dunne—that would be Dominick, or was it Irene? Bill Frye, Sophie Gimbel—oh, yes, she came from New York—Jimmy Galanos, Richard Gully, the Jorgensens, the Tom Joneses—he’s Northrop Aviation, the LeRoys, the Lohmans, the Millands, one May—it must have been Anita because Tom died somewhere in there—the Minnellis, Lorena Nidorf, the Perkinses—that would be Erlenne and Voltaire—the Starks, the Steins, the Schreibers, the Smiths—