Patti, who had just started her summer vacation from Orme, remembered her father being despondent over Robert Taylor’s death. He would come home from work at five every day,” she recalled, “but he didn’t seem part of those months.” Perhaps because the double tragedy in the Taylor family made them appreciate each other more, Patti and Sacramento II: 1969–1974
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her mother enjoyed “one of our rare cease-fires” that summer, taking sun by the pool and discussing books they’d give each other to read.57 In August the Reagans left Sacramento for the beach house they had started renting every summer in Trancas, just north of Malibu. Nancy recalled Bill Buckley spending a night with them there when he was in Los Angeles to give a speech. “He really endeared himself to the kids,” she told me. “First of all, he went swimming at midnight with flashlights. The kids thought that was just wonderful. ‘Why don’t you two do that?’
Then the next morning he had peanut butter on toast for breakfast.
That sealed it.”58
Trancas brought out the best in the Reagans. “That was where we’d do most of our visiting as a family,” Maureen wrote. “I’d try to get out there one or two days each week, depending on my work schedule. On the days that all of us were there at the same time, we’d be out body-surfing and Dad would look around and marvel, ‘My goodness, all four of my pupils, all here at the same time!’ ”59
Maureen was single again, having divorced Lieutenant Sills in 1967, and had a public relations job with Pacific Southwest Airlines. Michael was trying to make a name for himself by racing speedboats—he had won the Outboard World Championship in 1967—even while trading on his father’s name by endorsing products, including the Power Mac-Six chain-saw and Hart, Schaffner and Marx suits. He had been called up for the draft in 1968, but was excused owing to a variety of medical problems, including a chronic ulcer. After he had a serious accident in a race in Texas, his father urged him to “make your hobby your real job” by selling boats instead of racing them, advice Michael chose not to take.60
Patti, meanwhile, was earning high grades at boarding school and fanta-sizing “about being in Haight-Ashbury, plaiting flowers in my hair, or at Berkeley, protesting the war.”61 In her sophomore year she had tried to run away to Alaska with the school dishwasher, but that had been forgiven; her parents didn’t know she was now having an affair with her married English teacher. After she had been caught smoking in March 1968, her father wrote her a four-page letter, reminding her that cigarettes were addictive and unhealthy—Nancy had given them up under pressure from Loyal the year before—and indicating that he realized her problems went beyond sneaking smokes. “You broke not only school rules but family rules and to do this you had to resort to tricks and deception. Why is this of such great concern to the school or to me and your mother? The answer is very simple. We are 4 0 6
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House concerned that you can establish a pattern of living wherein you accept dis-honesty as a way of life.”62
Young Ron was still the model son and favorite. “Why don’t we just nuke ’em?” he would say when his father complained about antiwar “flag-burners.”63 “Nancy was crazy about that boy, just crazy about him,” said Marion Jorgensen. “And for him to say his father didn’t spend enough time with him, I’m here to tell you that’s not true. In fact, I think they spent too much time with him—he was spoiled rotten. They’d drag him everywhere—to the Wilsons’ ranch when there were no other kids around. Earle used to say to me, ‘I don’t know what they’re doing, bringing that kid along.’ They had him underfoot every five seconds.”64 According to Nancy, she tried to make her son’s life as normal as possible and even had the security man who drove him to school wear a sweater instead of a jacket and a cap. But he had a hard time adjusting to the move from Pacific Palisades, switching schools twice before settling in at Sacramento Country Day. He was beaten up by three classmates one day, and later told Patti that the boys had called him “warmonger” as they pummeled him.65
“I remember going out to watch Ron play football on his sixth-grade team,” Nancy said, “and hearing the boys on the other team saying,
‘There’s Reagan. Let’s hit him hard.’ They practically had to hold me back to keep me from going after those kids.”66 Nancy Reynolds told me that the Governor soon realized that his presence at the games aggravated the situation, but he tried to make it up to his son in other ways. When the assistant principal took Ron’s class on a tour of the capitol, for example, Reagan not only showed them around his office but also invited them to lunch at the Executive Residence.67
Still, there was something odd about Ronald Reagan’s approach to fa-therhood. He would never let his son win a swimming race, explaining that his pretending to lose would undermine the boy’s confidence “in a genuine victory achieved at a later date.” After Ron finally bested him at age twelve, they never raced again.68 When Arizona governor Jack Williams, whose daughter also attended Orme, wrote to Reagan to say that he had seen Patti singing in the school choir, and commented on her “eloquently beautiful dark eyes,” as well as the loveliness of the Western sky on that particular evening, Reagan replied: “It was very kind of you to write about Patti as you did, and both Nancy and I are grateful. We would have enjoyed your letter even without reference to our daughter—your description of the beauty of the setting was so vivid.”69
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“Mike came home one day and he was very excited—‘Oh, we’re going to the Orient! We’re going to Manila!,’ ” Carolyn Deaver recalled. “I heard the ‘we’ and was beginning to jump up and down. He said, ‘No, no, no, not you. I’m going with the Reagans.’ The next day I was in quite a funk about the whole thing when he came home. And he said, ‘I don’t know what you’ve done, but Nancy Reagan suggested that you come along. She said it would be fun, because they’re taking Patti and Ron.’ ”70
In early September 1969, President Nixon asked Governor Reagan to represent him at the opening of the Cultural Center of the Philippines, the pet project of that country’s first lady, Imelda Marcos. As much as Nixon resented Reagan’s popularity, he also feared that he might mount a challenge from the right in 1972, and the largely ceremonial trip to Manila was one way of keeping Ronnie and Nancy happy. Nixon was well aware that Nancy, whom he considered “smart and tough,” was her husband’s “chief advisor.” As he once told an aide, “Nancy Reagan runs Ronald Reagan. . . .
You just can’t afford to alienate [her].”71
The Reagans were provided with an Air Force jet and Secret Service protection, and put up at the four-hundred-year-old Malacañang Palace of President Ferdinand Marcos. “When we got off the plane, this little man kept running after me with a tape measure,” Carolyn Deaver told me. “And I kept saying, ‘Get away.’ The next day on my bed was laid out the most beautiful Philippine dress that he had done his best to make to my size—it had those great big butterfly sleeves, and it was like getting into a birdcage.
There was a little note that it was from Mrs. Marcos, and it was quite clear that she wanted me to wear it to that evening’s dinner. Mike said, ‘You look gorgeous.’ I couldn’t stand, but I did look pretty good. And I walked into the Reagans’ suite, and Nancy has got on the worst-looking outfit I’ve ever seen. It doesn’t have huge sleeves, it’s not beaded, it’s like a proletariat farmer’s dress. This had not been by accident. Nancy said, ‘Where did you get that dress?’ I said, ‘It was on my bed.’ She said, ‘ This was on my bed. Can you believe it?’ Of course, Imelda came out in something more resplendent than ever.”72
On their second day, while Reagan met with President Marcos, Nancy and the children were given a tour of Manila. When they passed a river-bank slum, Patti asked her mother if she felt guilty. “Of course not,”
Nancy answered.73 Their cease-fire was obviously over by then. For Nancy 4 0 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Reynolds, who was also on the trip, “Patti was a sullen, ungrateful little girl with a lot of anger and bitterness. I never saw her have a warm glance, a warm word, a warm anything toward Nancy.”74
“The favorable remarks about the exceptionally able manner in which you, Nancy and your children represented the United States at the opening of the Philippine Cultural Center continue to reach me,” Nixon wrote to Reagan on October 8. “You were superb Ambassadors of goodwill and I just wanted you to know how much I appreciated your efforts. . . . Pat joins me in sending warm personal regards to you and Nancy.”75
The following month the Reagans were off to London and Paris with the Bloomingdales. It was Nancy’s first trip to Europe since she had toured the Continent with Edith and Loyal when she was twelve, and Ronnie’s since 1949, when he filmed The Hasty Heart in London. “The wives flew over on one plane, and the husbands on another,” Betsy Bloomingdale told me. “In those days Ronnie and Nancy didn’t fly together because of the children.”76 Although this was a private trip, in London the Reagans stayed with the Annenbergs at the ambassador’s residence, Winfield House. The Bloomingdales, who were not as close to Walter and Lee, took a suite at Claridge’s.
As Walter Annenberg had predicted, his confirmation had been a real struggle. His predecessor at the Court of St. James’s had been the quintes-sential Eastern establishment career diplomat David K. Bruce, whose elegant and erudite wife, Evangeline, made no secret of her dismay at their being followed by a couple she considered nouveau-riche social climbers from California. “I’ve never even heard of these strange people,” Evangeline told friends as she set about poisoning the well for Walter and Lee in both London and Washington.77 The Bruces’ choice for the most desirable post in the U.S. diplomatic service had been CBS chairman William Paley, who along with his wife, Babe, had openly sought the appointment.78
More seriously, Annenberg’s nomination was opposed by Democratic senator William Fulbright, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and strongly criticized by The New York Times, which editorialized that Annenberg had bought the nomination with campaign contributions. (In fact, he had not given money to Nixon’s 1968 campaign, but several of his sisters had.) When The Washington Post joined in with a Drew Pearson column reminding readers that Moses Annenberg had been jailed for tax evasion in the 1940s, Walter called the Post’s owner, Katharine Graham, and accused her of betraying their friendship. Graham found herself in an awkward Sacramento II: 1969–1974
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position: she was scheduled to host a dinner in honor of the Annenbergs at her house in Georgetown a few days later, following Walter’s Senate confirmation hearings. Wanting to make the evening as enjoyable as possible—
and supposedly unaware of the tensions between the Annenbergs and the Bruces—she invited David and Evangeline Bruce. At the dinner, Evangeline refused to make conversation with Lee, and Walter later declared that he would never speak to Katharine Graham again.79 According to Marguerite Littman, a longtime American resident in London and a leading hostess, the fault lay as much as with the Annenbergs as with the Bruces. “They went around trashing the Bruces. Lee said they didn’t use fingerbowls, and silly things like that—that Winfield House was falling apart.”80
Even before Annenberg presented his credentials to Queen Elizabeth that April, his wife had flown over Billy Haines and Ted Graber to begin work on a six-month, $1 million renovation of the ambassador’s residence. The thirty-five-room Georgian-style mansion in Regent’s Park had been built in 1937 by Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton, who donated it to the American government after the war. “The first dinner we gave at Winfield House was for Governor and Mrs. Reagan,” Lee Annenberg told me. “Walter had arranged for Ronnie to be a speaker at the Institute of Directors, held in the Royal Albert Hall. There must have been six thousand people there, and then we gave a dinner for thirty or forty.”81
Although no one realized it at the time, among the corporate executives at the Royal Albert Hall that night in November 1969 was Denis Thatcher, who went home and told his wife, Margaret, then minister of education in the government of Conservative prime minister Edward Heath, how impressed he had been by the California governor’s ideas and delivery. Reagan had received a standing ovation, apparently a tribute that only former prime minister Harold Macmillan had ever received. “I started to cry,” Nancy later said. “I noticed a woman next to me also crying, and I was touched that she’d been as moved as I was.”82
“That was the English part of the trip,” Betsy Bloomingdale said. “I was in charge of the French part.” The high point of their Paris stay was a dinner in the Reagans’ honor at Versailles, hosted by its then curator, Gerald van der Kemp, and his American wife, Florence. “I had called Florence,” Betsy Bloomingdale said, “because Nancy had always been so fascinated by the stories of the dinners we’d gone to in Versailles. And being a big Republican anyway, Florence was thrilled to give a dinner for the Governor of California. . . . The Duke and Duchess of Windsor were 4 1 0
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House there, and a lot of terribly sophisticated French people—you know, Alexis de Redé, Ghislaine de Polignac, all that crowd that we’d known for years.
Real sophisticates. So nobody really cared who Ronald Reagan was. He was a nice, handsome-looking actor from Hollywood, I think they thought, with a very pretty wife and what have you. But Ronnie was fabulous that night. He got up—did a little bit in French—and then really started to speak. And after dinner they all knew who Ronald Reagan was.
They were mad for Ronald Reagan.”83
For Nancy, nothing compared with meeting the woman for whom a king had given up his throne. The aging Windsors, who were renowned for their exquisite taste in everything from decor to dogs, held sway over international society from a petit palais in the Bois de Boulogne. “The Duchess was the star of the evening, the absolute star,” Nancy told Women’s Wear Daily’s Jody Jacobs. “Her yellow Givenchy dress over pants was so beautiful even Ronnie mentioned it. . . . It’s not just that she looks so good. It’s her charm and the way she has of making you feel you’re the most important person in the world when she’s talking to you.” Nancy said of the Duke, “Oh, he was wonderful. . . . He told Ronnie, ‘I’m completely behind what you stand for.’ ”84 Jacobs had hoped to conduct her interview with Nancy at Winfield House, but Lee nixed that. According to Jacobs, Lee said that “she had spent too much time and effort on the house to have anyone but herself be the first one interviewed there.”85
A year later, at the 1970 Republican Governors’ Conference in Sun Valley, Nancy made a new friend, Katharine Graham. The shy, vaguely dowdy publishing heiress, who had taken over The Washington Post after her husband’s suicide seven years earlier, and the fashion-conscious former actress were an unlikely match, but they seemed to have an immediate affinity for each other. They had been encouraged to seek each other out by an even more unlikely go-between. “I must say, we kept this rather a dark secret,” Graham told me in 1998, sitting beneath a Diego Rivera painting in the drawing room of her R Street mansion. “Because what we actually did was meet through Truman Capote. And both of us felt slightly embarrassed—you know, because people kept asking all through the Reagan years, ‘How did you happen to meet? How did you happen to be friends?’ And at that point, for some reason, we didn’t think it was suitable. I don’t exactly know why. But we never much said that in fact we did meet through Capote. After In Cold Blood he was very interested in the death penalty, and he had gone out to California in pursuit of death row Sacramento II: 1969–1974
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interviews. In the course of doing that he met Governor and Mrs. Reagan.
He said to me, ‘I know you won’t believe me, honey, but you’d really like them,’ and encouraged me to look them up. It happened quite accidentally, because I was invited to speak at the Republican governors’ meeting in Sun Valley, on a panel about the pres
s. I flew out there all alone and feeling very unsure of myself—I’d only gone to work in ’63. At one of the first receptions—it was a terribly cold winter night and everyone went out to the dinner in sleds—I met the Reagans. And because of Truman, you know, Nancy and I got to know each other.”86
“Truman Capote came to the house for lunch a few times in Sacramento,” Nancy Reagan told me. “And he said, ‘You know, you really should know Kay Graham. If you knew her, you’d like her.’ Ronnie used to do a funny imitation of him. So we went to Sun Valley, and I walked into this lodge where we were having dinner. And there was Kay standing in front of the fireplace. So I walked up to her and said, ‘Well, I think it’s time we really met.’”87
California’s First Lady had become much more sure of herself by the end of her husband’s first term. Since 1968 she had been hosting annual poolside parties at the Executive Residence for legislators and their wives with entertainment provided by Hollywood friends such as Jack Benny, Danny Thomas, and Red Skelton. She had found a cause she loved in the Foster Grandparents Program, which arranged for lonely senior citizens to spend time with institutionalized children. As she told the Sacramento Union, “I think it is wonderful because it benefits both sides—the older people whose families are grown, and the children who receive an extra amount of love and attention.”88 The federally funded program had been started by Kennedy in-law Sargent Shriver in 1965, and was still quite small when Nancy became aware of it on a visit to Pacific State Hospital. She soon took charge, and eventually expanded the program to all state hospitals. She also made regular visits to soldiers wounded in Vietnam at military hospitals around the state. “Hospital visiting is a natural thing for me to do,” she said. “I used to watch my father operate.”89 After these visits, she would call the servicemen’s parents, wives, or girlfriends and pass on messages. These activities were well suited to Nancy’s nurse’s side—they also were her way of showing her support for Ronnie’s very vocal pro-war stance. On October 15, 1970, as hundreds of thousands of demonstrators marched on Washington to demand that Nixon pull out of Vietnam, the Governor’s 4 1 2
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