Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  “To my surprise, Reagan, who is seldom bitter, went to California a bitter man, convinced that Ford had stolen the nomination from him,”

  Nofziger would write. “While I’m certain he would have beaten Jimmy Carter, I’m still not sure that things didn’t work out for the best in the long run. The nation needed a Jimmy Carter in order truly to appreciate a Ronald Reagan.”10

  “I’m at peace with the world,” Reagan told reporters standing outside his polling place in Pacific Palisades on November 2. In response to their questions, he said he “wouldn’t rule out and wouldn’t rule in” another try for the presidency in 1980.11 Two days later, after Ford had lost to Jimmy Carter, a small-town peanut farmer who had served a single term as governor of Georgia, The New York Times reported that Reagan was refusing requests for interviews because, as an aide relayed, “he doesn’t want to get bogged down Reagan vs. Carter: 1977–1980

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  in saying I told you so.”12 The country’s lack of enthusiasm for both candidates was evident—it was the lowest turnout since the Truman-Dewey race of 1948—and many wondered if a more committed Reagan would have been able to save Ford, who lost by only 2 percent of the popular vote and failed to carry any Southern state other than Virginia.

  Three weeks after the election, the old Reagan team—Ed Meese, Deaver, Hannaford, and Nofziger—convened at the Pacific Palisades house to decide what to do with the $1.2 million left over from their 1976 campaign fund (which had been flooded with donations after the North Carolina victory). Conspicuously absent was John Sears, who had returned to his Washington law practice, having alienated the Kitchen Cabinet as well as most of the Sacramento staffers, who felt he had been condescending to them and to the candidate. Sears’s one ally, Mike Deaver, had unthinkingly okayed Nofziger’s offer to close down the convention operation. “My reason was simple: money,” said Nofziger. “I didn’t want Sears or one of his cronies controlling it. I didn’t like Sears, didn’t respect him, didn’t trust him; I’m confident the feeling was mutual. And I didn’t want him to have any say in how it was to be used.”13

  At the meeting, Nofziger and Meese proposed using the money to form a political action committee, Citizens for the Republic, which was officially launched in early January 1977, with Nofziger in charge. Under federal campaign finance law, Reagan could have kept the money after paying taxes on it; the fact that he didn’t was seen as a sure sign that he had already made up his mind to run again. Nofziger, however, claimed that was not really the case:

  I had given the situation a lot of thought, based on the belief that Reagan would not run again. Too old. Nor was I alone in this belief. Among others, it was shared by Deaver, who was closest to the Reagans. . . . On several occasions during the next two years, he was to confide to Meese, Hannaford, and me over breakfast that he thought Reagan was too old to run again. On my part, I thought that at age sixty-four [sic] he had had his shot at the Presidency and had missed. By the time he could run again he would be sixty-eight, an age which in general is a little long in the tooth to be seeking the presidency. But though I thought Reagan would not run again I was convinced he could continue to be an effective force in the Republican Party and a strong advocate for his philosophy of government. He was, after all, the unquestioned leader of the con-4 6 4

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House servative wing of the party, now the dominant wing. At our meeting we concluded that the best way to keep Reagan effective was to form a political action committee (PAC) with Reagan as chairman.

  The leftover money would serve as seed money—a million bucks buys a lot of seed—and using Reagan’s name we could raise a lot more. The PAC would finance Reagan’s political activities—his speeches, appearances, travel—and allow him to support candidates who shared his political views. . . . My dream was to use it to build a political power base that would effectively carry on the Reagan philosophy long after he had retired to Rancho [del] Cielo in the mountains above Santa Barbara.14

  According to Deaver, whose PR firm collected a monthly consulting fee from Citizens for the Republic, Reagan was simply doing what a candidate does: keeping his options open.15 For Nancy, a run in 1980 “seemed preordained, really, after the 1976 campaign. Ronnie was ready, and everything seemed to fall into place.”16 Reagan himself would write, “I think we both knew it wouldn’t—couldn’t—end in Kansas City. After committing ten years of our lives to what we believed in, I just couldn’t walk away and say, ‘I don’t care any more.’ ”17

  All the Reagans’ closest friends seemed to feel he would run again.

  Marion Jorgensen recalled, “We flew to Oklahoma City with Nancy and Ronnie and the Wilsons and the Tuttles—Holmes was being inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame. Ronnie was giving a speech in honor of Holmes in this great big auditorium, and we had a table right in front of the podium. I went to the ladies’ room, and there, standing in the door to the auditorium, was Mike Deaver, holding a raincoat. It was a miserable night, pouring rain and thunder and lightning. I said, ‘Mike, what are you doing here?’ He said, ‘I’m waiting for Ronnie. We’re flying to Albuquerque as soon as he finishes his speech.’ I said, ‘You can’t go out on a night like this on some charter plane.’ He said, ‘We have to. He’s giving a breakfast speech, he’s got a coffee meeting, he’s speaking to the Rotary at lunch, he has a late-afternoon speech, and he has a dinner speech.’ Five. In Albuquerque in one day. So, you see, after he was beaten in Kansas City, he started all over again.”18

  “Ronnie’s schedule was unbelievable,” Marion Jorgensen continued.

  “Earle and I used to travel quite a bit, going from one of his plants to another. And we never got on a plane back in those days that Ronnie wasn’t there with Mike Deaver, going somewhere to speak. Nancy was always all Reagan vs. Carter: 1977–1980

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  alone—oh, it was terrible. But Ronnie never gave up, and she was such a good wife. I remember there was a big fire in Pacific Palisades and she was frightened, so we went out there and got her. She came here and stayed the night.”19

  Reagan had resumed his radio commentaries and newspaper column in September 1976, and by Deaver’s reckoning he “could do 20 speeches a month for the next year, and that would add up to $100,000 a month in speaking fees. But he won’t do that many of course.” Nofziger found it annoying that Deaver & Hannaford would bill the standard $5,000 fee to the campaigns of candidates Reagan was supposed to be helping. According to The New York Times, Reagan expected his income to be about $750,000 in 1977.20

  Traveling with Reagan was an ongoing education in stagecraft for Deaver. “The meticulous care I learned to take in staging an event down to checking the mark—where the performer stands—and camera positions, I picked up from Reagan. He would come out of a ballroom after making a speech and say, ‘Mike, don’t ever let them turn down the house lights again. It causes me to lose my eye contact.’ Another of his rules was not to set up the first row of tables or seats more than eight feet away from him. He wanted to be able to look at the faces. Once, I tried to convince him he didn’t have to sit through every dinner, he could just go in and make his speech. He said, ‘No, you’d be surprised how much I learn about my audience, watching them during the meal and the early part of the program.’ ” Above all, Deaver said, Reagan “did not want to do things that were out of character. You might say to him, ‘Why don’t you take off your jacket and sling it over your shoulder?’ He would say, ‘No, I don’t do that with my jacket.’ ”21

  For Reagan a show was a show, as it had been for his mother, whether it was a Disciples of Christ reading or a Republican stump speech, whether it was performed in a county jail or at the Cocoanut Grove. Giving dinner speeches, however, he would turn into his father, the great big Irish raconteur with an endless store of jokes and tales. But unlike Jack, Ronnie didn’t need alcohol to turn on the charm, and Nancy always saw to it that he kept his drinking to a single vodka and orange juice or a glass of wine wi
th meals.

  On February 14, 1977, he gave Nancy a letter addressed to “St.

  Valentine”:

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  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House I’m writing to you about a beautiful young lady who has been in this household for 25 years now—come March 4th. I have a request to make of you but before doing so feel you should know more about her. For one thing she has 2 hearts—her own and mine. I’m not complaining. I gave her mine willingly and like it right where it is. Her name is Nancy but for some time now I’ve called her Mommie and I don’t believe I could change. My request of you is—could you on this day whisper in her ear that someone loves her very much and more and more each day? Also tell her, this

  “someone” would run down like a dollar clock without her so she must always stay where she is.22

  For their silver anniversary three weeks later, Ronnie gave Nancy a canoe he named Tru Luv. She later wrote that she had always teased him about the offhand way he had proposed, and this was his way of finally fulfilling her fantasy of the perfect proposal. “I had envisioned that Ronnie would take me out in a canoe as the sun was setting and would strum a ukulele as I lay back, trailing my fingers in the water, the way they used to do in the old movies I saw as a little girl. Twenty-five years later . . . [he]

  took me out on the little lake at our ranch. ‘I didn’t bring a ukulele,’ he said. ‘So would it be all right if I just hummed?’ I know it sounds unbelievably corny, but I loved it.”23 That summer Ronnie found a boulder on one of the trails, carved his and Nancy’s initials into it, and drew a heart around them.

  By then most of the alterations on the ranch house were complete, but Ronnie kept busy with Dennis LeBlanc and Barney Barnett building fences, clearing brush from riding trails, and chopping wood for the fireplaces. As LeBlanc told Peter Hannaford for his book Ronald Reagan and His Ranch, “He never asked Barney or me to do anything he wouldn’t do.

  It was wonderful to watch the two of them together. They were only a year apart in age, and their birthdays were on the same day, February 6.

  Barney would talk to him as if they were brothers. They’d be working on something and Barney would say, ‘Damn it, Governor, you can’t do it that way.’ He’d reply, ‘But Barney, I’m doing it.’ He attributed his physical well-being, his longevity to being able to go to the ranch, both for the physical nature of the work and for riding his horses. . . . He rode on an English saddle and everyone else up there rode Western. When you look at pictures of the group, he is always sitting straight as an arrow, while the others are slouching.”24

  Reagan vs. Carter: 1977–1980

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  While her parents were celebrating the durability of their love, Patti, at twenty-four, decided to have her fallopian tubes tied, fearing, as she later wrote, that if she had a child, “I would become like my mother.” Like many of her generation, she felt it was wrong to bring a child into a world that was overpopulated, polluted, and threatened with nuclear extinction.25 Her decision coincided with the end of her relationship with Bernie Leadon; an affair with the Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson led to a pregnancy scare a month after she had been sterilized. In desperation Patti turned to her parents and told Nancy what she had done. “Only a crisis could have sent me to their front door,” Patti wrote, adding, “For the next three years, we had the longest truce in our battle-scarred history.”26

  The previous fall, Ron had announced that he was dropping out of Yale University after only two months to pursue a career in ballet. The issue had been brewing since his senior year at the Harvard School, where he started studying dance after it was introduced into the curriculum.

  Nancy, who tended to blame Patti’s transgressions on her but Ron’s on anyone else, told me that her son’s interest in ballet stemmed from his relationship with the older woman, which was a continuing source of contention between him and his mother. Ron had moved in with the Wicks during his last year of high school, partly because his parents were away campaigning so much, partly because he wanted to avoid confrontations with his mother, who had told off his married girlfriend one day when she ran into her at the Bistro.

  His father had handed him his diploma at the Harvard School graduation in June 1976, and his mother was elated when he was accepted at Yale, after Bill Buckely wrote a strong letter of recommendation. Ron broke the news that he was casting aside an Ivy League education over dinner in New York the night before he and his parents were to spend Thanksgiving at the Buckleys’ in Connecticut. Nancy and Ronnie were extremely upset and shared their concern with Pat and Bill. “Such a decision is not easily received in any household,” Bill Buckley wrote in his 1983 memoir, Overdrive. “In their household, it was received with True Shock.”27

  Among the traits Ron had inherited from his father were a passion for debate, a flair for sarcasm, and a fierce stubborn streak. When his parents realized they could not change his mind, he once told me, “My father offered to call Gene Kelly and ask him about studios in Los Angeles. He thought it 4 6 8

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House would be a better idea if I came back there rather than go right to New York.” Reagan’s old colleague from the SAG board recommended the Stanley Holden Dance Center in West Los Angeles, where Ron worked hard to catch up with boys who had started studying ballet in their early teens. He also met and fell in love with Doria Palmieri, who worked at the school, came from a middle-class Italian-American family, and was seven years his senior. Nancy was not warm to the idea of another older woman, but at least Doria wasn’t married.28

  In 1977 and 1978, Nancy stepped up her entertaining at San Onofre Drive. The Reagans gave a dinner for the Buckleys on their next visit, and another for the Edmund Borys, who owned Fauchon’s, the gourmet food emporium, in Paris. “Her dinner parties are lovely, formal but casual with great warmth,” said Jerry Zipkin, sizing up Nancy as a hostess. “And Ronnie always makes an amusing toast that is pertinent.” Betsy Bloomingdale added, “If there are 16 guests, Nancy . . . has two or three round tables in the atrium off the living room. The dinners are usually seated and served, with place cards and imaginative centerpieces like pottery centerpieces from Thailand.”29

  Nancy even started her own party book, like Betsy’s and Marion’s, “but I wasn’t as good at keeping it up,” she told me. One dinner she recorded was for Jan and Gardner Cowles, on August 16, 1977. “We had,” she recited,

  “crudités, salmon mousse with sauce verte, chicken parmesan, corn sauté, vegetable platter, raspberries and blueberries with Kirsch and whipped cream, brownies, and Mouton Rothschild ’52—Ronnie knew about wine.”

  Their guests were the Tuttles, the Darts, the Jorgensens, the Bloomingdales, Zipkin, and Buff Chandler—the last a conciliatory gesture, Nancy Reagan said. It helped that the widow Chandler’s date, F. Patrick Burns, was a Reagan contributor.30

  Since leaving Sacramento, Nancy had maintained her association with the Foster Grandparents Program. She also attended Colleagues meetings to plan the annual Glamour Clothes Sale, which drew as many as six thousand bargain hunters to the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium the day before Mother’s Day. Marion was the head cashier, and Betsy ran the “fur department,” with help from the florist David Jones, who remembered, “One year this beautiful black lady came in and said she would buy this long mink Fendi coat with a mandarin collar and no sleeves if Betsy would autograph it. Betsy said, ‘Why does she want my autograph?’ I said, ‘Listen, we’re not Reagan vs. Carter: 1977–1980

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  going to make this sale.’ So I gave Bets a brown paper bag, and she autographed it, and we made the sale. The most amazing thing was when Marion Jorgensen donated a full-length lynx coat, which was probably worth $300,000.”31 Connie Wald told me, “Nancy and her friends—Betsy, Marion, Harriet, Erlenne, Mary Jane—always sat together at the Colleagues meetings. They moved as a herd, and were quite content being part of the Group
.”32

  In December 1977, Betsy took Ronnie and Nancy to the New York Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute Ball, which every year celebrated the opening of a new exhibition curated by Diana Vreeland, the former Vogue editor known as “the Empress of Fashion.” The ball was chaired by Jacqueline Onassis, and one had to be invited to buy a ticket by a committee of society ladies headed by Pat Buckley. That year’s exhibition was titled “Vanity Fair,” after a passage in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress about a town called Vanity, where “lusts, pleasures and delights of all types” were sold—a description Vreeland thought fit 1970s New York to a tee.33 Nancy, who had never attended the party before, was one of the stars of the evening, in a black strapless Yves Saint Laurent, with Ronnie behind her in the photographs, looking a little perplexed in his tuxedo. A big part of their allure stemmed from the assumption, held with much hope on the Upper East Side, that they would be the next occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. I remember Estée Lauder, the cosmetics tycoon, rushing over to say hello during the long cocktail hour in the grand foyer, and Jerry Zipkin and Betsy Bloomingdale, in her usual Dior, standing on either side of the Reagans with a proprietary look.

  Several months earlier, UPI had reported:

  Betty Newling Bloomingdale, a wealthy person prominent in fashionable society, was fined $5,000, given a one-year suspended prison sentence and placed on a year’s probation . . . for not declaring the full value of two Christian Dior dresses she brought to the United States from France. Testimony showed the true value of the dresses was $3,880, but Mrs. Bloomingdale presented an invoice to a customs agent showing the purchase price as $518.65. The reduction was made to avoid the import duty. Mrs. Bloomingdale, who lives in Beverly Hills and whose husband is a member of the New York department store family, pleaded guilty last August 23 to a charge of concealing an invoice from a customs inspector. Federal District Court Judge Lawrence T. Lydick, who imposed the sentence, told the 4 7 0