Reagan

by Bob Spitz

  Struggling out of his formal morning coat, Reagan slipped on a midnight-blue Air Force jacket with his name stitched above the left pocket. The plane ride was slated to be a casual, festive affair, and the guests of honor intended to partake of it in style. The cabins were crammed with friends and longtime aides, practically family now that the business of governing was behind them. The Reagans were unusually relaxed in their midst—even with the fourteen journalists aboard. Handshakes and hugs were meted out liberally. And champagne—bottles that ran the gamut from Korbel to Cristal—were poured to wash down slices of a cake inscribed “The Reagan Years 1981–89.”

  “It was very much a sentimental flight,” recalled Fred Ryan. The former president shared personal stories with aides and their families, crouching in the aisle to exchange a few words. There was festivity, but also business. A lot of fund-raising had been done in advance for a presidential library, under rigorous terms that were set by the White House counsel. One of the strictest, to avoid any conflict of interest, stated that neither of the Reagans could know the name of anyone who had made a pledge or payment to the library. Now that they were private citizens, however, the list of major donors was produced, and they went through it with the delight of children opening gifts on Christmas morning. “Oh, Ronnie—just look what Walter Annenberg gave! And the Bloomingdales!” They were touched by the generosity. There were also speaking requests to sift through, many of which involved considerable honorariums, and contracts for book deals.

  Even at seventy-eight, Reagan was keen to remain active. Foreign travel seemed attractive, as well as several offers to return to radio, although Reagan conceded that movies and TV were probably out of the question. What he looked forward to more than anything was having his privacy back, being able to spend time at the ranch, oblivious to politics, or even just taking a walk by himself. He was under the impression that no one would recognize him, and for today, but only today, his aides were content to let him believe that was true.

  During the last half hour of the flight, Ronald Reagan slipped quietly away from the celebration and rode the remainder of the trip in the cockpit, next to the pilot. He wanted a little peace and quiet, but more than that he wanted to gaze at the terrain of his beloved California as it loomed into view. He’d told journalists earlier in the day, “California isn’t a place in my mind—it’s a way of life,” and he’d meant it. He couldn’t wait to touch down.

  Peace and quiet—but not quite yet. As he and Nancy emerged from the plane at LAX, a homecoming rally organized by the White House staff swarmed toward them, seven hundred strong, chanting “Four more years! Four more years!” The Salvation Army Tournament of Roses Band, with help from the brass and woodwind sections of the USC marching band, struck up a thunderous fanfare: “California, Here I Come.”

  Here I come, indeed. To a new house in Bel-Air he’d never set foot in, a new office in Century City that he’d never seen. He listened to tributes from an assortment of local dignitaries: Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, comedian Rich Little, William French Smith, and actor Robert Stack. Following a stirring rendition of “America the Beautiful,” Ronald Reagan grinned broadly, waved, and threw his arms into a familiar V above his shoulders. Stepping to a microphone, he quieted the cheering crowd and told them that there “aren’t enough words to express” what was in his heart. Flush-faced, he admitted he’d been away from California for too long. “When you have to stay eight years away from California, you live in a perpetual state of homesickness.” The crowd roared approval and resumed its chant.

  “Four more years! Four more years!”

  Ronald Reagan soaked it in, before slipping into the backseat of an unmarked Town Car. He could still hear the melodious incantation as the car rolled slowly across the tarmac toward the welcome anonymity of the L.A. streets.

  “Then home,” he recorded, “& the start of our new life.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  AN ORDINARY CITIZEN

  “I’m out to pasture now.”

  —RONALD REAGAN

  Ronald Reagan had first gone west to California, like countless others before him, to stake his claim. He often quoted a popular vaudeville comic who said that “California was the only place where you could fall asleep under a rosebush in full bloom and freeze to death.” And, brother, wasn’t that the truth. In his journey from its southern palms to its northern vineyards, Reagan had encountered many hope-filled prospectors much like himself, shivering in the Golden State’s hothouse milieu. But he had prospered in each stage of his life there, thriving as actor, company spokesman, and governor, and launching himself from there for his eight-year reign as the most powerful person in the world, with, as he put it, “temporary custody of the United States.”

  “If I could do this,” he thought, “then truly any child in America had an opportunity to do it.” But could he reverse that path up the mountaintop? Could he find satisfaction as an ordinary citizen again? Could he feel comfortable in his own skin, not as a movie star or celebrated politician, but simply as a plain American citizen again? For all his surface humility, Reagan had been driven at each stage of his career by a desire to stand out, from the plays he’d appeared in with Nelle to his broadcasting and movie endeavors and on into politics.

  Making it harder, he was not returning home. The family house in Pacific Palisades had been emptied and sold in the months after the Reagans moved into the White House. In the intervening years, they’d either stayed at the ranch or bunked with the Annenbergs in Palm Springs. But they’d needed a place to put down roots in Los Angeles. It would be the nerve center of Ronald Reagan’s post-presidency, close to transportation, to their friends’ lavish homes, to their old restaurant hangouts, and to the Hollywood movie studios, to which he still felt a powerful connection. And close enough to the ranch so he could get there easily.

  The new house was a 7,192-square-foot, three-bedroom ranch all on one level at 668 St. Cloud Road.* A Norman Rockwell painting, The Five Faces of Ronald Reagan, hung just inside the front entrance, which opened onto an oversized living room paneled lavishly in the kind of dark wood that graced the old movie moguls’ offices. A room had been set aside in the back, near the master suite, for Reagan’s study. The three-car garage had been converted into a command post for his Secret Service detail. There were a lot of lovely touches that Nancy’s decorator had installed, not the least of which was the transformation of a former pantry into a gorgeous breakfast room all in white accented with light greens, but Reagan’s favorite feature was the heated swimming pool in the backyard, where he planned to resume his lifelong passion.

  The spectacular skyline views were just as diverting on days when the smog rolled out to sea. From the knoll atop the sloping lawn, he could look out over greater Los Angeles, all the way to where his new office stood, in the penthouse of the tallest building in Century City.

  The office had been in the works for some time. Federal buildings had been ruled out early in the process. Aides felt that it wouldn’t be dignified for Ronald Reagan to be sandwiched in between, say, the EPA and a visa office. Instead, they found space in the Fox Tower, one of the most dazzling buildings in Los Angeles, next door to the Century Plaza Hotel, the scene of Reagan’s presidential election celebrations. Even the street name dripped with glamour—The Avenue of the Stars. Fred Ryan, who had led the search team, was told that only one floor was available, the top one, the thirty-fourth floor, though it was in terrible shape at the time. It had served as the set for Die Hard and was riddled with fake bullet holes; shell casings littered the floor. “But it had incredible views,” Ryan recalls. The windows offered up a 180-degree panorama of the Pacific Ocean, all the way out to the Channel Islands. “The moment I laid eyes on it, I said, ‘We’ll take it.’” Only the Secret Service registered an objection. “This is terrific,” an agent told Ryan. “You’re putting the president in a building where a movie has instructed people how to blow it
up.”

  Reagan loved the location. Twentieth Century Fox was two blocks away. The studio’s owner, Marvin Davis, was an old Reagan pal. “Any time you want to drop by and have lunch at the commissary, feel free,” he offered. The president put it on his calendar as a weekly event.

  Ronald Reagan planned the office as the focal point of his post-presidency. He had no intention of slowing down. There were political loose ends he vowed to tackle—the line-item veto was a particular pet project, along with a balanced budget amendment and the elimination of term limits, which he abhorred. He remained furious at the 1984 gerrymandering (a word he pronounced, correctly, with a hard g) engineered by Democratic congressman Philip Burton, which he pledged to remedy. He even expressed interest in delving more actively into the AIDS issue. There were also what he called “the normal people things”—paying a visit to a child in a hospital, shaking hands with ordinary Americans, “real people,” or even stopping in at McDonald’s for a shake. “I want to see all those people I haven’t been able to see while I was chained to the Oval Office,” he instructed his staff. A policy he put in place at the outset dictated that any person who’d ever worked for him at any time while he was a public servant was entitled to come and see him. That invitation extended to the years he was president of the Screen Actors Guild. And to old acquaintances. Once that news got around, requests poured in.

  “Hi, my name is So-and-So and we were schoolmates in Dixon, Illinois.”

  “Sure, I remember you. C’mon in!”

  He had planned to take a couple of weeks off to settle in and acclimate himself to the new house. He wanted to decompress, but that changed within a day of returning to Los Angeles. “We were preparing the office,” recalls Joanne Drake, the president’s scheduling director, “and Mrs. Reagan called and said, ‘Okay, we’re done with retirement now.’” She had her hands full unpacking the boxes at home. He was driving her nuts. “‘This is not a good place for him. He has too much energy. I can’t get anything done. You must find something for him to do in the office. I’m sending him to you.’”

  Panic spread among the office staff—“The President’s coming in!” They weren’t nearly ready to receive him. Cardboard boxes were strewn around the floor. Everyone was in jeans and T-shirts. They scrambled to pull things together, racing around to make a room habitable. As soon as Reagan arrived he pitched in, helping with the unpacking process. “What can I do? Where do these go?” To keep him occupied, they took him to lunch in a public place. He wanted to eat ordinary food, a hamburger and a milk shake. Café Fifties, a diner across the street in the Century City Mall, suited his purposes nicely. He was besieged, of course, mobbed—surrounded by people who wanted to shake his hand, slap him on the back, tell him how much they’d appreciated his leadership. “He was a little frightened the first time it happened,” recalls Drake, who was in charge of his advance team. “It had been so long since he’d felt such freedom.” For his Secret Service detail, the situation was a nightmare. Access to the president had always been tightly restricted and controlled. At the White House, the agents always knew what was happening, where the rope lines were. They’d post a man on either side of Reagan and behind him. Here, people were walking right up and throwing things at him to autograph—a napkin, a menu, a dollar bill, a football, a baseball, even a bare arm. He signed each item graciously.

  Back at the office, Drake had to lay down the law. “Mr. President, you can’t sign everything people put in front of you. I’ve been told by the Secret Service you may not sign your name on a piece of currency. It’s against the law.”

  “Welllll, they . . .”

  “No, sir, I’m going to put my foot down on that. You cannot sign currency and you cannot sign anything that looks official. So from now on we will pass you the things to sign.”

  The whole money concept was new to him. He’d never had to worry about carrying cash as governor or president. Payment was taken care of by one of his aides. But now he carried a wallet, and he was quick on the draw. “Every day on the way to the office we passed a homeless guy on Beverley Glen,” says Jon Hall, the Reagans’ personal assistant. “The president would always roll down his window and give the guy five dollars, until an agent told him it was too risky.”

  “We didn’t know what to do with him those first few days,” says Mark Weinberg, who’d joined the staff as the president’s press secretary. “He was so good natured. And he craved contact—human contact. He’d wander out of his office and talk to people. We had to come up with things for him to do.”

  They made sure there were plenty of newspapers for him to read, including the Hollywood trades—Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. He was intent on staying current and connected to the movie business. A desk was set up for him with a working phone, and after he read something that hit him in a certain way he’d call the reporter or columnist to chat. He was on the phone incessantly, delighted to be able to make his own calls for a change.

  “Hi, this is Ronald Reagan.”

  “Uh-huh. Sure it is.”

  On day two, he handed Fred Ryan a piece of paper and said, “These are people I’d like to meet with.”

  Ryan had worked with Reagan for a number of years and could usually look at a name and detect who they were or where they came from. But this list left him cold. “Just out of curiosity,” he said, “what is the connection to these people?”

  “They’ve been calling,” the president answered.

  It did not take long to discover that the new phone system had been set up inadvertently so that all outside calls were coming in to Reagan’s private extension. The former President of the United States was serving as office receptionist.

  “Hello,” he’d answer each time it rang.

  “I’d like to speak to Ronald Reagan.”

  “Well, this is Ronald Reagan.”

  “People were requesting private meetings with him, and he was saying yes to everybody,” Ryan recalls. Needless to say, the phone was immediately disconnected and the wiring rejiggered, but by that time Reagan had a full schedule of appointments on the books. “We honored every one of them,” Ryan says, but there were areas where he had to draw the line. “A couple of them said, ‘I really liked meeting you. I’m going to send my neighbor in. He likes you, too.’ I had to pull him aside afterward and say, ‘Look, that’s not going to happen.’ But it was touch-and-go there for a while.”

  Eventually, a secure transmission phone was installed. George Bush intended to keep Reagan in the loop so that the former president could be briefed on a daily basis. But until that time, he got his news like everybody else, watching TV, reading newspapers, and chatting with friends, albeit in his case many of his friends were still Washington insiders.

  There was plenty of downtime to contend with, but fairly soon the exigencies of business took over. “We had a roomful of sacks containing thousands and thousands of envelopes and letters that required Reagan’s attention,” says Joanne Drake. Six months of correspondence had piled up. Requests for speeches to business groups and trade associations poured in by the hundreds, offers for him to present awards, to keynote fund-raisers and charitable functions—everybody wanted him. He loved the idea of speaking to business groups. And he made it clear—“I want to hit the rubber-chicken circuit again,” which he described as an arena where he could do his unfinished work. That meant scheduling events, many of which were gratis, while others promised to pay him a decent fee.

  He and Nancy had both expressed an interest in making some money. They weren’t poor by any stretch of the imagination. Income tax disclosures put their net worth at over $4 million. And the president’s pension was $99,500 annually, which, combined with his governor’s pension of $29,711, provided a steady income. A speaker’s bureau told him that he and Nancy could expect upward of $40,000 for a speech. It had been some time since they’d worked for anything but scale, and in Hollywood,
you had to keep up with the Joneses—the Jennifer Joneses. Elizabeth Taylor and Zsa Zsa Gabor lived right down the street, and God knows what they were raking in! The Reagans were the poor-relative members of their social circle, not exactly destitute but nowhere in the vicinity of the Annenbergs or Bloomingdales. Contracts sat on Reagan’s desk for a two-book deal—a memoir and a volume of his speeches—that would net him nearly $8 million, and there was another book deal for Nancy, for $2 million. Still, he was not overly keen to sign his contract. Telling jokes and Hollywood stories was one thing. But when it came to opening up, expressing his innermost feelings, he struggled mightily; it was like pulling teeth. “A book is the last thing I want to think about now,” he groaned, waffling, when the agent Mort Janklow and Richard Snyder, the publisher of Simon & Schuster, turned up to finalize the deal. But Nancy insisted, handing her husband a pen and double-checking to make sure he initialed the contract in the requisite places.

  Nancy began work on her book right away. She was still sensitive to the criticism she’d received while in Washington and looked forward to settling scores. But Reagan hedged. For him, the book was more obligation than ambition. It was so time-consuming. He preferred to forget all about it. The office staff carved out a few hours a day for him to devote attention to organizing the memoir, but it wasn’t until they brought in a cowriter, Robert Lindsey, the author of The Falcon and the Snowman, that a manuscript began to take shape. Work on it frustrated them both—for Reagan, who loathed going over the details, and for Lindsey, who was thwarted by the president’s reluctance. It was a challenge for Lindsey to get him to reminisce. Going deep wasn’t one of Ronald Reagan’s virtues. He was not introspective. His memory was imprecise; he had trouble concentrating. He referred to the writing experience as “getting the monkey off my back.” He cooperated, but grudgingly.

  The man who had spent the past eight years keeping banker’s hours in the Oval Office now settled again into the old pattern. He arrived in the office around ten o’clock every morning, spent a couple of hours working, then broke for lunch. “He was of that generation of men for whom lunch was a ritual at the same hour every day,” says Joanne Drake. “God help you if anything interfered with that. Then at two or three he’d leave and go home.”