The Triumph of Nancy Reagan

by Karen Tumulty

  “The term ‘role model’ was not a familiar term in that time and place, but looking back, I know I had found a role model in that traveling printer Harold Bell Wright had brought to life. He set me on a course I’ve tried to follow even unto this day. I shall always be grateful.”

  In the pages of Wright’s book, Ronnie would find his ideal of the perfect helpmeet. She was Dick’s love interest, Amy Goodrich, a virtuous dark-haired girl with sweet brown eyes. Amy comes from a privileged background, but, through a series of plot twists, she falls into a brothel from which Dick rescues her. Driven by his desire to impress her, he also discovers his gift as a great communicator. At the end of the book, Dick and Amy are married and heading to Washington, DC, “to enter a field of wider usefulness. For the people have declared, at the last election, that their choice for representative was ‘That Printer of Udell’s.’ ”

  The initial incarnation of Amy Goodrich to enter Ronnie’s life was Margaret Cleaver, the whip-smart but humorless daughter of his pastor at First Christian Church. She was the first girl he kissed. Ronnie saw in her similarities to his mother: they were both short, auburn haired, and bright. Margaret’s eyes were big, and widely spaced, the same feature that had caught his attention the moment he saw Nancy. From the time they were sophomores at Dixon’s North Side High School, he was devoted to the girl people called “Mugs.” Both were active in dramatics and appeared opposite each other their senior year in a play titled You and I. He followed her to Eureka College, a small Disciples of Christ liberal arts school 110 miles southeast of Dixon. Ronnie gave Mugs his Tau Kappa Epsilon pin and then an engagement ring.

  “For almost six years of my life, I was sure she was going to be my wife. I was very much in love,” he wrote. Mugs was not so sentimental or dreamy about him, it appears. Nearly a half century later, she would say of her former sweetheart: “He had an inability to distinguish between fact and fancy.” Hollywood was not a world she would have ever wanted to be part of. Nor did Margaret approve of Ronnie’s infrequent church attendance while he was president. “Even Nixon held services in the White House,” she said.

  As different as they were, their personalities interlocked. His affability complemented her drive. “Mugs was generally considered the stronger of the two, ‘young Miss Brains’ to his ‘Mr. Congeniality.’ He smoothed her bristling desire to control people, teasing her when necessary, but paying attention to everything she said,” Edmund Morris wrote. She was president of their sophomore class in college, and spent her junior year at the University of Illinois, because she did not consider Eureka academically challenging enough. Ronnie was more focused on his social life. He was president of the Eureka’s booster club three years running and of the student body when they were seniors.

  After graduation, the two set out on different paths. Ronnie began his career as a radio sportscaster in Iowa, and Mugs taught school in Illinois. She and her sister Helen also spent time in France, where she met and fell in love with a foreign service officer named James Waddell Gordon Jr. Mugs broke the news to Ronnie in a letter in which she enclosed his ring and fraternity pin. (That was his version; Mugs, in 1988, insisted to biographer Morris that she returned the ring personally.) She married Gordon in the summer of 1935 and moved to Scotland. “Margaret’s decision shattered me, not so much, I think, because she no longer loved me, but because I no longer had anyone to love,” Ronnie recalled.

  His life would soon find a new direction. In March 1937 Ronnie went to California to cover the Chicago Cubs’ spring training on Catalina Island. While he was there, a friend arranged for him to take a screen test with Warner Brothers Pictures. Ronnie returned to Iowa and soon received a wire offering him a $200-a-week, seven-year contract with the studio, which was MGM’s main competitor.

  On May 26 Nelle wrote the family of her old pastor—Margaret’s father—assuring them that her boy would not stray from his spiritual path in the worldly glitter of America’s Gomorrah. The eight-page letter, handwritten on yellowed stationery monogrammed with an R, is among the Reagans’ personal papers at his presidential library. It says:

  I am inclosing [sic] some clippings regarding Ronald, I hardly know how to explain “our feelings,” but when people ask me if I am not afraid to have him go to such a wicked place as Hollywood, all I can answer is, that I feel I can trust him anywhere, he has never lost his high ideals in life.… Friends, he does love God and he never forgets to thank Him for all his many blessings, and when we visited him, he told me of all the nice things he would be able to do now for Eureka College if he won the seven-year contract with Warner Brothers.

  Nelle told the Cleavers that shortly after the offer arrived from Warner, a colleague at the Iowa radio station where Ronnie worked “discovered Dutch in one of the smaller studio rooms on his knees, praying.”

  His mother also saw the possibility that Ronnie’s success could be the salvation for her and Jack. “You know he has been a wonderful son to us, his father hasn’t had any work since the 15th of June, last year, and during all that tyme [sic], I have rec’d a $60.00 check the first of each month, and another one of the same amt the 15th of each month,” Nelle confided, “and if he signs the seven-year contract then he is going to send for us that is the thing that makes me so happy, to think I can live my last days, making a home for him, it’s almost more happiness than I ever expected in this life.”

  Ronnie arrived in California in June to begin shooting his first picture, Love Is on the Air. It was a murder mystery filmed on a frantic three-week schedule, a “B movie” meant to be the second feature on a double bill. Ronnie played the lead, which was a bit of typecasting given that the character was a radio broadcaster. The Boston Globe wrote of him in its review: “He has a pleasant, boyish appearance and an attractive film personality.” A headline in the New York Daily News declared: “Treat for Ladies in Ronald Reagan.” During his first year with the studio, Ronnie would do eight pictures in eleven months.

  With his movie earnings, Reagan bought his parents a small house at 9031 Phyllis Avenue, just below the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood. Presenting his father with the deed to the first piece of real estate Jack ever owned, Ronnie recalled, “was the most satisfying gift of my life.” He hired his mother and father to answer his fan mail. Jack cut back on his drinking. Nelle found an outlet for her charitable energy doing good work among the prisoners at Lincoln Heights Jail and the tuberculosis patients at Olive View Sanitarium. Some of the newly released went to job interviews unaware they were wearing movie star Ronald Reagan’s old clothes. Still, Nelle did not feel quite at home among her son’s new set. “Ronald has finished three pictures now that he has taken the lead in and is very well thought of at the studio, but really I don’t just know how to act with these people. I don’t just fit in somehow—I get my fork in the wrong hand but I don’t care just so the boy gets along,” she wrote a friend in Tampico in 1938.

  * * *

  That same year, Ronnie’s romantic life picked up again when he became acquainted with brassy actress Jane Wyman during the making of a movie called Brother Rat. He played a cadet at Virginia Military Institute; her character was his love interest, the commandant’s daughter. In real life, they seemed an odd match. She had a tough shell, the product of a rocky start in life as Sarah Jane Mayfield. Her father split when she was a small child; shortly afterward, her mother abandoned her to the care of severe, fiftysomething neighbors in Saint Joseph, Missouri. Jane had been on her own since the age of fifteen, trying to catch a break as a dancer in Hollywood musicals. She wed the first time at sixteen to salesman Ernest Wyman. Then came another quick marriage to a much older dress manufacturer named Myron Futterman.

  Ronnie was a totally different kind of partner for a woman like Jane, who was worldly beyond her twenty-one years. “She was so experienced, hard-boiled, intense, and passionate, and he was so pragmatic, down-to-earth,” said Jerry Asher, one acquaintance. “He was—well, rather a square. Serious, respectful of women, stea
dy of mind and manners. In short, predictable and dull. He was a very sexy-looking man, of course—looked wonderful in swimming trunks, great body and all that, but he was a little earthbound for someone like Jane.” Nonetheless, she pursued him aggressively. Nancy claimed later to Edmund Morris that Jane had forced Ronnie’s hand in marriage by threatening suicide and downing pills. In the second wife’s version of events, Ronnie proposed as the hospital was pumping Jane’s stomach.

  He gave Jane an engagement ring set with a fifty-two-carat amethyst, his birthstone. Their January 26, 1940, wedding reception took place at the home of Louella Parsons. The gossip columnist, like Ronnie, hailed from Dixon and had appointed herself a sort of unofficial stage mother to him. “Theirs is the perfect marriage,” she wrote. “Jane always seemed so nervous and tense before she found Ronnie. She was a girl on the make—for life, for love. I think she wanted—well, everything. But steady, solid, decent young Ronnie has slowed down her pace, and it’s all for the best. Yes, it was an ‘opposites-attract’ thing, but I’m predicting here and now that these opposites will celebrate their twenty-fifth and fiftieth wedding anniversaries—together.”

  Nelle, who had been so close to Margaret and the devout Cleaver family back in Dixon, had misgivings from the moment she met Jane. “I wonder if my Ronald has made the right choice,” she wrote one friend. “I was in hopes he would fall in love with some sweet girl who is not in the movies.”

  Their marriage started off as a picture of bliss. Jane, whom Ronnie called “Button Nose,” gave birth to their daughter Maureen Elizabeth on January 4, 1941. The Reagans had two terriers, adorably named Scotch and Soda. Thanks to the negotiating skills of their new agent, Lew Wasserman, there was enough money to start building a comfortable house on a plot of land they bought in the Hollywood Hills. It sat at the end of a long driveway, and had a breathtaking view of the city, the ocean, and the mountains.

  But their careers were never in sync. Hers languished in the first few years of the 1940s, while Ronnie got his two most acclaimed parts, as doomed Notre Dame halfback George Gipp in Knute Rockne All American and as wealthy Drake McHugh, who loses his legs to a sadistic surgeon, in Kings Row. The first gave him a nickname, “the Gipper,” which stuck with him through his political career. In the latter, Ronnie’s character is most remembered for the passion with which he cried: “Where’s the rest of me?”

  That one line—“Where’s the rest of me?”—would become a self-defining metaphor for Ronnie. It spoke to his awakening need to find a more authentic identity than the ones confected for him by screenwriters. They saw him as good-looking enough but short on star quality. He didn’t exude sex appeal or danger. Even as Ronnie watched himself on the screen in Kings Row, delivering his most acclaimed performance as an actor, he realized: “I had become a semi-automaton ‘creating’ a character another had written, doing what still another person told me to do on the set. Seeing the rushes, I could barely believe the colored shadow on the screen was myself. Possibly this was the reason I decided to find the rest of me.”

  Events across the globe would soon disrupt his career and his life. Ronnie had been an army reservist since his days in Iowa. When World War II arrived, he was ordered to active duty. But his bad eyesight made him unfit for combat, so from the spring of 1942 through the end of the war, he served stateside in a military motion-picture unit, run by the predecessor to the US Air Force, that made training, morale-building, and propaganda films. “By the time I got out of the Army Air Corps, all I wanted to do—in common with several million other veterans—was to rest up awhile, make love to my wife, and come refreshed to a better job in an ideal world. (As it came out, I was disappointed in all of these postwar ambitions),” Ronnie recalled.

  He still nurtured hopes of vaulting from B movies to top roles in main attractions. His agent Lew Wasserman told him to be patient. After all, he was still getting $3,500 a week under his contract. But as Ronnie whiled away his time building model ships at a rented house on Lake Arrowhead, he couldn’t help noticing that the better parts were starting to go to younger men. The only real demand for his talents was on the speaking circuit, which, as he put it, “fed my ego, since I had been so long away from the screen.”

  Meanwhile, Jane’s star was ascending. She moved from playing ditzy blondes to challenging parts that brought critical acclaim. Her rise began with her role as the love interest of an alcoholic in 1945’s The Lost Weekend, costarring opposite Ray Milland and under the direction of Billy Wilder. It accelerated the following year, when she played emotionally stunted Ma Baxter in the drama The Yearling. She won the 1949 Best Actress Oscar for her starring role in Johnny Belinda, where she portrayed Belinda MacDonald, a deaf woman who had been raped. By dramatizing sexual violence and its consequences, the film pushed boundaries and required a relaxation of the Motion Picture Production Code.

  Jane immersed herself for months at a time in these grim roles, not breaking character even when she was at home. During the filming of Johnny Belinda, six-year-old Maureen had to learn a few words in sign language to communicate with her mother. (When the divorce finally came, Ronnie joked darkly to a friend: “Maybe I should name Johnny Belinda as co-respondent.”)

  But Jane’s new success was not the only reason the marriage hit the rocks. Ronnie was starting to talk incessantly about politics, though he had not yet begun his rightward drift from New Deal liberalism. His wife found the subject deadly. The trouble in their relationship became increasingly apparent to their friends. Jane once told actress and singer Joy Hodges: “Well, if he is going to be president, he is going to get there without me.” The gulf grew and deepened as Ronnie became preoccupied with his work with the Screen Actors Guild. Founded in the 1930s as a vehicle to give actors some leverage against being exploited by the producers who held their multiyear contracts, SAG was going through a turbulent and politically fraught period. Having joined the union’s board in 1941 and been elected its president in 1947, Ronnie was spending five nights a week at the headquarters, girding for marathon negotiations with producers. Seven months after becoming SAG president, Ronnie was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which had been established in 1938 as a special investigatory panel to investigate citizens and organizations suspected of having Communist ties. Its clout had increased dramatically in 1945, when it became a permanent committee of Congress.

  As Ronnie entered the committee’s hearing room on Capitol Hill, “there was a long drawn-out ‘ooooh’ from the jam-packed, predominantly feminine audience [at] the tall Mr. Reagan, clad in a tan gabardine suit, a blue knitted tie, and a white shirt,” the New York Times reported. The movie actor also ditched his contact lenses for glasses that gave him more gravitas.

  Ronnie was grilled about the possibility that a “clique of either Communists or Fascists” was trying to exert influence over the union. There was such a faction, Ronnie replied. What he did not reveal was that both he and Jane had been secret informants for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and had given it names of people in the industry they believed harbored pro-Communist beliefs. His testimony walked a careful line. Ronnie argued that “in opposing those people, the best thing to do is make democracy work. In the Screen Actors Guild, we make it work by ensuring everyone a vote and by keeping everyone informed. I believe that, as Thomas Jefferson put it, if all the American people know all of the facts, they will never make a mistake.”

  * * *

  As Ronnie and Jane were being pulled in different directions, they hoped more children might help bring them closer again. The couple had wanted a son when Maureen was born and even joked on her birth announcement that the plan to name their firstborn Ronald Reagan Jr. was “no longer appropriate.” To much fanfare in the movie magazines, the couple adopted three-day-old Michael Edward in March 1945. Their plans to expand their family further came to a heartbreaking end two years later, when they lost an infant daughter, Christine, who was born four months prematurely in June 1947. She lived
barely nine hours. Ronnie was not present for her birth or short life. He was in a different hospital two miles away, battling a life-threatening 104-degree fever and viral pneumonia.

  Christine’s death was the beginning of the end, though Ronnie had trouble understanding or accepting it. He learned that his wife was thinking of separating from an interview she gave in late 1947. “There’s no use in lying,” said Jane, who was on a solo vacation in New York. “I am not the happiest girl in the world. It’s nothing that has happened recently. It’s an accumulation of things that has been coming on for a long time.”

  Ronnie was stunned. Perhaps he had actually believed the idealized story line the studio had manufactured about his marriage. Maybe he had bought the gossamer narrative spun by Louella Parsons and the rest of the Hollywood press. “I suppose there had been warning signs, if only I hadn’t been so busy, but small-town boys grow up thinking only other people get divorced,” he wrote later. “The plain truth was that such a thing was so far from even being imagined by me that I had no resources to call upon.”

  Stories soon followed quoting Ronnie as saying the couple had merely had “a tiff.” Some implied that Jane had been mentally unbalanced since losing the baby. Ronnie told Parsons that he was willing to give his wife some space: “Right now Jane needs very much to have a fling, and I intend to let her have it. She is sick and nervous and not herself.”

  There was another reason Ronnie was so bewildered to see his marriage fall to pieces. His only frame of reference was the family in which he had grown up. Nelle had endured so much to keep them all together. When Jane walked out, “he didn’t really see it coming, because his idea of marriage was his folks, where, despite all his father’s failings in terms of his unfortunate alcoholism, his mother’s goal in life was devoted to three things: her husband, and family, and church activities,” recalled longtime Reagan aide Ed Meese, who talked to Ronnie years later about this difficult period. “He assumed that’s the way husbands and wives operated.”