The Triumph of Nancy Reagan

by Karen Tumulty

  There followed a period of separations and failed efforts to put the marriage back together. At a couple of points, Ronnie stayed in an apartment hotel on Sunset Boulevard called the Garden of Allah, which—coincidentally—had once belonged to Nancy’s godmother Alla Nazimova. Jane took up residence on a ranch near Las Vegas so that she could obtain a divorce under Nevada’s lenient laws, but she couldn’t take the constant wind there and moved back to Hollywood. In April 1948 Ronnie announced they had reconciled. Less than three weeks later, however, Jane filed a legal petition to end their marriage after eight years on grounds of mental cruelty, a catchall phrase frequently cited as a justification in those days before no-fault divorce.

  Ronnie did not attend the hearing on June 28, 1948. It was left to Jane to explain how the couple deemed so “perfect” had come apart. She wore a simple tangerine-colored shirtdress to court that day, with no hat atop her pageboy haircut, and looked more like an ordinary housewife than a movie star. “In recent months, Miss Wyman told the court, she and Reagan engaged in continual arguments on his political views. But it was not so much that she didn’t agree with him, she explained, as that she could not bring herself to display the interest he showed,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “Despite her lack of interest in his political activities, Miss Wyman continued, Reagan insisted that she attend meetings with him and that she be present during discussions among his friends. But her own ideas, she complained ‘were never considered important.’ ”

  Many of those discussions “were far above me,” Jane admitted.

  “Finally, there was nothing in common between us,” she told Superior Court Judge Thurmond Clarke, “nothing to sustain our marriage.”

  Jane gained custody of seven-year-old Maureen and three-year-old Michael, with Ronnie required to contribute $500 a month in child support. Another provision of the divorce agreement stipulated that, should Jane become ill or injured, he would have to pay an additional $500 a month in alimony. They divided $75,000 in community property.

  Ronnie’s dismay over the failure of his first marriage would foster his commitment to the success of his second, as well as a kind of myopia as to the collateral damage that could occur when a couple focuses so much on each other that they shut out everyone and everything else. “He vowed, either consciously or subconsciously, when he and Nancy got married, that there was nothing that was going to separate them,” Meese observed. “I would say that a lot of his emotional energy, and hers too, was devoted to each other. Quite frankly, I think, later on, more or less at the expense of the kids.”

  Biographer Edmund Morris was struck by the similarities between the two women Ronnie married—and by the most important quality that set them apart. “Both had been wide-eyed, street-smart, scorchingly ambitious starlets, abandoned by their fathers in infancy, convinced of the world’s treachery, drawn to Reagan as a haven of goodness and strength, then frustrated to the point of despair by his reluctance to propose,” Morris wrote in the New Yorker in 2004, after Ronnie died. “The difference with Nancy was that her ambition concerned only him: she wanted nothing for herself except the satisfaction of making him powerful. She had taken him on, moreover, when his acting career was in rapid decline, and when his brilliant future as a politician could hardly have been predicted. Yet she never flinched in her steely belief that he would recover and prevail.”

  Their early flurry of dates generated buzz that Ronnie might finally be moving past Jane’s rejection. Nancy saved the clippings in her scrapbook. One, from December 1949, reported that hers was “the newest telephone number in Ronald Reagan’s book,” and that he was “romancing Nancy like mad.”

  She spent Christmas that year back in Chicago with her parents. The local papers dutifully recorded the fur-clad, hometown starlet alighting from the Super Chief into Edie’s waiting arms. But after Nancy returned to California, Ronnie stopped calling so regularly. He seemed to have lost his fascination with her and was again playing the field. At one point, Nancy was having lunch in the MGM commissary with a group of other contract actresses, when one of them started talking about a gift that Ronnie had given her. “That hurt. I didn’t have one specific rival, but it did occur to me that perhaps I was just one girl of many,” she recalled. Meanwhile, Jane was still around, feeding Ronnie’s hopes—and the movie-industry gossip—that there was still a chance they might get back together.

  Nancy resumed dating other men as well. She was practical enough to know a woman in her situation had to keep open her options. It was also a way of making sure Ronnie noticed she had options. Robert Stack, later to become famous as Eliot Ness on the TV show The Untouchables, shows up on a few pages of Nancy’s scrapbook, including in one newspaper photo where he is at her side for a movie premiere. Playwright and screenwriter Norman Krasna, who had a $50 million production deal at RKO, was reported to be so smitten with her that he proposed.

  More serious, it would appear, was her relationship with Robert Walker. An actor known for his edgy roles, he was as troubled as he was talented. Walker had suffered what the New York Times called “a severe psychological crackup” after his 1945 divorce from actress Jennifer Jones, who left him to marry film mogul David O. Selznick. In December 1948 he fled the Menninger psychiatric clinic in Topeka, Kansas, and smashed up a local police station after being arrested for public drunkenness. He did another stint at the clinic in May 1949 and was then reported to be ready to resume what had been a promising film career. Walker’s romance with Nancy, according to the studio publicity machine, was paving his road to rehabilitation. “Robert Walker, who has changed his whole life—and for the better—has now found happiness with Nancy Davis, M-G-M actress,” according to one clipping in her scrapbook, next to which she wrote the date, April 24, 1950. “Someone close to Bob tells me that he is happier with Nancy than he has been at any time since his parting from Jennifer Jones. While Bob was in Phoenix, he met Nancy’s parents, Dr. and Mrs. Royal [sic] Davis of Chicago, and they approved so thoroughly of him that when they were visiting here, they were entertained by Bob and their daughter.” In June the movieland columns were saying that there might be a wedding in the works. Nancy was reported to be overseeing the redecoration of Walker’s home, where his two sons by Jones were frequent visitors.

  By the fall of 1950, however, Ronnie was back in the picture again. He wore a big smile and a jaunty checked bowtie as Nancy’s date to the October 1950 Los Angeles opening of her movie The Next Voice You Hear. (One photo caption about the two of them noted of Ronnie: “He and Jane Wyman, his former wife, are still the best of friends.”)

  The Next Voice You Hear was a passion project of MGM chief of production Dore Schary, designed to test his theory that there was an untapped market for darker, moralistic “message” pictures. It was Nancy’s first lead role, and the closest she would ever get to a shot at bona fide stardom. The premise of the film was that the voice of God was suddenly preempting radio programming all around the world. Nancy played opposite James Whitmore as Mary and Joe Smith, a middle-class couple whose life is upended by the voice.

  Schary was determined that his characters be utterly believable. He had been sold from the start on giving the male lead to the promising Whitmore, knowing he was perfect to play an everyman aircraft factory worker in postwar Southern California. The suggestion to cast Nancy as Joe’s pregnant wife, Mary, had come from Schary’s own wife, Miriam—the same woman who had earlier thrown a dinner party in a failed matchmaking attempt to bring Nancy and Ronnie together.

  “This idea took a bit of getting used to: this would be an exacting star role and Nancy had had only three small parts in pictures, and all of them had been on the ‘society’ side, rather than a middle-class wife and mother,” Schary later recalled. “But in her favor was the fact that her looks and manner and inner self were ‘nice’ rather than cover girl glamorous. And she was an actor by profession rather than by accident.” Nancy nailed an hourlong script reading with Whitmore, and Schary gave her th
e part without making her go through a screen test.

  Nancy was padded and wardrobed in frumpy maternity dresses that the costumer had bought at local stores for around $12.95 apiece. In those days, it was considered slightly indecent to show an expectant mother on the screen. Every outfit and camera angle had to pass muster with the Motion Picture Production Code, and the censorship office run by Joseph Breen, an arch-conservative Catholic. Nancy spent many of her off-hours with a pregnant friend, studying the way she moved. Her hair was cut into a simple bob, which she was told to wash and set herself, as Mary would do. She wore no makeup except for her own lipstick.

  The Next Voice You Hear had a pre-release engagement at Radio City Music Hall—a coup for a picture that had been made with no big-name stars or lavish budget. Its leading lady got the thrill of seeing “Nancy Davis” over the movie’s title on Radio City’s famous marquee. Schary inscribed her copy of the script: “You’ll never forget this picture, and I’ll never forget you.”

  She got solid reviews. Ronnie confidently told Nancy that she should unpack her bags—she would be around for a while in the movie business. (He did, however, advise her to send her wardrobe from that picture to the cleaners and lose the laundry ticket.) The studio set up a feverish promotional campaign that sent her across the country. But the earnest film, with its religious overtones, was a box-office failure in a year when moviegoers were flocking to see Annie Get Your Gun and Sunset Boulevard.

  Nancy was under a truckload of stress, which stoked her chronic insecurities. The tour was grueling. Her love life was shaky, with Ronnie still dating around, and Walker battling his demons. Whatever it was she had going with Bennie Thau was coming to an end. Right around the time of her brother Dick’s late-August wedding in Chicago, Nancy landed in Passavant Hospital, where Loyal was head of surgery. Various news accounts, saved in her scrapbook, deemed her ailment a “vitamin deficiency,” an “anemic condition,” and a collapse from “nervous exhaustion.”

  But she was becoming more focused on what she really wanted in life. Nancy started looking for ways to spend more time with Ronnie. One was to become more active in the Screen Actors Guild, where she was appointed to fill a vacancy on the board in August 1950. Ronnie’s constant talk about the union and its politics had driven Jane crazy, but he found a rapt audience in Nancy. By then, he had commenced his ideological journey from left to right. Ronnie was still enough of a liberal Democrat to have voted for Harry Truman in 1948, and he campaigned for actress-turned-politician Helen Gahagan Douglas against Richard Nixon for the Senate in 1950. But he was railing more and more about the Communist threat and confiscatory federal income taxes.

  Ronnie and Nancy’s romance began to gain real traction. Though he still saw other women occasionally, his brother, Neil, is said to have remarked: “It looks as if this one has her hooks in him.” They largely ditched the nightclub scene. Their evenings were spent with friends; their days, at his apartment or hers. Nancy knit him socks. One movie magazine account, which Nancy pasted into her scrapbook, noted that Ronnie was behaving like “a husband-in-training,” mixing cocktails and carving the roast at her dinner parties. It added: “Wherever they are, Ronnie is talking earnestly, and Nancy is drinking in every word.”

  One place they could often be found was at the home of his friend and fellow actor William Holden and Holden’s wife, Ardis, an actress who went by the professional name Brenda Marshall. Ronnie had slept on their couch for a while after his split with Jane. The Holdens thought Nancy was perfect for Ronnie and became “the godmother and godfather of that relationship,” said actress Stefanie Powers, who was Holden’s companion in his later years, after his divorce from Ardis.

  Ronnie also began including Nancy in the other parts of his life. He had discovered what would become a lifelong love of horses back in the 1930s in Iowa, when he was in the US Cavalry Reserves at Fort Des Moines. Around the time he started dating Nancy, he had just bought a magnificent 360-acre ranch in Malibu Canyon. It was a vast upgrade from the 8-acre one he had previously owned in the Northridge area of the San Fernando Valley, and it gave him ample space for his expensive hobby raising thoroughbreds. He invited Nancy up on weekends to ride and to paint fences—not exactly her idea of a good time, but he thought it was heaven. “I knew almost nothing about riding when I first met Ronnie, but I soon realized that if I wanted to marry this man, I’d have to trade my tennis racket for a saddle,” she recalled later. “I still remember the first time he helped me up on a horse at his ranch. ‘It’s easy,’ he assured me. ‘You just show him who’s boss.’ ” She never became truly comfortable astride an enormous beast, and when they rode together, she constantly begged Ronnie to slow down.

  More significantly, Ronnie let Nancy meet his children. That was a big step, and one he had not taken with anyone else he was seeing. Jane had sent Maureen and Michael to Chadwick boarding school on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, about an hour south of Los Angeles, which meant they only saw their parents every other weekend. “As far as we all knew at the time, she was the first woman in his life since Mother,” recalled Maureen, who was about ten at the time. “… Dad was so relaxed around Nancy—more relaxed than I had ever seen him.”

  On the long rides to the ranch in Ronnie’s red station wagon, Nancy and Maureen sang duets until he told them enough already. Six-year-old Michael sat in Nancy’s lap, craving her touch as she massaged and tickled his back. “Those back rubs were bonding me to Nancy so much that, although I wanted to be with Dad at the ranch, I looked forward most of all to being in the front seat of the car and having Nancy love me. I never told her that, however, because I didn’t want to be disloyal to my mom,” Michael wrote later. Jane, by her son’s account, was a volatile, stern disciplinarian who gave him ten whacks on each leg with a riding crop when he was naughty.

  It was clear from the start that the former Mrs. Reagan and the future Mrs. Reagan despised each other and were never going to get along. But the other woman in Ronnie’s life—Nelle—very much approved of Nancy. By then, her husband, Jack, had been dead a decade, felled at the age of fifty-seven by a series of heart attacks. In the darkest days after Ronnie’s divorce, he had spent every Sunday morning at Nelle’s little house, filling his stomach with her brunch and his soul with her comfort. Nelle counseled her son that everything—even a failed marriage—happens for a reason, and that someday, he would figure out what the purpose of his own torment was. Nancy seemed so different from Jane, and Nelle could see that she was in love. But Ronnie’s mother also knew that her son was not. Not yet, at least. So, she offered some advice. “You’re going to have to wait, Nancy. You are just going to have to wait,” Nelle told her. “Nancy, you will know when he loves you.”

  Judging by the clippings in Nancy’s scrapbook, she and Ronnie had become an exclusive item by the middle of 1951. The pages are filled with pictures of the two of them at movie premieres and parties. Nancy also pasted in news items charting the progress of her career, and her emergence as a minor celebrity. At a time when sexy bombshells ruled the screen, the MGM publicity machine seemed to have been doing its best to counterprogram Nancy as a classy, cerebral type. Her byline appeared on a magazine feature headlined “Brains Can’t Hurt You.” Neither the name of the publication nor the date is noted in her scrapbook, but its placement suggests it ran some time in 1951. The article touted Nancy as “one of Hollywood’s brainiest lassies.”

  She counseled teen girls not to hide their intelligence out of fear that being smart would make them unpopular with the male of the species. But she also cautioned young ladies not to flaunt it. “Personally, I cannot believe that boys are captivated by a vacuous girl, and that’s exactly what a brainless ‘dumb’ girl is. A girl is short-circuiting herself, in my estimation, if she is afraid of brains,” Nancy advised. “But there is, of course, a great difference between having brains and being ‘The Great Brain’ who is objectionable by showing off her knowledge, who parades her mental powers to the discomfiture o
f her associates.

  “… Use your brains and you stand to gain, not just in the matter of catching a fella, but to make your life fuller and richer. If your life is full and interesting to you, then you are interesting to other people.” A photo shows Nancy gazing devotedly at her own beau, as he beams back at her. The caption: “It’s pretty obvious that Ronald Reagan likes his girls smart as well as beautiful. Guess that’s why he’s been dating Nancy so much.”

  By the end of 1951, reporters were asking Nancy whether there would be a wedding with Ronnie in the near future. “He hasn’t asked me yet,” she told one. But she was getting impatient. Her thirtieth birthday was behind her, and her movie career was in neutral. So, she decided to give things a nudge. In January 1952 Nancy told Ronnie that she was considering asking her agent to find her a play in New York. It was a none-too-subtle hint that if he didn’t move, she would move on. This was more than a ploy on Nancy’s part. She was not exactly setting movie box offices on fire and knew that the studio most likely would terminate her contract when it came up for renewal in March.

  There was another problem: Jane. Ronnie’s ex-wife still had an emotional hold on him. They often crossed paths at social occasions, and, of course, were involved together in raising their two children. The gossip columnists were constantly hinting of the potential for a reconciliation. But Ronnie finally came to accept that there would be no second act with Jane. One night when Nancy was at his apartment, he got a telephone call. “I’ve got to go,” Ronnie told Nancy. “That was Jane.” Panicked, Nancy surreptitiously followed him in her own car over to Jane’s big house on Beverly Glen and sat outside. After fifteen minutes, he left, and Nancy raced back to her apartment. Soon Ronnie showed up and told her things were finally over with his ex-wife; this time, for good.