The Triumph of Nancy Reagan

by Karen Tumulty

  There were other snubs as well. When journalist Susan Page was researching a biography of Barbara Bush in 2018, she found in Reagan Library files the drafts of the invitation list for a November 9, 1985, White House dinner honoring Prince Charles and Princess Diana. It was a much-anticipated social event. At that time, the British princess was seen as the biggest celebrity in the entire world. On the first version of the guest list, the names of the vice president and his wife were crossed out with a black pen. On the second and the third, the Bushes were relegated to “suggested additions.” It is impossible to tell whether Nancy deleted the names of the Bushes with her own hand, but it was clearly her intention to exclude them. Deaver warned Nancy that she simply could not slight the second couple in such a public way. “Just watch me,” she said. Her chief of staff, James Rosebush, also made an appeal to include them on the eighty-person invitation list, and Nancy shut him down as well. So, the party went on without the Bushes.

  The enduring image of the night was Diana, in a dark-blue velvet gown and pearl choker, being spun on the dance floor by actor John Travolta. The awestruck star of the 1977 disco movie hit Saturday Night Fever had not planned to do this; it seemed presumptuous to ask a princess to dance. But Nancy told him Diana was hoping he would. Suddenly Travolta realized: “This was the plan—that I was the Prince Charming of the evening.” So he took Diana’s hand, and the rest of the guests gathered round as they danced for almost fifteen minutes. It was like something out of a fairy tale, but one where the magic had happened by design. No one knew better than Nancy that storybook endings don’t come about by accident. Sometimes they need a nudge.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  If the first year of her husband’s presidency had been swallowed by trauma and controversy, the second would see Nancy begin to find her footing. The turnaround started with a brilliant gambit to disarm her toughest adversaries. As she put it: “It isn’t often in life that one is lucky enough to enjoy a second beginning, but during one five-minute period in the spring of 1982, I was able to make a fresh start with the Washington press corps.”

  This unlikeliest of opportunities came in late March, at an annual dinner put on by the Gridiron Club. The club was and is an elite organization (at least in its own regard) of Washington journalists. It exists pretty much for the purpose of presenting an annual evening of skits and songs at a white-tie dinner for six hundred of the most powerful people in politics and media. With the exception of Grover Cleveland, who despised the press and didn’t care to pretend otherwise, every president since Benjamin Harrison in the early 1890s has attended and spoken; the Reagans went all eight years of his presidency.

  The idea for the first lady to make a surprise appearance on stage was the brainchild of her press secretary, Sheila Tate. Nancy had lately generated yet another embarrassment for the White House, when it was revealed that she had been “borrowing” designer dresses and not returning them. A practice that would not have raised eyebrows in Hollywood made Nancy look even more out of touch with average Americans. “I remember having to say to Mike [Deaver], ‘We’ve got to get a handle on this. We’ve got to do something about it. We’ve got to give them back or something,’ ” recalled Jim Baker. The first lady’s office offered an unconvincing cover story, which was that Nancy had planned all along to donate the expensive dresses to museums as part of an effort to promote the American fashion industry.

  Tate knew the fresh controversy would be irresistible fodder for ridicule at the dinner, and she was right. The club was planning to have a singer pretend to be Nancy and deliver a parody of the 1920s-era Fanny Brice song “Second Hand Rose.” The Gridiron Club rendition went like this:

  Second-hand clothes

  I give my second-hand clothes

  To museum collections and traveling shows

  They were oh so happy that they got ’em

  Won’t notice they were ragged at the bottom.

  Good-bye, you old worn-out mess

  I never wear a frock more than once.

  Calvin Klein, Adolfo, Ralph Lauren, and Bill Blass.

  Ronald Reagan’s mama’s going strictly first class.

  Rodeo Drive, I sure miss Rodeo Drive

  In frumpy Washington.

  Second-hand rings.

  Donate those old used-up things.

  Designers deduct ’em.

  We’re living like kings.

  So what if Ronnie’s cutting back on welfare.

  I’d still wear a tiara in my coiffed hair.

  Second-hand frock,

  Press critics are such a crock,

  Why don’t they just hush up and go away?

  Calvin Klein, Adolfo, Ralph Lauren, and Bill Blass

  Ronald Reagan’s mama’s going strictly first class

  Rodeo Drive, I’ll be back, Rodeo Drive

  In nineteen eighty-five.

  When Tate got her hands on a copy of those lyrics, she recognized the implication in that last line. It suggested that his wife’s hauteur might cost Ronnie a chance at a second term. Nancy, Deaver, and Baker all loved the idea of having the first lady turn the tables by singing a rebuttal. The Gridiron Club’s officers proposed that Nancy offer a rejoinder about “second-hand news,” blow the audience a kiss, and saunter off on the arms of two performers dressed as bellmen—in other words, to tell the journalists they could go to hell.

  Nancy’s spokeswoman thought that was a terrible idea. “As soon as I read this, I knew we were going to take an entirely different tack, but we never told the Gridiron in advance. Nancy needed to make fun of herself, not blame the press,” Tate recalled. For more than a week, Tate and speechwriter Landon Parvin worked in secret with Nancy in the study of the White House residence. Nancy nixed lines in Parvin’s first cut at it, which made fun of her fancy friends, and called out Betsy Bloomingdale and Jerry Zipkin by name. She also insisted that the song refer to “the” china, not “my” china, as Parvin originally wrote. He came back with another draft, which they rehearsed with her recently named chief of staff, James Rosebush, playing the piano. Social secretary Muffie Brandon scrounged up an over-the-top, tacky ensemble for Nancy to wear: a loud aqua skirt with red and yellow flowers, white pantaloons with butterflies, rubber rainboots, a ragged feather boa, and a double string of fake pearls that hung nearly to her knees. Nancy topped it off with a feathered red hat that her staff had given her for her birthday as a joke.

  The first lady kept her plan secret even from her husband. When the night of the dinner arrived, she was too nervous to eat as she sat at the head table with Ronnie and the Bushes. The event was, as usual, an all-star gathering of Washington bigwigs. Among the guests were Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, nine other foreign ambassadors, four Supreme Court justices, and most of the Cabinet. When the club’s singer performed her song about the first lady’s shopping habits, Nancy slipped away, setting off a buzz among her head-table neighbors that she had been offended by the lyrics. Tate heard one newspaper publisher whisper to another: “Nancy Reagan just left. I bet she’s pissed!”

  So they—and everyone else in the audience—were unprepared when a petite woman in a bag-lady costume suddenly stepped through a rack of clothes onstage and called out to the bandleader: “Let me see that score!” As it sank in who was standing before them in that outlandish getup, the room went silent. Then came a standing ovation that quieted down as Nancy began to sing:

  I’m wearing second-hand clothes

  Second-hand clothes

  They’re quite the style

  In the spring fashion shows.

  Even my new trench coat with fur collar

  Ronnie bought for ten cents on the dollar.

  Second-hand gowns

  And old hand-me-downs

  The china is the only thing that’s new.

  Even though they tell me that I’m no longer queen,

  Did Ronnie have to buy me that new sewing machine?

  Second-hand clothes, second-hand clothes,

 
I sure hope Ed Meese sews.

  For her big finish, Nancy threw a china plate, which had a pattern similar to her controversial White House selection, to the floor. Though it didn’t smash as it was supposed to, that brought another standing ovation. Then came calls for an encore, something Parvin hadn’t thought to write. So Nancy did the whole thing over again, the second time breaking the plate to pieces—and putting, at last, the first crack in her reputation as an ice queen.

  “This one song, together with my willingness to sing it, served as a signal to opinion makers that maybe I wasn’t the terrible, humorless woman they thought I was,” Nancy wrote later. “From that night on, my image began to change in Washington.” Ronnie was delighted. When he rose to give his speech, he began: “I was surprised when I learned I was coming here as a happy husband and leaving as a Stage Door Johnny.” Later, he mused in his diary: “Maybe this will end the sniping.”

  The criticism of Nancy didn’t end, not entirely, but a strategy was finally taking hold that would begin to change the country’s perceptions about its first lady. Nancy had already begun to get more active promoting her chosen cause: fighting drug abuse among the young. In the past, she had always avoided giving speeches, preferring to talk to audiences in question-and-answer sessions. Now she had to get over her nervousness about presenting her own ideas in public. She found herself turning to Parvin frequently for help, and he tried to break her in slowly by giving her brief sets of remarks. “In those early years, it was just one page, big spaces in between all over, indents, because she wasn’t comfortable giving speeches. So we started out with very little stuff,” he recalled.

  Her commitment to the antidrug cause, however, was genuine and deeply felt. As the daughter of a doctor, Nancy saw the nation’s health as an issue that could be shaped by both public policy and personal example. At her decree, the souvenir packs of cigarettes that had been given away on Air Force One since the Kennedy years were replaced by M&M’s. She had been concerned about drug abuse since her days in Sacramento, having seen the toll it had taken on many of her Hollywood friends and their families. Nancy also recalled the advice she had received during the 1980 campaign from veteran White House reporter Helen Thomas: “If your husband is elected, you will have a platform that is given to very few people. You should think about what you want to do with it. You’ll never be given this kind of opportunity again.”

  There was a paradox in Nancy’s choice of a cause. Going back as far as those stressful times in the 1950s, she herself had been dependent on prescription medications, and she remained so while she was in the White House. Reagan biographer Edmund Morris shared notes with me of an interview that he conducted with Deaver on June 7, 1989, in which Deaver told Morris that anxiety-ridden Nancy subsisted on “uppers and downers.” She took a pill to fall asleep, Deaver said, and then woke up in the middle of the night to take another.

  Her use of these drugs was serious enough to become a worry to at least two of the White House physicians who served under Ronnie. According to what Deaver told Morris, presidential physician Daniel Ruge became so “nervous and concerned” about her heavy use of medication that he went to the president with a warning that his wife had a problem. Morris found no evidence that Ronnie did anything about it. Her brother, Dick, a doctor, told me Ruge had not shared any such worries with him. However, Dick did not dismiss the possibility that Nancy had grown addicted to medication or that his father’s former medical partner would have taken action to put a stop to it: “Whether this accounts for some of the fluctuations in her mood over the years, I can’t say, but I’m sure Dr. Ruge would use the best possible judgment if he felt she was taking too much in the way of diet pills or sleeping pills. He certainly would have given her good advice, and perhaps that was the reason she didn’t care for him at all.”

  At a later point, John Hutton, one of Ruge’s successors in the job, attempted to wean her off the sleeping pill Dalmane. However, Nancy had been taking so much and for so long that she had a violent reaction to withdrawal. According to a former White House aide who says Hutton told him about the matter, the doctor was left with no choice but to put her back on the drug.

  On overseas trips, Nancy was intent on making sure her jet-lagged husband got adequate rest, so she would occasionally share her Dalmane with Ronnie. Sometimes, the president—unaccustomed to the long-acting drug—would show the effects the next day. “He couldn’t handle it very well. One wasn’t enough, because you know, he was a pretty good-sized guy, so he would take two, and he would wake up the next morning, and he was really kind of hung over, kind of groggy, and his balance was off,” the aide said. “It happened two or three times.” One such episode occurred in 1988 in Moscow, where Ronnie was holding a summit with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. It was a moment when the chief executive needed to be at the top of his game. The woozy president stumbled on a stair in the Kremlin, and the aide was relieved that there weren’t any cameras around.

  As Nancy described the dimensions of the drug problem in her appearances around the country, she did not address abuse of prescription medications, which decades later would contribute to an opioid crisis across the country. At that time, however, she was far from alone in assuming that taking something under a doctor’s direction was benign and not in the same category as illicit use. Her daughter, however, saw a connection between Nancy’s drug dependence and her choice of a cause. “I always felt that it was a subconscious cry for help,” Patti wrote in her 1992 memoir. “It’s not insignificant that Michael Deaver, now a recovering alcoholic, helped craft the crusade. The whole thing was a road map of denial.”

  Whatever forces were at work to draw Nancy to fighting drug abuse, it was a tricky issue for her to take on. She was assuming a high profile on the problem at the same time that her husband was cutting social programs, including making drastic reductions in those that dealt with drug abuse education, prevention, and treatment. Ronnie’s administration was approaching the nation’s narcotics problem as a law-and-order matter more than a health issue. Under Attorney General William French Smith, who had been part of the Kitchen Cabinet in California, the FBI got more heavily involved in the fight against drugs, and five hundred new agents were added to the Drug Enforcement Administration. Thirteen regional task forces were set up across the country, combining agents from the DEA; the US Customs Service; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms; the Internal Revenue Service; and the army and the navy. There were record numbers of seizures and convictions, but the problem of illegal narcotics use and addiction in the inner city remained just as great.

  Larger societal trends were also at work in the early 1980s. Nancy launched her campaign at a time when the nation’s attitudes about drugs—particularly marijuana—were evolving. In the previous decade, cannabis use had become so common across the country that a dozen states passed laws decriminalizing small amounts. More and more, it was being argued that the prosecution of otherwise law-abiding young people for a relatively harmless recreational drug was a waste of resources that could otherwise be spent combating more dangerous ones, such as heroin and cocaine. There was also pressure to change the federal law under which marijuana possession could result in up to a year in prison or a fine of up to $5,000. In his 1976 campaign, Jimmy Carter advocated decriminalizing marijuana, and in October 1977 the Senate Judiciary Committee voted for an amendment that would have made possession of up to one ounce of weed a civil rather than a criminal offense, with a maximum fine of $100.

  Then came a backlash and a growing mobilization of concerned parents who feared for the safety of their children. More and more young people were taking up pot, at earlier and earlier ages, with potential long-term consequences. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, antidrug activists blamed popular culture—movies, television, rock music—for glamorizing drugs and luring kids into trying them. Some who advocated less tolerance formed what became known as the Parent Movement. It grew into a potent political force in communities across
the country and succeeded in retoughening marijuana laws in many places. Nancy had heard of the efforts of these parents and was intrigued by the idea of discouraging children from being attracted to drugs. She was convinced there were ways to accomplish that which did not involve government intervention and were rooted in traditional values.

  Her partner within the White House was the man that Ronnie appointed as his drug abuse policy adviser in July 1981. Blunt-spoken Carlton Turner was born in Choctaw County, Alabama, and was a chemist by training. He had headed the Marijuana Research Project at the University of Mississippi and had actually grown pot to provide to government researchers. Turner had been arguing for years that marijuana was far more dangerous than much of the scientific community generally thought it was. But he did not believe that throwing more government dollars at the problem was the answer. “I used to say, ‘Let me put it to you succinctly: the only person that has a vested interest in solving drug abuse is the parent or the family,’ ” he told me. “ ‘Because the DEA will get more money, the bigger they can make the problem. Customs will get more money, the bigger they make the problems. And even though their job is to reduce drug abuse, the National Institute on Drug Abuse gets more money, the bigger they can make the problem. So the object for the federal bureaucracy is not to solve the problem. The object for a federal bureaucracy is to build their prestige, their power, and their influence and their budgets.’ ”

  Shortly after Turner joined the White House, he was asked to meet with Nancy in the library of the family quarters. His boss, Martin Anderson, the assistant to the president for policy development, came with him, which Turner thought was a sign that Anderson was worried about what the new drug adviser might say. But it was Nancy who did most of the talking. A meeting that was supposed to last twenty minutes turned into an hour. The first lady shared what she had observed about the drug problem in California and elsewhere, and peppered Turner with questions. He was struck by her knowledge of the issue. Then she put it to him: “Carlton, we’ve been here nearly six months. When are you going to do something?” Turner, in fact, had been on the job for only two weeks at that point, but, he recalled, “That told me right away that I had to get busy.”