The Triumph of Nancy Reagan

by Karen Tumulty

  Being associated with the Reagans gave Sinatra a legitimacy he craved. He had never gotten over the humiliation he felt when the Kennedys threw him out of JFK’s circle in the early 1960s, apparently because of his well-known friendships with crime bosses. Those unsavory associations were worrisome to Ronnie’s advisers as well. At one point, White House counsel Fred Fielding got wind that Nancy and Sinatra were discussing the possibility of giving the entertainer a formal role in the Reagan administration, perhaps overseeing the arts.

  “Deaver gave me the heads-up. He said Sinatra was over there for dinner with them, and Nancy had said something to him, and then to Mike, that he should come into the government in some way, shape, or form,” Fielding recalled. “So I said, ‘Well, bring him over, Mike,’ and he came walking in, and we chatted for a while. I said, ‘Listen, I think this is so great that you’re willing to serve, and I’ll tell you what, I’m going to get you the forms, and I’ll walk you through them, and I’ll help expedite the FBI investigation of you.’ ” At Fielding’s mention of a Federal Bureau of Investigation background check, Deaver found it hard to stop himself from breaking out in laughter. That was the last they heard of Sinatra’s interest in joining the administration.

  * * *

  Though Nancy, through her various projects, seemed to be gaining favor with the American public, Deaver and her East Wing team were constantly on the lookout for land mines. By now, they all were familiar with Nancy’s tendencies to self-sabotage. The files at the Reagan Library include a memo sent to Deaver and Rosebush by staff secretary Richard Darman. It was dated March 3, 1982, a time when preparations for Ronnie’s first big overseas trip were under way. Darman wrote:

  My dinner partner last night was Lady Mary Henderson, whom you know. She describes herself as a friend of Nancy Reagan’s who likes her very much. She thinks, however, that it is particularly important that, in the coming European trip, Mrs. Reagan have the benefit of:

  —sophisticated press advice; and

  —a strong and effective person to deal with the press on the trip.

  She implied as clearly and politely as one could that Mrs. Reagan lacked both in her previous visit to England [for the royal wedding]. And she suggested that Mrs. Reagan needed to have someone like Tish Baldrige (or an unleashed Muffie Brandon) along on the trip.

  Social secretary Brandon was dispatched to Europe a week early to nail down the first lady’s itinerary and scout for potential problems. A party planned for Nancy at the home of a countess in Paris was scotched because it was deemed too fancy. Aides made sure Nancy’s social activities would be interspersed with visits to drug rehabilitation centers in Rome and Bonn and a state-run facility for blind children in Paris. Nancy also made a pilgrimage to Normandy for the thirty-eighth anniversary of D-day and had a quiet visit with the widow of an American who had been murdered by terrorists in Paris earlier in the year. Her reviews on the trip were glowing—with the exception, perhaps, of the puzzlement she generated when she showed up at a dinner in Paris wearing a pair of Galanos-designed black satin knickers with rhinestones. A fashion-forward choice, no doubt, but a quirkier one than people were used to seeing on the first lady. “What the hell is she wearing?” reporter Helen Thomas asked Nancy’s press secretary a little too loudly for Sheila Tate’s comfort. The New York Times called Nancy’s knee-length pants a “fashion bombshell” detonated in the worldwide center of haute couture. Nancy appeared to have gotten the message. No one ever saw those knickers again.

  * * *

  As the midway point of Ronnie’s first term in office approached, Nancy’s poll numbers had turned in a positive direction, along with her press coverage. There seemed to be a new peace in Nancy; a sense that she had finally figured out her role and was settling into it with more ease. As the Washington Post noted: “Lately, Nancy Reagan has been calling the White House, not California, ‘home.’ ”

  If so, she knew it was but a temporary home. Nancy also kept up her old ties and was on the phone with her friends on the West Coast constantly. In August 1982 Alfred Bloomingdale died amidst a raging tabloid scandal involving a twenty-nine-year-old mistress who sued for “lifetime support” and revealed a secret life in which she claimed he had regularly bound and beat prostitutes. It might have made political sense for Nancy to distance herself from such a lurid story. But she stood by his widow, her friend Betsy, consoling her with two or three calls a day. Nancy also let it be known that if any in their social circle did not stay loyal to Betsy as well, the first lady would not have anything to do with them again.

  That same year, Nancy was dealing with another sorrow, one more private and personal. The health of both her parents had declined precipitously. Loyal, who had been hospitalized three times for heart problems since a 1978 cardiac arrest episode, was lonely and overwhelmed by the responsibility of caring for Edie, as Nancy’s mother slid deeper and deeper into dementia. There were days when Edie was alert and almost her old self. But there were others, more and more of them, when the once-effervescent woman who had animated Loyal’s life was incapable of expressing herself. Edie was beset by physical problems as well. In a February 19, 1982, letter to a friend named Evelyn, Loyal wrote: “Edith has trouble getting around with her walker, and her most difficult handicap is her severe loss of hearing, which aids do not help a great deal. We have tried out four different kinds with as many so-called hearing specialists, doctors, and nondoctors. You can [imagine] that handicap for her and the telephone. I have to do all the talking with Nancy and Ronnie and repeating the conversation in detail.” Patti, though estranged from her parents, visited Loyal several times during this period, and noticed a change in her stern and judgmental grandfather. “As he approached the end of his life, he softened, became more gentle and philosophical,” she recalled.

  After all the years in which Loyal had provided Nancy with guidance and emotional support, he had become the one who needed those things from her now. A typewritten letter he sent Nancy and Ronnie, dated July 20, 1982, is in a box of Nancy’s personal belongings held in the nonpublic collection at the Reagan Library. In it, Loyal confided: “It was such a pleasant surprise to talk with Ronnie. I’m afraid I’ve complained too much about Edith’s symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. It seems I was able to deal with patients’ symptoms, but when it comes to those of my very own, I’m totally at a loss to realize what is developing in their thinking process.” He wrote of how Edith had recently “becme [sic] very angry and struck me several times in the face. Her anger was gone as fast at [sic] it had come.” Loyal concluded his forlorn letter with an expression of gratitude for some unspecified piece of advice he had gotten from his son-in-law, which Nancy’s father wrote was “so sound and correct that I was ashamed I had not practiced it before.”

  Within three weeks of writing that letter, eighty-six-year-old Loyal himself took a sharply downward turn. It was clear he had not much longer to live. Ronnie wrote in his diary on Sunday, August 8: “Again at the W.H. More of Saturdays work plus a long letter I feel I have to write to Loyal. I’m afraid for him. His health is failing badly.” What worried Ronnie more than the prospect of Loyal’s death itself was the fact that his father-in-law was, by most definitions of the word, an atheist. Loyal had, from his youth, rejected any belief that Jesus Christ was a divinity or that there was any reward after death beyond being “remembered and discussed with pleasure and happiness.” And according to Nancy’s stepbrother, Dick, who had become a neurosurgeon like his father, Loyal had made his wishes crystal clear about how things were to be handled when he died: “He wanted no funeral arrangements. He didn’t want the press. He wanted no one. He simply wanted to be cremated and placed in a very nice area in Phoenix. He wrote Mrs. Reagan a letter, and he wrote me the same letter, and he wrote his lawyer the same letter, and it was also in his will. He was simply to ‘vanish.’ ”

  Loyal’s religious views—or rather, his lack of them—had long been a source of frustration and tension with Ronnie,
who believed that a Judgment Day awaited everyone. Ronnie was convinced that moment for Nancy’s beloved father was near. So, the most powerful man in the world put aside everything else on the weekend of August 8, took pen in hand, and set out to save one soul. What Ronnie wrote on four pieces of White House stationery had never become public until I discovered it among Nancy’s personal belongings at the Reagan Library. The library gave me permission to use it for a column I wrote for the Washington Post, which was published in September 2018.

  “Dear Loyal,” Ronnie began. “I hope you’ll forgive me for this, but I’ve been wanting to write you ever since we talked on the phone. I’m aware of the strain you are under and believe with all my heart there is help for that…”

  What followed in the next pages was an intimate and humble profession of Ronnie’s own faith. “We have been promised that all we have to do is ask God in Jesus name to help when we have done all we can—when we’ve come to the end of our strength and abilities and we’ll have that help,” he wrote. “We only have to trust and have faith in his infinite goodness and mercy.” Not a word of the president’s small, rounded script was crossed out, which was perhaps evidence of how carefully he had thought this out, or perhaps a sign that he might have rewritten and revised several versions until he felt he had gotten it perfect. Near the end of the letter that I saw thirty-six years later were three watery smudges—maybe spilled from a cup of tea; maybe someone’s later tears.

  It was striking to see what Ronnie envisioned as an eternal reward. In his eyes, heaven was, among other things, a chance to spend forever with the woman he loved the most on earth. “Loyal, you and Edith have known a great love—more than many have been permitted to know. That love will not end with the end of this life,” he wrote. “We’ve been promised this is only a part of life and that a greater life, a greater glory awaits us. It awaits you together one day, and all that is required is that you believe and tell God you put yourself in his hands.”

  The following evening, Ronnie found Nancy crying. Her father was back in the hospital. This looked like the end. She prepared to fly to Arizona to be with him one last time. “I wish I could bear her pain myself,” Ronnie wrote in his diary. A week later, he noted: “Last night or the night before, Nancy says Loyal asked for the chaplain at the hospital in the middle of the night.” And the following day: “Dr. Loyal died this morning.”

  Nancy was at Loyal’s bedside when he passed away of congestive heart failure at 8:40 a.m. on August 19, 1982, at Scottsdale Memorial Hospital. Afterward, she held his hand for nearly an hour, unable to let go. In a speech six years later to a Youth for Christ conference in Washington, the first lady recounted her father’s final days. “He was terribly frightened. He was even afraid to go to sleep for fear he wouldn’t wake up. He’d move from chair to chair trying to keep awake and, I guess, alive,” she said. “I can’t tell you how much it hurt to see him this way—this man who had always been so supremely confident and strong in my eyes.” In that address, Nancy also mentioned Ronnie’s letters. (She said there were two, though I found only one among her belongings at the library.) They may have had an effect, she said. From her father’s doctors, she learned that Loyal in his final hours had requested to see a clergyman. “I don’t know what the chaplain did or what he said, but whatever it was, it was the right thing, and it gave my father comfort,” she said. “I noticed he was calmer and not as frightened. When he died the next day, he was at peace, finally. And I was so happy for him. My prayers were answered.”

  Her brother, Dick, got word at three o’clock that morning that Loyal was about to die. He rearranged his surgical schedule and scrambled to get a plane ticket from Philadelphia, but by the time he arrived in Phoenix, his father was already gone. He also discovered that Nancy was planning a small memorial service for family and close friends—something his father had expressly forbidden. Nancy and Dick got into a furious argument, which White House staff members overheard, though they did not know the source of it. Dick spent the night with friends and caught the first plane he could back to Philadelphia, missing the service. “This was the only time I could remember, in the long friendship that the two of us had, that she was very, very nasty,” he told me. “I didn’t want any part of this funeral because, as my father’s neurosurgical resident and fellow, I obeyed, and I did what his wishes were. And so, I went home.”

  I asked Dick: Was it possible his father had had a change of heart? Had he become a believer on his deathbed?

  “I doubt it,” Dick said. “Seriously.”

  Nancy and her stepbrother did not speak for a year and a half. In the fall of 1983, Ronnie was beginning to campaign for reelection and had a speaking engagement in the Philadelphia suburbs. He sought out Dick and implored him to make peace with Nancy. “It took almost, maybe, six months before we did get together. It was in the spring of 1984, in Phoenix, [that] we finally had gotten our differences straightened out,” Dick said. “But what I felt that she should know is that her father should be obeyed. He was a rock-hard disciplinarian, and this was a very strong belief of his. So I, as his son, I stood beside him.” Nancy was just as certain that what she did was the right thing. The religious service was her final act of love and tribute for the man who had rescued her childhood. Afterward, there was a small reception. That night, once the guests had left, the family gathered in the living room of Loyal and Edie’s house. A nurse put Edie in bed, and Nancy and Patti went into her room to say good night.

  “Do you think he’s dancing tonight?” Edie asked, fixing her eyes somewhere in the distance.

  Nancy replied: “I’m sure he is.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  In a White House where processes ran smoothly in most respects, getting final decisions on the president’s schedule was an exception. Sometimes it seemed that it could take forever, which was confusing and frustrating to the dozens of people who had to know Ronnie’s plans on a given day before making any of their own. Most blamed the dithering on Michael Deaver. He was hard to pin down and would occasionally come back with unusual demands, such as stipulating that Air Force One take off at a peculiar predawn hour. “I found this odd because Deaver was remarkably punctual and efficient in everything else he did,” recalled Don Regan, who replaced Baker as White House chief of staff in 1985.

  At one point shortly after Regan took over at the White House, the chief of staff asked Deaver to explain why uncertainty and delay always seemed to bollix the scheduling operation. Deaver glanced around, clearly uncomfortable. Then he threw up his hands and told Regan: “Don’t bring that up. Leave it be.” Deaver was guarding a secret known only to a few. On Nancy’s insistence, decisions regarding the calendar of the most powerful man in the world were often put in the hands of a San Francisco astrologer named Joan Quigley. Nancy consulted her by phone nearly every weekend for advice on which days the stars aligned favorably for Ronnie, and which posed a danger for him to do anything outside the confines of the White House. The reassurance she received from Quigley became an emotional lifeline for Nancy after the 1981 attempt on Ronnie’s life. Without it, she felt she could not have faced sending her husband out into a world where treachery and danger might wait around any turn.

  When it all came out in 1988, the furor over the astrologer would become the most mortifying chapter of Nancy’s years as first lady. The whole thing sounded almost too wacky to be possible. Johnny Carson joked that Nancy’s sign was “the house of Adolfo.” House Speaker Jim Wright, a Texas Democrat, jumped in with a shot at Ronnie: “It’s all right with me. I’m glad he consults somebody. I thought he was making his decisions based on absolutely nothing at all.” Even the staid Wall Street Journal couldn’t resist: “We were going to print this story yesterday, but our astrologer—we can’t say who she is—advised against it.”

  Nancy’s interest in astrology had begun as an innocent enough pastime. Going back to their days in Hollywood, both she and Ronnie regularly had their zodiac signs read. They also made
a practice of scanning their horoscopes each morning in the newspaper. And as noted earlier, when his movie career hit bottom in the 1950s, Ronnie had consulted the syndicated Astrological Forecast column in the Los Angeles Times before setting aside his qualms and accepting that humiliating gig as a floor show emcee in Las Vegas.

  In Nancy’s personal papers at the Reagan Library, I came across an undated clipping of her horoscope from a newspaper. “You receive added ‘sustenance’ in form of romance, affection, love,” it advised. Ronnie had taped it to a piece of paper and written a playful message in capital letters: “I don’t know who this guy ‘added sustenance’ is, but he better not come around here. Signed, commander in chief.” As Nancy saw it, she was a classic Cancer: a homemaker and nester, intuitive and sensitive, presenting a hard shell to the world that hides an inner vulnerability. Ronnie was the quintessential Aquarian personality that she read about in an article a friend sent her: unassuming and without affectation; loving, but in a way that can seem impersonal. “If Aquarians have a fault, it’s that they are ‘too tranquil, too gentle and kindly in disposition,’ ” she wrote, quoting the description. “They are ‘incapable of petty tyranny.’ Their attitude toward the world is ‘kindly and humane.’ The article even mentioned that Aquarian men are often slow to get married!”

  When they were dating, Ronnie and Nancy were among many movie types who attended popular star-charting parties thrown by “gregarious Aquarius” Carroll Righter, who wrote the popular horoscope column that ran in the Los Angeles Times. He held gatherings to celebrate the birthdays of clients that fell in a particular month, each themed according to their sign of the zodiac. “All the stars were there: Rhonda Fleming, Marlene Dietrich, Lana Turner, Hedy Lamarr, Betty Grable,” actress Arlene Dahl told People magazine. “Fish were swimming around in his pool for the Pisces party, and he rented a live lion for my Leo party.” Righter was renowned for having warned Dietrich to avoid working on a movie set one day because she might get hurt. She ignored his advice and broke her ankle. The star charter to the stars was even said to have predicted the timing of his own death in 1988.