Movie Nights with the Reagans

by Mark Weinberg

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  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  NANCY REAGAN’S LAST GOOD-BYE

  1

  9 TO 5

  The Film That Made the Reagans Angry and Propelled a First Lady’s Crusade

  2

  OH, GOD! BOOK II

  The Film That Starred One of the Reagans’ Dearest Hollywood Friends, Who Modeled How to Joke About Old Age

  3

  RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK

  The Film That Revealed the President’s Greatest Hollywood Regret

  4

  ON GOLDEN POND

  The Film That Hit Close to Home

  5

  CHARIOTS OF FIRE

  The Film That Inspired a President

  6

  E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL

  The Film That Made the Reagans Cry

  7

  RETURN OF THE JEDI and WARGAMES

  The Films That Stirred the President’s Imagination

  8

  CURSE OF THE PINK PANTHER

  The Film That Revealed Reagan’s Biggest Disappointment

  9

  A GOLDEN OLDIE—BEDTIME FOR BONZO

  The Film That Helped Define a Career

  10

  GHOSTBUSTERS

  The Film That Energized the 1984 Campaign

  11

  BACK TO THE FUTURE

  The Film That Left Us Speechless

  12

  ANTI-COMMUNIST FILMS—ROCKY IV, REDS, AND RED DAWN

  The Films That Set the Tone for an Era

  13

  TOP GUN

  The Film That Became a Touchstone for the Reagan Years

  14

  KNUTE ROCKNE ALL AMERICAN

  The Film That Created a Political Legend

  15

  THE UNTOUCHABLES

  The Film That Echoed One of Reagan’s Lifelong Missions

  16

  FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF

  The Film That Reminded the Reagans of Yesterday

  17

  HELLCATS OF THE NAVY

  The Film They Starred In Together

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Index

  FOR MY WIFE, ERIN

  Because of her, I now understand what Ronald Reagan meant when he said he missed his wife when she was just in the next room.

  FOR OUR CHILDREN, GRACE AND JAKE

  Whose very existence thrills Erin and me beyond words and who bring unending joy to us every day.

  FOR MY PARENTS, JUDY AND HERB WEINBERG

  Without whom I would not be here, but beyond that, who were and are the embodiment of everything good in the world.

  and

  FOR NANCY AND RONALD REAGAN

  Welcoming and warm, they allowed me the greatest experience anyone could imagine.

  INTRODUCTION

  NANCY REAGAN’S LAST GOOD-BYE

  August 2015

  My rental car and I are finding our way down the streets of Bel Air, on a trip I hadn’t taken for years. Back then, when I worked for President and Mrs. Reagan, every one of these trips seemed important. Yet this one was perhaps the most important of all. I didn’t know it for certain, of course, and I sure hoped it wasn’t true. But I had a feeling this would be the last time I would see Nancy Reagan alive.

  The pop-culture notion of the Reagans’ former neighborhood is of multistory mega-mansions tucked behind elaborate gates and exotic foliage. There are, in fact, many homes like that—Elizabeth Taylor once lived nearby—but by no means does that image apply to all of them. That includes my destination that summer afternoon: the home of Nancy and Ronald Reagan.

  With all due respect, if tourists were driving through Bel Air to ooh and aah over houses, they would not give the Reagan home a second look. “It’s a very ordinary house,” an onlooker said once when the former First Couple moved into their multimillion-dollar digs at 668 Saint Cloud Road in January 1989. By the time I make this drive again, the former president has been gone for more than ten years, but that doesn’t matter. I still see the house as theirs. His widow clearly felt that way, too. She’d have never dreamt of abandoning the comparatively modest three-bedroom ranch house they shared a couple of miles from Century City, where the former president maintained his office after leaving the White House, and about an hour’s drive from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum in Simi Valley.

  There’s a nondescript metal mailbox in front of the gate, and at the appointed hour, I pull into the driveway, past the security station after having been cleared, and make the short drive to the front door.

  In earlier days, whenever I came to the house, I’d knock on the large, round, brass door knocker, and either the president or Mrs. Reagan—or sometimes both—would open the door without pretense and show me in. Whenever I left, one or both always walked me to the door and stood there, waving, until my car was out of sight. So it was no surprise to me, on such a balmy day, that a smiling Nancy Reagan—at this point, largely confined to a wheelchair—was at the door to greet me again. Standing beside her were a home health care aide and her housekeeper.

  As her health declined, Mrs. Reagan had allowed very few meetings like this one—which she knew in advance was an interview for this book. Her staff didn’t want her to be overwhelmed with requests from former aides and old friends. So my visit was kept quiet. As I understand it, it was the last interview she ever gave.

  I didn’t know what to expect, but even at ninety-four, Nancy Reagan looked and acted like—well, Nancy Reagan. Her hair was a little less puffy than when she was First Lady, but still very nicely styled, and her makeup—essentially only lipstick—looked perfect. She wore an orange blouse and cream-colored pants, simple earrings, and her wedding band. Her eyes and smile were warm. And her voice, while slightly softer, was otherwise exactly as it had always been, warm and welcoming. Just hearing it immediately evoked so many fond memories of our many years together—especially when she laughed. As I saw her again, my thoughts returned to the first time I’d met her, when I joined the 1980 Reagan presidential campaign. We had not gotten off to the best of starts.

  We had landed somewhere during our dizzying cross-country campaigning, and the Reagans were asked to stay aboard the plane for a short while because their motorcade was not yet ready. It was essentially just the two of them at the front of the plane, and I thought I saw an opportunity to ingratiate myself with Governor Reagan’s influential wife.

  I walked up the aisle, presented her with some trinkets I had found in a hotel gift shop, and said, “These might be fun for your grandchildren.”

  Mrs. Reagan accepted them, looked at me, and said “Thank you” in a perfunctory manner.

  I strutted to the back of the plane, feeling cocky because I had made myself known to the candidate’s wife.

  As soon as I got off the plane, however, another staff member came up to me. “You’re a fool,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t you realize, Mrs. Reagan doesn’t have any grandchildren?” He explained that the “grandchildren” were the children of Michael Reagan, a son from the governor’s first marriage to the actress Jane Wyman. My heart sank. N
eedless to say, I never mentioned grandchildren to the First Lady again.

  Mrs. Reagan did not hold that incident against me. That may surprise some people who bought into the caricature—created by some critics and carried out in the press—portraying her as some sort of Cruella de Vil. Over the years, I’d learn many times how very wrong and unfair that characterization was.

  “I’m not really walking very much anymore,” she confessed as we met for that final time in California, “so I hope you’ll forgive me for not opening the door.”

  “Of course,” I replied, and leaned down to kiss her on the cheek. “I brought you something.” An orchid, one of her favorite flowers.

  “Oh, how beautiful. Thank you, Mark.” She held it for a second, until the housekeeper reached down to take it to her bedroom.

  Probably by design, the house still felt as if the president might be just down the hall, walking into the room at any moment, with a quip or story on hand. This was very much the house, after all, of a woman still mourning a husband who, because of Alzheimer’s disease, was tragically lost to her long before he actually died.

  “Where shall we go?” Mrs. Reagan asked. “How about in here?” She motioned toward the den. Outside the room hung Norman Rockwell’s famous painting of the president, done in 1968 when Reagan was governor of California, which had been there for as long as I could remember.

  The den, too, was precisely the way it was the day the Reagans moved into the home. Two of the walls were lined with bookshelves holding many leather-bound collections of books on various topics. There were a few decorative silver plates and framed photos interspersed among the shelves: Mrs. Reagan with Queen Elizabeth II—the two had become good friends over the years—and another of the Reagans with Pope John Paul II at the Vatican.

  The den had dark paneling, but the room was very bright because one wall was glass and looked onto the backyard. There was a small fireplace tucked into one wall and a TV hidden by the paneling. On the large red-and-white couch sat an embroidered pillow that bore a map of the United States, highlighting the forty-nine states Reagan won in 1984 (all but Minnesota, Democratic opponent Walter Mondale’s home state), the words “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet”—one of the ’84 reelection campaign slogans—and an embroidered inscription, “Love, Fran and Ray.” The pillow was a gift from Fran and Ray Stark, he the legendary Hollywood producer who, many lifetimes ago, discovered Barbra Streisand, and gave her a film career. Ray Stark was involved with dozens of motion pictures, including West Side Story, The Misfits, Funny Girl, The Way We Were, and Steel Magnolias. In front of the couch stood a very large coffee table, piled high with videos of movies in which Ronald Reagan had starred.

  Nearby was a round wooden table, on which sat a beautiful orchid plant and some hand-painted enamel boxes.

  The home health care aide gently wheeled Mrs. Reagan to this table, and I took a chair right next to her.

  After I updated her—at her insistence—on my wife and children, we came to the reason for my visit. I reminded her that I was writing this book: the story of the Reagan presidency through the movies we watched at Camp David, the presidential retreat nestled in the wooded hills of Maryland, about an hour northwest of Washington, DC.

  “I know you are,” she said, smiling.

  Her eyes sparkled when she talked about our weekends at Camp David. For all that has been written about the Reagans over the years, it was an aspect of their lives about which little was, or is, known. She seemed eager to relive the memories and to see them live on in print.

  “That was such a special time.”

  Indeed it was. Which is the reason I wanted to write this book. It had been thirty-four years since I was a twenty-three-year-old White House press aide assigned to travel with the Reagans to Camp David for the weekends, and became one of the few members of the administration who saw them off guard and up close.

  The idea of having a Press Office staffer accompany the president to Camp David was White House Press Secretary Jim Brady’s. He thought it was essential that there be a point of contact with the chief executive at all times—someone who could act as his eyes and ears “just in case.” Because Jim and his two deputies were married with young children, the role fell to the two assistant press secretaries: David Prosperi and me. For the first year of the administration, we alternated weekends, but after David left the White House staff for a big job in the private sector, word came that “the missus is comfortable with Mark,” so I was more than happy to go every weekend.

  I was assigned to a small cabin called Sycamore, located down the path from Aspen Lodge, the presidential residence, and just a stone’s throw—literally—from Laurel Lodge: the main and largest building, where there was a big living room with a brick fireplace, conference room, presidential office, and dining room for senior staff.

  Almost every weekend, a small number of the staff spent our evenings with the Reagans doing one of the things they loved best: watching movies. Over the eight years, we watched nearly every major motion picture of the 1980s—from 9 to 5, to E.T., to Back to the Future, to Raiders of the Lost Ark, to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. The last film we saw together, the 363rd in their eight years—was Cattle Queen of Montana. The last wasn’t an eighties film but one of the president’s “golden oldies,” as he liked to call the films he’d starred in, and yes, we did watch other films in the Reagan repertoire: Knute Rockne All American, Hellcats of the Navy, and Bedtime for Bonzo. And we were very glad to do so.

  The official “call time” for the movie in Aspen Lodge was always 8:00 p.m. But invitees knew to gather at 7:40 because, without fail, at 7:45 the front door would open, and President Reagan would usher in his guests, which usually included his personal aide, physician, military aide, Camp David commander, senior Secret Service agent in charge, Marine One pilot, senior White House Communications Agency (WHCA) officer, and me. Mrs. Reagan was usually standing in front of a roaring fireplace or near a large picture window, depending on the season, of course, and as soon as she saw us, she would wave us in with a big smile and say, “Come in, come in. Get out of the cold [or heat]. So glad you’re here.”

  If it was a Friday night, the president’s hair would look much softer and shinier than usual, because he had washed it that afternoon. (He did not dye it, nor did he slick it down with grease.) When I first saw it, I was struck by how nice it looked and told him so. He smiled, winked, and then did a spot-on imitation of the old TV shampoo commercial featuring an actress saying “I just washed my hair, and I can’t do a thing with it.” Everyone had a good laugh. Mrs. Reagan—never a fan of the wet look—motioned me over and whispered, “Keep telling him that. Ronnie needs to hear how nice it looks.” I obliged every Friday thereafter.

  Invariably, one person would be running a little late, so the group would stand near the fireplace and talk with the Reagans about such innocuous topics as the weather or sports. Once the straggler arrived, everyone would take his or her regular seat in the living room. The president and Mrs. Reagan sat on the couch with two ottomans, the personal aide and I were in easy chairs with ottomans next to the couch, and everyone else was in comfortable chairs behind the Reagans’ couch.

  Once everyone was seated, a screen would automatically come down from the ceiling, the lights dimmed, and the movie started. It was just like in a commercial theater. There was a projection room behind the dining room in Aspen Lodge, but the “window” through which the film was shown was hidden by a framed print, which was removed just prior to the showing of the film. A projectionist operated a state-of-the-art projector and ran the reels, which had come in the typical metal “cans” in order. About thirty minutes into the film, the presidential food service coordinators from the Navy White House mess who attended the Reagans wherever they went served popcorn in individual baskets, first to the Reagans and then to the guests. Water was also served. I once considered asking for a beer but did not have the nerve. After the president was diagnosed with diverticulitis, n
uts and seeds were eliminated from his diet, and popcorn was banned. So on Fridays, a few hours before departure, I walked to a candy store across the street from the White House and purchased a large box of smooth-center chocolates, which the president liked. I thought about going back there one day and telling the nice ladies who’d carefully packed the box each Friday that their chocolates had been for the leader of the free world, but I never did.

  Once the movie was over, everyone stood up, reassembled near the fireplace, and shared views on the film for a few minutes. The president always spoke first. Not because he insisted on it, but because the guests all wanted to know what he thought. If the movie was one that either the president or Mrs. Reagan had been in, the conversation could go on for quite a while, as all of the guests had lots of questions. Both Reagans were more than happy to regale us with tales of their days in Hollywood, which were always interesting. Their memories were razor sharp, and they made us feel as if we were actually on the soundstages with them. If it was a Friday night, the president would dismiss his guests with a cheery “See you at noon tomorrow,” which was the time of his weekly radio address to the nation.

  The Reagans scrutinized every one of those films—watching them without moving their eyes from the screen—like students of the artistry of filmmaking. At the end of each movie, the president would immediately look at his watch to note the running time (he would track his radio addresses the following morning the same way). During the first couple of movies, I ended up watching the Reagans watching the films more than watching the films themselves.

  Even though some of us younger folks in the “Aspen Movie Club” (which is what the regulars dubbed ourselves) were usually skeptical about the older movies the Reagans sometimes favored, we were always anxious to see films that the president and/or Mrs. Reagan had been in. Ronald Reagan said that watching his old movies was like “looking at a son I didn’t know I had.” To watch them with him was almost surreal.

  As I sat with the president and Mrs. Reagan in their cabin at Camp David on our many movie nights, I was privileged to get a rare glimpse into their inner lives. I saw a small part of what made them tick—what resonated with them and what didn’t. I saw what merited their glowing praise and what was gently cut down with their trademark good humor. It was during our weekends at Camp David, and especially as we watched movies together over the eight years the Reagans were in the White House, that I got to know them.