Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  In September 1950, the Crusade held mass rallies at every major Hollywood studio, at which speakers ranging from liberal producer Walter Wanger to the ultra-right-wing John Wayne called for the liberation of the Soviet-dominated nations of Eastern Europe. Reagan participated in these rallies, and he fired off a telegram to General Clay, pledging the support of SAG’s “more than 8,000 members . . . in the battle for men’s minds now being waged around the world.”136

  By then, after Mao Zedong’s takeover of China, the North Korean invasion of South Korea, and the arrest of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for giving atomic secrets to the Russians, anti-Communism had become something akin to a national religion. The movement’s wild-eyed ayatollah, Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Wisconsin Republican, had burst from obscurity that February with a fiery Lincoln’s Birthday speech accusing the State Department of harboring 205 “card-carrying Communists.” Its holy grail, the Internal Security Act of 1950, which provided for the registration of Communist and Communist front organizations and for the internment of Communists during a national emergency, was passed over Truman’s veto in September.

  Reagan wisely refrained from praising McCarthy—he would later say that McCarthy was “using a shotgun when he should have been using a rifle”—perhaps because McCarthy never targeted Hollywood, perhaps because Reagan still considered himself a Democrat.137 In the November 1950 election for a Senate seat from California he campaigned for Con-gresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, the wife of actor Melyvn Douglas, against Richard Nixon, who had made a name for himself with HUAC

  by helping to expose Alger Hiss, a high-ranking State Department offi-2 5 2

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House cial, as a Soviet spy, and who now accused the liberal Douglas of being

  “pink right down to her underwear.”138

  There is reason to believe, however, that Reagan’s loyalty to the party of his father, as well as to Douglas, was wavering—and that Nancy may have had something to do with that. Nancy Reagan told me, “I knew nothing about politics, and I wasn’t even registered when I met Ronnie.”139 Reagan, however, later wrote that the girl he had met “was more than disinterested in Leftist causes: she was violently opposed to such shenanigans.”140 Once, when I asked her if she believed that there was a Soviet-backed plan to infiltrate Hollywood, she declared without a moment’s thought, “Damn right there was. And they were trying to get their message into the movies.”141

  In her memoir, A Full Life, Helen Gahagan Douglas recalls that Nancy’s old acting mentor and would-be political instructor, ZaSu Pitts, “who was livid on the subject of communism, made a particularly vicious speech about me.”142 Anne Edwards quotes Pitts referring to Douglas as “the Pink Lady who would allow the Communists to take over our land and our homes as well.” Unbeknownst to Douglas, Reagan was in the audience that night with Nancy, and he apparently liked what he heard.143 Robert Cummings, Reagan’s co-star from Kings Row, recalled Ronnie calling in the middle of the night to ask him to support Nixon. “We’re giving a party for him tomorrow night,” he said. “Can you come?” “But isn’t he a Republican?” Cummings asked. “I’ve switched,” said Reagan. “I sat down and made a list of the people I know, and the most admired people I know are Republicans.”144 Reagan would not formally change his party registration for another twelve years, but he never endorsed another Democrat.

  In 1951, Reagan stepped up his anti-Communist activities. He took to the dinner speaker circuit on behalf of the Crusade for Freedom, and even made a short film for the organization that was “circulated to schools, civic groups, and churches around the country.”145 That spring HUAC held another round of hearings on Communist influence in the film industry, which both the SAG and MPIC boards endorsed. The SAG board refused to support Gale Sondergaard—Nancy’s colleague from East Side, West Side—after she took an ad in Variety announcing she had been subpoenaed by the committee and intended to take the Fifth Amendment. Sondergaard wouldn’t make another movie until 1969.146 Actor Sterling Hayden, on the other hand, testified that “joining the party was the stupidest thing I ever did,” identified three industry associates as Communists, and praised Reagan for his handling of the 1945–46 strike, calling him “a one-man battal-Ronnie and Nancy in Hollywood: 1949–1952

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  ion” against Communism in Hollywood.147 Hayden went right back to work at Fox, and was rewarded with an official statement from the SAG

  board congratulating him on “his honesty and frankness.”148

  Along with the other industry potentates in MPIC, Reagan had come to believe that confessing one’s own sins was not enough; one also had to do penance by exposing the sins of others before one could be redeemed.

  He and IATSE head Roy Brewer proposed the creation of a Patriotic Services Committee at MPIC, and spent much time and effort clearing the falsely accused, rehabilitating cooperative penitents, and screening prospective employees for the studios.149

  “Any American who has been a member of the Communist party at any time, but who has now changed his mind and is loyal to our country should be willing to stand up and be counted, admit ‘I was wrong’ and give all the information he has to the government agencies who are combating the Red plotters,” Reagan wrote in the Hollywood Citizen News in July 1951. “We’ve gotten rid of the Communist conspirators in Hollywood. Let’s do it now in other industries.”150

  “Ronnie Reagan . . . is a happy man these days,” Hedda Hopper reported that summer. “He has a new 350-acre ranch that he loves and it’s very obvious that he’s in love with Nancy Davis.”151 For months, the Hollywood press had been describing Ronnie and Nancy as an “everynightem,” predicting an imminent marriage, or even an elopement. Ronnie refused to take calls from reporters; Nancy would say only, “He hasn’t asked me yet.”152 That spring, she had stopped seeing Robert Walker; in August—a few days after completing My Son John, in which he played a Communist who is turned in by his mother—Walker died from a sedative injection administered by a psychiatrist.153

  Ronnie and Nancy were occasionally photographed at premieres and nightclubs, and frequently dined at their favorite restaurant, Chasen’s, “especially on Tuesday nights, when the special was Beef Belmont,” as she remembered it. But they spent many more evenings at her apartment watching TV, or having quiet dinners at Bill and Ardis Holden’s “charming Tudor house”

  in Toluca Lake.154 Almost every Saturday, Ronnie invited Nancy to accompany him and the children to his new ranch in Malibu Canyon.

  “As far as we all knew at the time, she was the first woman in his life since Mother,” Maureen Reagan wrote in her memoir, First Father, First Daughter. “You could tell the two of them were crazy about each other. They 2 5 4

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House weren’t lovey-dovey or anything like that, at least not in front of us kids, but they had a natural, easy way of being with each other that suggested that they belonged together.”155 The ten-year-old Maureen took to her future stepmother immediately: “I especially liked Nancy because when the four of us were at the ranch, she would happily perform one of my most hated chores—whitewashing the thousands of feet of redwood fence that Dad was building. . . . He’d spend hours in the hot sun building paddocks for the horses, a riding ring, or whatever, all with a manual posthole digger.”156

  Michael, who was six, liked the way Nancy would let him sit on her lap and massage his back on their rides out to the ranch. “She was always cheerful, unlike Mom who had constant mood shifts,” he wrote in his memoir, On the Outside Looking In. An unhappy child who cried himself to sleep most nights, Michael craved attention and stability. The previous year, he had joined Maureen at the Chadwick School in Palos Verdes; Jane and Ronnie took turns having them on weekends. While Michael blamed his mother for the divorce—and took pleasure in annoying her with stories about his good times at the ranch—he idolized his father. “Dad taught Maureen and me to ride by leading us around the corral. He was a pussycat as
a teacher, always calm and patient,” Michael recalled. “I was in total awe of him. He was a man’s man and everyone loved him. I wanted to be just like him.”157

  Reagan bought the Malibu Canyon property, a wild stretch of oak-covered hills a half-hour’s drive inland from the Pacific Coast Highway, and the run-down old farmhouse on it, for about $85,000 in March 1951. It was almost completely surrounded by a 2,500-acre reserve where 20th Century Fox filmed its Westerns. Nino Pepitone, his partner in the much smaller Northridge horse farm, which had been sold for an undisclosed sum, continued to train Reagan’s thoroughbreds at Malibu. Curiously, Reagan kept the name Yearling Row. But, at Maureen’s suggestion, the first foal born at the new ranch, “a gorgeous dapple filly,” was named Nancy D.158

  Not surprisingly, Jane and Nancy saw each other as rivals. Michael Reagan wrote that even in those early days the two women said “derogatory”

  things about each other—and, as children of broken marriages often do, he would agree with both of them.159 According to Nancy Reagan, Jane “convinced” Ronnie that he shouldn’t remarry before she did, “because it wouldn’t be good for the children.”160 Someone close to the Reagans told me that when Jane realized Ronnie was getting serious about Nancy she Ronnie and Nancy in Hollywood: 1949–1952

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  made one last play to get him back, telling him she’d like to start over again.

  But it was too late.

  In the February 1951 issue of Modern Screen, Louella Parsons wrote,

  “Not long ago, I went to a dinner party at [Jane’s] home and Maureen came in to cut her birthday cake. Her mother and father stood by her side, polite to each other and respectful—so different from those gay kids who went barnstorming with me. I turned away so they couldn’t see the tears in my eyes. Since then, when I see Janie, she seems self-sufficient, independent, and oh, so gay. But I know that not long ago she said to someone, ‘What’s the matter with me? I can’t seem to pick up the pieces of my life again. Will I ever find happiness ahead?’”161

  Ronnie naively believed that the two women could get along, and even took Nancy to the premiere of Jane’s film The Blue Veil, in September 1951. Jane’s date was the Hollywood lawyer Gregg Bautzer, a slick playboy who had previously romanced Lana Turner, Merle Oberon, Sonja Henie, and Ginger Rogers. Although Jane had hopes of marrying him, by the end of the year he had resumed his long-term, up-and-down relationship with Joan Crawford.162

  Meanwhile, Ronnie took Nancy to meet his mother. The Disciples of Christ lay missionary and the Chicago Gold Coast princess would seem to have had little in common, but Nelle approved of Nancy’s sedate style and earnest personality. According to Nancy, Nelle “very quickly sized up the situation” between Ronnie and her. “You’re in love with him, aren’t you?”

  Nelle asked Nancy, who admitted she was. “I thought so,” said Nelle.163

  Nancy introduced Ronnie to Edith and Loyal “over the telephone; I called my parents every Sunday, and Ronnie would get on and say hello.”164

  On one of his trips to the East Coast he met Edith when he changed trains in Chicago. She brought Colleen Moore Hargrave and Lillian Gish along to look him over. Both of them had shared her concern that Nancy, at thirty, was in danger of never marrying. Colleen declared that Reagan reminded her of Loyal, which Edith saw as a good sign, given Nancy’s adoration of her stepfather. “It will take,” Gish reportedly predicted.165

  Still, two years after they had met and a year after they started going steady, Reagan needed more time. Or maybe he was waiting for an auspi-cious alignment of the stars.

  At some point during their extended courtship, Nancy began accompanying Ronnie to the sign-of-the-month parties given by Carroll Righter, 2 5 6

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Hollywood’s reigning astrologer. These parties, attended by everyone from such old-time divas as Marlene Dietrich to young sophisticates like Lauren Bacall, were famous for their decor: a baby lion greeted guests at the Leo party, the swimming pool was filled with fish for the Pisces party, sets of twins formed a receiving line at the Gemini party.166 “Ronnie went to all of Carroll’s parties,” I was told by Arlene Dahl, who had met both men shortly after she was signed by Warners in 1947. “They were very good friends. Carroll was helpful in choosing dates for Ronnie when he was president of SAG, and he told him early on that he would amount to much more than just an actor.”167

  According to Ed Helin, a longtime associate of Righter’s, Reagan started consulting the “guru to the stars” when he was still married to Wyman, who was also a client. “They even picked the date astrologically to get a good clean divorce without any problems,” Helin disclosed. “Whenever an occupation is kind of iffy, like show business, real estate, politics, the stock market,” he added, “you’re going to get a lot of people going to either psychics or astrologers.”168

  Righter’s movie star clients depended on him to set the dates for signing contracts, starting films, taking trips, even conceiving children. “I don’t ask Carroll when I should go to the bathroom,” Van Johnson’s wife, Evie, told Time magazine, “[but] some of our friends do.”169 Among those for whom Righter did monthly, weekly, or daily charts were Bette Davis, Clark Gable, Dick Powell, Bob Cummings, Lana Turner, Adolphe Menjou, Ann Sothern, Susan Hayward, Rhonda Fleming, and Peter Lawford, as well as the writer Erich Maria Remarque and Goodwin Knight, who would become governor of California in 1953. Buff Chandler, the wife of the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, sat on the board of the Carrroll Righter Foundation, which ran an astrology institute at his Hollywood mansion.170

  With his patrician air and gold-buttoned blazers, Righter reeked respectability. A confirmed bachelor from a Main Line family, he had obtained a law degree and chaired the Philadelphia Opera before moving to Los Angeles in 1939. As a practicing Episcopalian, he assured his clients that astrology did not conflict with traditional religion. “If God works through other mediums,” he told Life in 1954, “why not also through the planets?”171

  He virtually invented the syndicated daily horoscope column, and by the 1960s, when astrology had became gospel for the hippie generation, his prognostications could be read in more than three hundred newspapers.

  The actor Cesar Romero took Nancy to her first Righter party, in Jan-Ronnie and Nancy in Hollywood: 1949–1952

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  uary 1950, a month or so after her first date with Ronnie.172 About the same time, Nancy befriended Arlene Dahl, who had moved from Warners to Metro in 1948 and was something of a fanatic about astrology. The earliest reference to Nancy’s interest in the zodiac can be found in a Walter Huston biography and dates back to 1933, when she was twelve. In describing a dinner party hosted by Nan and Walter and attended by Edith and Loyal, author John Weld notes, “The conversation turned to astrology. Edith Davis’s daughter Nancy had recently had her horoscope charted by Nan’s friend Deborah Lewis, a professional astrologer and writer for American Astrology. She prophesied that Nancy would be a great success, no matter what she chose to do.”173

  That’s not the way it looked as 1951 drew to a close. Nancy’s film career was all but over, and the man of her dreams still had not proposed. In September she was told that MGM would terminate her contract when her next option came up, in March.174 It was clear by then that while her talent was substantial, her star appeal was limited. Earlier in the year she had made her last two films for Metro, turning in her usual solid but un-charismatic performances as James Whitmore’s wife (again) in Shadow in the Sky, and George Murphy’s wife in Talk About a Stranger. “After reading the script of that frightful picture,” Murphy later said, “Nancy and I both realized the studio wanted to get rid of us.”175

  Nancy decided not to go home for the holidays that year, preferring to stay close to Ronnie. “Ronnie brought over a small tree for my apartment,” she recalled, “and on Christmas Eve I finally got up the courage to ask him what was, for me, a very bold question: ‘Do you want me to wait for you?’
And he said, ‘Yes, I do.’ ”176

  What was holding him back? According to Kitty Kelley, he was secretly seeing an actress named Christine Larson at the time.177 He was also mired in his own career crisis and worried about his financial situation. On January 15, 1952, Universal cut his five-picture deal back to three after he had rejected two scripts that he considered beneath him.178 Two weeks later he completed his forty-second and last movie for Warners. For a change it was a picture he wanted to make— The Winning Team, in which he played Grover Cleveland Alexander, the troubled baseball great—but that was the end of his guaranteed annual income.

  Both Ronnie and Nancy were now on their own, at a time when the studio system was collapsing all around them. The major film companies, 2 5 8

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House battered on one side by the 1948 Supreme Court ruling forcing them to sell their lucrative theater chains and on the other by the ever-rising popularity of television, were in a state of upheaval. Weekly movie attendance had plummeted from a postwar high of 100 million to half that by the early 1950s, and the studios were dropping contracts, slashing budgets, and cutting back production to stem their losses. The King of Hollywood, Louis B. Mayer, who more than anyone had created and upheld the old order, had finally been toppled by Dore Schary in June 1951.

  According to Nancy, sometime in January 1952 she told Ronnie that she was thinking of calling her agent to “see about getting a play in New York.”

  “I decided to give things a push” is how she later put it. “As I recall, he didn’t say anything, but he looked surprised. Not long afterward, while we were having dinner in our usual booth at Chasen’s, he said, ‘I think we ought to get married.’”

  She quietly answered, “I think so too.”179