Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  A few nights later, during an MPIC meeting, Ronnie asked Bill Holden to be his best man. “It’s about time,” Holden blurted out.180

  On February 20, MGM issued a face-saving press release stating that Nancy had asked to be let out of her contract.181 That same evening Ronnie called Loyal from Nancy’s apartment and asked for her hand in marriage. “Davis-Reagan Nuptials Set,” Louella Parsons announced the next day, saying the wedding was scheduled for early March. “Ronnie stands for all that’s good in the industry,” added Louella about her favorite from Dixon. She also reminded her readers, “It was at my home that Jane and Ronnie held their wedding reception, so I have always felt very close to him through the years.” (In her scrapbook, Nancy blacked out references to Ronnie’s first marriage in the deluge of press items that followed Louella’s scoop.)182

  On February 27, MGM announced that the wedding would take place the following Tuesday at “some small church in Southern California.” The day after that, Nancy and Ronnie were photographed at Santa Monica City Hall getting their marriage license: Ronnie looked a little pale in a turtleneck and trench coat; Nancy radiant in a white-collared black dress, just like the one she wore on their first date.183

  There was one sad note leading up to the wedding: Nancy’s grandmother, Nannee Robbins, whom she hadn’t seen in years, heard about the upcoming marriage and decided to make the trip from New Jersey to meet her only grandchild’s betrothed. “The three of us were having din-Ronnie and Nancy in Hollywood: 1949–1952

  2 5 9

  ner at Chasen’s,” Nancy later wrote, “when she suffered a stroke. We rushed her to the hospital, and although she recovered, she died not too long afterward.”184

  Otherwise, the planets seemed to be aligned in their favor. According to Ed Helin, the couple consulted with Carroll Righter, and he gave their union his blessing.185 For those who believe in such things, the combination of an Aquarius II (Ronnie) and a Cancer II (Nancy) is said to be extremely potent. As Gary Goldschneider and Joost Elffers write in The Secret Language of Relationships:

  This relationship seems easygoing but conceals a tremendous thirst for power. Hidden beneath an amiable exterior is a core that no one who mistakes these two for an easy touch will quickly forget. Although Cancer is a water sign and Aquarius air, their relationship is ruled by earth and fire, here connoting smoldering desire and ambition. These volcanic seethings may cause tremendous frustration if not vented, but Cancer II–Aquarius II couples often have the patience and foresight to wait until they are called. Part of this pair’s power lies in their popularity. Lovers, friends and mates in this combination may be in high demand in their social circle. Their charisma, often of the charming and light variety, is a kind of hook with which they can snag the hearts of their admirers. The process need not be at all unpleasant, and in fact a good time is often had by all in the long run.186

  The couple themselves seemed to realize how perfectly suited they were.

  By then they had even chosen “their song”—George Gershwin’s “Our Love Is Here to Stay.”

  C H A P T E R E L E V E N

  PACIFIC PALISADES

  1952–1958

  Nancy’s marriage paralleled her mother’s exactly. You had two men—got them on the rebound. They were lucky men. Very, very lucky.

  Richard Davis to author, May 30, 2003

  THE LITTLE BROWN CHURCH IN THE VALLEY, A DISCIPLES OF CHRIST OUT-post on the southern fringe of the San Fernando Valley, is everything its name suggests: small, simple, picturesque. A rose-covered white picket fence frames the church’s neatly trimmed lawn, and the dark brown clap-board structure is topped by a squared-off steeple bearing a plain white wooden cross. Another unadorned wooden cross stands in the center of the altar: a bare table with the words “In Remembrance of Me” carved along its front edge. The walls are knotty pine, except for the one behind the altar, which is draped in red velveteen. There are only nine rows of pews, and the center aisle is just three feet wide. This is where Ronald Reagan and Nancy Davis were married on Tuesday, March 4, 1952, at five o’clock in the afternoon. He was forty-one, she was thirty.

  The only attendants were the couple’s witnesses, Bill and Ardis Holden.

  When I asked Nancy Reagan why the wedding was so small, she answered,

  “That was the way we wanted it.”1 Tellingly, the woman who had waited nearly a decade to be a bride had convinced herself that her groom’s wishes were her own. “Came our wedding day,” Reagan wrote in his autobiography, “and not one protest from Nancy over the fact that I cheated her out of the ceremony every girl deserves.” Clearly referring to his resentment of the press’s intrusive coverage of his breakup with Jane Wyman, he continues, “I can only confess that at the time to even contemplate facing reporters and flashbulbs made me break out in a cold sweat.”2

  2 6 0

  Pacific Palisades: 1952–1958

  2 6 1

  Instead of a wedding gown, Nancy wore a smart gray wool suit with white collar and cuffs from I. Magnin—“I was so disappointed that Amelia [Gray] didn’t have anything for me”3—and the single strand of pearls her parents had given her for her debutante party. Her dark hair was brushed back high off her forehead and crowned with a chic white-flowered hat and veil. Ronnie presented her with a bouquet of white tulips and orange blossoms when he picked her up at her apartment, where her German housekeeper, Frieda, had helped her dress. The brief nuptial service was performed by the Reverend John H. Wells, and Nancy was “so excited” that she “went through the ceremony in a daze” and had no memory of saying “I do.”4

  If Ardis hadn’t arranged for a photographer to meet the newlyweds at the Holdens’ house a few miles away, there would be no visual record of the historic event. Ardis had also ordered a three-tiered wedding cake, and in the photograph of Ronnie and Nancy cutting it, they both look truly content. From the Holdens’, they drove to Ann Straus’s house in Beverly Hills, where the MGM publicist helped them prepare the press release announcing their wedding. “It was seven o’clock when they stopped by,” recalled Bill Fine, who was taking Straus out to dinner that night, “and they were very bubbly.”5

  At some point they called Edith and Loyal in Chicago, Nelle at home in West Hollywood, and the children at Chadwick to say, “OK, it’s official,” as Maureen later put it, adding, “I think Michael and I both felt a little weird

  . . . waiting for a phone call like that, but Dad felt strongly that we should be a part of things in at least this small way.”6

  The happy twosome then drove off in Ronnie’s Cadillac convertible to the Mission Inn in Riverside, the Spanish colonial-style hotel that was famous locally for hosting presidents going back to William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt. Richard and Pat Nixon had been married and spent their wedding night there in 1940. A plaque in the lobby commemorates the Reagans’ first night as man and wife:

  Upon arrival, a bouquet of red roses greeted the couple, compliments of the hotel with wishes for a long and successful union. Before continuing on to Phoenix the following morning, the Reagans gave the roses to another guest of the Inn—an elderly woman staying across the hall from the newlyweds.

  2 6 2

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House

  *

  *

  *

  After a long day on dusty Route 10, Ronnie and Nancy checked into the Arizona Biltmore. Loyal and Edith arrived in Phoenix four days later.

  Ronnie later wrote, “Meeting her father, the doctor, wasn’t the easiest moment I ever had. After all, here was a man internationally renowned in the world of surgery, a fearless stickler for principle, and a man who could no more choose the easy path of expediency than he could rob the poor box.

  My fear lasted about a minute and a half after we met—which was as long as it took to find out he was a true humanitarian.”7

  Ronnie related to his new mother-in-law on a less elevated plane. They quickly discovered a shared fondness for off-color hu
mor and, according to Richard Davis, whenever they got together from then on “the first thing Edith would do was take Ronnie into the guest bedroom and lock the door. They would tell dirty jokes and stories for hours. . . . You could hear the hilarious laughter. . . . She just adored him.”8

  The Davises weren’t staying at the hotel, as they had recently built a house in the adjacent Biltmore Estates, which was considered Phoenix’s best address. The white-brick ranch-style house with its gray slate roof and dark green shutters was tastefully landscaped and set along the edge of the Biltmore’s golf course. Still, it was among the more modest residences in this posh enclave, where the Davises’ neighbors included Senator Barry Goldwater, Vincent and Brooke Astor, and Henry and Clare Booth Luce.

  A couple who were also honeymooning at the Biltmore that spring remember the Davises showing up every afternoon to join Ronnie and Nancy at their poolside cabana.9 It was clear that Ronnie was impressed with his new in-laws, and not without reason. Two years earlier Loyal, then in his mid-fifties, had been elected to the board of regents of the American College of Surgeons and by the end of the decade would become chairman—“the most powerful position in American surgery,” as the Chicago Daily News proclaimed upon his appointment.10

  Edith, at sixty-four (pretending to be fifty-six), continued to amaze in her own way. A few months before her daughter’s wedding, while Loyal was giving a lecture at Oxford University, Edith and her Chicago socialite pal Narcissa Thorne were having tea with the Queen Mother in London.

  (Thorne presented the dowager queen with a rare first edition of James Doyle’s History of England; Edith confided to a Chicago society columnist that Her Majesty was “very folksy.”)11 The Davises’ two-month European Pacific Palisades: 1952–1958

  2 6 3

  tour had also included a visit with General Eisenhower, then commander of NATO, and his wife, Mamie, at their home outside Paris. Probably as a result, Ronnie and Nancy received a congratulatory telegram from the Eisenhowers two weeks after their wedding.12

  Ronnie and Nancy spent ten sun-drenched days in Phoenix, leaving just in time for him to start shooting Tropic Zone with Rhonda Fleming at Paramount. On the way back to Los Angeles, the convertible’s canvas top was nearly torn in half in a sandstorm, and Nancy had to hold it together.

  “From the start, our marriage was like an adolescent’s dream of what a marriage should be,” Reagan would later write. “It was rich and full from the beginning, and it has gotten more so with each passing day. Nancy moved into my heart and replaced an emptiness that I’d been trying to ignore for a long time.”13

  On March 13, while the new Mr. and Mrs. Reagan were still on their honeymoon, Louella Parsons announced Jane Wyman’s engagement to Travis Kleefeld, the twenty-six-year-old scion of a locally prominent contracting family. The photographers went wild when both couples attended the Academy Awards later that month. Jane was up for best actress for The Blue Veil but lost to Vivien Leigh. A few days later she broke off the engagement with Kleefeld. Since Jane was at the height of her career—and an older woman going out with a younger man, which raised eyebrows in those days—the Hollywood press played the story for all it was worth. An irked Nancy told friends she was sure Jane had set up the whole thing to upstage Ronnie’s marriage.14 As Richard Gully, a Carroll Righter follower, remarked many years later, “Destiny planned to pit Jane Wyman against Nancy Reagan.

  Jane is a Capricorn and Nancy is a Cancer and it’s a very bad mix. They were bound to clash. It was fate.”15

  Ronnie moved into Nancy’s Hilgaard Avenue duplex but kept his place on Londonderry Terrace, because there wasn’t enough room in her apartment for all of their clothes. Soon they found a three-bedroom Cape Cod–style house at 1258 North Amalfi Drive in Pacific Palisades. “We bought it for $42,000,” Nancy Reagan recalled. “I loved that house. Pacific Palisades wasn’t as built up as it is today. We had a wonderful garden—it was almost like living in the country.”16

  Before the war, Pacific Palisades had been considered too far west for the Hollywood crowd, though its steep hillsides covered with oaks, cedars, palms, and eucalyptus attracted artists and writers, most notably the Nobel 2 6 4

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Prize–winning novelist Thomas Mann, who settled there in 1940 after fleeing Nazi Germany. By 1952, however, with prices escalating in Beverly Hills and Bel Air, the Palisades was rapidly becoming an upper-middle-class suburb. Gregory Peck, Joseph Cotten, and Lawrence Welk were among the first entertainers to move there. “Jerry Lewis lived on our street,” Nancy Reagan told me.17 The summer the Reagans moved in, Mann, hounded by HUAC for openly supporting the Hollywood 10, sold his estate and returned to Europe. “The sick, tense atmosphere of this country oppresses me,” he said. “I have no desire to rest my bones in this soulless soil.”18

  For Reagan, such a thought would have been inconceivable. “This land of ours is the last best hope of man on earth,” he declared in a commencement address at William Woods College in June 1952, echoing Lincoln.

  Ronnie and Nancy had traveled by train to the Disciples of Christ school in Fulton, Missouri, and Reagan wrote his speech on the way. America, he told the graduating students, was “a promised land . . . in the divine scheme of things . . . less of a place than an idea . . . an idea that has been deep in the souls of man ever since man started his long trail from the swamps. It is nothing but the inherent love of freedom in each one of us, and the great ideological struggle that we find ourselves engaged in today is not a new struggle. It’s the same old battle.”19

  The Reagans also attended the premiere of his last Warners film, The Winning Team, in Springfield, Missouri, where their train was greeted by some seven hundred fans, even though it arrived at midnight. President Truman was in Springfield for a reunion of his World War I artillery unit, but at the last minute he decided not to attend the film’s opening. According to Stephen Vaughn, Truman had “considered inviting the Reagans for dinner, but after some thought concluded that he did not want any ‘Hollywood riffraff.’” Reagan, who had done so much to fight the Wallacites in Hollywood during Truman’s 1948 run, was miffed, as was Nancy, and the snub may have contributed to his decision to support Eisenhower instead of the Democratic candidate, Adlai Stevenson, that fall.20 It would be the first time he voted Republican in a presidential election.

  Eight weeks after they were married, the Reagans announced that Nancy was expecting a baby at Christmastime. In June, reporters in Missouri noticed, her condition was already showing. On the evening of October 20, Ronnie and Nancy were at a horse show at the Pan Pacific Auditorium in Pacific Palisades: 1952–1958

  2 6 5

  Hollywood, watching one of their horses—a mare named Mrs. Simpson after the Duchess of Windsor—jump. During the show Nancy started having labor pains, but she insisted it was just the baby changing positions or cramps. Ronnie wanted to take her to the hospital, but she made him take her home, an hour’s drive along Sunset Boulevard. By the time they got into bed, the contractions were coming fast.

  “There was a heat wave,” Nancy Reagan told me. “It was so hot I thought I was going to lose the baby.”21 After fourteen hours of labor at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, her doctor asked Ronnie for permission to perform a cesarean. Patricia Ann Reagan was born at 2:30 in the afternoon on October 21, seven and a half months after the wedding. Although she weighed a healthy seven pounds three ounces, Patti was always told by her parents that she had spent two months in an incubator. “This was the Fifties,” she wrote in her autobiography, The Way I See It. “Good girls weren’t supposed to have sex before marriage. If they did, they were supposed to be ashamed of it and hide it. So, if you had a baby seven months after you got married, pretending prematurity was one option.”22

  “Nancy was pregnant when they were married,” a longtime family friend told me. “It was common knowledge.” Still, the question remains whether Nancy knew she was pregnant or had told Ronnie that she was before he called Loyal
Davis and asked for her hand on February 20—

  about a month after the child was presumably conceived. “Go ahead and count” is all Nancy Reagan would ever say.23

  “If you drive up to the house on Amalfi,” Nancy Reagan told me over lunch at the Hotel Bel-Air many years later, “you’ll see there’s an olive tree out front that Ronnie had planted for me when I had Patti. When I came home from the hospital it was there with a big red ribbon around it that said, ‘Welcome Home, Mommy.’ Most people don’t know this about Ronnie, but he was a very, very sentimental, romantic man.”24

  From then on, Ronnie would call his wife Mommy, in letters and in person, in private and among friends. In his autobiography he practically admitted that he wasn’t thrilled with the idea of having to share his new wife with a baby so soon into their marriage. “I confess that at the moment her arrival didn’t impress me much,” he wrote about Patti’s birth. “The only word I wanted concerned her mother.”25

  On doctor’s orders, Nancy stayed in bed for six weeks after Patti’s birth, and an English nanny named Penny was hired to look after the baby. The 2 6 6

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House chubby little girl with a full head of dark hair was a problem child from the beginning. “Patti always, always wanted attention twenty-four hours a day from the day she was born,” Nancy Reagan told me. “And you couldn’t give anyone attention twenty-four hours a day.”26

  Nancy wore her wedding hat—minus the veil—to Patti’s christening at the Hollywood-Beverly Christian Church in December. Bill Holden was the godfather, and Louise Tracy stood in for the godmother, Colleen Moore Hargrave, who was unable to leave Chicago. Edith and Loyal were there, as was Nelle, looking frail but proud in a black dress and light-colored shawl.

  One week after Patti’s birth, Jane Wyman made headlines again, by eloping with Fred Karger, a suavely handsome musician who had been dating a newcomer named Marilyn Monroe. Maureen and Michael, who were already feeling threatened by the arrival of a stepsister, were introduced to their “new father” and his eleven-year-old daughter by a previous marriage the night before the wedding.27 Ronnie tried to make Michael feel better about this sudden turn of events by inviting Fred out to the ranch one Saturday, “so that I could see both of my fathers getting along together,” as Michael put it.28 Neither of his mothers, however, seemed willing to make that kind of effort.