Jane’s fifth and final marriage would last four years; Maureen’s first—to a wife beater, as it turned out—less than one.95
Michael’s grades were still perilously low, and he was suspended from Loyola several times for unruly behavior. He recalled that Nancy was furious 3 1 0
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House when she saw his report card. “You’re not living up to the Reagan name or image,” she told him, “and unless you start shaping up, it would be best for you to change your name and leave the house.” He snapped back, “Why don’t you just tell me the name I was born with, so at least when I walk out the door I’ll know what name to use.”
According to Michael, Nancy took up his challenge and managed to get ahold of his adoption papers. She told him his real name was John L.
Flaugher and that his birth parents had not been married.96 “My relationship with Nancy was now strained to the point where we spoke to each other only when necessary,” he writes.97 His father blamed him for “pressuring” her into giving him the information, but tried to encourage Michael by offering to get him into Eureka College if he made it through high school. Michael had a counterproposal: “If you send me out of state to a coed high school for my last year, I promise to get good grades.”98
Loyal Davis pulled some strings, and in September 1962, Michael was enrolled at the Judson School in Arizona, where his grades improved and he became the quarterback on the football team and the star pitcher on the baseball team. When his parents couldn’t make a baseball game just before Easter the following year, Loyal and Edith filled in for them. “My first time up at bat with two men on base,” Michael remembered, “I heard DeeDee yell, ‘You better hit a home run, you little sonofabitch.’ . . . I was so excited that I pounded out my first and last home run.”99
On July 25, 1962, Nelle Reagan died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of seventy-nine in a nursing home in Santa Monica.100 “Mother’s passing was peaceful and without pain,” Reagan wrote to Lorraine Wagner, a fan who had become a regular correspondent. “It was just a matter of going without waking. I’m sure it was what she wanted, too, because these past few years have found her unable to do any of the things that had always made her life meaningful.”101 Neil’s wife, Bess, told me that she thought Nelle had Alzheimer’s, though it wasn’t called that then, and Reagan himself said as much to Edmund Morris.102 In 1954, Nelle had told Wagner in a letter, “I have hardening of the arteries in my head—and it hurts just to think.”103 By 1957 she was complaining of memory lapses and heart problems. That summer she wrote friends in Dixon: “I am a shut in. I can’t drive a car any more so it was sold this last week. I will be 74 years young this month of July, and am grateful to God, to have been spared this long The Group: 1958–1962
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life. Yet when each attact [sic] comes I whisper—‘Please God, let it be now, take me home.’ ”104
“She had a lady who came and lived with her,” Bess Reagan told me, adding, “Ronald paid for it.”105 In 1958, Nancy arranged for Nelle to be put into the nursing home, and most of her possessions were moved to Neil’s house in Bel Air, which burned to the ground in 1961. The only things Neil and Bess managed to save were their silverware and Nelle’s Bible.106
In 1962, Nancy was made a member of the Colleagues, signifying her full acceptance into Los Angeles’s hardest-to-crack social clique. Betsy Bloomingdale, Marion Jorgensen, Betty Wilson, and Betty Adams had all been members for several years. The private charity had been founded in 1950 by nine society women headed by Lucy Toberman, whose husband’s grandfather was mayor of Los Angeles in the 1870s—and who had introduced Marion to Earle Jorgensen—and Onnalee Doheny, whose husband’s grandfather discovered oil downtown in 1892. “I was part of the original group,”
said Erlenne Sprague, who was then married to her first husband, Voltaire Perkins, a wealthy lawyer who played the judge on television’s Divorce Court.
“They just picked out women that were very socially involved.”107
The Colleagues met once a month for lunch at one another’s houses, which was one reason they limited membership to fifty. Every Saturday before Mother’s Day, they held their annual “Glamour Sale,” at which the ladies—clad in “Colleagues Blue” smocks—sold their old furs, designer clothes, and jewelry and gave the proceeds to the Big Sister League’s homes for unwed mothers. The sale was originally held in Carlotta Kirkeby’s ballroom—her husband owned the Sherry-Netherland Hotel in New York, the Drake in Chicago, the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach, and La Quinta resort near Palm Springs. By 1960 it had become so popular that it was moved to the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, and everything from art and antiques to sheets and children’s clothes were added to the inventory. At the time Nancy joined, the Colleagues was almost exclusively Gentile, and only a few Hollywood wives had made the cut, including Mal Milland and Clark Gable’s fourth wife, Kay Spreckels, an heiress to the sugar fortune. The membership was expanded to sixty-five in the early 1970s, which is when Harriet Deutsch and Fran Stark, among others, were asked to join.108
“I sponsored Nancy,” said Erlenne Sprague. “I sponsored a lot of these girls—Marion, Betsy, Betty Adams—because they were good workers 3 1 2
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House and good friends and it just made the whole group so special.” As Sprague explained, the Colleagues continued to grow over the years, adding two auxiliary organizations—Les Amis (“the mothers and aunts and grandmothers of some of us”) in 1962, and the Chips (“our daughters and granddaughters”) in 1966—and raising millions for both unwed mothers and abused children while maintaining its cachet as L.A.’s chicest charity.109
The year Nancy became a Colleague, Kurt Niklas, the popular maître d’
at Romanoff ’s, opened the Bistro in Beverly Hills with the director Billy Wilder. Backed by Alfred Bloomingdale and David May, among others, the restaurant became the Group’s canteen. Nancy and her friends now had their own charity, their own designer, Jimmy Galanos, their own hairdresser, Julius of Saks, their own flower arranger and party planner, David Jones, and their own interior decorator, Billy Haines, as well as a regular place to lunch. They also had their own resident political philosopher—and no one found him boring. “Ronnie was always so fantastic about talking after dinner,” said Erlenne Sprague. “He would talk about the government and how it was just too big and this and that. And we would sit there absolutely spell-bound, listening to him. Everybody thought he was great.”110
Betty Adams agreed: “Ronnie was easy to understand, and he was one of the sweetest, most thoughtful men I ever met. I would have rather talked to Ronnie at a dinner party than anybody. We’d get talking head to head, because we talked politics. He was interested in history and remembered everything. This country was his life. He felt it was the greatest in the world, and he brought it up to people everywhere. And we all thought he and Nancy were so wonderful together.”111
“Our next anniversary will be our tenth,” Nancy told Lydia Lane of the Los Angeles Times, who interviewed her while she was visiting her husband on the G.E. Theater set in June 1961. “So I feel [our marriage is] a success.
A man should be the captain of the ship. I don’t feel it’s the woman’s place to run things.” She added, “A wife can’t let her housework and her children blot out her husband. I know this isn’t easy when she does all the work herself, but we can’t get away from the fact that romance is kept alive by keeping up appearances.”112
C H A P T E R T H I RT E E N
THE KITCHEN CABINET
1963–1966
I know it sounds corny, but these men were good men. They believed in the good. They believed in this country and all it stood for.
Marion Jorgensen to author, November 4, 1997
Most of them were self-made men. They were all tough and crusty and very patriotic and strongly anti-Communist. They really felt that the system had allowed them to come from very humble beginnings to wonderful live
s that I don’t think they had ever even dreamed of when they were small children—and they were very, very grateful for that. I think those were the values they shared with Ronald Reagan. What really irritated all of these guys was to be called fat cats. That was how you got under their skin. Boy, my dad hated that.
Robert Tuttle, son of Holmes Tuttle, to author, November 19, 1997
ABOUT THE SAME TIME NANCY REAGAN BECAME A COLLEAGUE, RONALD
Reagan became a Republican. As she moved up socially, he moved right politically. He had supported Eisenhower and voted Republican for the first time in 1952. But his instincts remained liberal, and he campaigned for Los Angeles’s reformist mayor Fletcher Bowron against a Republican candidate handpicked by Asa Call and the Committee of 25, whom he then characterized as “a small clique of oil and real estate pirates.”1 Just seven years later he and Nancy were among a handful of stars who refused to attend a gala at 20th Century Fox for Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev.2 The following year he wrote Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner to complain about favorable articles on Charlie Chaplin and Dalton Trumbo, who was writing his first screenplay under his own name since the blacklist, for Spartacus, starring Kirk Douglas. Unlike most 3 1 3
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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House people in Hollywood, Reagan still refused to admit that there had ever been a blacklist.
He backed Richard Nixon against John F. Kennedy in the 1960 election, even though he had long-standing doubts about the vice president’s integrity. After a conversation with G.E. chairman Ralph Cordiner, whom he greatly admired, he even agreed to head Democrats for Nixon in California.3 Reagan later wrote that he was ready to change parties at that point, but “[Nixon] said I’d be more effective if I campaigned as a Democrat.” Joe Kennedy, he said, tried to persuade him to support his son, “but I turned him down.”4 Reagan had an “almost visceral loathing” of JFK’s New Frontier agenda, historian Matthew Dallek observes in The Right Moment, and was soon urging Nixon to expose Kennedy as a socialist at heart. “Shouldn’t someone tag Mr. Kennedy’s bold new imaginative program with its proper age?” he wrote Nixon shortly after Kennedy’s nomination. “Under the tousled boyish haircut it is still old Karl Marx.” Nixon passed Reagan’s letter on to his campaign staff, after scrawling across it,
“Use him as speaker whenever possible. He used to be a liberal.”5
Reagan was swimming against the tide, since Hollywood was solid Kennedy territory. The sexy young Democrat became a familiar presence at his brother-in-law Peter Lawford’s parties in Malibu, and Frank Sinatra was busy rallying everyone from Gregory Peck to Marilyn Monroe to back him.
Only the most diehard Republicans—Dick Powell, Edgar Bergen, George Murphy, John Wayne, Irene Dunne—supported Nixon. At a Nixon rally in Beverly Hills, Reagan met William F. Buckley Jr., who had founded the National Review in 1955—Reagan was a charter subscriber—and was already considered the country’s leading conservative intellectual. Shortly after that Reagan initiated a correspondence with Buckley that would go on for decades and greatly influence his political thinking; Nancy, in turn, would become close to Buckley’s outspoken socialite wife, Pat.
“I was having dinner at a restaurant across from the hall where I was to give this speech, and Reagan was there with Nancy,” Bill Buckley recalled.
“He got up and introduced himself. He had just read my book Up from Liberalism, and he rambled off a couple of lines that had amused him. We went into the auditorium together, and there was this great panic because the kid who was supposed to turn on the loudspeaker system couldn’t be found. Reagan jumped up on the stage and tried to soothe the crowd while we waited for the superintendent to bring a key to the control room.
They couldn’t find him, so Reagan asked, ‘Where is this machine?’ They The Kitchen Cabinet: 1963–1966
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pointed way up to the balcony to a room abutting the street. The next thing we knew, he had poked his head out the window—there was a little ledge there—and he did one of those Cary Grant things. Nancy was practically ready to kill herself. I stuck my head out and thought, How is he going to do this? He got up to the window that corresponded to where the speaker system was, then sort of jutted his elbow in and broke the window, climbed in, turned on the loudspeaker system, and the show went on.
That was a great introduction to Reagan.”6
Over the next two years, Reagan traveled as far right as he would ever go. He gave several speeches for Fred Schwarz’s Christian Anti-Communism Crusade in 1961 and was campaign chairman for Loyd Wright, the archconservative Los Angeles lawyer who challenged moderate Republican senator Thomas Kuchel in the 1962 primary. (Wright won only 15
percent of the vote, perhaps because he made statements such as “If we have to blow up Moscow, that’s too bad.”)7 Reagan was also the featured speaker at a 1962 fund-raiser for Republican congressman John Rousselot, who was a member of the John Birch Society.
This highly controversial organization—named after a Christian missionary and U.S. Army intelligence officer killed by the Chinese Communists—had been founded by Massachusetts candy manufacturer Robert Welch in 1958. It claimed 100,000 members, at least a quarter of them in Southern California, where the Birchers, as they were called, were system-atically taking over local Republican clubs and volunteer organizations—
much as the Communists had tried to take over liberal groups affiliated with the Democrats in the 1930s and 1940s. Welch actually accused former president Eisenhower of being a Communist agent, and while Reagan was not willing to go that far, he saw little to disagree with in the Birchers’
attack on the graduated income tax, Social Security, and school busing.
Two of his longtime allies in the battle against the Communists in Hollywood, Adolphe Menjou and John Wayne, were members.
Reagan devoted most of his efforts in 1962, however, to Nixon’s unsuccessful bid for the California governorship. It was at a Nixon fund-raiser that Reagan officially switched parties. As he told it, a woman in the audience stood up in the middle of his speech and asked, “Mr. Reagan, are you still a Democrat?” He replied that he was. “Well, I’m a deputy registrar, and I’d like to change that,” she announced, then marched to the stage with a registration form in hand. “I signed it and became a Republican,” Reagan recalled, “then said to the audience, ‘Now, where was I?’”8
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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House From then on, he liked to say, “I didn’t leave the Democrats, they left me.” He never made the connection that his decision to abandon the party of his father came a month or so after his mother’s death.
The conventional wisdom is that Reagan’s decision to switch parties and shift to the far right was heavily influenced by Loyal Davis. Nancy Reagan objected strongly to the notion: “It’s always written that my father was a rich, conservative John Bircher. That is untrue. He was not rich. He was not a John Bircher. . . . And he did not influence Ronnie’s views. Ronnie made up his own mind about things. And once he did, it was very hard for anyone to change it.”9
Richard Davis agreed with her. “This business of Dr. Loyal convincing Ronald Reagan that he should be a Republican, and a conservative Republican at that, is absolute nonsense,” he told me. “Whenever I saw Edith and Loyal with Ronnie and Nancy, the dinner-table conversation was about family affairs, the children, that sort of thing. They didn’t really talk politics.”10 Alice Pirie Wirtz, who was married to Colleen Moore’s stepson, Homer Hargrave Jr., recalled rather differently a dinner with Reagan, the Davises, and her in-laws when he was passing through Chicago on a G.E.
trip. “He was talking politics during the whole dinner,” she said, “and they were all urging him to run for office.”11
Homer junior told me that Loyal paid him very little notice until he ran for Congress in Chicago in 1958, as a conservative Republican. “He was way to the right, further to the right than I am,” said Hargrave.12 “He had fairl
y strong political opinions,” said Nancy’s friend Kenneth Giniger, who helped Loyal write his autobiography. “Yes, I would call them rightwing.” Giniger doubted, however, that Loyal would have joined the John Birch Society, which attracted mostly middle-class suburbanites. “It wasn’t his kind of thing. He wouldn’t have liked the other people. He was a considerable snob.”13
In fact, Ronnie and Loyal were already in agreement on the big issues when they met. Both had a burning antipathy for the Soviet Union and
“confiscatory taxes,” and no doubt fueled each other’s fire when it came to denouncing Communist sympathizers and “encroaching government control,” the dominant themes of Reagan’s G.E. speeches by the late 1950s.
On certain issues, including abortion and separation of church and state, the irreligious Loyal was more liberal than his son-in-law. Loyal’s novel, Go in Peace, a defense of euthanasia in hopeless cases, caused quite a stir when The Kitchen Cabinet: 1963–1966
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it was published in 1954. After Kennedy took office, Ronnie was only too happy to oblige Loyal when he asked him to record an album, Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine, which the American Medical Association distributed as part of its campaign against what would become the Medicare program. A year later Reagan, in a speech on the same subject titled “Losing Freedom by Installments,” warned that “you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.”14
Often overlooked is Edith Davis’s role in Reagan’s rise. A year after Nancy and Ronnie married, Edith accosted the Reverend Billy Graham on the Biltmore golf course and dragged him into the house to meet her sonin-law. The politically conservative evangelical minister would say that the two-hour talk he and Reagan had that afternoon was the beginning of a lifelong friendship, and that Reagan was the president to whom he was closest.15 After Mayor Kelly’s death, Edith herself apparently switched parties. “I can assure you that she worked for Republican candidates starting already in 1960, and maybe before that,” Loyal’s partner Dr. Daniel Ruge told me.16
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