Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  Sacramento: 1967–1968

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  Jean and Bill—the Thorntons—Tex Thornton was Litton Industries—

  Lady Caroline Townshend—whoever the hell that is—and, of course, the Wilsons.” The indefatigable Betsy had also recorded those unable to attend, including the Tuttles, the Salvatoris, and the Darts, as well as the Jimmy Stewarts and Cesar Romero.92

  Carolyn Deaver told me, “The Reagans had two lives, one in Sacramento and one in Los Angeles.”93 The couple who had once been thought of as hopelessly B-list were now the highest-ranking personages in the state, and the social stock of their friends and backers in Beverly Hills and Bel Air was soaring. Even stuffy San Francisco society had to take notice; Nancy seized every opportunity to flee Sacramento for luncheons and charity events in the City by the Bay, only an hour’s drive away. At the September 1967 opening of the San Francisco Opera, she stole the show in a black-velvet Galanos coatdress set with crystals and rhinestones, and the Reagans would continue to attend the opera’s white-tie opening night throughout his governorship.

  But it was in Los Angeles that the couple truly reigned, and there that the social rituals that would turn the Reagan Group into something akin to a royal court took hold. The first of these was Nancy’s annual birthday celebration, which began as a ladies’ lunch at Betty Adams’s house in July 1967. “I had a cozy little group—Amelia Gray, Betsy, Harriet, Marion, Erlenne, Mary Jane, and Betty Wilson,” Betty Adams told me.94 This lunch was later moved to the Bistro, and some years was supplemented by a coed dinner at Chasen’s for a larger group, including Mervyn and Kitty LeRoy, Jules and Doris Stein, Billy Haines and Jimmie Shields, and, if they were in town, Walter and Lee Annenberg. The Tuttles, Salvatoris, and Darts were included in the dinners, but Virginia, Grace, and Punky were not part of the lunches. “She usually had the same group,” Betsy Bloomingdale explained. “Because what we did then was to have her pick one thing out, and everybody bought it—maybe a very nice chain from Ruser, which used to be the jeweler. You know, instead of everybody bringing her lots of things that she didn’t need.”95

  In 1968, Betty Wilson launched the Western-theme party that would be given every Fourth of July weekend as part of Nancy’s birthday festivities. The first two or three were tailgate picnics on an undeveloped piece of property the Wilsons had bought in Temecula, a remote area of Riverside County southeast of Los Angeles. “It was pretty land,” said Bill Wilson. “It had some nice oak trees. But there was nothing there, so we had 3 7 6

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House to take tables and benches and barbecues down there. Ronnie used to insist on taking a couple of .22 rifles, because he couldn’t stand the idea of these little ground squirrels chewing up the roots of the trees. So if one of them would pop his head out of a hole, Ronnie would take a shot at him and see if he could get him. His security guys would really go into orbit when Ronnie would hand me a rifle and we’d start walking out through the bushes. But I think Ronnie did that pretty much to tease them, as well as so the two of us could just go out and have some fun shooting gophers or ground squirrels together.”96

  “There was nothing there,” Marion Jorgensen said of the first party at Temecula. “They had a little landing strip, and Tex Thornton flew us down on his plane—Irene Dunne, Earle, and me. It was a Cessna, it didn’t hold more than about six people. I remember sitting on logs. We spread out everything on the ground. It really was a picnic.”97

  The Reagans, the French Smiths, and the Schreibers had all bought tracts adjoining the Wilsons’ that year. The developers of the area called it Rancho California, and there was an understanding that roads and utilities would be extended into it. The Reagans paid $347,000 for their 778

  acres, which they could well afford, having sold the Malibu Canyon ranch to 20th Century Fox for $1.9 million just before he became Governor. By the early 1970s, with Rancho California still undeveloped, the Wilsons bought an avocado farm north of Santa Barbara, and Betty started giving Nancy’s Western parties there. A few years later, the Wilsons acquired a huge spread in northern Mexico, and the Reagans bought the 688-acre Rancho del Cielo, on a mountaintop above the Wilsons’ old avocado farm, for $527,000, and sold their Rancho California tract for $856,000.

  From then on, Betty Wilson, joined by Marion Jorgensen, hosted the outdoor parties for Nancy at the Reagans’ ranch. By then the hot dogs and hamburgers were catered by Chasen’s, but everyone still came in checked shirts, jeans, boots, and cowboy hats.98

  According to both Ronnie and Nancy, selling their beloved Malibu Canyon ranch was an emotional wrench; it was where they had courted, where Nancy got to know Maureen and Michael, where they took Patti and the Skipper on weekends. It also made Reagan an out-and-out millionaire for the first time in his life; he told Lou Cannon in 1968, “I could not have run for office unless I sold the ranch.” Sacramento reporters, including Cannon, “smelled a sweetheart deal,” as the highly lucrative sale Sacramento: 1967–1968

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  had been worked out by Jules Stein and Taft Schreiber with Fox chief Darryl Zanuck, who was also a Reagan supporter.99

  Reagan had paid $85,000 for the 290-acre property in 1951, or about $293 an acre. In December 1966 he sold 236 acres to Fox, which owned 2,500 adjacent acres that the studio used as a location for its Westerns.

  The $1.9 million purchase price worked out to $8,178 per acre, or a profit of more than 2,500 percent. French Smith was Reagan’s lawyer for the sale and became one of three trustees of the blind trust established for the Reagans the day he became Governor—the other two were Bill Wilson and Jules Stein. Justin Dart would replace the aging Stein a few years later, but Oppenheimer Industries, a Kansas City–based investment firm run by a son of Doris Stein’s from her first marriage, continued to manage the trust’s assets. Meanwhile, Reagan had retained fifty-four acres at Malibu Canyon and used it as a down payment of $165,000 on the Rancho California land in 1968; a year later a New York–based corporation controlled by Jules Stein bought the fifty-four acres from the Rancho California developers for the same price.

  Two more factors would make these transactions appear suspicious: in 1968, Reagan signed a tax bill advantageous to Fox and several other movie companies that had been vetoed by Pat Brown; and in 1974, just before he left office, the State Park and Recreation Board purchased the entire Fox property, including the former Reagan ranch, for $4.8 million, or $1,800 an acre. Numerous investigations and a lawsuit by a local Democrat, however, produced conflicting opinions regarding fluctuating real estate values but no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of Stein or Reagan.100

  One last note about Malibu Canyon: in the next-to-last segment of Portrait of a Politician’s Wife, Nancy and Betsy are sitting in the back of a Lincoln Continental, being driven to the ranch for a farewell visit, Nancy in a white button-down shirt, jeans, and Keds, Betsy in an apricot silk blouse and pants with matching sandals. “Does the ranch have a name?”

  asks Betsy. “We named it Yearling Row,” says Nancy, “because yearling was the business of the ranch, and row after Kings Row.” “Oh, that’s marvelous,” says Betsy, presumably unaware of the Jane Wyman connection.101

  In August 1968, Betsy Bloomingdale was at Nancy’s side at the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, where Reagan sought the party’s 3 7 8

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House presidential nomination, some felt prematurely. So were Marion Jorgensen and Betty Wilson—all the women chipped in and brought along Julius Bengtsson to keep their bouffants crisp and high in the humidity of South Florida in summer. Alfred Bloomingdale, Earle Jorgensen, and Bill Wilson were part of the California delegation, which was chaired by William French Smith and pledged to Reagan as a favorite son. Although most observers thought Richard Nixon, making an extraordinary comeback from the defeats of 1960 and 1962, was all but assured of the nomination, the Kitchen Cabinet was not about to give up. As Holmes Tuttle recounted,

  “We went
from delegation to delegation. Len Firestone was right there. He would talk to one, I’d talk to the next one. Justin Dart, Henry Salvatori, Taft Schreiber, Raymond Lee, Lee Kaiser, [Jack] Hume, all of us were there.

  There wasn’t any question who we wanted. We knew the kind of Governor he had been; we knew what he stood for; we knew that was who we needed back at the White House.”102

  More than the stay-at-home evenings and the run-away weekends, Reagan’s ostensibly reluctant quest for the presidency barely a year after he had arrived in the state capital made many feel that the movie star governor and his social queen wife saw Sacramento as a mere stepping-stone to higher ground. During his campaign, he had promised to serve a full term as governor, and he continued to insist until the very eve of the balloting in Miami that he wasn’t running for anything, just keeping his delegation unified. As far as the press was concerned, Reagan had been thrust into the front row of possible GOP nominees simply by virtue of his landslide victory in 1966: three days after that election, The New York Times ran a front-page story listing him as one of four leading contenders, along with Nixon, who had moved to New York and turned himself into the workhorse of the Republican Party; Governor George Romney of Michigan, a likable cen-trist; and Senator-elect Charles Percy of Illinois, a forty-eight-year-old corporate star with a handsome wife.103 Nixon worried about Reagan from day one. Bill Buckley told me, “Nixon asked me how did I account for Reagan’s success. This was just after he was elected Governor. And he spoke about him in terms of a presidential perspective. I said, ‘He’s a Hollywood actor.’

  And he said, ‘Anybody who wins California by one million votes is a presidential candidate.’”104 One suspects that the savvy Nixon also realized that Reagan’s public appeal far outdistanced his. As Sue Cummings, the wife of Kitchen Cabinet member Ted Cummings, who knew both men quite well, Sacramento: 1967–1968

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  said, “You had to know Nixon to like him. You didn’t have to know Reagan to love him.”105

  As both Cannon and Garry Wills have pointed out, the anointing triumvirate of Rubel, Tuttle, and Salvatori had always wanted to elect a president; they had become interested in the charismatic actor only after their original favorite, Goldwater, stumbled. The idea of taking Reagan all the way to the White House was, at the very least, in the air early on. Jean French Smith told me that after hearing Reagan speak at the Ambassador Hotel the night of Goldwater’s defeat, she turned to her husband and said,

  “That man ought to run for president.”106 Robert Tuttle remembered his father coming home from one of the first Major Appointments Task Force meetings and repeating what Jaquelin Hume had said: “Gentlemen, we don’t have gubernatorial material here, we have presidential material.”107

  Henry Salvatori didn’t discourage the notion in an interview he gave a couple of months into the first gubernatorial term. “People criticize Ronnie for having no political experience,” he told Doris Klein of the Associated Press. “But he has a great image, a way to get through to people. . . .

  Look at John F. Kennedy. He didn’t have much of a record as a senator.

  But he made a great appearance—and he had a beautiful wife. So does the governor. Nancy Reagan doesn’t have to take a back seat to anyone. And the governor has plenty of time between now and the nomination to make a record as an administrator. But I don’t believe people in other states really care much about what’s happening in California anyway.”108

  As for Reagan’s own ambitions, political consultant Stanley Plog, who traveled with him during the 1966 campaign, said, “He has always wanted to be president, not governor.”109 Also worth mentioning is Reagan’s reply to a letter from his most politically minded child, Maureen, written shortly after he switched parties in 1962. She had seen a newspaper item about his being approached to run for governor, and urged him to do so. “Run . . .

  you can win back California” were her words. “Mermie, I really appreciate your support,” her father wrote in return, “but if we’re going to talk about what could be, well, I could be president—ha, ha!—but of course, that’s not going to happen, is it?”110

  This attitude, at once boastful, ambivalent, and self-deprecating, would characterize the entire 1968 Reagan for President campaign. Like his run for the governorship, it began with a meeting at the house on San Onofre Drive of the Reagans and their rich backers, who would eventually 3 8 0

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House spend nearly half a million dollars on the effort.111 As Theodore H. White revealed in The Making of the President 1968: Within ten days of his election, Reagan had gathered his inner circle together, on Thursday, November 17, 1966, at his home in Pacific Palisades for a first discussion of the Presidency. There, too, was named a captain for the adventure—young Tom Reed. . . .

  Reed, in the next two weeks, was to engage as counsel for the campaign the master architect of the Goldwater nomination of 1964, F.

  Clifton White of New York. Together, the two were to draw up a meticulous master plan for seizure of the nomination, timed in five phases and date-deadlined from December, 1966 to nomination in August, 1968.112

  Lyn Nofziger, who was present at that meeting and was one of those pushing hardest for Reagan to run, named the other participants as Battaglia, Tuttle, Salvatori, Schreiber, and Mills, all of whom were also raring to go. Only Nancy and her ally Stu Spencer, it appears, were counseling caution. According to Mike Deaver, Nancy “was skeptical from the start.

  I can still hear her telling Reagan and me that it was ‘way too early for this kind of thinking.’ ”113 Deaver, however, didn’t come into the picture until after Battaglia’s exit, in August 1967, and the scandal that ensued convinced nearly everyone in the Governor’s office, especially the new chief of staff, Bill Clark, that it would be wise to pull back. “My position throughout was that first we had to prove ourselves in Sacramento,” Clark told me. “And I thought we had a lot of work to do.”114

  That summer, Reagan saw Nixon at the Bohemian Grove, the annual encampment of the Bohemian Club of San Francisco’s members and guests, an all-male event that went back to the 1870s and that in the postwar years had become the most important conclave of mainly Republican politicians and corporate chieftains in the country. The club’s secret membership was said to include such Reagan backers as Asa Call, Justin Dart, Earle Jorgensen, Leonard Firestone, and Northrop chairman Thomas V. Jones.

  Barely a handful of staunchly conservative Hollywood people belonged—

  Bing Crosby, Edgar Bergen, Art Linkletter. Bill Buckley was a guest of Senator George Murphy that year, and as Buckley’s biographer John Judis recounts: “At that gathering, Reagan and Nixon, who were both members, met frequently and agreed finally that Reagan would stay out of the primaries unless Nixon faltered.”115 Buckley, who had been actively courted by Sacramento: 1967–1968

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  Nixon over the past year, had also begun a regular correspondence with Nancy Reagan at this time, and he may have influenced her cautious attitude about having her husband run.116

  Ed Meese and Casper Weinberger also opposed a run, but Nofziger, Reed, and Clifton White, backed by the Kitchen Cabinet, pushed ahead.

  As Rus Walton, a junior aide close to Clark, explained, “I think [Reagan]

  was reluctant at first. I can’t pretend that I really know personally his inner thoughts. I think that he was had. I think what came into play were not necessarily his ambitions but other people’s ambitions. Maybe some of it was anti-Nixon. I don’t know. What I’m trying to say is, I don’t think he pushed and shoved his way to get there in ’68. I think he was dragged rather than he led.”117

  As far as Nofziger could tell, Reagan “believed that if God wanted him to be President He would see that it got done.”118 Usually accompanied by Nofziger and Reed, he began flying around the country giving speeches at GOP fund-raisers while maintaining that he was a “noncandidate.” When delegates to the South Carolina state convention in S
eptember started chanting, “Reagan ’68! Reagan ’68!” he gave them his best aw-shucks look, then blushed bright red before breaking into a great big grin that indicated how happy their chanting made him. Earlier in the year, he had agreed to debate Robert Kennedy, who had been elected to the Senate from New York after his brother’s death, on the CBS program Town Meeting of the World, and after standing up to intense questioning by European students about the Vietnam War, he emerged as the surprise victor. That fall, following in the footsteps of such heavyweights as Harry Truman and Adlai Stevenson, he spent four days as a Chubb Fellow at Yale and again made a positive impression on those who were prepared to dismiss him as a dimwitted cowboy. After a brief visit to her alma mater, Smith College, Nancy joined him in New Haven—she wore a leopard coat over a bright green trapeze dress to one lecture—and the Reagans visited Bill and Pat Buckley at their weekend house in nearby Stamford.

  By the end of 1967, Reagan had raked in some $1.5 million for the party, and a Gallup Poll of Republican county chairmen had him in second place after Nixon.119 “There is a very real possibility,” intoned Harry Reasoner on CBS Reports, “that Ronald Reagan, an actor who ran for his first public office just over a year ago, will be the next Republican candidate for president. This frightens some people and delights others. The 3 8 2

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House people who are delighted and those who are frightened are responding to the same feeling: that the man might go all the way.”120

  To say 1968 was a tumultuous year in American politics is both an un-derstatement and a cliché. One shocking and calamitous event followed another, throwing the plans of candidates in both parties, including the sitting President himself, into constant disarray. For Reagan, the year began with a celebration: a $1,000-a-ticket ball in Sacramento co-chaired by Tuttle and Salvatori to congratulate their protégé on completing his first year as governor. At that point, President Lyndon Johnson and Vice President Hubert Humphrey seemed all but certain to be renominated, and George Romney, backed by Nelson Rockefeller, who had vowed not to run again, was still Nixon’s strongest rival for the Republican nomination.