Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House press office invited TV crews to accompany the First Lady on a visit to an Army hospital in San Francisco. “It’s a symbolic visit,” Nancy admitted. “I want the boys here to know there are a lot of people in California who are grateful to them.”90

  Reagan’s decision to seek reelection surprised no one, as he said in a fifteen-minute televised speech on March 10, 1970. Less than two weeks earlier he had been forced to call upon the National Guard again, when students at U.C.-Santa Barbara, shouting “Death to corporations” and

  “Burn, baby, burn,” set fire to a Bank of America branch. The attacks on businesses continued on and off for three months, and at one point a frustrated Reagan snapped at a reporter, “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.”91 Nancy told columnist George Christy,

  “From a woman’s standpoint, it frightens me when I see students shouting obscenities; I think of Hitler’s Nazi youth movement.”92 “Every time you and Ronnie open your mouths you echo my thoughts,” a supportive Lillian Gish wrote Nancy from New York.93

  Reagan was opposed by the Democrats’ State Assembly leader, Jesse Unruh, who opened his campaign on Labor Day weekend by taking two busloads of reporters to the gates of Henry Salvatori’s estate in Bel Air. As the TV cameras rolled, Unruh asserted that a property-tax-relief bill proposed by Reagan would save his wealthy friend $4,113 a year, whereupon Salvatori, in tennis whites, appeared and yelled through the gates, “Oh, you ass! Is this the way you have to get your publicity?” Grace was right behind him, shouting, “We worked for the money to pay for it!”94

  Unruh was playing on the lingering perception that the Kitchen Cabinet was running the state—he also staged a showy scene outside the 45th Street house to remind voters that it had been bought by a group headed by Holmes Tuttle and Jaquelin Hume—but his antics backfired. “In a single stroke Unruh had revived the image of ‘Big Daddy,’ the domineering political bully who had no respect for the rights of others,” Lou Cannon observes. “Californians value both their holidays and their privacy, and they identified with the nice-looking elderly couple whose castle had been invaded on a holiday by the dread Unruh. Rarely has a self-inflicted wound so thoroughly undermined what might have been a promising campaign.”95

  “We just stood on Ron’s record, and ran on it and ran on it and ran on it, and we won again,” said Tuttle. “Of course, we didn’t win by a million votes, but we won by over a half million.”96 Despite a recent hospitalization Sacramento II: 1969–1974

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  for his chronic stomach problems, Tuttle co-chaired the campaign with Tom Reed. Tuttle’s fund-raising partner, Justin Dart, replaced Salvatori as finance chairman, but in most respects 1970 was a carbon copy of 1966, with Hume heading the Northern California effort and Ed Mills serving as Tuttle’s deputy in the south. Spencer-Roberts managed the campaign, and Neil Reagan’s agency, McCann-Erickson, handled the advertising. However, there was one big new name on the campaign’s organizational chart, Frank Sinatra, who was a co-chair of Californians for Reagan, which was made up of Democrats and independents.97

  It is commonly thought that Sinatra, who was once so far left that both MGM and MCA dropped him in the blacklist days, had switched sides after his buddy President Kennedy opted to stay with Bing Crosby instead of him on a 1962 visit to Palm Springs. According to Sinatra’s valet, George Jacobs, Attorney General Robert Kennedy had told Sinatra, “We can’t have the president sleeping in the same house where Sam Giancana slept.”98 “The Kennedy slight hurt him deeply,” his daughter Tina Sinatra told me. “But he did not sledgehammer his helipad when he found out the President wasn’t coming, and the new guesthouse had been built for my sister, brother, and me, not Kennedy.” In Tina’s view, her father had little truck with “the far-right Minutemen—John Wayne, Randolph Scott, Ward Bond,” who were Reagan’s most faithful Hollywood supporters. He saw his role, she said, as “nudging Ronnie toward the middle. . . . I also think he thought the Democratic Party was going to take a major nosedive. Once he went off to the Reagan camp, he stayed there, but he remained a registered Democrat until the day he died. He loved politics. He loved to put his money where his mouth was, to entertain and put his voice into the electoral process, to help make something happen.”99

  Sinatra had made a few appearances for Reagan in 1966, after taking of-fense at Pat Brown’s an-actor-killed-Lincoln ad. This time around, he was angry at Jesse Unruh, who had been a major Bobby Kennedy booster, for not doing enough to carry California for his friend Hubert Humphrey in 1968. In the intervening years Sinatra had seen more of the Reagans socially through the Annenbergs and the Deutsches; the latter had been spending New Year’s at the singer’s desert compound since the early 1960s. He went all-out for Reagan in 1970, staging glitzy benefits throughout the state, usually with Dean Martin at his side, and raising more than $500,000 of the campaign’s $3.5 million total.100

  On election night in November, the Reagans went to the Jorgensens’

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  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House before proceeding to the Biltmore, as they had four years earlier. “Ronnie decided it was good luck,” explained Marion Jorgensen. “So when he ran a second time, Nancy called me up. I said, ‘Oh, are we having the cocktail party?’ She said, ‘Yes, but there will be a few more people.’ It was astonishing how many more popped up that night.” Almost the entire Kitchen Cabinet was on hand this time, as well as outgoing Nevada governor Paul Laxalt, who had become a close ally of Reagan’s; the Deavers and Nancy Reynolds; and Gloria and Jimmy Stewart. Marion made a point of having not only the same food—veal stew and coconut cake—but also the same employees from the same caterer.101

  Demonstrators carrying Vietcong flags hurled four-letter words and oranges at Ronald Reagan as he was sworn in for a second term on the steps of the capitol, on January 4, 1971. But that didn’t stop the Governor, who was only a month away from his sixtieth birthday, from completing his address.

  “They’re like mosquitoes and flies. They’re part of the world, and you have to put up with them, I guess,” he said of the protesters who now plagued most of his public appearances.102 For them, he was now “Ronald Ray-gun,”

  a term that Joan Baez had coined at Woodstock in 1969.

  Nancy had decided that the inaugural ball should be white-tie, and had asked Sinatra to produce the inaugural gala at the Sacramento Municipal Auditorium. She also asked Frank, who was between marriages to flower-child actress Mia Farrow and former Las Vegas showgirl Barbara Marx, to escort Patti to the ball. Years later, after Kitty Kelley alleged that Nancy had a long-term affair with the crooner that began around this time, Patti told an interviewer, “When I read about my mother and Sinatra in Kitty’s book, I thought, Well, God, I spent this whole evening with him and he never came on to me. Of course, I was jailbait at the time, but he was very gentlemanly. We talked about music; he was going to teach me to sing. And then I thought, Maybe he did come on to me and I just didn’t recognize it. . . . Maybe there was something to those singing lessons after all.”103

  By then Patti was a freshman at Northwestern University, her grandfather’s alma mater. That wasn’t why she chose it; she had thought her English teacher from Orme was going to get a job there, but that didn’t work out, and he ended up at the University of Pennsylvania. Her father had spoken at her high school commencement the previous June, and she had agreed to make her debut at Las Madrinas, the top cotillion for Los Ange-Sacramento II: 1969–1974

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  les society girls, in December to appease her mother, but in Evanston she drew the line at pledging for a sorority. Instead, she befriended the very person her father had warned her to avoid, student body president Eva Jefferson, who he had been told was a radical black activist. When Patti finally managed to fly to Philadelphia to see her paramour, he picked her up at the airport with his wife and kids. He then promised her a rendezvous in Chicago, but didn�
�t show up on the appointed weekend.104

  A few weeks later, perhaps sensing something was wrong, Nancy invited her daughter to join her in New York, where she was speaking at a United Community Campaign of America luncheon. This had been Edith’s primary charity in Chicago, and now Nancy was national chairman of its women’s committee. Although Patti had not planned on even mentioning her failed affair, she was so upset that she found herself telling her mother the whole sad story. Much to her surprise, Nancy was understanding and comforting. Patti’s analysis of her mother’s reaction is insightful:

  There have been comments from the media that she is more liberal politically than my father, but I don’t think her ideology or her morality are rooted in either liberalism or conservatism. One of my mother’s complexities is her ability to transform, adapt to situations for personal reasons. I was bringing her a personal crisis, showing her I needed her, and she adapted to that, became gentle, nurtur-ing, and non-judgmental.105

  Yet when The New York Times’s Judy Klemesrud turned up at Nancy’s Waldorf Towers suite, she reverted to her public role as the no-nonsense wife of a conservative politician. She was “shocked,” she said, to read that a welfare family had recently been housed at the Waldorf. “I think the people of New York should be shocked, too. There must be somewhere else to put these people.” She was “appalled and ashamed” by the sex-oriented films Hollywood was turning out. “I think they’ve shown no sense of responsibility, no taste. . . . I’ve often said that it’s going to be cured at the box office if people stop going. But some people, even my friends, say they go ‘out of curiosity.’ I don’t see why they are so curious. A dirty picture is a dirty picture, and that’s that.” Even Love Story with Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw went too far for her. “I thought it leaned too heavily on the four-letter words. I would have liked a little more tenderness.” As for Women’s Lib, “I’m in agreement with equal pay for equal jobs. . . . After 4 1 6

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House that, I’m afraid they kind of lose me.” Hot pants? “I think a woman should look like a woman, with a little more femininity and elegance than hot pants offer. I don’t like fads.”106

  As fate would have it, Patti no sooner returned to Northwestern than she was embroiled in what came to known as “the hot pants incident.”

  This brouhaha started when she and a friend were approached in their dormitory lobby by a black man selling shorts out of a cardboard box; the friend called security, the man was arrested, and the press ran away with the story. reagan’s daughter in hot pants hassle was the headline on the Chicago Tribune’s front-page story the next day. Soon everyone from Loyal Davis to Eva Jefferson to the peddler’s brother, a local alderman, became involved. When Frank Sinatra read about the upcoming trial, he called Nancy, who told him she was on her way to Chicago. “He was in New York for some big fight,” recalled Nancy, “and he said, ‘Well, I’ll stop there on my way back to the Coast.’ We had dinner with Patti at the Drake.” As Patti remembered it, Sinatra gave her a lecture on law and order and sticking up for her rights, but others have suggested the dinner was merely a cover for an assignation between the singer and Nancy, who was staying at the hotel rather than at her parents’ one-bedroom pied-à-

  terre. “Oh, please,” said Nancy when I asked her about these allegations.

  “Frank? There was nothing.”107 It seems unlikely that someone as controlled as Nancy Reagan would have risked her husband’s political career for a fling with a man who was known to brag about his conquests.

  In any event, the trial was postponed, perhaps because strings were pulled by Sinatra or the Davises, all of whom were friendly with Mayor Richard Daley, and Patti left Northwestern at the end of that semester. She spent the summer of 1971 at Oxford and then transferred to USC as a drama major. After two years she dropped out. “I can’t say we’re surprised,” her father told her. “Maybe I’ll go back and finish college someday,” Patti replied. “No, you won’t,” said Nancy.108

  The great achievement of Reagan’s second term, indeed of his entire governorship, was the California Welfare Reform Act of 1971. It took him six months of struggle with the cocky new Democratic speaker of the assembly, Bob Moretti, to get the bill through the legislature, and when he first asked his aides, including Meese and Deaver, what they thought his chances of success were, their answers ranged from “We shouldn’t try” to “None.”109

  Since coming into office, Reagan had been determined to get what he called Sacramento II: 1969–1974

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  “the welfare monster” under control—one out of nine Americans was on some form of relief by the early 1970s, and in California the Aid to Families with Dependent Children caseload was increasing by forty thousand a month.110 On March 3, 1971, Reagan unveiled the “lengthiest, most detailed and specific legislative proposal ever originated by a California governor,” which called for cutting welfare expenditures by as much as $800

  million annually by tightening eligibility requirements and closing loop-holes while increasing funds for “the truly needy.”111 Reagan’s most controversial proposal would force able-bodied fathers—and mothers with older children—to work at public service for their AFDC checks.112

  The bill became law on August 13, after a final version had been hammered out in three weeks of face-to-face negotiations between Reagan and Moretti, which involved a fair degree of cursing as well as nitty-gritty hag-gling over nearly every subclause. “Both he and I developed a grudging respect for each other,” said the thirty-four-year-old speaker, who came from a poor, half-Italian, half-Armenian family in Detroit. “I don’t think that socially we’d ever have mixed, but when the governor gave a commitment he kept it, and when I gave a commitment, I kept it. So that working on the development of legislation with him was relatively easy because we always knew where the other guy stood.”113

  “Reagan always prided himself on his ability to compromise,” said Mike Deaver, who had been given the fancy new title director of administration at the start of the second term. “And he understood that there always was going to be compromise. He would tell you stories about what he learned in his work with the unions and the studios and the Screen Actors Guild. That’s where he really learned how to compromise— when to make the move and so forth.”114

  The path to reform had taken Reagan to the Winter White House at San Clemente that April for a “welfare summit” with President Nixon, who had proposed his own Family Assistance Plan in 1969 and was not happy about the California Governor stealing his thunder. Nixon’s plan essentially amounted to a guaranteed minimum income for welfare recipients and was seen by conservatives as yet another example of his inability to control spending and his lack of principles. Reagan had even testified against Nixon’s plan in U.S. Senate hearings the previous summer.115 Their three-hour meeting in San Clemente was mediated by Caspar Weinberger, who had left Sacramento to become Nixon’s budget director. Reagan essentially got what he wanted, the presidential blessing for his work-for-checks 4 1 8

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House reform. In exchange he agreed to stop opposing Nixon’s plan, which would be shelved in 1972.116 Reagan’s reform legislation, on the other hand, would become the model for other states, and eventually for the federal government during the Clinton administration.

  For Nixon, struggling with a recession, inflation, and soaring deficits, as well as a war in Southeast Asia he could neither win nor end, Reagan increasingly represented a looming threat to his renomination in 1972. Despite Reagan’s assurance at a White House meeting in January 1971 that he

  “would not in any way allow himself to become a candidate,” as Nixon’s chief of staff H. R. Haldeman noted in his diary, the President’s paranoia was set off by the slightest sign of a Reagan surge. When the Young Americans for Freedom came out for Reagan that May, for example, Nixon ordered Attorney General John Mitchell to “straighten them back out.”117

  But Reagan was both sinc
ere and realistic about not running this time around. In July, responding to a letter from Vermont governor Deane Davis urging him to make another try for the White House, Reagan joked,

  “Just between us, though, I think we’d better settle for the North Pole—it’s easier to reach than that other place you mentioned.”118

  “They got along fine,” Nancy Reagan said of her husband and Nixon, adding, “We were never close.”119 Nixon seemed to alternate between slighting the Reagans and courting them. Nancy Reagan told me that they were never invited to a state dinner by Nixon, though they were by Lyndon Johnson, who seated her at his table. They were asked to San Clemente in the summer of 1970 for an intimate dinner with the Nixons and Henry Kissinger, who was then national security adviser. Reagan wrote Kissinger a cryptic note the following day: “It was good seeing you last night—my mind is busy but my lips are sealed. Enclosed is the Pat-ton speech made to his 3rd Army before it left England to cross the Channel.”120

  On July 15, 1971, Nixon startled the nation—and Ronald Reagan—

  when he announced that he would be paying an official visit to Communist China the following year. Bill Buckley, who was in Sacramento to tape a session of his talk show, Firing Line, with Reagan, was at the Governor’s house when “there was a call from his office saying that it was very important to hear a special broadcast that Richard Nixon was making at six o’clock. It was the announcement that he was going to China, which was a very anti-rightwing thing to do in those days. So we sat and watched it. And then the phone rang, and someone came in and said, ‘Dr. Kissinger for Governor Sacramento II: 1969–1974