by Nancy Reagan
Well, I wasn’t insincere. And I smile, I’m afraid, the way I smile. I couldn’t help but wonder: Would she have liked it better if I had snarled? She had obviously written the story in her mind before she ever met me.
Twelve years later, in 1980, several other profiles of me followed similar lines. My biggest fault, it seems, was that I was too polite, too much a lady. Writing in the Washington Post, Sally Quinn attacked the way I sat and listened when Ronnie gave a speech: “She never seems to get an itch, her lips never stick to her teeth, she hardly blinks. Don’t her legs ever go to sleep? Haven’t they ever had a terrible fight just before the speech? Isn’t she ever bored hearing the whole thing over and over and over?”
Julie Baumgold in New York magazine went a little further: “She does not provoke; she flatters and always suppresses the little touch of the bitch inside.”
Wow!
It got worse as the campaign went on. In October, just two weeks before the 1980 election, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner ran a five-part series called “The Woman Who Would Be Queen.” It was just awful! I still cringe when I think of it. Beneath a full-page hideous drawing of me—in regal clothes, wearing a crown, and towering over a chessboard—the author, Wanda McDaniel, portrayed me as a calculating, power-hungry manipulator who was just dying to move into the White House. Some of the stories she described were simply absurd: In one of them, she said that I wouldn’t allow the actress Ruta Lee and another woman to ride in an elevator with Ronnie and me because they were too attractive and I was jealous. Ruta is very attractive, but she’s also a friend, and no such thing ever happened.
Later in the article, Ms. McDaniel also quoted an old friend of mine, Rupert Allen, as saying that if Ronnie was elected, Nancy Reagan would make the White House comfortable and “all their non-Jewish friends would be there.” Rupert never said that, and he was so angry that he threatened to sue the paper.
Wanda McDaniel also repeated a myth that I’ve heard hundreds of times: that my father was an extreme right-winger who was responsible for Ronnie’s political shift from liberal to conservative. Or, in yet another article from that period, “They fell in love, and Nancy converted him to her father’s politics, and out popped Ronald Reagan, the right-winger.”
Well, these stories hurt.
Kay Graham was probably right to mention the influence of Joan Didion’s profile, because it did seem that other women writers elaborated on the same themes, not only in 1980 but into 1981. With few exceptions, they described me as a woman who was interested only in rich friends and fancy clothes, a supercilious and shallow socialite, a lady who loved shopping and going out to lunch.
In another words, an airhead.
Writing in Ms., Gloria Steinem called me “the marzipan wife,” and “the rare woman who can perform the miracle of having no interests at all.”
A few years later, of course, I would be criticized for having too many interests—especially in politics. But back in 1981, Newsweek predicted that “Nancy is not likely to be faulted for interfering in affairs of state.” I wish!
And the Chicago Tribune surely deserved a prize for squeezing the greatest number of negative references into a single sentence, when it described me as “Queen Nancy the Extravagant, an aloof former debutante and movie star whose main concerns are fashion, decorating and lunching with rich girlfriends, whose idea of hard times is tablecloths that shrink, whose doe-eyed devotion to her husband leads to hard-eyed terrorizing of her aides.”
I was called more names than I can remember. Queen Nancy. The Iron Butterfly. The Belle of Rodeo Drive. Fancy Nancy. The Cutout Doll. On the Tonight show, Johnny Carson quipped that my favorite junk food was caviar.
These stories not only hurt, they also made me damn mad. They usually mentioned my friends who were well known (and whom the press referred to as “The Group”), but they rarely mentioned my friends who are not well known. It infuriated me to read that I had been part of the lunch bunch who spend their days shopping on Rodeo Drive. I know there are women who shop every day and who center their lives on going out for lunch, but I didn’t do that then and I don’t do it now. It would bore the daylights out of me.
When we lived in Pacific Palisades, Ronnie and I had small children, and I spent most of my time carpooling with them, driving the kids to the dentist, taking them to buy shoes, going to the market, serving on the board of the school, manning the hot-dog stand at the school fair—all the normal things that mothers do. Did I sometimes go out to lunch? Sure. Did I ever shop? Of course. But shopping and lunch were never my life.
I was also accused of being “Hollywood.” Well, yes, Ronnie and I worked in Hollywood. We’re proud of it. But we were never part of the glitzy Hollywood scene—the world of stars like Ava Gardner and Joan Crawford, or later, Elizabeth Taylor and Joan Collins. When we were married in 1952, we deliberately chose not to live in Hollywood—at that time, Pacific Palisades was considered a distant suburb. Our idea of a big evening was to watch a picture on television with the Holdens, or go out to the movies.
But by the time I became first lady, there was already a fixed image of me in the press. Then, during my first year in Washington, the White House renovation, the new china, and my wardrobe all were seen as confirming that image.
It’s easy to blame it all on the press, but I now think that in fact there was fault on both sides. I wish the press had taken a little more time to get to know me better, rather than relying on old stories and images. And I also wish I had tried harder to communicate to them who I really was. I’m a very private person, and it has always been difficult for me to open up to people, especially reporters, and especially about personal matters. And in the beginning, when I did, it often backfired. When I’m hurt, as I was repeatedly in 1980 and 1981, I tend to retreat, a form of self-protection. Now I see that this might just have made things worse, by making me appear aloof and snobbish.
I’d like to think that by the time we left the White House, the press and I had come to know each other a lot better. I wasn’t the first first lady to be attacked by the media, but nobody could remember anything remotely resembling the bad press I endured during that first year. Bess Truman and Mamie Eisenhower were criticized for their dowdy clothes and unglamorous friends. Jackie Kennedy fared somewhat better, although I’m sure she grew tired of the endless curiosity about her wardrobe. Mrs. Johnson was treated well—nobody objected to the fact that she had many wealthy friends who helped support her beautification project. I always thought Pat Nixon was maligned simply for being herself. Betty Ford received good press, but Rosalynn Carter was mocked for taking an interest in policy issues. But I won the unpopularity contest hands down. By the end of 1981 I had a higher disapproval rating than any other first lady of modern times.
It isn’t often in life that one is lucky enough to enjoy a second beginning, but during one five-minute period in the spring of 1982, I was able to make a fresh start with the Washington press corps.
It happened at the annual Gridiron Dinner, which, as I soon learned, was one of the most important events in Washington. The Gridiron is a small, select club of sixty print journalists. Every spring they hold an elegant white-tie dinner, which is limited to six hundred invited guests. The program is always the same: Members of the press perform clever and (hopefully) funny skits that poke fun at both Democrats and Republicans. These skits are followed by two speakers—one from each party. The evening ends with a brief toast to the president—followed by his response.
For politicians and reporters in Washington, the Gridiron Dinner is the social event of the year. The guest list always includes the Speaker of the House, members of the Cabinet, top White House aides, justices of the Supreme Court, and leading members of Congress, along with a fair number of anchormen, publishers, columnists, diplomats, and other opinion leaders.
Every president since Benjamin Harrison has been to at least one Gridiron Dinner, and during our stay in Washington, Ronnie and I attended them all. Ronnie ha
d a particularly good time at the 1984 dinner, where he got to tease several of the Democrats who were fighting it out for the honor of opposing him in the November elections. When he came to Senator Alan Cranston, who was a few years younger than himself, Ronnie said, “Imagine running for president at his age!” And he dismissed Gary Hart by saying, “This country would never accept a president who looks like a movie star.” It was typical of Ronnie that both of these quips were really directed against himself.
A few weeks before the 1982 dinner, Sheila Tate realized that after the year I had just gone through, it was inevitable that the evening would include a skit about me. She thought it would be terrific if I appeared in that skit, in a surprise cameo role.
First, Sheila tried the idea out on several of Ronnie’s advisers, including David Gergen, Larry Speakes, and Mike Deaver. After they had all given it their blessing, Sheila came to me.
It turned out that the Gridiron members were planning to have somebody sing a song about me. Someone suggested that I should respond with a song of my own that would attack the press.
“Forget it,” I told Sheila. “I’m not willing to attack the press. If I’m going to do this at all, I think I should make fun of myself.”
“Are you willing to sing?” she asked.
“Sure.”
“Dance?”
“Absolutely.”
“Would you be willing to smash a plate that was painted to look like the new White House china?”
“Of course! But only if it’s a surprise. I don’t want anybody to know in advance—not even my husband!”
To help us prepare a suitable response to their skit about me, the Gridiron officers provided us with the lyrics to their song, in which a singer pretending to be Nancy Reagan sang new words to “Second-Hand Rose,” an old Fanny Brice hit song from the 1920s that had recently enjoyed a revival. Their lyrics went like this:
Second-hand clothes.
I give my second-hand clothes
To museum collections and traveling shows.
They were oh so happy that they got ’em
Won’t notice they were ragged at the bottom.
Goodbye, you old worn-out mess.
I never wear a frock more than once.
Calvin Klein, Adolfo, Ralph Lauren and Bill Blass.
Ronald Reagan’s mama’s going strictly First Class.
Rodeo Drive, I sure miss Rodeo Drive
In frumpy Washington.
Second-hand rings.
Donate those old used-up things.
Designers deduct ’em.
We’re living like kings.
So what if Ronnie’s cutting back on welfare.
I’d still wear a tiara in my coiffed hair.
Sheila then asked Landon Parvin, one of our best speech-writers, to work on a set of lyrics for my response. Meanwhile, we had to decide what I would wear. With the enthusiastic help of my staff, we put together a really ridiculous costume—it made me look like a bag lady on Halloween. I wore white pantaloons with blue butterflies, yellow rubber rainboots, a blue blouse with white dots, and over that a really ugly sleeveless red cotton print housedress. Over that I wore a blue print skirt pinned up on the side with a sequinned butterfly, a long strand of fake pearls, a mangy boa, and a red straw hat with feathers and flowers. I was gorgeous!
During dinner (dressed properly, of course), I was so nervous that I couldn’t eat a thing. Maybe, just maybe, it was because six hundred of the most influential people in America were about to see the first lady make a complete fool of herself.
But it was too late to back out. When the singer on stage was singing “Second-Hand Clothes,” I turned to Ronnie and told him I had to go to the ladies’ room. Sheila Tate, who was even more nervous than I was (if that’s possible), was sitting between two newspaper publishers. “Oh, boy,” one of them said. “Mrs. Reagan has just left the head table. I bet she’s really ticked off.”
Backstage, I got into my costume. One of the stage props was a big clothing rack, the kind you see in the stock room of a store. I hid behind the rack where nobody could see me, while the Gridiron skit poking fun at me went on. When the song was over, I parted the clothes and walked out.
I was greeted by a thunderous silence. For a few seconds, nobody realized who this woman was, or why she looked so ridiculous in those silly clothes. But when it sank in, the audience rose and gave me a standing ovation before I even opened my mouth. When the room was quiet again, I sang Landon’s lyrics to “Second-Hand Rose”:
I’m wearing second-hand clothes
Second-hand clothes
They’re quite the style
In the spring fashion shows.
Even my new trench coat with fur collar
Ronnie bought for ten cents on the dollar.
Second-hand gowns
And old hand-me-downs
The china is the only thing that’s new.
Even though they tell me that I’m no longer Queen,
Did Ronnie have to buy me that new sewing machine?
Second-hand clothes, second-hand clothes,
I sure hope Ed Meese sews.
When I was finished, the audience responded with another standing ovation. Even better, they had laughed at all the right places, and I began to relax and enjoy myself. The only snag came at the very end, when I was supposed to smash the “china” plate on the stage. I threw it down, but it didn’t break!
When the audience yelled for an encore, I sang the whole thing over again, threw down the plate again, and this time it broke.
I was wondering what Ronnie’s reaction would be to all of this, but when I got back to the table he was still laughing, so I knew he had thought it was all right.
I never dreamed that my appearance that night would be so influential. It was talked about for the rest of our years in Washington, almost as though it were an important political event—which in a way it was. This one song, together with my willingness to sing it, served as a signal to opinion-makers that maybe I wasn’t the terrible, humorless woman they thought I was—regal, distant, disdainful. From that night on, my image began to change in Washington.
It had been a long time since I had received any favorable press, so I treasured the newspaper reviews of my performance. The Gridiron Dinner is supposed to be off-the-record, but I wasn’t about to quibble when reports about it in the press were kind to me. FIRST LADY FLOORS ’EM WITH SONG AND DANCE, said the New York Daily News. SHE SINGS, SHE JOKES, SHE’S A HIT, said the Los Angeles Herald Examiner.
According to the Washington Post, “the sophisticated audience of journalists, politicians and their friends responded to her performance as though she had undergone a major change. A number of those image-makers left the ballroom saying that Nancy Reagan’s song-and-dance number had transformed her image.”
And the New York Times said: “President Nixon once played the piano and Betty Ford once danced, but the consensus was that no other First Lady had ever come so well prepared.… Socko!”
3
Astrology
THE criticism I faced during that first year of Ronnie’s presidency was nothing compared with the eruption over astrology that occurred during Ronnie’s last year in office. At the time I said nothing about it. But now it’s my turn to explain exactly what I did—and why.
I was devastated after the shooting, as I’ve already explained. Ronnie recovered, but I’m a worrier, and now I really had something to worry about: that it might happen again, and that this time I would lose him forever.
Astrology was simply one of the ways I coped with the fear I felt after my husband almost died.
For a long time after the shooting, the world seemed to be inundated with violence. Six weeks after Ronnie was almost killed, the pope was shot and wounded—right in St. Peter’s Square. Four months after that, President Sadat was shot and killed during a military parade in Cairo. Within nine months of my husband’s inauguration, three world leaders had been shot.
; Everyone said it was just a coincidence, and yet I worried. How could any public figure be protected from acts of violence? And what if these three events were somehow connected in a way that would become known only at some future time?
There was also the so-called twenty-year death cycle for American presidents. For more than a century, every president elected or reelected in a year ending in zero had died in office. This strange pattern had been written about during the 1980 campaign. Back then, I hadn’t paid much attention—but it had stuck in my mind.
Now that my own husband was president and an attempt had been made on his life, the historical pattern became terrifying to me. President William Harrison, elected in 1840, had died in office. Lincoln, elected in 1860, had been killed, as had Garfield (1880) and McKinley (1900). Harding (1920) had died, and in my own lifetime, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1940) had died, and John F. Kennedy (1960) was killed.
Was Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980, next?
Was the shooting in March 1981 merely an omen, an early warning that something even worse might lie ahead?
All that aside—if an assassination attempt had come so close to succeeding, what would prevent it from happening again? After Ronnie was shot, the threats against his life continued, something that apparently happens whenever a major public figure survives a shooting: His recovery serves as a kind of perverse challenge to other would-be assassins. According to the Secret Service, it was very possible that someone would try to complete the task.
What if March 30 was only the beginning? And how was I ever going to live through eight years of this?
Night after night, I lay beside my husband and tried to drive these gruesome thoughts from my mind. Ronnie slept, but I could not. When Ronnie was in the hospital, I would lie on his side of the bed at the White House as a way of feeling closer to him, but I barely slept. Now that he was home, I still kept waking up during the night.