My Turn

by Nancy Reagan

  I could see that Jane knew how to play on Ronnie’s good nature. She had convinced him that he shouldn’t get married again until she did. It took me a little time, but I managed to unconvince him.

  Around the end of 1951, he told me that it wasn’t so much that he hungered for someone to love him, but that he really missed having somebody to love. When I heard that, I knew he had recovered from the trauma of the divorce.

  In previous years I had returned home to spend Christmas with my family in Chicago, but in 1951 I stayed in Los Angeles to be with Ronnie. We had been going together for two years, and we were so happy and comfortable together—he with me, and I with him. I had dated a number of men, and I knew Ronnie was the right one for me. He was all I had ever wanted in a man, and more, and he was different from anyone I had ever known.

  Even then, Ronnie could see that I was totally supportive of him, and that he could trust me. Ronnie’s interest in the Guild and in politics had been a source of irritation in his first marriage, and Jane had said publicly that she was bored by all of his talking. But I loved to listen to him talk, and I let him know it.

  That Christmas, Ronnie brought over a small tree for my apartment, and on Christmas Eve I finally got up the courage to ask him what was, for me, a very bold question: “Do you want me to wait for you?”

  And he said, “Yes, I do.”

  Before long, marriage just was inevitable.

  He wanted to be with me all the time, but he still hesitated to get married. The press continued to write about us. I felt the pressure and was more than ready to move things along. And so a few weeks after Christmas, I told Ronnie that I had asked my agent to get me a play in New York.

  We announced our engagement on February 21, 1952, and planned the wedding for early March. The columnist Louella Parsons wrote, “The long-expected marriage of Nancy Davis and Ronald Reagan has now been set for early next month.” We were thrilled, and so were our parents. But Ronnie still wanted to keep things low-key. We had already agreed on a very small wedding, with absolutely no press. I would have preferred a bigger one, with all our friends, but I understood how Ronnie felt, and if he thought a private ceremony was more appropriate, that was okay with me. By then we felt we were already married, and it was time to make it official.

  One evening, Ronnie and Bill Holden were sitting together at a meeting of the Motion Picture Industry Council when Ronnie scribbled a note to Bill: “To hell with this. How would you like to be the best man when I marry Nancy?”

  “It’s about time!” was Bill’s response, echoing our own attitude. Whereupon they both stood up and left the room without a word of explanation.

  We were married very simply, on March 4, 1952, at the Little Brown Church in the Valley. We didn’t invite anybody—no press, no family, no fuss. Our only witnesses were Ardis, who was the matron of honor, and Bill, our best man. After the ceremony, we went back to the Holdens’ for wedding cake and dinner. Bill had arranged for a photographer, and our wedding picture ran everywhere. Bill and Ardis had offered to have a reception for us, which in retrospect I wish we had done. But again, Ronnie wanted to avoid publicity.

  For the wedding, Ronnie gave me a bouquet of flowers, and I wore a gray wool suit with a white collar and a small flowered hat with a veil. I still have my wedding suit, which turned up again in the fall of 1988, as I was unpacking boxes in our new house in Los Angeles. It didn’t look bad, either, and it still fit! I also have the wedding bouquet, and of course I saved the plastic bride and groom from the top of the cake.

  I spent the entire day in a happy daze and didn’t notice that Bill and Ardis had been fighting and weren’t speaking to each other. I was so blissfully unaware that I hadn’t even seen that they were sitting on opposite sides of the church! Nor can I remember hearing the minister say, “I pronounce you man and wife.”

  All I recall is Bill coming up to ask, “Can I kiss the bride?”

  “Not yet,” I replied. “It’s too soon.”

  He laughed. “No, it’s not!” and he kissed me. But I don’t remember Ronnie kissing me, and I don’t recall either of us saying “I do.” Ronnie swore to me that it all happened, and that we really were married.

  We spent the night at the Old Mission Inn in Riverside, and I still remember standing there and feeling so excited when Ronnie signed the register “Mr. and Mrs. Ronald Reagan.” The next day we drove to Phoenix, where my parents met us for a happy celebration. When we got to our room at the Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix, where I had been going for years with my parents during Easter vacation, I picked up the phone and called room service.

  “This is Mrs. Ronald Reagan,” I said proudly, using my new name for the first time.

  When the voice at the other end said, “Nancy, how are you?” I was absolutely crushed! Ronnie said I suddenly looked as if I were twelve years old again.

  When we got engaged, Ronnie had called my father in Chicago to say we wanted to spend our lives together and to explain why we wanted a quiet ceremony. But for years afterward I teased him that I missed out on the proposal of my dreams. I had envisioned that Ronnie would take me out in a canoe as the sun was setting and would strum a ukulele as I lay back, trailing my fingers in the water, the way they used to do in the old movies I saw as a little girl.

  Twenty-five years later, on our silver anniversary, he gave me a canoe called Tru Luv and took me out on the little lake at our ranch.

  “I didn’t bring a ukulele,” he said. “So would it be all right if I just hummed?”

  I know it sounds unbelievably corny, but I loved it.

  We were so happy on our honeymoon, but the first year of our marriage was difficult. During that year we had our first child, Patti, who was born—go ahead and count—a bit precipitously but very joyfully, on October 22, 1952. I didn’t know much about being a parent, and I was an insecure mother. Then too, Ronnie’s career in Hollywood had trickled to a standstill; he just wasn’t offered any good parts. I had said I wouldn’t be a working wife and mother, but I went back to work and made some films because we needed the money. I’ll get into these and other matters shortly, but although the course of our lives together hasn’t always been smooth, I have never doubted for one single instant that Ronnie and I belong together.

  7

  Ronald Reagan

  WHAT is Ronald Reagan really like? We have been married for almost forty years, so I think that makes me an expert.

  The secret to Ronald Reagan is that there really is no secret. He is exactly the man he appears to be. The Ronald Reagan you see in public is the same Ronald Reagan I live with.

  I realize that is the sort of line that some people will sneer at. After all, some of our recent presidents turned out, in hindsight, to be different men than we thought they were. But I honestly don’t believe that will happen with Ronnie. There aren’t any dark corners to Ronald Reagan’s character that will be revealed twenty years from now, no desperate moments of anguish, indecision, and self-doubt. Of course he has his moods and his disappointments, but on the whole, Ronnie is the most upbeat man I’ve ever known.

  There is also a common assumption that because Ronnie used to be an actor, everything he does must be an act. It’s not. Ronald Reagan is not a fraud or a phony. He is what he seems to be. And ever since I’ve known him, this cynicism about Ronnie’s good nature has led people to underestimate him.

  I’ve always known that I am a classic Cancer, but it wasn’t until we moved back to California, when a friend sent me an article describing the Aquarian personality, that I realized how closely that description fit Ronnie. “He has no affectation or snobbery,” the article said, “and he hates all forms of hypocrisy.” And “Aquarians are capable of love, but their version is somewhat impersonal. Much of their energy is likely to go into public life.” If Aquarians have a fault, it’s that they are “too tranquil, too gentle and kindly in disposition.” They are “incapable of petty tyranny.” Their attitude toward the world is “kindly and humane.”
The article even mentioned that Aquarian men are often slow to get married!

  I’ll come back to some of these traits shortly. But as with most people, the place to begin in understanding Ronald Reagan is with his past—his roots, his parents, and the way he was raised.

  He grew up in Dixon, Illinois, where life was wholesome, where people trusted each other, and nobody locked his door at night. People in Dixon stuck together and helped each other. To this day, Ronnie thinks that’s the way it should be, and it’s one reason he bristles at the idea of a large, impersonal government that takes care of the things neighbors once did for each other.

  Ronnie’s father was an alcoholic, which meant that Ronnie and his older brother, Neil, had to become self-reliant more quickly than many other boys. One of Ronnie’s most powerful memories is of coming home from school one snowy afternoon when he was eleven and finding his father dead-drunk on the front steps. His mother and his older brother were out, so Ronnie dragged Jack Reagan upstairs, undressed him, and put him to bed. Years later, when he told this story, he said it marked a turning point in his life. He had wanted to go straight to bed and to pretend his father wasn’t there. “I wasn’t ignorant of his weakness,” he wrote. “I don’t know at what age I knew what the occasional absences or the loud voices in the night meant, but up till now my mother or my brother handled the situation and I was a child in bed with the privilege of pretending sleep.”

  Ronnie’s mother used to tell the boys that Jack suffered from an illness, and that he couldn’t always control himself. “Your father may sometimes say or do things that we don’t understand,” Nelle said. “He’s sick, and he needs our help and love.”

  Jack had trouble keeping a job, and the family moved around a great deal. Ronnie spent his first five years in Tampico, Illinois; they lived above the general store where Jack worked as a shoe salesman. From there they moved to Galesburg, where they stayed for two years, and then on to Monmouth; a year after that they returned to Tampico, and the following year they moved to Dixon, where Ronnie stayed until college—although even there Jack had to move his family to a less expensive house after three years.

  It’s hard to make close friends or to put down roots when you’re always moving, and I think this—plus the fact that everybody knew his father was an alcoholic—explains why Ronnie became a loner. Although he loves people, he often seems remote, and he doesn’t let anybody get too close. There’s a wall around him. He lets me come closer than anyone else, but there are times when even I feel that barrier.

  Ronnie’s closest friends and advisers have often been disappointed that he keeps this distance, especially when he seems more open and candid with a complete stranger than with the people he sees every day. As president, Ronnie loved to answer some of the thousands of letters that poured in every week, and his replies were invariably warm and personal. Sometimes it’s easier with people you don’t know.

  Ronnie is an affable and gregarious man who enjoys other people, but unlike most of us, he doesn’t need them for companionship or approval. As he himself has told me, he seems to need only one other person—me.

  Jack Reagan was a Catholic who felt very strongly about prejudice. Ronnie loved to go to the movies as a boy, but when The Birth of a Nation came to town in a revival, the Reagan boys were forbidden to see it. “The Klan is the Klan,” said Jack, “and a sheet’s a sheet, and any man who wears one over his head is a bum.”

  Ronnie’s proudest story about his father is of the time Jack was on the road one winter’s night and checked into the only hotel in a small town. “You’ll like it here, sir,” said the clerk. “We don’t permit Jews.”

  Jack was outraged. “I’m a Catholic,” he said, “and if you don’t take Jews, I guess you don’t want Catholics either.” He walked out and spent the night freezing in his car. He soon developed pneumonia, which led to his first heart attack.

  A lot of lies are told about people who go into politics, but the only one that ever got Ronnie steamed up was the occasional allegation that he was a bigot. Jack Reagan had his problems, but prejudice was one thing that was never allowed in the Reagan home.

  These stories about Ronnie’s father are well known because Ronnie has told them so often, and they’re true. Ronnie is a conservative Republican, and to a lot of people that means he’s probably a bigot. But that’s ridiculous. He just doesn’t believe that social problems should—or can—be solved by government.

  When Ronnie came to Hollywood, he moved his parents out there too, and bought them a house on Phyllis Avenue, not far from where he was living. Ronnie didn’t want his father to feel like a freeloader, so he gave Jack a job taking care of his fan mail.

  Jack died in 1941, when Ronnie was away in New York. Ronnie didn’t fly in those days, and when Nelle called him, she said, “Don’t get on a plane, because if something happened to you I couldn’t take it.” Ronnie returned by train, and Nelle delayed the funeral until he arrived.

  It wasn’t until our final year in the White House, as Ronnie and I lay in bed one night, that he told me about his father’s funeral. Ronnie was sitting in the chapel, feeling terrible, when it seemed he heard his father’s voice saying to him, “I’m okay, I’m happy, don’t worry about me. I’m doing fine here.” When he told me that, I thought, Lord, how I would have loved to have had that happen to me when my parents died. I envied him that peace of mind.

  Ronnie is a great deal like his mother. Jack Reagan could be cynical, but Nelle believed that people are basically good. She used to visit patients at sanatoriums and mental hospitals and bring cookies and Bibles to prisoners. After the men were released, she often took them into her house until they found a job. Nelle never saw anything evil in another human being, and Ronnie is the same way. Sometimes it infuriates me, but that’s how he is.

  She was a very religious woman whose faith saw her through bad times. She was also an incredible optimist—a trait her son shares. Ronnie once said, “We were poor, but I never knew it.”

  Nelle used to tell her boys that everything happens for a reason, that they might not understand the reason at the time, but eventually they would. Ronnie still believes that. Nelle told him this repeatedly, especially after Ronnie’s divorce from Jane Wyman. The divorce had happened suddenly, with absolutely no warning, and Ronnie was shattered and ashamed. But later, he would say to me, “You see, my mother was right. If I hadn’t been divorced, I never would have met you.”

  Because Ronnie really believes what his mother taught him, that everything happens for a purpose, he doesn’t let setbacks or disappointments get him down. At the age of seventeen he described his optimistic outlook in a poem that was published in The Dixonian, his high-school yearbook. It began,

  I wonder what it’s all about, and why

  We suffer so, when little things go wrong?

  We make our life a struggle,

  When life should be a song.

  This attitude is why, in my next life, I’d like to come back as Ronald Reagan.

  If he worries, you’d never know it. If he’s anxious, he keeps it to himself. Depressed? He doesn’t know the meaning of the word. He’s really as relaxed and hopeful as he appears.

  I’ve almost never heard him complain. If something is bothering Ronnie, he’ll rarely mention it. And he never tells anyone, not even me, if he’s not feeling well.

  Ronnie is not impervious to events, but he is very resilient. In difficult times, the people around him, including me—all right, especially me—may become nervous and impatient. Ronnie stays calm, and it usually turns out that he was right. Looking back, I see that I have spent a lot of time worrying when I really didn’t need to.

  But it can also be difficult to live with somebody so relentlessly upbeat. There have been times when his optimism made me angry, or when I felt Ronnie wasn’t being realistic and I longed for him to show at least a little anxiety. And over the years I think I’ve come to worry even more than I used to because Ronnie doesn’t worry at al
l. I seem to do the worrying for both of us.

  Every marriage finds its own balance. It’s part of Ronnie’s character not to confront certain problems, so I’m usually the one who brings up the tough subjects—which often makes me seem like the bad guy. During the White House years, if we were at a party, Ronnie would be having a wonderful time, but I’d be thinking, We’d better be leaving soon, because he’s got an early meeting tomorrow morning.

  Anyone can be optimistic when times are good, but Ronnie remains hopeful even in the worst of times. When the space shuttle Challenger was destroyed, he could reassure the nation that the seven astronauts had not died in vain, and that this tragedy would not mark the end of our scientific progress. When his meetings in Reykjavik in 1986 with Mikhail Gorbachev ended without an agreement, Ronnie was able to set aside his anger and continue talking to the Soviets. After his disastrous first debate with Walter Mondale in 1984, he recovered in time for the second debate. When he was shot in 1981, and again when he had surgery for cancer four years later, Ronnie’s positive attitude helped him make a fast recovery.

  Politically, the most difficult period he ever went through was during the long months of the Iran-contra affair in 1986 and 1987. Not only was Ronnie under attack from all sides, but for the first and only time in his life, the polls showed that millions of Americans had begun to doubt his integrity. I’ll never forget the horror I felt when a panelist on a television talk show started speculating about impeachment. Impeachment!

  In May 1987, just before the congressional hearings began, Ronnie and I were invited to a small dinner party in Washington. Ronnie was in fine spirits, which amazed even me. That night, in the privacy of our bedroom, I asked him if he was really as unperturbed about the hearings as he seemed to be. “Are you doing this for my sake?” I asked.