My Turn

by Nancy Reagan

  He was always going through newspapers and magazines and clipping out little anecdotes or statistics that caught his eye and helped him make a point. That’s one reason he became such a good speaker: Because he wrote his own material, he could deliver it with total conviction.

  When he became president, there was simply no time for him to write his own speeches or to transfer them to note cards. Since 1981, he has been using a TelePrompTer; the text of his speech is scrolled across a glass panel by a projector—like credits at the end of a movie.

  Before every speech, he removes the contact lens from his right eye, which allows him to see the audience with one eye and the TelePrompTer with the other. Ronnie started wearing contacts early, back in the days when they covered the entire eye. When we first started going out, he would sometimes pop out a lens at a red light, wet it with his tongue, and stick it back in. The first time he did it, my heart stopped. I was sure he wasn’t going to get it back in before the light changed. But he did, and from then on I learned to trust his timing.

  • • •

  One thing that’s true about Ronnie is that he lives a balanced life. He sleeps six or seven hours a night, eats properly, and makes time for daily exercise. He doesn’t smoke, and on the rare occasion when he takes a drink, it’s usually a glass of wine—or, at Camp David, a screwdriver before dinner.

  Both of us stopped drinking coffee years ago, after Ronnie’s doctor told him that he could probably prolong his life by a couple of years if he gave up caffeine in the morning. (We had already stopped drinking coffee at night because it kept us awake.) At the White House we always served decaffeinated coffee, and nobody ever seemed to know the difference. If guests turned the coffee down, I would mention that it was decaf and they’d usually change their mind.

  Ronnie has never been a fussy eater. He’ll enjoy a good steak, but this man, who as president was served some of the finest and most elaborate meals in the world, would just as soon have a hamburger. He adores macaroni and cheese and would be perfectly happy eating it for breakfast. Basically, he’s a meat-and-potatoes man.

  But he hasn’t eaten a tomato in seventy years. When Ronnie was a boy, a neighbor brought over a bushel of tomatoes and told him they were apples. Ronnie liked apples a lot, so he took a big bite out of one. He hated the texture so much that he never looked at a tomato again.

  Ronnie is also a big dessert man, and here you can forget about moderation. In fact, as long as you give him dessert, you can forget about the rest of the meal. When he’s speaking at a luncheon or a dinner, he’s always nervous just before they introduce him, but not because of the speech. No, he’s afraid he’ll be called upon to start speaking before they serve dessert! God forbid a piece of cake should go by and Ronnie not be able to eat it.

  His other weakness, as everybody knows, is jelly beans. He doesn’t eat as many of these as he used to, and he never ate as many as people said. But he does like them.

  Ronnie often appears on the best-dressed list, but that’s an honor he doesn’t deserve. He pays little attention to clothes, and he’d be perfectly happy with one pair of jeans and a plaid shirt. It never occurs to him to buy anything new. We both hang on to clothes a long time, but I really have to tie him down before he’ll get a new suit. (He orders them from Mariani in Beverly Hills, where he’s been buying suits since long before I met him.) He still has the same white tie and tails that he had made when he was invited to a command performance for the king and queen of England back in 1948.

  But Ronnie has picked out some of the worst ties over the years, and there have been times when those ties have just disappeared! There was also a particularly unsightly pair of slacks that mysteriously vanished during the move from the White House to Los Angeles. Amazing how these things happen, isn’t it?

  Once, early during Ronnie’s first term, I ordered a suit for him from a fine English tailor who had his measurements on file. It was a blue-and-gray plaid that looked terrific in the swatch. But a few weeks later, when the package arrived from London, I was horrified. The suit came out loud and ugly, a real eyesore.

  Foolishly, I gave it to Ronnie anyway, and of course it became his favorite suit. It wasn’t long before I just couldn’t stand to look at it anymore. He was wearing it one day as we boarded Air Force One, and I turned to him and said, “Honey, please. I want you to give that suit away. Otherwise, I might just have to burn it.”

  Ronnie was incredulous. “You don’t like this suit?”

  “You know I don’t,” I replied. “I’ve told you that a hundred times.”

  Mike Deaver was with us. “Let’s ask Mike,” said Ronnie. “Mike, what do you think of my suit?”

  Mike just smiled.

  “Come on, Mike,” I said. “Tell him what you think.”

  “Do you want me to be honest with you?” he asked Ronnie.

  “Of course I do.”

  “Well, then,” said Mike, “around the office we refer to it as your Mutt-and-Jeff suit. Whenever you wear it, people say, ‘If he had to be shot, why couldn’t he have been wearing that suit?’ ”

  So he’s not the world’s best dresser, and he doesn’t appreciate fine dining. But he certainly has a flair for romance!

  Ronnie doesn’t wait until he’s going away on a trip to be affectionate; sometimes he kisses me when he’s only leaving the room. He says “I love you” frequently, and so do I. We are physically affectionate with each other, both in public and in private, and we’re always holding hands. A reporter once told me that he and his colleagues were sometimes embarrassed to look at us, especially when I was meeting Ronnie’s plane after a trip, because instead of a peck on the cheek, we would really kiss.

  Although Ronnie doesn’t show his feelings easily, he has always been sentimental. He used to send flowers to Mother on my birthday—to thank her for giving birth to me.

  And I loved it when he told an interviewer that coming home to me was like coming out of the cold into a warm room with a fireplace. Or that being married to me was what he dreamed as an adolescent that marriage should be.

  Does that mean we share everything? Of course not. As close as we are, we’re still separate people. When we lived in the White House, I had a life that was completely different from his. As first lady, I was meeting and talking with people he didn’t know anything about. And of course it was much easier for me to go out for lunch, which I did as often as I could—especially with George Will, and with Kay Graham and Meg Greenfield.

  We don’t often fight, but we have certainly had our disagreements—especially around raising children and about money. “Never go to bed mad,” Mother used to say, and we never have. Sometimes after an argument we’ll kiss and say good night. Ronnie will drop right off to sleep, but I’ll be so stirred up that I’ll lie awake for hours and get mad at him all over again.

  Fortunately, our fights don’t last very long. Years ago, when we were on vacation with my parents at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix, Mother described a pair of newlyweds she had overheard at the pool. The bride was crying, and her husband swam over to see what the problem was. “You were cool to me in the pool,” she said.

  Somehow, that line stuck. Whenever something isn’t quite right between Ronnie and me, one of us will say, “You were cool in the pool.” That’s a signal that we have some repair work to do, to fix whatever small problem has come up before it has time to grow into a large one.

  Whoever said that marriage was a fifty-fifty proposition didn’t know what he was talking about. There are many times when you have to give 90 percent, or when both of you have to give 90 percent. If our marriage has been successful, it’s because Ronnie and I have both worked very hard at it. Maybe we tried extra hard because Ronnie had been divorced, and he didn’t want to go through that again. Both my parents had been divorced, so I too had some idea of what that meant.

  Like Mother, I gave up my career when I got married. When I first signed up at Metro, I was asked to fill out a questionnaire for the p
ublicity department. Under “Ambition,” I wrote, “to have a successful marriage.” That was always my goal, and I knew I would give up acting when the right man came along.

  Times are different now, and I’m certainly not advising young women to give up their careers. But I had seen too many movie marriages founder, and I didn’t think I could handle both a career and a husband. I believed that something would suffer, and I was afraid it would be the marriage—especially in Hollywood, where everybody is always telling you how dear and darling you are. Then, when you come home at night, it’s hard not to expect your husband and children to treat you with that same adulation. Instead, it’s “Hey, Mom, what’s for dinner?”

  Ronnie didn’t ask me to give up my career, but he told me later that he thought it was wonderful that I was willing to. When he said that, he was probably thinking back to his first marriage.

  Ronnie has always been there for me, even during the years when the world was on his shoulders. At the time of the shooting, he comforted me as much as I comforted him. When I had my mastectomy, he said, “This makes no difference to us. That’s not why I married you.” I knew that, of course, but it meant so much to hear him say it. It must be terrible to be married to a man who turns away from you at such a time, or who doesn’t want to deal with it, to face it. But I’ve never felt there was anything that happened to me that Ronnie couldn’t handle.

  He takes care of me. If I’m going away for a couple of days, he’ll count out the right number of vitamin pills and he’ll put them in a bottle for me. And after all these years, he still leaves me notes on my desk saying “I love you.” Ronnie doodles, and he once drew a picture of Jiggs from the Maggie and Jiggs comic strip and left it on my desk. It was inscribed, “Dearest wife, A portrait of Jiggs, who was a husband who couldn’t begin to be as happy as you’ve made me.”

  On Valentine’s Day, my birthday, or our anniversary, I’ll find half a dozen cards from Ronnie waiting for me at breakfast—even during the White House years. Often he writes at the bottom, “I.T.W.W.W.,” which stands for “in the whole wide world.” As in: “I love you more than anything I.T.W.W.W.”

  During Ronnie’s first term, we were at a dinner one night at Mark Hatfield’s house, together with a small group of presidential biographers and historians. Like it or not, they told us, you are now part of history, and it’s important for future generations that both of you keep a personal record of everything that happens to you in the White House.

  Then Daniel Boorstin, who was Librarian of Congress, made a beautiful comment. “We have never had a presidential couple like the two of you, and that alone is an important historical fact. The love and devotion you show to each other isn’t seen much around here these days.”

  “You know,” Ronnie replied, “if Nancy Davis hadn’t come along when she did, I would have lost my soul.”

  8

  I Thought I Married an Actor

  WHEN I married Ronnie, I thought I married an actor. But looking back now, I really should have known that acting wasn’t fulfilling enough for him. He had already served five terms as president of the Screen Actors Guild and two more as president of the Motion Picture Industry Council. And he had always been active in supporting candidates for public office. All that should have been a signal to me, but somehow I missed it.

  Shortly after we were married, the Democrats came to Ronnie to ask if he’d run for Congress, but he turned them down. He said he preferred to make his contribution by working in behalf of somebody else, and I just assumed it would always be that way.

  Looking back now, I’m amazed at my own naïveté. But I honestly never expected that Ronald Reagan would go into politics.

  Not only did I think I’d married an actor, I thought I’d married a successful actor. But after the war, Ronnie’s career started slowing down, and soon after we were married we found ourselves with financial problems. Ronnie had been well paid for some of his films, but he was in the 91 percent tax bracket when he made his money—which certainly influenced his views later on taxes.

  For the first few months of our marriage, we had two apartments. We lived in mine, but because it wasn’t big enough to hold all our possessions, Ronnie held on to his. Soon we settled down in a house on Amalfi Drive in Pacific Palisades, which at the time was an affordable and quiet neighborhood. (We paid $42,000 for the house.) At the time, nobody could understand why we were moving way out there—“in the country,” as it was thought of then.

  But Ronnie wasn’t getting any good picture offers, and what with the mortgage on the house, child-support payments, and quarterly tax payments on money he hoped to earn later in the year, we quickly found ourselves in debt. It was a year and a half before we could afford to furnish our living room, but when we put up our Christmas tree, it seemed beautiful to me.

  In 1953, five months after Patti was born, and despite my decision not to be a working wife, I went back to work for one picture. Quite simply, we needed the money. This was a blow to Ronnie, but we had to face facts, and face them together. I could get work, but his movie career was at a standstill.

  The picture was Donovan’s Brain, a low-budget film about a scientist, played by Lew Ayres, who keeps the brain of a dead man alive and then becomes dominated by it. The shooting took six weeks. It wasn’t a classy picture, but it did pay some bills.

  The phone continued to ring for Ronnie, but now he was being offered bad roles in bad films—pictures he described as “They don’t want them good, they want them Thursday.” He had made a few clunkers in the early years of his career, and he wasn’t willing to do that anymore. We waited for over a year, and we got by only because Ronnie was able to guest-star on Burns and Allen and other television shows. Neither of us realized it, but Ronald Reagan’s Hollywood career had pretty much come to an end.

  There’s no question in my mind that Ronnie’s political involvements had begun to hurt his prospects for work. By the time I came along, he had become so identified with the Screen Actors Guild that the studio heads had begun to think of him less as an actor than as an adversary. In a small community like Hollywood, an actor’s reputation has a lot to do with his off-screen image, and the men who made pictures had come to see Ronnie primarily as a negotiator. He used to say that it had reached the point that if they were shooting a Western, they’d probably cast him as the lawyer from the East.

  There were a few offers from Broadway, but we had started a family in California and neither of us wanted to move. There was always television, but Ronnie was reluctant to sign up for a series because he didn’t want to get typecast. Along with many other Hollywood actors in the early 1950s, he believed that too much television exposure could ruin your chances of getting good film roles. Why would people pay to see you on the screen when they could see you at home for free?

  This was a difficult period for Ronnie and for us. He was, as you might expect, pretty low. One evening, when he returned from a meeting that had evidently been covered by the press, he told me he had overheard somebody say, “Well, at last Ronald Reagan is having his picture taken.” He was crushed, and when he told me about it, I could have cried for him. I remember going over and putting my arms around him. How humiliating for a man to hear that!

  Near the end of that year, Taft Schreiber, one of the agents at MCA, the agency that represented Ronnie, asked if he would be interested in being part of a nightclub act in Las Vegas. Ronnie hated the idea, but the money was good and we were broke, so he agreed to consider it. At first they wanted him to appear over Christmas, but we just couldn’t see ourselves spending Christmas in Las Vegas, no matter how much we needed the money. Then Ronnie was asked to MC a show with a stripper, and he turned that down, too.

  Finally, the agency put together a deal that had Ronnie appearing for two weeks with the Continentals, a well-known male singing group. Ronnie would open the show with a comic monologue, and would then appear with the four Continentals in several of their skits. Despite his misgivings, he agreed t
o give it a try.

  Ronnie could have gone to Las Vegas alone, but if ever there was a time my husband needed me, it was then. We were coming off a terrible year, we had our first child, and Ronnie was about to try something altogether new. Neither of us could tell how it would go. It almost killed me, but I left three-month-old Patti at home with our housekeeper.

  Ronnie and I are not exactly Las Vegas types, and when we arrived at the Last Frontier Hotel, we had enough books in our suitcase to stock a small library. When the owner brought us to our suite, he was astonished. “I’ve had a lot of entertainers at this hotel,” he said. “But I’ve never seen anyone bring books to Las Vegas.”

  When Ronnie wasn’t performing, we spent our time reading in the suite or by the pool. We weren’t even tempted to gamble; we were there to make money, not lose it. And we had both heard too many stories about Hollywood entertainers who were paid fabulous amounts of money in Las Vegas and promptly gambled it all away between shows. We held out until the final night, when we risked the grand total of twenty dollars at the blackjack table—and lost it all.

  Fortunately, Ronnie’s act was a great hit. I should know—I attended every performance. The show was sold out every night, and people were standing in line to get in. Before the two weeks were over, offers had come in from nightclubs in Chicago, Miami, and New York. But two weeks in Las Vegas was enough to tell us what we already knew: The nightclub life was not for us.

  A few weeks later, Taft Schreiber told Ronnie that General Electric wanted to sponsor a weekly dramatic program on television on Sunday nights. They needed a host who would introduce each of the shows, and who would also go on the road as a “corporate ambassador” for the company, visiting G.E. plants and offices all over America.