by Nancy Reagan
Again, Ronnie had doubts, but it was better than Las Vegas. And of course, as it turned out, Ronnie was a big success. And he loved the job. He introduced each episode of General Electric Theater, and signed off at the end with that familiar line, “Here at General Electric, progress is our most important product.”
Ronnie’s contract also called for him to star in four programs a year, and occasionally I appeared with him. These were live shows, which meant there was no time to change clothes between scenes. And so I’d be wearing three different dresses in the first scene, and I’d peel them off, one by one, while the camera lingered on some other character—or on the furniture.
The only bad part of Ronnie’s job at G.E. was that he had to travel so much. The first time he left, he was gone for two months, so I took Patti with me to Chicago, where we stayed with my parents. That was far too long a separation for all of us, and Ronnie arranged a new travel schedule, which would never have him away longer than two weeks at a stretch. Even so, during the eight years he worked for General Electric Ronnie spent a total of almost two years on the road.
By 1956, two years into Ronnie’s new job, we were able to build a new, larger house on San Onofre Drive, not far from where we had been living. Ronnie designed it with the architect Bill Stephenson, and it was Ronnie’s idea to have the den, the living room, and the dining room all flow together in a way that made the house look much larger than it actually was. When the people at General Electric learned of our plans, they decided to turn our house into a showcase for the latest electrical appliances. They provided us with so many refrigerators, ovens, and fancy lights—not to mention a built-in garbage disposal—that they had to build a special panel on the side of the house for all the wiring and the switches. When we had company, Ronnie used to say that we had a direct link to the Hoover Dam. I wasn’t wild about having my home turned into a corporate showcase, but this was Ronnie’s first steady job in years, so it was a trade-off I was more than happy to make.
If you believe, as Ronnie does, that everything in life happens for a purpose, then there was certainly a hidden purpose in Ronnie’s job with General Electric. Although he wasn’t running for any political office, essentially he spent eight years campaigning—going out and talking to people, listening to their problems, and developing his own ideas about how to solve them.
It was during this period that Ronnie gradually changed his political views. He had grown up in a Democratic household, and was (and still is) a great fan of Franklin Roosevelt. During the 1948 race he had campaigned in behalf of Harry Truman for president and Hubert Humphrey for the Senate. Two years later, Helen Gahagan Douglas had decided not to ask for Ronnie’s help in her Senate race against Richard Nixon because Ronnie was considered too liberal. Around the same time, Ronnie was part of a group of men who tried to convince General Eisenhower to run for president—on the Democratic ticket.
Meanwhile, Ronnie’s brother, who was a conservative Republican, was always trying to convince him that the Democrats were all wrong. Moon (Neil’s nickname) and Ronnie had terrible arguments, and every time Moon and Bess came over to our house, the two brothers would get into a loud shouting match while Bess and I tried to get them off the subject. It’s hard to imagine now, knowing Ronnie’s personality, not to mention his political views, but it really did happen.
But as he traveled across the country for General Electric, Ronnie started seeing things differently. He became increasingly concerned about government interference in the free enterprise system—and also in the lives of individuals. One day he came home from a speaking trip and told me he was starting to realize that the Democrats he had campaigned for in election years were responsible for the very things he was speaking out against between elections.
In 1962, when Richard Nixon was running against Pat Brown for governor of California, Ronnie wanted to campaign for Nixon, and he asked Nixon whether he should do so as a Democrat or a Republican.
“You’d be more effective as a Democrat,” Nixon said.
A few weeks later, Ronnie was out speaking for Nixon when a woman in the second row raised her hand and said, “Mr. Reagan, are you still a Democrat?”
“Yes, ma’am, I am,” said Ronnie.
“Well,” she said, “I’m a deputy registrar and I’d like to change that.”
Whereupon, to the delight of the audience, she came up on stage and registered Ronnie as a Republican. He had been planning to change parties for quite a while, and this seemed as good a time as any.
By now General Electric Theater had come to an end. It had been enormously popular in its time, and even today members of my generation remember it as one of the best shows on television. It went off the air in 1962, after NBC moved Bonanza from Saturday night to Sunday. Bonanza was a big-budget one-hour show in color, and the competition was simply too much. (Ironically, Bonanza was also a program Ronnie loved to watch.)
But Ronnie’s career in television wasn’t over. Thanks to his brother, who was a vice president at McCann Erickson, the advertising agency, Ronnie spent the next two years introducing Death Valley Days, a series of Western stories sponsored by the Borax Company.
Then, during the 1964 presidential campaign, Ronnie made a speech for Barry Goldwater that would soon change our lives.
Holmes Tuttle, a successful Ford dealer in Los Angeles, had organized a fund-raising dinner for Goldwater at the Ambassador Hotel and he had asked Ronnie to speak. Ronnie’s speech went over so well that Tuttle came up to him afterward and said, “We’ve got to get that speech on television.”
Holmes raised the money, and Ronnie’s speech for Goldwater was scheduled to be shown across the country on October 27, exactly a week before the election. On the twenty-fifth, Barry called Ronnie at home to say his advisers wanted him to cancel the broadcast.
“Have you read the speech?” Ronnie asked.
“No,” said Barry, “but they tell me you’ve got something in there about Social Security.”
“That’s true,” said Ronnie. “I said that any individual paying into Social Security should have a right to declare who his beneficiary should be.”
“I can’t argue with that,” Goldwater said.
According to Ronnie’s brother, who was with Goldwater in Cleveland, Goldwater asked to see a tape of Ronnie’s speech. When it was over, he looked at his staff and said, “Now what the hell was wrong with that?” And so they went ahead, and the speech was shown on national television.
Ronnie’s speech, which he wrote himself, included the same themes he had spoken about during his years with General Electric: the dangers of big government, the loss of individual liberty, and the erosion of traditional morality. It ended on a dramatic note, with these words:
“You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We can preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we can sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children, and our children’s children, say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.”
At three o’clock in the morning, Barry’s representative in Washington woke us up with a phone call. “I just thought you’d like to know,” he said, “that the switchboard back here is still lighting up with all the calls coming in.”
Although Goldwater lost to Lyndon Johnson in the election, Ronnie’s speech brought in more money than had ever been raised for a candidate—a total of eight million dollars. Almost immediately, Holmes Tuttle put together a committee to support Ronnie for governor of California.
Ronnie thought they were crazy. “Oh, no,” he said. “You don’t run for governor on the basis of a single speech. Besides, I’m not interested in going into politics. You find a candidate and I promise to campaign for him, the way I’ve always done.”
But they knew Ronnie could win, and they kept after him, and pretty soon I just knew that he’d eventually say yes. By the end of 1964 Ronnie was receiving dozens of letters every
day urging him to run for governor in 1966. Some of the people who wrote to him were Democrats, and they said that if Ronnie ran, they would switch parties in order to support him.
For about two weeks we talked about it constantly—during dinner, after dinner, and late at night, in bed. After the Goldwater defeat, with the Republican party in shambles, Ronnie felt he could play a role in helping to put it back together.
But I hung back. I had no clear idea of what a political life would be like, and I wasn’t all that eager to find out.
After a lot of stewing on our part, Ronnie finally said, “I’m willing to consider it. Let me do some traveling around the state and make some speeches, and we’ll see if there’s really any support out there.”
A few weeks later we went to a reception for Ronnie at one of the big hotels in San Francisco, where so many people wanted to meet him that they were lined up through the lobby and around the block, waiting to get in.
This was my introduction to politics, and when I woke up the next morning I couldn’t move my neck. We called a doctor, who explained that when people are nervous, they tend to raise their shoulders—which I had apparently done for four hours. That, plus standing in an unnatural position with my arm extended, shaking hands, had sent me into a spasm. When I came home, a friend put me in touch with a Swedish woman, who put me in hot packs, massaged my neck, and used traction. Ever since, I’ve kept my shoulders down in a receiving line.
Ronnie did run, of course, and in the Republican primary he defeated George Christopher, a former mayor of San Francisco, by a wide margin. It was during that race that Gaylord Parkinson, the state Republican chairman, issued the famous Eleventh Commandment, which Ronnie has followed ever since: “Thou shalt not speak ill of thy fellow Republican.”
But there was no such commandment in force for the general election. Governor Pat Brown was running for his third term, and he never took Ronnie seriously as an opponent. During the campaign, his people made a terrible commercial which showed the governor telling a group of black children, “I’m running against an actor. And you know it was an actor who shot Lincoln, don’t you?”
Neither Ronnie nor I ever saw that commercial. We heard about it from Carl Greenberg of the Los Angeles Times as Ronnie was leaving a speaking engagement, and I still remember how shocked we were when Carl described it. “No, it can’t be,” Ronnie said. “He couldn’t have said that.” But he did, although I’m sure he later regretted it.
When Governor Brown attacked Ronnie for his lack of political experience, Ronnie readily admitted that he wasn’t a professional politician. “The man who currently has the job has more experience than anybody,” he said. “That’s why I’m running!”
Another of Ronnie’s popular lines from that campaign had to do with the governor’s generosity with public funds. “Keeping up with Governor Brown’s promises,” Ronnie said, “is like trying to read Playboy magazine while your wife turns the pages.”
But this wife wanted no part of campaigning. I was shy in those days, and terrified that I’d have to give a speech. I have often been asked why I felt that way, given all the years I had spent in theater and in film. But to me the difference is enormous. When I was acting, I wasn’t being myself—I was playing a role that had been created for me. But giving a political speech is completely different. You can’t hide behind a made-up character, and I was far too private a person to enjoy playing myself.
I remember telling Stu Spencer, Ronnie’s campaign manager, “I’d like to help my husband, but I won’t give speeches or anything like that.”
“Fine,” he said, “but if you’re introduced to an audience, you could stand up and take a bow, couldn’t you?” I allowed as to how
I could manage that.
A few weeks later, Ronnie’s advisers came to me and said, “Nancy, California is a big state. Your husband can’t possibly get to every little town. We’ve already got him running around to so many places that the poor guy is exhausted. Could you help? It would be wonderful if you could visit some of these places and do a little Q-and-A with the people.”
They certainly knew where my soft spot was! I’d do anything to help Ronnie, and so Q-and-A it was. This was a big step from simply standing up and taking a bow, but I was surprised that in fact I came to enjoy it. It was more informal and more natural than giving a speech, and I liked the give and take with the audience. It was also informative. From their questions, I soon learned what was on people’s minds, and I could go back to Ronnie and tell him what I’d heard. I also felt that audiences had a better picture of me as a person in such a setting.
I began to pick up some tips about campaigning. I learned, for instance, that you should never say the name of the town you think you’re in, because when you visit six towns in one day, there’s always a chance that you’re going to make a mistake somewhere. So instead of saying, “I’m glad to be in Fillmore,” it was always safer to say, “It’s nice to be here.”
California is a big state, but even so, Ronnie and I managed to sleep at home most nights during the campaign. Still, the traveling does wear you down. And the food! After far too many political dinners and banquets where they served chicken and beef, I started to wonder why nobody ever thought of serving Mexican or Chinese food for a change.
Ronnie won the election in a landslide, defeating Pat Brown by almost a million votes. On election night, we had been out having dinner with friends, and we heard the results on a car radio on the way to Ronnie’s campaign headquarters at the Century Plaza Hotel. I had always thought you waited up all night listening to the returns, and although this may sound silly, I felt let down. After so much hard work, Ronnie’s early and overwhelming victory seemed almost an anticlimax.
Ever since 1967, people have speculated as to why Ronnie was sworn in as governor at the unusual hour of one minute past midnight. No, it had nothing to do with astrology! During the election year, Governor Brown had left many judicial vacancies unfilled, and as soon as the election was over, he began appointing eight or ten new judges a day. Ronnie was so frustrated that he asked: “What’s the earliest I can be sworn in?”
The answer was 12:01 on the morning of January 3. We arranged to have a quiet ceremony, which would be followed two days later by a large public inauguration.
I assumed that the swearing-in on January 3 would consist of a brief informal ceremony in front of family and friends in the dimly lit capitol, and then home to bed. Friends of ours, the Jorgensens and the Wilsons, gave a dinner at the Firehouse, a great local restaurant, and from there we went on to the capitol. Imagine my shock when we walked in and saw a bank of television cameras, bright lights, a choir, and people jammed into every corner! I guess everyone took it for granted that we knew what to expect, and so nobody had warned us.
The first speaker was Robert Finch, the lieutenant governor. He was followed by Senator George Murphy. George had been Ronnie’s predecessor as president of the Screen Actors Guild and had been elected to the Senate in 1964. Like Ronnie, he was a former Democrat. Both men spoke from notes, and I suddenly realized that Ronnie would also be expected to speak. My Lord, I thought, what’s he going to do? He hasn’t prepared anything!
Because the hour was so late, and because it had been so long since a Republican had been elected, it was a dramatic and emotional moment. When it was Ronnie’s turn to speak, I was hoping to heaven that he would think of something to say. And of course he did. He looked out at the crowd and then turned to George and said, “Well, Murph, here we are again on the Late, Late Show.” The whole room erupted in laughter and the tension was broken. Then Ronnie gave a short, impromptu, and moving speech about his hopes and his plans. I was tremendously proud of him.
Now that Ronnie was governor, we had to move to Sacramento. A few weeks earlier, I had been taken through the governor’s mansion by Mrs. Brown. When it came time to leave, the press asked me how I liked it. “I love old houses,” I replied. I held back from adding, “But I hate unsa
fe, dilapidated old houses!”—which this one certainly was.
I remember lying in bed that night with Ronnie, back in Los Angeles. When he asked me how I liked the mansion, I said, “Oh, fine.” But as soon as he turned out the light I started to cry. I’m sure I made Ronnie feel awful, but that house was so depressing that I just couldn’t stand the thought of living there.
The so-called mansion, built in 1877, had been declared a fire hazard years before we moved in. It was a tinderbox, its wooden frame eaten through by dry rot. Mrs. Brown had been very clear about that, and had also told me that she and her husband had tried to get approval for a new mansion during their years in Sacramento. But their plan was for a kind of mini White House, and it turned out to be so expensive that the legislature turned it down.
Mrs. Brown had warned me that the house was noisy, but I didn’t understand how bad it was until we moved in. The mansion was downtown, on a busy street that carried traffic from San Francisco to Reno, and the big trucks rolled by all through the night. They stopped for a red light outside our house, and even at four in the morning you’d hear the shifting of gears. When we had people for dinner, there were times when the traffic was so loud we’d have to stop talking. There were no grounds around the mansion. There was a motel across the street and gas stations on the other two corners, and the house backed up on the American Legion Hall.
For the first couple of months I lived in Pacific Palisades during the week and commuted to Sacramento on weekends, because I didn’t want to take Ron out of school in the middle of a semester. (By this time Patti was going to school in Arizona.) But I hated leaving Ronnie alone in such a depressing house. The place reminded me of a funeral parlor. When we moved in, there were purple velvet drapes in each room—so old that when we took them down, they practically crumbled in our hands.
After dinner Ronnie would go right up to the bedroom, because there was no other place to read or watch television. The house was drafty, and we weren’t allowed to use any of the fireplaces because they weren’t safe.