Ronnie and Nancy (46 page)

Yet, she continued to entertain proposals of marriage from Krasna—

“Norman Krasna, alter ego of producer Jerry Wald, is so currazy about Nancy Davis that he’s already popped the all-important question,” Hollywood columnist Edith Gwynn reported on October 13. “Nancy and her whole family are thinking it over at the moment.”123 Maybe the Davises were just being practical: Krasna and Wald had recently signed a $50 mil-2 5 0

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House lion deal with Howard Hughes to produce twelve movies a year for five years at RKO.124 Or maybe Nancy was trying to make Ronnie jealous. By mid-December, she had turned Krasna down, and for Christmas Ronnie gave her a gold key from Ruser Jewelers in Beverly Hills to congratulate her on getting her own dressing room at MGM.125

Nancy worked to get closer to Ronnie in other ways as well. She took a few riding lessons from Peter Lawford, the handsome British-born Metro actor and future brother-in-law of John F. Kennedy. She put aside her distaste for alcohol and let herself have a weak cocktail or two when Ronnie took her out to dinner. “I’d drink a little,” she told me. “Nothing very strong like a martini—that would taste like gasoline to me. But some orange juice and vodka I would drink.”126

Perhaps the most important factor in drawing Ronnie and Nancy together was her appointment to fill a vacancy on the SAG board, a goal she had been pursuing for almost a year. The minutes for October 9, 1950, open with, “President Reagan welcomed Nancy Davis to her first Board meeting.” The following November she was elected to a full three-year term.127 Although the SAG board was deeply involved in such controversial issues as loyalty oaths, Nancy Reagan told me, “I don’t remember any tension. Maybe it’s my memory, or maybe it’s that I was falling in love.”128

Going on the board meant that Nancy now saw Ronnie every Monday night. “After the meetings,” she said, “we’d all go—Ronnie and I and whoever else—to this little place nearby and sit and visit.”129 It also meant that Nancy witnessed firsthand and over an extended period of time how Reagan functioned as a leader: how he took advice, how he could be influenced, how he dealt with opposition, how he achieved a consensus, how he reached a decision. She may have ended up with a clearer understanding of Reagan’s decision-making process and leadership style than he had.

For Reagan, the SAG presidency, which he held until 1952, was half of

“my double life.”130 Yet he clearly relished every moment, from traveling to New York for meetings with the American Federation of Radio Artists about which union would represent the growing numbers of television performers to wrangling with the studio bosses to get actors a five-day week. (“Thanks to Ronnie, we had
Saturdays
off,” exclaimed Ann Rutherford. “We could go away for a
weekend
.”)131 On nights when he didn’t have a date, Reagan worked late at SAG headquarters, and was often seen din-Ronnie and Nancy in Hollywood: 1949–1952

2 5 1

ing alone at Chasen’s, sipping a glass of wine while reviewing Guild papers.132 At a time when his movie career was faltering, running the Guild kept his profile high and boosted the ego he hid so well.

Closely related to Reagan’s SAG duties were his activities as “a leader in the industry drive against Communists and their sympathizers,” in Nancy’s words.133 Although his term as chairman of MPIC had expired in July, he remained on its executive board and met with State Department officials that fall to discuss ways in which the industry could help the government fight Communism overseas.134 He had also become heavily involved in the Crusade for Freedom, a new national organization supported by the recently created CIA and headed by General Lucius Clay, the Army commander who had organized the 1948–49 Berlin Airlift.135

In September 1950, the Crusade held mass rallies at every major Hollywood studio, at which speakers ranging from liberal producer Walter Wanger to the ultra-right-wing John Wayne called for the liberation of the Soviet-dominated nations of Eastern Europe. Reagan participated in these rallies, and he fired off a telegram to General Clay, pledging the support of SAG’s “more than 8,000 members . . . in the battle for men’s minds now being waged around the world.”136

By then, after Mao Zedong’s takeover of China, the North Korean invasion of South Korea, and the arrest of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for giving atomic secrets to the Russians, anti-Communism had become something akin to a national religion. The movement’s wild-eyed ayatollah, Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Wisconsin Republican, had burst from obscurity that February with a fiery Lincoln’s Birthday speech accusing the State Department of harboring 205 “card-carrying Communists.” Its holy grail, the Internal Security Act of 1950, which provided for the registration of Communist and Communist front organizations and for the internment of Communists during a national emergency, was passed over Truman’s veto in September.

Reagan wisely refrained from praising McCarthy—he would later say that McCarthy was “using a shotgun when he should have been using a rifle”—perhaps because McCarthy never targeted Hollywood, perhaps because Reagan still considered himself a Democrat.137 In the November 1950 election for a Senate seat from California he campaigned for Con-gresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, the wife of actor Melyvn Douglas, against Richard Nixon, who had made a name for himself with HUAC

by helping to expose Alger Hiss, a high-ranking State Department offi-2 5 2

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House cial, as a Soviet spy, and who now accused the liberal Douglas of being

“pink right down to her underwear.”138

There is reason to believe, however, that Reagan’s loyalty to the party of his father, as well as to Douglas, was wavering—and that Nancy may have had something to do with that. Nancy Reagan told me, “I knew nothing about politics, and I wasn’t even registered when I met Ronnie.”139 Reagan, however, later wrote that the girl he had met “was more than disinterested in Leftist causes: she was violently opposed to such shenanigans.”140 Once, when I asked her if she believed that there was a Soviet-backed plan to infiltrate Hollywood, she declared without a moment’s thought, “Damn right there was. And they were trying to get their message into the movies.”141

In her memoir,
A Full Life
, Helen Gahagan Douglas recalls that Nancy’s old acting mentor and would-be political instructor, ZaSu Pitts, “who was livid on the subject of communism, made a particularly vicious speech about me.”142 Anne Edwards quotes Pitts referring to Douglas as “the Pink Lady who would allow the Communists to take over our land and our homes as well.” Unbeknownst to Douglas, Reagan was in the audience that night with Nancy, and he apparently liked what he heard.143 Robert Cummings, Reagan’s co-star from
Kings Row
, recalled Ronnie calling in the middle of the night to ask him to support Nixon. “We’re giving a party for him tomorrow night,” he said. “Can you come?” “But isn’t he a Republican?” Cummings asked. “I’ve switched,” said Reagan. “I sat down and made a list of the people I know, and the most admired people I know are Republicans.”144 Reagan would not formally change his party registration for another twelve years, but he never endorsed another Democrat.

In 1951, Reagan stepped up his anti-Communist activities. He took to the dinner speaker circuit on behalf of the Crusade for Freedom, and even made a short film for the organization that was “circulated to schools, civic groups, and churches around the country.”145 That spring HUAC held another round of hearings on Communist influence in the film industry, which both the SAG and MPIC boards endorsed. The SAG board refused to support Gale Sondergaard—Nancy’s colleague from
East Side, West
Side
—after she took an ad in
Variety
announcing she had been subpoenaed by the committee and intended to take the Fifth Amendment. Sondergaard wouldn’t make another movie until 1969.146 Actor Sterling Hayden, on the other hand, testified that “joining the party was the stupidest thing I ever did,” identified three industry associates as Communists, and praised Reagan for his handling of the 1945–46 strike, calling him “a one-man battal-Ronnie and Nancy in Hollywood: 1949–1952

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ion” against Communism in Hollywood.147 Hayden went right back to work at Fox, and was rewarded with an official statement from the SAG

board congratulating him on “his honesty and frankness.”148

Along with the other industry potentates in MPIC, Reagan had come to believe that confessing one’s own sins was not enough; one also had to do penance by exposing the sins of others before one could be redeemed.

He and IATSE head Roy Brewer proposed the creation of a Patriotic Services Committee at MPIC, and spent much time and effort clearing the falsely accused, rehabilitating cooperative penitents, and screening prospective employees for the studios.149

“Any American who has been a member of the Communist party at any time, but who has now changed his mind and is loyal to our country should be willing to stand up and be counted, admit ‘I was wrong’ and give all the information he has to the government agencies who are combating the Red plotters,” Reagan wrote in the
Hollywood Citizen News
in July 1951. “We’ve gotten rid of the Communist conspirators in Hollywood. Let’s do it now in other industries.”150

“Ronnie Reagan . . . is a happy man these days,” Hedda Hopper reported that summer. “He has a new 350-acre ranch that he loves and it’s very obvious that he’s in love with Nancy Davis.”151 For months, the Hollywood press had been describing Ronnie and Nancy as an “everynightem,” predicting an imminent marriage, or even an elopement. Ronnie refused to take calls from reporters; Nancy would say only, “He hasn’t asked me yet.”152 That spring, she had stopped seeing Robert Walker; in August—a few days after completing
My Son John
, in which he played a Communist who is turned in by his mother—Walker died from a sedative injection administered by a psychiatrist.153

Ronnie and Nancy were occasionally photographed at premieres and nightclubs, and frequently dined at their favorite restaurant, Chasen’s, “especially on Tuesday nights, when the special was Beef Belmont,” as she remembered it. But they spent many more evenings at her apartment watching TV, or having quiet dinners at Bill and Ardis Holden’s “charming Tudor house”

in Toluca Lake.154 Almost every Saturday, Ronnie invited Nancy to accompany him and the children to his new ranch in Malibu Canyon.

“As far as we all knew at the time, she was the first woman in his life since Mother,” Maureen Reagan wrote in her memoir,
First Father, First Daughter
. “You could tell the two of them were crazy about each other. They 2 5 4

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House weren’t lovey-dovey or anything like that, at least not in front of us kids, but they had a natural, easy way of being with each other that suggested that they belonged together.”155 The ten-year-old Maureen took to her future stepmother immediately: “I especially liked Nancy because when the four of us were at the ranch, she would happily perform one of my most hated chores—whitewashing the thousands of feet of redwood fence that Dad was building. . . . He’d spend hours in the hot sun building paddocks for the horses, a riding ring, or whatever, all with a manual posthole digger.”156

Michael, who was six, liked the way Nancy would let him sit on her lap and massage his back on their rides out to the ranch. “She was always cheerful, unlike Mom who had constant mood shifts,” he wrote in his memoir,
On the Outside Looking In.
An unhappy child who cried himself to sleep most nights, Michael craved attention and stability. The previous year, he had joined Maureen at the Chadwick School in Palos Verdes; Jane and Ronnie took turns having them on weekends. While Michael blamed his mother for the divorce—and took pleasure in annoying her with stories about his good times at the ranch—he idolized his father. “Dad taught Maureen and me to ride by leading us around the corral. He was a pussycat as a teacher, always calm and patient,” Michael recalled. “I was in total awe of him. He was a man’s man and everyone loved him. I wanted to be just like him.”157

Reagan bought the Malibu Canyon property, a wild stretch of oak-covered hills a half-hour’s drive inland from the Pacific Coast Highway, and the run-down old farmhouse on it, for about $85,000 in March 1951. It was almost completely surrounded by a 2,500-acre reserve where 20th Century Fox filmed its Westerns. Nino Pepitone, his partner in the much smaller Northridge horse farm, which had been sold for an undisclosed sum, continued to train Reagan’s thoroughbreds at Malibu. Curiously, Reagan kept the name Yearling Row. But, at Maureen’s suggestion, the first foal born at the new ranch, “a gorgeous dapple filly,” was named Nancy D.158

Not surprisingly, Jane and Nancy saw each other as rivals. Michael Reagan wrote that even in those early days the two women said “derogatory”

things about each other—and, as children of broken marriages often do, he would agree with both of them.159 According to Nancy Reagan, Jane “convinced” Ronnie that he shouldn’t remarry before she did, “because it wouldn’t be good for the children.”160 Someone close to the Reagans told me that when Jane realized Ronnie was getting serious about Nancy she
Ronnie and Nancy in Hollywood: 1949–1952

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made one last play to get him back, telling him she’d like to start over again.

But it was too late.

In the February 1951 issue of
Modern Screen,
Louella Parsons wrote,

“Not long ago, I went to a dinner party at [Jane’s] home and Maureen came in to cut her birthday cake. Her mother and father stood by her side, polite to each other and respectful—so different from those gay kids who went barnstorming with me. I turned away so they couldn’t see the tears in my eyes. Since then, when I see Janie, she seems self-sufficient, independent, and oh, so gay. But I know that not long ago she said to someone, ‘What’s the matter with me? I can’t seem to pick up the pieces of my life again. Will I ever find happiness ahead?’”161

Ronnie naively believed that the two women could get along, and even took Nancy to the premiere of Jane’s film
The Blue Veil
, in September 1951. Jane’s date was the Hollywood lawyer Gregg Bautzer, a slick playboy who had previously romanced Lana Turner, Merle Oberon, Sonja Henie, and Ginger Rogers. Although Jane had hopes of marrying him, by the end of the year he had resumed his long-term, up-and-down relationship with Joan Crawford.162