Ronnie and Nancy (50 page)

Pacific Palisades: 1952–1958

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This first tour, in the fall of 1954, lasted eight weeks. “At the beginning, I took Patti and went to see my family in Chicago,” Nancy recalled.

“The time apart seemed to drag on and on. Ronnie and I were both so unhappy that . . . we never allowed ourselves to be separated for that long again.”56 In the following years, G.E. reduced Reagan’s time on the road to twelve weeks a year, broken into three or four trips, and Nancy sometimes joined him in New York or Chicago. Of the eight years Reagan worked for the company, he estimated, he spent two on the road. He always traveled by train, and Nancy always drove him to the station. He preferred to do his own packing, but Nancy “would slip little notes and jellybeans” into his suitcase; it was part of their “ritual,” she said.57

By 1958, according to
TV Guide
, he had visited more than 130 G.E.

factories in twenty-five states and met nearly 200,000 G.E. workers. “He delivers as many as 15 talks per day in an 18-hour day of corporate good will,” the magazine reported in its November 22 issue. “Reagan speaks not only to employee groups in company auditoriums and cafeterias, but also

. . . is available wherever he goes, free, to local groups. Lions, Kiwanians, Ro-tarians, high school principals, Great Book-worms, chambers of commerce or clergymen have only to phone their requests to the local G.E. plant manager . . . and lo, a live TV star from Hollywood . . . appears as if at the press of an electric button. . . . The community and employee relations aspect of his job is the part of which Reagan is apparently most proud.”58

For Reagan, traveling through Middle America was an enlightening experience: “When I went on those tours and shook hands with all of those people, I began to see that they were very different people than the people Hollywood was talking about. I was seeing the same people that I grew up with in Dixon, Illinois. I realized I was living in a tinsel factory. And this exposure brought me back.”59

As much as he related to his audiences and loved the glad-handing and applause, Ronnie never stopped missing Nancy and never ran out of new ways to tell her so. “My darling,” he wrote from the Atlanta Biltmore on Sunday, March 20, 1955:

Here it is—our day and if we were home we’d have a fire and

“funnies” and we’d hate anyone who called or dropped in.

As it is I’m sitting here on the 6th floor beside a phoney fireplace looking out at a grey wet sky and listening to a radio play music not intended for one person alone.

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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Nevertheless I wouldn’t trade the way I feel for the loneliness of those days when one place was like another and it didn’t matter how long I stayed away. With all the “missing you” there is still such a wonderful warmth in the loneliness like looking forward to a bright warm room. No matter how dark & cold it is at the moment—you know the room is there and waiting.

Of course when I say “you” anymore I’m talking a package deal—you and the two & a half year old you. Time goes so slowly and I’m such a coward when you’re out of sight—so afraid something will go wrong if I’m not there to take care of you, so be very careful. . . .

I love you so very much I don’t even mind that life made me wait so long to find you. The waiting only made the finding sweeter

. . . I love you, Ronnie.60

A year after Reagan signed on, G.E. helped him build “The House of the Future.” Ronnie and Nancy had found the perfect plot of land, as high up as you can go in Pacific Palisades, at the top of a twisting, unpaved road called San Onofre Drive. They hired the local architect William Stephen-son to design their five-thousand-square-foot modern ranch house, but it was very much Ronnie’s project. As Nancy Reagan told me, “Ronnie made a model, and he had it on the dining room table at the Amalfi house. He’d study it, and he figured out some things that were wrong—and how to improve some things. . . . He wanted it to flow; he wanted the rooms to go into each other, because he said when you have parties people always stay in the library. He didn’t want that. He wanted people to spread out.”61

In exchange for letting the house be used in advertisements, G.E. outfitted it with the company’s full repertoire of electrical devices and gadgets, including intercoms in every room, an electric-eye security system in the driveway, a retractable roof over the central atrium, a heated swimming pool with underwater lights, an electric barbecue and rotisserie, a refrigerated wine cellar, a projection booth, three TVs, and a $5,000, state-of-the-art kitchen with two electric ranges, two ovens, three refrigerators, two freezers, a washer-dryer, and—G.E.’s latest innovation—a dishwasher with a built-in garbage disposal.62 There was also a three-thousand-pound switchbox attached to the rear exterior wall that Ronnie liked to joke had a direct connection to the Hoover Dam. “I wasn’t wild about having my home turned into a corporate showcase,” Nancy said, “but this was Ronnie’s first steady job in years, so it was a trade-off I was more than happy to make.”63

Pacific Palisades: 1952–1958

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In 1999, I was given a tour of 1669 San Onofre Drive by the owner, Norman Switzer, a retired executive, who assured me that very little had been changed. The house was well hidden behind a hedge of bougainvillea and an iron gate, which opened onto the short, steep driveway. The Reagans’ original gray shag wall-to-wall carpeting still covered the floors of the living room, dining room, and den. Built-in black-lacquered book-cases lined two walls of the den, and a matching bar stood in one corner.

All three main rooms had floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors that opened onto the deck, the pool, and sweeping views of the city and the ocean.

“The ceilings are eleven feet high,” Switzer noted. “When I walked in, I said to my wife, ‘This is it.’ I wanted high ceilings, big rooms, and a view.

We didn’t buy it because of the Reagans.”

The living room was dominated by a gray fieldstone fireplace, and the lights over the dining room table could be changed from white to yellow, pink, or blue. “We have a letter from G.E. to Reagan saying that he should have this lighting system because everybody would look better,” Switzer said, indicating the large metal panel on the wall studded with switches, buttons, and knobs. “There are so many switches in this house we’re still not sure what some of them are for.”

Traces of Nancy’s favorite colors could be found in almost every room: the kitchen cabinets were buttercup yellow, the play area between the children’s bedrooms was bright red, the his-and-her sinks in the master bathroom were pale peach. And every room flowed into the next—just as Ronnie wanted them to. Only the master bedroom was set apart, opening onto its own courtyard. “They could come in here right from the garage,”

Switzer pointed out. Along with a massive stone fireplace, the Reagans’

bedroom had the largest control panel of all: “Flick this switch,” Switzer said, “and every light in the house goes on one by one.”64

Ronnie and Nancy would live on San Onofre Drive for the next twenty-five years.

In both Pacific Palisades houses, Nancy Reagan told me, “Ronnie drew a heart in wet cement and then wrote our initials and put an arrow through the heart. At the house on Amalfi he did it on the patio, and at the house on San Onofre he did it in front of the barbecue.”65 The new house was finished in December 1955, and Nancy softened its contemporary architecture somewhat by furnishing it with traditional sofas and club chairs in the living room and den and a black-lacquer dining room set that seemed to cross 2 7 6

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Chippendale with Art Deco. Ronnie’s reproduction George Washington desk went into the master bedroom, as did a Paul Clemens oil portrait of Nancy hugging Patti in a white-and-gold frame. The Reagans’ first houseguests were Loyal and Edith, who from then on would come to stay every Christmas. There was also a new addition to the family that holiday season: a collie named Lucky, “because that’s the way I felt,” said Ronnie.66

The Reagans’ social life was far from glittering in the early years of their marriage. In memoirs and coffee-table books of the period, they turn up at major events such as the 1954 wedding of Jack Benny’s daughter, Joan, which had a guest list of 1,200, but they are nowhere to be found at the A-list dinner parties of the Goetzes, the Goldwyns, and the Selznicks, or the even more exclusive get-togethers at the Ronald Col-mans’, the Gary Coopers’, and the Jimmy Stewarts’. “As a couple during the fifties they had no social prestige,” said Richard Gully. “They were not Gable and Lombard, or Tyrone Power and Linda Christian. They were not glamorous. They weren’t in the top circles socially. No one ever saw them. They were never at Jack and Ann Warner’s. Ann Warner thought Reagan was dull and had nothing in common with either one of them.”67

“We really weren’t part of that Hollywood scene,” Nancy Reagan admitted. “I mean, we’d stay home at night and pop popcorn. . . . When we did go out, we mainly saw the Holdens, Dick Powell and June Allyson, and Bob and Ursula Taylor, who lived across the street from us on San Onofre.”68 After a string of brilliant hits, including
Sunset Boulevard
,
Sta-lag 17
,
Sabrina
,
Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing
, and
Picnic
, Bill Holden was the highest-paid actor in the business and the number one box office draw, but he hated fancy parties, preferring to share his extensive collection of fine wines with close friends.69 The other two couples were equally rich and famous, but, like the Holdens, the Taylors shunned the social scene, and the Powells were considered a bit B-list. According to Arlene Dahl, who married Fernando Lamas and moved to Pacific Palisades in 1954, the Reagans were still regularly attending Carroll Righter’s sign-of-the-month parties. “Nancy had become pretty good at designing her own charts,” Dahl added.70

The Taylors had also moved to the Palisades in 1954, shortly after they were married. Robert Taylor, “the man with the perfect face,” was one of the all-time great matinee idols, best remembered for holding a dying Garbo in his arms in
Camille
. He had been on the SAG board in the
Pacific Palisades: 1952–1958

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1940s, and he and his first wife, Barbara Stanwyck, had become friendly with Ronnie and Jane. He was divorced from Stanwyck in 1951, and, like Reagan, he apparently found happiness and stability in his second marriage. His movie career was also waning, though not so rapidly as Reagan’s; he hung on at MGM until 1959, when he signed up for his own TV series, called
The Detectives
. The two men, who were the same age, shared an enthusiasm for horsebreeding and a love of words. If anyone could outtalk Ronald Reagan on the subject of the Communist threat, it was Bob Taylor. Reagan’s relationship with Taylor, Patti would write, “was the only time I observed my father being close friends with another man.”71

Nancy’s friendship with Ursula Taylor revolved around the children.

Like Nancy, Ursula had put aside a modest movie career, in her native Germany, to focus on her family; she had two young children by her first marriage, and two more with Taylor, a boy named Terrance in 1955 and a girl named Theresa in 1959. Nancy frequently turned to her for help with Patti, who even at that young age seemed to have a hostile relationship with her mother. When she was three, she asked her father to marry her, which can be seen as merely cute or disturbingly competitive. After they moved to San Onofre and her English nanny was let go, “Patti would throw up all over her bed,” Nancy Reagan told me. “Ursula and I would go in and change that bed all the time. I remember Ursula would always say, ‘I never saw a child try so hard to get you mad.’ ”72

Nancy was not as close to Dick Powell and June Allyson, though she often took Patti to play with their children, Pam and Richard. The Powells had moved from their Tudor mansion in Bel Air to a sixty-two-acre spread in Mandeville Canyon, replete with a stone manor house, a private lake, pastures for their Black Angus cattle and sheep, a barnyard for their chickens, turkeys, and pheasants, and stables for their horses. Powell had made a successful transition from leading man to TV producer with his own company, Four Star Television, and Allyson continued making movies at MGM

all through the 1950s. They still had the same tight circle of friends—half showbiz, half big business—including the George Murphys, the Justin Darts, the Leonard Firestones, and the Edgar Bergens. And they were still square-dancing on Saturday nights. But they had their hip moments: when Ford introduced the Thunderbird in 1955, June and her girlfriends all got convertibles. Hers was pink, Punky Dart’s yellow, and Frances Bergen’s lavender.73

Of this group, Nancy gravitated toward Frances Bergen, who was by 2 7 8

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House far the most stylish and social. A former fashion model, she had married Edgar Bergen in 1945, when she was twenty and he was forty, and gradually transformed the rich but reclusive ventriloquist into one of Hollywood’s most esteemed and well-connected figures. The Bergens lived in Bella Vista, “a sprawling whitewashed Spanish house that hung high over Beverly Hills,” as their daughter, the actress Candice Bergen, described it in her 1984 memoir,
Knock Wood
, and it was at the Bergens’ parties that the Reagans occasionally mingled with the cream of 1950s Hollywood society, including Jules and Doris Stein, Jimmy and Gloria Stewart, Ray and Mal Milland, David Niven, Rosalind Russell, David Selznick and Jennifer Jones, Judy Garland and Vincente Minnelli, and the Randolph Scotts (he was the only actor to be made a member of the Los Angeles Country Club).74

“Ronnie and Nancy lived rather quietly,” Frances Bergen recalled. “They were not that much party people. They would have small dinner parties at the G.E. house, as they called it, and we were there quite often. Usually Bob and Ursula Taylor would be there, and the Holdens, and Henry Koster, who had made his name, more or less, directing Deanna Durbin pictures, and his very pretty wife, Peggy. Bob Arthur, who was a producer at Universal, and his wife, Goldie, who was very involved in Republican causes and politics, were also very close to the Reagans then.”75