Ronnie and Nancy (58 page)

Edith assiduously cultivated another powerful figure in Arizona: the charismatic Senator Barry Goldwater. She and Loyal got to know Goldwater because his brother, Robert, was married to Donald and Sybil Harrington’s daughter. “Mother and Barry were good friends,” Nancy Reagan told me. “They were very close, actually.”20 When Reagan gave a speech to the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce in March 1961, the Davises took Goldwater to hear him. Goldwater’s Polish-Jewish grandfather had founded Arizona’s leading department store chain, and his mother was descended from New England Puritans, but like Reagan he identified strongly with the mythology of the West and saw himself as something of a cowboy. A year earlier he had published the best-selling
The Conscience
of a Conservative
, which he wrote with L. Brent Bozell, Bill Buckley’s Yale roommate and brother-in-law (and a former speechwriter for Senator Joseph McCarthy). It made Goldwater the darling of the right and set off talk about his running for president in 1964. “I was one of the very early ones who . . . began saying that I thought he should be a candidate,” Reagan recalled. “I must say . . . the first time I ever said it to him, he had no such thing in mind at all.”21

The Davises had first introduced the two men shortly after Goldwater was elected to the Senate in 1952, but it was only after Reagan’s Phoenix
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speech in 1961 that they had their first serious talk. It may be that was when Reagan initially urged him to run for president. The silver-haired Goldwater, who was only four years older than Reagan, had not yet made up his mind, but after he declared his candidacy in December 1963, he asked Reagan to help with his campaign in California.

There is reason to believe that Reagan’s right-wing views cost him his job with
G.E. Theater
in 1962. Reagan recounted that the show was canceled on twenty-four hours’ notice that March, after he had refused to drop the political content of his speeches and limit himself to promoting G.E. products.

“I thought about the dates already set up for three years ahead—the first one the annual dinner of the Indiana Manufacturers Association. I couldn’t quite see myself spellbinding this group with a description of the new 1963

coffee pot,” he wrote. He told the BBD&O executive who delivered the un-welcome message that “if the speeches were an issue I could see no solution short of severing our relationship.”22

In addition, several G.E. executives were under federal indictment for price-fixing at the time, and Reagan had become openly antagonistic toward the Kennedy administration in his speeches. Two months before he was severed, he attacked the President by name for the first time in a speech at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena. Kennedy’s domestic policies, Reagan declared, were little more than warmed-over welfare-statism, and he questioned whether the young president was up to dealing with “the roughnecks in the Kremlin.” Given the Bay of Pigs debacle and the erection of the Berlin Wall the previous year, such views were applauded by the rich burghers of Pasadena, but apparently they were less well received by some of the higher-ups at the company’s headquarters in Schenectady.23

Another factor was at work as well. One month before G.E. canceled the show, Reagan had testified before a federal grand jury investigating MCA for alleged monopolistic practices, including the 1952 blanket waiver SAG had given to Revue Productions when he was Guild president. A week after his testimony, which was riddled with “I don’t recalls,”

Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department asked the IRS for Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s tax returns for the years 1952 to 1955, obviously looking for evidence of a bribe from MCA (none was found).24 Reagan blamed this on politics, implying that the Kennedys were out to get him for supporting Nixon in 1960. Although the grand jury proceedings were closed, 3 2 0

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House there was much speculation in the press that the MCA investigation could turn into a major scandal for the forgetful Reagan and his powerful friends Jules Stein, Lew Wasserman, and Taft Schreiber.

According to Nancy Reagan,
G.E. Theater
came to an end after NBC

moved
Bonanza
, “a big-budget one-hour show in color,” to Sunday nights at nine. “The competition was simply too much,” she said, adding that the wholesome Western was “a program Ronnie loved to watch.”25 Lou Cannon backs her up, pointing out that because
Bonanza
was “routing”
G.E. Theater
in the ratings, Ralph Cordiner could do nothing to save Reagan’s job.26

Cordiner himself would step down the following year, after G.E. was convicted of price-fixing, and go to work for the Goldwater campaign.27

Losing his G.E. job was an unexpected blow to Reagan. Though he denied the story, the widow and sons of BBD&O’s then chief executive Charles Brower told Edmund Morris that Reagan had gone to see Brower in New York a few days after the cancellation. In Mrs. Brower’s recollection, Reagan “begged” her husband to try and change G.E.’s decision, crying as he pleaded, “What can I do, Charley? I can’t act anymore, I can’t do anything else. How can I support my family?”28

Lew Wasserman was hardly more comforting when Reagan went to see him about reviving his movie career. “You’ve been around this business long enough to know that I can’t force someone on a producer who doesn’t want to use him,” the MCA president told him. Reagan saw this rebuff as politically motivated, too, since Wasserman was one of Kennedy’s most active supporters in Hollywood. He told Morris that he had felt

“betrayed,” and Nancy added, “Ronnie was devastated.”29

However, Wasserman’s Kennedy connection may have saved Reagan from more serious problems. In June 1962 the Justice Department filed a civil suit against MCA for conspiracy in restraint of trade and named SAG

as a co-conspirator. A remarkably quick and favorable settlement was reached in July, when MCA agreed to dissolve its talent agency, which by then was only a small part of an empire that included Universal Studios and Decca Records, as well as Revue Productions.30 While this was good news in terms of Reagan’s legal situation, it meant that as of July 23, 1962, he and 1,400 other MCA clients no longer had an agent.31

At fifty-one, Reagan was forced to think about what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. Even though he had effectively given up a $200,000-a-year job because he would not stop talking about politics, he still found it
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3 2 1

hard to see himself professionally as anything other than an actor. The possibility of a career in politics was always there, looming from as far back as 1940, when Dick Powell tried to get him to switch parties and run for Congress. He had been asked to run for Congress again in 1952, by the Democrats, and that same year for the Senate, as a Republican, by Holmes Tuttle. Ten years later the wealthy Ford dealer tried to get him to run for the Senate again, this time by challenging the incumbent Thomas Kuchel in the Republican primary.32 He turned Tuttle down but agreed to chair the campaign of Loyd Wright, who ran instead. Perhaps he sensed that the race was unwinnable; perhaps he listened to Nancy, who craved security, and Loyal Davis, who, as he put it, “cringed at the prospect of his beloved son-in-law stepping into what he called ‘a sea of sharks.’ ”33 As it turned out, a few weeks later he was unemployed and had plenty of time to hit the hustings not only for Wright but also, in the general election, for John Rousselot and Richard Nixon—all of whom lost. In Phoenix that Easter, there was talk around the family table that maybe Ronnie should consider a political career of his own after all.34

Ronnie and Nancy were in much stronger shape financially in 1962

than they had been the last time he hit a fallow period, shortly after they married. Although G.E. was no longer acting as his booking agent, he was more in demand as a public speaker than ever, earning several thousand dollars a speech from business groups and conservative organizations around the country. In October he was honored by the Young Americans for Freedom at a rally on Long Island attended by thirteen thousand junior Cold Warriors.35 He also agreed to serve on the advisory board of the fast-growing organization, which had been founded at the Buckley family’s Connecticut estate in September 1960 and would provide an army of volunteers for Goldwater’s 1964 campaign.

At some point in 1962 or early 1963, Reagan started working on his autobiography,
Where’s the Rest of Me?,
with Richard Hubler, a Hollywood writer who specialized in as-told-to books. The longest passages focus on incidents and stories that highlight his leadership qualities, from his speech during the student strike at Eureka to his struggles against Hollywood’s Communists in the 1940s and 1950s. The last five pages read like a campaign tract. Quoting Lord Macaulay, Thomas Paine, and Lincoln, he denies that he is part of “the right wing lunatic fringe” or a “warmonger,” and renounces liberalism once and for all. “Sadly I have come to realize that a great many so-called liberals aren’t liberal—they will defend to 3 2 2

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House the death your right to agree with them. The classic liberal used to be the man who believed the individual was, and should be forever, the master of his destiny. That is now the conservative position.”36

The book’s last line, however, goes to Nancy—“the rest of me.”

In late 1963, Lew Wasserman came through with a role in the film
The
Killers
. Co-produced by Revue Productions and Universal Pictures, it was one of the first made-for-TV movies—a form for which Wasserman can be credited—but was ultimately shown in theaters after NBC decided it was too violent for home viewing. Reagan played a sinister underworld figure with a semipermanent scowl and got fourth billing, after Lee Mar-vin, Angie Dickinson, and John Cassavetes. Dickinson, who played Reagan’s kept woman, remembered that their big scene came when she told Reagan she was going home with the Cassavetes character. “Reagan slaps me and says, ‘I said, get home.’ He
hated
doing that. He’s just dreadful in that movie, because he could not be a bad man. He could not be bad. He was the most pleasant man I’ve ever dealt with. Every time I would see him for the next twenty years, it would be ‘I’m still glad I didn’t really have to hit you.’ ”37

The Killers
, Reagan’s last film, turned out to be a critical and commercial flop. “It’s one I try to forget,” Reagan told the
Saturday Evening Post
in 1974. “I let Lew Wasserman . . . talk me into doing [it].” Nancy inter-jected, “No—it was a personal favor.”38 Over lunch with me thirty years later, Nancy Reagan elaborated: “Lew said if Ronnie did this movie, he would get him other movies after that. But when Ronnie tried to hold him to his end of the deal—well, there weren’t any movies. He never really forgave Lew.”39 Several of their friends told me that the Reagans and the Wassermans were on distant terms all through the 1960s and 1970s.

The Killers
started filming the day after John F. Kennedy was assassinated. “It was a very, very tough time,” said Dickinson, who at thirty-two was one of the most attractive actresses in town and rumored to have been one of JFK’s girlfriends. Perhaps in deference to her, Reagan refrained from talking politics on the set. “You weren’t about to talk politics when this man had just been murdered—and most of us were Democrats,” she said. “But Ronnie was always studying on the set. He was knee-deep in all this political stuff.”40

Nancy later wrote that she was driving down San Vicente Boulevard when the news from Dallas “came over the car radio,” but neither she nor
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her husband make any further note in their books of an event that was as traumatic as Pearl Harbor.41 Patti, who much to her parents’ annoyance had a crush on the young president, claimed that her mother registered no emotion when she picked her up from school that afternoon, and that her father’s only reaction as they watched the television coverage was to remark, when Jacqueline Kennedy stepped off the plane from Dallas, “Couldn’t she have changed her suit? There’s blood all over it.” Patti said she begged her parents not to go ahead with a cocktail party planned for two nights later, but Nancy told her, “Stop being so dramatic.”42 The Reagans had the party, and the Bloomingdales, Bob and Ursula Taylor, Holmes and Virginia Tuttle, and John Wayne attended it.43

On January 3, 1964, Barry Goldwater, wearing a work shirt and blue jeans at his home in Phoenix, announced that he would seek the Republican nomination to run for president against Lyndon Johnson. “I will not change my beliefs to win votes,” he said. “I will offer a choice, not an echo.”44 His principal rival was liberal New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, and the contest between them tore the Republican Party apart during the primaries leading up to the convention in San Francisco in July. Rockefeller’s supporters portrayed Goldwater as “a captive of the radical right,” an irresponsible militarist who would lead the country into a nuclear war. Goldwater’s camp labeled Rockefeller a “Me Too” Republican, an arrogant patrician who would outspend the Democrats at home and appease the Soviets abroad.

Rockefeller’s 1963 divorce and remarriage a month later, to divorcée Margaretta “Happy” Murphy, was also used against him by the Goldwaterites, in an era when politicians stayed married no matter what. Nowhere was the battle fought more bitterly than in California.

Reagan became an almost full-time volunteer for Goldwater. At a breakfast rally in Inglewood in May, he accused Goldwater’s “liberal Republican enemies” of conducting the “most vicious and venomous campaign against a candidate in our party we have ever seen.” Mimicking Goldwater’s detrac-tors, he proceeded to introduce the candidate as “a Neanderthal man, a bigot, a warmonger, looking out at us from the 19th century.” The joke fell flat.45 Overall, though, Reagan was one of the campaign’s most effective and popular speakers, drawing huge crowds wherever he appeared. At the Memorial Day finale at Knott’s Berry Farm in Anaheim, he stood on the podium—flanked by John Wayne and Rock Hudson—and led 27,000